TFBT: “Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece” by Lee E. Patterson

As a birthday present, my oldest son (with whom I am well pleased) and his wife bought me “Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece” by Lee E. Patterson.  These are the stories that Ancient Greek people and peoples told one another who they were in the world by remembering who they were related to.  Most famously in Book 6 during the bragging that preceded Iliadic duels the hero Glaucus in bragging up his lineage touched upon a story from the family saga of the hero Diomedes,

“the heart of Diomedes of the great war cry was glad. He planted his spear in the ground, and spoke to him with friendly words. [215] “Then,” he said, “you are an old friend of my father’s house.”...With these words they sprang from their chariots, grasped one another’s hands, and plighted friendship.

The Dorians told how they were descended from the Heraclidea, grandsons of Heracles returning to their ancestral home, rather than the Johnny-come-lately barbarians, the neighbors thought of them.  Former colonies reminded their metropolis of their familial relationship.  Leagues of Nations were formed amongst the supposed descendants of Ion or Chyrsoar for purposes of trade and defense.  It was a big deal. The Megarians had a totally different account of King Sciron, foe of Theseus.  (Aeacus wed one of his daughters, so Sciron couldn’t have been that bad!)

In the first five chapters of the book, Patterson explains all this is the broadest terms.  He explains that such myths are “used to create ethnic, national and other cultural identities.”  He says we “often embraces (such) fictions, and thus deny them to be fictions, despite the evidence put forward by those who apply a more clinical skepticism. To traditions embraced by the majority.”  Adding phrases like; “myth gives shape to the ideas that bind a society”; “a community’s origins”, “sense of its identity” and “to give meaning to those who believe its doctrines.”  Apparently all genealogically and anthropological evidence that a clinical skepticism can bring to bear will not dislodge these myths of who we are because “boundaries of the group are determined by only that group.” A theory that might able to modern American politics just as well as Ancient Greeks.

Patterson purports on several occasions that “the vast majority of Greeks who had no interest in separating truth from falsehood were not shaken by fictions that contradicted no know science.  Thus they listened to the true myths and inventions in the same frame of mind.”  Which explains so much about the ending of the Oresteia.

This broader discussion goes on for the first 108 pages.  Sadly his constant criticism (and dismal) of his own sources, critiques of their implications and of his own inferences, “suggests” that a reader will lose Patterson’s line of logic as well as  the storyline of the myth under discussion.

Starting, at Chapter Six things really pick up with very specific local myths and specific groups of people, complete with explanatory genealogy tables.  (Love those.) Here we hear that people along the banks of the Meander married their founding fathers off to the river-gods daughters.  Making themselves sibling city-states and “autochthonous”.  (The latter being a big thing in the Ancient Greek world.  It means they were there before anyone else.  Lots of other good stories too.  As a mythologist I found all these local myths about minor heroes and their family sagas amazing.

The story of the city of “Heraclea at Latmus and the Aetolian League” (page 132-137) enlightened me greatly.  When reading West’s “The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women) I never understood the myths of Aethlius and Endymion and their role in the “Aetolian-Elean-Pylian Myth Cycle.” 

This is an incredible researched book.  Both in primary sources and regarding other scholars on the topic. (Pages 165-219 are the notes, appendices, bibliography and indexes in fine print.)  I loved it.