([Greek: mêtris]), and not fatherland ([Greek: patris]). In primitive Athens the women had the right of voting, and their children bore their name—privileges which were taken from them, says the legend, to appease the wrath of Neptune, after an inundation.[1] Tradition also relates that at Athens, until the time of Cecrops, children bore the name of their mother.[2]
Among the Lycians, says Herodotus, the matriarchate endured a long time, and the children followed the status of their mother. Uterine brothers were carefully distinguished from german brothers for a long period in Greece; the former are called [Greek: homogastrioi] in Homer, and the latter [Greek: opatroi]; and uterine fraternity was regarded as much more close. Lycaon, pleading with Achilles, says, in order to appease him, that he is not the uterine brother of Hector.[3] At Athens and Sparta a man could marry his father's sister, but not his mother's sister.[4] In Etruria the funeral inscriptions in the Latin language make much more frequent mention of the maternal than the paternal descent. Sometimes they mention only the name of a child and that of his mother (Lars Caius, son of Caulia, etc.); sometimes they indicate the father's name by simple initials, whilst that of the mother is written in full.[5]
As in so many other countries, the paternal family succeeded the maternal family in the ancient world, but not without difficulty. To begin with, the fact of marriage did not suffice alone to establish paternal filiation; the declaration of the father was necessary, as well in Greece as in Rome. In his Oresteia, Æschylus puts in opposition before Minerva the old maternal right and the new paternal right. The chorus of the Eumenides, representing the people, defends the ancient customs; Apollo pleads for the innovators, and ends by declaring, in a fit of patriarchal delirium, that the child is not of the blood of the mother. "It is not the mother who begets what is called her child; she is only the nurse of the germ poured into her womb; he who begets is the father. The woman receives the germ merely
