IX. The Decay of Exogamy in Advancing Communities

It will complete the view of early society, to which we have been led by our investigation of the origin of the form of capture, if we point out the principal causes of the breakdown of exogamy in advancing communities. We have seen the liability of the principle to decay in the confusion incident to the growth of the system of kinship through males; and have found reason to think that it gave place to endogamy in many tribes which had, previous to the revolution in kinship, nearly attained a balance—sufficient for the purposes of marriage—of persons accounted of different stocks. It remains, then, that we should consider the causes of the neglect of the principle where it perished gradually, and without the people becoming endogamous.

To indicate the causes in any case will be sufficient for our purpose. We select the cases of Greece and Rome as being those which, to the generality of readers, are most familiar. That the Greeks and the Romans were originally exogamous may be inferred from three distinct grounds, separately, and in combination. (1), They present us with the Form of Capture in marriage ceremonies. (2), Many of their mythic traditions are incapable of a rational explanation, except on the hypothesis that they anciently had the system of capturing women for wives. (3), The composition and organization of their tribes and commonwealths cannot well be explained, except on the hypothesis that they resulted from the joint operation, in early times, of exogamy, and the system of kinship through females only. The two first grounds we have already noticed; on the third, we must now dwell somewhat. It not only affords new evidence of the prevalence of exogamy, but introduces us to the chief causes of its decay in advancing communities.

The old theory of the composition of States, was based upon the tendency of families to multiply round a central family, whose head represented the original progenitor of them all. The family, under the government of a father, was assumed to be the primary group—the elementary social unit; in it were found at once the germs of the State, and of sovereign authority. Many circumstances recommended this theory, and none more than its apparent simplicity. It was easy to find abundant analogies for the prolongation of the family into the State. A family tends to multiply families around it, till it becomes the centre of a tribe, just as the banyan tends to surround itself with a forest of its own offshoots. And it is obvious, to follow up this figure, by remarking that the feelings of kindred which hold families together in tribes, tend to bind together, in nations, tribes which, like the Greek races, trace back their descent to kinsmen.

The origin of the State on this view is so simple, that a child may comprehend it. But it is very easily shown that the theory cannot be supported. In the first place, it is not borne out by history. The tribes are numerous whose members claim to be descended from a common progenitor. Inquiry, however, everywhere discloses the fact, that the common progenitor is a fiction—a hero or god, called into being to explain the tribe—from whom the tribe did not derive its being. In many cases, not only the fact that the genealogy is fictitious, but even the time when it was invented, can be shown; and nowhere can tribes or nations be traced back to individuals. Also, the theory turns on a fundamental error as to the primitive state. It postulates that human history opens with perfect marriage, conjugal fidelity, and certainty of male parentage—that, from the first, all the necessary conditions of the rise of a perfect family system were satisfied. Demonstrably, history did not so begin; and hence, demonstrably, the family—the social unit of the theory—is not the primary unit it is assumed to be. Farther, and apart from these objections, the theory is wanting in this essential quality of a good theory, viz., that it should explain, or be capable of being made to appear to explain, the facts. The more acute thinkers who have adopted it, and who at the same time have rejected, as they felt constrained to do, the principle of contiguity, as a principle on which groups in early times united, have discerned serious difficulties in the way of entertaining the theory. Mr. Maine especially seems to have been impressed with these difficulties, and to have been unable to find any proper solution of them.

“In most of the Greek States, and in Rome,” says Mr. Maine, “there long remained vestiges of an ascending series of groups, out of which the State was at first constituted. The family, house, and tribe of the Romans, may be taken as the type of them; and they are so described to us, that we can scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles, which have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is the family connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of families (which elsewhere he calls the fictitious extension of the family) forms the gens or house. The aggregation of houses makes the tribe. The aggregation of tribes forms the commonwealth.”

Obviously, this is not an explanation of the growth of the commonwealth. It does not show how, consistently with the assumption of the family as the elementary unit, the various aggregations spoken of were effected. The gens, clan, or house, which occurs in early tribes wherever we look, was in India, Greece, and Rome, as elsewhere, composed of all the persons in the tribe (included in families, of course), bearing the same name, and accounted of the same stock. Were the gentes really of different stocks, as their names would imply, and as the people believed? If so, how came clans of different stocks to be united in the same tribe? The production of a tribe of one stock—of a homogeneous agnatic group—is readily conceivable on the family hypothesis. But how came a variety of such groups—of different stocks—to coalesce in a local tribe? On the other hand, how came a tribe of descent to be divided into clans situated in different local tribes; how came such a tribe to be at all divided into clans or houses?

To these questions no proper answer has, so far as we know, been given. The common supposition is, that the heterogeneity of the local tribes was somehow brought about by the fiction of adoption. It is supposed that the agnatic groups must have united through this fiction, the one adopting the other on the pretence of kinship; although, after their union, they preserved their distinctive names. Mr. Maine does not expressly say that the observed combination of heterogeneous elements in tribes, and hence in the commonwealth—often assumed to be composed wholly of kindred—was due to the employment of the fiction of adoption; but he leaves that conclusion to be drawn by his readers. “If,” he says, “adoption had never existed, I do not see how any one of the primitive groups (i.e., the agnatic brotherhoods, for he contemplates none other), whatever were their nature, could have absorbed one another; or, on what terms any two of them could have combined, except those of absolute superiority on the one side, and absolute subjection on the other.” Here the difficulty is distinctly perceived; but, is it overcome? What is the evidence that the fiction of adoption was ever employed on so grand a scale as we must suppose, to explain the heterogeneity of such groups as the tribes of Rome, Greece, or India? We say that there is none. It is a case of error, induced by the maxim “causa æquat effectum.” As the fiction of adoption was the only cause conceived of, that might have produced the observed phenomena, it has been assumed to have been employed on the scale required by its supposed effects. But, we repeat, there is no evidence that it was so employed. And there is no likelihood that it was so employed. Our belief is, that adoption has been much more extensively employed by philosophers to explain, than it was by rude races to produce, heterogeneity. It is of no consequence how families and gentes were adulterated by the practice of adoption. The difficulty to be got over does not lie so much in any want of purity of the so-called stocks, as in the union of different stocks—admittedly different—in the same tribe.

The phenomena we have been contemplating offer no difficulty when regarded from the point of view to which we have been led by our investigation. To satisfy the reader of this, we must to some extent recapitulate. We started in the last chapter from the conception of populations, the units of which were homogeneous groups or tribes, which, on the introduction of kinship, became the stock groups of each particular district or country, and gave their names to the variety of stocks subsequently known to the district or country. And we saw how, into the groups, and into their sections, if they divided, exogamy conjointly with the system of kinship through females only, while it endured, systematically imported strangers, and thus in time rendered the groups heterogeneous, and the general population to the same extent homogeneous. We saw how thus every local tribe came to consist of persons of different stocks; also how all of the same stock, in each, were bound together by rights and obligations springing out of kinship; and how they were also united—though to less practical effect—to all others of the same stock in whatever local tribes residing. Farther, we saw that, when kinship became agnatic, the character of the local tribes became stereotyped, the causes of heterogeneity ceasing to operate.

In each local tribe all the men of the same stock and name were bound by kinship to common action, in certain cases, against the men of other stocks, both in the tribe and elsewhere. Here we have the gentes in the local tribe. And gentes of the same stock and name would exist in different neighbouring local tribes. We shall learn from this how the causes which led to the diffusion of the stocks throughout the population, favoured the union of the population in the commonwealth. Most probably contiguous tribes would be composed of precisely the same stocks—would contain gentes of precisely the same names, and thus be in the strictest sense akin—kindred. There is no difficulty in conceiving equal unions taking place between such tribes under the influence of kinship, similarity of elements and structure, contiguity and convenience. And on the union of several local tribes under a common government, the gentes of each stock in the combination would be recognised as forming together a tribe of descent, as in reality they would do. Thus, the tribes of descent in the commonwealth would each embrace several gentes which had taken shape, and acquired special rights and property in the local tribes in which they respectively were, before the union in the State. As the gens (or the germ thereof) would arise under the influence of female kinship, it would precede—probably long precede—agnatic kinship and the family system as they existed in Rome. And we have already seen something of the processes by which the gentes would be resolved into rude family groups, and the family system gradually advance into the patriarchal, till the gentes would be resolved into a series of families of the Roman type. The order of social development, in our view, is then, that the tribe stands first; the gens or house next; and last of all, the family. We are satisfied that the more the reader studies the phenomena of early tribal composition—the phratries and such-like unions of persons in different tribes—the more he will be convinced that this was the order of the genesis of tribes, gentes, and families; and that in no other way can the phenomena of the composition of early states be satisfactorily explained.

Assuming that we have given the true account of the origin of clans of different names and stocks in local tribes, and of the appearance of distinct houses of the same name in tribes of descent, in ancient commonwealths, we might greatly extend the area of exogamy. But to do so is not our present purpose. We observe that the breakdown of exogamy in advancing communities must have been most intimately connected with this evolution of clans and families, and of clan and family estates within the tribe. As we have already had occasion to point out, the only species of property known anywhere originally appears to have been property in common. Everywhere it would appear that the groups were at the first the only owners. And the history of the right of property, as we have it, is just that of the growth inside groups of proprietary rights distinct from the tribal. It was an advance when clan estates were recognised as distinct from the tribal; it was a farther advance when family estates were recognised as distinct from those of the clan. Barbarism was already far in the rear when individual property made its appearance.

Now, when the authentic history of Rome begins, marriage-laws had not only become stringent, but modern in character, conjugal fidelity had become common, and, as the consequence, relationship had become agnatic. The tribal system, moreover, had been stripped of several of its leading features. Property had long been localized in families as distinct from gentes; and this localization had cut the families off from one another, and to a large extent from the gentes. Families were still associated in gentes; the gentes in tribes, for political purposes; and there remained to the gentiles the right and spes successionis to family estates, failing legitimate heirs. But already the laws of succession which had sprung up with family property—which were springing up with individual property—were training the people to consider a few persons only as their kinsmen in any special sense. And the course of decadence of the recognition of extended kinships in Greece followed much the same path. However strongly implanted the principle of exogamy may have originally been, it must have succumbed to the influences which thus disintegrated the old bonds of kinship. So complete was the disintegration, that in Rome while the right of succession still remained in the gentiles as evidence of kinship, and its rights and obligations, having been originally co-extensive with the gens, we find this so far lost sight of in the nebulosities of legal terminology, that the lawyers declared that all consanguinity ended with their names for its seven degrees—names invented with a view to the regulation of successions; ended there, “quia ulterius per rerum naturam nec nomina inveniri nec vita succedentibus prorogari potest.” A maxim, by the way, which proved very convenient to those pontiffs who maintained that the Levitical rule prohibited marriage between all blood relations, and which is probably found very convenient now in Russia where the Greek church still asserts that view of the Levitical rule. For the rest, it must be enough to say that exogamy died out with the blood-ties on which its existence depended, and that the process of destruction of those ties which the laws of succession inaugurated, was carried on and completed by the law of Testaments. If to this general view anything should be added, perhaps it is that the earliest violations of the rule of exogamy would appear to have been called for in the case of female heiresses. Such ladies, if they made proper marriages according to old law—at that stage of progress when a wife was usually what they call in Ceylon a deega wife, i.e., passed from her own family into the family and village of her husband—must have carried their estates into other tribes or gentes, and so have cut off their own gentiles from the prospect of succeeding them. Numbers xxxvi. contains an account of the origin among the Israelites of the rule prohibiting a female heiress from marrying out of the tribe of the family of her father. And the prohibition is not uncommon.