ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Divine Institutions: Genealogical Thinking and Social Organization in Ancient Greece

• In Event: Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, I

English Abstract

Genealogy was a cornerstone of Greek thinking about social organization. Indeed, the history of
the developing polis is usually written as a weakening of old elite, hereditary claims to politico-
religious prerogatives in favor of more open and egalitarian civic fabrics. This paper complicates
such narratives by paying close attention to the shifts in hereditary civic priesthoods and the
genealogical practices that legitimated them over the course of the fifth century BCE. It is
difficult to overstate the importance of civic priesthoods in the Greek polis. These institutions
anchored and perpetuated the relationship between the city and its patron divinities, ensuring
the longue-durée social reproduction of the community. In early Greece such priesthoods were
available only to members of specific elite families—“eupatrids”—and carried lifetime tenure. But
the elite strangle-hold on these significant posts was gradually challenged by new forms of
politics and the hereditary logics which authorized them. In 5 th century Athens, new priesthoods were introduced whose selection procedures mirrored that of democratic office holding (i.e., random selection from all eligible citizens for one year). This religious innovation paralleled other egalitarian expansions of the mid-fifth century which diluted the hereditary elite’s control over political institutions. Yet, this expansion of the franchise itself was legitimated by discursive changes to the hereditary history of the state itself. New citizenship laws restricted political (and therefore religious) membership to those born of two citizen-parents. The result was a state in which all citizens were virtually related through myths of autochthony and complex genealogical ties. Ultimately, then, it was not at the expense of hereditary authority, but through revisions of hereditary logic, scope, and practice, that civic religion and its divine institutions became “Democratic.”

Author

• Calloway Scott, University of Cincinnati