by Jack Lindsay
To return to the Moirai: though essentially birth-spirits, they had a potent relation also to the two other great moments of change, marriage and death. At Athens, when a man came home after being reported dead and lamented by his kin, he was readmitted by a rite consisting of a mimic birth and was called deuteropotmos, a man with a second fate or lot (potmos). In myth the Moirai attended the bridal bed of Zeus and Hera. In cult a bride offered a lock of her hair to Artemis and Moirai. Antiphon says of the bridal night that it ‘inaugurates a new potmos, a new daimōn’. And finally there was the term, moira thanatou, share or lot of death, corresponding to moira biotou and moira gamou, share of life, share of marriage. If we carry back the moira concept to the early days we discussed above, moira might well represent the authority of tribal custom administered, at least in large part, by women. The cults of the Moirai and the Erinyes were reserved for women; the Erinyes were specially concerned with crimes against the mother; and Aischylos recalled that in the beginning the world was ruled by ‘the threefold Moirai and the unforgetting Erinyes’.[406]
As an historical parallel we may take the situation among the Ibibios of southern Nigeria early in this century; we have already noticed how a son thundergod displayed the Great Mother there. The main secret societies had been taken over from the women. This was true even of the most dreaded association, Ekkpo Njawhaw, the Ghosts or Destroyers. From three different parts of the district the same story was obtained. ‘In the old days Ibibio women were more powerful than the men, for to them alone the mysteries of the gods and of secret things were made known. By such knowledge they were able to keep all males as servants, employing them to do the heaviest work.’ One day, in fighting another folk, the men captured the masks, fetishes and fringed robes needed for the cult. At a great festival they cajoled the women into imparting their lore, so that ‘together our people may become strong beyond all others’. The old women tried to keep up their mystery in secret places of the bush, but the men tracked them down and killed them. Again, at certain crucial moments in the ritual of the Egbo, connected with the death of an Efik chief who had held a high position in the society, an old woman had to be consulted. The investigator was told, ‘after considerable hesitation, that feminine aid was necessary because Egbo was originally a woman’s secret society, until the men wrested from them its secrets, learned the rites and then drove out women from all participation therein.’ No doubt the process was much more complex in the Aegean world, but we certainly see goddesses or priestesses in roles which show that their status had once been much more dominant. There, as elsewhere, the growth of war and the rise of the war-chieftain must have helped the increase in male powers, social and religious.
Agamemnon, coming to regret his action against Achilles, attributes his behaviour to the malice of Zeus, Moira, and Erinys; he has taken away the geras or moira of Achilles, his due honour. Aischylos says that Zeus, the first king, would not override the power of the Erinyes; that is, the new patriarchal power had to compromise with the immemorial rights and powers held by the women. Homer at moments depicts the equivocal situation. Zeus, tempted to rescue Sarpedon, is warned by Hera that if he violates the decrees of fate, other gods will do the same. All the while, however, the Moirai become more and more the reflection of the will of the Olympian gods, especially Zeus, who later takes the title of Moira-leader, Moiragetes, at Olympia, while Apollo takes it at Delphoi. The Erinyes are similarly subordinated to Zeus. These religious changes are linked at every point with the changes going on in the ownership of land and the distribution of the necessities of life, in particular food.[407]
Aisa, which we have seen was also used for Fate, means an equal share or portion. It seems connected with the Lesbian issasthai, or its equivalent klerousthai (Hesychios); and we thus have evidence for an Homeric issa, the portion of booty due to a man. Aisymnetes, with allied forms, shows the connection of aisa with order concepts. In the Odyssey, it is used of the judges for the dances at Alkinoos’ court; it can mean the president of an association of dancers and singers; it is used for the eponymous magistrates at Miletos and on Naxos; finally it stands for tyrannos or legislator (especially in times of crisis when the customary shares of men are undergoing change). All the meanings have at root the notion of ‘one who distributes, gives, or directs the shares’. Aisa in local dialects such as that of Argos seems to mean a share of the banquet or a part of the sacrificial offerings; thence, a portion of anything. Another fate word is oitos, generally used in a bad sense. There is much argument as to its origin; but from Demokritos and Sophokles we have evidence of the meaning of lot or share. Instructive too is the way in which the term for law, nomos, originally referred to a share of pastoral land, as moira did to a share of the arable. Commonlands were often used for pasture, so that the local group had to get together in making the arrangements. Nomos thus got the sense of customary usage. But as private property developed, matters of custom gave way to law proper, and nomos came to mean law. A similar development can be traced in the word ēthos, which in Homer means an accustomed place; in plural, haunts. Thus the Iliad tells us that when a stallion is let loose, ‘his knees bear him to the ētha and nomos of mares’. The Odyssey says: ‘They shut up the sows to sleep in their ētha’. In Hesiod ētha means the abodes of men, which men themselves have made. The heroes who died in Helen’s war were carried off by Zeus to the end of the world and given ‘a living and ētha’. The term next developed the sense of custom or usage in general, of manners and character. A turning point came when Herakleitos stated, ‘The ēthos of a man is his daimōn’. So our word Ethics goes back to the notion of common shares in pastureland.[408]
Few scholars have realized that the inner meaning of the fate words, the share of life and death by an individual of which they speak, is throughout linked with the social aspects of the given situation. The inner lot is dialectically one with the social lot. Moira was above all one’s share in arable land, since wealth, status, power, all went ultimately back to a man’s position as owning or lacking land. With moira was linked lachos (compare Lachesis), synonymous with klēros, used for a land-holding though originally meaning a bit of wood for use in casting lots. In Irish, crann, lot, is identical with crann, tree. (We noted earlier petala, leaves, used for lot-casting.) Yet another word for fate, potmos, means literally: what is falling, how the lot turns out for one. Numbers and Joshua tell how the land was to be distributed by lot among the Israelite tribes and clans. In Greece the system, which must have been at work through the Dark Ages, is reflected in myth. The Olympians cast lots for a conquered universe. Helios, absent, lacked a klēros. Rhodes, only just then coming up out of the sea, had not been included in the allocations; so it was given to Helios and the system was ratified by an appeal to Lachesis, the allotter of the lachos. Later on, Rhodes was divided into three moirai by the sons of Helios, who corresponded to the three immigrant tribes.[409]
The Iliad has the same myth of allocations by the gods, omitting the episode of Helios and Rhodes. Poseidon, told by Iris that Zeus bade him keep out of the war, retorted that when Zeus, Hades and he got their shares (sky, under-earth, sea), ‘the earth and high Olympos remained in common to us all’. Such myths may well reflect quarrels among groups, or inside groups, about common lands. There seems also a reflection of the system whereby, on a father’s death, his real estate (house and land) was held jointly by the heirs, while the personal estate was divided by lot. Iris threatens Poseidon, ‘You know how the Erinyes always follow to aid the elder-born.’ The elder son claims that customary right is on his side in assuming a dominant role.
Hesiod says that Hekate got from Zeus a moira of land and sea, holding in perpetuity the share allotted to her in the original division or dasmos. The Odyssey tells how the king of the Phaiakians, on leading his people into their new country, ‘divided the ploughlands’. The Dorians after their conquest of the Peloponnesos were said to have divided the land into three parts, for which they cast lots. In historical ti
mes, the settlers of Kyrene invited emigrants from Greece to share in a ‘redivision of the land’. Some years later the territory was again divided, under an arbitrator from Arkadia, into three moirai, and the inhabitants into three tribes (thus artificially created). When the dispossessed peasants of Attika demanded a redivision of the land in the later seventh century, and when Solon in the 590s brought in his reforms, they were all appealing to ancient custom.[410]
Indeed, through Greek history, the various states, dominated by rich landowners, were afraid of such demands, which came powerfully to a head in Sparta under Nabis. In earlier years one way of damping down or sidetracking the call for land redivision lay in the despatch of colonists to new regions. Athens had a system, kērouchia, by which conquered land was divided among settlers from Athens. Diodoros tells us of colonists from Rhodes and Knidos on the islands of Lipara about 580: ‘Well received on Lipara, the settlers were induced to share out the land with the natives, surviving settlers of Aiolos, about five hundred in all. In course of time, owing to depradations of Tuscan pirates, they built a fleet and divided their occupations, some of them continuing the collective tillage of the soil, others being organized for defence against the pirates. They held property in common and ate at common meals. After living this communal life for some time, they divided Lipara itself, where the city was, but went on cultivating the other islands collectively. In the end they divided all the islands for periods of twenty years, reallotting them at the end of each.’
The reference to common meals shows how strongly a tribal basis persisted, and the account reveals three stages: collective ownership of all arable land; division of land in the neighbourhood of the town; division of all the land with periodic redistribution. One part of the land was in general reserved for priests and kings, the temenos. Here a religious factor was at work; for kings were ‘honoured like a god’. The word temenos is Mykenean: at Pylos a tablet speaks of ‘the temenos of the king and the lawagetas’ (leader of the people, a military title). Homer knows of the king’s temenos; and as in later usage the word is restricted to land dedicated to a deity, he seems certainly to be speaking in terms derived from Mykenean customs, though how long such customs survived, perhaps in partially changed forms, in the Dark Ages we do not know. With the decay of the kingship, temenos took on a purely sacral character.[411]
Moira, lachos, geras, timē, were all terms used for the sharing of spoils among warriors. Dasmos was the distribution, as demos was the people who shared. The tradition had a long history, like the others we have examined. When in 484 there was a surplus from the silver mines, the Athenians proposed it be distributed among the body of citizens; Themistokles persuaded them to use if for a fleet. There was also a strong tradition that food should be held in common and shared out. Ploutarch says that in ancient times, when meals were administered by Moira or Lachesis on the principle of equality, all was liberally and decently performed; and he points out that the old word for a meal meant properly a share or division. He was right. (We saw that dais was cognate with demos.) Once the moira of meat went by lot. ‘And when they had roasted the outer flesh and drawn it off the spits,’ says Homer, ‘they divided the moirai and had a glorious dais.’ The chine went to the presiding chief as a geras. Ploutarch goes on to say that the brotherly equality of the common meal was destroyed in time by the growth of luxury (that is, private property), but persisted in public distribution of meats at state sacrifices (on which large sums were spent under the Athenian democracy). In Fraternal Love Ploutarch again shows the strongly persisting memory of a time of fraternal equality before the division of the land. He advises brothers, who want to share goods at a father’s death, to have recourse to the drawing of lots, but he thinks that sons of the same father should divide up only the administration and management of property, while the usage and enjoyment of the whole remains undivided, communal.[412]
After the democratic revolution at Athens the use of lots was an integral element in the state; Greek writers agreed in seeing it as distinctive of a democratic constitution. For the lots men employed pebbles, beans, kleroi, astragaloi (knuckle-bones, also used in games of chance). Already in the Iliad we find lots used for the selection of champions. Many systems of divination by lots were devised. Astragaloi lay ready on the holy tables in temples, for instance Orthia in Sparta or in the temple at Ephesos (in the lower deposits). On coins of Hypaipa, Tarsos, Samos, Ephesos, we see people casting coins before the image of a goddess. Dice-divination in the classical period was attached to the great mother. Kubaba has been claimed as an ancient Cretan goddess, her name connected with kybos, cube or dice. There is a familiar vase type in which two warriors cast lots before an image of Athena or a palmtree. Are they just passing time, or deciding some issue of fate? We see them also playing draughts (pessoi), though at times it is hard to tell if it is astragaloi or draughtsmen over which they crouch. But however we interpret the scenes, the idea of fate is implicated in some form.[413]
In myth the nymphs Thriai, daughters of Zeus and nurses of Apollo, discovered the three mantic psephoi (pebbles: used in calculations, in draughts, in juggling, in divination and in voting). They gave them to Athena; but not wanting to trespass on Apollo’s share of things, she cast them on the Thriasian Plain. In another version she herself invented the art of pebble divination, and Apollo complained to Zeus, who made the lots untrustworthy. (Here is another tale of one god trespassing on the moira of another.) In the Hymn to Hermes Apollo tells Hermes how the Thriai reared him in a glade of Parnassos, teaching him prophecy while he tended his cattle and his father ‘took no heed’. That is, he was a child secluded with the mothers, away from the male world. The Thriai are bees and their name seems to be connected with thriazein to be rapt, possessed.
At Delphoi tradition indicated that originally prophecy was made by drawing lots. The technical term for the Pythia’s delivery of the oracle was ‘to take up’, which is best explained as referring to her action in selecting a lot under the god’s inspiration. There was also a story that the Pythia first used lots in selecting the ten eponymous heroes for the Kleisthenic tribes at Athens, presumably soon after 508. Officials at Delphoi included representatives of the local community chosen by lot; and at least in early times the order of hearing was determined by lots. Lots were also used in the oracle of Zeus at Dodona. In Achaia, ‘on going down from Boura to the sea you come on a river called Bouraikos, and here you can divine by means of tablet and dice. He who inquires of the god offers up a prayer before the image; then he takes four dice, an abundant supply of which are set by Herakles, and throws them on the table. For every figure made by the dice there is an explanation expressly written on the tablet.’ Normally dice divination took the form of interpreting the sequences of numbers got by throwing several dice on a board. Figure or shape here cannot mean the number on a die-face; and the text has been taken to mean that each die has a certain figure marked on it.[414]
To return to the link of the lot or allotment with land: the whole basis of Hesiod’s Works and Days lies in the charge that his brother Perses has acted unjustly in the share-out of their patrimony. In Greece before Solon there were two kinds of property: the land of the city, the inalienable klēros, the common family estate; and the peripheral land, situated apart from the urban agglomeration, which was less rich and perhaps made up of reserves. This second kind could be the object of a different appropriation. Hesiod knew both types; but perhaps his father as a newcomer to Askra in Boiotia had got an estate of the peripheral kind. After Hesiod’s day the sharing-out of land by inheritors became more and more common, but was not yet the general rule. During the seventh century the nobles felt it necessary to take steps to deal with some of the effects; at Corinth the legislator Pheidon acted to preserve the inequality of lots. The smaller owners faced a dilemma. They could share out the land in ever smaller lots or cultivate in common; they could be beggared alone or in a group. In any case they had to borrow from rich neighbours, usually the aris
tocratic owner of a large estate; then at last they had to sell out after a bad harvest or some such run of ill luck. But the land was inalienable. The rich creditor got rights over it: not a definite sale, but a sort of control prefiguring the sale proper. The poor peasant lived on on his land, but produced in part or whole for the lord. So he vegetated in poverty or struck out elsewhere. The demos was not yet a community of citizens, but rather like the demos of Homer, the scattered peasants on the land in general.
So the clans or phratries which we find in the sixth and fifth centuries were largely a creation of the nobles. The latter organized themselves in genē, the alliances and rivalries of which decided the issue of the day. Their dependants were associated in phratries, each under a genos. No doubt elements of earlier kindred groups persisted in these organizations, but the latter were largely artificial creations. Nobles controlled the cults, to which a man needed access, for instance at Athens, in order to prove himself a true Athenian. Homer had known phratries, but these cannot have belonged to the earlier world; they had been formed for military and political reasons during the period of migration. We cannot fit them into the social picture drawn by the Odyssey. But certain tribal forms must have existed and been carried on through all phases of Greek society, including the Mykenean. Sometimes they were driven out of sight, that is, lacking an effective relation to the system of controls imposed from above by king or lords; sometimes they were taken up and reorganized in ways that suited the lords, yet always reasserting themselves and ultimately making possible Athenian democracy, which in effect was a tribal system reconstituted and given fresh points of reference on a new level of social development. Herein lay the one great element of difference between Greek society and all previous states in the ancient world.[415]