parents' community' ( Teichman 1982: 178). Marriage is (surpris-
ingly) omitted from the definition because Teichman has implicit-
ly decided in advance that certain disadvantaged statuses related
to birth but not to marriage should count as 'illegitimacy', for
example, the status of the Jewish Mamzer. ⁸ She does not to my
mind escape the ontological trap by taking refuge in
Wittgensteinian 'core-definitions' and 'penumbra concepts', ⁹ for
she must still site, in ontological fashion, the concept- or
definition-centre, however much she wishes to leave its exterior
limits undefined. ¹⁰

Marriage and legitimacy are in fact reciprocally defined in tradi-
tional anthropology. The Royal Anthropological Institute's Notes
and Queries defines marriage as follows: 'Marriage is a union
between a man and woman such that children born to the woman
are recognised legitimate offspring of both partners' ( Royal
Anthropological Institute 1951: 111). Leach, however, has argued
that this definition breaks down in the context of polyandry. ¹¹ We
shall see that in classical Athens at any rate marriage by betrothal
(engyē) and legitimacy (gnēsiotēs) do appear to have been recipro-
cally defined.

There is one small and rather negative fashion in which
comparative material from non-Greek societies can actually be
useful and unproblematic in application: it can be used to expose
fallacious assumptions, as the history of the Scottish Debate, to
which we shall turn shortly, well illustrates. Any more positive,
paradigm-building use of it can strictly possess no more than a
rhetorical value.

However, any study of one society by an individual socialized in
another involves an unavoidable implicit comparison between the
two. 'Bastardy' is a modern English word and concept, not an
ancient Greek one. ¹² To analyse together that series of institutions,
or fragments of institutions, from ancient Greece that might
superficially correspond to our notion of 'bastardy' might, in
Greek terms, be a very arbitrary and misleading exercise.
Teichman 1982 book again serves to illustrate the point. She
seeks to generate a universal definition of 'illegitimacy' by

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