POLYGAMY

(Gr. tsX'j?, apd yxf^o;, fnnrriage.) The custom of having several wives; a custom apparently common to all nations in remote antiquity, and common now to most of those in which the tie of marriage is recognized, and to which Christianity has not extended. It was admitted among the Patriarchs, and under the Mosaic dispensation (Exod. xxi. 10., Deut. xxi. 15.); and Selden {Uxor Hebraica) has shown its prevalence among the Jews, without mentioning the extraordinary instances of sovereigns, such as David and Solomon, recounted in Scripture. It may be questioned, however, whether it continued at the period of our Saviour's preaching. Certainly his injunctions In regard to marriage seem rather to be founded on the supposition of monogamy; and the absence of positive injunctions against polygamy has been relied on by some modern disputants, with very little reason, as an authority that the licence a umed by the holy men of the Old Testament is not revoked. The severer manners of Western nations seem to have repudiated it. It was no part of Grecian manners: the notion that the A then i an laws allowed of two wives (founded in part on a pa age in A the ruBus, I. xiii. ch. 1.) seems a mistake; but it appears to have been allowed to a citizen, in addition to his lawful wife, herself a citizen, to live in a kind of legitimate concubinage with a female not belonging to that cla . Thus (if there is any truth in the story of So crates' two wives) his plague, Xantippe, was the wife by night, while the softer Myrto was only a wife by courtesy. In republican Rome no such licence was known; but under the emperors the practice of polygamy seems to have crept in, though repudiated both by the moral sense and civil usages of the ))eople. Val ent in i an I. legalized it by an edict. But the Christian ecclesiastics of the empire strenuously opposed it; and it disappeared altogether, we believe, from Christen dom with the fall of the Roman empire. In the East it has continued to prevail. A few bold writers in modern times have raised the defence of polygamy, grounded on the supposed absence of its expre prohibition. Bernardns Achinus, a well known and able but unsteady theologian of the 16th century, who belonged by turns to the Roman Catholic and Protestant communions, is among the most remarkable. Lyserus {Polygam i a Triumphatrix) adopted a still more decided view. The Rev. Mr. Madon, ih his Thelyphthora (a work which excited an extraordinary and very, unfavourable sensation on its appearance), limited the privilege of polygamy to men; and a erted that the injunction of St. Paul, that a bishop " should be the husband of one wife," plainly demonstrated its lawfulne in others; meaning one wife at a time: a supposition which is not improbable, although it will scarcely support his conclusions. But a greater number of philosophical writers have sought for a justification of the practice in the East. Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others, defend it on the ground of the rapid decay of female beauty in those regions. IMontesquieu also relies on the strange notion, that the number of females in eastern countries is much greater than that of males; which the traveller Bruce a erts on the authority of his own obs err a tions. But the supposed fact on which these reasonings rest seems.to be altogether imaginary. At all events, the practice of polygamy in the East is confined to so few that it can have little direct effect on manners, and none on population. Mr. Urquhart, who endeavours to place Turkish usages in a favourable contrast with those of the West, after to a certain extent defending polygamy, says rather 956 POLYGLOT. inconsistently, " While the law of nature renders this practice an impo ibility as regards the community, it is here still farther restrained, among the few who have the means of indulging in it, both by the domestic unquiet that results from it, and by the public censure and re« probation of which it is the object." {Spirit of the East.) He adds, that in his time " a case of polygamy was unknown in Candia, among a population of 40,000 Mu ulmen." And Niebuhr says, that in Arabia the conduct of those who take more than one wife " is blamed by all other men." But it seems scarcely to have occurred to most reasoners that while polygamy itself is rare, its recognition is almost always accompanied with the toleration of concubinage by public morality. The man who is not rich enough to take two wives, or who does not choose to encounter the household disturbances which follow such an arrangement, falls entirely in with the public opinion of his cla , in taking into his family a recognized concubine to dwell with his lawful spouse. Our Western manners divide the female part of the community into two cla es: a greater number, treated with the highest respect, and in whom perfect purity is presumed; a smaller number, abandoned to utter degradation. Where polygamy and concubinage are recognized, there is probably much le gro prostitution; but the general character of the sex sttmds on a lower basis. POL YGA' [s. 969]