Here we find the late genealogist inventing a pedigree to connect the traditional families of the Argolid, Thebes and Cnossos with the eponymous heroes of Phœnicia, Cilicia and Egypt, and tracing them all from Poseidon. This seems to indicate that popular tradition believed all these families and peoples to have been connected, and that they were worshippers of the sea-god.
Let us now turn to the Danaan pedigree. That the fifty daughters of Danaus were mythical admits of no doubt, and the same is true of their fifty cousins, but it is possible that tradition is correct in claiming that one of them, Hypermnestra, married her cousin and succeeded her father. They are succeeded by Abas, who is followed by Acrisius, and then again we get a daughter Danaë, 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 likely 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 Alcæus as king of Mycenæ. 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 Ægistheus 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.”[532]
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 Bacchæ 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 well be urged 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 matrilinear succession? The forms of patrilinear succession are not all alike. The laws on this subject varied between the Ripuarian and the Salic Franks, the British crown passes by a rule which differs from that governing the descent of a peerage, and peerages granted by letters patent differ from those dependent upon a writ of summons. I submitted the point recently to the late Dr. Rivers, who told me that it was his opinion that several types of matrilinear succession had probably existed and that he had found evidence of two in Melanesian society.
I do not suggest that the evidence which I have cited shows the typical matrilinear succession as it is commonly understood, or that among pre-Hellenic peoples “the father did not count,”[533] but it seems to hint that the succession was in the process of passing from some form of matrilinear to some form of patrilinear descent. Perhaps it may only indicate that the eldest child succeeded regardless of sex, but in any case there appears to be sufficient evidence for assuming that in Minoan cities an heiress counted for more politically than she did in “Achæan” households. It is well, too, to remember in this connection that these Minoan tyrants were probably Prospectors and that among another group of Prospectors, the Etruscans, “it is, of course, agreed on all hands that such a system did exist.”[534]