Ancient & modern

21 November 2009

What, an ancient would ask, has marriage to do with love?

A new Telegraph survey on ‘dating’ (the romantic rather than temporal kind), reveals that 91 per cent of women and 86 per cent of men would not marry someone ‘who had everything you looked for in a partner, but whom you were not in love with’. But what, an ancient would ask, has marriage to do with love?

Greek and Roman upper-class males — for they composed the literature, and it is their views of the matter that we have — did not regard love as a crucial component of marriage. To put it crudely, marriage was primarily business: the production of legitimate heirs, preferably male ones, to continue the line and keep the family in the style to which it had become accustomed. Indeed, so crucial was this objective that adoption of sons was remarkably frequent, and not babies either, but adults. For example, from ad 14 to 200 only three emperors were survived by natural sons. Families scrambled to get one of their own sons adopted into the imperial line.

Feelings of the sort that we associate with romance and marriage, especially sexual ones, were something of which ancients were rather wary. They were seen as uncontrollable external forces — a sort of heaven-sent madness leading to extremes of idiotic behaviour. It is therefore appropriate that love (Eros/Cupid) was pictured as an irresponsible and malicious little boy, armed with arrows (love’s darts) which he shot off randomly at any passing target.

So when one fell in love, one rationalised that there was little to be done about it. If the object of desire responded, all well and good. If not, one agonised one’s life away. The result (as poets painted it) was withdrawal from the world — the gratified lover because he had his love and needed nothing else, the ungratified because he did not, and life was not worth living. The poet Philodemus despaired of it all: ‘I fell in love. Who hasn’t? I partied. What’s new? I had been driven mad. By whom? By Aphrodite. To hell with her. My hair is getting grey now, announcing I am at the age of discretion. When it was time to play, I played. That’s over. Now wiser counsels will prevail.’

But none of these feelings was expressed in relation to marriage — only to lovers:

91 per cent of women and 86 per cent of men are missing their big chance.

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