On vase paintings, in political rhetoric, and on the tragic stage, Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries bc boasted that they were the indigenous occupants of their land, descended from snake kings, literally born from the earth, in a word - autochthonous. Non-Athenians, boasts Praxithea in a fragment from Euripides’ lost play Erechtheus, have migrated from one land to another, but Athenians are born autochthonous: “Some cities are divided as if by throws of the dice, while others are imported from other cities. Whoever moves from one city to another is like a peg badly fixed on wood; in name he is a citizen, but not in his actions” (Eur. Erechtheus fr. 50.5-13 Austin). Perhaps the best expression of these autochthonous origins can be found in the myth of the birth of Erichthonios: Hephaistos caught an unwilling Athena in an amorous embrace; as the virgin goddess, patron deity of Athens, fled in disgust, Hephaistos ejaculated onto her leg. Athena wiped off the seed with some wool and threw it on the ground. From the Athenian ground, thus, emerged baby Erichthonios, his name derived from eris (wool) and chthonos (ground), literally born from the earth together with a myth that brilliantly joins the city’s patron deity to the native tradition of earthborn kings.
This myth of Athenian autochthony was a powerful one, and yet, as Vincent Rosi-vach has shown, Athenians were not continuous occupants of Attica, nor did they think they were. He shows that the myth of Athenian autochthony first appears in the middle of the fifth century bc and helps express political and ideological beliefs related to Athenian democracy (Rosivach 1987). Since all citizens are born equally from the earth, all have equal access to political power, and Athenian public discourse linked democracy explicitly to autochthony. In addition, since autochthony traced the genealogy of its citizens back to the earth itself, instead of to the four Ionian tribes that had earlier restricted political access to a limited aristocracy, Athens’ autochthonous myth helped distance the city from Ionia even though Athenian-
Ionian connections remained strong, the two cultures bound together by common dialect, ritual, and ancestry.
So what do we do with this Athenian myth of autochthony? Do we completely reject it? Exclude it from our historical inquiry because it does not tell the truth? No, but we need to recognize what it is telling us. In Barthes’ terms the myth of autochthony naturalizes a historical reality - a fifth-century one, not that of the city’s origins. The myth does not tell us how the city originated, but rather what it thinks to be important at the time of its telling - that all Athenians have equal access to political power. The myth also celebrates the homogeneity of the Athenian citizen body by contrast with those cities with mixed populations. When Euripides’ Praxithea celebrates Athens’ autochthony, she includes a parallel critique of other cities whose colonial origins or traditions of immigration created a citizen body comprised of random assemblies of poorly assimilated strangers, leaving the city prone to tyranny or civil war.
In other words, once we welcome the mythic into the scope of historical analysis it can tell us a lot, provided we learn how to read it. The first step is to recognize that it is not just about the facts, and so checking their accuracy misses the point. Instead, it is all about how these “facts” are arranged, and so we need to think about and decode their discursive strategies, their modes of representation. In Athenian public discourse the myth of autochthony, embodied by baby Erichthonios, draws upon a set of metaphorical images to legitimate current political practice: mother earth gives birth to all Athenian citizens equally; they are all brothers. The language of familial relations helps naturalize a radical political institution in the most basic terms - the relationship of city to citizen has been recast as that of mother to son.
In this respect, as Hayden White has argued so effectively, historians must approach myth a bit more like literary scholars would, and recognize its culturally significant plot structures and metaphors (White 1973; 1978; 1987). We need the historical context to read myth, but the opposite is true as well. To get a better idea of how this works, let’s turn to three different narratives of the colonial foundation of Syracuse. The archaic Greek colonial movement is a good test case for reading myth and history together because of the lack of contemporary written accounts, together with the prominence and continued popularity of colonial myths in literary contexts long after the colonies themselves had been settled.
World History
