Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/327

 Mother- Right in Early Greece. 291

one of his own quotations (Xenoph., Rep. Lac, \. 9) -^ clearly shows that only the children of the husband were fully legitimate, and the story of the Parthenioi proves as much. Hence, so far as they go, his authorities show that neither the Dorians nor their problematical northern kinsfolk were matrilinear at all. The other arguments have already been dealt with in this paper, except one which rests on an accidental misreading of Pausanias. Still worse is the same author's attempt to prove ^^ that the Aeschylean Danaides were matrilinear, for he stultifies his argument at the outset by saying that they regard as incestuous the proposed marriage with the sons of their paternal uncle, who by mother-right would not be even remotely akin to them nor members of the same tribe.

That the Greeks never in remote antiquity had any sort of mother-right is a proposition which I am not interested to defend ; but if anyone holds that in historical or quasi- historical times any Hellenic tribe was matrilinear, the onus probandi rests on him, and is likely to prove a burden too grievous to be borne.

H. J. Rose.

^^ all re 7ap '^vva.'iKf.'i olttovs otKovs povXovrai. /carexeic o'i t' dvdpes doeXtpovs rois iraial irpoaXafipdveLV oi toO fxkv yivovs Kal T^r bwdfiewi KOi.voivovaL, tCiv 5k Xpyifi-o-Tuv oiiK avriTToiovuTai, ("For the women wish to be mistresses of two households and the men to provide their children with new brothers " ; (R.'s translation of this odd phrase is wildly impossible), "who share in the family and its power, but make no claims to the property "). The arrangement sprang from a desire for a large family combined with a dislike to dividing the estate.

^ The Origin of Tragedy, pp. \(^\ ei seq.