檳榔嶼

- In a world where most of the upper class was busily establishing pretensions to noble blood, the best way to bolster one's legitimacy was to marry someone who also had an august line of ancestors.
  - Rulers used marriage to establish diplomatic, military, or commercial ties.
- Before the development of banks and free markets, marriage was the surest way for people lower down the social scale to acquire new sources of wealth, add workers to family enterprises, recruit business partners, and preserve or pass on what they already had. 
- For the ruling and upper classes, marriage was crucial to establishing and expanding political power. 
- Many families voluntarily offered their daughters or sisters to rulers with the aim of gaining a useful family connection.
- This was a dangerous game. A secondary wife or concubine who found favor with the ruler might well be murdered by a primary wife or her kin. 
- In the modern world, we tend to think that "marrying up" is something only women do, as when a woman snags a rich husband or handsome price. In many ancient societies, however, it was often men who sought wealth and power by marrying women higher up the social scale.
- The marriage jackpot for a man was to wed the daughter of a deceased or soon-to-die king and to live with her in her father's household, where he might inherit the throne.
- By taking more that one wife, kings could establish a network of alliances with several other rulers. 

Not a Love Story: The Marriage of Antony and Cleopatra
- The love affiar between Antony and Cleopatra has been the subject of books, films, and a play by Shakespeare.
- The real story is more complicated, because both Cleopatra and Antony were playing for stakes that had little to do with undying love. Their saga can be understood only in the context of the role of princesses in confierring legitimacy in Hellenistic Egypt and their active participation in struggles for political power. Sexual passion may indeed have existed between Cleopatra and Antony and, prior to that, between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. But on everyone's part this was a calculated, even ruthless, political intrigue.
  - Cleopatra, an educated, intelligent woman who spoke several languages, was no slouch when it came to intrigue and power plays.
  - As she participated in the political and military negotiations designed to reconcile her with her brother, Cleopatra began a love affair, or at least a sexual liaison, with Caesar.
  - Cleopatra's ambitious campaign to escape Roman domination and revive the power of Egypt shows that princesses were not always helpless pawns in the marital intrigues of the ancient wolrd.
- Women's power plays generally revolved around their husbands: who they might marry or scheme to discard.
- The Fujiwara lcan was well known for its marriage politics.

Marriage Among the Common Folk of Ancient Society
- In most cases, marriage was still a matter of practical calculation rather than an arrangement entered into fro individual fulfillment and the pursuit of happiness.
  - For people with property, marriage was an economic transaction that involved the transfer or consolidation of land and wealth as well as the development of social networks.
  - For families with larger amounts of wealth, marriages in the ancient world were the equivalent of today's business mergers or investment partnerships.
- Roman husbands were so little troubled by possessive feelings that they joined with a wife's previous husbands to build a tomb for her after she died.
  - A husband rarely displayed such open-mindedness about a wife's sexual behavior while she was married to him, but this had as much to do with fear that she might bear another man's child as with love-based jealousy.
  - One of the most important functions of marriage for the propertied classes was the production of legitimate children who would honor the father in his old age, show respect to the ancestors and clan gods, and perpetuate the family's property.
- When Greek husbands eulogized their departed wives, they seldom talked of their mutual love or the personal qualities they treasured in their wives. The most common words of praise for a wife were that she showed "self-control", an attribute connected in Greek thought to female chastity and to a wife's protection of her husband's property.
  - Under Athenian law, a man's seduction of another's wife was punishable by death, but the rape of another man's wife merited only a monetary fine.
- A woman needed a man to do the plowing. A man needed a woman to spin wool or flax, preserve food, weave blankets, and grind grain, a hugely labor-intensive task. A woman was also needed to bear more children to help in the fields.
- The lower and middle classes made decisions about marriage and divorce according to criteria different from those used by the upper classes. But in neither case were these decisions likely to be based primarily on love and sexual attraction.
- For thousands of years, the economic functions of marriage were far more important to the middle and lower classes than were its personal satisfactions, while among the upper classes, the political functions of marriage tooke first place.