Looking around the modern world, she was not encouraged; powerful men are often childless. Hitler was so consumed by ambition that he had little time left for philandering.' 9
But when she examined the record of history, Betzig was stunned. Her simplistic prediction that power is used for sexual success was confirmed again and again. Only in the past few centuries in the West has it failed. Not only that, in most polygamous societies there were elaborate social mechanisms to ensure that a powerful polygamist left a polygamous heir.
The six independent "civilizations " of early history—Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru—were remarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute. These men were despots, meaning they could kill their subjects without fear of retribution. Without excep-tiop, that vast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity. The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave " wives " at his command. The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten procured 317 concubines and " droves" of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
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Indian emperor Udayama preserved sixteen thousand consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guarded by eunuchs: The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem. The Inca Atahualpa, as we have seen, kept virgins on tap throughout the kingdom:
Not only did these six emperors, each typical of his predecessors and successors, have similarly large harems, but they employed similar techniques to fill and guard them. They recruited young (usually prepubertal) women, kept them in highly defensible and escape-proof forts, guarded them with eunuchs, pampered them, and expected them to breed the emperor 's children. Measures to enhance the fertility of the harem were common. Wet nurses, who allow women to resume ovulation by cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B:C.; they were sung about in Sumerian lullabies. The Tang Dynasty emperors of China kept careful records of dates of menstruation and conception in the harem so as to be sure to copulate only with the most fertile concubines: Chinese emperors were also taught to conserve their semen so as to keep up their quota of two women a day, and some even complained of their onerous sexual duties. These harems could hardly have been more carefully designed as breeding machines, dedicated to the spread of emperors ' genes:'°
Nor were emperors anything more than extreme examples.
Laura Betzig has examined 104 politically autonomous societies and found that "in almost every case, power predicts the size of a man 's harem: "" Small kings had one hundred women in their harems; great kings, one thousand, and emperors, five thousand.
Conventional history would have us believe that such harems were merely one among many of the rewards that awaited the successful seeker of power, along with all the other accoutrements of despotism: servants, palaces, gardens, music, silk, rich food, and spectator sports. But women are fairly high on the list. Betzig 's point is that it is one thing to find that powerful emperors were polygamous but quite another to discover that they each adopted similar measures to enhance their reproductive success within the harem:
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The Red Queen
wet nursing, fertility monitoring, claustration of the concubines, and so on. These are not the measures of men interested in sexual excess: They are the measures of men interested in producing many children.
However, if reproductive success was one of the perks of despotic power, one peculiar feature stands out: All six of the early emperors were monogamously married. In other words, they always raised one mate above all the others as a "queen." This is characteristic of human polygamous societies: Wherever there are harems, there is a senior wife-who is treated differently from the others: She is usually noble-born, and crucially, she alone is allowed to bear legitimate heirs: Solomon had a thousand concubines and one queen: Betzig investigated imperial Rome and found the distinction between monogamous marriage and polygamous infidelity extending , from the top to the bottom of Roman society. Roman emperors were famous for their sexual prowess, even while marrying single empresses: Julius Caesar 's affairs with women were "commonly described as extravagant " (Suetonius). Of Augustus, Suetonius wrote, "The charge of being a womanizer stuck, and as an elderly man he is said to have still harbored a passion for deflower-ing girls—who were collected for him by his wife: " Tiberius 's
" criminal lusts" were " worthy of an oriental tyrant " (Tacitus).
Caligula "made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome "
(Dio), including his sisters. Even Claudius was pimped for by his wife, who gave him "sundry housemaids to lie with " (Dio): When Nero floated down the Tiber, he "had a row of temporary brothels erected on the shore " (Suetonius). As in the case of China, though not so methodically, breeding seems to have been a principal function of concubines.
Nor were emperors speciaclass="underline" When a rich patrician named Gordian died leading a rebellion in favor of his father against the emperor Maximin in A:D: 237, Gibbon commemorated him thus:
" Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested to the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than osten-tation. "
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" Ordinary " Roman nobles kept hundreds of slaves: Yet, while virtually none of the female slaves had jobs around the house, female slaves commanded high prices if sold in youth: Male slaves were usually forced to remain celibate, so why were the Roman nobles buying so many young female slaves? To breed other slaves, say most historians. Yet that should have made pregnant slaves command high prices; they did not: If a slave turned out not to be a virgin, the buyer had a legal case against the seller: And why insist on chastity among the male slaves if breeding is the function of female slaves? There is little doubt that those Roman writers who equate slaves with concubines were telling the truth: The unre-stricted sexual availability of slaves "is treated as a commonplace in Greco-Roman literature from Homer on; only modern writers have managed largely to ignore it. "4z
Moreover, Roman nobles freed many of their slaves at suspiciously young ages and with suspiciously large endowments of wealth. This cannot have been an economically sensible decision: Freed slaves became rich and numerous: Narcissus was the richest man of his day. Most slaves who were freed had been born in their masters ' homes, whereas slaves in the mines or on farms were rarely freed: There seems little doubt that Roman nobles were freeing their illegitimate sons, bred of female slaves."
When Betzig turned her attention to medieval Christendom, she discovered that the phenomenon of monogamous marriage and polygamous mating was so entrenched that it required some disinterring. Polygamy became more secret, but it did not expire: In medieval times the census shows a sex ratio in the coun-tryside that was heavily male-biased because so many women were