The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [99]
However, if reproductive success was one of the perks of despotic power, one peculiar feature stands out. All six of the early emperors were monogamously married. In other words, they always raised one mate above all the others as a ‘queen’. This is characteristic of human polygamous societies. Wherever there are harems, there is a senior wife, treated differently from the others. She is usually noble-born, and, crucially, she alone is allowed to bear legitimate heirs. Solomon had a thousand concubines, and one queen.
Betzig investigated imperial Rome and found the distinction between monogamous marriage and polygamous infidelity extending from the top to the bottom of Roman society. Roman emperors were famous for their sexual prowess, even while marrying single empresses. Julius Caesar’s affairs with women were ‘commonly described as extravagant’ (Suetonius). Of Augustus, Suetonius wrote: ‘The charge of being a womanizer stuck, and as an elderly man he is said to have still harboured a passion for deflowering girls – who were collected for him by his wife’. Tiberius’ ‘criminal lusts’ were ‘worthy of an oriental tyrant’ (Tacitus). Caligula ‘made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome’ (Dio), including his sisters. Even Claudius was pimped for by his wife, who gave him ‘sundry housemaids to lie with’ (Dio). When Nero floated down the Tiber, he ‘had a row of temporary brothels erected on the shore’ (Suetonius). As in the case of China, though not so methodically, breeding seems to have been a principal function of concubines.
Nor were emperors special. When a rich patrician named Gordian died leading a rebellion in favour of his father against the emperor Maximinus in AD 237, Gibbon commemorated him thus:
Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested to the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than ostentation.
‘Ordinary’ Roman nobles kept hundreds of slaves. Yet, while virtually none of the female slaves had jobs around the house, female slaves commanded high prices if sold in youth. Male slaves were usually forced to remain celibate, so why were the Roman nobles buying so many young female slaves? To breed other slaves, say most historians. Yet that should have made pregnant slaves command high prices; they did not. If a slave turned out not to be a virgin, the buyer had a legal case against the seller. And why insist on chastity among the male slaves if breeding is the function of female slaves? There is little doubt that those Roman writers who equate slaves with concubines were telling the truth. The unrestricted sexual availability of slaves ‘is treated as a commonplace in Graeco-Roman literature from Homer on; only modern writers have managed largely to ignore it’.42
Moreover, Roman nobles freed many of their slaves at suspiciously young ages and with suspiciously large endowments of wealth. This cannot have been an economically sensible decision. Freed slaves became rich and numerous. Narcissus was the richest man of his day. Most freed slaves were born in their masters’ homes, whereas slaves in the mines or on farms were rarely