3 - GENEALOGY AND FAMILY TRADITION: THE INTRUSION OF WRITING

Summary

Greek genealogy is an area where both oral tradition and writing are involved. It is not pure oral tradition untouched by writing but the product both of written coordination and oral tradition. Genealogy and the part of family tradition that recorded legendary and heroic ancestors raise questions rather different from the oral traditions of family history of the last chapter. As shall be argued, it attracted a certain amount of written or literate study. It therefore introduces crucial and particularly interesting problems concerning the influence of writing and written study on oral tradition. More specifically, it bears also on the formation of a written ‘history’ and chronology for early Greece.

With genealogy we are largely shifting our attention back to a more archaic period and set of interests than those dealt with so far and to the very beginnings of written study of the past. Up till now we have been concerned mainly with the late fifth and fourth centuries, the high classical period of Athens and its full radical democracy. But genealogies and their study are redolent of an earlier Greece, that of Pindar, Herodotus and indeed of the earliest prose writers of Greece, the writers of Genealogies (the first, Hecataeus, flourished c. 500 B.C.). This genre of writing appears first in the very late sixth century and was still practised in the late fifth century. The genealogists' writings seem to belong to a world of predominantly aristocratic values, of legendary heroes and Homeric ancestors. They take us back to the very dawn of historiography.