Polybius on Fertility Control in Ancient Greece  

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Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Population and Development Review vol. 23 no. 4 (Dec. 1997), page 875-876 .
Topik: Fertility Control; Polybius; Voluminous historiograp.

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: PP30 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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A recurrent theme in the voluminous historiographic writings of Polybius (born in the late third century BC, died about 118 BC) is a distinction between events for which causality cannot be assigned and those for which it can. The former are properly attributable to Fate and Chance-in today's parlance, to acts of God. The latter cannot be ascribed to divine action: men should seek to discover their underlying causes. In Book XXXVI of his great surviving work known as The Histories (cover- ing approximately the period 220-144 Bc, hence the crucial years of Rome's ascen- dancy in the Mediterranean), Polybius illustrates this point by contrasting human inability to fathom the reasons for plagues or exceptionally bad weather and some- thing for which responsibility can be clearly established: a phenomenon he matter- of-factly refers to as a decline of the population in the Greece of his time due to a low birth rate. Polybius 's explanation for fertility control provides a concise formulation of what more than 2000 years later came to be elaborated as the theory of demo- graphic transition. Polybius perceives urban Greeks as having fallen into a "state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence," prompting men not to marry or, if mar- ried, to choose to have only one or two children. Such behavior, which Polybius condemns, is also prompted by considerations of children's material welfare: the desire to bring them up in affluence. This evil, he notes, "grew rapidly and insensi- bly, " rendering cities resourceless andfeeble. Having identified the cause, he recom- mends not supplication to gods but human action-changing men's aspirations or "passing laws making it compulsory to rear children. " The passage reproduced be- low is from Volume VI of Polybius, The Histories, translated by W. R. Paton (The Loeb Classical Library, first published in 192 7).

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