Families in the Greco-Roman World by Laurence Ray; Stromberg Agneta;

Author:Laurence, Ray; Stromberg, Agneta;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Inheritance, Priesthoods and Succession in Classical Athens: the Hierophantai of the Eumolpidai

William S. Bubelis

For all of the exacting attention that scholars have long paid to the legal, economic, demographic, and social dimensions of the oikos in Classical Athens, still much remains unclear and unsatisfactory. A particular problem concerns the degree to which an ancestral priesthood might always have been ensconced within a given oikos and thus attached to a given patriline connecting a priest to his direct biological ancestors. The very primacy of the oikos itself, however, and its close connection to the nuclear family, should not be taken for granted. This assumption has guided much of the work on the matter of succession among ancestral Athenian priesthoods, so much so as to hinder an accurate and reasonable understanding of the evidence at our disposal. Indeed, the appeal of the assumption has proven strong enough that few scholars have seen that inheritance of a priesthood might be a distinct institution in its own right, markedly different from that surrounding the oikos and the normal transmission of rights, property, and obligations.1

Any inquiry into the familial dimension of priesthoods ought therefore to yield a stimulating trove of new perspectives and information, especially those which challenge the underlying assumptions that have driven so much prior research.

The methodological challenges at hand nevertheless arise for understandable reasons. Lacking any detailed account of priestly succession in ancient literature, scholars have long sought to exploit the prosopographic data, drawn mainly from inscriptions and a few literary texts, in order to determine the principles involved. While that evidence is fragmentary and, especially in epigraphic texts, opaque, the occurrence of patrilineal farther – son family relationship patterns through time have long been unquestioned. Notably, such transmission would also be hard to distinguish from the devolution of non-priestly property, rights, and obligations more or less bound up with the oikos of a deceased priest.2 (That priests might, through force or by their own will, abdicate their office while obviously remaining in possession of their oikos has not yet entered the debate, and I will return to this question later.) It is curious that although scholars have known for some time that priestly succession among women could not have conformed to any oikos-centred model, none seem to have questioned whether the same might also have been true among some of their male counterparts.3 Indeed, the evidence for exclusively father-son inheritance is rather weak, for while such patrilineal transmission might appear to be the rule for some genê over long periods of time, those lines only seem to terminate when an external individual assumes the priesthood.

Much more problematic are those instances where an extra-patrilineal individual seems merely to interrupt such continuity, allowing father-son lines to resume only after the tenure of some other person. Uncomfortable with these patterns, a wide range of scholars has suggested that while certain genê did employ such patrilineal inheritance (e.g. the Eteoboutadai) others must have used allotment (e.g. the Kerykes) or a kind of priestly election or allotment (e.

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