It was not on erotic grounds, but for political and social reasons that the Greek introduced monogamy.  The reason which weighed in the scales more heavily than all others was the necessity for legitimate offspring.  It was natural that a man of property should desire a legitimate heir who would inherit it on his death.  The right of succession from father to son, incorporated later on in the Roman Right, originated during this period.  But this was not the only advantage connected with the possession of a son:  religion taught that after death the body required sacrificial food which could only be provided by the legitimate male descendants of the deceased. (The same belief was held by the Indians and Eastern Asiatics.) In several Greek States marriage was compulsory and bachelors were fined.  At the same time the contraction of a marriage did not interfere with the personal freedom of the man; he was at liberty to go to the hetaerae for intellectual stimulation (unless he happened to prefer the friends of his own sex) and to his slaves for the pleasures of the senses.  His wife, although she was not free, was respected by him as the guardian of his hearth and children.  There was but one legal reason for divorce:  sterility, which frustrated the object of matrimony.  Conjugal love as we understand it did not exist; it is a feeling which was entirely unknown to the ancients.

With the exception of the gradually weakening hold of religion on the imagination of the people towards the decline of the Roman Empire, no perceptible change occurred in the social life of the old world until the dawn of the Middle Ages.  To quote Otto Seeck:  “A wife had no other task than to produce legitimate offspring; and yet she gave herself airs and graces, embittered her husband’s life with her jealousy and bad temper or, worse even, set all tongues wagging with her evil conduct.  Is it to be wondered at that marriage was merely regarded as a duty to the State, and that a great number of men were not sufficiently patriotic to take such a burden upon their shoulders?”

Thus the victory of the male spiritual principle over universal sexual intercourse ushered in the second stage which checked the sexual impulse and directed it upon certain individuals, a distinction however, which bears no relation to love.

Monogamy had conquered, in principle at least and as an ideal.

The profoundly mystical core of the most powerful Greek tragedy which has come down to our time, the Orestes of Aeschylus, represents the victory of the new gods of light over the old maternal powers.  Orestes has sinned against the old law, for in order to avenge his father’s death, he has slain his mother.  The sun-god Apollo and the sinister Erinnys, the upholders of the old maternal right, are waging war over the justifiableness of the deed.  To the Erinnys, matricide is the foulest of all crimes, for man is more nearly related to the mother than to the father.  But Apollo had commanded the deed, so that the father’s murder should not remain unavenged.