Low fertility is the “new normal” across the globe, with most countries, including the United States, converging on birth rates below replacement levels. Marriage is divided along lines of class, culture, and ideology. A new study finds only 39% of liberals are married, versus 62% of conservatives; only a third of liberals believe marriage is needed to create strong families, compared to 80% of conservatives.
The collapse of marriage and child rearing is a development with civilizational implications.
Caesar Augustus thought so, too.
Political careerism and changing sexual mores, including increased bachelorhood and promiscuity, reduced an upper-class population already devastated by civil war. Augustus needed Roman citizens to administer the Empire and, of course, serve in its legions. So, he introduced moral and practical social reforms.
His Lex Julia (“Julian laws”), of 18 B.C. and 9 A.D., encouraged marriage and childbearing and discouraged licentiousness. Augustus established new inheritance laws to preserve property within families and penalized the celibate and unwed while granting social and financial rewards to those with three or more children. (Millennia later, tax reformers would declare their “child tax credit” “innovative.”) Augustus made adultery a criminal offense, for which he later sent his own daughter and granddaughter into exile. Tacitus, in his Annals, chides him for punishing relatives more than the law required.
In Roman History, Cassius Dio records Augustus reprimanding unmarried equites in the Forum in 11 A.D. “You are betraying your country by rendering her barren and childless,” the princeps civitatis enjoined. “In fact, you are destroying Rome by making it empty of future inhabitants.”
The speech is Dio’s invention, but it’s a fitting recreation for argument of Augustus: “How can the State be preserved, if we neither marry nor have children?”
Et tu, America?
