Appendix II — Matrilinear Succession in Greece
BACHOFEN525 was the first to draw attention to the existence of mother-right in Greece, and he was followed in 1886 by M’Lennan.526 Both these authors claimed support from evidence which will not now stand investigation; a more judicious statement of the case was issued last year by Dr. Hartland.527 In 1911 Professor Rose528 set out to prove the case, but found that his evidence led him to a contrary conclusion, and he argued that such customs were unknown in Hellenic Greece. If by Hellenic he means “Achæan” and Dorian, that is to say Wiro Greece, I am in full agreement with him, but he includes also Minoan Crete, “because it is just possible that the population was in some sense Hellenic.” 529
Rose argues that the existence of the worship of a mother goddess must not be taken as evidence of matrilinear succession, and were this the only detail on which we could rely, I would readily admit that the evidence was too slight. But we have some support from pedigrees. Rose dismisses the evidence from traditional genealogies, because “many of these are late, and a large part of them is doubtless pure invention.” 530 I do not feel confident that we must dismiss these genealogies, even if late, so summarily. Much of the detail contained in them occurs in the tragedians, who gathered it from the legendary matter current in their day. That there was much more such legendary matter, and that it was for long after kept alive in the minds of the people, is clear from the pages of Pausanias. Still doubtless there were some inventions, in fact it is obvious from internal evidence that this was so, but such interpolations can usually be detected, and by no means vitiate the pedigrees for our purpose. Often the interpolation is but the substitution of a fictitious name for an unnamed son or daughter, or when tradition states that C is the grandson of A, a name B has been invented to fill in the missing intermediate ancestor.
I propose, therefore, to examine some of these pedigrees, and will choose those of undoubted Minoan origin. Ridgeway531 has suggested that the Minoans traced their descent from Poseidon, as the “Achæans” did from Zeus or Ares. There are three well-known families that do so, the Neleids of Pylos, the Danaans of the Argolid and the Cadmeians of Bœotia; in the two former cases there is ample evidence that those places received a population from Crete either in the first or early in the second Late Minoan period.
The Neleid pedigree is meagre and does not help us, but those of the Danaans and Cadmeians are fuller, and it is claimed by later writers that the families were connected. The first part of the genealogy is unquestionably fictitious, and designed to show a connection between the two families, but it is worth looking at.
Here we find the late genealogist inventing a pedigree to connect the traditional families of the Argolid, Thebes and Cnossos with the eponymous heroes of Phœnicia, Cilicia and Egypt, and tracing them all from Poseidon. This seems to indicate that popular tradition believed all these families and peoples to have been connected, and that they were worshippers of the sea-god.
Let us now turn to the Danaan pedigree. That the fifty daughters of Danaus were mythical admits of no doubt, and the same is true of their fifty cousins, but it is possible that tradition is correct in claiming that one of them, Hypermnestra, married her cousin and succeeded her father. They are succeeded by Abas, who is followed by Acrisius, and then again we get a daughter Danaë, who is succeeded by her son Perseus. This hero is said to have left many sons, but here the pedigree gets mixed. It seems more likely to my mind that Perseus was succeeded by Electryon, whose daughter Alcmene married her cousin Amphitryon, though later writers, accustomed to a more strictly patrilinear succession, made Amphitryon succeed his father Alcæus as king of Mycenæ. But the times were troubled, the Pelopids were conquering the Peloponnese and the succession failed. It is well to remember, though, that Perseus is said to have had a daughter Gorgophane, whose name may well be fictitious and that her son or grandson Tyndareus was father of Clytemnestra. It would seem that both Agamemnon and Ægistheus claimed to reign not only by right of conquest but jure uxoris.
Hartland has well cited from the Eumenides that “when Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes for his mother’s death, pleads that he is not of kin to her and wins by the casting vote of Athena, the Erinyes are startled and shocked on finding that even the gods decide against them, declaring that these, the younger gods, have over-ridden the old laws and unexpectedly plucked Orestes out of their hands.”532
Cadmus is said to have married Harmonia, daughter of Ares, again a fictitious name for a Thracian maiden. He had four daughters and one son, but it is not the latter who succeeds him, but the son of his fourth daughter Agaue. The Bacchæ of Euripides seems to show a struggle between the claims of the priestly or divine son of Semele, the eldest daughter, and the more mundane and regal son of Agaue, the youngest. The claim of Polydorus, the only son, does not arise until Dionysus has been banished and Pentheus slain.
While these genealogies, much garbled by writers accustomed only to patrilinear succession, show the frequent succession of a daughter or a daughter’s son, it may well be urged that there is no evidence of the importance of the maternal uncle, or of the avunculi potestas of Sir James Frazer. This is undoubtedly true, and no reasonable claim can be made that this particular form of matrilinear succession obtained in Minoan Greece. But are we sure that there is only one type of matrilinear succession? The forms of patrilinear succession are not all alike. The laws on this subject varied between the Ripuarian and the Salic Franks, the British crown passes by a rule which differs from that governing the descent of a peerage, and peerages granted by letters patent differ from those dependent upon a writ of summons. I submitted the point recently to the late Dr. Rivers, who told me that it was his opinion that several types of matrilinear succession had probably existed and that he had found evidence of two in Melanesian society.
I do not suggest that the evidence which I have cited shows the typical matrilinear succession as it is commonly understood, or that among pre-Hellenic peoples “the father did not count,”533 but it seems to hint that the succession was in the process of passing from some form of matrilinear to some form of patrilinear descent. Perhaps it may only indicate that the eldest child succeeded regardless of sex, but in any case there appears to be sufficient evidence for assuming that in Minoan cities an heiress counted for more politically than she did in “Achæan” households. It is well, too, to remember in this connection that these Minoan tyrants were probably Prospectors and that among another group of Prospectors, the Etruscans, “it is, of course, agreed on all hands that such a system did exist.”534