ABSTRACT
A sociological survival of which an attempt has been made to find traces in historical Greece is the institution known as mother-right, or less correctly as matriarchy. At most, some faint recollection of the time when a king was a god survived in Crete, and so passed to the Greeks in the form of a legend. If ever they had had such kings themselves (as opposed to kings who had some priestly functions, a very different matter), no identifiable survival of this existed among them; much less, therefore, any discoverable influence on their thought or behaviour. Many other supposed survivals of savagery in Greece have been pointed out by various investigators, and the evidence found unsatisfactory by others. And many more probably would have been put forward had they not been strangled at birth by the reflection that the long past of civilization in ancient Greece makes more than doubtful any theory which assumes a recent condition of savagery.
