Patterson - Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece

KINSHIP MYTH IN ANCIENT GREECE

This book has been supported by an endowment dedicated to classics and the ancient world and funded by the Aret Foundation; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; the Dougherty Foundation; the James R. Dougherty, Jr. Foundation; the Rachael and Ben Vaughan Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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First edition, 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, Lee.
Kinship myth in ancient Greece / Lee E. Patterson. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-292-72275-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. KinshipGreeceHistory. 2. Mythology, Greek. 3. Civilization, Ancient. 4. GreeceCivilization. 5. GreeceForeign relations. 6. GreecePolitics and government. I. Title.
GN585.G85P37 2010
938dc22
2010019016

For my father,
Stanley Mac Patterson,
and in loving memory of my mother,
Vanessa Leigh Patterson

In general, Greek names have been rendered in their more familiar Latinized form to ease their recognition. Terms such as sungeneia are transliterated unless part of a quotation from an original source. Translations of the Greek quotations, and in one case Latin, are mine unless otherwise indicated.

This book is both a beginning and an end. While the end of a long labor, I also hope that it will be the beginning of a new stage in the dialogue on how societies often use myth to construct political, social, and cultural identity. Of interest here is how and why a pair of Greek states (or leagues or kings) would cite a common ancestor, usually a legendary figure, as support or justification for their diplomatic activity. Of central importance is the authority they gave to myth, whether it was an elaborate narrative or a simple acknowledgment of an ancestor. These stories of foundations were taken seriously and accorded the respect demanded of traditions that expressed a communitys identity. But even a study limited to putative consanguinity in ancient Greek diplomacy ultimately connects to larger issues involving ethnicity, constructions of memory, perceptions of foreigners, hero cult, and so on. I was less aware of these implications when embarking on this journey many years ago as I began investigating kinship myth for my Masters thesis at the University of Mississippi and later for my dissertation at the University of Missouri. This study has taken enormous strides since then by having a larger scope than that of kinship diplomacy itself and by showing, especially in the first chapter, that in fact kinship myth is a