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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…
