A Note on Religion

Abstract

At the beginning of our era, after a battle on the Ionian Sea, Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives in Egypt, and Augustus was made an imperator by his senators. Roman emperors had sexual access to those senators’ daughters and wives, and to thousands of slaves. But they ran governments with help from their cubicularii, castrated civil servants. And they enforced an Imperial Cult: subjects made sacrifices to the emperor's genius, or procreative spirit; or they got disemboweled by wild animals, or decapitated. Then Constantine moved off from the Tiber to the Bosporus, and Europe was ruled over by a few. Lords covered the countryside with bastards, but passed on estates on to their oldest sons. Daughters and younger sons were put away in the Church, where some became parents, but most were reproductively suppressed: they were ἄνανδρος or anandros, or without a husband, and ἄγαμος or agamos, or without a wife. Heretics who objected got burned at the stake. Then the Crusaders expanded Europe to the East, and Columbus went off to the West, and politics, sex and religion became more democratic. Power was more widely distributed; more men and women had families if they wanted them, and monasteries emptied out. The Reformation followed the Roman Church, which had followed the Imperial Cult.

Aristotle split governments into 3 sorts. First was rule by many; second was rule by a few; third was rule by just one. For a few years after Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, his student swept across Asia, from the Adriatic to the Indus, and died on the Euphrates at the age of 32. When he debated the subject in his Politics, Aristotle found merits in every form of government. Regardless of how many rulers there were, governments formed in the common interest were good; those formed in the interests of the ruler or rulers were bad. Overall he liked monarchy best. For men preeminent in excellence there was no law: they themselves were the law. So they ought to be kings. “All should happily obey such a ruler, according to what seems to be the order of nature” (Politics 1279a-1284b; compare Plato, Laws 710–712).

A few centuries later, Cicero defended the Roman senate. From the orations against Catiline that made his reputation, to the philippics against Mark Antony that cost him his head, Cicero spoke up for the republic. He thought that a mix of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy was better than the rule of one man. “Nature has decreed not only that men of superior character and ability should be in charge of the less endowed, but also that the latter should willingly obey their superiors” ( Republic 1.51, 1.69; compare Polybius, Histories 6.3-4).

More than a millennium after that, liberty flourished along the coasts of Europe and across the Atlantic. Constitutions with balances of powers were drawn up in England, the Americas and France; the individual liberties of the people, and of their posterity, were secured. By August of 1789, the French National Assembly had determined that all men are born and remain and free and equal in rights, and that those rights included liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. “The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man” (Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen1789).

Monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy are common across natural history. In monarchical societies, often insect societies, just one female, with just one or a few males, are able to breed; and the rest work as parts of a sterile caste (Batra, 1966). In oligarchical societies, many of them avian societies, a minority of adults reproduce, and the rest help at their nest (Skutch, 1935). And in democratic societies, some of them mammalian societies, most females and males are able to breed, but they breed more or less (Wilson, 1971 and Hrdy, 2009; theory in Vehrencamp, 1983a, 1983b; Trivers, 2002).

In history, as in natural history, some societies are monarchies. Fights, often fatal, determine what female, or what male, or what mated pair will become king or queen. Monarchs are prolific breeders; subordinates make up sterile castes. Other societies are oligarchies, ruled over by minorities. Dominants compete for status, and to become parents; subordinates are reproductively suppressed. More egalitarian societies, or democracies, are ruled by majorities. Power is shared, and reproduction is widespread.

Our own monarchies have included the first empires in Mesopotamia and on the Nile; other empires in Asia beside the Yellow River and between the Indus and Ganges; and in the New World, a pair of empires in the Valley of Mexico and the Andes. After 27 BC there was a Mediterranean empire, in and around Rome.

Oligarchies have included Sparta, ruled over by a pair of hereditary kings with a council of 28 elders. They included the 30 men who ruled Athens after the Peloponnesian war was over. Rome was led by a pair of consuls elected annually from 509 to 27 BC. And after the fall of Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor in the West, in AD 476, the descendants of a long-haired barbarian named Merovech divided large parts of Europe among themselves. They were succeeded by the descendants of Charlemagne.

Aristotle used the word “democratic” to describe Athens; and in most of the small societies of prehistory, people were more or less equal. But democracies were uncommon in history. Popular constitutions were written in Europe after Magna Carta; and with the establishment of parliaments, they spread across the West. Over just the last couple of centuries the popular vote has expanded, with an end to property qualifications, the abolition of language requirements, the inclusion of women, and the lowering of age.

Politics

Rule by One

One day in August of 38 BC, Julius Caesar won a battle against Pompey the Great, at Pharsalus, on the plains of Greece. Then in September of 31, after another battle on the Ionian Sea, Caesar's great-nephew, the man-who-would-be-called Augustus, chased Antony and Cleopatra back to Egypt. He started to call himself divi filius: the son of a god. And in the senate, in 27 BC, they gave his new name. “It signified that he was more than human; for all the most precious and sacred objects are august” (Dio 53.16.8; Taylor, 1931).

Augustus, like most emperors, ended the lives of men and women who plotted against him. Many were ambitious; most were oversexed. Under the republic, most Romans had thought of treason as an injury to maiestas, and of maiestas as the dignity, grandeur and power of the people of Rome (Cicero, On Invention 2.53). Under the empire, the maiestas of divine and human, public and private affairs became the emperor's alone to decide ( Lex de Imperio Vespasiani 6). Under the 5 members of Caesar's dynasty, and under the 3 dynasties that followed, the proud were worn down. Some died for dangerous words; others died for dangerous acts. Occasionally, whole lineages were wiped out.

Just months after they started to call him an emperor, Augustus went after his prefect of Egypt, Cornelius “the Cock” Gallus, who wrote immoral lyrics (“I’m sorry you’re such a degenerate”) about his mistress, Lycoris (Gallus, Elegiacs 4/15/29). The senate voted for exile and offered the emperor his estate, but Gallus committed suicide before those decrees took effect. A couple of years later, in around 24, Marcus Primus, the Macedonian governor, was tried in the senate: Primus’ defender (“the immoderate and unrestrained”) Varro Murena, and Murena's friend (“a man of the worst character”) Fannius Caepio, were caught in a conspiracy to assassinate the princeps. “Seized by state authority, they suffered by law what they had wished to accomplish by violence” (Dio 54.3). Then roughly another 5 years later, Marcus Egnatius Rufus (“a man who in all respects resembled a gladiator more than a senator”) was handed over to the senate and condemned to death (Velleius 2.91-94; see Raaflaub & Samons, 1990). “Winds fell tall pines; lightning strikes at the high peaks” (Horace, Odes 2.10).

Augustus was succeeded by his step-son, Tiberius; then by his great-grandson, Caligula; then by Claudius, his great-nephew; then by Nero, his great-great-grandson. Every one of them had their enemies offed. Because most of those enemies were debauched.

Many were convicted of adultery. One was ultra impudicitiae maledictum impudicam: shameless beyond shamelessness; another was probris contaminate: contaminated by disgrace; one had ingenium sordidum ac ferox: a wild and sordid nature; another was brought up foedissimae criminationes: on the filthiest charges; one had uxor foedata: a polluted wife; another adliciendis feminarum animis: captured the souls of women; some were well known for corruptis moribus: bad morals; others exoletis suis prostraverit: had been prostituted to the emperor's friends; one was accused of incustoditum amorem: unguarded affection for his sister; another was the emperess’ vitiis aemulabantur: emulator in vice; one had a mind dissoluta luxu: that was enfeebled by excess; another had a body mollitia infamis, that was infamously soft. That list is far from complete (see Rutledge, 2001; Levick, 1999, 2010, 2015; Barrett, 2015; Griffin, 1984).

Nero was succeeded by the Flavian emperors; who were succeeded by the Antonines; who were succeeded by the Severans. Flavians, Antonines and Severans all had their antagonists dispatched. More of the immoral were put to death.

Domitian, the last Flavian, tortured subjects obscaena igne: by setting fire to their genitals. “Many men and women among the wealthy were punished for adultery” (Dio 67.12.1). Commodus, the last Antonine, dispatched his mother, Faustina's, lovers. “She sat on the beaches in Caieta and solicited gladiators and sailors” ( Augustan History , Marcus Aurelius 19.7). And Elagabalus, the next-to-last Severan emperor, attacked his critics. “Even though the emperor seemed to be devoting all his attention to dancing and to his priestly duties, still he found time to execute many famous and wealthy men who were charged with ridiculing and censuring his way of life” (Herodian 5.6.1). Every one of those emperors was the subject of plots. Domitian was stabbed between the legs by a slave (Suetonius, Domitian 14-17). Commodus was strangled in his bath by the wrestler, Narcissus (Dio 73.22.1-5). And Elagabalus was liquidated in a latrine. His imperial corpse was dragged through the streets, stuffed into a sewer, carried around the circus, and tossed into the Tiber ( Augustan History , Elagabalus 16-17).

But most emperors depended less and less on their senators, and more and more on their slaves. As Pliny put it in his panegyric on Trajan's accession, in the year 100: “Most emperors, though masters of their subjects, were slaves of their freedmen” (Pliny, Panegyric 88). They worked as head chefs and ornamental gardeners; they were archivists and accountants; they were secretaries of the treasury (a rationibi) and secretaries of letters (ab epistuli) and secretaries of state (a libelli). And they were generally unmarried. “There is no connubium with slaves” (Ulpian, Fragment 5.5; with Weaver, 1972).

Many were parts of a sterile caste. There were cubicularii (bedchamber attendants) and supra cubicularii (supervisory bedchamber attendants) and decurio cubicularii (heads of 10 bedchamber attendants), soon after there was an empire in the West. And after the emperors moved toward the East, they ended up running the state. Eunuchs managed the emperor's bodyguard, his movables, his properties and his money; some eunuchs became generals, other eunuchs became consuls. A castrensis sacri palatii (who managed the sacred palace) was in charge of the imperial household; a praepositus sacri cubiculi (or prefect of the sacred bedchamber) effectively ran the empire (Jones, 1964; Hopkins, 1978; Tougher, 2008).

Rule by a Few

Legend has it that one day toward the end of the 5^th century AD, in around the time of Romulus Augustus, the son of a sea monster was born. They called him Merovech, and he became the father of Childeric, who became the father of Clovis, who became a king. But when Clovis died in Paris in 511, he divided his domains. His sons Childebert, Chlodomer, Theuderic and Chlothar settled, respectively, in Paris, Orléans, Rheims and Soissons.

Clovis’ descendants would follow that precedent. Encouraged by viri fortiores, their strong men, those kingdoms would be divided again (Gregory of Tours, History 9.36, with Fredegar, Continuations 23). So would Charlemagne's. Procerum consiliante choro, to a chorus of his loftiest councilors, in 806, Charles the Great divided his own lands. He gave Aquitaine to Louis, his youngest son; he gave Italy to Pippin, his second; and Charles junior, his oldest, got pretty much everything else (Ordinatio Imperii of 817, with Ermold the Black, In Honor of Louis). But medieval heirs often fought with each other. And they fought with their oversexed dukes and counts.

Many of the worst persons were counts. Leudast came into the world as the son of a slave who worked in the vineyards of Charibert I, got himself a job in his kitchens in Paris, worked up to become master of stables, and was made count of Tours. “He feathered his nest in the most rapacious way, was always the loudest shouter in any brawl, and simply wallowed in promiscuity.” He went so far as to interfere with women who stood at the church door. So one day after queen Fredegund came out of the cathedral with her husband, king Chilperic of Soissons, their retainers bound Leudast in chains and threw him in jail. “At the personal command of the queen he was placed flat on his back on the ground, a block of wood was wedged behind his neck and then they beat him on the throat with another piece of wood until he died” (Gregory of Tours, History 5.48-49, 6.32).

Dukes were often no better. Chilperic, the king of Soissons, fell out with his brother Sigibert, the king of Rheims. Sigibert was assassinated; then Chilperic was stabbed to death. And in the aftermath Guntram Boso, a duke who’d played both sides, was brought before Sigibert's widow, Brunhilda, and her friends. His body was exposed to the open air, and so were his supporters’; his wife was sent into exile, and so were his sons. “He was greedy and avaricious, an unprincipled sort of man.” He probably slept with his servants, and he probably raped nuns (Gregory of Tours, History 9.10, 20, 27, 10.8; (see James, 1988; Wood, 1994 on Merovingian kings).

As an alternative to their oversexed senators, dukes and counts, Clovis and his descendants ran governments with help from large numbers of celibate sons. But they were usually wellborn. Formularies recommended the appointment of helpers with illustrious parents; many came from the noblest and most distinguished families in the land (Marculf 1.7; Gregory of Tours, History 4.15).

Charlemagne and his descendants continued to run governments with help from their bishops and abbots, but many came from farther away. From the remotest part of Britain came Alcuin of York, who ran the school at the palace; and from the savage wilderness around faraway Fulda, east of the Rhine, came Charlemagne's earliest biographer, Einhard. He accumulated lay abbacies all over the empire (Alcuin, Letter 67 to Charlemagne; Willibald, Life of Boniface 5; De Jong, 1996).

Other bureaucrats seem to have been lowborn. Charlemagne and his descendants took servorum suroum, men raised out of the fisc, and brought them up to curam regni, their royal courts. They made summi pontifices, the highest bishops, out of vilissimis servis, their lowest servants (Adrevald of Fleury, Miracles of St Benedict 18; Thegan, Deeds of Louis 20).

And some civil servants were bastards. There was Hugo, who ended up as archchancellor and abbot of St Quentin; there was Drogo, who ended up as archchaplain and bishop of Metz; there was Richbod, a St Riquier abbot; and there was another Bernard, abbot of Moutier St Jean. Ebbo, who was regii fisci familia: descended from goatherder ancestors on the imperial fisc, grew up as Louis the Pious’ collactaneus: they sucked at the same breast, and became the archbishop of Rheims. Nithard, the court historian and lay abbot at St Riquier, and Louis, the St Denis abbot and archchancellor, were a couple of Charlemagne's bastard grandsons.

A number of the unmarried were sent out as missi dominici, Charlemagne's imperial ambassadors. In the capitulary set out in 802, they were ordered to make circuits of the empire, and to enforce the emperor's orders. “Both archbishops and some of the other bishops also, and venerable abbots and pious laymen, he has sent throughout his whole kingdom, and through them by all the following chapters has allowed men to live in accordance with the correct law” (Capitulary for the missi 1). Some missi were sought out for relief from extortionate counts. Others extracted goods and services on the emperors’ behalf (see McKitterick, 2008; Nelson, 2019 on Charlemagne).

Rule by Many

In the century after a Norman named Rollo set siege to Paris, William the Bastard left Normandy and became conqueror of England. He took the crown at Westminster at Christmas of 1066. The defeated were dispossessed. But the Conqueror's successors made concessions.

In his Charter of Liberties, William's son, Henry I, promised to get rid of malas consuetudines, or bad customs, and iniustis exactionibus, or unjust exactions. Then a couple of generations later, in the Coronation Charter written for his own inauguration in 1154, Henry II made the same promises his grandfather had (Henry I and Henry II, Coronation Charters). And just 3 generations after William the Conqueror, on a June day in 1215, John I met 25 barons at Runnymede, on the banks of the Thames. They drew up Magna Carta, the great charter. It promised that no free man would be imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled, except by the lawful judgment of his peers, and per legem terre: by the law of the land. And it went on to guarantee that no aids would be levied by the king, unless the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls and greater barons were summoned, with at least 40 days’ notice, to offer commune consilium: common counsel on the affairs of the realm ( Magna Carta 14, 39; Holt, 1992). The Great Charter, in various forms, would be renewed many times. And concessions to the Commons would increase.

By 1254, under Henry III, who was John I's son and successor, writs were sent out to suggest that 4 milites, or knights, should be elected to represent their counties at Westminster. Civibus quam burgensibus, or citizens and townsmen, were added by 1265. Edward I, who was Henry III's successor and son, summoned 4 discreet and law worthy knights from every county, along with 4 or 6 citizens, burgesses or other good men from every city, borough or market town, to his first parliament in 1275. Knights and burgesses were represented at 23 out of 29 parliaments under Edward II. His son and successor, Edward III, summoned another 48 parliaments over the course of his 50-year reign; and his knights and burgesses always came (Richardson & Sayles, 1981; Maddicott, 2012).

Richard II succeeded his grandfather in the summer of 1377, at the age of 10. And in the summer of 1381, his peasants revolted. Some said that poll tax collectors had molested their daughters; so they beheaded the lord high treasurer and poll tax administrator, and his house was burned to the ground. Many of the protestors were upset that that the court cost so much: in a parliament just months after the Peasants’ Revolt, the Commons objected to the outrageouses nombre des familiers at Richard's palace ( Parliament Rolls 3.100; with Dobson, 1970).

There would be further disapproval of promiscuous kings. In his first speech to parliament, the first James Stuart reassured his subjects that he considered himself his peoples’ husband. “The whole Isle is my lawfull Wife.” So far from increasing their burdens after the fashion of Rehoboam, he intended to lighten them (James I, Speech to Parliament 1604, with 1 Kings 12:10-11). But he was asked by his Lords and Commons, more than once, to cut costs. “To what purpose is it for us to drawe a silver streame out of the contry into the royall cesterne, if it shall dayly runne out thence by private cocks?” (Parliamentary Debates of 1610 ). After nearly half a century of Elizabethan thrift, the household was enormously overstaffed, and expenses were up by over 100% (Aylmer, 1974; Croft, 1985).

James’ son, Charles I, would be had up on the same counts. And on 30 January 1649, his head would be cut off. A year after his own accession, Charles opened his first parliament with a request for funds. He was granted a pair of subsidies by his Commons, but warned that his estate was already overburdened with domestic charges. Too many annuities were being paid. And too many hangers on were being fed. “Abuses in the Kinge's household by increasing of tables and misimplyinge that which comes from the subject, which must be reform’d” (Debates in the House of Commons, 1625 ). Charles was aware that his father had set a bad precedent: “We saw much disorder in and about his household, by reason of the many idle persons, and other unnecessary attendants.” So he gave idle and extraneous persons 24 h to get out, on pain of imprisonment or corporal punishments ( Stuart Royal Proclamations 2.14). None of those efforts seem to have done enough. On the eve of the civil war, in their 1641 Grand Remonstrance, the parliament of Charles I presented him with a complaint: “The King's household was to be provided for: — they had brought him to that want, that he could not supply his ordinary and necessary expenses without the assistance of his people” (Grand Remonstrance of 1641 ). Grievances like that would persist. On 6 January 1649, the House of Commons set up a high court of justice to try him. On 20 January, they charged him with cruel and unnatural wars against his parliament and his people. On 27 January, they sentenced Charles I as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of England. “Wicked designs, Wars, and evil Practices of him the said Charles Stuart have been and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of the personal Interest of Will and Power, and pretended Prerogative to himself and his Family, against the Publick Interest” (Sentence of the High Court in 1649 ). And on 30 January, on a scaffold at Whitehall, soon after 2:00 in the afternoon, and they took off his head with an ax.

Sex

Rule by One

In the Roman Empire, as in other empires, reproductive variance was large. Emperors collected thousands of women, and fathered hundreds of children, who were fed and protected by sterile castes (Betzig, 1992a, 1992b, 2014).

After he died, Augustus was remembered as a lecher. Gaius Suetonius, the 2^nd-century secretary of letters who mined the imperial archives for his Lives of the Caesars, found a note from Marc Antony that asked him: “Is Drusilla the only woman you mount? Good luck if, when you read this, you haven’t been in bed with Tertulla, or Terentilla, or Rufilla, or Salvia Titisenia, or all of them. Does it matter where and in whom you have your erections?” Augustus’ first wife, Clodia Pulchra, was sent back to her mother intactam adhuc et virginem: untouched. Augustus’ second wife, Scribonia, was divorced. Morum perversitatem eius: intolerant of his infidelities, he found her morally perverse. But Augustus’ third and last wife, Livia Drusilla, held onto her husband for more than 50 years, even if libidines haesit: his lustfulness stuck. As Suetonius summed up: “As an elderly man he is said to have still harbored a passion for initiating girls, who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife” (Suetonius, Augustus 62.1-2, 69.1-2, 71.1).

Augustus’ successors were no better. Charges against them included occultiores luxus: occult excesses, and arcanarum libidinum: arcane lusts; exoletis suis prostraverit: they prostituted their sisters, and set up lupanaria: places for shewolves in the palace; caelibis vitae intoleranti: intolerant of celibacy, they loved to be pampered by paelices, the women they slept with; they were fans of exoletorum feminarumque: worn out women, and fond of novitatem stupri, stupor-inducing novelties (Suetonius, Tiberius 43.1, Caligula 24.3, 41.1; Tacitus, Annals 4.67, 11.29, 12.1, 16.18).

Flavian and Antonine and Severan emperors occasionally outdid them. Domitian made himself censor perpetuus, or perpetual censor, and started a correctio morum, or correction of morals (Suetonius, Domitian 8.3). But his satirists were onto him. “When you-know-who was reviving those stern laws against adultery, even Mars and Venus blushed, but all the while he himself was flouting the law, and spiced his crime with a dash of incest” (Juvenal 2.29-33). Marcus Aurelius wrote about the struggle to master his passions: “Where another man prays, ‘Grant that I may possess this woman,’ let your own prayer be, ‘Grant that I may not lust to possess her’;” but Commodus, his son and successor, loved both puberibus exoletis, or effete adolescents, and matronarum meretricumque, or meretricious matrons: he collected them, 600 in an afternoon (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.40; Augustan History, Commodus 5.4-11). Elagabalus was remembered as an astonishingly beautiful young man, the handsomest of his time (Herodian 5.3.7). But he was dissolute, and despised for it. This emperor had forcemeats of fish, oysters, crayfish and lobsters made; he had roses and lilies and hyacinths and narcissus strewn around his dining rooms; his cushions were stuffed with rabbit fur or partridge wings; he swam in pools filled with seawater, or scented with saffron. He drove gold chariots, and urinated in silver urns spoiled with lewd designs. Beautiful women were hitched to his wheelbarrows, and ordered to pull him around in the nude; he ordered hundreds of whores at a time (Dio 78.16.1, with Augustan History, Elagabalus 18ff).

Mostly though, these emperors had sex with their slaves. There may have been 6 million slaves in a population of 60 million in the whole Roman empire by Augustus’ time, and most of them were owned by rich women and men. Slave holdings in the hundreds were common; imperial holdings were larger. Slave women were bought young; they cost more if they looked good; cash was refunded if they had trouble producing children; but they could be freed if they bore 3 children or more. “All are agreed that a pregnant woman, the object of a sale, is healthy; for it is the highest and particular lot of woman to conceive” ( Digest 19.1.2, 21.14.1). Slave women gave birth in their masters’ houses, on their masters’ estates, to the thousands of homeborn slaves, or vernae, who became liberti, or freed slaves. Those children were attended by the same midwives and doctors, wetnurses and babysitters as their masters’ heirs; many ended up with large legacies, and they were often loved. Some grew up to become knights, or sat in the senate. And many ended up in the civil service, as members of the familia Caesaris (Betzig, 1992a, 1992b; Scheidel, 2009a, 2009b).

Rule by a Few

After Roman emperors moved toward the East, there were no more sterile castes in the West. Instead there was unmarried, or celibate, help; court servants put off becoming parents, in order to help others reproduce. But across the Middle Ages, reproductive variance decreased (Betzig, 1995, 2020a, 2020b).

Gregory of Tours remembered reges for their incontinent habits. “Childeric I, king of the Franks, whose private life was one long debauch, began to seduce the daughters of his subjects. They got so incensed that they forced him to give up his throne.” He got wind of an assassination plot and left town. A few years later he returned with a Thuringian queen, and their son Clovis was born. Clovis’ Burgundian wife, Clotild, who gave him 4 sons, converted to Catholicism and disapproved of the old gods. She thought that Mars and Mercury were worthless, and that Jupiter was worse: “He was an obscene perpetrator of all sorts of mucky deeds, who couldn’t keep his hands off other men, had his fun with all his female relatives and couldn’t even refrain from intercourse with his own sister.” Clovis’ descendants were no better. Chlothar I was a woman chaser, and so were his descendants. Spurcicia deditus: they were addicted to filth; plures concubinas: they had too many women to count (Gregory of Tours, History 2.12, 29, 4.27, with Fredegar 4.60 and Royal Frankish Annals 44).

Most of these kings held vast lands, and their palaces became numerous. There were royal manors near Paris; and there were over a hundred others. Many women would have worked in gynaecea, spinning and weaving rooms, on estates where their pueri, or children, were born. Pueri in the Pactus legis Salicae, a set of laws put together by Clovis and sons, got sent out as sacebarones, or judges, and obgrafiones, or counts. Pueri who would become bishops got brought up together at the palace, where their trustworthiness was tested. Pueri fought in the army. And there were pueri in other offices, brought up in the histories of Gregory of Tours. They worked as messengers for Rigunth, one of Chilperic's daughters; they garroted Brunhilda's sister Galswinth, one of Chilperic's wives; they tortured or beheaded the enemies of Fredegund, another of Chilperic's wives; and they killed Sigibert with a couple of scramasaxes, smeared in poison. At least some pueri regis must have been what they were named, the children of kings (Gregory of Tours, History 4.13, 28, 51, 5.3, 49, 5.20, 6.32, 35, 10.27; with Halsall, 2009).

Charlemagne had a number of queens, and a number of women on the side. In his Life of the emperor, Einhard names some of the daughters: 3 by his wife Hildegard; 2 by his wife Fastrada; 3 by women he never married. And Einhard names some of the sons: 3 by his wife Hildegard; 2 by his mistress Regina; another by Adalind. Charlemagne's first wife, Himiltrude, gave birth to Pippin Pulcher, the “Handsome,” but was repudiated; his second wife, Desiderius the Lombard's daughter, was repudiated too; his last wife, Liutgard the Alemannian, died without any known children (Einhard, Life of Charlemagne 18). But there were lots of anonymous women at Charlemagne's court. In a capitulary issued in the first years of his reign, Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious ordered that women of doubtful morals should be sent away from his domains. “It is our will likewise, concerning gadalibus, or trollops, and meretricibus, or prostitutes, that in whosoever's houses they may be found they should likewise be carried by those men to the marketplace where those same women are to be flogged or, if he refuses, it is our will that he, along with her shall be beaten in the same place” ( Capitulary on Discipline 3).

The Father of Europe, or Pater Europae, Charlemagne spent time in the country on hundreds of properties. His son Louis the Pious was especially fond of Ingelheim. Accessed by a thousand gates and supported by a hundred columns, it held a thousand rooms; it sloped down to the Rhine with orchards and fields all around, and pictures of Eve tempting Adam drawn inside. As Carolus Magnus ordered in his Capitulary de Villis: “It is our wish that those of our estates which we have established to minister to our needs shall serve our purposes entirely and not those of other men.” He asked that the best possible wine, beer, cider, vinegar, cheese, butter, honey, mead, flour, swans, peacocks, pheasants, ducks, pigeons, partridges, turtle doves, chickens, geese, bees, fish, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, nuts, grain, grapes and other produce be provided for his table, with wool, linen, dyes and combs, a number of heated rooms, good fences all round and strong doors for his women's rooms. An inventory of the estate at Treola includes a demesne house, built well of stone, with 2 chambers and 2 fireplaces, 3 living quarters for men, and a gallery, where women worked. Another inventory of Charlemagne's estate at Asnapium lists a stable, a kitchen, a bakehouse, 4 brewhouses, 2 gardens, 2 barns, 17 wooden houses in the courtyard, and one house surrounded by galleries and made of stone for the king, with 11 rooms for girls. Overall, there were plenty of accessible servants, or ancillae; and many of their spurii, or bastards, would have prospered ( Capitulary de Villis 1, 24; Brevium Exempla, 25, 36).

Rule by Many

For a millennium after pope Alexander II sent off William the Bastard to conquer England as a crusader, reproductive variance continued to decline. Early modern Englishmen competed for resources and sexual access, but most were able to breed. They just bred more or less (Betzig, 2002, 2013, 2021).

Constitutio domus regis, the census put together by a treasurer of Henry I, regulated the size and composition of the household of the king. It accounts for the bread and wine, cash and candle allowances of officers from chamberlain on down. It lists 4 hornblowers and 20 serjeants, scent hound keepers and huntsmen of hounds on the leash, with various wolf hunters and archers, on the hunt staff alone. The Constitutio doesn’t mention women, but there would have been some. Henry I had a marshal of the meretrices, or prostitutes; his name was Oin Purcell, and he worked part time in the kitchen. Another staffer, Ranulf de Broc, worked under Henry II as marshal in custody of meretrices de curia domini Regis, the whores of the king's court: he looked after buboes, or groin sores, and germinibus noctis, or germs of the night. And there was Henry de la Mare, another custodian of meretrices sequentes curiam domini regis, in this case the loose women who followed Henry III's court. Some of those procurers carried seals with an ominous message: “God save the woman to whom I am sent” (Round, 1911; Vincent, 2007).

More household ordinances would follow. Ribauz e ribaudes, rowdy men and unruly women, were evicted from the household of Henry III's son, Edward I, in 1279; by 1376, under Edward III, the household census was up to 500, more or less; and his servants included Ralph de Middleton, marescallus de meretricibus in hospitio regis: marshal of the household whores. The household of Henry IV numbered well over 600; and by the time of Henry VI, there may have been as many as 800 at court. When in June of 1478 Edward IV agreed to another household ordinance, the Black Book, or Liber niger, it counted 325 yeomen and 120 grooms in the house of mgnificence, or domus magnificencie, attendants on the king and queen, with a house of providence, or domus providencie, the hundreds of servants who provided for them (Given-Wilson, 1986; Black Book 4). And when Henry VIII submitted to ordinances at Eltham in 1526, the court numbered as many as 750 over the summer progress; so sickly and impotent and incompetent courtiers were cut off, rascals and vagabonds thrown out ( Ordinances at Eltham, 1526;Starkey, 1987).

Then the Stuarts descended from Scotland. And for the benefit of his son, James I pointed out that fornication might be considered a light and venial sin in some parts of the world, but to most readers of the English Bible that he was about to commission, it would not. As he put it in his own Basilicon Doron: “It is not enough to a good King, by the scepter of good Lawes well execute to gouerne, and by force of armes to protect his people; if he ioyne not therewith his vertuous life in his owne person.” It was important to eat and drink moderately, dress modestly and abstain from the idle company of dames: “Yee must keepe your bodie cleane and vnpolluted, till yee giue it to your wife, whom-to onely it belongeth” (Basilicon Doron 2). But Stuart actions spoke louder than Stuart words. On the eve of the revolution, the households of Charles I and his queen and their children accounted for up to half of all public expenditures in England. And many hangers on were women: “The court of this king was a nursery of lust and intemperance” (Hutchinson, Memoirs 1.120). Even after the revolution, when in 1660 Charles II came back to England from France, and parliament limited his allowance, Restoration households may have numbered over 2250 heads; and women were taken advantage of. “He was an excellent prince had he ben lesse addicted to Women, which made him uneasy & always in Want to supply their unmeasrable profusion” (Evelyn, Diary 2/6/1685; Aylmer, 2002).

Their successors spent less. When, in 1714, parliament put the Hanoverian great-grandson of the first James Stuart on the throne, his domestic allowance was set at £700,000; and his household was smaller than the Stuarts’ by half. George I kept on the order of 3 dozen attendants in his bedchamber, headed as always by his groom of the stool. He kept better than 4 dozen servants in his privy chamber, another 4 dozen in his guard and presence chambers, cupbearers, carvers and servers, pages and grooms. There were 48 watermen, 48 chaplains, 47 messengers, and at least 100 yeomen of the guard; and there were another 296 at least—drum majors, axe keepers, lion keepers, mole takers, barge builders, tennis court masters, herb strewers, decipherers—in the chamber and offshoots upstairs. Below stairs and in the stables, there were 262 more—working in the spicery, confectionary, ewery and buttery. The total ran to 900, more or less. The servants had started to move out, from bottom to top (Beattie, 1967; Hatton, 1978).

Their descendants would be patronized by their parliamentarians. George V succeeded his father in 1911, and spent most of his adult life in York Cottage and Sandringham House, where he shot grouse and collected stamps. After a visit to Balmoral, the history writer and MP, Lionel Brett, made a note in his journal: “There is no longer the old atmosphere about that house—that curious electric current,” after which he gratuitously went on, “Everything is very charming and wholesome and sweet.” Lloyd George, the PM, was at least as condescending in a letter to his wife. “The king is a very jolly chap but thank God there's not much in his head. They’re simple, very, very ordinary people, and perhaps on that whole that's how it should be” (Brett, Journals, 8/21/1910; Lloyd George, Letter to his wife Margaret, 10/8/1910). George VI was born at York Cottage in 1895. His daughter, Elizabeth II, has ruled England for 49 years.

Religion

Rule by One

In the Roman empire, as in other empires, the divinity of the emperor was commemorated, on papyrus and metal and stone. Sacrifices were made to his health, or salus, and to his fertility, or genius. Subjects who failed to make sacrifices were punished.

Under the republic, members of every household had made sacrifices to the genius, or generative spirit, of the head of their family, or gens. Under the empire, they made the same sacrifices to the genius, or generative spirit, of their head of state. From one end of Rome to the other—at home and on the farm; in neighborhoods all over the city; in the grove of Dea Dia, the fertility goddess, just outside of the city; on frontiers of the army, as far away as the Euphrates—Romans sacrificed wine and incense and fully virile bulls on behalf of their emperors’ procreative powers (Gradel, 2004; Lott, 2004).

Just months before the Ides of March, and days after they voted to call him Pater Patriae, the father of his country, the senate asked his subjects to swear by Caesar's genius (Dio 44.6.1). Years later, they issued the same order for Augustus. In every household, beside the genius of the paterfamilias set out in the morning and again at night, the genius of the emperor was added; at every banquet, public and private, libations to the imperial genius were poured (Horace, Odes 4.5.33-35). Tiberius rescinded the genius oath, but Caligula reintroduced it; subjects were tortured, or sawn in half, for failing to swear by the imperial genius (Suetonius, Caligula 27.3). More sacrifices were made to the genius of Nero, though objections were made. “You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons” (1 Corinthians 10:21).

Reliefs from the Frieze of the Vicomagistri, a 5-meter marble altar recovered from the Campus Martius, show a procession of flute players and lyre players, animal sacrificers and offering plate carriers, with the emperor and other men in togas, and 4 boys as bearers of small statues, the lares Augusti, with another small statue, the genius Augusti. A steer, bull and heifer are led to slaughter. The heifer is probably for diva Augusta, the wife of Augustus, who was Claudius’ grandmother; the steer is for divus Augustus, the first emperor, who was Claudius’ step-grandfather; and the bull is for genius Augusti, the living emperor's family (Gradel, 2004).

Not far away, in the grove of Dea Dia, the fertility goddess, roughly 8 kilometers west of the city, a set of 96 Arval Acta have been discovered on fragments of marble. The Fratres Arvales, or brothers of the fields, made sacrifices on behalf of the crops every spring. And throughout the year, on emperors’ birthdays, and on emperors’ accession days, they made sacrifices on behalf of their emperors’ procreative powers. Some Acta Arvalia record sacrifices to the genius of Nero (“sacrificed in the name of the Arval Brothers on the capitol for the accession of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus: to Jupiter a steer, to Juno a cow, to Minerva a cow, to public Felicity a cow, to his genius a bull”). Others record sacrifices to the genius of Domitian (“for his welfare”) within weeks of his accession, and later to the geniuses of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus, Severus Alexander and Gordian III, at least (Henzen, 1874; Beard, 1985).

Other genii were commemorated in metal. Coins issued under Nero in AD 64, around the time of the Great Fire in Rome, show genio populi Romani, the genius of the Roman people, holding an offering plate over a lit altar. That genius is almost undressed, and carries a cornucopia in his free hand. The words GENIO AVGVSTI are written along the rim of the coin (Mattingly, 1968; Zanker, 1988). And in front of Domus Aurea, the house of gold he put up at around the same time, Nero's nude bronze Colossus was put up, and stood over 30 meters high. It looked out over the Roman Forum, under a solar crown. Inside the palace were elaborate Babylonian tapestries, with frescos by Famulus on almost every surface: there were images of Eros; there were images of abductions by Zeus (Pliny, Natural History 35.37.120; Suetonius, Nero 31.1-2).

Sacrifices to the genii of Severan emperors were recorded on papyrus. A calendar recovered from a camp on the Euphrates, at Dura Europus, ordered that oxen be slaughtered in January, February, March April, July, August and September—at which point, the records run out. In January, March and August, there were sacrificed cows; in March, May and June, there were sacrificed bulls. There was slaughter in honor of the salus, or welfare, of the emperor; there was slaughter on the birthdays and accession days of deified emperors. Caesar, Augustus, Germanicus, Claudius, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and his brother Lucius Verus, Commodus, Pertinax, Septimius Severus and Caracalla are mentioned. When Severus Alexander grew up and put on the toga virilis, and again months later on the day of his accession, then in honor of his being named Pater Patriae, bulls to his genius were sacrificed (Beard et al., 1998, no. 3.5).

But failure to sacrifice was punished. From the Flavians to the Severans to the Antonines and afterward, subjects who neglected to swear by the emperor's genius were tortured, disemboweled by wild animals, burned alive in the circus, or had their heads cut off.

In the summer of 64, the emperor and his cubicularii turned Rome into an inferno. Fire climbed into the 7 hills, where it burned for 6 days; 10 of the 14 regions of the city were ruined. Countless people died. Nero had an immoderate multitude of Christians rounded up, members of a maleficent sect that was everywhere spoken against, odio humani generis: because they detested the human race. Their deaths were turned into a farce. Wrapped in the pelts of wild animals, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or turned into human torches. Nero provided his gardens for the purpose (Tacitus, Annals 15.39-44). Peter was hung upside down on a cross; and Paul, having taught righteousness to the whole world, was decapitated (Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians 5.2-6). Nobody mentioned the imperial genius.

They did under Domitian. The last Flavian emperor was sensitive to insults to suam divinitatem, suum numen: his divinity, his spirit; and many sacrifices were made. “Vast herds of victims were often stopped on the Capitoline Way, and large numbers were forced to turn aside, for that grim statue of a brutal tyrant was worshipped with as much blood as the human blood he himself shed” (Pliny, Panegyric 33.1, 52.6-7). Flavia Domitilla—who was a daughter of Domitian's sister—was accused of ἀθεότης, or atheótēs, or atheism, and sent off to the Bay of Naples; Flavius Clemens—who was Domitilla's husband—and others were killed on the same charge (Suetonius, Domitian 15.1, Dio 67.14.2). And in a letter to the 7 churches of Asia, a man named John—who had been banished to the island of Patmos in the Aegean, on account of his religion—bore witness in a revelation. “I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God, and who had not worshiped the beast or its image” (Revelation 20:4).

Years later, a governor on the Black Sea sent a letter to an emperor to ask for advice. Men and women of every age and class were reluctant to offer wine and incense at the emperor's statute. So Pliny the Younger ordered their execution. “I am convinced that their stubbornness and unspeakable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.” Trajan famously wrote back: “These people must not be hunted out” (Pliny, Letters 10.96-97). But many died for their faith. Polycarp, the octogenarian bishop of Smyrna, was brought before another provincial governor in Asia Minor under the Antonine emperors, and made a martyr. “Have respect for your age,” he was advised, “swear by the genius of the emperor.” Instead he was burned at the stake ( Martyrdom of Polycarp 8-10). And the philosopher Justin Martyr, who corresponded with Antoninus Pius, was one of a group of 7 Christians brought before the Roman city prefect, and told to offer libations to images and sacrifice to the gods. They did not. As Justin put it: “We are not atheists, worshipping as we do the maker of this universe, and declaring, as we have been taught, that he has no need of streams of blood and libations and incense.” Or as the prefect, Junius Rusticus, responded: “Those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods are to be scourged and executed according to the laws.” They lost their heads to a sword (Justin, Apologies 1.13; Acts of Justin & Companions 5). Another dozen were martyred under Commodus at Carthage. As Vigellius Saturninus, the provincial governor, warned: “We swear by the genius of our Lord the emperor and we offer prayers for his health. And you should too” ( Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 3).

Under the Severans, subjects who failed to make sacrifices to the health, or salus, of the emperor, or failed to swear oaths on behalf of his genius, or procreative powers, were martyred. Septimius’ governor at Carthage asked Vibia Perpetua, a 22-year-old wife with an infant son at her breast, to sacrifice pro salute imperatorum: to the emperor's health. “Have pity on your father's grey head; have pity on your infant son. Offer sacrifice for the emperors’ welfare.” She said no. So she and her ancilla, Felicitas, another newly-delivered mother, were stripped, bound in a net, and tossed about by a heifer; Perpetua guided a gladiator's knife to her throat ( Acts of Perpetua & Felicitas 6).

Decius posted an edict that ordered sacrifice throughout the empire to the emperor's genius in the fall of 249. Many apostasized. On 46 bits of papyrus signed and dated, his subjects bore witness: “I have always and without interruption sacrificed to the gods, and now in your presence in accordance with the edict's decree I have made sacrifice, poured a libation, and partaken of the sacred victims.” Smoke rose from their sacrifices all over the empire; infants were rushed to imperial altars in the arms of their mothers or fathers; adults swore by the emperor's τύχην, or genius. But not everybody lapsed (Knipfing, 1923; Rives, 1999).

From early in of 303 to the spring of 304, another series of 4 edicts ordered men and women to choose among gods. Many swore by the τύχην, or genius, of Diocletian. Those who declined to were decapitated, scourged, burned, thrown to the leopards, bears, bulls and wild boars, or mutilated on their genitals and bowels. “The prisons were crowded; tortures, hitherto unheard of, were invented,” wrote Lactantius, the persecuted Nicomedan rhetorician (Lactantius, Persecutors 15). Altars were placed in the courts, so that litigants might offer incense before their cases could be heard. Sets of 10, 20 or 60 or more were condemned at the same time; whole families of the pious were put to death. “Those especially were marvelous who were distinguished for wealth, reputation and birth,” remembered Eusebius of Caesarea, the persecuted historian of the church (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.9.3-6). It was impossible to remember the number and splendor of all those martyrs (Frend, 1965; De Ste Croix, 2006).

Rule by a Few

When Constantine the Great moved his capital toward the East, he took along sterile castes who filled offices in his church, from patriarch to bishop to monk. Out West, those offices would fill up with celibates. The Roman Church took the place of the imperial cult.

Many of the first Christians are married. Simon Peter had a mother-in-law, who was cured of a fever by Jesus (Mark 1:30, Matthew 8:14, Luke 4:38). And the brother of Jesus, Jerusalem's first bishop, James the Just, didn’t drink or eat meat, shave or bathe, but seems to have had a wife (Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men 2). Paul asked his correspondents in Corinth: “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (1 Corinthians 9:5). And Philip, who was one of 7 honest men who looked after the Jerusalem church, had 4 daughters at least (Acts 21:9).

But many were unattached. Philip's 4 daughters were virgins, who prophesized at Caesarea. John the Baptist, who was a member of Jesus’ family, wore a camelhair shirt with a leather girdle around his loins, ate wild honey and locusts, and was apparently unmarried (Mark 1:6, Matthew 3:4). Jesus’ mother, Mary, conceived as a παρθένος, or parthenos, or virgin: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Matthew 1:23-25, with Luke 1:27, Isaiah 7:14). Joseph, her husband, knew her not before she gave birth. And Jesus was a bachelor, of course.

The word παρθένοι, or parthenoi, shows up another 3 times in Matthew, where the kingdom of heaven is compared to ten virgins, who trimmed their lamps and made the request, “Lord, open to us” (Matthew 25:1, 7, 11). Then it shows up in Revelation, where 144,000 redeemed men play harps on Mt Zion: “It is these who have not defiled themselves with women” (Revelation 14:4).

Other παρθένοι, or parthenoi, or virgins, show up in letters Paul sent to the Corinthian church. Marriage, he reassured his friends, was not a sin. “For it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9 KJV). But he said that by way of concession, not by way of command. Married men and women would have worldly troubles, he wanted to spare them (1 Corinthians 7:6, 28). Parents who gave away their virgin daughters in marriage did well; parents who did not give away their virgin daughters in marriage did better (1 Corinthians 7:38). “I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I betrothed you to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one husband” (2 Corinthians 11:2).

The words ἄνανδρος or anandros, or without a husband, and ἄγαμος or agamos, or without a wife, show up in letters to the Corinthians as well. Men without wives should remain single, as Paul was; and women who had left their husbands should try to reconcile with them, or remain alone. “To the unmarried and widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do” (1 Corinthians 7:8, 11). Married men and married women were anxious about how to please a spouse. But ἄνανδρος or anandros, or celibate women, and ἄγαμος or agamos, or celibate men, were anxious about how to please the Lord. “So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (1 Corinthians 7:32-34, 38).

Before he sent letters to church in Corinth, Paul wrote to churches in Thessalonica, Philippi and Galatia; and he would write in the end to Rome. Those letters encouraged churchgoers to abstain from πορνεία, or porneia, or fornication (1 Thessalonians 4:3). And they told them to dwell on whatever was αγνος, or hagnos, or chaste (Philippians 4:8). They insist that their ἁσέλγεια, or aselgeia, or lust, has to stop. “Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness” (Galatians 5:19). And they argue that promiscuity, or κοίτη, or koite, must become a thing of the past. “Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness” (Romans 13:12-13).

Within a generation after Jesus was crucified in Tiberius’ Jerusalem, and within a few years after Paul was beheaded in Nero's Rome, a handful of people put together the gospels, probably under the Flavian emperors and at the capital. They agreed that, toward the end of his ministry, toward the end of his life, Jesus told the crowds that followed that it was good to be celibate. Evangelists and apostles, patristic writers and prolific philosophers would all spread the good news that the unmarried would be saved.

“Truly, I say to you,” Mark had Jesus remind his disciples around Galilee, “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many that are first will be last, and the last first” (Mark 10:29-31, with Matthew 10:37-38, 19:29-30 and Luke 14:26, 20:34-36).

Matthew's gospel went further than that. Large crowds followed Jesus when he crossed over the Jordan, and when they asked if it was better to be a bachelor than to have a wife, Matthew had Jesus say this: “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:11-12).

And at the end of his ministry, toward the end of his life, as he was being led away to Calvary to be hung on a cross, the gospel of Luke put these words in Jesus’ mouth. “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’” (Luke 23:28-29, with 20:34-36).

A number of the first Christians defended celibate men and women. When Justin Martyr sent a letter to the emperor Antoninus Pius, he insisted that countless multitudes of Christians had got the better of their intemperate habits, and learned how to be chaste. “We who formerly delighted in fornication, now embrace chastity alone.” Their thoughts, like their works, were an open book. “Many, both men and women, who have been Christ's disciples from childhood, remain pure at the age of 60 or 70 years.” Justin had watched abstinence catch on in the capital: “We who formerly delighted in fornication now embrace chastity alone” (Justin Martyr, Apology, 1.14-15). And he suffered for his beliefs.

Under the Severan emperors, Tertullian, a Carthaginian church elder, wrote this to his wife: “Marry we may because marry we must.” But what was permitted was not necessarily good: “Happy the man who shall prove like Paul” (Tertullian, To His Wife 1-3). The time to be fruitful and multiply had passed; the Law had given way to the Word; being married was good, but being unmarried was better; and being unmarried was common in Carthage. Tertullian knew virgins from birth, and he knew virgins from second birth, from the font. Some were churchgoers who blushed under their veils; others were nuns and priests. “How many men, and how many women, in ecclesiastical orders, owe their position to continence, who have preferred to be wedded to God; who have restored the honor of their flesh, and who have already dedicated themselves as sons of that future age, by slaying in themselves the concupiscence of lust, with that whole propensity which could not be admitted within paradise!” (Tertullian, Exhortation to Chastity 13). As he wrote unapologetically under Septimius Severus, the more they were mown down, the thicker they grew; the blood of the Christians was seed. “The outcry is that the state is filled with Christians, that they are in the fields, in the citadels, in the islands: they make lamentation, as for some calamity, that both sexes, every age and condition, even high rank, are passing over to the profession of the Christian faith.” Many were celibate, and some were punished for that. “In condemning a Christian woman to the leno rather than to the leo, you made confession that a taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible than any punishment and any death” (Tertullian, Apology 1.7, 50.12-14).

Under Decius, the Alexandrian theologian known as Origen endured his own tortures. His neck was locked in an iron collar; his feet were locked in the stocks. But he encouraged others to die for the cause. They included his students, Plutarch, Serenus, Heraclides and Hero, who were tortured and beheaded; and they included Potaminaena—“who is still famous among the people of the country for the many things which she endured for the preservation of her chastity”—and her mother, Marcella, who were extinguished by fire (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.5.2). Origen warned his followers to avoid fornication: “The lord says to his bride, the soul, that he is a jealous God.” And he praised the unmarried. “Those who subdue that fierce longing for sexual pleasures which has reduced the souls of many to a weak and feeble condition, and subdue it because they are persuaded that they cannot otherwise have communion with God” (Origen, Exhortation to Martydom 9, 49). As a young man in Egypt, Origen had eaten little, slept less, gone barefoot and made his own continence permanent. Waiting for an embrace by the spirit, and to receive Jesus’ seed, he took Matthew 19:12—“there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”—to heart, performed a second circumcision, and castrated himself (Origen, Homilies on Joshua 1.7, Homilies on the Song of Songs 9; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.8.1). And as an old man in Palestine, he was proud of his bachelor friends. “Among Christians, those who maintain a perpetual virginity do so for no human honors, for no fee or reward, from no motive of vainglory, but as they choose to retain God” (Origen, Against Celsus 4.26).

In the century after Origen was tortured in Decius’ prison, the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and the seat of empire was relocated to Constantinople. For centuries, the Eastern church would be headed by castrated patriarchs. In the West, the church would be overrun by unmarried women and men (Betzig, 2019, 2021).

Rule by Many

In the fall of 1095 Urban II, the bishop of Rome, summoned the first crusaders to a field outside Clermont, France; just over a century later, under pope Innocent III, the fourth crusaders took Constantinople. Europeans had dispersed into Asia. They dispersed into the Americas after 1492. And reproductive suppression lessened.

John Wyclif, the well-educated son of well-to-do Yorkshire sheep farmers, got caught up in the heresies that came home with the crusades. Wyclif went down to Oxford soon after another crusade import, the Black Death, infested it; he would be affiliated with Oxford for most of his life. He preached against celibacy, and in favor of husbands and wives. He believed that both Paul and Jesus had admitted marriage. “Since fornication is so perilous, and men and women are so frail, God ordained priests in the old law to have wives, and never forbid it in the new.” And he knew that celibacy wasn’t for everybody. “Priests who keep clean chastity, in body and soul, do best; but many on account of these new bonds, needlessly made, take this charge upon them indiscreetly, and slander themselves foully before God and his saints” (Wyclif, Of Wedded Men and Wives). The words of the apostle had been adulterated by the antichrist. Marriage, on the other hand, had been divinely ordained. Nature created 2 sexes, so the generation of children must be meritorious and praiseworthy to God. Wyclif's assistants were the first to translate the Bible into English; and his followers, who preached in that vernacular, were generally known as mumblers, or Lollards. But in retirement at his Lutterworth parish, he made himself clear in Church Latin. “How could man not be meritorious in the completion of what was divinely ordained, since the member, the matter and power, and the powerful appetite for procreating are naturally implanted in man?” (Wycliffe, Trialogus 3.22).

Just over a decade after Wyclif collapsed of a stroke in the middle of mass, in January of 1395, his followers nailed Twelve Conclusions to the doors of St Paul's. They objected to sacraments that lacked scriptural precedents; and they were blunt about vows of continence (Walsingham, Chronica Majora 1402). Conclusions 3 and 11 did not mince words. “The law of continence annexed to the priesthood, that in prejudice of women was first ordained, induces sodomy in the Holy Church.” And that law was responsible for the abortion and destruction of innocent children. “We would they were wedded, for we cannot excuse them from private sins” ( Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards 3, 11).

For which Wyclif was incinerated, postmortem, as a heretic, at the Council of Constance in 1415. All of 45 articles were set out against him; the worst had to do with peccato mortali, the mortal sins of ordained men. The councilors’ verdicts were unambiguous: “John Wyclif was a notorious and obstinate heretic who died in heresy.” And their punishment was harsh. “His body and bones are to be exhumed, if they can be identified among the corpses of the faithful, and to be scattered far from a burial place of the church.” Books, treatises, volumes and pamphlets authored by the Balliol College master were burned. And his remains were torched (Council of Constance, sessions 8, 15; Lahey, 2008).

Jan Hus copied out works by Wyclif at the University of Prague, where he read sermons in the vernacular every Sunday to packed houses. In his little book On the Church, he complained about overindulgent popes. “It is evident that a pope living contrary to Christ, like any other perverted person, is called by common consent Antichrist” (Hus, On the Church 13-23). And in his essay On Simony, he complained about ordained men. “And how shall priests excuse themselves who shamefully squander pay for requiem masses in fornication, in adorning their concubines, priestesses, or prostitutes more sumptuously than the church altars and pictures, purchasing for them skirts, capes, and fur coats from their tithes and offerings of the poor?” (Hus, On Simony 7). That happened so openly and often that it was done without shame.

Celibacy was responsible for many of those sins. Unmarried ministers baited matrons and widows and uninitiated women; others went after prostitutes, to the ridicule of their parishioners. “Just as his heart is not unresponsive to nature, into which God has placed all creatures for enjoyment, and has given us reason, by which we are told to live wisely, so the priest cannot do justice to this most severe of all human commands.” It wasn’t as though they hadn’t been warned. Hadn’t Paul written to Timothy to ask bishops to be blameless husbands? And hadn’t Paphnutius, the one-eyed bishop at the Council of Nicaea, told priests to hold onto their wives? Marriage was instituted by God. As a dissenter would remember his words after Hus was gone: “I hold this to be the seed of iniquity and the root of all evil, the fact that the priest does not marry. God forsakes him, because he has turned from God. He sinks into oblivion because neither a wife nor children bring happiness into his home, he seeks not salvation, but the tawdry atmosphere of bawdry houses” (Poggius, Letter to Leonhard Nikoai of 10/14/1415; Fudge, 2010).

Like Wyclif, Hus combusted; unlike Wyclif, he was alive when it happened. Another 30 articles attributed to him were condemned at the Council of Constance: He was charged with the beliefs that nobody was a true bishop if he lived in sin, and that wicked popes were the sons of perdition. His response was short. “I, Jan Hus, in hope a priest of Jesus Christ, fearing to offend God and to fall into perjury, am not willing to recant” (Hus, Letter 98 to the Council, 7/1/1415). So they ordered him deposed and degraded, then turned over to the secular arm to be punished. Brought out of a dark Dominican dungeon, then out of a Franciscan prison in chains, he was tied to a stake with his hands behind his back, as bundles of wood and straw were piled up to his neck and lit. The heretic sang hymns as the wind blew flames into his face. “So praying within himself and moving his lips and the head, he expired in the Lord” (Peter of Mladonovice, An Account 1.2-5).

Martin Luther was inspired by Jan Hus. Just over a century after the Council of Constance, and 25 years after Columbus’ 3 ships found the American coast, on All Hallows’ Eve of 1517, he nailed his 95 Theses to the door of his Wittenburg church. Luther argued that punishment after death for sins committed in life could not be ameliorated by fees paid to the pope. “To consider papal indulgences so great that they could absolve a man even if he had done the impossible and had violated the mother of God is madness” (Luther, 95 Theses 75). Celibacy wasn’t mentioned.

It was 3 years later, in a set of 3 essays. In August of 1520, his Open Letter to the Christian Nobility was printed on a Wittenburg press. It argued that men and women of the Church should be free to marry, or not. “The pope has as little power to command this, as he has to forbid eating, drinking, the natural movement of the bowels or growing fat.” Luther, like Wyclif, knew his scriptures. Vows of chastity were never commanded by Jesus, or Paul. The devil must have ordered it. The salvation of souls was more important than tyrannous, arbitrary, wicked laws, that were never ordained by God. Men and women were permitted to together, but the pope ordered them not to sin. “Just as if one were to set fire to straw, and command it should neither smoke nor burn” (Luther, Open Letter 13-14; citing Matthew 19:11, 1 Corinthians 7:7 and 1 Timothy 4:1-5).

That September, Luther's essay On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church took issue with the 7 sacraments. The sacrament of marriage, and the sacrament of holy orders, robbed people of their money, and of their faith in God. The pope had become a pimp; he traded in genitals: “The papacy is the grand hunting of the bishop of Rome.” And the Church was crowded with prostitutes. “If one has defiled 600 harlots, or violated countless matrons and virgins, or kept many Ganymedes, that would be no impediment to his becoming bishop.” But again, there were no impediments to marriage in the Bible. “What if wicked men in sheer despotism prohibit or annul it. So be it! Let it be wrong among men; it is nevertheless right before God, whose command must take precedence if it conflicts with the commands of men” (Luther, Babylonian Captivity 6-7).

Then in November, Luther said it all again in his essay On the Freedom of a Christian. Luther had kind words for his pontifical correspondent: “I am not so foolish as to attack one whom all people praise.” Leo X was a Daniel among lions; he was an Ezekiel among scorpions. But Luther had harsh words for his Church. It was more corrupt than Babylon or Sodom; it was a den of thieves, and the most shameless of all brothels; nothing flowed out of Rome but wasted bodies and souls; it was a kingdom of sin and hell. “The name of the Roman curia is today a stench throughout the world.” It was good to pommel the body and subdue it; to crucify the passions and desires of the flesh; to reduce the body to subjection and purify it of its evil lusts; to fast, watch and work, keep the body under control and hold it in check. But in the end, none of that was relevant. Even a harlot could be saved. “It will profit nothing that the body should be adorned with sacred vestments, or dwell in holy places, or be occupied in sacred offices, or pray, fast, and abstain from certain meats, or do whatever works can be done through the body and in the body.” Clothes, cathedrals and monasteries, offices, rituals and abstinence were unnecessary. Nothing mattered but faith.

Like his predecessors, Luther suffered for his beliefs. Tried by a papal legate at Augsburg in October of 1518, he refused to recant. Under the protection of the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, he slipped away to Wittenburg on a horse in the middle of the night. When, in June of 1520, Leo X offered him 60 days to submit, Luther responded with this: “I call upon you to renounce your diabolical blasphemy and audacious impiety and, if you will not, we shall all hold your seat as possessed and oppressed by Satan, the damned seat of Antichrist.” At the imperial Diet of Worms in April of 1521, he refused again to recant. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, put his hand to this text: “Luther is to be regarded as a convicted heretic. His followers also are to be condemned. His books were to be eradicated from the memory of man.” So Luther slipped away, again under the protection of Frederick III the Wise, and hid out in the Wartburg Castle, where he wrote sermons and translated the New Testament into German—the New Testament translation would come later. While he was away, the monasteries started to empty. Monks married, nuns married, monks and nuns married each other (Luther, Against the Execrable Bull of Antichrist and Edict of Worms in Bainton, 1950, p. 155, 184).

And in June of 1925, Luther took a wife. Her name was Katarina von Bora, a runaway nun; she would give him 6 children, and make him a happy man. As the runaway monk wrote to his friend Nicolaus von Amsdorf: “I wanted to confirm what I have taught by going through with it” (Luther, Letter to von Amsorf, 6/21/1525). Others anticipated, or followed, him. Ulrich Zwingli, the Zurich reformer, had publicly married Anna Reinhart, the widow of a Swiss mercenary, a year before; Jean Calvin, the reformer who preached in Geneva, would marry Idelette de Bure, another widow, 15 years later. Luther's fellow Wittenberger, Andreas von Karlstadt, married the 15-year-old daughter of a poor nobleman early in 1522; another Wittenberger, Philipp Melanchthon, married Katharina Krapp, the burgomaster's daughter, as early as 1520. Marriage was a human institution, Luther wrote to his friend. “Man, who has instituted it, can also abolish it” (Luther, Letter 91 to Melanchthon, 8/1/1521; on Luther see Brecht, 1985).

Conclusion

Why do some animals work or help, so that other animals can reproduce? At least partly, because breeding opportunities are scarce. Because it isn’t easy to abandon a safe place with plenty to eat, for a dangerous location where a good meal is hard to find. Because wherever prey are abundant but predators are scarce, animals are reluctant to run, fly or swim off. And where they’re reluctant enough, they end up as helpers-at-the-nest, or as members of a sterile caste (Emlen, 1982, 1995; Vehrencamp, 1983a, 1983b; Sherman et al., 1995; see too Crespi, 2014).

For on the order of 200,000 to 300,000 years, most of us made a living by moving around. We followed the migrations of game herds, and the windfalls of natural harvests; we wandered from shelter to shelter, and from water source to water source. And whenever the food and water were gone, we moved on. More sedentary foragers are less egalitarian foragers. Foragers who settle along coasts and rivers, or up against mountains and deserts, or nearer the equator where climate is consistent and subsistence is continuous, are less equal than foragers without borders. Conflict is endemic to any human group; wherever violence escalates enough, foragers vote with their feet (Lee, 1979; Chagnon, 2012). But as long as the hunting and gathering are good where they are, they prefer to stay. Big men are able to take part of the fruits of their labors, and some of their women, from little men. Who are unwilling, or unable, to get away (Kelly, 2007).

The first empires rose up in fertile lake or river valleys, bordered by mountains or deserts that made it hard to get away. They were, in a word, circumscribed (Carneiro, 1970). As far as we now know, civilization started in Mesopotamia, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, set against the Zagros Mountains to the east and the Syrian Desert to the west. Egypt became an empire on the black land of the Nile, bounded by the red land of the deserts on either side. Civilizations centered on the Indus and Ganges backed up against the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. And the empire that originated on the Yellow River and stood for over 2 millennia, was hemmed in on 4 sides. “The old territory of Qin is well protected by mountains and girdled by the Yellow River. From the time of duke Mu to that of the First Emperor, Qin had over 20 rulers, and at all times they were leaders among the feudal lords. Surely this was not because generation after generation they were worthy men, but because of the strategic position they occupied” (Sima Qian, Shi ji 6).

At its height, the Roman empire controlled 4 out of 5 inhabitants of Europe, though it claimed no more than 1/4 of European land. That territory included the whole Mediterranean basin; the entire population along its coasts was subjected to Rome (Scheidel, 2017, 2019). But after Constantine relocated the capital to Constantinople at the start of the 4^th century, wars of reconquest and Justinian's plague contributed to population decline across the West. The 6^th-century Roman bishop, Gregory I the Great, watched as towns were depopulated, and fortified places wrecked. “No farmer dwells here now; wild beasts have taken the place of throngs of men” (Gregory the Great, Dialogues 3.38). Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Lombards and Franks apportioned the Roman empire among themselves. Monarchy moved toward the East, and oligarchs took over in the West.

Generations later, Europeans moved into Asia with the Crusades. As pope Urban II insisted in his Claremont speech: “This land you inhabit is everywhere shut in by the sea, surrounded by ranges of mountains and overcrowded by your numbers; it does not overflow with copious wealth and scarcely furnishes food for its own farmers” (Robert of Rheims,Chronicle 1095). It was past time to set out for the navel of the world, the land of milk and honey, a land more fruitful than all others, a paradise of delights. Within a year after the faithful were asked to take up the cross, in the summer of 1096, there were as many as 20,000 crusaders in Constantinople. Tens of thousands came with every successive wave. Many died in battle, or of the plague; but some survived. In Europe, wages dramatically went up; and others emigrated toward the Levant. Crusaders took Antioch in 1098, and Jerusalem in 1099. At their height, there were hundreds of thousands of crusaders in the crusader states (Mitchell & Millard, 2009; see too Turchin & Nefedov, 2009; Turchin, 2016). Enormous ships were built; trade volumes dramatically increased.

After the end of the 15^th century, those ships and that trade headed west. Columbus found coasts in and around the Caribbean in 1492, and wrote home to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain: “I assure Your Highnesses that it seems to me that under the sun there can be no better lands” (Columbus, Diary 11/27/1492). Then in 1496, the Italian explorer, John Cabot, got a commission from Henry VII of England, “to seeke out, discover, and finde, whatsoever Iles, Countreyes, Regions, or Provinces” he could find (Henry VII, Patent Granted in 1496). After a couple of false starts, a permanent settlement, named after the first Stuart, would be established at Jamestown in 1607.

Sparsely populated by Bering Strait crossers for 20,000 years or more, the American continents would accommodate tired, poor, breathless and wretched immigrants from all over the world. They wrote a democratic constitution; they insisted on freedom of religion; and they were monogamous, more or less. Without interference from state or church, every woman, and every man, had the right to pursue happiness. And to pass on that opportunity to generations of their own posterity.

Images of the emperor, pater patriae, the Father of his Country, were set up all over the empire, in banks, booths, bars, vestibules, alcoves and arbors. People lived with them day-to-day, and looked at them face-to-face.

Monuments paid testament to the imperial genius. On the southside of Rome at Prima Porta, in a villa owned by Livia Drusilla, who was married to Augustus for over half a century, a statue of her husband in Parian marble was rehabilitated in 1863. A goddess carries a cornucopia on his curiass, with babies at her breast. And on the base, a nude Cupid tugs at the bottom of his tunic. They shared an ancestor: both Cupid and Augustus were descended from Venus.

A couple of centuries after Augustus became an emperor, Marcus Aurelius erected a column of Egyptian granite on the Campus Martius in honor of his father-in-law, the emperor Antoninus Pius. Carved on the base in Italian marble a winged genius, with a snake in his grasp, lifts Antoninus to his apotheosis. On his right, a goddess leans on a shield, with reliefs of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf. On his left, a genius reclines on his back, as an obelisk rises in his lap. The point of religion was sex. The procreative power of the emperor was reinforced by the Imperial Cult (Fronto, Letter 4.12.4 to Marcus Aurelius, AD 145-147; Zanker, 1988; Vogel, 1973).

When Johanness Tetzel, the Dominican friar, traveled around Germany early in the 16^th century, he offered indulgences, or remissions of temporal punishments, for money. That money was set apart to help reconstruct St Peter's spectacular Basilica in the Vatican, a project supported by the great Medici family papa, or Father, or pope, Leo X. On All Hallow's Eve of 1517, Martin Luther objected to that practice in his 95 Theses: “Why doesn’t the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?” Giovanni de’Medici, who became Leo X in 1513, was warned by his father Lorenzo, the magnificent Florentine, to avoid silks and jewels, to subsist on plain food, and to be content with a pious, chaste and exemplary life. But Leo rode into Rome on a white Arabian stallion, under an embroidered canopy blocking the rays of an envious sun god, blessing crowds with the pearls on his perfumed gloves as his chamberlains threw coins. “God has given us the papacy: Let us enjoy it” (Jovius, Life of Leo X;Luther95 Theses, 86). Over the course of the long medieval millennium, monuments were erected by the great oligarchs across Europe, whose powerful and prolific patriarchs covered the continent with castles and filled them with women and children, then added cloisters that collected the reproductively suppressed.

When John Wyclif, and Jan Hus, and Martin Luther translated the first scriptures into their vernaculars, they wrote about patriarchs and judges and kings, who collected wives and concubines and slaves, employed סָֽרִיסִ֔ים, or sārîsîm, or the ungonaded, and fathered multitudes: tens or hundreds of daughters and sons. When they translated Paul's letters, or Revelation, they mentioned Christians who were ἄνανδρος or anandros, or without a husband, and ἄγαμος or agamos, or without a wife. And they talked about the unblemished, with voices like the sound of many waters and the sound of loud thunder, who had been redeemed on Mt Zion, where they played harps, and were παρθένοι, or parthenoi, or virgins. Wyclif would die alone in England; Hus would be burned at the stake in Constance. But Luther would marry a nun hustled out of a Wittenberg nunnery in a fishcart. It was just a start (Betzig, 2021).

The world was opening up. And, if they chose to, sterile civil servants, and celibate servants of the Church, were walking out.