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Musonius Rufus — Lectures XIII and XIV: On marriage
Groucho Marx famously said that “Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?” Those who wish to procreate and raise virtuous children, responds the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus in his thirteenth lecture.
We have already seen in this series that Musonius had a tendency that by today standards we would call conservative in his thinking about sex. It is, therefore, not surprising to find a consistent attitude toward marriage.
According to Musonius, people should marry with the primary goal of having children, but he is careful to add that that’s not enough:
“The birth of a human being which results from such a union is, to be sure, something marvelous, but it is not yet enough for the relation of husband and wife, inasmuch as quite apart from marriage it could result from any other sexual union, just as in the case of animals.”
What else, then, is needed? A virtuous union between husband and wife (or, we would say today more broadly, between loving partners). The members of the couple need to really care for each other in health and sickness and under all other conditions. If either only looks for his or her own interest and neglects the other then that household is not a good place to bring children into the world. For the Stoics the family is where we naturally learn the rudiments of virtue, as Seneca points out on multiple occasions. So it makes sense that they would put special emphasis on marriage and procreation.
Musonius goes on to say that the basis of a good marriage cannot be wealth, beauty, or high birth, because those things do not promote a virtuous relationship and therefore do not lead to a virtuous upbringing of children.
Moreover, Musonius argues that two base human beings cannot possibly enter into a good relationship, because they cannot have sympathy of spirit for one another. Nor can one good person be in harmony with a bad one. And of course, as we’ve seen when we looked at lecture XII, homosexuality is out of the question precisely because it doesn’t beget children. In a striding passage, from the point of view of modern sensibilities, Musonius refers to homosexuality as “monstrous” and “contrary to nature.” That’s one instance in which modern Stoics, I hope, will not want to follow the ancient way.
The next question is whether philosophers should marry. As you might imagine, I have a personal stake in this particular issue, which Musonius takes on in lecture XIV (not that I would mindlessly follow my predecessors, who, Seneca reminds us (Letter XXXIII.11), are not our masters). The answer is a resounding yes:
“When someone said that marriage and living with a wife seemed to him a handicap to the pursuit of philosophy, Musonius said that it was no handicap to Pythagoras, nor to Socrates, nor to Crates, each of whom lived with a wife, and one could not mention better philosophers than these.”
Pythagoras was indeed married, according to Porphyry, to a woman named Theano of Crotone (southern Italy), who was a student of Pythagoras and a philosopher in her own right. She is considered the first known female mathematician of the western tradition. They had either three or four children, depending on the source. This is interesting, since — according to Diogenes Laertius — Pythagoras “did not indulge in the pleasures of love” and moreover cautioned others to have sex only “whenever you are willing to be weaker than yourself.” I guess Pythagoras t least occasionally was okay with being weak…
Socrates was famously married to the somewhat difficult Xanthippe, though that may have been his second wife. Socrates and Xanthippe had three children, one of whom — Lamprocles — is featured in a fascinating dialogue reported by Xenophon in his Memorabilia (II.2). Lamprocles comes to Socrates complaining about how hard his mother is on him, and Socrates engages his son in one of his standard conversations by the end of which Lamprocles has to agree that he is actually lucky to have a mother like Xanthippe.
As for Crates, he was a famous Cynic philosopher and the teacher of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Hipparchia was from a wealthy family and her parents were dismayed at her decision to marry a Cynic, who had no property and lived in the streets. According to Diogenes Laertius, Crates himself tried to dissuade her by going to visit her, dropping his cloak and saying “This is the bridegroom, here are his possessions; make your choice accordingly” (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VI.96). Apparently, what she saw was good enough, because they married shortly thereafter. Hipparchia too was a philosopher, and a pugnacious one, judging from how Diogenes Laertius describes her debates with Theodorus the atheist.
But let us get back to Musonius. He writes:
“Marriage, if anything, is manifestly in accord with nature. For, to what other purpose did the creator of mankind first divide our human race into two sexes, male and female, then implant in each a strong desire for association and union with the other, instilling in both a powerful longing each for the other, the male for the female and the female for the male?”
He very much sounds like a Christian here, though it isn’t clear what he meant by “the creator of mankind,” since the Stoics were pantheists and did not believe in a creator god. Or perhaps some of them did, as very similar allusions appear also in Seneca and Epictetus, and as it’s a bit of a stretch to rationalize away this language in pantheistic terms.
Be that as it may, the important bit here is that marriage is “in accord with nature.” Stoic ethics was a naturalistic type of ethics, and this means that nature is our guide toward what is good or bad, or what is preferred and dispreferred. Entering into a relationship and having children is in agreement with nature, and is therefore preferred. On the one hand, this is hard to deny, since all biological beings have a strong urge for procreation, and social beings in particular have a strong urge to establish stable relationships for the purpose of raising offspring. On the other hand, this raises a number of questions common to all philosophies that derive good or bad from nature. But I’ll set aside that discussion for now, as I’m working on a separate essay on the concept of natural law.
Musonius goes on to say that several other things follow from looking at what is or is not in agreement with nature, insofar as the human species is concerned. Looking out for one’s own interests only, for instance, is against nature, because we are a cooperative species. For the same reason, “evil consists in injustice and cruelty and indifference to a neighbor’s trouble,” while virtue is “brotherly love and goodness and justice and beneficence and concern for the welfare of one’s neighbor.” Again, strong echoes of Christianity — or perhaps we should say, respecting the historical chronology, Stoic echoes in Christianity — are hard to ignore.
Near the end of the lecture Musonius returns to the question of whether philosophers should marry. Of course they should, because if marriage and procreation are primary concerns for human beings in general, why wouldn’t they be primary concerns for philosophers, who after all are human beings? Indeed, what is the point of philosophy itself?
“Manifestly the study of philosophy is nothing else than to search out by reason what is right and proper and by deeds to put it into practice.”
I can get behind that.
