Stoic sex and marriage, considered

As I warned last week, I wanted to write about the strange world of ancient Greek sexual ethics, and that of the Stoics in particular.  Why?   Because I would have assumed that Stoic attitude would be to suck it up and be indifferent as to whether you are having an active sex life or not.   And in fact it seems that later Stoics, particularly of the Roman variety, were pretty conservative on the topic.  But to my surprise, the original Stoics were about as "stoic" when it came to sex as Austin Powers.

So, let's start extracting from the book "The Making of Fornication:  Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity" by Kathy L Gaca.  (I'm not sure why so much of it is available via Google Books, but there is a lot):



OK.  That "sex as a means of training in reason and ethics" is a worry, but we'll get to that.  First of all, they thought eros was all about "the making of friends".  This sounds pretty laid back, and kind of modern:

Already, you can see, things are taking a turn for the weirdly ancient Greek worse when they agree with the practice of mentors getting it on with their students:

....yeah, so we have heard of this before, but at least Zeno didn't think it should be all older men wanting a "friendly" rub up against adolescent boys.  No, girls should expect to be talked into educational sex with their wiser ones too:

Am I the only person to find such a faux high-minded attitude aligning sex with virtue inadvertently funny?  Did parents mock their son if he wanted to change careers to become a professional "wise man" because they knew the job came with far more sex than being something more useful, such as local potter or baker?  "No Mum, I think it's really important, the development of virtue in our city."  "Yeah, sure, son"

Anyway, how did they think the adults should ideally act between themselves?  Here we get into the 1960's "free love" bit:

 

As is common in these radical revisions of how the world of sex and reproduction should be, the kids are to be raised communally too (and, by the sounds of it, not having a clue as to who their true parents may be):

Stupid Greek hippies!   And reminiscent of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's free love ideas, too. 

Things get even worse when they argued that the importance of communality meant that incest prohibitions were silly:

OK, so I presumably have convinced everyone that early Stoicism was one of the early cases of highfalutin' philosophising getting in the way of common sense and biology.  But how did they get to think this way?

Well, remember I recently mocked the way tantric sex was a silly Indian/Asian fetishisation of the (alleged) enormous mystical power of semen?   The early Stoics were probably ahead of them:

I'll skip a bit, til we get to this key part, which apparently shows how a philosophy can make a disproportionately big deal out of a bit of, well, Temple porn:

I've read somewhere (maybe I will turn it up again for a link) that this mural or painting (in a temple to Hera at Argos, I think) puzzled most Greeks because their mythology didn't have a story of Zeus and Hera, um, interacting that way.    As such, it's meaning, and whether or not Chrysippus was even being serious in reading so much into it, was much debated at the time:

Chrysippus’ interpretation of the sexual union of Zeus and Hera belongs to

one of the most infamous pieces of ancient allegoresis. The extravagance of this

interpretation has even prompted some scholars to question the seriousness of

Chrysippus’ hermeneutical attempts. Thus, for example, A.A. Long in his semi-

nal paper has expressed some doubts as to whether Chrysippus’ was earnest in his

allegorical interpretation of the Samos (or Argos) mural.  Such an assessment, nev-

ertheless, does not sit well the testimonies that present Chrysippus’ interpretation

as a serious, albeit scandalizing, allegorical suggestion. Origen, who provides us

with the most important testimony here, insists that Chrysippus “misinterprets”

(παρερμηνεύει) the painting, but he clearly regards it as a serious hermeneutical

attempt. In a similar vein, Clemens Romanus3and Theophilus Antiochenus4con-

sider Chrysippus to be in earnest, even if they abominate the view he advocates.

I find it very odd, and amusing, that so much deep philosophical discussion could arise out of questioning the meaning of a piece of art.  Presumably, the guy who created it wasn't around to explain what he meant, so early Stoics just put their own spin on it.  

Anyway, I suppose I should add in that early Stoics weren't the only ones with extreme ideas on marriage - Plato in The Republic had the "guardians" of his ideal state actually run as a eugenic farm:

Socrates then discusses the requirement that all spouses and children be held in common. For guardians, sexual intercourse will only take place during certain fixed times of year, designated as festivals. Males and females will be made husband and wife at these festivals for roughly the duration of sexual intercourse. The pairings will be determined by lot. Some of these people, those who are most admirable and thus whom we most wish to reproduce, might have up to four or five spouses in a single one of these festivals. All the children produced by these mating festivals will be taken from their parents and reared together, so that no one knows which children descend from which adults. At no other time in the year is sex permitted. If guardians have sex at an undesignated time and a child results, the understanding is that this child must be killed.

To avoid rampant unintentional incest, guardians must consider every child born between seven and ten months after their copulation as their own. These children, in turn, must consider that same group of adults as their parents, and each other as brothers and sisters. Sexual relations between these groups is forbidden.

A great idea (I say sarcastically) that finally got to more-or-less be tried out by the Nazis:

In 1935, Himmler began a propaganda campaign inviting any unwed mother who fit the racial profile to give birth inside a Lebensborn home.

It was an ambitious pledge, as it sought to turn a centuries-old attitude about unwed mothers on its head. No longer was having a child out of wedlock a source of shame — instead, the Nazi regime would celebrate the birth of any Aryan child, regardless of its parents’ marital status....

Yet even the government’s open-arms approach to unwed mothers wasn’t enough to dramatically change the numbers. So Himmler took the Lebensborn program one step further.

He began arranging secret meetings in which “suitable” women could meet S.S. soldiers and, if both parties were amenable, create more babies for the Nazi party — with no offer of marriage on the table.

 Anyway, back to the Stoics.  As I said at the beginning, the later Roman Stoic philosophers, who are more influential now anyway under the current revival of interest in Stoicism, were right regular romantic conservatives compared to Zeno.   Here's Hierocles:

 “The whole of our race is naturally adapted to society … cities could not exist without a household; but the household of an unmarried man is truly imperfect … a life accompanied by wedlock is to be precedaneously chosen by the wise man; but a single life is not to be chosen, except particular circumstances require it … Nature herself, prior to the wise man incites us to this, who also exhorts the wise man to marry. For she not only made us gregarious, but likewise adapted to copulation, and proposed the procreation of children and stability of life, as the one and common work of wedlock … In the first place, indeed, because it produces a truly divine fruit, the procreation of children, since they will be assistants to us in all our actions … I also think that a married life is beautiful. For what other thing can be such an ornament to a family, as is the association of husband and wife? … For there is not anything so troublesome which will not be easily borne by a husband and wife when they are concordant, and are willing to endure it in common … but when we marry those whom we ought not, and, together with this, are ourselves entirely ignorant of life, and unprepared to take a wife in such a way as a free and ingenuous woman ought to be taken, then it happens that this association with her becomes difficult and intolerable.” (Fragment V, On Wedlock)

That's quite nice, and has quite the ring of common sense compared to proto-hippy Zeno.

And here is advice from Epictetus that lots of Christian parents would be very comfortable with:

 “As for sex, abstain as far as possible before marriage, and if you do go in for it, do nothing that is socially unacceptable. But don’t interfere with other people on account of their sex lives or criticize them, and don’t broadcast your own abstinence.”

 As the person who posted that quote writes: 

Basically, try to be responsible and mind your own business. Not a bad way to live.

There’s no reason to be a pleasure-hating moralist (that is its own passion, anyway). There’s not much to admire in the stories we hear from Greece and Rome about slaves and prostitution and pederasty either. Worse still are the hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

Epictetus’s formula is almost a perfect Aristotelian Mean: Don’t abstain and don’t overdo. Leave other people to their own choices. Keep your own choices private. And don’t think you’re better than anyone else—because you’re not.

 So, maybe the lesson of the whole post is this:  ignore most Greek philosophising on sex and marriage, and don't base theology on porn.