Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece

Chapter Three. KINSHIP MYTH IN THE LITERARY SOURCES: Alliances and Assistance

Kinship Myth in the Literary Sources Alliances and Assistance The dialogue between historians of the ancient world and authors in the ancient world has always been precious, more so than applies to those who study the recent past, where a cornucopia of evidence makes the goal of getting at real historical events and processes easier. Nevertheless, ancient historians, ever with one foot in the interdisciplinary field of classics, are increasingly recognizing that the traditional approach of compiling, collating, comparing, and contrasting our sources (e.g., literary, archaeological), to see what picture emerges from them, has limitations that are no longer acceptable. Now, more and more effort is being made to evaluate our sources in their original context and with reference not only to the historical events ancient authors presented but also to what the authors’ own opinions were on those events.1 In a similar fashion, greater attention is now being paid to the circumstances of composition. For example, Tarn’s face-value reading of Arrian suggested an Alexander the Great who embraced a brotherhood of mankind because, among other things, he offered a prayer of equality and harmony between Macedonians and Persians at a banquet after a mutiny at Opis.2 Bosworth has argued that this scene and other suggestions of a policy of racial fusion are products of the typical rhetorical training of authors like Arrian and Plutarch in the early Roman Empire and are inadequate as evidence for Alexander ’s dream of racial harmony.3 It follows then that a study of the uses of kinship myth, as recorded by Herodotus, Thucydides, and others, necessarily requires an evaluation of the perspective and agenda of that author. It also requires an assessment of the audience not only for how they responded to the author’s narrative but for how the narrative responded to the common beliefs that had been held about the myths and their uses. Oneofthepatternsthatemergesfromtheliteraryaccountsofkinshipmyth, as opposed to the epigraphical, is that the type of diplomacy tends to involve the formation or proposition of an alliance, requests for assistance, and justification of conquests and territorial possession. The type that one finds more three KinshiP Myth in ancient Greece 46 of in inscriptions—exchanges of polity and requests for asylia and for recognition of religious festivals—is less prominent in the literary sources, perhaps because they provide less drama and draw less attention from writers who seek to engage theiraudience. Also useful for the presentation of theseventures are the roles played by charismatic individuals, such as Xerxes, Dorieus, and of course Alexander. As is well known, the romance that builds around such individuals engenders the fabulous as much as the historical. Sure enough, if we were to limit ourselves to studying kinship myth in literature and left aside the inscriptions, we might question just how real and howcommon the phenomenon was in ancient Greece. Admittedly, the inscriptions attest mainly (though not entirely) to kinship diplomacy in the hellenistic period, while our literary sources primarily record instances that allegedly took place in the archaic and classical eras.The argument to be made here, however, is not that the conception of sungeneia in a diplomatic context developed only in the fifth century (beginning with Herodotus), which later writers ascribed to early would-be practitioners such as Solon and Dorieus. There was indeed an environment for kinship myth to be efficacious, but the details of the kinship diplomacy as a historical event must for the most part remain uncertain. Xerxes and Argos Indeed, the historicity of our first recorded example, at Herodotus 7.150, is highly doubtful. Xerxes was preparing his invasion of Greece in the late 480s, when he sent an envoy to the Argives to request their neutrality. Herodotus says that the Great King claimed kinshipwith the Argives through Perses, who the Persians believed was their eponymous ancestor. They also believed that this Perses was the son of Perseus, an Argive hero, and they concluded that the Argives were the forefathers of the Persians.This passage and others like it have been the subject of intense debates about Herodotus’ methods, goals, and reliability. Another example would be the famous “Persian” accounts at the very beginning of Herodotus’ History (1.1–5) of the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen, whose stories we know from Greek mythology.One might argue that in such accounts Herodotus depicts Persians as having knowledge of Greek myth. At 7.150, the author’s purpose for this depiction is to explain and perhaps...