Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece

Chapter Eight. CONCLUSIONS

Conclusions One hopes that Musti’s claim of “artificiality” in late hellenistic kinship diplomacy is now disproved. In that claim, he asserted that Greeks before c. 240 somehow viewed political myth as usable only if it expressed a historical reality andthatafterwardskinshipmythconsistedoffabricationsemployedfordiplomatic purposes despite being obviously baseless.Christopher Jones has already recognized that the “concept of artificiality is not really helpful,” because it comes into play not as a means of deception but as a necessary mechanism for constructing familial ties.1 This sort of fabrication is different from the learned allusions and affectations on display in the literary works of writers in Alexandria and elsewhere. In their pages, myth had become an artifact and subject to scholarlyanalysis, a phenomenon that has traditionallycome to mind when we think of mythopoeic artifice in the hellenistic age and is more akin to what Musti described. Nevertheless, myth continued to be a living expression of cultural meaning in the public consciousness of hellenistic communities, a continuation of a mindset identifiable as much in Solon’s day as later. Moreover, most Greeks did not view accounts that appear fabricated to us as really fabricated. On those occasions when they were aware of variants or exposed to new traditions , by and large these stories entered the collective memory of the Greeks and gained the authority to become precedents for political action, though in some cases immediate fabrications might have taken time to solidify as venerable traditions hallowed even by writers. This study has shown that most Greeks could accept interstate kinship even when local foundation narratives could not be reconciled smoothly or when accounts suddenly emerged to explain the link. By “most” Greeks, of course, I mean ordinary Greeks, for instance, the members of democratic assemblies , with varying degrees of education.Obviously, prominent personages like King Archelaus of Macedon and Jonathan the High Priest were capable of eiGht 155 concLUsions bald-faced fabrications and had no illusions about theiragendas. Likewise, the choices of the Attalids seem more deliberate, more self-conscious than those of communities that used myth over long periods of time, wherebyculture and history generally gave shape to these local accounts in a less calculated fashion. Some potentates and statesmen perhaps understood the aetiological function of myth, its ability to account for the origin and nature of cultural, religious, social, and political institutions in a community; they therefore shared some degree of clinical incredulity with the most intellectual of Greeks. The point is that this vital function of myth, on which its authority was based, turned no corner in the mid third century but continued as it had for centuries, even in the changed political circumstances of the late hellenistic era. More analytical thinkers, notably writers of Pausanias’ and Ephorus’ ilk, on the other hand, often applied criteria of analysis based on concepts of authenticity as they understood it. To be clear, the distinction I am making does not involve usages of myth themselves. The intellectual writers made use of myth to explain things as well. Hecataeus, for instance, may well have invented the figure of Perses to account for the origin of the Persians. This eponymous ancestor was a device to help make sense of the world, about which Hecataeus wrote in a systematic way in his geography. However, his attempt to bring about such order was in linewith his rationalizing approach to myth, whereby he sorted out different versions and evaluated aristocratic claims of divine origin that did not, to his way of thinking, hold water. Such a rationalizing approach is the main division between these thinkers and the majorityof Greeks, even given the vast range of incredulity that informed the former’s attitudes about the heroes. The intellectuals were often on the hunt for a “canonical” version of a story; most other Greeks were less aware of this concept, if at all. Let us now consider these matters in more detail by briefly recalling the three questions I posed in Chapter One. (1) How was the myth in question relevant to the participants in the diplomacy? (2) To what extent did the participants actually invoke the supposed mythical links between the two parties engaging in the diplomatic venture? (3) Did the participants and anyone else interested in the treaty, alliance, or conquest actually believe in the reality of the ancestral hero or race? The first question can be restated in terms of choices, whether a choice to bring to mind the outstanding qualities of a certain hero like Heracles, to give...