|The Roman festival of Midsummer was a kind of Saturnalia, and was specially associated with the fire-born King Servius Tullius.| In this connexion it may not be without significance that a festival of jollity and drunkenness was celebrated by the plebeians and slaves at Rome on Midsummer Day, and that the festival was specially associated with the fire-born King Servius Tullius, being held in honour of Fortuna, the goddess who loved Servius as Egeria loved Numa. The popular merrymakings at this season included foot-races and boat-races; the Tiber was gay with flower-wreathed boats, in which young folk sat quaffing wine.[[884]] The festival appears to have been a sort of Midsummer Saturnalia answering to the real Saturnalia which fell at Midwinter. In modern Europe, as we shall learn later on, the great Midsummer festival has been above all a festival of lovers and of fire; one of its principal features is the pairing of sweethearts, who leap over the bonfires hand in hand or throw flowers across the flames to each other. And many omens of love and marriage are drawn from the flowers which bloom at this mystic season.[[885]] It is the time of the roses and of love. Yet the innocence and beauty of such festivals in modern times ought not to blind us to the likelihood that in earlier days they were marked by coarser features, which were probably of the essence of the rites. Indeed, among the rude Esthonian peasantry these features seem to have lingered down to our own generation, if not to the present day. One other feature in the Roman celebration of Midsummer deserves to be specially noticed. The custom of rowing in flower-decked boats on the river on this day proves that it was to some extent a water festival; and, as we shall learn later on, water has always, down to modern times, played a conspicuous part in the rites of Midsummer Day, which explains why the Church, in throwing its cloak over the old heathen festival, chose to dedicate it to St. John the Baptist.[[886]]
|But the uncertainty as to the paternity of the Roman kings may only mean that in later times the names of their fathers were forgotten.| The hypothesis that the Latin kings may have been begotten at an annual festival of love is necessarily a mere conjecture, though the traditional birth of Numa on the festival of the Parilia, when shepherds leaped across the spring bonfires,[[887]] as lovers leap across the Midsummer fires, may perhaps be thought to lend it a faint colour of probability. But it is quite possible that the uncertainty as to their fathers may not have arisen till long after the death of the kings, when their figures began to melt away into the cloudland of fable, assuming fantastic shapes and gorgeous colouring as they passed from earth to heaven. If they were alien immigrants, strangers and pilgrims in the land they ruled over, it would be natural enough that the people should forget their lineage, and forgetting it should provide them with another, which made up in lustre what it lacked in truth. The final apotheosis, which represented the kings as not merely sprung from gods but as themselves deities incarnate, would be much facilitated if in their lifetime, as we have seen reason to think, they had actually laid claim to divinity.
|Where descent is traced through women only, girls of the highest rank may be married to men of humble birth, even to aliens and slaves.| If among the Latins the women of royal blood always stayed at home and received as their consorts men of another stock, and often of another country, who reigned as kings in virtue of their marriage with a native princess, we can understand not only why foreigners wore the crown at Rome, but also why foreign names occur in the list of the Alban kings. In a state of society where nobility is reckoned only through women—in other words, where descent through the mother is everything, and descent through the father is nothing—no objection will be felt to uniting girls of the highest rank to men of humble birth, even to aliens or slaves, provided that in themselves the men appear to be suitable mates. What really matters is that the royal stock, on which the prosperity and even the existence of the people is supposed to depend, should be perpetuated in a vigorous and efficient form, and for this purpose it is necessary that the women of the royal family should bear children to men who are physically and mentally fit, according to the standard of early society, to discharge the important duty of procreation. Thus the personal qualities of the kings at this stage of social evolution are deemed of vital importance. If they, like their consorts, are of royal and divine descent, so much the better; but it is not essential that they should be so.
|In Ashantee, where the kingdom descends through women, the rank of the king’s father is not regarded.| The hypothesis which we have been led to frame of the rule of succession to the Latin kingship will be confirmed by analogy if we can shew that elsewhere, under a system of female kinship, the paternity of the kings is a matter of indifference—nay, that men who are born slaves may, like Servius Tullius, marry royal princesses and be raised to the throne. Now this is true of the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast in West Africa. Thus in Ashantee, where the kingdom descends in the female line to the king’s brothers and afterwards to the sons of his sister in preference to his own sons, the sisters of the reigning monarch are free to marry or intrigue with whom they please, provided only that their husband or lover be a very strong and handsome man, in order that the kings whom he begets may be men of finer presence than their subjects. It matters not how low may be the rank and position of the king’s father. If the king’s sisters, however, have no sons, the throne will pass to the king’s own son, and failing a son, to the chief vassal or the chief slave. But in the Fantee country the principal slave succeeds to the exclusion of the son. So little regard is paid by these people to the lineage, especially the paternal lineage, of their kings.[[888]] Yet Ashantee has attained a barbaric civilisation as high perhaps as that of any negro state, and probably not at all inferior to that of the petty Latin kingdoms at the dawn of history.
|Traces of a similar state of things in Uganda.| A trace of a similar state of things appears to survive in Uganda, another great African monarchy. For there the queen dowager and the queen sister are, or were, allowed to have as many husbands as they choose, without going through any marriage ceremony. “Of these two women it is commonly said all Uganda is their husband; they appear to be fond of change, only living with a man for a few days and then inviting some one else to take his place.” We are reminded of the legends of the lustful queen Semiramis, and the likeness may be more than superficial. Yet these women are not allowed, under pain of death, to bear children; hence they practise abortion.[[889]] Both the licence and the prohibition may be explained if we suppose that formerly the kingdom descended, as it still does in Ashantee, first to the king’s brothers and next to the sons of his sisters. For in that case the next heirs to the throne would be the sons of the king’s mother and of his sisters, and these women might accordingly be allowed, as the king’s sisters still are allowed in Ashantee, to mate with any handsome men who took their fancy, in order that their offspring might be of regal part. But when the line of descent was changed from the female to the male line, in other words, when the kings were succeeded by their sons instead of by their brothers or their sisters’ sons, then the king’s mother and his sisters would be forbidden to bear children lest the descent of the crown to the king’s own children should be endangered by the existence of rivals who, according to the old law of the kingdom, had a better right to the throne. We may surmise that the practice of putting the king’s brothers to death at the beginning of his reign, which survived till Uganda passed under English protection,[[890]] was instituted at the same time as the prohibition of child-bearing laid on the king’s mother and sisters. The one custom got rid of existing rivals; the other prevented them from being born. That the kingship in Uganda was formerly transmitted in the female line is strongly indicated by the rule that the kings and the rest of the royal family take their totems from their mothers, whereas all the other people of the country get their totems from their fathers.[[891]]
|In Loango also, where the blood royal is traced in the female line, the princesses are free to cohabit with whom they please, and their consorts are practically their slaves.| In Loango the blood royal is traced in the female line, and here also the princesses are free to choose and divorce their husbands at pleasure, and to cohabit at the same time with other men. These husbands are nearly always plebeians, for princes and princesses, who are very numerous and form a ruling caste in the country, may not marry each other. The lot of a prince consort is not a happy one, for he is rather the slave and prisoner than the mate of his imperious princess. In marrying her he engages never more to look at a woman during the whole time he cohabits with his royal spouse. When he goes out he is preceded by guards who drive away all females from the road where he is to pass. If in spite of these precautions he should by ill-luck cast his eyes on a woman, the princess may have his head chopped off, and commonly exercises, or used to exercise, the right. This sort of libertinism, sustained by power, often carries the princesses to the greatest excesses, and nothing is so much dreaded as their anger. No wonder that commoners in general avoid the honour of a royal alliance. Only poor and embarrassed men seek it as a protection against their creditors and enemies. All the children of such a man by such a wife are princes and princesses, and any one of the princes may in time be chosen king; for in Loango the crown is not hereditary but elective.[[892]] Thus it would seem that the father of the King of Loango is nearly always a plebeian, and often little better than a slave.
|Similar rights enjoyed by queens in Central Africa.| Near the Chambezi river, which falls into Lake Bengweolo in Central Africa, there is a small state governed by a queen who belongs to the reigning family of Ubemba. She bears the title of Mamfumer or Mother of Kings. “The privileges attached to this dignity are numerous. The most singular is that the queens may choose for themselves their husband among the common people. The chosen man becomes prince-consort without sharing in the administration of affairs. He is bound to leave everything to follow his royal and often but little accommodating spouse. To shew that in these households the rights are inverted and that a man may be changed into a woman, the queen takes the title of Monsieur and her husband that of Madame.”[[893]]
|Traces of female descent of the kingship in ancient Greece.| At Athens, as at Rome, we find traces of succession to the throne by marriage with a royal princess; for two of the most ancient kings of Athens, namely Cecrops and Amphictyon, are said to have married the daughters of their predecessors.[[894]] This tradition is confirmed by the evidence, which I shall adduce presently, that at Athens male kinship was preceded by female kinship.
|With this rule of descent of the kingship males rule over different kingdoms in successive generations.| Further, if I am right in supposing that in ancient Latium the royal families kept their daughters at home and sent forth their sons to marry princesses and reign among their wives’ people, it will follow that the male descendants would reign in successive generations over different kingdoms. Now this seems to have happened both in ancient Greece and in ancient Sweden; from which we may legitimately infer that it was a custom practised by more than one branch of the Aryan stock in Europe. Take, for instance, the great house of Aeacus, the grandfather of Achilles and Ajax. Aeacus himself reigned in Aegina, but his descendants, as has been justly observed, “from the beginning went forth to other lands.”[[895]] His son Telamon migrated to the |Migrations of the male descendants of Aeacus.| island of Salamis, married the king’s daughter, and reigned over the country.[[896]] Telamon’s son Teucer, in his turn, migrated to Cyprus, wedded the king’s daughter, and succeeded his father-in-law on the throne.[[897]] Again, Peleus, another son of Aeacus, quitted his native land and went away to Phthia in Thessaly, where he received the hand of the king’s daughter, and with her a third of the kingdom.[[898]] Of Achilles, the son of Peleus, we are told that in his youth he was sent to the court of Lycomedes, King of Scyros, where he got one of the princesses with child.[[899]] The tradition seems to shew that Achilles followed the custom of his family in seeking his fortune in a foreign land. His son Neoptolemus, after him, went away to Epirus, where he settled and became the ancestor of the kings of the country.[[900]]
|Migrations of the male descendants of Tydeus and Pelops.| Again, Tydeus was a son of Oeneus, the King of Calydon in Aetolia, but he went to Argos and married the king’s daughter.[[901]] His son Diomede migrated to Daunia in Italy, where he helped the king in a war with his enemies, receiving as his reward the king’s daughter in marriage and part of the kingdom.[[902]] As another example we may take the family of the Pelopidae, whose tragic fortunes the Greek poets never wearied of celebrating. Their ancestor was Tantalus, King of Sipylus in Asia Minor. But his son Pelops passed into Greece, won Hippodamia, the daughter of the King of Pisa, in the famous chariot-race, and succeeded his father-in-law on the throne.[[903]] His son Atreus did not remain in Pisa, but migrated to Mycenae, of which he became king;[[904]] and in the next generation Menelaus, son of Atreus, went to Sparta, where he married Helen, the king’s daughter, and himself reigned over the country.[[905]] Further, it is very notable that, according to the old lyric poets, Agamemnon himself, the elder brother of Menelaus, reigned not at Mycenae but in Lacedaemon, the native land of his wife Clytaemnestra, and that he was buried at Amyclae, the ancient capital of the country.[[906]]