Ancestry at a Distance

The warriors of the Iliad do not all have a god as an immediate parent. Many belong to remembered houses whose standing comes through a longer ancestry. They inherit names, obligations, and prestige across generations.

This makes the heroic world more varied than a collection of first-generation demigods. Direct divine parentage is conspicuous, but genealogical distance is common. The divine relationship may be ancestral rather than immediate.

The difference matters for the proposed history. If earlier unions establish a lineage, later warriors need not represent new supernatural generation. At the same time, a remote divine ancestor may function as a claim to status rather than as recoverable biological information.

We need to read the particular genealogies before drawing a broad conclusion. Homer gives us a world in which ancestry matters deeply, but in several forms. Its variety should guide the comparison with the much shorter biblical description of mighty men and renown.