Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/359

 HISTORY. 343 any other nation ; the Lycians, in order to define their name, add thereto their mother's, and not their father's. If you inquire of any of them to what family he belongs, he will give you the name of his mother and the ascendants on his mother's side. If a freeborn woman cohabits with a slave, her children have the right of citizenship ; but if a freeborn man, no matter how exalted his rank, has children by an alien or a concubine, they remain outside of the city," l e.g. they can have no civic rights. A much later writer, Nicholas of Damascus, but who had access to documentary sources now lost, corroborates the formal assertion of Herodotus, adding that family substance descended in the male and not the female line. 2 It must be admitted that inscriptions show but very faint traces of the superior condition women are supposed to have enjoyed in Lycia ; 3 the texts in question, however, are comparatively recent ; whilst we may assume that the action of Hellenic culture in its onward progress could not but efface local habits, rendered all the more easy that it did not clash with written laws, for the simple reason that the Lycians, we are assured, knew of no other except custom and usage. 4 We have no reasons for discrediting the data bearing upon the earliest relations between the two people. If the habit under consideration had not been current among the Lycians, it is not in the least likely that the Greeks would have conceived the notion of attributing it to them, On the other hand, we can well realize their surprise when brought face to face with such a reversion of parts ; one too diametrically opposed to their customs, and therefore all the more calculated to attract their attention. The system which was still in force in the time of Herodotus, is what modern lawyers call matriarchate, of which vestiges have been traced among people and nationalities the most diverse, and which is generally considered a survival of a very primitive state of society, leading back to a period when the family had not yet constituted itself by marriage, when the relations of the sexes 1 Herodotus, i. 173. 2 Fragmenta Hist. Grcec., torn. iii. p. 461. 8 In regard to this subject read Treuber's observations, Geschichle, pp. 121-124. 4 Heraclides Pontinus, Fr. 15 (MULLER, Fragm. Hist. Grac., torn. ii. p. 217). This same writer also alludes to the Lycian " gynecocracy," as he styles the ruling station of women in Lycia.