Vicki, you said:
The sexual urge is suffient to ensure that people are going to procreate.
That is probably true in most cases, at least before there were contraceptives. On the other hand, if homosexuality became too popular, men might possibly prefer childless homosexual relationships over married, child-producing relationships with women. According to a book about ancient Greece that we have in my school, homosexuality was a part of young man's education in that society. An older man became the young man's teacher and mentor, but also his lover. When the young man had reached a certain age, he was no longer the older man's lover. Instead, later on, he himself took a younger man under his wings, and that young man became his lover. So you can say that (male) honomsexuality was institutionalised in ancient Greece.
Yet in Greece, and certainly in Athens, men were required to marry a woman. Not only that, but according to the book we have at my school, the men of Athens were required to have sex with their wives at least three times a month, to make sure that the population of Athens did not decline. It might have done so, if a lot of the Greek men had preferred homosexual activites over their married bed. So married sex with his wife was a man's lawful duty in Athens.
As for the functions of women in ancient Greece, I can't resist quoting this passage from
Against Naera by Demosthenes (384–322 BC):
For this is what living with a woman as one's wife means - to have children by her and to introduce the sons to the members of the clan and of the deme, and to betroth the daughters to husbands as one's own. Mistresses [hetairas] we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines [pallakas] for the daily care of our persons, but wives [gunaikas] to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.
Do men necessarily take care of their children, if they know that the children are theirs? When I read the Bible, I don't see many signs that fathers back then did a lot to provide for their children. Yes, Joseph took Jesus to Egypt to protect him from Herod (maybe - the other Gospels do not repeat that story) and Jairus, a patron of the synagogue, asked Jesus to raise his daughter. And there is of course the story of the prodigal son and his kind and forgiving father. Otherwise the fathers seem to be very distant from their children in the Biblical stories, and it is the mothers who care for the children.
Please note that you don't need marriage to have mothers who take care of their children. A famous story from 1 Kings 3 tells the story of two harlots who come before Solomon to fight over one living child:
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Later, two harlots came to the king and stood before him.
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One woman said: "By your leave, my lord, this woman and I live in the same house, and I gave birth in the house while she was present.
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On the third day after I gave birth, this woman also gave birth. We were alone in the house; there was no one there but us two.
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This woman's son died during the night; she smothered him by lying on him.
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Later that night she got up and took my son from my side, as I, your handmaid, was sleeping. Then she laid him in her bosom, after she had laid her dead child in my bosom.
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I rose in the morning to nurse my child, and I found him dead. But when I examined him in the morning light, I saw it was not the son whom I had borne."
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The other woman answered, "It is not so! The living one is my son, the dead one is yours." But the first kept saying, "No, the dead one is your child, the living one is mine!" Thus they argued before the king.
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Then the king said: "One woman claims, 'This, the living one, is my child, and the dead one is yours.' The other answers, 'No! The dead one is your child; the living one is mine.'"
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The king continued, "Get me a sword." When they brought the sword before him,
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he said, "Cut the living child in two, and give half to one woman and half to the other."
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The woman whose son it was, in the anguish she felt for it, said to the king, "Please, my lord, give her the living child--please do not kill it!" The other, however, said, "It shall be neither mine nor yours. Divide it!"
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The king then answered, "Give the first one the living child! By no means kill it, for she is the mother."
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When all Israel heard the judgment the king had given, they were in awe of him, because they saw that the king had in him the wisdom of God for giving judgment.
You don't need marriage to take care of children. The way I see it, the chief historical function of marriage (at least the kind where the woman is punished most severely for infidelity) has been to let the father know what children are his, so that he can make decisions for them (for example, decisions about who his children will marry). Marriage also allowed the father to know what boys were his, so that he could pass his property on to them. But fatherhood did not necessarily require the man to provide for his children very much.
So let me amend what I said in my previous post: The two chief functions of marriage have been to produce children, and to let the fathers know what children are theirs, so that they can make decisions for them, and so that they can pass their property on to their own sons.
Ann
