Costin Alamariu, who writes under the nom de guerre “Bronze Age Pervert,” is a 45-year-old childless Romanian whose academic career has not managed to generate anything peer-reviewed. To be blunt, his life is similar to what a recent IFS survey showed many young men fear becoming. He is also a poor historian and an even worse demographer; but his provocative aphorisms have won him an online following, and as such, his recent article, “Fertility Cult,” has gone viral. The article seems largely to be trolling religious conservatives, but though it is clearly meant as bait, I am happy to bite: Alamariu’s view of fertility is wrongheaded in numerous ways.
His thesis is not complex: he contends that conventional monogamous sexuality governed by religiously-informed morals, alongside economic modernity, suppresses virile sexual impulses—especially for intelligent men and women. He further argues that modern developments like women’s entrance into the workforce have created additional headwinds against fertility, and thus that successful pronatalism requires a uniquely extreme policy intervention. Specifically, because he believes fertility of high achieving people is especially low, he suggests giving massive bonuses ($500,000!) to people with high IQs who have children, while also launching a state-sponsored fertility cult centered around reverence for male beauty, and particularly the phallus. He also proposes children born in this program could be raised in state-run orphanages, so parents don’t face many burdens. But his emphasis on creating a modern-day sex cult is derived from his belief that ancient societies sustained high fertility via reverencing male virility, and that religious norms suppressing this reverence are a root cause of low fertility.
It is a disappointing testament to the modern information economy that there is a need to respond to these kinds of ravings, but that’s the internet for you. Unfortunately, to rebut Alamariu’s call for Dionysian orgies to boost fertility, this post will be forced to include some descriptive content that is not entirely PG-rated.
In this post, I’ll rebut three of Alamariu’s core arguments. First, I will show that his claims about ancient demography, which he uses to justify what he calls “Dionysian orgies,” are simply false. Second, I will show that his claims about modern fertility vs. intellectual and professional abilities are also false. Third, his argument that religious sexual norms may be reducing fertility is completely incorrect—indeed, “Dionysian” sex lives are particularly infertile.
Pagans Were Bad at Making Babies
Alamariu’s historical argument in favor of phallus-cults rests heavily on three historic cases: 1) Spartan laws pressuring Spartan elites to reproduce, 2) Christianity failing to boost low fertility among Roman elites, and 3) an argument that ancient Greek fertility was high due to Dionysian-like phallus-reverencing. He errs in all three cases.
Sparta did indeed have laws to try to promote fertility. Sparta went to great lengths to do as Alamariu suggests—glorify the virile male, celebrate male youth, and set aside conventional morality to ensure elite reproduction. Yet Alamariu doesn’t mention a fact every student of Spartan history knows: these laws totally failed. Sparta’s radically elitist culture went to extreme lengths to try to propagate the elite lineages, yet failed, such that the population of Spartiates peaked at perhaps 8 to 10,000 around the 700-500 BC. By Aristotle’s time in the mid-300s, under 1,000 remained, and Sparta was replenishing its ranks by promoting lower-class Spartans to the elite ranks en masse. By 200 BC, the few remaining Spartans were exiled by a populist leader named Nabis, who abolished their privileges, freed their slaves, and then gave their wives away to his political allies. Giving Spartan elites every advantage, favor, and sexual glorification not only failed to lead to elite reproduction, but it also eventually led to elite extinction and peasant rebellion.
Christianity certainly did boost fertility among Roman elites—dramatically.
Alamariu also argues that fertility was low for Roman elites in the early empire, and that when fertility did rise in the eastern empire under Christian influence, it was under fundamentally different elites, i.e. not a continuation of the genuine Roman elite. This is a forgivable error: Alamariu cannot be faulted for repeating a common view among many scholars. But it turns out, Roman fertility was highest for elite men—and lowest for commoners.1 What the data show, based on original analysis I conducted, is that Roman elites had comparatively high fertility rates—they reproduced just fine. It was commoners and slaves who had the lowest birth rates.
Failure of elite reproduction was not the cause of Rome’s fall. Rome fell because the average, everyday people—those who did the farming, trading, and most of the fighting—simply became thinner on the ground as plague reduced their numbers and urban diseases and zero-sum status competition reduced their natural growth rate. When the final wave of barbarians toppled Rome, those barbarians weren’t even numerous—genetic evidence shows the Visigoths who conquered Spain, for example, were a very small group essentially only replacing elites.
More to the point, Christianity certainly did boost fertility among Roman elites—dramatically. The best case-in-point for this comes from consular and imperial families themselves, the most elite of the elite. The figure below uses a method pioneered by historian Walter Scheidel to infer prevailing fertility rates in the social circles around elite families.
At the highest rung of the pagan elite during the Republican period, Roman consuls seem to have had fertility rates around 6 children per man for nearly the whole span of the Roman Republic. But when Augustus established the Principate and consolidated power in himself, fertility rates for the most elite families crashed, from 6 to 2 children or less. Yet, while the last two centuries of pagan emperors averaged 2 children or less, the first two centuries of Christian emperors averaged over 3 children each. By the 600s and 700s AD, Christian emperors of the eastern Roman empire were averaging around 6 children each, though estimates are more volatile since the sample size for Christian emperors is much smaller than the sample size for Republican-era consuls.
Thus, where we can observe religion among the most extremely elite families in the empire, Christians avoided the lowest-low fertility rates of the pagan imperial families and were able to restore fertility rates equivalent to those observed among Roman Republican consular families. Among the higher social classes generally, however, fertility simply never dropped as low as it did for the imperial families. Rome’s rise to power and its subsequent decline were mainly shaped by common fertility rates (except insofar as failure to establish long-term dynasties fueled civil war), and, regardless, Christianity clearly led to higher fertility rates for the most elite families.
While Alamariu suggests this was some accidental feature of an otherwise ascetic and celibacy-friendly faith, this reading is nonsensical: Christians were notable for their distinctive sex lives from the earliest days of the faith, as Rodney Stark has argued. While Christianity was historically divided by debates about family life (“Jovinian” dissidents wished to elevate it to a pinnacle of honor, while “Encratite” sects deprecated it), the Christian mainstream broadly rejected both family-cultism and ascetic extremism as the normative path. Instead, as we can see from the Christian imperial families, Christianity oversaw a return to the fertility rates that had characteri
