On her wedding night, Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, dreamt that lightning struck her womb. Years later, when her son was about to launch his great expedition against Persia, she explained the meaning of the dream: Alexander was not the issue of her husband Philip. He was a son of Zeus!^(1)

Olympias probably never had such a dream - the whole episode is almost certainly the invention of a later historian, inspired by Alexander's divine aspirations - but claims of divine descent were still fairly common in the classical era. Typically, the god resided in a distant branch of the family tree; one thinks of Hecataeus of Miletus, who informed bemused Egyptian priests that he was descended from a god in the sixteenth generation.^(2) But some Greeks at least hinted that their own parentage was divine. The great pankratiast Theagenes of Thasos, for example, was rumored to be a son of Hercules. Hellenistic monarchs, following Alexander's lead, circulated rumors of liaisons between their mothers and various divinities: Seleucus I liked to be thought a son of Apollo, and pointed to a fortuitous anchor-shaped birthmark as evidence.

Claims of divine paternity, in short, are well-attested, at least among the Greek elite. Such claims, however, seem to have typically been made by prominent men trying to sanction and burnish their reputations. In this case, as so often in classical history, we know much less about the actions and agency of women.

In most parts of the Greek world, paternity was extremely important, since paternity determined citizenship. Under the stringent laws proposed by Pericles, for example, Athenian citizenship could only be conferred on children born to a citizen father and citizen mother. With a few exceptions - notably Sparta - similar restrictions were in effect throughout the Greek world. In addition to the social handicaps set on her children, a woman who gave birth out of wedlock was liable, especially in cases of adultery, to a host of grim of legal and social penalties.

Almost everywhere in the Greek world, in short, women who gave birth outside of marriage suffered very serious social penalties. They certainly had incentive to claim divine parentage for an illegitimate child. But did they make such claims? And if they did, were they believed?

The first source that came to mind was not Greek, but Roman. Near the beginning of his History, Livy - talking about Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus - observes that Rhea "named Mars as their father, either because she really believed it, or because the fault might appear less heinous if a deity were the cause of it."^(3) Here, at least, we see that ancient authors understood why women might make such a claim. It is less clear how often historical women actually did.

It certainly happened occasionally. The paternity of Demaratus, a king of Sparta, was disputed, since his mother had given birth to him less than nine months after her marriage. When Demaratus approached his mother and asked her to tell him the truth, she said:

"On the third night after [my husband] Ariston brought me into his house, I was visited by a phantom exactly resembling him. The phantom came to my bed, and afterwards took the wreath it was wearing and put it on me...the wreath proved to have come from the shrine of the hero Astrabacus, by the courtyard gate, and when we questioned the diviners, their answer was that the phantom who visited me was Astrabacus himself."^(4)

Astrabacus was a local hero - not a major god, but supernatural, and a perfectly legitimate father for a king.

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(1) e.g. Plutarch, Alexander 2.3 (2) Herodotus, Histories 2.43 (3) 1.4.2 (4) Herodotus, Histories 6.69