Pausanias and Mythical Kinship Reckoning
Guest Author: Written by Ari Toumpas (OSU)
My work with MANTO began in 2016 while I was an undergraduate at UNH, volunteering on Scott’s side of the project. Every Friday afternoon half a dozen (oddly) enthusiastic students would meet with Scott to work on recording every mention of mythological characters that appeared in Pausanias’ Description of Greece. At the time we were reading Pausanias’ eighth book on Arcadia—the mostly landlocked region characterized by its claims to autochthony, rugged mountains, and, by Pausanias’ time, numerous ruined cities which were abandoned to found Megalopolis more than 500 years earlier. In time, Pausanias’ Arcadia became the focus of my senior thesis at UNH, particularly for its extensive record of heroic lineage, which shall be the main topic of this post. Pausanias’ eighth book is also the section of data I have just completed adding to the MANTO data set, so it is only natural that I look back on the ‘genealogy’ of my own research.
Shameless wordplay aside, my research in Pausanias has been centered on mythical kinship reckoning, or in other words, how the vast web of family ties in Greek myth is conceptualized. This can be as brief as a hero proclaiming one or two generations of ancestors in the middle of battle or as extensive as a genealogical catalogue. In an earlier post on the definition of myth, Greek myth was described using J. R. R. Tolkien’s idea of a ‘secondary world’—a coherent and consistent fictional universe with its own spatial and temporal dimensions, as well as biological and social norms which result in a narrative setting that is perceived to be just as full and rich as our ‘primary world’.[1] However, as Sarah Iles Johnston has persuasively argued, the story world of Greek myth is certainly not a starkly secondary world in Tolkien’s since, but rather is conceived of in a space that is analogous to the primary world, in its norms, biology, and geography.[2] Mythical kinship reckoning serves as a tool to construct and connect the various aspects that contribute towards the richness of the story world. Kinship, of course, ties people together, but they also connect narrative episodes and provide a relative chronological ordering of events. This is glaringly obvious in some texts, such as the Library of the mythographer Apollodoros, which is completely organized around the lineages of mythical figures, but this expansive and relatively consistent genealogical web implicitly lies beneath every myth.
To be clear, Pausanias’ Description of Greece is not a genealogical text, nor is it exclusively concerned with mythography. The work consists of ten books organized by region and mythical family ties are discussed as they relate to the region at hand. However, there is some variance in how Pausanias introduces these inset narratives: at times the place takes precedence over the inset narratives, as is the case in book one’s account of Attica where the lineage of mythical kings is only discussed in reference to artwork. Contrast this with the account of Laconia in book three where an extensive myth-historical preface presents the majority of the region’s genealogical information before discussing its relation to local topography.
These longer narratives of a region’s mythical history introduce six out of ten books.[3] They contain anywhere from ten to twenty generations of named characters in only a few chapters. Book eight on Arcadia is a clear example of this (fig. 1): in the first six chapters the introductory narrative contains some sixty names across twenty-two generations which prompt brief stories from the first humans to inhabit the region to the last pseudohistorical kings. One might even call Pausanias’ genealogies kingship reckoning, as the vast majority of the characters named in these initial chapters are kings of Arcadia and only five women are named. Clearly, the patrilineal descent of kings is a prominent social norm in his conception of the story and is generally analogous to the norms of his primary world. In the rest of book eight and throughout the work, Pausanias adds more detail to this initial family group when he encounters related features and stories in the landscape.
Figure 1: A family tree of Arcadian heroes made using PowerPoint.
The myths recorded and alluded to in Pausanias’ account of Arcadia practically touch every corner of Greek myth, such as Deucalion’s Flood, the Seven Against Thebes, the Trojan War, etc. Pulling Pausanias’ conception of mythical kinship to the front shows the continuity between events that may not otherwise be connected. In other words, the story world sits within the framework of mythical kinship that Pausanias describes.[4] Furthermore, the narratives tied to each character within a lineage creates ties to places, events, and non-kin mythical figures, supporting the fullness of the story world. Mythical kinship reckoning is a cornerstone of the story world of Greek myth because it creates a relatively consistent temporal framework for events and actions of the mythic world. From this important role kinship systems play in structuring the world of Greek myth, you might wonder: What is MANTO doing with this information?
Yaya Lu’s project visualizing MANTO data in family trees aims to have a computer do all the labor which would otherwise be done ‘by hand’ (i.e. in PowerPoint for me). However, a family tree is only a snapshot of one person’s interpretation of the source(s) and Pausanias’ reckoning of mythical kinship is intrinsically linked to the narratives he records and in turn to their context within his whole work. The above Arcadian family tree, for example, represents my interpretation of the kinship system expressed in a brief section of Pausanias. It does not show the information I chose to leave out or emphasize, and the context of this information and non-genealogical ties are absent. This hand-made family tree functions as a tool to assist in expressing my interpretation of Pausanias in much the same way that the underlying kinship reckoning in Pausanias’ text assists in expressing his conceptualization of the world of Greek myth. While the computer-generated family tree of course has the advantage of speed and ease of use, the most useful feature will be the ability to swiftly access the context, non-genealogical ties, and alternative genealogies from the MANTO dataset. The goal of such a tool is that any user could create a family tree and easily access the literary sources in the underlying data to understand the decisions that have led to the image before them, whether it be for work on Pausanias or otherwise.
Setting aside the potential for swiftly generating genealogical visual aids, I would like to turn towards a much narrower example. What I hope to show is that the non-genealogical information in the MANTO data set can be used to better contextualize minor genealogical ties within the broader story world. During our session of data collection this past summer, our Australian contingent encountered an issue in Pausanias book two concerning the introduction of the Eleusinian mysteries at the city of Phlious by Dysaules (2.14.4):
At all events, this Dysaules, according to the Phliasians, established the mysteries here, and he it was who gave to the place the name Celeae. I have already said that the tomb of Dysaules is here. So the grave of Aras was made earlier, for according to the account of the Phliasians Dysaules did not arrive in the reign of Aras, but later. For Aras, they say, was a contemporary of Prometheus, the son of Iapetus, and three generations of men older than Pelasgos the son of Arcas (τοῦ Ἄρκαδος) and those called at Athens aboriginals.[5]
Translators have broadly taken ‘τοῦ Ἄρκαδος’ as a genealogical designation, “son of Arcas”.[6] We had several entities named Pelasgos in our system (highlighted in red in fig. 2, but none seemed to match this, so we were suspicious about this interpretation of the text). The Argive Pelasgos was firmly the son of Triopas; there was an Arcadian one, the eponym for Pelasgia, but Pausanias clearly casts him as an autochthon and the grandfather of Arcas (see fig. 1 above); and the last candidate is the father of Hippotoos, a Trojan War hero, but he is only attested in a potentially erroneous passage of Apollodoros (E.3.34).
Figure 2: The data collection process for MANTO. The three figures named Pelasgos are highlighted in red.
Of course this could be a radical variant only found here (as some have indeed interpreted it), and it is not uncommon for us to encounter new entities of this sort during the data collection process, but the data we had recently collected in book eight compelled us to take a closer look. As I mentioned, the Arcadian Pelasgos is already connected to Arcas, but as his great grandfather rather than son. The following passage also seemed related to the passage in question. Here, Pausanias explains the chronology of early athletic games founded by Lycaon, the son of the Arcadian Pelasgos (8.2.1-2):
Lycaon the son of Pelasgos devised the following plans, which were more clever than those of his father. He founded the city Lycosoura on Mount Lycaios, gave to Zeus the surname Lycaios and founded the Lycaian games. I hold that the Panathenian festival was not founded before the Lycaian. The early name for the former festival was the Athenian, which was changed to the Panathenian in the time of Theseus, because it was then established by the whole Athenian people gathered together in a single city… My view is that Lycaon was contemporary with Cecrops, the king of Athens, but that they were not equally wise in matters of religion.
Figure 3: The data collection process for MANTO. The ties between Cecrops and Lycaon are highlighted in red.
Additionally, the MANTO dataset contained a passage from Apollodoros asserting that this Cecrops, an early king of Athens, is an autochthon (highlighted in red in fig. 3). So, we had an Arcadian Pelasgos who is connected to an Athenian autochthon, just as the Pelasgos in book two is described, but seemed the two passages disagree on his parents. Such contradictions certainly do occur in Greek myth and MANTO does account for them, but from the signs in our data we decided to reconsider the meaning of 'τοῦ Ἀρκάδος’: What has been broadly assumed to mean ‘the son of Arcas’, we realized actually must mean ‘the Arcadian’, as is paralleled in various other parts of Pausanias but namely at 8.38.5 when it is used to describe a historical Arcadian athlete.[7]
By connecting the Phliasian Eleusinian mysteries to the Arcadian and Athenian autochthons, it becomes clear that Pausanias actively conceptualizes the mysteries as early, but still later than some of the earliest human actions. I have not even mentioned the role of Prometheus in this passage, who is a much more recognizable actor in the origins of humankind, and further fleshes out the relative chronology that Pausanias has in mind. What is particularly significant here, is how this passage adds to the several points in book eight where Pausanias defers to the Arcadian local traditions because he views them as especially wise because of their early origins.[8] The Arcadian autochthonous genealogy not only impacts how Pausanias interacted with the local tradition in Arcadia, but as is evident from the passage in book two it also holds weight for in the in his broader perception of the story world of Greek myth.
End Notes:
1. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, with a memoir by C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947).
2. Johnston, Sarah Iles. The Story of Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019): 121–130.
3. To be precise, books 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 begin with a general mythical history of the region.
4. Pretzler, Maria "Turning Travel into Text: Pausanias at Work." Greece & Rome 51, no. 2 (2004): 199–216, especially 212.
5. Translation by W.H.S. Jones, the most accessible translation, available alongside the Greek both in the Loeb and at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
6. See Gregory Nagy’s CHS Pausanias Reader “Son of Arkas” is given here at 2.14.4 , as well as n. 70 in Pretzler (2004) where it is assumed this is a radical variant.
7. As Levi (Penguin, 1979) correctly interprets, as does the index in the edition of Rocha-Pereira and Roscher’s Lexicon, though none adduce the passage from book 8.
8. Baleriaux, Julie. “Pausanias’ Arcadia.” in Myths on the Map: The Storied Landscapes of Ancient Greece edited by Greta Hawes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).