136 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



Lucian relates that at Byblus, at the annual mourning 

 for Adonis, the women performed the well-known 

 mourning rite of cutting off their hair. Any woman 

 who refused to do this was required to exhibit herself 

 on one day of the festival and undergo prostitution 

 to one of the strangers who resorted thither, handing 

 over the price to the goddess called by Lucian the 

 Byblian Aphrodite. 1 This was an annual rite. 

 Presumably at other times the woman preserved 

 her chastity. But if we may trust the ecclesiastical 

 historian Socrates the women of Heliopolis (Baalbec) 

 were, down to the establishment of Christianity, 

 required by the law to be common, so that the 

 offspring were doubtful, for there was no distinction 

 between fathers and children : a social condition 

 which Constantine abolished. 2 If we may believe 

 Theopompus the historian (who wrote in the time of 

 Alexander the Great), as quoted by Athenaeus, a 

 similar law governed the relations of the sexes among 

 the Etruscans. He gives shameful details of their 

 licentiousness, in the course of which he states that 

 they brought up all the children that were born, 

 nobody knowing who was the father of any child, and 

 that the children imitated their elders in their frequent 

 feasts and their intimacy with all the women. 3 



But it is not only matrilineal peoples who are thus 

 careless of the chastity of their women or the actual 

 paternity of their children. Matrilineal freedom has 

 often survived into fatherright in more or less 



1 Lucian, De Dea Syria, 6. 



2 Socrates, Hist. Eccl. i. 18. In more general and rhetorical 

 terms Eusebius, a contemporary witness, testifies to the same effect, 



Vita Const, iii. 58). See my paper in Tylor Essays, 192. 



3 Athenaeus, Deipnos. xii. 14. 



