Origins

Every Greek community traced its origin to a founder. Sometimes this would be a ‘‘real’’ person, the oikistes of a colony, like Battus in Cyrene or Archias for Syracuse, men who became heroized on death as the source of identifying characteristics of the community (not least its laws and sacred rites) and whose heroic status was celebrated in cult thereafter. More often a state’s foundation would be attributed to a ‘‘mythical’’ character, like Cadmus in Thebes, or some hero from the epic cycle. Usually, a god would be involved in some way as a catalyst or inspiration for the foundation. In the case of many colonies Apollo served this function, through the intermediation of Delphi. Sometimes there were conflicting traditions, as for example in Thebes, where the story of Cadmus rubbed shoulders with the notion that Thebans were ‘‘sons of the soil’’ (Spartoi, ‘‘sown-men’’). In any case, the account of a community’s foundation was the starting point of its local history and, at the same time, a justification for its presence on the land.

The story of Athens was the most complex. A series of shadowy figures, Ogygos (the first man), Aktaios (from whom Attica took its name as a corruption from Aktike), Cecrops (half-man, half-snake, first king, founding father), and Erichthonius (the ‘‘very-earthy’’ child of Athena’s thigh and Hephaestus’ sperm) were all named ‘‘autochthon’’ (‘‘earthborn’’). They embody one of the most distinctive features of Athenian national tradition, namely that all Athenians were, like their ancestors (progonoi), ‘‘born of the earth.’’ By this claim the Athenians set themselves apart from almost all other Greeks (Loraux 2000: 13-18). It became fundamental to the self-awareness of Athenian society and was cultivated by the orators in the epitaphios logos (Loraux 1986: passim; 2000: passim). It is easy to see this as a political creation of the fifth century, designed to upstage the Spartan tradition of the Return of the Heraclidae, but it is more likely a very old belief, centered around a number of local ‘‘first men,’’ who were only organized into a genealogical progression by the first chronicler of Athens, Hellanicus (FGrHist 323a F 10; cf. Jacoby 1949: 68ff., 87ff.; Komm. III b (Suppl.) Text 1-21; Harding 1994: 9-10, 48-49; Moller 2001). Put another way, the local historians did not simply record tradition, they molded it into a historical narrative. And they could challenge or change it, since popular tradition and chronicle are not identical. For example, Hellanicus recognized that others (e. g., the Arcadians, the Aeginetans, and the Thebans) laid claim to autochthony (FGrHist 323a F 27) and Philochorus (FGrHist 328 F 2a-b) appears to have rationalized that claim and adopted a position similar to that of Thucydides (1.2.5; cf. 2.36.1), namely that the Athenians were the first to settle down from their wanderings and found cities and that only since then could it be said that ‘‘the same people had always dwelt in the land.’’

Of course, founders were not the only heroes for a Greek community. There were many others and they were all worshipped at shrines, or sacred sites. Some people’s heroes had already been fitted into the grand scheme of heroic genealogy by the poets and early mythographers (West 1985); in the case of Attica, a latecomer, they were massaged into the genealogical progression of kings, as mentioned above, and at the same time tied in to the larger Panhellenic construct. The traditional tales that developed around these figures were part of local lore and the sites became topographical markers of cultural significance. A large preponderance of the fragments of the local histories collected by Jacoby concern the origin and location of such sites and the cults celebrated at them. In this way, local history compiled the sacred history of the community and, in doing so, traced the origin and importance of the major aristocratic families, since so many of them became significant in cultic contexts, as priests or other officials (see, for example, Androtion, FGrHist 324 F 1 for the origin of the Ceryces; Clinton 1974: passim, for the other families that controlled the priesthoods at Eleusis; Kearns 1989: passim, but especially 139-207, for a list of the heroes of Attica and the families associated with their worship).

Nor did a local history fail to locate the origin of a state’s later political, legal, and administrative institutions in the ‘‘mythical’’ past. The best example of the way local history interpreted the past in light of the present is perhaps the Areopagus. Whilst Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 3.6, 8.2) found evidence to convince him that the pre-Solonian Areopagus had constitutional control of the state, the local historians treated it exclusively as a court of law (Hellanicus, FGrHist 323a F 1; Androtion, FGrHist 324 F 3-4; Phanodemus, FGrHist 325 F 30; Philochorus, FGrHist 328 F 20 and F 196) with competence mainly for homicide (Wallace 1985: 3-47, but see Harding 1994: 85-87). This was, of course, the extent of its competence in the fifth and fourth centuries, which was thus projected into the past through the fiction of its adjudication of four mythical homicide trials, beginning with the suit between Ares and Poseidon over the killing of Alcippe by Halirrhothios in the reign of Cecrops, followed three generations later in the time of Erechtheus by the trial of Cephalus for the death of Procris, then after another three generations the trial of Daedalus for the murder of Talos, and culminating in the trial of Orestes, which had been invented and added to the list by Aeschylus for the resolution of the Oresteia.

This last example gives a good indication of the combination of oral legend and literary convenience that had to be molded creatively by the historian into a chronological scheme in order to provide a state with a history for the so-called regal period. In the subsequent period, what for us would be the archaic time, the list of the state’s eponymous magistrates provided the skeleton upon which to hang the few facts that could be found out. In my opinion these facts were based upon documented events, though they were sometimes filtered through family and popular tradition.

From the reforms of Cleisthenes onward, at least at Athens and probably in other states as well, increasingly accurate records were kept and available for consultation by local historians. Though I am not convinced by the suggestion of Shrimpton (1997: 147ff.) that local histories were distinguished from general histories specifically by their use of documents, I am of the opinion that the evidence supports the view that local historians were aware of their importance as sources of historical data and used them whenever they could (Harding 1994: 35-47; pace Thomas 1989: passim). And, as the excerpt from Dionysius cited above shows, as they came closer to their own time the local historians became increasingly detailed and accurate recorders of precise information that would otherwise have escaped the attention of the general historians, like Theopompus or Ephorus, or even Thucydides.