Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/319

Rh the temple of that vert galant Herakles at Gades,—in "matriarchal " Spain. Incidentally, with reference to the Amazons, we may note that the only ones we know much about, — those of Dahomey, — are the women of a huge patrilinear royal family.

Many of these are late, and a large part of them is doubless pure invention. Still, taking them as con- taining a modicum of historical fact, it has been pointed out : —

1. That most of them are rather short. Thus, Hekataios of Miletos had to go back only fifteen generations from about the beginning of the fifth century B.C. to find a divine ancestor ; i.e. a man of noble family, presumably a skilled herald with a herald's knack of inventing ancestors, could not trace his line further back than about 1000 or 1050 B.C., — ralmost within historical times. The average hero of mythology is decidedly Oewi/ ayxi.cnropo<s ; eg. Achilles is in the third, and Orestes in the fifth, genera- tion from Zeus ; and, generally, few families go back more than two or three generations from the siege of Troy. Does this mean that no more male ancestors could be found, i.e. that before iioo or 1200 B.C. or so, in the traditional chronology, descent counted through the female } This theory, however, is met by a serious difficulty ; why, among the numerous cults of heroic ancestors, do we hear so little of heroines ; and, especially, why are few, if any, tribes or clans called after them?

2. In several royal families the son seems to rule anywhere but in his father's kingdom. Thus, for the Pelopidai, we have Tantalos lord of Sipylos, Pelops of Pisa, Atreus of Mycenae, and Menelaos of Sparta. Does this indicate a matrilinear system with exogamy? Leaving out Menelaos,—for he and his brother shift bewilderingly between Mycenae,