Love and sex

Widespread experience of romantic love has been rare throughout history and has been connected with women's control over property.

## Rome and Greece of old

In the cities of the Mediterranean basin during classical antiquity ~ id est, from about 400 p.e.v. to around 400 e.v. ~ heterosexual couplings generally took four forms: use, concubinage, marriage, and romance. The rigidly hierarchical nature of ancient social structures ~ everyone was bound through dependence or subordination to persons above and below her/him ~ were imported overtly into these relationships, even into marriage, so that emotional aspects were limited and shaped to a large extent by the social roles of the partners.

An adult Roman male could commit only a few sexual failings:

* he would incur contempt as unchaste if his appetite for sex led him to financial or political foolishness
* if he took the passive role in a sexual relationship or sold his sexual favors
* if he violated the sanctity of someone else's family or marriage through adultery or child molesting, he would incur scandal and possibly violent retribution.
> This is what it means to be married: to have sons one can introduce to the neighbors, and to have daughters of one's own to give to husbands. For we have courtesans [ἑταίρας] for pleasure, concubines [παλλακας] to attend to our daily bodily needs, and wives to bear children legitimately and to be faithful wards of our homes.
>
> Δημοσθένης, 384 to 322 p.e.v.

### Use

Neither the mores of pagan culture nor the precepts of most ancient religions hindered a man's sexual access to women under his power. The reverse of this ~ sexual use of male dependents by female masters or owners ~ probably took place occasionally, but was risky for the woman. There was much Roman legislation about women of higher status having sexual relations with slaves or unfree dependents; its import varied by century, but it is fair to say that it was nearly always to the disadvantage of the woman, and very often harshly punitive.

It was common then for sterile women to lend their own maids to their husbands to produce an heir.

Relationships of this sort obviously entailed few or no obligations on the male's part, either in terms of conferring status or property on his partner or in terms of his commitment to longevity.

### Concubinage

The term "concubine" denotes a social inferior (but not usually a possessed person) maintained in a long-standing relationship for the sexual fulfillment of a male. It was very rare for women to have male concubines; if they used subordinate females for this, as seems only logical, it has left no record. Sometimes some commitment was involved in relations of this sort. Concubines might live in the household or be maintained in a separate home, usually though not always depending on whether there was also a wife. Concubinage was more respectable (for both parties) than prostitution, and there might even be an official concubine, recognized by the family, community, or the state in the case of a monarch. Such relationships differed from marriage in that they would not normally involve property or status or dynastic rights for the concubine, or at least not those of a wife: they were an alternative to marriage or in addition to it. In contrast to marriage, which was a social institution by which families of the same standing entered into an alliance to perpetuate themselves, concubinage was a personal union, an affair of love, at least on the part of the man.

### Marriage

Marriage, the only respectable sexual relationship for women in antiquity, took two forms. Polygamy was widespread among some Mediterranean peoples for rich males. Women in such a system usually could not remarry.

The most common type of opposite-sex marriage in all Mediterranean societies (and the only legal form at Athens and Rome) was monogamy: a male-female couple. Such unions were often officially possible only for the propertied classes, but the monogamous permanent relationships of the lower classes were apparently understood as analogous. Such couplings were not irrevocable, at least for males: divorce was permitted, usually (but not always) at the man's instigation, in nearly all pre-Christian cultures of the Mediterranean. Romans idealized and praised with the term uniuira (which means, loosely, "one-man woman") women who had only a single husband, and with the word solus a man to whom a uniuira was devoted; the ideal applied both to women who maintained lifelong marriages and to those who declined to remarry after being widowed. No similar terms or concepts applied in the other direction.

### Romance

Nonetheless, some opposite-sex relationships were based less on property and status considerations, but were two people involved in a romantic relationship without a predominant coercive element , either legal (as in slavery) or economic (as in concubinage). Neither property nor household considerations were central in such relationships (the parties usually did not occupy the same household, at least at first). They were based on mutual attraction and love between persons whose social and economic statuses were either comparable or irrelevant; they were rarely married to each other, though they might be married to someone else. Such arrangements were for the most part possible only in prosperous, sophisticated societies in which women could maintain themselves in their own households without military protection ~ id est, the urban centers of the Mediterranean and southern Europe.