The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

MATRILINEAR 175
married her cousin and succeeded her father. They are succeeded by Abas, who is
followed by Acrisius, and then again we get a daughter Danae, who is succeeded by her
son Perseus. This hero is said to have left many sons, but here the pedigree gets
mixed. It seems more hkely to my mind that Perseus was succeeded by Electryon,
whose daughter Alcmene married her cousin Amphitryon, though later writers, accustomed
to a more strictly patrilinear succession, made Amphitryon succeed his father Alcaeus
as king of Mycenae. But the times were troubled, the Pelopids were conquering the
Peloponnese and the succession failed. It is well to remember, though, that Perseus
is said to have had a daughter Gorgophane, whose name may well be fictitious and
that her son or grandson Tyndareus was father of Clytemnestra. It would seem that
both Agamemnon and ^Egistheus claimed to reign not only by right of conquest but jure
uxoris.
Hartland has well cited from the Eumenides that " when Orestes, pursued by the
Erinyes for his mother's death, pleads that he is not of kin to her and wins by the
casting vote of Athena, the Erinyes are startled and shocked on finding that even the
gods decide against them, declaring that these, the younger gods, have over-ridden the
old laws and unexpectedly plucked Orestes out of their hands."'
Cadmus is said to have married Harmonia, daughter of Ares, again a fictitious
name for a Thracian maiden. He had four daughters and one son, but it is not the
latter who succeeds him, but the son of his fourth daughter Agaue. The Bacchse of
Euripides seems to show a struggle between the claims of the priestly or divine son of
Semele, the eldest daughter, and the more mundane and regal son of Agaue, the
youngest. The claim of Polydorus, the only son, does not arise until Dionysus has
been banished and Pentheus slain.
While these genealogies, much garbled by writers accustomed only to patrilinear
succession, show the frequent succession of a daughter or a daughter's son, it may weU
be xurged that there is no evidence of the importance of the maternal uncle, or of the
avunculi potestas of Sir James Frazer. This is undoubtedly true, and no reasonable claim
can be made that this particular form of matrilinear succession obtained in Minoan
Greece. But are we sure that there is only one type of matriUnear succession ? The
8 Hartland (1921) 123.