New publication: “Matrilineal succession in Greek myth”
Written by Greta Hawes
One of the unexpected delights of data collection on a project like MANTO is that it can become a long-term, collaborative experiment in close reading. I was thinking about this recently when an article that Rosemary Selth and I wrote was published in Classical Quarterly.
MANTO’s data may seem distanced from the quirks and character of actual ancient storytelling, but it is all created through our constant and ongoing grappling with what is there on the page. MANTO has pushed us all to look carefully at material that we would not otherwise have considered. Similarly, this data is not an end point, but (hopefully) a springboard to new insights. As our good friends at the Digital Periegesis project put it —
Semantic annotation can help draw attention to the text’s database of information […] and expose it for analysis. [...] The technology equally facilitates close reading…
Barker, Konstantinidou, Kiesling & Foka, “Journeying through Space and Time with Pausanias’s Description of Greece” Literary Geographies (2003) 9: 126-7.
In short, the emergence of digital tools for research does not mean that our traditional skills in engaging carefully with texts have been superseded. Rather, these two practices become part of the same process of finding meaning.
“Matrilineal succession in Greek myth”, the article that has just come out, characterises, I hope, what makes MANTO special. MANTO is of course a repository for data, but it is also a space for thinking seriously about Greek myth and discovering things that might have gone overlooked.
Usually in Greek myth succession occurs through the male (patrilineal) line: sons become king after their fathers die. Matrilineal succession occurs when a hero ascends the throne because he is connected to a former king via a female relative. This new king might have married the former king’s daughter or widow, or he might be the former king’s maternal grandson or stepson. The most frequently discussed examples come from Homeric epic. So, Menelaos married Helen and succeeded her father as king of Sparta. Aigisthos’ authority at Mycenae is connected to his relationship with Clytaimnesta, the absent king’s wife. And the assumption at Ithaca is that whoever marries Penelope will also receive her “dead” husband’s kingdom. Such examples are often treated as memories of Bronze Age reality. So, Sarah Pomeroy argued that, because Menelaos held power only as long as he remained married, retrieving Helen from Troy was not merely a matter of personal pride, but of political security; royal women, then, could wield some amount of power and autonomy through their marriages (S.B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York, 1975), 19–20).
In our article, we wanted to go back to basics and examine the phenomenon as a whole. Existing discussions of matriliny tend to continually discuss just a handful of examples. Are these representative of the whole tradition? How common are matrilineal successions in Greek myth? And more than this, could we explain why this motif persisted without attributing it to a memory of a historical custom?
MANTO’s dataset made the first part of this relatively easy. We identified 54 stories where a king is related to his predecessor via a matriline. At the time (we used the dataset as it was in mid-2022), MANTO had 541 heroes who were either rulers or founders of cities. This meant that more than 90% of these owed their kingdoms to something other than matrilineal succession.
(The article goes into more detail about the dataset, but it’s worth pointing out here that we excluded instances only attested in rationalising or parodic texts so as not to skew the data. We also excluded instances of queens who succeeded through matrilineal connections: there are vanishingly few instances of these (see the long footnote n.7)! Since our dataset is constantly expanding, we would no doubt find more instances now if we were to re-run these queries now or in the future. One instance I would add now would be Leucos’ succession in Crete as Idomeneus’ son-in-law: the exact family relationships are not clear enough in MANTO’s existing data to have been found in our queries, but they will be when we add the material from Lycophron, Alex. 1218-25. Notably, this is an unusually conflict-ridden succession!)
Fifty-four is a big enough number. It showed that there were many instances of matrilineal succession that had not been discussed in this context. It also allowed us to look for patterns.
We recognised early on that many of the most “normal” stories of matrilineal succession narrated the transfer of power unproblematically. Stories of conflict between patrilineal and matrilineal claimants are very rare, as are any hints that succession via the matriline made the new king in any way illegitimate, or corresponded to a break or disruption in the city’s history. Indeed, in most instances where a son-in-law, step-son or maternal grandson inherits the kingdom, we showed that it is often the patriline of the new king that is emphasised. Matriliny has its benefits within patrilineal calculations since it allows for kings fathered by much more prestigious figures than the city’s own dynasty could offer. So, in the case-study of Sicyon we pointed out that matriliny allowed the city to claim both that it had been ruled by an almost unbroken line of kings, and also that it had been ruled by kings who were sons of gods like Poseidon, Hermes, Dionysos and Apollo.
The usefulness of matrilines in emphasising civic narratives of concord and continuity is on show in another of our case studies, this time concerned with the city of Argos:
Argive myth-making is remarkable in that it imagines that, in the generations of the Seven and their sons, the city was full of heroes co-existing without rivalry or hostility. Royal women served as marriageable nodes, connecting Argive heroes ever more tightly to one another, and quickly integrating non-Argives. [A]n exceptional commitment to matrilineal calculations effectively blurred distinctions between insiders and outsiders in these generations. (p. 10)
All this is to say that matrilineal connections tie together the large number of prominent Argive heroes; and in these generations they did not compete with each other to rule Argos, but collaborated in focusing their hostilities on their enemies at Thebes. The “family tree” is as remarkable as you might suspect:
Genealogical connections of the Seven at Argos. A synthetic rendering of the traditions discussed in the article. Not all alternatives for parentage of Aigialeia, Cyanippos and Hippomedon shown. Capaneus appears four times to capture alternative genealogies. Not all relationships shown. Names in upper case are rulers at Argos; underlined names are members of the Seven. Dotted lines represent patrilines greater than one generation.
Hawes & Selth, “Matrilineal succession in Greek myth” Classical Quarterly 2024, fig. 4.
The women who act as matrilineal nodes in these stories are most commonly “merely names” (and sometimes they do not even possess that). They seldom possess personalities, but exist simply to create the requisite genealogical connection. All this is to say that, even in stories that insist on the legitimacy of matrilineal calculations women are not necessarily granted greater visibility or autonomy.
Where matrilines do show their character, though, is in the stories related to the “succession via widow” modality. We found only four such stories. Three appear in Homer (Penelope, Clytaimnestra, and Iocaste), and the fourth was likely invented by Euripides on this model (Merope in the Cresphontes). These stories of a kingdom hanging on the decisions of a “widow” have high narrative stakes: a family drama complete with a “disloyal” spouse and a young, endangered heir imperils even the security of the kingdom:
the widow’s presence crystallizes competition for control of a city as inter-personal conflict, replete with very human emotions. (p. 5)
It is no surprise then that these eye-catching examples of matriliny have came to almost define our understanding of matrilineal succession in Greek myth. They are full of tension and memorable dilemmas. The point of our article is that these are not the only instances that we should be looking at if we want to understand the phenomenon in its full complexity.
Rosemary and I would like to thank Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels from Nodegoat for their help in compiling the dataset of matrilineal successors; CQ’s anonymous readers for their thoughtful responses; Scott Smith, whose reading of an early draft improved it greatly; Patrick Finglass, Clare Roberts, and Marco Perale for shepherding it through to publication.
This article is part of the Australian Research Council project, ‘Storytelling networks and community crises in ancient Greece’ (FT220100543) and received partial funding support from Macquarie University’s DataX Research Centre.
Page references are to the “first view” version of the article and may change.