" employed " in the castles and monasteries: Their jobs were those of serving maids of various kinds, but they formed a loose sort of
" harem" whose size depended clearly on the wealth and power of the castle 's owner: In some cases ,historians and authors were more or less explicit in admitting that castles contained "gynoeciums, "
where lived the owner 's harem in secluded luxury: Count Baudouin, patron of a literary cleric named Lambert,
" was buried with twenty-three bastards in attendance as well as ten legitimate daughters and sons. " His bedchamber had access to the
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servant girls ' quarters and to the rooms of adolescent girls upstairs.
It had access, too, to the warming room, "a veritable incubator for suckling infants. " Meanwhile, many medieval peasant men were lucky to marry before middle age and had few opportunities for fornication."
THE REWARDS OF VIOLENCE
If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause and reward of violence. This is presumably the reason that the early Church became so obsessed with matters of sex. It recognized sexual competition to be one of the principal causes of murder and mayhem. The gradual synonymy of sex and sin in Christendom is surely based more on the fact that sex often leads to trouble rather than that there is anything inherently sinful about sex. 4f Consider the case of the Pitcairn Islanders. In 1790 nine mutineers from HMS Bounty landed on Pitcairn along with six male and thirteen female Polynesians. Thousands of miles from the nearest habitation, unknown to the world, they set about building a life on the little island. Notice the imbalance: fifteen men and thirteen women. When the colony was discovered eighteen years later, ten of the women had survived and only one of the men. Of the other men, one had committed suicide, one had died, and twelve had been murdered: The survivor was simply the last man left standing in an orgy of violence motivated entirely by sexual competition. He promptly underwent a conversion to Christianity and prescribed monogamy for Pitcairn society. Until the 1930s the colony prospered and good genealogical records were kept. Studies of these show that the prescription worked. Apart from rare and occasional adultery, the Pitcairners were and remain monogamous. 46
Monogamy, enforced by law, religion, or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men. According to Tacitus, the Germanic tribes that so frustrated several Roman emperors attributed their success partly to the fact that they were a POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
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monogamous society and therefore able to direct their aggression outward (though no such explanation applied to the polygamous and successful Romans): No man was allowed more than one wife, so no man had an incentive to kill a fellow tribesman to take his wife. Not that socially imposed monogamy need extend to captive slaves. In the nineteenth century in Borneo, one tribe, the Iban, dominated the tribal wars of the island. Unlike their neighbors, the Iban were monogamous, which both prevented the accumulation of sullen bachelors in their ranks and motivated them to feats of great daring with the prize of foreign female slaves as reward."
One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence.
Until the 1970s primatologists were busy confirming our prejudices about peaceable apes living in nonviolent societies. Then they began to observe the rare but more sinister side of chimp life: The males of a chimpanzee "tribe" sometimes conduct violent campaigns against the males of another tribe, seeking out and killing their enemies: This habit is very different from the territoriality of many animals, who are content to expel intruders. The prize may be to seize the enemy territory, but that is a small reward for so dangerous a business: A far richer reward awaits the successful male alliance: young females of the defeated group join the victors. 48
If war is something we inherited directly from the hostility between groups of male apes over female apes, with territory as merely a means to the end—sex—then it follows that tribal people must be going to war over women rather than territory. For a long time anthropologists insisted that war was fought over scarce material resources, in particular protein, which was often in short supply.
So when Napoleon Chagnon, trained in this tradition, went to Venezuela to study the tribal Yanomamo in the 1960s, he was in for a shock: " These people were not fighting over what I was trained to believe they were fighting over—scarce resources. They were fighting over women. "" Or at least so they said. There is a tradition in anthropology that you should not believe what people tell you, so Chagnon was ridiculed for believing them. Or as he puts it, "You are allowed to admit the stomach as a source of war but not the gonads. " Chagnon went back again and again and eventually accu-
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mulated a terrifying set of data that proves beyond doubt that men who kill other men (unokais) have more wives, independent of their social standing, than men who do not become murderers.'°
Among the Yanomamo, war and violence are both primarily about sex: War between two neighboring villages breaks out over the abduction of a woman or in retaliation for an attack that had such a motive, and it always results in women changing hands: The most common cause of violence within a village is also sexual jealousy; a village that is too small is likely to be raided for women, but a village that is too large usually breaks up over adultery.
Women are the currency and reward of male violence in the Yanomamo, and death is common. By the age of forty, two-thirds of the people have lost a close relative to murder—not that this dulls the pain and fear of murder. To Yanomamo who leave their forests, the existence in the outside world of laws that prevent chronic murder is miraculous and tremendously desirable. Likewise, the Greeks fondly remembered the replacement of revenge by justice as a milestone, through the legend of the trial of Orestes.
According to Aeschylus, Orestes killed Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, but the Furies were persuaded by Athena to accept the court ' s verdict and end the system of blood feuds." Thomas Hobbes did not exaggerate when he listed among the features of life of primitive mankind " continual fear and danger of violent death"; though he was much less correct in the second and more familiar part of the sentence: "and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. "
Chagnon now believes that the conventional wisdom—people only fight over scarce resources—misses the point. If resources are scarce, then people fight over them. If not, they do not: "Why bother, " he says, "to fight for mangango nuts when the only point of having mangango nuts is so that you can have women: Why not fight over women? " Most human societies, he believes, are not touching some ceiling of resource limitation. The Yanomamo could easily clear larger gardens from the forest to grow more plantain trees, but then they would have too much to eat.' Z
There is nothing especially odd about the Yanomamo. All POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
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studies of preliterate societies done before national governments were able to impose their laws upon them revealed routinely high levels of violence: One study estimated that one-quarter of all men were killed in such societies by other men: As for the motives, sex is dominant:
The founding myth of Western culture, Homer' s Iliad, is a story that begins with a war over the abduction of a woman, Helen.