Mycenaean Kingship, Matrilineal Succession & Female Power by Laura Gill

My article discussing Bethany Hughes’s argument for matrilineal succession among the Mycenaeans drew some articulate objections from Laura Gill, an author writing fiction set in the Mycenaean period. As I pointed out in that post, Hughes’s argument is based solely on the mythological tradition, not linear B or other evidence, so I invited Laura to submit an article. You’ll enjoy her excellent discussion of this issue about the power of ancient queens versus kings.

Laura Gill is the author of Orestes, The Young Lion, the first book in a trilogy about Orestes, son of Agamemnon. She hosts a blog about Minoan and Mycenaean culture called Helen’s Daughter. Her ebooks are also available through Smashwords.

A curious fact about the Mycenaean Linear B tablets is that while they provide the name of a king, or wanax, named Enkhelyawon who ruled Pylos around 1200 B.C., they do not give us the name of his wife. Where it does appear, the word for queen, wanassa, refers to various goddesses.

From the surviving records and physical remains, we know that Mycenaean kingship was based upon a testosterone-fueled dogma of survival of the fittest, in keeping with the macho tenets of heroic culture. Kings might flank their thrones with frescoes of winged griffins, denoting the protective presence of a goddess, and offer sacrifices in the cult sanctuaries, but they seem to have kept their mothers, sisters, and wives well away from the political maneuverings in the megaron.

If Mycenaean royal women did hold the keys to political power, one would expect them to appear somewhere in the record. The Linear B texts provide a wealth of information about the administration of the palaces. Among the extant bureaucratic records are preserved the names of palace officials, craftsmen, and even a few priestesses, but not a single queen’s name survives.

In the absence of solid documentary evidence, proponents of the matrilineal tradition of kingship turn to the legends themselves to support their theory, and point to royal heiresses such as Helen of Sparta and Penelope, wife of Odysseus, as kingmakers. Let us look at the same legends, as well as further examples where Mycenaean royal women seem to hand power to men, to demonstrate that those women were the instruments rather than the wielders of political power.

Helen stands as the preeminent figure in the argument for matrilineal based kingship in Mycenaean Greece. According to the legend, her father Tyndareus passed over his twin sons Castor and Polydeukes, and gave the Spartan kingship to his son-in-law Menelaus. On the surface, it seems as though royal daughters in Sparta took precedence over their brothers, and certainly many historical fiction authors have taken this idea and run with it, without considering alternative explanations.

Sparta did not have a custom of matrilineal based kingship. Tyndareus inherited the throne from his father Oebalus, and not through his marriage to Leda. Leda, in fact, had Aetolian ancestry, and was an outsider who married into the Spartan royal dynasty. Furthermore, Helen’s brothers were known hotheads and troublemakers who enjoyed bashing in the skulls of friend and foe alike, in addition to the usual cattle raiding, boxing, wrestling, and abducting women. Tyndareus must have known that dividing the kingdom between the twins would have been tantamount to declaring civil war, which was precisely what happened up in Thebes when Oedipus divided his kingdom between his sons, Polyneikes and Eteokles, the resulting wars of the Seven Against Thebes and the Epigoni tore Thebes apart.

In some cases, kingship might be determined by marriage to a royal heiress, but the man who married that heiress had to be the fittest, most ruthless and cunning man available. Hence, the famous marriage contest to find Helen a suitable husband, and Tyndareus’s subsequent woes over alienating the unsuccessful suitors, who, he feared, would gang up on and oust the chosen man. Anyone laying odds on the outcome could hardly have been surprised when he decided to forge an alliance with the robust neighboring House of Atreus by giving Helen to Menelaus, and granting Agamemnon his blessing to murder his son-in-law Tantalus and baby grandson, and take his daughter Clytaemnestra forcibly to wife.

By the way, neither Helen nor Clytaemnestra had anything to say about these arrangements.

Kingmaker Helen might have been, but it was her father, future husband, and brother-in-law who brokered the deal. Helen did not govern her own lands, or control her own dowry, which consisted of the gold and silver Paris seized from the Spartan treasury, and which Menelaus demanded back along with his wayward wife.

Menelaus did not execute Helen after the Trojan War, but took her back as queen without any recriminations. It is possible that his authority to rule derived from her, and he needed her alive in order to remain on the throne, especially after such a prolonged absence. However, it is equally possible that Helen was abducted against her will, and he could not hold it against her. Or perhaps he loved her, and was willing to forgive her the affair with Paris now that his enemy was dead, and his personal honor restored. Perhaps it was all of the above.

Helen’s cousin Penelope is another key figure in the scholarly debate over royal heiresses as kingmakers in Mycenaean Greece. It is not difficult to see why. As a former teacher, I recall trying to explain to ninth grade students reading The Odyssey why the suitors were harassing Penelope when, it seemed, the adult Telemachus should have been king. At the time, teachers faced with the perplexing question either shrugged their ignorance, or stated that kingship in ancient Ithaca derived from marriage to the royal heiress.

In fact, Odysseus’s kingship derived from his father Laertes, not his marriage to Penelope. Penelope was a Spartan princess, whom Odysseus claimed as his reward for helping her uncle Tyndareus sort out the mess of Helen’s three dozen suitors.

So why do the suitors plague Penelope with the expectation of choosing a new king, if the object of their pursuit does not even belong to the Ithacan royal line? In my novel The Young Lion, there is a short scene in which two ambassadors raise several prurient points about the political situation in Ithaca. Telamachus might be an adult, yet because he has no followers and has never led men into battle, he lacks the brute strength and experience he needs to defend Ithaca against piratical raids and maintain law and order. Penelope is not a royal heiress by birth, but becomes one by circumstance, and the suitors feel justified in opting for the most legitimate way to select from among themselves the strongest, most capable leader.

Other Mycenaean queens have been cited as examples of royal heiresses passing the kingship onto their husbands: Hippodamia, Hermione, Clytaemnestra, and Aegialia. As with Helen and Penelope, in each case the argument does not bear close scrutiny.

Pelops, grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus, became king of Elis through his marriage to Hippodamia, daughter of King Oenomaus. Although this is technically true, Hippodamia was also her father’s only child, so anyone marrying her would have inherited the kingdom. She did not, however, have the authority to choose her own husband, or prevent her father, who lived in fear of a prophecy which stated he would die at the hands of his son-in-law, from eliminating her suitors through death-match chariot races where he clearly had the advantage, and then nailing their severed heads to his door.

Like her great-grandmother Hippodamia, Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, was also an only child, and royal heiress with a kingdom to give away; her half-brother Megapenthes, mentioned in The Odyssey, was the son of a concubine, and most sources never mention her younger, legitimate brothers. Hermione was betrothed to her younger cousin Orestes when they were both children, then she was sent to live with her aunt Clytaemnestra at Mycenae while her father and uncle fought at Troy. After the war, she was either abducted by or given to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, with whom she had a short but disastrous marriage. Later, after Neoptolemus was killed, Hermione married Orestes, and gave birth to a son, Tisamenus, who inherited the united kingdoms of Mycenae and Sparta. There are several versions of the Hermione-Orestes-Neoptolemus story, but they generally agree that Menelaus chose to pass over his legitimate sons and illegitimate favorite to marry his daughter to the most vigorous, up-and-coming king in the Peloponnese. In doing so, he both secured a strong succession and, because Orestes was also his nephew, furthered the political ambitions of the House of Atreus.

As stated above, Sparta had no established matrilineal kingmaking tradition, but a precedent had been created when Tyndareus passed over Castor and Polydeukes, and handed the scepter to his son-in-law.

Aegialia, wife of Diomedes, is a lesser-known Mycenaean queen who, hearing a false rumor that her husband was about to replace her as queen with a Trojan concubine, overthrew him upon his return, sent him into exile, and set her lover Cometes upon the throne of Argos. It is interesting to note that Aegialia could have looked out from her palace and seen Clytaemnestra’s Mycenae on its high hill some six miles away. As Agamemnon and Diomedes were close associates, surely their wives knew each other, and were perhaps even friends.

On the surface, Aegialia and Clytaemnestra appear to provide evidence that a forceful Mycenaean queen could depose her husband, choose a new king, and rule in her own right. Yet underneath the tempting veneer of female empowerment lie darker truths.

If they existed, Clytaemnestra and Aegialia must have been remarkable women, yet theirs was a male-dominated society where kingship was determined by legitimate right and brute strength, and not even the shrewdest, most formidable queen had the legal authority to shunt aside her lord and master, and choose a new consort.

Aegisthus and Cometes were not outsiders who suddenly appeared one day and swept these royal ladies off their feet, but kinsmen of the kings whose thrones and wives they eventually usurped. As the son of King Thyestes, Aegisthus had a preexisting legitimate claim to the throne of Mycenae, and Cometes belonged to the complex tangle that was the Argive ruling dynasty. Neither one needed a woman’s stamp of approval to wield the scepter. Clytaemnestra and Aegialia as incumbent queens must have been useful instruments, and may have instigated the plots against their husbands, but without their royal male lovers to support them they did not stand a chance. In the end, they may have been compelled to marry their co-conspirators in order to maintain their positions and influence.

Clytaemnestra, Aegialia, and their lovers were eventually overthrown by royal kinsmen with more legitimate claims, firmly demonstrating that women in the Mycenaean world had no business interfering in politics, and that swift and severe consequences awaited any queen or princess who became too high-handed and upset the natural male order of things.

An ambitious Mycenaean woman could exercise power within the religious world. Linear B tablets give us the names of priestesses who held ecclesiastical land grants in exchange for performing ritual offices. Given the prevalence of religious art in the palaces, queens and princesses may have served as high priestesses. All we can say for certain right now is that priestesses could administer their own properties, and be named in legal disputes.

The marriages of Mycenaean royal women were political alliances arranged by the bride’s male relatives. On occasion, the marriage of an heiress could determine kingship, except that a prospective husband was not considered based on his looks or personality, but on the basis of his political and military successes, and how well he would be able to defend his new queen and throne once he had them. In short, marriageable royal women were instruments employed by Mycenaean rulers to further their own ambitions, and ranked among the fortified citadels, treasuries, warships, and armed men with which these cunning and ruthless men marked their territory.