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Idea of Matriarchy
Author(s): Simon Pembroke
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Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 30 (1967), pp. 1-35
Published by: The Warburg Institute
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WOMEN IN CHARGE: THE FUNCTION OF ALTERNATIVES
IN EARLY GREEK TRADITION AND THE ANCIENT IDEA
OF MATRIARCHY
By Simon Pembroke
over a century ago, a book appeared in Basle revealing to the world a
Just
stage of evolution through which all mankind had passed and of which
nothing had been known until then: Das Mutterrecht,by J. J. Bachofen.
Matriarchy, as the title came to be translated, was not a simple phenomenon.
It was an entire epoch, dominated and virtually contained by a feminine,
material principle, to which a whole series of cosmic and terrestrialrepresenta-
tions necessarily corresponded, and which the more spiritual period of
masculine ascendancy which succeeded it had to combat for every step in its
own advance.
At a less metaphysical level, matriarchy assumed one quite specific form.
It was generally assumed at the time that human society had developed out
of the patriarchal family, as it did in the Old Testament. Bachofen, however,
drawing his evidence almost exclusively from classical antiquity, succeeded in
demonstrating the existence of a form of family organization where the father
was not the head of the household and in which descent was traced on the
female side, not the male one; and he put forward the theory that the paternal
family had everywhere been preceded by a family of which the mother was
the head. The controversy which followed gave a new subject-matter to
anthropology. Families of a similar type were discovered in existing societies,
and for several decades the classification of these discoveries took a chrono-
logical form, backed in each case by a hypothetical system of evolution which
led up to the family of modern industrial Europe and thereby enabled the
various discoveriesto be dated to successivephasesin the prehistory of this family.
Few of these systems have survived to the present day. Modern anthro-
pology is scrupulous in distinguishing between the two phenomena which
Bachofen saw as one, the tracing of descent through women, on the one hand,
and the power or influence of women on the other; and of these the second is
by no means necessarily correlated with the first, besides being a great deal
harder to locate objectively. It is no longer believed that the tracing of
descent through women was ever universal, or that it is essentially an older
phenomenon than that which is traced through males. Above all, it is no
longer thought that the factors governing social organization are so simple, or
so stable, that the entire history of the species can be reconstructed by in-
ference; and inference, in these theories, provided not only mortar, but bricks.
Antiquity, however, remains a separate problem. Whatever is thought of
the methods of Bachofen, the sheer quantity of evidence he could assemble is
impressive enough. It covered a period extending from Homer to the
Gnostics; and this evidence cannot simply be forgotten along with his theories.
Classical studies have in fact taken two separate directions in the present
century, and the real problem has been by-passed on either side. On the one
hand, the theory of matriarchy is still being promulgated, but only by the
followers of Engels, who combined the findings of Bachofen with his own ideas
I
2 SIMON PEMBROKE
as to the origin of private property; and the work of his successors today,
amalgamating as it does phenomena of totally different kinds and reducing
them all into material for a history of social organization whose outline is
known in advance, cannot be described as a contribution to knowledge. The
phenomenological side of the problem, on the other hand, and the evidence of
mythology and religion, are now largely the province of isolated studies deriving
from analytical psychology and broadly unconcerned with questions of his-
torical context and origin. But the main body of classical studies has aban-
doned not only the idea of matriarchy but the very extensive range of problems
connected with it, and these problems have not ceased to exist. A good many
of the connexions which were made in the last century are unacceptable, but
explicit distinctions must be set out in order to make it clear why this is so.
The first thing to be established is how antiquity itself saw the problem and
how close it came to making a category out of matriarchy. There is no lack
of evidence, and this needs to be organized within specific traditions and set
against a historical background before its significance can be assessed. The
present study is intended as a preliminary investigation of this material, and it
concentrates, for the main, on one area for which the Greek tradition is
particularly strong yet can at the same time be controlled by independent
evidence.* A strictly geographical basis, however, is not altogether satis-
factory, and the assessment of this tradition involves an attempt to define its
place in ancient ethnology as a whole, to relate ethnology, in turn, to Greek
reconstructionsof their own past, and since it is not certain, in either case, how
far the simplest categories, such as past and present, Greek and non-Greek,
are effectively operative, to establish a method of confronting this uncertainty
in archaic tradition of all kinds.
I
About the middle of the sixth century B.c., when Cyrus had completed the
conquest of Lydia and was moving on to Assyria, the Persian general Harpagos
was given the task of subduing the South-West coast of Asia Minor. Herodotus,
recording the fact, gives a brief survey of its inhabitants-the Carians,
Caunians and Lycians. He has most to say about the last of them.
Their customs are partly Cretan, partly Carian. They have, however, one
singular custom in which they differ from every other nation in the world:
naming themselves by their mothers, not their fathers. Ask a Lycian who
he is and he answers by giving his own name, that of his mother and so
on in the female line. Moreover, if a free woman marries a slave, their
children are full citizens; but if a free man marries a foreign woman, or
lives with a concubine, even though he is the first person in the State,
the children forfeit all the rights of citizenship.1
A short passage-Herodotus hardly mentions the Lycians again-but one
which has been decisive in the formation of modern anthropology. In i86o
* The Greek colony of Locri Epizephyrii and its foundation will be examined in a
separate article.
1 Hdt. I, 173.
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 3
Lewis H. Morgan inaugurated a massive survey of kinship systems throughout
the world, an undertaking to which he had been brought by his study of the
American Iroquois, the emphasis which they laid on descent through the
mother, and the peculiar terms in which they described and addressed one
another. Ancient Greece, in this survey, was one of the societies whose
terminology was assembled by Morgan himself; but he did not regard it as
very significant. It added little, in his opinion, to what was already known
from other Indo-European societies, and the stage which these represented in
Man's progress from savagery to civilization was well advanced. The work of
Bachofen, however, which made Herodotus on Lycia its starting-point,
persuaded him otherwise; and he admitted, in his next book, that 'descent
was anciently in the female line in the Grecian and Latin gentes'.2 Through-
out the controversy which followed, the case of Lycia epitomized this view.
Descent in the female line, it was believed, was an older phenomenon than
descent through males; societies of the various types encountered outside
Europe had also existed in antiquity; and the history of mankind could be
reconstructed simply by getting these societies in the proper order. Morgan's
Iroquois, however, had already been investigated by a Jesuit missionary,
more than a century before; and the connexion which he had made with
Lycia was of a different kind.
Quelques cofitumes caractdristiques des Peuples de la Lycie, compardes
avec celles des Iroquois & des Hurons, m'avoient d'abord persuadd que
je ne m'dcarterois pas de la verit6 en les faisant descendre les uns des
autres; et je croyois avoir trouv6 dans Hdrodote... de quoi assurer mes
conjectures.
For Lafitau, in fact, the Iroquois were the Lycians, driven from the ancient
world by a chain reaction which started with the Hebrew expulsion of the
Canaanites.3
In the traditions with which the present study is concerned, this same
passage from Herodotus occupies a unique position, and not simply by being
the first such statement to survive. The point is rather that it constitutes an
intersection between traditions of a different kind; and as this assertion must
be established in detail, or not at all, it will first be necessary to examine one
of the headings under which Herodotus presents the customs of a people-a
group of customs which he calls, straightforwardly enough, 'marriage and
intercourse'.
There are fourteen passages of this kind, if we discount three passing men-
tions; and for the present they can be discounted, since they make no pretence
2
AncientSociety,New York 1877, p. 343; Science, xi, 1858, 132-48, p. 145; but he
cf. Systemsof Consanguinityand Affnity of the did not attach the same importance to it at
HumanFamily, Smithsonian Contributions to this time, and in League of the Iroquois,
Knowledge, xvii, no. 218, Washington 1871, Rochester 1851, pp. 86-87, explained matri-
pp. 29-31. That Morgan was familiar with liny in functional terms.
Herodotus's description of Lycia before 3J. Lafitau, Matursdes sauvagesamericains,
reading Bachofen is certain from his 'Laws compare'esaux maurs des premiers temps, i,
of Descent of the Iroquois', Proceedingsof the Paris I724, PP. 69, 89-92.
American Associationfor the Advancementof
4 SIMON PEMBROKE
at a complete description of the society's workings or of how marriage was
organized within it. Thus the information that girls in Lydia earn their
dowries by prostitution is given not for its own sake, but to explain how a
scheme of a quite different kind, the building of a particular tomb, was
financed.4 Even in concentrating on these fourteen passages, however, we
will not get a different custom for each society. In fact it is very nearly true to
say that with the exception of the Asiatic Empires, Herodotus produces
nothing but variations on a single theme, so the exception may be considered
first.
For Herodotus there are three continents-Europe, Asia and Libya; and
despite a remarkable attempt to liberate himself from this position and show
how arbitrary the names were,5 the first two, at least, remain powerful
categories of thought throughout his work. Asia stands for slavery, Darius
and Xerxes for the attempt to extend it into Europe. Something of these
categories can be felt in the background when Herodotus comes to describe
the treatment of women in Persia and Babylon. For the tendency of these
descriptions, which can to some extent be isolated from their factual content,
for which there is independent evidence, is to represent the highest condition
to which a woman can aspire as inferior to that of a free woman in Greece.
A Persian, according to Herodotus, not content with any number of con-
cubines, could lawfully be married to any number of wives as well." Is
this to be believed? Achaemenid Persia has left no code of laws to match
those of its predecessors; but the practice revealed by cuneiform texts, from
their Sumerian beginnings down to the latest Babylonian period, is wholly
consistent. One woman is distinguished as dam,wife-the Sumerian word is
itself used ideographically by Assyrians, Babylonians and Hittites alike7-
from every other status of women a man could live with, and there is no
reason to think that Persia was an exception.
What Herodotus is saying, therefore, could almost be rephrased as follows:
what the Persians call marriage is in fact concubinage. The same tendency
can be seen in his statement that at least once in a lifetime, every woman in
Babylon-not just a particular class of them, though this is what the
Babylonian texts indicates--has to undergo prostitution in a temple;9 or
4 Hdt. I, 93, 4; cf. below, nn. 6 and 67. 8 The various classes of prostitutes in
5 Hdt. 4, 45. Babylon and Assyria are distinguished in E.
6 Hdt. I, I35. The language is emphatic, Ebeling, Liebeszauber im Alten Orient,Leipzig
U
yOptouol • cxazro otcrOav7on& phEv xoupLOtac 1925, P- 5, and B. Meissner, Babylonienund
yuva'ix, unlike e.g. 5, 5. No particular em- Assyrien,ii, Heidelberg 1925, pp. 68-71, cf.
phasis is given to Thracian polygamy: at 435-6. Hierodules of a certain rank were
5, 5 it is only mentioned to explain a funeral permitted not only to marry but to veil them-
custom, at 5, I6, 2 in connexion with house- selves when they did so, whereas the Assyrian
construction. Laws prescribe heavy penalties for any street
SCf. R. Labat, Manuel d'epigraphie ak- prostitute (harimtu)who veiled herself under
kadienne,3Paris I959, p. 231, no. 557; G. R. any circumstances, Driver and Miles, The
Driver and J. C. Miles, Kt., The Babylonian AssyrianLaws, Oxford 1935, PP. 126-34, 406-
Laws, ii, Oxford 1955, PP. 46b, 57; 340 col. 411 (??40-4I). Thus the tendency of State
iii, I6ff.; J. Friedrich, Die hethitischeGesetze, control was not to lower the status of free
Leiden 1959, p. 140, and for Persia see the women but to raise that of the prostitution
distinction made in Dinon, FGrHist 690F27 which it sanctioned.
Athen. 13, 3, P. 556B. 9 Hdt. I,
I99.
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 5
again, more clearly still, when he says that the Babylonians sell their daughters-
as wives, not concubines; this time the distinction is made explicit-by annual
public auction.10 In this case there is a mass of evidence from Babylon to
prove that they did nothing of the kind; but it can almost be shown from the
text of Herodotus himself. When Cyrus received a message from the Spartans
ordering him not to interfere with any Greek city, he expressed his contempt
for them by saying 'I have never yet been afraid of any men who have a set
place in the middle of their city where they come together to cheat each other
and forswear themselves'; and Herodotus, having put the words into his
mouth, goes on to explain that unlike the Greeks, who buy and sell in market-
places, the Persians do not conduct business in this way and in fact do not
have such things as market-places at all.1 A century of excavations has shown
that this is perfectly true, for Persia and Babylon alike; and the fact has far-
reaching implications for our understanding of their economies, which is still
very far from complete.12 Yet marriage in Babylon, as Herodotus describes it,
does seem to require a market-place. Even so, he cannot bring himself to set
the scene in one; he has the girls rather vaguely 'collected together in one
place' instead.13 On his own showing, the institutions needed to make the
practice feasible were Greek.
Herodotus's account of marriage in Asia, then, shows a consistent tendency
to exaggerate the subjection of women; and the Lydians are no exceptions,
since Strabo, the writer to whom our knowledge of prostitution in this country
is chiefly due, while admitting that the hierodules of Akisilene were by no
means all drawn from the lower classes, and that a girl who had served her
time in this temple was not thought any the less eligible at the end of it-a
state of things which does much to align Lydia with Babylon-explicitly
refuses to go so far as Herodotus and represent every woman in Lydia as a
prostitute.4
It is not the subjection of women, however, that comes to the fore once
Herodotus is off Asiatic ground. The peoples in question all belong to the
more or less remote areas of Libya and Northern Europe; and what he has to
say about them centres-with one exception, which will be considered later-
on two things. Either they have intercoursein public, or they are systematically
promiscuous. Both of these apply to the Massagetai, who also practise
monogamy; it is one another's wives with whom they are promiscuous.'5 The
Nasamones of Libya are polygamous, as well as promiscuous, although they
do not go in for the same kind of publicity and when having intercourse make
the fact known less directly, by leaving a stick outside the woman's house. At
a wedding, the bride is had by all the guests; hence the wedding-presents.'"
10 Hdt. I, I96. by a Hova prince. 'Chez nous, ajouta-t-il, la
11Hdt. I, 153. prostitution est encouragfe, honoree m~me,
12 Cf. K. Polanyi and Conrad Arensberg, et les filles des premieres familles du pays
TradeandMarketin theEarlyEmpires,Glencoe font ce que nous appelons karamou(marchC)
(Illinois) 1957. de leurs charmes, et n'ont aucune honte de
13 ESV Xeptov, Hdt. I, 196, I. vendre leurs faveurs au premier venu', B.-F.
14 Str. I I, 14, 16, p. 532, cf. 12, 3, 36, p. Legu~vel de Lacombe, Voyage & Madagascar
559, and for Corinth 8, 6, 20, p. 378. A very et aux iles Comores,i, Paris I840, p. 145.
similar account was given to a traveller in 15 Hdt. I, 216, cf. I, 203.
Madagascar early in the nineteenth century 1 HIdt. 4, 172.
6 SIMON PEMBROKE
The Agathyrsi, on the other hand, have no formal restrictions whatsoever;
they are simply promiscuous, and this means that, in Herodotus's words, 'they
are all one another's kindred and relatives, and neither envy nor hate one
another'."7 Not like the Ausees of Libya: these do not even co-habit, but
simply have intercourse like cattle. Two months after any child is born, the
men assemble and it is assigned a father on the basis of physical likeness.18
Finally, among their neighbours the Gindanes, the women put a ring round
one ankle for every man they have slept with, and the woman with the most
rings is highest in the general rating.1"
Such, in outline, is Herodotus's conspectus of the sexual behaviour of
foreigners. The details may seem sparse, the distinctions hazy, but they can
by no means all be written off as pure invention. Nothing in the wedding-
ceremony of the Nasamones is essentially different in kind from those at which
the guests all kiss the bride, although in our own society, the kiss neither
requires a precedent, nor creates one. As for the Gindanes, a very similar
custom, which if anything goes a stage further, was reported by Marco Polo
for the Tibetan province of Caimul. In this country, he was informed, no girl
could get married before she had had at least twenty lovers, and collected a
token from each of them.20 In a less rigidly prescriptiveform, the same attitude
was already being encountered in various parts of the world by seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century travellers. Ulloa found the Quito Indians of South
America not merely indifferent to, but positively suspicious of, any girl who
had failed to have liaisons by a certain age; and Des Marchais, who met with a
similar phenomenon in the Kingdom ofJuda, attempted to correlate it with
the premium that its inhabitants placed on knowing that a woman was fertile.21
The degree of emphasis varies, but the state of things described is no more than
an extension of tendencies which at some level exist in all societies, whether
they are formally enacted or not; and the exception is not classical Greece,
but the Atarantes, a people which later in antiquity was represented as
valuing women for the length of time they had preserved their virginity, and
nothing else.22
It might appear, therefore, that the most productive method of dealing
with Herodotus's descriptions is also the simplest and most straightforward
one: to isolate the factual content from the distortion which it has undergone,
concentrating attention on the former and treating the latter as more or less
arbitrary. Despite this, however, there is much to be said for transposing the
priorities, and giving pride of place to the distortion. The distorting factor, it
can be argued, is a constant, whereas in many of these cases it is impossible to
17 Hdt. 4, 104. Leipzig 1859, p. 354; cf. e.g. Lahontan,
18Hdt. 4, I80. Mimoires de l'Amirique septentrionale, The
19Hdt. 4, I76. Hague 1703, p. 132: 'les femmes sont sages
20 Col. H. Yule, Marco Polo, 2, ii, London et leurs maris de m~me: les filles sont folles &
1875, p. 35. les garcons font assez souvent des folies avec
21 G. Juan and A. de Ulloa, Voyage elles. II leur est permis de faire ce qu'elles
historique de l'Amirique miridionale, i, Leipzig- veulent: les PWres, mdres, freres, soeurs, &c.
Amsterdam 1752, p. 343; Labat [J. G.], n'ont rien Aredire sur leur conduite.'
22 Nic. Damasc. FGrHist 9oF Io3(u) =
Voyagedu chevalierdes Marchais en Guinie (1725-
1727), ii, Paris I730, p. 222, quoted in Stob. Flor. 4, 2.
Theodor Waitz, Anthropologieder Naturv'lker, i,
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 7
be certain as to the identity of the peoples involved, or even whether they
really existed; and this means that the distortion is the most concrete datum
that can honestly be elicited from the material. Nicolas of Damascus, writing
in the first century B.c., said that it was the Libyrni, not the Ausees, who used
physical resemblance to determine fatherhood; and the Libyrni lived in the
North of Europe, not the Southern extremities of Libya."23 According to the
same writer, the people who held women in common and called everyone in
the society their kindred and relatives-parents, brothers, sisters and child-
ren-were the Galactophagi, not the Agathyrsi; the title, Milk-Drinkers,
is taken from Homer.24 For Strabo, writing about the same time, it was the
Massagetai, and even the Arabs, not the Nasamones, who left sticks outside
the houses of women they were visiting, though in this case he had simul-
taneously to cope with a variant tradition that the Massagetai had no women
at all.25
Scholars of the last century were inclined to treat this evidence as cumula-
tive. The customs were taken at their face value, or even upgraded. They
were regarded as evidence for stages in the universal evolution of social
institutions; and if ancient testimony attributed the same custom to more than
one people, it was concluded that the custom had genuinely been practised by
two different peoples. But the form taken by these later descriptions, and the
detailed similarities between their language and that of Herodotus, cannot be
accounted for by co-incidence alone.26 In a large number of cases, at least, the
phenomenon is due to a process which can be termed localization; and the
nature of this process is most easily illustrated by an analogy.
In the HistoriaAnimalium,it is said that during the mating-season of horses,
any mares to which stallions are denied access may become impregnated by
the wind instead, and Aristotle mentions the precautions which were taken in
Crete to prevent this happening.27 The statement must be seen in a wider
setting, though it is not possible to make this a complete one. An association
between the wind and male sexuality was not uncommon in ancient Greece,
and might come out at a variety of levels. At Athens, those about to marry
made a sacrifice to a group of divinities called the Thrice Fathers, who were
also identified as the winds. This sacrifice was supposed to bring the couple
children.28 Again, there is a passage in the Mithraic liturgy describing the
vision of a tube which hangs from the disc of the sun, and this tube is 'the
source of the ministering wind'.29 And in common parlance, eggs laid by
hens which had not been impregnated were called wind-eggs.30 The analogy
of the farmyard, however, is not enough to explain the further connexion of
the wind with horses, there being no datum to correspond to the egg; and
something of this connexion might be found at Sparta, where a horse was
23 N1c. Damasc. FGrHist 90FIo3(d), ibid. 27 Arist. HA 572a 13-
24Nic. Damasc. FGrHist 90Fio4(3) = 28 Demon FGrHist 327F2, cf. ibid.
Stob. Flor. 3, I, 200oo. 325F6; J. and L. Robert, REG 68 (I955), p.
25 Str. 7, 3, 4, PP. 296-7 (Massagetai); 16, 195, no. 30.
4, 25, p. 783 (Arabs). 29 A. Dieterich, Fine Mithrasliturgie, Leipzig
26 Cf. M. Rostowzew, Skythien und der 1903, p. 6, 9f.
Bosporus, i, Berlin 1931, pp. 4-12 and 30 P1. Theaet. 151e; Arist. HA 559b2o;
where one area is fully documented. 76-I04, Soph. fr. 436 TGF2 Nauck.
8 SIMON PEMBROKE
sacrificed to the winds on Mount Taygetus,31 or even in the Homeric poems:
Xanthos and Balios, the divine horses of Achilles, were the offspring of the
West Wind.32
The background of Aristotle's statement, therefore, is at least partly
obscure. In later writers, however, the phenomenon becomes not a universal
fact of nature, but a purely local oddity. From Aristotle's hint that the
trouble was particularly common in Crete, we come to Varro, Columella,
Pliny and Solinus, all describing it as something which happened regularly,
but only in Lisbon-until finally, Augustine moved it back again, beyond the
Cretan end of the Mediterranean, and placed it in Cappadocia.33
Biology and ethnology are not altogether distinct fields in the tradition of
antiquity. One writer says that the Southernmost inhabitants of the world
were animals of a species outwardly indistinguishable from mankind; else-
where, and with apparent seriousness, a corresponding incursion is made by
the description of a people called the Gorillas.34 And the first conclusion to
be drawn from the horse-wind syndrome is equally applicable to both fields.
The phenomenon reported by these various writers is not biologically possible,
but the reports themselves constitute a phenomenon of a different kind, and
this belongs to the study of popular tradition. There are excellent reasons for
attempting to analyse the phenomenon, and plotting its successive localiza-
tions on the map, and it may even be that these conform to a recognizable
pattern, but the pattern cannot be a biological one. Anthropology, in this
instance, is necessarily less certain of its facts than biology, and the anthropo-
logist cannot assert with the same confidence that there is no genuine know-
ledge of foreign societies behind his material. But the knowledge actually
possessed by antiquity is seldom directly accessible through the literary
tradition. No one confronted with a series of fragmentary, and in some cases
much-travelled, descriptions of isolated customs, can begin to reconstruct the
various types of society compatible with each custom, without giving constant
attention to the place of each description in the literary tradition which has
preserved it. The biological equivalent of this evidence is not a fossil, but the
description of a fossil; and from the very beginning of the tradition, descrip-
tions of this kind are likely to owe as much to preconceptions about the nature
of animals as they do to the nature of the object in question. As the tradition
developed, inaccuracy, and even plain invention, were facilitated by the fact
that there was never any need to produce material evidence, as there was with
the Piltdown skull. People of the type standardized by earlier writers could
simply be planted on the map, and reports of fresh anomalies assimilated to
the existent categories. The final description is often the same, in both cases,
which makes it impossible, without independent evidence, to say which route
the description has taken. The problems in an assessmentof ancient ethnology,
therefore, are at least as substantial as any which could arise from fossil-
hunters seeing purely inanimate configurations as living matter.
31Festus s.v. October equus, cf. for NH 8, 166; Solin. 23, 43; Aug. CD 21, 5.
Tarentum Hesych., s.v. &VEE
ATO,i. 169 no. 34 Agatharchides in Diod. 3, 31, 4 (GGM
4886 Latte. i, p. 152, ?60 Miller); Hanno ?18, GGM i,
32 I1. 16, 149ff. PP. 13-14.
33Varro RR 2, I; Colum. 6, 27; Plin.
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 9
That localizations of the same kind were made by ancient ethnologists is
not open to dispute. The practice of lamenting the birth of a child, and
celebrating deceases with a general merriment, which Herodotus records for
the Trausi, is later attributed to the Kausiani, to the Krobyzi, and even to one
city whose inhabitants were Greek.35 Even when the field is narrowed to
sexual behaviour, the accounts given by Herodotus, and the categories which
he employed, are found to have set a pattern to which nearly all the ethno-
logical writings of later antiquity conformed, and the conformity is close
enough for such rare innovations as do appear, like incest, to stand out by
contrast.36 The combined evidence of these writings, which constitutes a
considerable bulk, was given a great deal of weight in the nineteenth century,
and anthropologists of this period laid particular emphasis on certain features
which could not be directly corroborated by accounts of contemporary
societies and which provided a unique authority for current reconstructions
of that state of nature with which the Garden of Eden had to be replaced. A
careful assessment, therefore, of the distance which lay between Herodotus and
the societies he described, is important for understanding the ethnology of the
last century as well as that of antiquity; and for this reason the remaining
passages must be examined in greater detail.
One custom which may draw immediate attention from anthropologists
is that of the Agathyrsi, all of whom are related to one another. It could
fairly be suggested that this description is based on the classificatory system of
kinship which, just over a hundred years ago, was found by Lewis H. Morgan
to prevail in a very large number of societies in different parts of the world,
and in which terms such as mother, father, brother, sister, son and daughter
are applied to categories of persons who are not physically related in this way.
Today it is generally accepted that these terms denote social relationships, not
physical ones, and that they are more or less metaphorical in form; Morgan,
however, believed that the terms had survived from an era when human
societies were systematically promiscuous-a state of things for which there
is no direct evidence and which is today generally regarded as an impossibility
for any society which is governed by human speech. It is quite possible,
therefore, that contact with a genuine classificatory system does lie some-
where behind Herodotus; but that his explanation of the phenomenon should
anticipate that of Morgan is no coincidence, since the latter was quite certainly
influenced, directly and perhaps crucially, by this description of the
Agathyrsi.37 And there is no reason to think that Herodotus knew the
Agathyrsi as well as Morgan did the Iroquois.
35 Hdt. 5, 4; see the references in Jacoby where the evidence is restricted to the ruling
on FGrHist 90FI 17 [Dummler, K1. Schr. i, family, cf. W. Judeich, Kleinasiatische Studien,
212, 1], and add Herakleid. Pol. 20, FHG ii, Marburg I892, PP. 248-55. The case of
p. 221, ?20o = Arist. fr. 6 I, 60 Rose (Locri). Persia, where a persistent tradition repre-
36 So first Eur. Andr. 1 7off., cf. below, n. sents sons as marrying their mothers, is a
6i. Brother-sister marriage in Egypt, which more complex one and will be studied else-
was not confined to a governing class, is where.
well-attested, but only in documents from the 37J. H. McIlvaine, to whom Morgan
Roman period, H. Thierfelder, Die Ge- dedicated his magnum opus and whom he
schwisterehe im hellenistisch-riimischenAgypten, acknowledges as having provided the clue on
Miinster 1960, pp. 90-96, and for Caria, which his own theory was based (Systems, p.
io SIMON PEMBROKE
Later in antiquity, systems of the same kind are encountered in a different
role. They have become not survivals from an older order of things, but blue-
prints for a new one. Thus in the ideal Republic of Plato, all the members of
a generation are brothers and sisters to one another, children to all members
of the previous generation, and parents to all those of the succeeding one;
and although Aristotle was scornful of the dilution of human affection which
this scheme would involve, it was taken up again by the Stoics.38 This is not
to say, however, that the system had in the meantime disappeared from
ethnological reports. Nicolas of Damascus is found attributing the same type
of organization to the Thracian Galactophagi, centuries after Herodotus; he
is explicit that the terms in question are used to denote relationships between
members of age-groups, and adds the further information that the Galacto-
phagi lived in a state of complete communism, holding not only women but
all other property in common.39 Whatever the immediate data of Herodotus,
therefore, the promiscuity with which they have been overlaid in the tradition
has transferredthem to the Golden Age; and this Age, to which the end pro-
duct has belonged ever since, is not one from which historical facts can be
elicited.
The Agathyrsi were assured of posterity, but the situation of the Ausees
was a more precariousone. The assignation of children on the basis of physical
resemblance is also reported in Arabic tradition, and the story in question has
never, to my knowledge, been systematically aligned with the Herodotean one.
Al-Bukhiri described four types of marriage which had existed in the Time of
Uncertainty, before the coming of Mohammed, and which the Prophet
hastened to abolish. One of these involved a number of men consorting with a
single woman, apparently a prostitute, who had a flag over her door indicating
that she would turn no one down. When the woman became pregnant, and a
child was born, the men were all summoned, and an official physiognomist
was called in to decide which of them most resembled the child. The man in
question was formally declared the father, and had no choice but to acknow-
ledge the child.40
In Islamic times, physiognomists were called in only in highly exceptional
circumstances, where the paternity of a child was being actively disputed; and
these arose when the mother was a slave, and had been sold by one man to
another recently enough for the former to be able to contest the paternity of
the latter.41 Other sources say that before Mohammed, it was possible for a
479, n. I), wrote him a letter in I864, part of Zeno and Chrysippus in D. Laert. 7, 131 =
which is printed in Carl Resek, Lewis Henry SVF iii. 183 no. 728 Arnim.
Morgan, AmericanScholar, Chicago 960, p. 94, 39 Nic. Damasc. FGrHist 90FIo4 = Stob.
drawing his attention to passages from classi- Flor. 3, I, 200oo.
cal authors in which promiscuous societies 40 O. Houdas (tr.), El-Bokhdrf, iii, p. 565 =
are mentioned. Prof. Leslie A. White (letter ed. Krehl, ii, p. 427; known to me from G. A.
of 3.vii.65) kindly informs me that the Wilken, Das Matriarchatbei den altenArabern,
omitted paragraph runs as follows: 'With Leipzig I884, pp. 25ff.
respect to the Agathyrsi Herodotus says, 41E. Sachau, 'Muhammedanisches Recht
"They have their wives in common, so that nach Schafiischer Lehre', Lehrbiicherdes
they may be all brothers (kasignetoi) and Seminarsfir OrientalischeSprachenzu Berlin
being all akin, may be free from envy & XVIII (1897), pp. 89-90; Th. Juynboll,
mutual enmities." ' Handbuch des Islamischen Gesetzes nach der
38 P1. Rep. 461B; Arist. Pol. I261 b24ff.; LehrederSchdfi'itischen Schule,Leipzig I910o, p.
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY II
As long as he abides there he leaves his hat or some other token hanging
at the door, to let the master of the house know that he is still there. As
long as the wretched fellow sees that token, he must not go in.45
Hospitality of this kind is well attested in many parts of the world, and Sir
Henry Yule was able to quote one very striking parallel in his edition of
Marco Polo almost a century ago. Earlier in the century, a traveller visiting
the Hazaras of Abyssinia was told that there were parts of the country in which
husbands would lend their wives to the embraces of their guests, and that 'if a
188, n. I, quoted in D. B. MacDonald, art. prostitution is noted in Montesquieu, De
'Kiyafa', Encyclopedia of Islam, ii (1927), p. L'Esprit des Lois, Book XVI, ch. 4, where the
I048. reference is probably to Anciennes relations des
42 H. A. Schultens, Meidanii Proverbiorum Indes et de la Chine de deux VoyageursMahome'-
Arabicorum Pars, Leiden 1795, p. 50. Al- tans, qui y allerent dans le neuvidmesikcle [ed.
ShahrastinI's Religious andPhilosophicalSchools Eusbe Renaudot], Paris 1718, pp. 56-58.
(p. 442 Cureton -= Th. Haarbrucker (tr.), ii, I am indebted to Dr. R. Walzer for this
Halle 1851, p. 351) has a lacuna at this identification (Abu Zaid al-Hasan as-Sirafi).
point. Acknowledgment is due to Dr. 44 So already Christoph Meiners, Unter-
A. I. Sabra for his assistance with this suchungen ueber die Verschiedenheitender Men-
passage. schennaturen,ii, Ttibingen 1813, p. 26, n. 1.
43 Another case of polyandry being mis- 45 H. Yule (ed.), Ser Marco Polo, ii, p.
taken by a Mohammedan observer for 45-
12 SIMON PEMBROKE
husband of that part of the country finds a pair of slippers at his wife's door,
he immediately withdraws'."4
Guests are not regular members of the societies they are visiting; and in this
sense the analogy is not wholly satisfactory, since Herodotus, rightly or
wrongly, represents the promiscuity of the Nasamones as a purely internal
affair. It may therefore be worth citing two cases in which a similar use of
tokens is confined to members of the same society as the women in question.
There are, however, important further qualifications in each case, although
the first one, an explorer's description of the Ladrone Islands, which is again
taken from Yule, was written over four hundred years ago.
In these ilands there is one the strangest costume that euer hath bin
heard of or seene in all the whole world, which is, that vnto the young men
there is a time limited for them to marrie in (according vnto their costume),
in all which time they may freely enter into the houses of such as are
married, and be there with their wiues, without being punished for the
same, although their proper husbands should see them: they doo carrie in
their handes a staffe or rodde, and when they do enter into the married
mans house they do leaue it standing at the doore, in such sort, that if any
do come after they may plainly see it: which is a token that, although it be
her proper husband, he cannot enter in till it be taken away. The which
costume is obserued and kept with so great rigour and force, that whoso-
euer is against this law, all the rest do kill him.47
As can be seen, there are two significant restrictions in this account. In the
first place, access to other men's wives is confined to a particular age-group.
However, there is no sign of any further restriction within this age-group, and
more emphasis may be placed on the fact that the whole business applies only
to a specific period of time. It cannot fairly be made to represent the everyday
workings of this society, any more than the Saturnalia can be made to repre-
sent those of ancient Rome; and if this period was associated with marriage,
it may well have come round with less than annual frequency. There is a
distinct possibility, therefore, that Herodotus has generalized the behaviour
sanctioned at a particular festival into something normal and secular-a
possibility further reinforced by his own reference to wedding-ceremonies;
and a description of ancient Greece founded on similar evidence would have
been at least equally surprising to his readers. This being so, it is as well to
examine the workings of one society of which a more detailed description has
survived from antiquity and in which rights of the same kind were recognized
all the year round.
The people in question were the inhabitants of Arabia Felix; and the one
account of this society which we possess, which was written by the geographer
Strabo, in the first century B.c., claims to be based on information which had
only become accessible to the West in his own lifetime. 'Brothers are held in
more honour than children,' it begins; and the most coherent part of the
46 Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, An 47 Gonzalez de Mendoza, The History of the
Accountof the Kingdomof Caubuland its Depen- GreatandMightyKingdomof China,ii, London:
dencies,3ii, London I839, p. 209 (Yule, op. Hakluyt Society, I853-54, PP. 253-4 (Yule,
cit., p. 48, n. 3). loc. cit.).
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 13
description which follows does appear to have as its subject a formally re-
gulated system of adelphic polyandry. 'All kinsmen hold property in common,
but control is held by the eldest. One wife is shared by all, and when one man
goes in to have intercourse with her, he leaves a stick outside her door (all of
them have to carry sticks). At night-time, however, she sleeps with the eldest
of them. Consequently, everyone is the brother of everyone else... Adultery
is punished by death, though to be an adulterer, a man must belong to
another family.'48
There is only one other attempt in classical sources to describe the work-
ings of a polyandrous society, and this is Julius Caesar's description of the
ancient Britons. Here too, the men involved are related to one another; and
the control retained by the eldest takes a more specific form. 'Wives are
shared between groups of ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and
between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as the
children of the man to whom the girl was first betrothed.'49 On this analogy,
it seems probable that Strabo has misinterpreted cause and effect in calling
everyone the brother of everyone else, as though the relationship were a
purely metaphorical one; but there are two further difficulties. First, it is
stated that the Arabs have intercourse with their mothers. Here the explana-
tion may be that in some cases not only brothers but also (like the Britons of
Caesar) fathers and their sons, could have access to the same woman, and
that Strabo has failed to distinguish between mothers and other wives of a
father.50 But the additional information that women were, literally or other-
wise, the sisters of their husbands, appears to be no more than a mistake; and
the simplest explanation would be that at some stage, a situation in which
women have husbands who are brothers has been transformedinto one where
the women 'have' brothers as husbands.
It could fairly be objected, however, that this is special pleading. Strabo
claims to be reporting from somewhere very near the horse's mouth, yet the
contradictions which have found their way into his account could equally
well be due to literary tradition, and specifically, to the categories in terms of
which so many other societies had been described. Brother-sister marriage
was one such category, intercourse between mother and son another; and
metaphorical brotherhood is known to go all the way back to Herodotus.
Furthermore, Strabo's description of this society concludes with an anecdote,
which is directly relevant to Herodotus; and although it is impossible to
prove that the story is not an Arabian one, its sophistication is perhaps
48 Str. 16, 4, 25, p. 783. both in the Old Testament and the Koran.
49 Caesar BG 5, 14, 4-5. H. Zimmer, ZSS The Hittite Lawcode, to take another
xv (R6m. Abt.), I894, p. 224, argued that example, explicitly permitted brothers to
this description applies only to the interiores have intercourse with a single free woman
mentioned in ?2 and separated from the (fathers and sons could do the same with a
present passage only by the tattooing of prostitute), provided that none of them was
omnesBritanni described in ?3. married to her; but intercourse between a
50 W. Robertson Smith, 'Animal Worship man and his brother's wife, in the lifetime of
and Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in her husband, constituted an offence,
the Old Testament', Journal of Philology, ix, Friedrich, Die hethitische Gesetze, pp. 84-85,
I88o, pp. 75-I00oo, suggested a connexion with ??80-8I*(a), lines 45-50.
the inheritance of father's widows attested
14 SIMON PEMBROKE
sufficient to suggest that the distance between this society and the description
which has reached us is greater than Strabo admits.
One exceptionally attractive woman, according to this story, who had
fifteen husbands, found that she was in almost incessant demand. So she had
the idea of acquiring a set of sticks on her own account. Each of these closely
resembled one of those carried by her various husbands, and with good timing
she was able to postpone their respective visits by leaving the appropriate stick
outside her own door. In the end, however, one of her husbands was led to
suspect her of adultery, because he found a stick at the door one day when he
had just left all his brothers together in the market-place; and in this way, the
trick was discovered.
There is very little outside Strabo which can today be said to confirm his
picture of Arab society.51 The only criterion by which it can be judged is that
of its inner coherence; and if the incestuous element is passed over, this
coherence certainly gains a great deal from the distinction made between the
eldest husband and all the others. The same distinction is made by Caesar;
and although there is again no independent evidence from ancient Britain
which can corroborate this description,52a fair number of societies have been
recorded in the present century to which a similar distinction applies.53
Furthermore both descriptions imply a patrilineal system, with property
51 The Minaean inscriptions referred to in Breathnach, Dublin 1848, Addit. Notes, pp.
W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in lv-lviii;J. F. McLennan, Primitive Marriage,
Early Arabia,2 London 1903, p. 316, Addi- Edinburgh 1865, pp. 126-30). One striking
tional Note G, where an individual is fact which has been used to support this
designated as the 'son' (kinsman) of more theory is that in the Pictish King-List, almost
than one man, cannot legitimately be inter- no father is succeeded by his son, but this can
preted in this way, cf. M. Hartmann, Der be explained in other ways. James Hogan,
Islamische Orient, ii: Die arabische Frage, 'The Irish Law of Kingship', Proceedings of
Leipzig 1909, PP. 197-202: N. Rhodokanakis, the Royal Irish Academy, xl, 1931-32, Section
'Katabanische Texte zur Bodenwirtschaft', C, p. 254, pointed out that the elaborate
SBAW (phil.-hist. K1.), 194, ii. Abh., 1919, system of agnatic rotation which prevailed
p. 66, n. 4; further references in Repertoire in Ireland at this time would have a similar
d'tpigraphie Semitique, v, Paris 1928, no. 2999. effect; and more recently, Marjorie Ogilvie
52 Total promiscuity is attributed to the Anderson, 'The Lists of the Kings', Scottish
Caledonians in classical sources from the time Historical Review, 28 (1949), pp. 108-19 and
of Dio Cassius (70, 6, 12 and 76, 16) onwards; 29 (I1950), pp. 13-22, has produced evidence
but little more can be made of this than the that the patronymics in these lists were not
reports tentatively recorded by Strabo that genuine but simply supplied by the copyists
the Irish had intercourse in public with their from elsewhere in the list, pp. IIO-I and p.
mothers and sisters, 14, 4, p. 201. The Irish 19. The nature of the phenomenon to which
legend that the Picts originally came from Bede attached his story is not clear, but later
Scythia and on crossing to Scotland were sources use the same story to explain different
given 300 women, having brought none of customs; thus according to the Scala Chronica
their own (so first Bede, hist. eccl. gent. Angl. (W. F. Skene, Chroniclesof the Picts and Scots,
I, I, where it is said to explain a contem- Edinburgh 1867, p. 199), the Picts received
porary custom: 'ea solum condicione dare their women from the Irish, 'sure condicioun
consenserunt (sc. Scotti), ut ubi res per- qe lour issu parlascent Irrays, qel patois
veniret in dubium, magis de feminea regum demeurt a iour de huy', and the story is
prosapia quam de masculina regem sibi attached not to inheritance but to language.
eligerent: quod usque hodie constat esse It is hoped to make a fuller study of this
seruatum'), has for over a century been tradition elsewhere.
taken to indicate matriliny, which is not 56 Cf. E. R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology,
reported by Caesar (J. H. Todd, Leabhar London 1961, pp.
I05ff,
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 15
transmitted through males only; and this too makes perfectly good sense,
which is more than can be said for the Bukhari tradition, since here the
acquisition of an heir, and hence the transmission of property, is represented
as depending entirely on chance.
Despite this, however, it is not easy to draw firm conclusions from Strabo's
description and apply them to the Nasamones of Herodotus. It might perhaps
be said that stick-carrying, like physical likeness in al-Bukhari, refers most
naturally to a situation in which a number of men have access to one particular
woman; and the anecdote lends some support to this view. It is not easy to
imagine a simpler version of Strabo's story which could apply to bilateral
promiscuity, since adultery would be impossible in a society of this kind.
Against this, however, must be set the custom recorded by Marco Polo, since
here it is a number of women who are accessible to one particular man, and it
is the former, not the latter, whose identity is communicated by the stick.
Above all, even if the patrilineal bias manifested by the Arabs does give a
certain verisimilitude to Strabo's description, it is certainly not true that there
is any further coherence between patrilineal inheritance and the carrying of
sticks. An almost identical custom has been reported, again and again, over
a period of several centuries, among the Nayar of Southern India; and this
society is a matrilineal one in which children are regularly recruited to the
lineages of their mothers. A woman may have a number of recognized
lovers, as well as one ritual husband, but none of these has any rights over her
children, and the notion of fatherhood is entirely lacking.54
From the fifteenth century onwards, European travellers have recorded
the fact that the Nayar left their swords and shields outside the houses of the
women they were visiting; and until a comparatively recent date, the accounts
given by these travellers have almost always drawn this picture in far greater
detail than any other aspect of the society. Nicolo di Conti described Nayar
women as taking any number of husbands they liked; the men left their
shields outside the woman's door, and their own property was inherited by
their nephews.55 The Portuguese Joho di Barros went further than this only
to specify (wrongly) that the nephews in question were the children of a
brother.5s Cesare dei Federici, in the sixteenth century, described the
principles of succession in the Royal family, but claimed that the remaining
Nayars held women in common;57 and much the same goes for the account
given by the Dutchman Philip Baldaeus, almost a century later, since here
there are several pages between his description of regal succession and what he
has to say about the Nayar as a whole. The second of these passages is here
quoted in full.
If they meet any of the common people in the streets, they cry out, Po,
Po, i.e. Give way, Give way. They seldom appear without their scymetars
and shields, which they leave at the door when (by a peculiar privilege)
54 See now E. Kathleen Gough in (ed. with 56 L'Asia del S. Giovannidi Barros, nuoua-
D. M. Schneider) Matrilineal Kinship, Berkeley mentedi lingua Portoghesetradotta,Venice 1562,
1961, pp. 298-404. fol. I76.
55G. B. Ramusio, 'Viaggio di Nicolo 57 Cesare dei Federici, Viaggio nell'India et
Conti venetiano alle Indie', Navigationi et oltre l'India, Venice 1587, p. 57.
Viaggi, i," Venice 1553, fol. 378a.
16 SIMON PEMBROKE
they go to give a private visit to one of their neighbours wives, as a sign
that no body must enter there in the mean while to disturb them.58
It could hardly be inferred from such passages that a Nayar could be put to
death for consorting with the wrong class of woman.59
At this point it may be thought that the proportion of commentary to
the texts from Herodotus has become excessive, but two things may be
regarded as established. The first is that it would be difficult, if not impossible,
to prove that the societies which lie behind Herodotus's descriptions were not
matrilineal; and the significance of this fact will later be heightened by the
case of another society which was described by the same author and whose
interest lies precisely in the fact that he did not record its marriage customs.
The second is that whatever the true nature of these various Libyan and
Thracian societies, they have all, in Herodotus, been assimilated to a state of
complete promiscuity, and although this state can manifest itself in a number
of different forms, it is not essentially restricted by any of its manifestations.
Promiscuity, unlike matriarchy, is symmetrical; and whatever meaning is
attached to the second of these terms-its Greek equivalent will be discussed
presently-the rings worn by the Gindanes are no exception to the rule. The
approval meted out to these girls comes from the men every bit as much as
from the women; and the society is not ultimately directed by an oligarchy of
prostitutes.
The tendency which has converted these various customs into manifesta-
tions of promiscuity may be described as an additive one. In attempting to
make sense of his data, Herodotus has set them in a wider context, and the
context is in each case attributed wholly to the society in question. In this
sense, therefore, the tendency can be contrasted with one which was at least
equally important in ancient ethnology and whose effect was the subtractive
one of isolating foreign customs from their societies, instead of inventing a
social context for them. This process may be termed reversal, and it is again
Herodotus who provides the model, with the introduction to his description
of the 'marvels' of Egypt.
The people, in most of their manners and customs, exactly reverse the
common practice of mankind. The women attend the markets and do
business, while the men sit at home at the loom. The men carry loads on
their heads, while the women carry them on their shoulders. The women
pass water standing up, the men sitting down. They relieve themselves
indoors, but take their meals in the streets. Sons need not support their
parents unless they choose to, but daughters must support them whether
they choose to or not... Dough they knead with their feet; but they mix
mud, and even take up dirt, with their hands... When they write or
calculate, instead of going, like the Greeks, from left to right, they move
58 Philip Baldaeus, 'A Description of the 59 Voyagede Pyrard de Laval,4, Paris
most celebrated East-India Coasts of Malabar I679, P. 274 =Francois
tr. Albert Gray and H. C. P.
and Coromandel', translated in Churchill's Bell, Hakluyt Society, London I887, i, p.
Collection of Voyages and Travels, iii, London 283; F. Buchanan in James Forbes, Oriental
1732, PP. 501-96, at p. 579, cf. pp. 561-2. Memoirs, i, London 1813, P. 385.
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 17
their hand from right to left; and they insist, despite this, that it is they
who go to the right, and the Greeks who go to the left.60
T'hereis no sign, in this passage, of a specific purpose to which, in the time of
Herodotus, oppositions of this kind were already being put-a systematic
moral relativism, which drew up lists of divergent customs as a sort of
dialectic, designed to produce nothing. The marvels of Egypt have no sake
but their own; and the story about Egyptian men sitting at the loom while the
women went out reappears in what is, on any view, one of the most serious
of the plays of Sophocles.61 Even Xenophon, who can seldom be convicted
of any ulterior motive, unless it is one directly connected with himself, can
ad lib. in the same way when describing foreign customs. Thus after reporting
that the Mossynoeci have sexual intercourse in public, he moves on, without
warning, to a more general proposition: they do in public the things which
other people only do when alone, whereas when one of the Mossynoeci is
alone, he does things which elsewhere are only possible in company, like
laughing and dancing.62 More important, there are signs in Herodotus him-
self of the same tendency in a less fully elaborated form. When he says that the
Persians make their important decisions when drunk and then reconsider them
in a state of sobriety, he is doing little more than exaggerate in making the
drunken preliminary an institution. But he cannot resist adding, 'sometimes
they are sober at their first deliberation, but in this case they always reconsider
the matter under the influence of drink'.63 It is symmetry, not relativism, at
which the addition is aimed.
About the end of the fifth century, however, there appeared a pamphlet
known as The Two Arguments (Dissoi Logoi), of which the sole purpose was
relativism. Its author, like the dialect in which he wrote, has not been
identified; and all further interest could be discouraged with a single quota-
tion. 'Disease is bad for the sick, good for the doctors.'64 One section,
however, deals with the customs of cities and nations; and although a lot of
these customs are derived from Herodotus, there are significant additions,
particularly for Persia, where men are said to wear women's clothes and to
have intercourse with their mothers, sisters and daughters.65 And one
passage has an outstanding importance.
The Macedonians think it fine for girls to have lovers and sleep with them
before they are married, but a disgrace after marriage; the Greeks think
both disgraceful. In Thrace, tattooing is an adornment for women;
everywhere else, it is a punishment for wrongdoing.66
60 Hdt. 2, 35. 4IBC Migne), anticipates Lewis H. Morgan
61 Soph. O.C. 337-41. with a remarkable evolutionary schema
62 in which the circumcision of Abraham is
Xen. Anab. 5, 4, 34.
63 Hdt. I,
I33, cf. I, I40, 2. made to symbolize the rejection of incest, and
64 Text in Diels-Kranz,5 no. 9o, ii, pp. is then followed by a period of polygamy
405ff. which lasts until the enforcement of mono-
65 D-K. The standard later gamy by the Prophets, but I have been
ii, 15 p. 408
treatment of incest is that of Sext. Emp. unable to find this a predecessor in classical
pyrrh. 3, 205, cf. e.g. Bardesanes in Euseb. sources.
PE 6, Io, 6. Methodius of Patara, Convivium 66 Dissoi Logoi ii, I2.
decemvirginum,?3 (Patrologia Graeca XVIII,
18 SIMON PEMBROKE
II
The question can be answered without any premature verdicts as to the
factual content of Herodotus's description. And the first point to be noted is
that Herodotus describes not one custom, but two. 'Ask a Lycian who he is'
does not, taken on its own, refer to anything more significant than behaviour
in the street; and it is the mother's mother that links the two customs.
Patronymics, in ancient Greece, had a function comparable to that of sur-
names, though they clearly lacked the impersonal and generic quality which
makes it so hard to ask any further questions about a surname. Even so, the
questioner, not content with his victim's patronymic, would be more likely
to ask where he came from than what his father's father was called, since
except in the case of younger sons, this would most often be the same name as
that of the victim;"68 and 'X, son of Y, from Such-and-such a place' is a
common formula in official documents. But the second Lycian custom, the
filiation of children whose parents are of different status, or to be more precise
the status of these children, seems to indicate a familiarity, however indirect,
with the workings of the society as a whole. It cannot be treated as an
isolated oddity, and here the answer is more complex.
67 Hdt. 5, 6.
68 Is. 2, 36; 2, 41; P1. Lach. I79a; Dem. 39, 27; [Dem.] 43, 74.
THE ANCIENT IDEA OF MATRIARCHY 19
Greek practice, in this respect, was not standardized. In the Lawcode of
Gortyn, in Crete-roughly contemporary with Herodotus, though neither he
nor any other ancient author shows much knowledge of the society which it
reflects-there occurs a passage which is at first sight remarkably close to his
version of Lycia,69 and which is worth quoting here because it shows how
much more complex the real criteria were.
[if the slave]
goes to the free woman and marries her,
the children are to be free, but if
the free woman goes to the slave, the
children are to be slaves.7o
Here it was possible for the children of a free woman and a slave father to
count as free, but an additional factor was involved, locality, and this covers a
wide range of possibilities. It is not enough to describe the first marriage as
matrilocal and the second as patrilocal, since anything might be involved
from the thoroughgoing residence-unlikely in the case of the father, whose
status is apparently unchanged-to mere access at night."71For the children
it was presumably crucial where, and hence how, they were brought up.
Crete was exceptional-the Lawcode makes lengthy provisions for
marriage between slaves, using exactly the same term as for marriage between
free persons-but it was not Never-never Land. Furthermore where status
and political rights were involved, the situation might vary not only from
place to place but from day to day, as Aristotle observed; and the decisive
factors were political. There were some democracies, he said, in which a man
could have citizenship if his mother had it-that is to say, without reference
to the status of his father; and in many cities the same went for a man's
illegitimate sons. It all depended on the size of the population: such persons
might be tolerated on the citizen lists as long as the numbers were low, but as
these rose, qualifications would become correspondingly restrictive. The
first to be struck off would be the children of a slave father or a slave mother
(Aristotle does not break the sequence down further than this); they would be
followed by those whose fathers were not citizens, until finally citizenship
was restricted to those who had citizen descent on both sides.72
All the same, if Aristotle's series is accepted-and it does not involve any
dogma as to the general course of human evolution-we are left with maternal
descent as one extreme and descent through the father as something pretty
close to the other. Herodotus's description of Lycia, therefore, represents the
69So first E. Szanto, 'Zum lykischen s.v. LvE'•Lv,i. 322 no. 466 Latte) and mis-
Mutterrecht', Festschrift O. Benndorf, Vienna interpreted by Plutarch as a kind of droit du
1898, pp. 259-60. seigneur (Sol. 20, 2).
70 M. Guarducci (ed.), InscriptionesCreticae, 71 Cf. Audrey Richards in A. R. Radcliffe-
iv, Rome 1950, no. 72, col. vi, 56ff. The Brown and Daryll Forde (ed.), African
verb for 'marry', 6muLv,is standard for all Systems of Kinship and Marriage, Oxford 1950,
classes of persons in the Code (cf. col. iii, pp. 208-9.
4off. and vii, I5ff.), although later it ceased 72 Arist. Pol. I278b26ff.; for illegitimate
being anything like a legal term, LSJ, s.v. sons cf. Ar. Av. I660ff., [Dem.] 43, 51, Dem.
But it does appear to have been used in a 57, 53, Athen. vi. 234E and outside Athens
similar sense in the laws of Solon (Hesych., Ditt. Syll.3 I2I3 (Boeotia), SGDI 3624 (Cos).
20 SIMON PEMBROKE