What was nobility in early Greece?
Macedonian kings.
Romans.
The great and only patent of respectability in any Greek house or city of early times was foundation by a hero or the direct descendant of a hero; for the heroes were sons or grandsons of the gods, from whom all Greek nobility was derived. The Homeric poems, in making or defining the Greek theology, also told of the great houses directly descended from Zeus or Heracles; and so a royal house which was descended from these personages,
or a city founded by them, secured for itself a dignity recognized by all the race. To cite late historical instances: the Macedonian kings made good their claim to being Greeks and civilized men by showing their descent from the hero Æacus, whose descendants the Æacids figure so prominently in the legendary wars. The Romans, when first they came into contact with Greek culture, and felt at the same time their superior strength and their social inferiority, at once accepted and promoted the story invented for them at Pergamum or adapted for them in Sicily, that they were a colony of Trojans, led by Æneas, the child of Aphrodite by a mortal hero.
Hellenistic cities.
If these things took place in the dry tree of sober history, what must have taken place in the green? Every city was bound to have a heroic founder, and to have been established in almost mythical times. Even in late and reflecting days, as I have already mentioned ([§ 16]), when the successors of Alexander founded new towns in Syria and Asia Minor, stories continued to be invented alleging old Hellenic settlements of mythical heroes in these places, whose shrines were accordingly set up, and their worship instituted, to produce an appearance of respectability in upstart polities.
Glory of short pedigrees.
It is not usually felt by modern readers that in consequence of these sentiments the great thing was not to have a long pedigree for a family or city, but to have as short a pedigree as possible for its founder. To be the son or grandson of a god was
splendid; to be his remote descendant was only to cling on to real nobility like the younger and remoter branches of great English families. This will indicate how strong was the tendency to derive an early origin from a great and known descendant of the gods or their acknowledged sons. The subsequent history and fortunes of a city were comparatively vulgar, provided it was founded by a Heracleid,—the second or third in descent from Temenus or Hyllus. Hence the systematic habit of all early chronologers of counting downwards from Heracles or the Trojan war, and not upwards from their own days.
