Ancient society

by Lewis Henry Morgan

Such had the law of inheritance become in the Athenian gens in the time of Solon or shortly after; when the property passed to the sons equally, subject to the obligation of maintaining the daughters, and of apportioning them in marriage; and in default of sons, to the daughters equally. If there were no children, then the inheritance passed to the agnatic kindred, and in default of the latter, to the gentiles. The Roman law of the Twelve Tables was substantially the same.

It seems probable further, that when descent was changed to the male line, or still earlier, animal names for the gentes were laid aside and personal names substituted in their place. The individuality of persons would assert itself more and more with the progress of society, and with the increase and individual ownership of property, leading to the naming of the gens after some ancestral hero. Although new gentes were being formed from time to time by the process of segmentation, and others were dying out, the lineage of a gens reached back through hundreds not to say thousands of years. After the supposed substitution, the eponymous ancestor would have been a shifting person, at long intervals of time, some later person distinguished in the history of the gens being put in his place, when the knowledge of the former person became obscured, and faded from view in the misty past. That the more celebrated Grecian gentes made the change of names, and made it gracefully, is shown by the fact, that they retained the name of the mother of their gentile father, and ascribed his birth to her embracement by some particular god. Thus Eumolpus, the eponymous ancestor of the Attic Eumolpidæ, was the reputed son of Neptune and Chione; but even the Grecian gens was older than the conception of Neptune.

Recurring now to the main question, the absence of direct proof of ancient descent in the female line in the Grecian and Latin gentes would not silence the presumption in its favor; but it so happens that this form of descent remained in some tribes nearly related to the Greeks with traces of it in a number of Grecian tribes.

The inquisitive and observing Herodotus found one nation, the Lycians, Pelasgian in lineage, but Grecian in affiliation, among whom in his time (440 B. C.), descent was in the female line. After remarking that the Lycians were sprung from Crete, and stating some particulars of their migration to Lycia under Sarpedon, he proceeds as follows: “Their customs are partly Cretan and partly Carian. They have, however, one singular custom in which they differ from every other nation in the world. Ask a Lycian who he is, and he answers by giving his own name, that of his mother, and so on in the female line. Moreover, if a free woman marry a man who is a slave, their children are free citizens; but if a free man marry a foreign woman, or cohabit with a concubine, even though he be the first person in the state, the children forfeit all the rights of citizenship.”[393] It follows necessarily from this circumstantial statement that the Lycians were organized in gentes, with a prohibition against intermarriage in the gens, and that the children belonged to the gens of their mother. It presents a clear exemplification of a gens in the archaic form, with confirmatory tests of the consequences of a marriage of a Lycian man with a foreign woman, and of a Lycian woman with a slave.[394] The aborigines of Crete were Pelasgian, Hellenic and Semitic tribes, living locally apart. Minos, the brother of Sarpedon, is usually regarded as the head of the Pelasgians in Crete; but the Lycians were already Hellenized in the time of Herodotus and quite conspicuous among the Asiatic Greeks for their advancement. The insulation of their ancestors upon the island of Crete, prior to their migration in the legendary period to Lycia, may afford an explanation of their retention of descent in the female line to this late period.

Among the Etruscans also the same rule of descent prevailed. “It is singular enough,” observes Cramer, “that two customs peculiar to the Etruscans, as we discover from their monuments, should have been noticed by Herodotus as characteristic of the Lycians and Caunians of Asia Minor. The first is, that the Etruscans invariably describe their parentage and family with reference to the mother, and not the father. The other, that they admitted their wives to their feasts and banquets.”[395]

Curtius comments on Lycian, Etruscan and Cretan descent in the female line in the following language: “It would be an error to understand the usage in question as an homage to the female sex. It is rather rooted in primitive conditions of society, in which monogamy was not yet established with sufficient certainty to enable descent upon the father’s side to be affirmed with assurance. Accordingly the usage extends far beyond the territory commanded by the Lycian nationality. It occurs, even to this day, in India; it may be demonstrated to have existed among the ancient Egyptians; it is mentioned by Sanchoniathon (p. 16, Orell), where the reasons for its existence are stated with great freedom; and beyond the confines of the East it appears among the Etruscans, among the Cretans, who were so closely connected with the Lycians, and who called their father-land mother-land; and among the Athenians, consult Bachofen, etc. Accordingly, if Herodotus regards the usage in question as thoroughly peculiar to the Lycians, it must have maintained itself longest among them of all the nations related to the Greeks, as is also proved by the Lycian inscriptions. Hence we must in general regard the employment of the maternal name for a designation of descent as the remains of an imperfect condition of social life and family law, which, as life becomes more regulated, was relinquished in favor of usages, afterwards universal in Greece, of naming children after the father. This diversity of usages, which is extremely important for the history of ancient civilization, has been recently discussed by Bachofen in his address above named.”[396]

In a work of vast research, Bachofen has collected and discussed the evidence of female authority (mother-right) and of female rule (gyneocracy) among the Lycians, Cretans, Athenians, Lemnians, Ægyptians, Orchomenians, Locrians, Lesbians, Mantineans, and among eastern Asiatic nations.[397] The condition of ancient society, thus brought under review, requires for its full explanation the existence of the gens in its archaic form as the source of the phenomena. This would bring the mother and her children into the same gens, and in the composition of the communal household, on the basis of gens, would give the gens of the mothers the ascendency in the household. The family, which had probably attained the syndyasmian form, was still environed with the remains of that conjugal system which belonged to a still earlier condition. Such a family, consisting of a married pair with their children, would naturally have sought shelter with kindred families in a communal household, in which the several mothers and their children would be of the same gens, and the reputed fathers of these children would be of other gentes. Common lands and joint tillage would lead to joint-tenement houses and communism in living; so that gyneocracy seems to require for its creation, descent in the female line. Women thus entrenched in large households, supplied from common stores, in which their own gens so largely predominated in numbers, would produce the phenomena of mother right and gyneocracy, which Bachofen has detected and traced with the aid of fragments of history and of tradition. Elsewhere I have referred to the unfavorable influence upon the position of women which was produced by a change of descent from the female line to the male, and by the rise of the monogamian family, which displaced the joint-tenement house, and in the midst of a society purely gentile, placed the wife and mother in a single house and separated her from her gentile kindred.[398]

Monogamy was not probably established among the Grecian tribes until after they had attained the Upper Status of barbarism; and we seem to arrive at chaos in the marriage relation within this period, especially in the Athenian tribes. Concerning the latter, Bachofen remarks: “For before the time of Cecrops the children, as we have seen, had only a mother, no father; they were of one line. Bound to no man exclusively, the woman brought only spurious children into the world. Cecrops first made an end of this condition of things; led the lawless union of the sexes back to the exclusiveness of marriage; gave to the children a father and mother, and thus from being of one line (unilateres) made them of two lines (bilateres).”[399] What is here described as the lawless union of the sexes must be received with modifications. We should expect at that comparatively late day to find the syndyasmian family, but attended by the remains of an anterior conjugal system which sprang from marriages in the group. The punaluan family, which the statement fairly implies, must have disappeared before they reached the ethnical period named. This subject will be considered in subsequent chapters in connection with the growth of the family.

There is an interesting reference by Polybius to the hundred families of the Locrians of Italy. “The Locrians themselves,” he remarks, “have assured me that their own traditions are more conformable to the account of Aristotle than to that of Timæus. Of this they mention the following proofs. The first is, that all nobility of ancestry among them is derived from women, and not from men. That those, for example, alone are noble, who derive their origin from the hundred families. That these families were noble among the Locrians before they migrated; and were the same, indeed, from which a hundred virgins were taken by lot, as the oracle had commanded, and were sent to Troy.”[400] It is at least a reasonable supposition that the rank here referred to was connected with the office of chief of the gens, which ennobled the particular family within the gens, upon one of the members of which it was conferred. If this supposition is tenable, it implies descent in the female line both as to persons and to office. The office of chief was hereditary in the gens, and elective among its male members in archaic times; and with descent in the female line, it would pass from brother to brother, and from uncle to nephew. But the office in each case passed through females, the eligibility of the person depending upon the gens of his mother, who gave him his connection with the gens, and with the deceased chief whose place was to be filled. Wherever office or rank runs through females, it requires descent in the female line for its explanation.