————— THREE —————

KINSHIP MYTH IN THE LITERARY SOURCES

Alliances and Assistance

The dialogue between historians of the ancient world and authors in the ancient world has always been precious, more so than applies to those who study the recent past, where a cornucopia of evidence makes the goal of getting at real historical events and processes easier. Nevertheless, ancient historians, ever with one foot in the interdisciplinary field of classics, are increasingly recognizing that the traditional approach of compiling, collating, comparing, and contrasting our sources (e.g., literary, archaeological), to see what picture emerges from them, has limitations that are no longer acceptable. Now, more and more effort is being made to evaluate our sources in their original context and with reference not only to the historical events ancient authors presented but also to what the authors’ own opinions were on those events.1

In a similar fashion, greater attention is now being paid to the circumstances of composition. For example, Tarn’s face-value reading of Arrian suggested an Alexander the Great who embraced a brotherhood of mankind because, among other things, he offered a prayer of equality and harmony between Macedonians and Persians at a banquet after a mutiny at Opis.² Bosworth has argued that this scene and other suggestions of a policy of racial fusion are products of the typical rhetorical training of authors like Arrian and Plutarch in the early Roman Empire and are inadequate as evidence for Alexander’s dream of racial harmony.³ It follows then that a study of the uses of kinship myth, as recorded by Herodotus, Thucydides, and others, necessarily requires an evaluation of the perspective and agenda of that author. It also requires an assessment of the audience not only for how they responded to the author’s narrative but for how the narrative responded to the common beliefs that had been held about the myths and their uses.

One of the patterns that emerges from the literary accounts of kinship myth, as opposed to the epigraphical, is that the type of diplomacy tends to involve the formation or proposition of an alliance, requests for assistance, and justification of conquests and territorial possession. The type that one finds more of in inscriptions—exchanges of polity and requests for asylia and for recognition of religious festivals—is less prominent in the literary sources, perhaps because they provide less drama and draw less attention from writers who seek to engage their audience. Also useful for the presentation of these ventures are the roles played by charismatic individuals, such as Xerxes, Dorieus, and of course Alexander. As is well known, the romance that builds around such individuals engenders the fabulous as much as the historical. Sure enough, if we were to limit ourselves to studying kinship myth in literature and left aside the inscriptions, we might question just how real and how common the phenomenon was in ancient Greece. Admittedly, the inscriptions attest mainly (though not entirely) to kinship diplomacy in the hellenistic period, while our literary sources primarily record instances that allegedly took place in the archaic and classical eras. The argument to be made here, however, is not that the conception of sungeneia in a diplomatic context developed only in the fifth century (beginning with Herodotus), which later writers ascribed to early would-be practitioners such as Solon and Dorieus. There was indeed an environment for kinship myth to be efficacious, but the details of the kinship diplomacy as a historical event must for the most part remain uncertain.

XERXES AND ARGOS

Indeed, the historicity of our first recorded example, at Herodotus 7.150, is highly doubtful. Xerxes was preparing his invasion of Greece in the late 480s, when he sent an envoy to the Argives to request their neutrality. Herodotus says that the Great King claimed kinship with the Argives through Perses, who the Persians believed was their eponymous ancestor. They also believed that this Perses was the son of Perseus, an Argive hero, and they concluded that the Argives were the forefathers of the Persians. This passage and others like it have been the subject of intense debates about Herodotus’ methods, goals, and reliability. Another example would be the famous “Persian” accounts at the very beginning of Herodotus’ History (1.1–5) of the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen, whose stories we know from Greek mythology. One might argue that in such accounts Herodotus depicts Persians as having knowledge of Greek myth. At 7.150, the author’s purpose for this depiction is to explain and perhaps justify current views held among his contemporaries and possibly by the author himself on how the Argives stood in relation to their fellow Greeks and also to the Persians.

Given Herodotus’ practice of hellenizing the Persians in his narrative, Detlev Fehling posed the important and legitimate question of where Herodotus got his information. Fehling’s answer was that Herodotus fabricated the accounts and made up his sources.4 The responses to Fehling have been many and at times vigorous. In the more productive of these he has been criticized for (1) applying twentieth-century standards to Herodotus’ work and (2) failing to give due consideration to the “cultural milieu” in which Herodotus wrote.⁵ For my purposes, this milieu is the key to understanding the nature and true extent of his fabrications (I, for one, am perfectly willing to agree with Fehling that there may be some fabrication in the work). In short, Herodotus did not work in a vacuum: the world in which he lived (the Greek world of the fifth century) influenced how he shaped and presented his material.⁶ It is well to keep in mind the true significance of this accomplishment.

When Herodotus first approached the task of writing his History, he was doing something no one else had done before. With no precedents to guide him, he had to decide what material and what kinds of material to include (not just the facts but also events and deeds that may or may not have been factual but were meaningful to his sources and his audience), how to organize it, and what it all meant to him and to his audience (e.g., lessons about the dangers of hubris or the vicissitudes of fortune).

One example of this influence is the hellenocentric point of view of Herodotus’ contemporaries that worked its way into his History. By that I mean that the Greeks tended to view the wide world around them in Greek terms; they ordered or structured the world by putting themselves in the center and relating everybody else to them. Not surprisingly, these relationships were primarily expressed in mythological terms. A prime example would be assigning heroes from Greek mythology as eponymous ancestors of non-Greek peoples, such as Perses, ancestor of the Persians.⁷ More than that, however, this was not some abstract construct but a world that was very real to the Greeks. The evidence for this reality is twofold. First, as we have seen, heroic legend was considered an earlier part of history, and thus it had a direct effect on the present. Second, there was a common (but not universal) belief in the hellenic world that non-Greeks worshiped Greek gods, for example, Heracles in Tyre, Dionysus among the Arabs, and so on.⁸

The foregoing suggests that Herodotus’ sources were primarily Greek, rather than Persian. The cosmopolitan nature of Herodotus’ hometown of Halicarnassus in Anatolian Caria exposed him to foreign influences, perhaps even to foreign languages. This point remains one of the more controversial in Herodotean studies.⁹ D. M. Lewis has suggested that much of Herodotus’ information about the Persians came from Greek secretaries working within the Persian Empire, who are attested in clay tablets found at Persepolis and dated to the reign of Darius I.¹⁰ If accurate, such a state of affairs not only can explain some of the errors Herodotus makes about Persian history, language, and so on but also account for the hellenocentric perspective that Herodotus has given to Xerxes at 7.150.

So, keeping in mind Herodotus’ craft and the influence on the development of that craft, let us now look at the passage in question:

Another story is told in Greece that Xerxes sent a herald to Argos before he set out on his campaign against Greece. Upon arriving, the herald is said to have delivered this message: “Men of Argos, King Xerxes says the following to you: ‘We believe that it is from Perses, son of Perseus, whose mother was Danaë, and Andromeda daughter of Cepheus, that we are descended, and so from you also we are descended. Thus it is neither reasonable for us to make war on our ancestors nor should you be ranged against us assisting others, but rather you should remain quiescent. Should the matter be resolved according to my will, I will honor no one more than you.’”11

We can quickly dispense with the question of the historicity of this account. First, although the possibility exists that the Persians might have had some familiarity with Greek mythology, given their considerable interaction,¹² the fact remains that no Persian source material exists as evidence for such knowledge or its political potential. Second, at Sepeia near Tiryns, Argos suffered a devastating defeat by the Spartans in 494, with apparently thousands of her adult male citizens wiped out.¹³ I find it difficult to accept that Argos had recovered sufficiently in fourteen years to be worthy of Xerxes’ attention as a great military power whose neutrality made a difference to the Persian war effort. Let us now turn back to Herodotus himself and his reasons for including so unlikely an alleged instance of kinship diplomacy in his narrative.

As Herodotus himself says at the beginning of 7.150, this account is a Greek one, one of three in fact related to him by others, all to explain why Argos did not join the Greek coalition in the war (7.148–152). We will consider these variations and their implications presently. For now, it bears noting that the story of Perses has a rich hellenic tradition. Hellanicus of Lesbos, one of Herodotus’ sources, not only mentions Perses but says that he led his people, the Cephenes, to Persia, where they became Persians. Though none of the extant fragments explicitly state that Perses was the ancestor of the Persians, Hellanicus seems to imply this and may well have expressed such a belief in a passage of his Persica, which is now lost.¹⁴ The idea that Perses is the ancestor of the Persians is certainly not older than the mid sixth century. At this time, the Persians under Cyrus the Great, having overcome the Medes and supplanted them as the great power in the East, first came to the notice of the Greek world.15 The Greeks perceived a great menace as the Persians defeated Lydia and conquered the Ionians and later Egypt and Samos.¹⁶

Besides his Ionian predecessors, Herodotus also had as evidence an oracle that supposedly predated the Battle of Thermopylae. Leonidas remained behind at the Pass of Thermopylae, Herodotus believes, because he was convinced that he should give his life for his people for the following reason: the oracle deemed that if the king did not fall, then Lacedaemon itself would be destroyed “by the Perseid men” (), that is, the descendants of Perseus (7.220.4).

Most importantly, we have oblique references to this kinship in Aeschylus’ Persians, wherein Xerxes is described by the Chorus (a group of Persian Elders) as “a godlike man of a race born from gold” (, lines 79–80), meaning from Perseus, whose mother Danaë was visited by Zeus as a shower of gold. Drews cites line 146 of the play as evidence of the playwright’s assumption of the audience’s long-standing familiarity with the Perses link, given the “allusive nature of the references.”¹⁷ The Chorus asks, “How does King Xerxes fare, born of Danaë’s race that is named for our forefather?” ( / . / ; lines 144–146). Aeschylus does not mention Perses by name; the references to him are “allusive” in that the audience understands to whom the bits of information refer without needing direct identification. To these we might add lines 185–187, cited by Pericles Georges as an indication of Graeco-Persian kinship, for here Atossa dreams of two maidens who are sisters, one dressed as a Persian and the other as a Greek (Dorian).¹⁸ Thus, we see even in only one play of Aeschylus some indication of how well established the Perses myth was in the repertory of Greek culture.

The story itself was developed somewhat by Hellanicus, as preserved by the lexicographer Stephanus of Byzantium: “The Chaldaeans were formerly the Cephenes, named after Cepheus, father of Andromeda, whose son was Perses, son of Perseus son of Danaë and Zeus…. Hellanicus says in Book 1 of his Persica the following: ‘After Cepheus had died, [Perses and the Cephenes] marched from Babylon [where Cepheus had been king] and occupied Artaea.’”¹⁹ In Fragment 60: “Artaea is the land of the Persians, which Perses colonized. According to Hellanicus in Book 1 of his Persica, the Persians, and likewise the Greeks, call the ancients Artaeans.”²⁰ There is no specific mention of Perses as the eponymous ancestor of the Persians, who in Hellanicus’ version might be the Cephenes or perhaps the Artaeans, though the implication is clear. However, an anonymous scholiast in later centuries makes Perses’ eponymous role explicit: “He left [Babylon], bringing with him many Cephenes to the land of the Artaeans. Finding them at odds with each other, he became master of the Artaeans and joined them to the other people [the Cephenes] and then named them all Persians after himself. And he had a son Achaemenes, from whom the Persians were called Achaemenides.”21 The clear implication is that an assimilation of peoples took place,²² and it seems very likely that Hellanicus also believed (and perhaps asserted in a no longer extant passage) that the Persians derived their name from Perses, whether by his decree or in some other way.²³

As for Xerxes’ request itself, we can better understand its implications by examining all three accounts Herodotus gives at 7.148–152. In the first variation, given by the Argives themselves, the Delphic oracle advised Argos to decline any Greek proposals for alliance against the Persians. The Argives ostensibly rejected this advice but set conditions that would prove unrealistic to the Spartans, with whom the former proposed to share command of the Greek armies, despite having traditionally only one royal house (the Temenids) to the Spartans’ two (7.148–149). The second version (7.150), which includes Xerxes’ embassy, does not have a specific referent but is simply a story “told in Greece” ().²⁴ According to this account, the Argives rejected Greek overtures only after the embassy to Xerxes, presumably at a later date from when the Argives themselves said they had done this. In fact, as Herodotus points out (7.150.3), when the Spartans rejected the demand for sharing the leadership, the Argives could cite Spartan intransigence and remain neutral, thus adhering to the oracle (and helping the Persians) with no guilt. The third version is given after Herodotus’ gnomic statement that his knowledge of which account to believe is limited but guided by the principle of recording variations and realizing that culpability in certain actions should be measured by the adverse circumstances that might have prompted, and thus mitigated, those actions. So that, to take the Argive example, even if they had actually invited the Persians to Greece, which constitutes the third account Herodotus has heard, there is still a way to explain it and both of the other versions, that the Argives were at a low ebb, having lost many men at Sepeia and now vulnerable to Spartan domination. For this reason, we should resist accusing Argos of acting “most shamefully” () (7.152).

Gregory Nagy has noted that presenting the third account in this way, following a statement of Herodotus’ general principle of historical inquiry, softens the blow, as it were. That general statement contains an aphorism of sorts.²⁵ Herodotus says that if all men could come together to a place where they could see each other’s kaka, or “evils,” each would choose to go home with his own rather than with someone else’s. The implications are that (1) the Argives’ kaka should be seen in relation to those of others and (2) the reliability of different versions of a story will not be the same. Therefore, Herodotus’ policy is not to accept necessarily every story he hears (7.152.2).

But we need to have a better understanding of what kaka means to appreciate the value of Herodotus’ inclusion of Xerxes’ embassy. Kaka can refer to misfortunes, such as what the Argives had suffered at Sepeia and now potentially faced at Spartan hands. Kaka can also refer to wrongdoings, such as medizing. As we have noted above, the implication of 7.152.2 is that others who are guilty of their own “wrongdoings” should not be so quick to judge the Argives. Rosaria Munson has noted that this gnomic statement says as much about Herodotus’ view of humanity in general as about his historiographical methodology. In other words, it serves the same function as that of another famous maxim that speaks of Herodotus’ cosmopolitan attitude at 3.38.4, where Herodotus says, “I think Pindar had it right when he said that nomos is the king of all” ( ).26 Herodotus’ history pursues the paradoxical goals of revealing a common human nature that transcends culture, a loose translation of nomos, and of recording individual manifestations of human nature in culture. The aphorism at 3.38 acknowledges that one society will cultivate a practice or ritual that is abhorrent to another and that it is human nature to judge other cultures by the criteria of one’s own. In this same vein, the maxim at 7.152.2 is intended to exculpate Argos in the context of condemnation levied in stories circulating in the Greek world during and after the Persian Wars by reminding us that those stories are not always reliable or the condemnation always justifiable. Especially if we take into account the very human reaction of Argos to its circumstances, we should remember that another state might behave in the same way under similar conditions. This leads Herodotus to his conclusion that the Argives had not acted “most shamefully.”

If this conclusion holds, the account of Xerxes’ attempt at kinship diplomacy would serve to remind Herodotus’ readers of Argos’ traditional Perseid associations and to bring that association into a discussion of Argos’ role in the prelude to the Persian War of 480. The Perseid kinship was obviously well known, as attested by Aeschylus and Hellanicus, and could not be overlooked in Herodotus’ use of Argos as an example of the hazards of presenting historical information. It likely loomed in the minds of readers of 9.12–13, where another act of Argive medism was recorded. Before the Battle of Plataea in 479, while Mardonius was still in Attica, the Argives reported that they could no longer hinder the Spartan army under Pausanias from advancing over the Isthmus against the Persians. The Argives wished good luck to Mardonius, who then devastated Attica and withdrew to Boeotia. This time there is no assessment of the Argives’ motivations, just a presentation of the “facts,” if genuine. This passage also seems condemnatory on the surface, because here we are not dealing with competing versions and the issues raised above are not brought to the fore. Again, the context of the Argive-Laconian enmity helps to explain Argos’ medism, if not justify it as convincingly as before. The enmity at least makes the medism at 9.12 intelligible, and the tradition of Argive-Persian kinship accomplishes the same purpose.

A significant comment on Herodotus’ methodology, and of Fehling’s criticism of it, is that the historian in this case uses a tradition already well established. He may be reluctant to take a stand on the veracity of Xerxes’ embassy, but that he includes it at all suggests that it would not raise eyebrows, even if Herodotus’ account was the first in which his audience heard of the event, at least given the context in which it was presented. In short, at 7.150 Herodotus was not working in a vacuum.

If we consider his comments on Thebes by comparison, which drew the hostility of the Boeotian Plutarch,27 an interesting difference arises. Herodotus makes no secret of his disdain for the way the Thebans behaved in the course of Xerxes’ invasion. The Thebans readily surrendered to the Persians and supported them at length, even providing their city as a base of operations.²⁸ The Thebans, too, had a connection with the barbarian East, specifically the Phoenicians, who served in the fleets of the Persians. Herodotus notes that Phoenicians led by Cadmus came to Boeotia and introduced the alphabet in Greece (5.57–58). Yet, interestingly, he makes no attempt to associate the Thebans’ medism with their Phoenician origins. The opportunity does not seem to have been there; that is, stories do not seem to have circulated of diplomatic interaction between Thebes and the Phoenicians, nor do Thebes’ Phoenician origins have the same significance for Greeks as the Persians’ Argive origins. For this reason, Herodotus has nothing on Thebes comparable to Xerxes’ embassy at 7.150.

In any case, the idea of kinship diplomacy was not likely to have been a novel concept to Herodotus’ audience. Thucydides gives plenty of indication that such methods of diplomacy were common in that period, including a possible use of kinship myth in Thrace, as we shall see. Peisistratus seems to have used kinship myth in the 560s. Moreover, Herodotus’ account depends on a hellenocentric world view that establishes a real relationship between Persia and Argos, based on a putative ancestor shared by both. What How and Wells called a “Greek fiction” when referring to the Perses link is a fiction only from our point of view.²⁹ A more appropriate word would be “tradition.” Herodotus is not only interested in recording the facts; he also seeks to preserve the traditional, as Oswyn Murray has shown,³⁰ because by its very nature, the traditional is important and meaningful and should be preserved. Just as this hellenocentric mode of thinking enabled the Greeks to give order to the wide world around them, thus informing the development of Herodotus’ craft as a recorder of the past, it also enabled a fuller understanding of Herodotus’ purpose by his audience, as he intended when he presented, if not also invented, Xerxes’ remarkable embassy to Argos.

ATHENS AND THRACE

Thucydides makes abundantly clear the extent to which the concept of sungeneia, or kinship, in a diplomatic context was known to the Greeks of the late fifth century, who would constitute the initial audiences of the first two historians. Out of thirty-three passages in which he refers to sungeneia, twenty-six examples are between separate and sovereign poleis.31 An example would be the relationship between colony and mother city, such as that of Corinth and Syracuse: the latter sought help from its mother city in the face of Athenian aggression on the basis of their kinship (6.88.7). There were also indications of ethnic affiliation: a common Dorian identity was felt among Corinth, Sparta, and Potidaea, on which basis the Corinthians pleaded for help from Sparta on behalf of Potidaea (1.71.4). The Athenians justified their subjugation of Ionian states, denying that they held them in enslavement but rather likening the relationship to that of a parent and children (6.82.3). We have seen this same sort of justification of hegemony in the use of the Return of the Heracleidae by Argos and later Sparta. Alexander the Great would employ kinship myth in the same vein.

While Thucydides would seem to embrace some sort of reality of the ancient heroes,³² he does express doubt about the motives of political actions when grounded in myth. For example, he argued that some of the myriad states involved in the Athenian/Syracusan conflict of 415–413 made ethnic affiliations a pretext for more pragmatic concerns. That is, money, power, and necessity, rather than considerations of sungeneia, often determined which side a polis would take (7.57–58). However, a number of scholars have felt that Thucydides underestimated the earnestness with which Greek states did embrace an ethnic identity grounded in putative, and usually eponymous, ancestors, that to be Dorian meant to be descended from Dorus and Ionian from Ion.³³ Thucydides may have seen the invocation of such identity as rhetorical or a pretext and presented it as such in his narrative,³⁴ but we can account for his attitude by remembering his historiographical objectives, which were “to reach down to the real causes of events, and not to be satisfied with the superficial. This often manifests itself as a reaction against popular beliefs and explanations.”³⁵ If Thucydides feels that a tradition, no matter how widely held, contradicts observable data, he will intercede in his narrative and apply a corrective. Such is the case of the Athenian claim of kinship with the ruling dynasty of Thrace, to which we now turn.

At the outset of the Peloponnesian War, in the summer of 431, Athens formed an alliance with Sitalces, king of the Odrysian Thracians. The Thracians were a nonhellenic people who were considered primitive by Greek writers, especially the Thracians who lived in the mountainous areas, as opposed to the ones in the coastal plains who interacted more with the Greeks. The Athenians had considerable interests in the Thraceward region, which was an important source of wheat, timber, and gold and an area adjoining Athens’ mercantile links to the Black Sea. There were also concerns about the Athenians’ erstwhile ally Perdiccas in Macedon, whose proximity to Amphipolis, Potidaea (currently under siege by the Athenians), and other Athenian interests was a cause for anxiety. As Thucydides relates (2.29), to procure the alliance, the Athenians enlisted the aid of one Nymphodorus of Abdera as their proxenos, a sort of ambassador who looked out for Athenian interests in Thrace. His sister was married to Sitalces, and so he had the king’s ear. The alliance was arranged in Athens, where, as part of the agreement, Sitalces’ son Sadocus became an Athenian citizen.36 Nymphodorus also managed to turn Perdiccas back to Athens’ side in exchange for the city of Therme, to be restored to the Macedonian king.

In the middle of his account, Thucydides makes a curious remark: “This Teres [father of Sitalces and founder of the Odrysian state] has nothing to do with the Tereus whose wife was Procne, the daughter of Pandion, from Athens. They are not even from the same Thrace. Rather Tereus dwelt in Daulis, in the land now called Phocis but at that time inhabited by Thracians.”³⁷ There is no evidence that the Athenians ever asserted a mythical link with the Odrysians in the treaty. However, the fact that Thucydides should take the time to mention Tereus in this connection suggests that there was at least popular talk of such a connection. Thracian Tereus, son of Ares, loomed large in Athenian tradition. He was, for example, the subject of a play by Sophocles.³⁸ According to the tale as preserved by later sources, Pandion king of Athens enlisted Tereus’ aid during a border dispute with Labdacus of Thebes. The matter was resolved satisfactorily, and so Pandion gave Tereus his daughter Procne in marriage. The rest of the tale concerns Tereus’ loathsome treatment of Procne and her sister Philomela and their revenge, which entails the murder of Tereus’ son Itys. The whole affair is resolved with the metamorphosis of Tereus and the sisters into birds.³⁹

Several points bear noting. Thucydides’ objection is not to the historicity of Tereus but to the application of his story to the diplomatic exchanges over which Nymphodorus presided. So when the historian criticizes the use of this story, he does so on the myth’s own terms, with four arguments: (1) Contrary to the idea that Tereus was from Thrace proper, the tradition held that he was from Daulis in Phocis, where Thracians had resided in “ancient” times. (2) Like any good, practical king, Pandion would expect to reap some material benefit from giving away his daughter in a diplomatic marriage. Procuring aid from an allied king would be considerably easier if his kingdom were close at hand, as Daulis was, compared with Thrace. (3) The names of Tereus and Teres are different. (4) Teres was the founder of the Odrysian dynasty and not of a line going back to Tereus. The effort that Thucydides exerts in making these arguments suggests that he was fighting a well-entrenched tradition. Hornblower and Gomme both conjecture that Thucydides, who had strong connections with Thrace (see below), felt compelled to apply a corrective to earlier treatments of the story by Sophocles and possibly Hellanicus.40

Until Sophocles, there is no evidence that links Tereus directly with Thrace.⁴¹ Before that invention, Tereus was a hero from Phocis and had a cult in Megara.⁴² Curiously, he was still regarded a Thracian either way, given the tradition that central Greece had been inhabited by Thracians at one time. Again, our main and earliest source is Thucydides (2.29.3), although Pausanias makes an interesting observation: whereas the Megarians believed Tereus to have been king in Pagae (in the Megarid), Pausanias asserts his view that he was king of Daulis, “for long ago barbarians dwelt in much of what is now called Greece. After Tereus’ acts against Philomela and those of the women regarding Itys had occurred, Tereus was unable to capture them.”⁴³ The last clause implies that Tereus, a Thracian or Thracian descendant, started out in central Greece and pursued the sisters southward.⁴⁴

Associating Tereus with Thrace itself may have been a Sophoclean invention because an association based on the similarity of names (Thucydides notwithstanding) provided an opportunity.⁴⁵ Sophocles would be operating in the same vein as Herodotus with such a name association. Though he may well have had more immediate literary goals in connecting Tereus with Thrace (see below), his method would be in accordance with the general hellenocentric view discussed above in connection with Herodotus 7.150, whereby the periphery of civilization is organized in terms of its relationship to the hellenic core. But it could have been only after 480 that such an innovation on that basis occurred,⁴⁶ that is, the period in which the Odrysian kingdom was first consolidated under Teres.⁴⁷ The date of composition of the Tereus is uncertain but most likely was in the decade or so following the treaty with Thrace.⁴⁸ The question becomes, why associate Tereus with Thrace? The treaty obviously provides the context, but interpreting the few scant fragments is difficult. On the one hand, the play may have been acknowledging the historical reality that the Athenians were seeking closer ties with the Thraceward region. We have noted that it was in their interests to promote their links with the region, given its importance to their strategic concerns. The tradition of Odrysian descent from Tereus would serve this purpose, for which Sophocles, whose plays served a civic function as much as any other, provided no doubt a memorable expression.49

The fact remains that Tereus seems hardly an appropriate symbol of Athenian-Thracian kinship, and the play hints at an Athenian apprehension of sungeneia with the barbarian Thracians. Of the mutilation of Philomela, which follows her rape, Anne Pippin Burnett says the following:

This second act of violation thus fixes Tereus not just as a barbarian opposed to Greek ways but as an enemy to the whole human race—one who not only dismantles Greek marriage, breaks oaths, and insults an Attic king, but also represents mating itself as a barren cutting of female flesh. And this means that the place where he rules, the Thrace where Procne will take her revenge, is a place where men are far worse than beasts.⁵⁰

Given the genius of Sophocles, we should not be surprised to find him painting a multifaceted and problematic picture, a trademark to be found more famously in his plays on Oedipus. The foreign Tereus, whether invented by Sophocles or someone earlier in the fifth century, gave the playwright an opportunity to explore Tereus’ barbaric behavior in the context of “otherness,” whereby one could contrast the boorish and uncivilized behavior and character of foreigners to those regarded as virtuous by good Greeks.⁵¹

Nonetheless, the question remains whether the Thracians themselves could have embraced this story. In theory, it would seem unreasonable to expect the Athenians to propose a link through Tereus as a basis for an alliance if the Odrysians did not share their belief. Such practical considerations do seem to have entered the mind of Alexander the Great in his dealings with non-Greek peoples, as we shall see. Can the same be true of the Athenian demos, who managed foreign affairs in the popular assembly known as the ecclesia? The question is further complicated by the considerable influence Pericles and other charismatic individuals wielded over the members of the ecclesia. Thucydides does not say so, but it would not be surprising if it were Pericles, an educated and practical man who understood the importance of the Thraceward region to Athens, who engineered the diplomacy with the Odrysians.⁵²

We find some evidence to support a Thracian acceptance of the tradition. First, there was a strong Greek presence on the Thracian littoral, with colonies such as Amphipolis, Eion, and Brea engaging in extensive mercantile activity with the Thracians and others. As Isaac has shown, this state of affairs provided opportunities for wealthy families, especially in Athens, to serve the interests of both their polis and themselves. For example, the gold and silver mines in Thrace provided a basis of power for Peisistratus after he seized the tyranny in Athens.53 Several of the Philaïdai were actually tyrants in the Chersonese, most notably the elder and younger Miltiades.⁵⁴ Miltiades’ son Cimon, just before his success at Scyros, captured Eion in 476 and in 465 acquired the gold mines at Mount Pangaeus in Thrace after putting down a Thasian revolt.⁵⁵ Thucydides himself, of course, wielded considerable power in Thrace, as he comments that he had the right to mine gold in the area, enhancing his influence among the Thracians and others, who could then be potential enemies of Brasidas. He seems to be referring to the mines at Mount Pangaeus, because Plutarch says that Thucydides inherited his from Cimon.⁵⁶

Second, we have evidence of intermarriage and actual consanguinity between Thracians and Greeks. We have already noted the marriage of Nymphodorus’ sister to Sitalces. The younger Miltiades was married to a daughter of an earlier Thracian king, Olorus.⁵⁷ Thucydides’ father was also named Olorus, leading to the conclusion in Plutarch’s mind that he was descended from Cimon.⁵⁸ At the beginning of the fourth century, the Thracian kinglet Seuthes II offered his daughter to Xenophon in marriage and also offered to buy Xenophon’s daughter, if he had one, “in the Thracian fashion” (Xen. Ana. 7.2.38). As a result of this state of affairs, many avenues of cultural influence were open, allowing for some level of hellenization of the Thracians to occur, even given their reputation for barbarity and their frequent hostility to Greek mercantile endeavors in the area.

Finally, it is Seuthes who offers the best evidence of Thracian acceptance (or at least acknowledgement) of their descent from Tereus. This Seuthes was the son of Maesades, who had ruled the Melantidae, the Thynians, and the Tranipsae in a strategically vital part of Thrace north of the Propontis. Apparently a vassal to King Medocus, Maesades had been expelled from his territory,⁵⁹ leaving the orphaned Seuthes to be raised in the royal court. Later, Seuthes strongly desired to recover his ancestral land. For this purpose, he sought the help of Xenophon and those Greek mercenaries who had survived their journey out of Asia following their disastrous association with Cyrus the Younger (Xen. Ana. 7.2.32–34). At their meeting, “Seuthes said that he would not mistrust any Athenian, for he said that he knew the Athenians were his kinsmen and that he believed them to be well-minded friends.”⁶⁰ Later, while preparing for a march against his enemies, Seuthes and Xenophon agreed to have “Athena” be their watchword in recognition of their kinship.⁶¹

Ultimately, however, we can go only so far with this evidence. Let us recapitulate several important points with the following questions: (1) Does Seuthes’ acknowledgement of Tereus in c. 400 mean that Sitalces also recognized the link in 431? (2) Did there have to be an expectation that the Thracians believed in the Tereus link for such a link to be invoked in the treaty with Sitalces? (3) If so, would the Athenian demos have been concerned with such a practical question, or would it have occurred only to someone like Pericles to consider it? These questions are difficult to answer without the best evidence of all, an actual text of the treaty. With that state of affairs, there can be no definite answers, only probabilities.

Seuthes’ assertion is strong evidence, but one more piece of evidence must be considered as well. Because it is clear that Thucydides knows Thrace and the peoples of that region, he would seem to be in a strong position to know the answer to our first question. There is no doubt that he feels the need to correct mistaken notions among the Athenians about the connection of Tereus to the house of Teres, but in addition he may have done so with the knowledge that there were no such beliefs in the court of Sitalces, and Thucydides’ superior vantage point compelled the need for the remarks at 2.29 as a corrective.

That interpretation of Thucydides’ perspective and intentions, however, still does not preclude the invocation of kinship in the treaty with Thrace, for the remaining two questions stand: did it really matter if the Thracians shared the Athenians’ belief, and would the Athenian citizenry have been pragmatic enough to consider this question? The answers to both amount to the following conclusion: it did not matter whether the Thracians believed in the Tereus link or not. Even if someone like Pericles, seeing the benefits of an alliance with Sitalces, proposed it in the Assembly, there is no reason to say that the demos then did not invoke the link with Tereus as a means of supporting that alliance. Regarding practical matters, for example, Thracian acceptance of Tereus, there is considerable evidence that the members of the Athenian ecclesia were often short-sighted and fickle. The decisions involving the judgment of Melos in 416 and the Sicilian Expedition in 415 are cases in point. I mentioned before Adcock and Mosley’s proposition that the citizens voting in a democratic assembly would be at a disadvantage in fully understanding the particulars of foreign affairs (see note 52). It was opinion rather than knowledge that guided Athenian public policy; moreover, it was a “collective opinion,” arrived at through the deliberative process of an entire voting community, thus giving its decisions their authority and demonstrating their wisdom. Thus, in political matters, authority was granted by collective acknowledgement and agreement.62 Kinship diplomacy is an example of a political matter, and the same process that granted authority to political decisions in full democracies also granted authority to kinship myths, the authority expressed by the traditions that were well known to the voting collective. However the connection of Tereus with Thrace came about, it was a tradition that apparently was commonly acknowledged in Athens, found voice in Sophocles, and was rejected by Thucydides on rational grounds.

I opened this section by noting the recurring disconnect between Thucydides and the masses. Thucydides documents it in other contexts, as when he contrasts his scientific approach to historical knowledge to the more reckless credulity of others (1.20). Thucydides also has stern words for the imprecise conceptions of myth described above, for the belief in the demos’ collective wisdom, based partly on their embrace of the poets and of sensationalistic historians (logographoi, including Herodotus perhaps?) without sufficient practical knowledge.63 At 2.29, Thucydides certainly is reacting to a real phenomenon, for which Sophocles provides evidence, if after the fact, and our historian does so in the context of the treaty with the Odrysians in 431. Even the silence about other sons of Tereus besides the ill-fated Itys did not hinder popular belief that the Odrysians could have been descended from Tereus. We are reminded of Smith’s ideological model of descent, discussed in Chapter One, which can account for an embrace of this tradition without those intermediaries in the collective memory of the Athenians.

THE SPARTANS AND THE JEWS

Kinship between Greeks and Jews, even its allegation, opens up the fascinating question of contact between two of the great civilizations of ancient times. While they seem to have paid little attention to each other for much of their respective histories, all that changed (as with so many other things) with the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the hellenistic period that followed, the Jews suddenly found themselves in a Greek world that had exploded into Asia and Egypt.⁶⁴ The supposed claims of kinship took place in this new cosmopolitan context. Because of their profound implications, these claims have received enormous scholarly interest, especially those made in a letter sent to Rome and Sparta in 143 BCE by the Hasmonean Jonathan Maccabaeus, who referred to kinship with the Spartans through Abraham, an assertion he says had already been made by an earlier king of Sparta.⁶⁵ My purpose in going down this already thoroughly traveled road is to accomplish two things: to gauge the nature of Abraham’s authority as a putative ancestor of Greeks and to observe how the Jews made use of a hellenic diplomatic mechanism.

First, let us review the evidence. Our earliest source is the first book of Maccabees, a book of the Apocrypha, written in Hebrew around 100 BCE,⁶⁶ though surviving manuscripts exist in Greek, thanks to its inclusion in the Septuagint. To this we can append, with some variations, the account of Josephus, a historian residing in Jerusalem before its sack by the Romans in 70 CE. Our sources allege that during his long reign (309/8–265), Areus I of Sparta sent a letter to Onias I, the High Priest in Jerusalem,67 with the following claim: “It has been found in writing concerning the Spartans and the Jews that they are brethren and are of the family of Abraham. And now that we have learned this, please write us concerning your welfare; we on our part write to you that your cattle and your property belong to us, and ours belong to you.”⁶⁸ The text of this letter is given at the end of the section of I Maccabees that deals with the diplomatic overtures of the High Priest Jonathan to Rome and Sparta in 143 BCE. In his own letter to Sparta, Jonathan alleges that Areus had mentioned alliance as a goal of his diplomacy as well, although the quoted text of Areus’ letter does not say anything about alliance, nor does Josephus’ rendering. Jonathan makes the following case to the Spartans:

Onias welcomed the envoy with honor and received the letter, which contained a clear declaration of alliance and friendship. Therefore, though we have no need of these things, since we have as encouragement the holy books which are in our hands, we have undertaken to send to renew our brotherhood and friendship with you, so that we may not become estranged from you, for considerable time has passed since you sent your letter to us.⁶⁹

Jonathan goes on to say that the Spartans have been remembered in holy festivals, as well as in the Jews’ prayers. He mentions the wars Judaea has fought (and won) over the Seleucids during Jonathan’s tenure and concludes, “We were unwilling to annoy you and our other allies and friends with these wars, for we have the help which comes from Heaven for our aid; and we were delivered from our enemies and our enemies were humbled,”⁷⁰ a not unfair boast, given the disarray of the Seleucid leadership at this time. Two ambassadors are then named, envoys to be sent to Rome who are then to stop at Sparta, to “greet you and deliver to you this letter from us concerning the renewal of our brotherhood.”⁷¹ Josephus’ version has most of the elements of Jonathan’s, with such variations as a longer greeting (Ant. 13.166), attributing Seleucid aggressions to “covetousness” () (13.169), and, most importantly, the rendering of “we have no need of [alliance and friendship]” as “we have no need of proof [of our alliance and friendship]” (, 13.167).⁷² The last item is significant because it shows Josephus’ awareness of how kinship diplomacy was conducted in the hellenistic period. As we shall see in more detail later, when we examine hellenistic inscriptions containing kinship terms, presentation of proof of kinship was often expected.73

To this overture the Spartans responded with another letter, apparently addressed to Jonathan’s brother and successor Simon, having learned of Jonathan’s death in 143/2. Thus, “they wrote to [Simon] on bronze tablets to renew with him the friendship and alliance which they had established with Judas and Jonathan, his brothers.”⁷⁴

Taking Areus’ letter first, we must ask why a hellenistic Spartan king would approach the Jews and declare kinship with them. As with Xerxes’ embassy to Argos, the notion is highly implausible.⁷⁵ Yet, some scholars have gone to great lengths to find a reason for the diplomacy. Arguments in favor of it vary widely in plausibility. One proposal is that Areus needed manpower to bolster his aggressive policies, a commodity Sparta was sorely lacking at this time.⁷⁶ Jewish mercenaries, the argument goes, would have served well in this capacity. The phrasing at I Maccabees 12.23, about the sharing of resources, may have referred to military resources.⁷⁷ Areus’ connection with Judaea perhaps should be seen in the context of his alliance with Ptolemy II, whose territory at this time included Judaea. There may have been a Jewish community near Sparta, through which Areus might have forged a link with Judaea and thus strengthened his ties to Egypt. The context perhaps involves the traditional anti-Macedonian stance taken by Sparta, for which Areus hoped for support from Judaea, again in its capacity as a Ptolemaic vassal state.⁷⁸ Other theories have been advanced, but there has been little headway in plausibility. To be sure, the Ptolemies were active in Greece, especially working against the interests of their Macedonian rivals there. But why would Areus need Jewish intermediaries when he already had an alliance with Ptolemy II, as attested in the Chremonidean Decree of 268, a document that recorded the list of Spartan allies ranged against Macedon (SIG³ 434/5)?⁷⁹

For me, the most salient objection to the authenticity of Areus’ letter is his reference to Abraham rather than a Greek figure. The problems are several. (1) Would Areus have even been aware of Abraham, bearing in mind that the Septuagint did not exist until later in the third century? (2) What could possibly link Abraham to the Spartans? (3) Were there any sources in Greek that might have suggested to Areus such a link? (4) Most importantly, if Areus were somehow aware of Abraham, is it reasonable that this Hebrew patriarch could possess the authority with which we have seen the Greeks investing their own heroes?

No more evidence is at hand to support Areus’ claims, but there was another incident between the periods of Onias I and Jonathan involving putative kinship between the Spartans and the Jews that could suggest a prior tradition. In 174, the leader of the pro-Greek party in Jerusalem was Jason, the brother of the High Priest Onias III. To remove his brother and take his place, Jason sought the help of the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes, later to be one of the great villains in Jewish history. In response to offers of money and to promises to hellenize the city (including the building of gymnasia, the implementation of a Greek education, and the enrollment of Jews as citizens of Antioch), Antiochus helped establish Jason as High Priest. Jason kept his promises but was eventually deposed, in 171, by another rival, Menelaus, who went further in his efforts of hellenization. Later Jason returned to Jerusalem and captured the city, killing many Jews and engendering such hatred that he was driven out again. Detested and cursed, he fled to the Nabataean Arabs, to Egypt, and finally to Sparta, where he perished. His reason for going to Sparta supposedly was to seek sanctuary on the basis of kinship (sungeneia).80

Is it possible that Jason was referring to the tradition supposedly cited by Areus? Our main source for Jason’s exploits, the Second Book of Maccabees, was an epitome of an earlier history by Jason of Cyrene, whose floruit would seem to be around 150 BCE.⁸¹ That is roughly the time of Jonathan’s letter (143). So either Jason the exiled High Priest knew of the tradition or it was Jason of Cyrene or his epitomizer who introduced it (possibly under the influence of Jonathan’s letter). Orrieux has suggested that the detail about kinship was introduced by the author of II Maccabees to emphasize the cruel (and just) fate Jason suffered, seeking the kinship of a foreign people and dying in a land far from his ancestral home. There is nothing about the Spartan reaction to Jason’s claim of kinship, but there would be no need, the point having been made.⁸² If Orrieux is right, then we cannot use this evidence to support the authenticity of Areus’ claims.

However, the possibility of Areus’ awareness of Abraham, slim though it is, cannot be denied. Goldstein maintains that Areus’ letter could have originally been written in Aramaic, given that Aramaic scribes were known to be of service to governments in the Greek world as early as the late fifth century (at least in Athens, where Persian documents in Aramaic were translated: Thuc. 4.50).⁸³ From this one might further adduce that Areus learned of Abraham directly from local Jewish contacts, whether the aforementioned neighboring community or scribes in his court. Ultimately, this notion is unconvincing.

More promising are possible sources in Greek. One that predates Areus’ letter is Hecataeus of Abdera (fl. 300 BCE), a courier under Ptolemy I who had traveled extensively across Greece, including to Sparta.⁸⁴ Hecataeus is the earliest source in Greek for the origins of the Jews, especially his Aegyptika, which describes the exodus from Egypt under Moses. Not all these “banished foreigners” () followed Moses to Palestine; some, says Hecataeus, followed Danaus and Cadmus to Greece.85 Here we may have a possible link, because Danaus was ultimately an ancestor of Heracles through Perseus. It will be recalled that the two royal houses of Sparta were founded by the sons of the Heraclid Aristodemus. No less than his predecessors, Areus would certainly have embraced his Heraclid ancestry, but it remains questionable if he would have connected all the dots, as it were, to link the Spartans (or rather the ruling class) with the Jews, even through their common ancestors in Egypt; on the Greek side alone, several traditions must come together to link Danaus to the founders of Sparta. But once that was established, Hecataeus could provide the proof of kinship with Areus’ contemporaries in Judaea.

Areus’ letter speaks of Abraham, however, not Moses. Goldstein offers a possible explanation: Danaus was equated with a son of Abraham and Keturah named Dedan, who himself had a son named Leummim, a word associated with Gentiles, including possibly (as at Gen. 10.5) the Greeks.⁸⁶ In other words, the kinship becomes apparent when two different versions of the same story are compared: the Greek containing Danaus and the Hebrew containing Dedan. Whatever the merits of this reconstruction, the problem remains of how Areus would be aware of any of it. A direct reference to Abraham would be required. Such a reference supposedly was made in another work of Hecataeus called On Abraham and the Egyptians. However, the quotation of this lost work by Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius does not inspire confidence.⁸⁷ Here Hecataeus supposedly gives verses of Sophocles that reflect Jewish monotheistic ideas, a strong marker of fabrication by later Jewish sources.⁸⁸ It seems then that Hecataeus could only be useful to Areus if Abraham were mentioned in some no longer extant portion of an authentic work like the Aegyptika.

A hellenistic writer who unequivocally connects the Greeks and the Jews through Abraham is Cleodemus Malchus. Josephus relates that the hellenistic historian Alexander Polyhistor had quoted Cleodemus, who wrote in his history of the Jews that a son of Abraham and Keturah, Aphras, had accompanied Heracles in his expedition against Antaeus in north Africa. Aphras’ daughter married Heracles and bore him a son, Diodorus.⁸⁹ The date of Cleodemus is unknown, but Alexander Polyhistor’s floruit is c. 100 BCE, making him contemporaneous with the author of I Maccabees. Areus could have read Cleodemus and used him to justify kinship with the Jews. To connect Diodorus with the Spartans, Goldstein notes the similarity of “Diodoros” and “Doros,” a scenario that brings together two disparate traditions concerning the Spartans’ origins, their Heraclid and their Dorian ancestries (Figure 3.1). This is the only way the Spartans and the Jews could be linked.

FIGURE 3.1
The Spartans and the Jews

Curiously, it is the same sort of mythopoesis that lies behind the much older and unquestionably authentic tradition articulated by Tyrtaeus and others, wherein Heraclid and Dorian are linked by the adoption of Hyllus by Aegimius. But here no opportunity can exist for a Spartan-Jewish link, and one wonders if the resulting contradiction would have bothered Areus, namely, that Dorus is a grandson of Heracles in the one version and the father of Hyllus’ adopted father Aegimius in the other. Contradictions such as these are ubiquitous in Greek myth and did not generally meet with the sort of dismay sometimes expressed by analytical writers. Was Areus of like mind? One can presume, given his education, that he would not likely embrace the genealogy outlined by Cleodemus unless the Spartan king’s appeal to the Jews was consciously made for purely expedient reasons and was based on a tradition he would otherwise reject. Given the unknowns on that count, as well as our ignorance of when Cleodemus lived, we cannot put much faith in this source.

Finally, none of the foregoing really gets to the heart of the fourth question I posed above: could a Hebrew patriarch stand in for a Greek hero? Even if Areus were aware of Abraham, had some reason to reach out to the Jews, and acknowledged a genealogy such as that found in Cleodemus, it does not seem possible to me that Abraham could command the sort of authority that we have seen bolster and justify Greek kinship diplomacy. To be sure, Areus was a shrewd leader who transformed the archaic Spartan kingship into a hellenistic institution and made his city a respected power once again (if not the feared hegemon of the classical period). But I see no reason why he would not follow the same pattern that had prevailed in the Greek world for centuries: whenever expressing relationships with nonhellenic peoples, in diplomatic activity and other venues, the Greeks always employed hellenic personages (regardless of whether they were actually Greek in origin), for example, Tereus with the Thracians and Perses with the Persians. There is no evidence that in the hellenistic period the hellenocentrism in Greek myth-making began to break down.

On the contrary, considerable evidence shows that hellenistic Greeks firmly retained this world view. The embrace of Greek heroes and gods as ancestors (and legitimizing agents) by the major dynasties illustrates the point. It was primarily to Heracles that the Antigonids turned (following the example of their Argead predecessors); to Apollo, the Seleucids; and to Dionysus (rather than the non-Greek but similar god Osiris), the Ptolemies.90 Nor does Abraham have the benefit of appearing to be similar to some Greek personage, the way Osiris in Egypt and Indra in India struck the Greeks as similar to Dionysus. Areus’ embrace of Abraham as ancestor is simply untenable. Areus’ letter to the High Priest Onias, then, seems to be inauthentic.

Corroborating evidence comes from another case of diplomacy between Greeks and Jews later in the second century. In time, the Jews achieved a favored status in Rome. The senate issued a senatus consultum (s.c.) that admonished the Seleucids to abandon all hostile actions and ambitions toward Judaea, which supposedly was quoted in a decree of Pergamum (as Josephus has it). The Pergamenes wanted to assure both the Romans and the Jews of their intention to comply with the edict (Jos. Ant. 14.247–258). The question of the exact timing of the s.c. and the Pergamene decree defies easy answers. John Hyrcanus I was High Priest (135/4–104), and the Antiochus mentioned in the text is either Antiochus VII Sidetes (139–129) or Antiochus IX Cyzicenus (115–95).⁹¹ In any case, the Pergamenes acknowledged, if not kinship, a close tie to the Jewish state, for their ancestors and Abraham had been philoi. The Pergamenes could have easily asserted a bond of consanguinity with the Jews but chose not to. As we shall see in Chapter Six, the former were not reluctant to employ their putative ancestor Heracles in support of their grant of polity to the citizens of Tegea. Heracles could have provided the same tie with the Jews as he would have for the Spartans. I suggest that the Pergamenes did not go this route because, again, Abraham was not a hellenic figure. As in Sparta, he did not command the authority that one would expect as a link in kinship diplomacy.

Given this state of affairs, one might wonder why the Spartans of the second century bothered to send a letter to Simon, Jonathan’s successor, apparently acknowledging his claim of kinship. But in fact the Spartans held back. The letter only mentions “friendship and alliance,” using philia and summachia, with no references to more consanguineous connections (as denoted by sungeneia and sometimes oikeiots). Philia could imply kinship but generally described a more distant connection,⁹² and thus it was the appropriate term to signal Spartans’ disavowal of Abraham as an ancestor while they embraced Jonathan’s overtures in general terms.

The authenticity of Jonathan’s letter has proven easier to sustain in scholarly discussion. Further, Jonathan likely fabricated Areus’ letter for his own purposes around 143.93 Jonathan was himself a dynamic figure, with a career not entirely dissimilar to Areus’. Like the Spartan king, Jonathan fought (militarily and diplomatically) to enhance Judaea’s position in the face of external threat, in this case from the Seleucids.⁹⁴ He also faced enemies within the Jewish state. Set in opposition to the Maccabees was a hellenizing party, who occasionally appealed to the Seleucids for support. The aforementioned Jason was such an opponent.

These foreign and domestic challenges are important to keep in mind when considering some of the proposals that have been made to explain Jonathan’s motives for alleging kinship with Sparta. A detailed analysis of those motives is beyond the scope of this study,⁹⁵ but a brief notice of the main patterns of scholarly opinion does yield an interesting observation about a Greek institution, kinship diplomacy, in the hands of non-Greeks. There is general agreement that if Jonathan’s letter is authentic, it points to an understanding among the Jews of how hellenistic diplomacy worked.⁹⁶ As Goldstein has noted, his diplomacy bears certain similarities to the embassies sent by Lampsacus to her sister-city Massilia and to Rome in 197 BCE (SIG³ 591).⁹⁷ The purpose of the embassy to Rome was probably to ask for help in the face of the aggressions of Antiochus III.⁹⁸ Though Lampsacus could claim a basis for kinship with the Romans through its affiliation with—not to mention proximity to—Troy, the Lampsacenes also enlisted the aid of Massilia, a former colony of Phocaea (as Lampsacus was) and a long-term ally of Rome, to strengthen the case made to the Romans. Jonathan saw a similar opportunity with Sparta, another inveterate ally of Rome, which had gone so far as to destroy the Achaean League in 146, in part for Sparta’s sake.⁹⁹ In lieu of kinship with the Romans themselves, Judaea had to rely on kinship with a favored Roman ally. The purpose for this diplomatic overture would be to procure the same sort of protection from Seleucid aggression that Lampsacus had sought, the threat this time coming from the kings Demetrius II and Tryphon.

There are, however, two flaws in this reconstruction. One, Judaea already had a treaty with Rome, in effect since 161.¹⁰⁰ Thus, it would be surprising to find Jonathan strengthening ties with Rome by reaching out to Sparta.¹⁰¹ The difficulty is analogous to that of Areus’ appeal to Judaea for the sake of establishing or strengthening bonds with Ptolemy. Second, Jonathan’s boasts themselves argue against Goldstein’s interpretation: Jonathan quite clearly eschews any call for alliance with Sparta for practical reasons, for the Jews have divine protection, which has already seen them through their wars with the Seleucids (I Macc. 12.9–15).

Most explanations of Jonathan’s motives are couched in the context of the Jews’ place in the hellenistic world at large. In the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, the spread of Greek culture was one legacy of Macedonian imperialism, a culture that came to imbue the world of the Jews, who thus had to articulate their own place within the wider hellenistic world. But if the objective was to promote a sense of political or cultural legitimacy among the Greeks, the link Jonathan chose should have been a Greek god or hero, not a Hebrew patriarch. Jonathan’s purpose was in fact quite the opposite: not assimilation but an assertion of distinctiveness in the wider world.102 The evidence is in the confident assurances of their strength at I. Macc. 12.9–15; these assurances refute any need of material aid from Sparta.

So of what use was Sparta to Jonathan? Despite its peculiarities of social and political structure, Sparta’s traditional Lycurgan system, however much it was a shadow of its former self in the hellenistic period, gave Sparta its reputation for preeminence in discipline, order, valor, and military prowess. Jonathan was trying to declare Jewish superiority to the Spartans by denying his people needed their help, thus distancing themselves from the Greeks in an effort to assert their own identity, while at the same time he had the Jews take credit for Sparta’s brilliance by producing Abraham, the embodiment of their own virtues as conveyed in the Torah and, as progenitor of the Spartans, the one responsible for their virtues as well.¹⁰³ A likely motivation was to appeal to the hellenized Jews in Judaea, including Jonathan’s enemies in Jerusalem. He was trying to promote the legitimacy of the Hasmoneans.¹⁰⁴

For the most part, we have considered myth as a means of constructing identity in the Greek world, but we see that here, too, the Jews, having learned much from the Greeks, were employing myth in the same way. Jonathan was a good student. The use of kinship myth was a time-honored way to establish bonds between states, whatever their immediate objectives. In fact, kinship diplomacy seems to have increased dramatically in the hellenistic period, as the evidence of inscriptions suggests, though the pattern of survival of literary texts must also influence the percentage. More than ever before, it was a means to procure such goals as exchanges of polity, recognition of asylia, and so on. Because most of our sources for kinship diplomacy in this period are epigraphical and not literary, we sidestep much of the incredulity that often hampers our learned sources from unconditionally accepting a given tradition. Some of the links articulated at this time may well have involved fabrications, if not in whole, at least inasmuch as new lines had to be drawn in stemmas to make Polis A kin to Polis B. This process often involved reconciling local myths and connecting them through such panhellenic figures as Hellen, as we shall see. Fabrication of this sort is what lies behind Jonathan’s letter. While the Maccabees may have been enemies of the pro-hellenizing factions in Jerusalem, Jonathan at least understood Greeks, their modes of thought regarding myth, and their methods of diplomacy involving kinship. But rather than by a Greek figure, his purposes were best served by the Hebrews’ great forefather, who facilitated an expression of Jewish identity in the same way Heracles or Hellen did in the Greek world.