Homer: Critical Assessments [2] 0415145279, 9780415145275

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HOMER Critical Assessments

Routledge Critical Assessments of Classical Authors Forthcoming: Virgil Edited by P.R. Hardie Greek Tragedy Edited by Katerina Zacharia

HOMER Critical Assessments Edited by Irene J.F. de Jong

VOLUME II The Homeric W orld

ROUTLEDGE

λ

London and New York

First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © Selection and editorial material 1999 Irene de Jong Typeset in Garamond by J&L Composition Ltd, Filey, North Yorkshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Homer: critical assessments/edited by Irene J.F. de Jong, p. cm. Essays in English, French, and German. Contents: v. 1. The creation of the poems —v. 2. The Homeric world — V. 3. Literary interpretation - v. 4. Homers art. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-1452 7-9 1. Homer —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Epic poetry, Greek —History and criticism. 3- Oral-formulaic analysis. 4. Oral tradition —Greece. 5. Civilization, Homeric. 6. Greece - In literature. I. Jong, Irene J.F. de. PA4037.H 7747 1998 883'.01-d c21 9 8 -1 1 3 7 5 CIP ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

0 -4 15 -14 5 2 7 -9 0-4 15 -14 5 2 8 -7 0 -4 1 5 - 1 4 5 2 9 - 5 0 -4 15 -14 5 3 0 -9 0 -4 15 -14 5 3 1-7

(set) (vol. (vol. (voi. (vol.

I) II) Ill) IV)

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Homer and Early Greece (original contribution)

vii H.J. van Wees

A. Historical and Archaeological Background 22. An Historical Homeric Society? A.M.Snodgrass 23. The Use and Abuse of Homer I. Morris 24. ‘Reading the Texts’: Archaeology and the Homeric Question E.S. Sberratt B. Homeric Society 25. The Homeric City G. Glotz 26. State Organization in Homer and in the Mycenaean Age M. Nilsson 27. Household, Kin, and Community M.I. Finley 28. The Dynamics of the Homeric Society B. Qviller 29- La femme dans la société homérique C. Mosse 30. The Homeric W ay of War: The Iliad and the Hoplite Phalanx (I) H J. van Wees C. Ethics and Psychology 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Homer’s View of Man B. Snell Agamemnon’s Apology E.R. Dodds Homer: Mistake and Moral Error A.W.H. Adkins Morals and Values in Homer A.A. Long La faute, l’erreur et le malheur S. Said

1 33 35 52 11 103 105 126 149 174 210 221 239 241 260 279 305 332

VI

Contents 36. Centres of Agency

B. Williams

D. Religion 37. 38. 39· 40. 41.

339 357

The Gods and Fate E. Ehnmark Mycenaean and Homeric Religion AL Nilsson Motivation by Gods and Men A. Lesky Some Aspects of the Gods in the Iliad Al. AL Willcock Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey: A Study of Religious and Mythical MeaningsP. Vidal-Naquet 42. The Divine Audience and the Religion of the Iliad J . Griffin

359 369 384 404

Select Bibliography

465

416 437

Acknowledgements

The editor gratefully acknowledges the following who have kindly given permission to reprint articles in this volume: The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 22 and 34; I. Morris, 23; E.S. Sherratt and Antiquity Publications, 24; M.I. Finley and Viking Penguin (a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.), 27; Universitetsforlaget AS/Scandinavian University Press, Oslo, 28; Akademie Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 29; Oxford University Press, 30, 33 and 42; Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 31; University of California Press, 32 and 36; S. Said 35; Carl Winter Universitätsverlag GmbH, Heidelberg, 39; The Institute of Classi­ cal Studies, London, 40; Cambridge University Press, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l ’Homme, P. Vidal-Naquet and R.L. Gordon, 4 l. W hile every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material used in this volume, the editor and publisher would be grateful to hear from any they were unable to contact.

Introduction: Homer and Early Greece H.J. van Wees

The Iliad and Odyssey tell of a time when the earth was populated by a superhuman race of great strength, distant lands were inhabited by canni­ bals and nymphs, and gods moved among mortals. Nevertheless, these poems have since antiquity been mined for historical information about the past world in which the legends are set. Just when the hunt for historical kernels was finally being abandoned as futile, the excavations conducted by Heinrich Schliemann from 1870 onwards brought to light, in Turkey, the city that had inspired the legend of Troy and, in mainland Greece, the Mycenaean civilization (1600—1200 BC) that had inspired the idea of a heroic age. These important discoveries turned back the clock, as generations of scholars once more set off in search of historical fact buried in the legends. Unfortunately, but with the benefit of hindsight not surprisingly, this search turned out to be something of a wild goose chase. Despite seeming initial successes, all the learning and ingenuity brought to bear has ultimately identified only a few possible Mycenaean phrases and equally few Mycenaean artefacts in the epics, while even those who defend the historicity of the Trojan W ar are forced to dismiss what legend tells us about its cause, course, duration and participants. Whatever the precise extent of the genuine Mycenaean element preserved in Homer —a question that continues to be debated —it is clearly too small to allow the use of the epics as independent sources for the history or society of the Mycenaean ag e.1 If we are to treat the Iliad and Odyssey as historical evidence, it must be primarily as sources for the world in which their author(s) and audiences lived. Fond as literary critics are of stressing the ‘timeless value’ of the great works they study, every piece of literature is none the less necessarily a product of its time. It is telling, for example, that the Odyssey ends with the settlement of the feud between the hero and his enemies. Ever since the third century BC, critics have felt that it could and should have ended

2

The Homeric World

sooner, at the point where the hero is reunited with his wife. Evidently, the Odyssey was the product of an age when revenge was of paramount impor­ tance, rather than the love interest that came to fascinate audiences as values changed. Even in something as fundamental as the expression of emotions, the epics are time-bound: to their original audiences it was apparently acceptable for men to weep uncontrollably and gods to laugh loudly, but many a later reader has found such behaviour puzzling, indeed scandalous. The first definite signs that the world of the Iliad and Odyssey had become alien to Greek audiences arrived as early as the late sixth century BC, and were soon followed by the first strained attempts to give the poems a new relevance by interpreting them as allegories.2 That the epics are products of their time does not mean that the world of the heroes is a simple copy of the world of their poets. On the one hand, in the absence of —and even in the face of —much historical information to the contrary, people do tend to imagine the past as much like the present. Poets are no exception, and it would be odd if the heroic world did not in at least some ways mirror contemporary life. On the other hand, the setting in a remote and superior past allows for a large element of idealization and fantasy, too: the heroic world may encompass not only things as they are (or were), but also things as they should be, and things as they might have been. We must disentangle these disparate elements, which is not always easy, but worth the effort: a society’s ideals and fantasies are of as much historical interest as its actual norms, customs and institutions. The historian’s task is further complicated by the lack of solid answers to the basic questions one must ask of any source: when, where and why was it created? The epics, attributed to a legendary poet, grew out of an oral tradition of uncertain origin and duration and were given their final form at an uncertain time and place, for reasons not stated. We will thus need to reconstruct the history of the Iliad and Odyssey before we can begin to reconstruct Greek history from them. External evidence tells us enough to provide some approximate answers, and we shall see that it may give us a more precise indication of when and why the epics were composed than has yet been recognized.

The Eighth Century and the Legend of Homer Probably the most widely shared view on the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey is that they were written down in the second half of the eighth century BC. The main reason for its popularity is not that it has much support in the sources, but that it offers a convenient compromise between ancient legend about Homer and modern theory about the introduction of the alphabet in Greece. Tradition tells us that our epics were written by Homer, a poet dated by most ancient sources no later than the beginning of the ninth century BC.

Homer and Early Greece

3

That is impossibly early, above all because the Greeks did not have a system of writing until about a century later: after centuries of illiteracy, they adopted the alphabet around 800 BC. It has recently been suggested that the alphabet was invented for the very purpose of writing down epic poetry, which would therefore have been recorded right at the beginning of the century. More commonly and plausibly, it is assumed that the new script was invented for other uses and that at least a generation or two would have passed before it was employed to write down long epics, giving an earliest likely date of c. 750 BC.3 At the same time, if anything is to be salvaged from the tradition about Homer, the epics ought to have been composed before the work of the first known historical poets, who date to the middle of the seventh century. For the Iliad and Odyssey, this would mean a lowest conceivable date of 650 BC, but a date before 700 BC would more easily fit the legendary status of their author. The question is whether there is anything worth rescuing in ancient beliefs about Homer. In the classical period, Homer was generally regarded as a tenth-generation descendant of the mythical singer Orpheus, which meant that he had lived nine generations, or about three centuries, after the Trojan War, which in turn dated his lifetime to the first half of the ninth century BC. When Herodotos dated him to c. 850 BC (‘four hundred years before me, and no more’, 11.53), he was, as his polemical tone suggests, pressing for a rather low date. Several sources suggested that the poet was born around 907 B C .1 Theopompos and Euphorion, two scholars who radically brought Homer down to the first half of the seventh century, were in a very small minority.5 The trend among Hellenistic scholars was to push Homer further back in time and ever closer to the legendary events that he described. Eratosthenes, who dated the fall of Troy to 1184/3 BC, suggested that Homer lived but a single century afterwards. ‘Most people’ accepted this, but there were those who made the poet’s birth coincide with the start of the Ionian migration or with the foundation of Smyrna, 140 and 168 years after the Trojan War, respectively.6 In the second century BC, Krates of Mallos boldly declared that Homer had lived a mere 60 years after the war, making him of an age to be Odysseus’ grandson. Krates made such an impact that several hundred years later, under the emperor Hadrian, no less an authority than the Delphic oracle proclaimed that Homer had indeed been Odysseus’ grandson, born of Telemakhos and a daughter of Nestor.7 It was left to Byzantine scholars to take the inevitable final step and turn Homer into a contemporary of the Zeroes whose tales he tells. That view is incompatible with the epics themselves, but has such intrinsic appeal that, ever since, it has played on the minds of the more romantic readers, including an early nineteenth-century scholar who convinced himself that our poet had been ‘Agamemnon’s aide-de-camp, or perhaps his secretary’.8

4

The Homeric World

Clearly, the Greeks had no real information about Homer’s lifetime. Nor did they have any about his work. We shall see that hymns to the gods composed as late as the sixth century could still be attributed to Homer, and that their real authors might positively encourage such attributions to their legendary predecessor. A great many other works, including a series of shorter epics, some epigrams, and a few comic poems, were ascribed to Homer, too, even when their actual authors were known, as in the case of the Battle o f Frogs and M ice, composed by Herodotos’ uncle Panyassis in the early fifth century. Homer was, then, a legendary figure imagined to have stood at the beginning of the tradition of epic poetry, to whom those who worked in the genre conventionally ascribed their compositions. In all probability, he was legendary already by the time our Iliad and Odyssey were created. That would explain why, with a single exception, all the ancient dates assigned to the poet fall well before even the earliest modern estimate of the time of the poems. If the Iliad and Odyssey continued to be regarded as Homer’s own work and no other author was ever suggested, while all other ‘Homeric’ poetry was eventually rejected as inauthentic and reassigned to other authors, this was no doubt simply because they were longest and best of all, not because there was any evidence that theirs was the only genuine attribution. In support of 750—700 BC as the time at which our epics were composed some further external evidence can be produced, but it is fair to say that this amounts to very little and that scholars have been uncharacteristically uncritical of its value, gratefully seizing upon anything, however tenuous, that might corroborate a date favoured on other grounds. Linguistic evidence has been thought to provide authoritative dates of c. 150-725 for the Iliad and c. 743-713 for the Odyssey. In principle, it is possible to date a text by its vocabulary, spelling, and grammar,9 and Richard Janko’s Horner, Hesiod and the Hymns (1982) demonstrated that the frequency of older forms declines from the Iliad to the Odyssey, and again, more dramatically, from the Odyssey to the poems of Hesiod. The excellence of the linguistic analysis, however, should not make us forget that its translation into historical dates is essentially guesswork. We do not know how long it might have taken for, say, long forms of the dative plural to decline from 85.4 per cent to 85.2 per cent in frequency, as they do between the Iliad and Odyssey. Perhaps differences as marginal as this cannot be translated into any span of time at a ll.10 Even if the length of the intervals has been guessed correctly, a conversion into absolute dates requires a fixed point for at least one of the poems. No such fixed points are provided by the epic language, and one must look for them, as Janko did, in the kinds of historical evidence discussed below.11 The linguistic evidence, in other words, does not offer independent dates. Many have seen proof that our epics were composed before 700 BC in the

Homer and Early Greece

5

fact that epic stories and epic formulas were known in the eighth century. This line of argument wilfully ignores the universally recognized existence of an oral poetic tradition long before the Iliad and Odyssey. That the epics were not created from scratch is clear from their frequent and systematic use of the kind of formulaic phrases, lines and passages found in oral poetic traditions across the world. Unless one finds very detailed parallels or explicit borrowing, therefore, it is not possible to demonstrate that the Iliad and Odyssey, as opposed to an oral tradition of heroic poetry, existed in the eighth century. Thus, one cannot claim that early poets such as Hesiod and Tyrtaios ‘adapted’ verses from the Iliad and Odyssey, and that these poems therefore pre-date them. Similarities between poems occur when poets draw on a common stock of oral, formulaic material, not only when they borrow from established texts. Scholars who have tried their hand at distinguishing original formula from imitation argue that the ‘original’ is the one that works best in its context, but by that criterion one can only distinguish more and less skilful uses of traditional material —and even then one critic s clumsy adaptation’ is another’s ‘daring originality’. 12 W ith other kinds of literary parallels the problem is that they are simply not specific enough. The best and earliest instance is an eighth-century graffito which refers to Nestor’s drinking-cup, as featured in the Iliad (XI.632—7). The epigram has been said to derive from our epic, presumed to have been ‘a bestseller at the time, but there is no reason to think that the composer of the Iliad was the first and only poet to speak of Nestor’s cup. The cup may well have been a traditional attribute of this hero, just as a huge shield was a traditional attribute of the hero Aias.13 The appearance of epic episodes and plot-elements in art is also incon­ clusive as evidence. A good example is a set of vases of 675—650 BC depicting Odysseus’ adventure with the Cyclops. All are close to the epic account, but none exactly matches it, an^ they fail to prove that the painters were familiar with our Odyssey, since the story was so well-known before the composition of the poem that its author did not even need to mention the vital detail that the Cyclops had only one eye. The first heroic scenes in art appear in the second half of the eighth century, but until perhaps the late seventh century they do not match the epics in such detail that knowledge of our texts can be safely assumed.14 The chief reason why scholars have been prepared to overlook such, surely obvious, objections is, as suggested, that these arguments support the ear­ liest possible date, and only the earliest possible date can rescue the ancient belief that the epics had been created by Homer. It must be conceded, I think, that the external evidence marshalled in defence of an eighth-century date and authorship by Homer himself is far from conclusive. The Iliad and Odyssey could have been composed at a later date, by an anonymous author

6

The Homeric World

and there is evidence for the history of their transmission that suggests that they were. The ‘Publication’ of the Iliad and Odyssey: Kynaithos and the Sixth Century In the late fifth century BC, an Athenian could listen to a recital of selections from the Iliad or Odyssey by a professional singer of epic, a rhapsode (rhapsoidos), ‘almost every day’. These rhapsodes committed to memory the tens of thousands of verses that make up the two poems, and aimed to give performances that were word perfect, as well as theatrical enough to move their audience to tears. Many belonged to a group calling itself‘The Sons of Homer’ (Homeridai), a guild of rhapsodes based on Chios, which presumably provided its members with training. As professionals, they were regarded with disdain by the upper classes, who themselves had to memorize a fair bit of epic in their schooldays but remained strictly amateurs in the field. Nevertheless, competitions for rhapsodes were a regular feature at major religious festivals, and once every four years, at the Great Panathenaia, a relay of rhapsodes performed the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey. The institution of this relay performance is, for us, a crucial moment in the history of the epics, since it is the earliest point at which we can be certain of the existence of both works as we know them. Most of our sources attribute the innovation to Peisistratos, the sixth-century tyrant of Athens, but one text plausibly gives the credit to the tyrant’s son, Hipparkhos, a patron of the arts and something of a poet himself. A likely occasion would therefore be the Panathenaia of 534 or 530 BC, in the last phase of Peisistratos’ career when his sons would already have played an active public role. If we ignore the reference to Hipparkhos, the institution might go back another generation, to the general reorganization of the festival in 566 BC. Whoever was responsible, the sources stress that he also arranged for the poems to be written down, and it appears that the texts produced by this ‘Peisistratean recension’ acquired authoritative status in Greece. 15 Were there written texts of the epics before this? Since our sources think that the epics were written down by the legendary Homer himself, they are forced to assume that in the course of time the originals had somehow been taken apart, and that Peisistratos or his son had the scattered fragments reassembled. This is an extremely unlikely scenario, no doubt inspired by the observation that rhapsodes normally performed only short extracts from the poems. Much more probably, Hipparkhos or his father simply asked a contemporary organization of rhapsodes to produce the texts we have. The rhapsodes involved may have possessed written texts already, and need have done no more than allow these to be adopted integrally as the official

Homer and Early Greece

7

Athenian version. Alternatively, the poems may have been preserved in memory without being written down, until this very occasion.16 But, written or oral, the traditional texts were not completely fixed; until the Athenians intervened, they were open to at least minor changes. Sixth-century rhapsodes could do more than memorize established texts: some were also creative poets. Kynaithos, the most famous ‘Son of Homer’ of his day, composed a 178-line Hymn to Delian Apollo, commissioned by another tyrant, Polykrates of Samos, perhaps in 522 BC.17 The fact that the author was known did not prevent his work from being attributed to Homer, and the attribution is encouraged by the poem itself, with its closing reference to the author as ‘a blind man, who lives in Chios’, the composer of ‘songs which will be supreme ever after’ (172-3), which could only mean Homer himself. Thirty-three other hymns to the gods survive, all serving as prologues to songs about heroes, all attributed to Homer, and most, if not all, the work of rhapsodes.18 Rhapsodes, it seems, presented all their poetry, new compositions along with memorized traditional material, as the work of the old master. In these circumstances, it would not be surprising if they made an occasional contribution to the body of the epics, too, and we are indeed told that ‘Kynaithos and his associates . . . composed many verses and inserted them into Homer’s poems’. In view of their date, it is significant that this is said about Kynaithos and his contemporaries but not about rhapsodes in general. Kynaithos must have been famous by 522 BC, but was young enough to be still performing twenty years later, in Sicily.19 His generation was thus the first after the Athenian Iliad and Odyssey were set down (if we accept 534 or 530 BC as the most likely date for this event) and marked a transitional stage in the history of the epics. Previously, in the absence of widely known, definitive texts against which their performances could be measured, rhapsodes had been able to insert their own verses while claiming to give word-for-word renditions of Homer’s originals. Kynaithos and friends simply continued that practice, but faced the first generation of audiences to become familiar with a rigidly fixed, official text, and hence the first to notice when singers departed from it. Soon, creativity on the part of the performer was no longer tolerated, and by the fifth century rhapsodes were reduced strictly to rendering memorized poems. How large was the contribution made by rhapsodes before the late sixth century? It is most unlikely —though it has sometimes been suggested - that the oral tradition remained highly flexible, and produced only relatively short poems, until some exceptionally skilled rhapsode was commissioned to create the Iliad and Odyssey specifically for the Panathenaia.20 If this were so, rhapsodes throughout Greece would have been obliged to learn two new poems, vastly larger than anything else in their repertoire and demanding a previously unheard-of standard of memorization, merely to be able to

8

The Homeric World

compete at one Athenian festival. It is hard to see what might have induced them to do that. Much more probably, the texts were already largely established, and rhapsodes confined themselves to what is implied by the accusation that they ‘inserted verses’: they did not engage in wholesale innovation, but tinkered with a traditional text to suit the occasion of any particular performance. We might therefore expect to find some tailor-made topical references to sixth-century Athens and its festivals if our text was indeed created for the Panathenaia, but have no reason to think that adaptations by rhapsodes would have a cumulative, or otherwise significant, effect on the content of the poems. Contests between rhapsodes are first attested at the very beginning of the sixth century, when they were banned from Sikyon because its tyrant disliked the constant references in ‘Homeric verses’ to Argos, his city’s enemy (Herodotos V.67). Classical sources imagine that earlier still Homer himself had operated much like a rhapsode. Pindar speaks of the poet as singing of heroes ‘leaning on his rbabdos, the staff which was the badge of classical rhapsodes (.Isthmian 4, 41—3). A Life o f Homer, attributed to Herodotos, imagines the poet alternately making a living as a schoolteacher (4-5, 24-5) and as a professional performer, singing in workshops (9-10) and in the community halls where old men spend their leisure time (12, 15). All this, however, is entirely at odds with the portrayal of epic poets in the Odyssey. At some point the performance of the poems appears to have changed in nature.

The Composition of the Iliad and Odyssey : Terpander and the Seventh Century In the Odyssey, singers are not equipped with a rhabdos, but with a lyre, on which they accompany themselves. They perform songs of the Trojan War, not in public, before a popular audience, but at private feasts, before an audience of aristocrats.21 They boast, not of their skill in memorization, but of the divine inspiration that enables them to sing accurately of distant events, while their audiences demand ‘whatever is the newest song’ (1.3512), and feel free to make requests for specific topics (8.492-5). Far from being regarded with disdain, epic poets are shown the greatest respect by their upper class hosts, who pay them high compliments and offer them choice shares of the feast. The poet will have exaggerated the prestige of the singer, but he would hardly have invented a manner and milieu of epic performance wholly unlike his own. Just as classical Greeks pictured Homer as a rhapsode because that was the only kind of epic singer they knew, so the poet of the Odyssey projected into the heroic past an idealized version of his own situation.

Homer and Early Greece

9

We thus need to date and explain three major changes in epic perfor­ mance before the early sixth century: a shift from improvisation to memor­ ization, an abandonment of musical accompaniment, and a transfer from aristocratic to broader audiences. The date is narrowed down somewhat by two graffiti of c. 740—720 BC, scratched onto a jar for ladling wine and a drinking cup, which contain verses about drinking and dancing, composed in hexameters, the metre of epic poetry. One, already mentioned, even parodies heroic subject matter when it jokingly alludes to the Cup of Nestor.22 These inscriptions suggest that in the late eighth century epic songs were still performed at feasts. As it happens, we know of a poet who bridged the divide between traditional epic performer and rhapsode. This is Terpander, a poet from Lesbos, variously dated between 676 and 641 BC.23 His semi-legendary status means that we cannot take on trust what we are told about him, but the information we have is consistent and not implausible in itself. He was thought of as a highly creative artist, who introduced a range of new melodies for the lyre, and indeed a new type of lyre, with seven strings rather than the traditional four. His audience was primarily aristocratic, since Pindar, the earliest source to mention Terpander, calls him the inventor of the melodies and the musical instrument used in a game typical of aristocratic conviviality, the singing of skolia, which were performed in such a way that each participant had to continue wherever the previous singer chose to leave off.24 Hardly anything survives of his own poetry because he was, we are told, above all a performer of ‘the poems of Homer’, which he sang to the accompaniment of the lyre.25 Terpander, then, was a bard in the Homeric mould. At the same time, Terpander is the first poet on record to have performed epic poetry in competition at religious festivals and to have composed hymns to the gods as prologues for such performances. He was said to have been the winner of the first ever song contest at the Karneia, a festival of Apollo, in Sparta in 676—673 BC, and four times winner of the reputedly oldest song contest in Greece, the hymn-singing for Apollo at Delphi. Several surviving fragments, if genuine, fit that picture perfectly.26 Our poet here comes close to performing epic in the manner of a rhapsode, except that he still sings to lyre music. In Terpander, therefore, we may have a representative of another transi­ tional phase in the history of the epics, a time when they first moved out of the sphere of private aristocratic feasting into the public and religious sphere, and when they first began to be suitably prefaced by hymns to the gods honoured by their performance. Why this should have happened is best understood in the light of the transformation of aristocratic banquets in the course of the seventh century. The feast as it is described in the epics, relatively austere and focused on the sharing of meat, turned into the symposion, a luxurious and leisurely drinking

10

The Homeric World

party, characteristic of the archaic and classical periods. The custom of reclining on couches alluded to in seventh-century poetry, instead of sitting on chairs or stools as diners do in the epics, is a tangible expression of the change. Most significant for our purposes is that songs in a variety of metres and on a variety of topics (from martial exhortation and political advice to wine and sex) began to be performed, to the accompaniment of the lyre or an oboe-like instrument 0aulos), not by professional singers, but by the dinner guests and drinking companions themselves. As already noted, Terpander was believed to have contributed much to the new culture. Admittedly, the Iliad already hints at upper-class amateurs singing to the lyre (III.54; IX. 186—91), and the Odyssey may well exaggerate the predo­ minance of the professional epic singer over other forms of entertainment at aristocratic feasts. Still, it can hardly be a coincidence that, just like Terpander, the earliest surviving examples of the ‘new’ forms of poetry, the elegiac songs of Arkhilokhos, Kallinos and Tyrtaios, all date to c. 680— 640 BC. Around that time, a significant swing towards such songs as the preferred form of elite entertainment must have taken place, at the expense of epic. Since another general trend of the seventh century is the further develop­ ment of the Greek city-state as a political, social and religious organization actively involving all its citizens, rather than primarily the aristocracy, the pressures would all have been pointing the same way. New aristocratic habits meant a loss of upper class interests in epic song just as emerging forms of collective religious activity needed new ways of celebrating. The transfer of Homeric poetry from one sphere to the other filled the gap. It is in the nature of ritual to preserve its forms unchanged, and the adoption of epic poetry into religious ceremonies would have tended to lim it creative contributions to the tradition. At the same time, poets were in any case turning their creative energies to genres of poetry other than epic. Both pressures again point the same way: to a ‘freezing’ of the oral tradition during, or soon after, the generation of Terpander and Arkhilokhos, and the transformation of epic performers into memorizers first and foremost. The abandonment of the lyre playing skills associated with creative poets is likely to have followed soon. 27 This scenario, based on external evidence not previously considered by scholars, thus supplies a possible date - the mid-seventh century - as well as a plausible reason for the composition of our epics. The process may well have involved the writing down of the poems, since it is, after all, at precisely this time that many other forms of poetry were first put in writing, too. Their composer, unfortunately, remains unknown. We may call him the ‘monumental’ poet, as scholars often do, and we may even for the sake of convenience call him ‘Homer’, provided we remember that he is not the Homer of Greek legend. If he needed encouragement to give the epic tradition a fixed form, this would surely have come from his fellow singers:

Homer and Early Greece

11

rhapsodes’ guilds presumably began to emerge when the social function of epic song was transformed, and their members would have gained a com­ petitive edge from access to exceptionally fine poems to memorize and perform.28

The Oral Tradition Transformed: Hero Cult and the Eighth Century Their use of formulaic material proves that the Iliad and Odyssey were crafted out of an oral poetic tradition, and the nature of the formulas proves that this tradition had its origins long before the seventh century. Some lines and phrases do not scan properly unless pronounced as they would have been at an earlier stage of the development of the Greek language. Of course, one can hardly expect every single line to scan flawlessly, but the more common a formula, the less likely it is that imperfect scansion is an accident. It seems pretty certain, for instance, that several phrases were created when the language still had a consonant H, which by the time our first texts appear in the eighth century was apparently no longer pronounced anywhere in Greece. It follows not only that the poetic tradition had earlier origins, but that it was conservative enough to retain archaic elements, even at the expense of fluency.29 When the tradition began is difficult to determine. Some of the old linguistic forms it retained had existed in Mycenaean Greek, but since we do not know how far into the intervening Dark Age these forms may have lasted, we cannot be sure that the tradition originated in the Mycenaean period itself. For a couple of formulas, it has been argued that they only work with an early Mycenaean pronunciation, which would mean that the tradition went back to before c. 1400 BC. Bearing in mind that the nature of early Mycenaean Greek is purely hypothetical, one ought to hesitate before accepting this theory and the implication that lines that no longer scanned were nevertheless retained for at least 600 years out of sheer conservatism, but it has to be accepted as a possibility.30 A conclusion sometimes drawn from this linguistic evidence for the conservation of archaic elements is that the Iliad and Odyssey must be a patchwork of material composed at very different periods, a jumble of early and late Mycenaean formulas, Dark Age lines and eighth century passages.31 Yet the bulk of the epics - including, for example, the many long speeches - does not consist of formulas, and the bulk of formulaic material, in turn, cannot be shown to be earlier than the late eighth century. Moreover, after centuries of debate, it is now universally agreed that our epics present narratives of such coherence and sophistication that they cannot represent a mere accumulation of material over several centuries: a major creative effort must have gone into their final composition. An abundance of comparative evidence shows that oral traditions in

12

The Homeric World

general do tend to be flexible. Those who pass on a story or poem will insist that their version is true to the original, but this by no means excludes constant, mostly unconscious, adaptation of the tradition. Changing values, new customs, altered political circumstances: anything that impinges on the lives of the storyteller and his audience may find its way into the tale. Indeed, a tradition which does not change with the world will simply not ring true.32 It is therefore likely that the epic tradition, while preserving some older material, received a new incarnation in the hands of every successive generation of creative oral poets. From the last third of the eighth century onwards, the oral tradition is likely to have seen particularly radical changes: a major historical develop­ ment of the age, the spread of ‘hero’ cult, indicates a great surge of interest in the heroic past. In Greek terms, a hero (herôs/ήρως) was a mortal who after his death obtained semi-divine status and offered protection in return for worship at his tomb. There had long been tomb cult at the graves of ancestors and famous men, but a new phenomenon of the late eighth century was worship at ancient, usually Mycenaean, tombs where previously there had been none. This type of hero cult will have been driven by a changed attitude to the past, a new desire to exploit the remains of an earlier civilization for the expression of family, class or community identities. Although it has been argued that its spread must have been prompted by the popularity of our epics, this is unlikely, because the particular sites and objects of worship bear little direct relation to the heroes of epic. 33 At a more general level, however, the new religious, social and political importance of heroes could not have failed to affect the songs sung and stories told about them. It is a remarkable feature of the epics that their heroes are not simply outstanding mortals, but living heroes in the Greek sense. Strikingly, in the Iliad, as in later poetry, they are portrayed as members of a race o f‘demigods’, which had subsequently become extinct.34 That is obviously not how the Mycenaeans saw themselves, and we may ask where this notion came from. Early tomb cult suggests that the idea of individual warriors attaining ‘heroic’ status after death goes a long way back. The notion of an entire vanished race of such heroes, by contrast, must surely have evolved in the late eighth century, when we first meet the habit of treating a ll anonymous ancient tombs as potential places of worship. The spread of hero cult, then, appears to have been responsible for introducing into the epic tradition, at a very late stage, a fundamentally new conception of its heroes. We can only speculate what further changes this may have entailed, but it seems likely enough that the new-found prestige of the heroes from this point onwards would have stimulated the composition of longer and richer poems, which over the next two or three generations reached the excep­ tional scale and detail of our epics. That at least some older material

Homer and Early Greece

13

SLirvived is undeniable, but from c. 735 BC onwards changing attitudes to the heroic past must have transformed the epic tradition - perhaps beyond recognition.35

The history of the epics thus begins with a tradition of orally composed poems, performed at aristocratic feasts, possibly of very early origin, but subject to considerable change. These poems grow in importance and scale in the late eighth century, but remain the preferred entertainment of the upper classes for only two more generations, after which they begin to lose their place to the poetry and drinking games of the symposion. From c. 675 BC onwards, public religious festivals become the main stage for the epic tradition, and it soon loses its flexibility. Around the middle of the seventh century, the Iliad and Odyssey are composed, probably in writing, and subsequently performed with only minor additions: prefatory hymns and occasional ‘topical’ references. In the 530s, they are adopted as the poems to be performed at the Panathenaia, and derive such authority from this that within a generation not even slight deviations are tolerated any longer. For the study of the epics as historical sources this means that one may have to reckon with verses that might have been composed with an eye to sixth-century performance and with formulas that might go back to a prehistoric stage of the oral tradition, but that most of our material is likely to be the creation of poets of between 735 and 640 BC. What we may expect to find in the Iliad and Odyssey, then, are first and foremost the ideas about the past, the fantasies, the ideologies and the realities of these three generations.

The Worlds of Homer and Early Greece: Poetry and History For Greece in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BC, we have a range of sources besides our epics. Archaeological evidence from tombs, settlements and sanctuaries, along with iconographical evidence from vase painting, sculpture and other works of art, reveals much about the material world, and casts some light on the society and culture of the age. The works of Hesiod and the fragments of seventh-century poets, as well as the earliest inscriptions, throw further light, even if they are by no means straight­ forward historical sources themselves. We may cautiously draw also on Classical, Hellenistic and later literary evidence, which offers what it believes to be historical information about Greece in the Dark and archaic ages. Finally, the history of other periods and the anthropology of other societies present models which, used in conjunction with our sources, may help us understand the world of early Greece. The question is how we should set about using the Homeric epics to supplement this evidence, and indeed whether the epics can supplement it

14

The Homeric World

with anything of historical use. A brief survey of some key features of the heroic world may serve to illustrate the nature of the epic material and highlight its potential, as well as its problems, for the historian. Homeric Geography One passage in the Ilia d s Catalogue o f Ships presents a feature of political geography that makes sense only in the light of sixth-century conditions. The Athenian entry in this catalogue (2.546-56) has a two-line appendix in which we are told that Aias of Salamis ‘stationed his men where the Athenian troops were standing’ (2.557-8). That seems very short shrift for Aias, the second greatest warrior of the Greeks, and is inconsistent with several other passages in the Iliad describing the location of his troops. Another peculiarity is that Athens’ neighbour Megara, a city of some importance in the eighth and seventh centuries, does not feature in the catalogue at all. Since we know that in the early sixth century Athens won a hard-fought war against Megara for control of Salamis, an explanation lies to hand: these verses were composed by a rhapsode and added to the poem when it was adopted for performance at the Panathenaia, to reflect and reinforce Athenian claims at the expense of their rivals.36 Elsewhere, all recent studies agree, Homeric geography largely mirrors the landscapes and settlements of the late eighth or seventh century, despite earlier attempts to show that it corresponds to the geography of Mycenaean Greece.37 To give but a few clear-cut instances, repeated references in the Odyssey to ‘the Sicilians’ as trading partners, alongside passages revealing an interest in where and how to start new settlements, can hardly pre-date the wave of Greek settlement in the West which started c. 750 BC, or the first settlement in Sicily itself, c. 735 BC.38 Both the Iliad and Odyssey tacitly assume that the region of Messenia is part of Spartan territory, which, according to later literary sources, was the case only after the First Messenian War, believed to have ended about 725 BC.39 When, in the Iliad, Akhilleus casts around for names of fabulously wealthy places, he picks ‘Egyptian Thebes’ (Luxor/Karnak) and the temple of Apollo at Delphi (9.381—4, 404-5). Egyptian sources show that ‘Thebes’ had not been a prominent city for 650 years when it again became the capital of Egypt in 715 BC; archaeological evidence shows that at Delphi dedications first appear in any numbers in the eighth century, and were probably neither outstanding nor contained in a temple until the seventh century.40 Sometimes, however, the poet makes a conscious effort to reconstruct the geography of the distant past. He attributes great territories and forces to Mycenae and Pylos, despite their humble status in his own day. These territories do not actually correspond to the Mycenaean situation either, but are, it seems, products of the poet’s imagination, based on nothing more than the knowledge that these places had been powerful once.41 More remarkable is the complete eradication of Greek cities on the coast

Homer and Early Greece

15

of Turkey. In reality, there had been Mycenaean Greek settlements in the area, but later Greeks were not aware of this and believed instead that they had first arrived in Asia Minor as a result of an ‘Ionian migration’ several generations after the Trojan War. Accordingly, the Iliad avoids all mention of Greek cities when it describes that part of the world, and even makes a point of announcing that Miletos, later the most powerful of Ionian cities, was in the hands of ‘Karians of barbarian speech’, introducing a distinction between barbarians and Greeks which is made nowhere else in the epics (2.867-9). The point is humorously repeated in the Odyssey, when the king of the far-western Phaiakians states his belief that Euboia is ‘the most distant place’ (7.321-4): as yet there are no Greeks further east. A similar effort of historical imagination lies behind the reference to a slender young palm tree at the altar of Apollo on Delos, which is surely the ancient sacred tree famous as a landmark in historical times, imagined to have been a mere sapling in the heroic past.42 The most remote regions of the heroic world are inevitably populated by fantastic beings, who no doubt embodied the worst fears and highest hopes of Greek travellers, but nearer home Homeric geography combines unthinking representation of the world as it was at the time of composition with an occasional self-conscious attempt at plausible reconstruction of the world as it was believed to have been long ago. Our external evidence, along with internal analysis of the epics, enables us to tell apart pure fantasy, likely instances of historical imagination and Athenian inspired adaptations of later date: what remains we may cautiously treat as evidence for early Greece. Homer's M aterial World A life-size statue of a seated Athena in the Iliad and a golden oil lamp carried by Athena in the Odyssey are two objects that may have been introduced specifically for the benefit of the Athenian public at the Panathenaia. No other cult statues of any kind are mentioned in the epics, and there are no surviving instances of large, seated images before c. 650 BC, yet the presence of one in the temple of Athena at Troy is implied by repeated references to a peplos, a woman’s dress, being placed as an offering ‘on the knees of finehaired Athena’ (6.90-2, 271-3, 302-3). It might be concei­ vable that this statue found its way into the Iliad as a novelty at the time of composition, but the way in which the poet takes its existence and shape for granted, and the fact that the presentation of a peplos to Athena was a ceremony central to the celebration of the Panathenaia, rather suggests that the whole episode was revised in the sixth century to include an allusion to the festival at which the poem was performed. The lamp, too, is unique. Since torches and braziers are used everywhere else in the poems, and since lamps are not archaeologically attested until the seventh century, it may have been added as an oblique reference to another feature of

16

The Homeric World

Athenian cult: a lamp kept permanently lit for Athena in the temple of Erekhtheus.43 Most aspects of material culture, by contrast, match the late eighth and early seventh centuries. What we are told of dress, personal ornament, furniture and domestic decoration is not so precise that we can positively exclude earlier dates, but fits well with archaeological and iconographical evidence down to the middle of the seventh century, when male dress and the furnishing of dining rooms began to change significantly.44 The heroes’ regular military outfit of bronze helmet, cuirass, greaves and bronze-faced shield, on the other hand, was standard Greek equipment throughout the archaic and classical periods, but is not found before c. 720 BC.45 Moreover, the figurative and narrative images that adorn several pieces of armour and clothing must reflect a period after the development of narrative art in Greece around the middle of the eighth century. In two specific instances, the intricate ornamental brooch worn by Odysseus and the Gorgon emblem on Agamemnon’s shield, the earliest parallels date to the early seventh century. 46 Much remains obscure about the Homeric house, but its central part, an oblong hall with a pitched roof, corresponds to a type of dwelling common throughout the Dark Age and not supplanted by multi-roomed, flat-roofed houses until, again, about c. 650 BC.47 The architecture of towns, by contrast, is more sophisticated than anything the Dark Age has to offer: there are fortification walls and towers, stone altars and temples, streets and public meeting places, all unknown before 800 and uncommon before 700 BC.48 The last decades of the eighth and the first half of the seventh century thus saw older forms of dress and housing coexisting with new forms of armour and communal architecture, and it is this state of affairs that we find predominantly reflected in the epics. The material culture of the past is represented, accurately or nearly so, by at least two objects: Meriones’ helmet made of scales cut from boars’ tusks (II. 10.260-71), a regular piece of Mycenaean armour before 1400 BC, and Nestor’s golden cup with bird ornaments on the handles (II. 11.632-7), similar to one found in a shaft grave of the same early Mycenaean period. There are obstacles to what might seem to be the obvious conclusion that these are two ‘survivals’ preserved in the oral tradition for seven centuries or more. First, there is nothing to suggest that the description of either artefact is linguistically old. Second, both objects are unique and receive a detailed description, whereas one would have expected the helmet, in particular, to occur more often and without much description if it had been preserved in tradition from a time when such helmets were the norm. The more likely alternative, therefore, is that we have here another conscious attempt at reconstructing the past: with a new interest in ancient tombs would have come a new awareness of ancient artefacts discovered in graves or seen in Mycenaean representations, and a couple of these antiquities found their

Homer and Early Greece

17

way into the epic tradition as attributes of heroes. The poets, of course, were not to know that these objects had gone out of use at least two centuries before the age of the heroes who fought at Troy.49 Several shields and spears are extraordinarily large, and many arms are made of more precious metals than would have been used in the poet’s day including sword blades and spearheads of bronze, rather than iron, and pieces of armour of gold, silver or even tin, rather than bronze. The result sometimes approximates the reality of the past. Large, so-called ‘tower’ and ‘figure-of-eight’ shields were at one time used by the Mycenaeans, along with large thrusting spears, and bronze was, of course, the metal of which weapons were made in the Bronze Age. Yet the Homeric picture here owes more to fantasy than to history. It is the round shape of the smaller contemporary shield rather than the oblong shape of large Mycenaean shields that is copied, and we may infer that the poets merely took the shields and spears familiar to them and inflated these to suitably heroic (if in practice very awkward) proportions. 50As for bronze, it may be the preferred material for weapons, but tools are always described as made of iron, although tools, too, had been made of bronze in the Mycenaean age. We are clearly dealing neither with a genuine tradition nor with a serious attempt at recreating the material culture of the past, but with an imaginative use of precious metals to enhance the glamour of heroic prestige objects.51 Two sixth-century cult objects and two early Mycenaean curiosities aside, then, the material world of the epics is made up of things that are some­ times fantastically large and valuable, but otherwise much as they were in the poet’s own experience. Homer’s Political World The Iliad and Odyssey present a picture of government essentially similar to the political systems of early Greece, but with an added heroic dimension. The chief unit of government is in each case the political community constituted by a town {polis). Towns in Homer correspond closely to reality not only in their public architecture, as noted, but also in scale: seventhcentury Athens could raise a fleet of about fifty warships, which is precisely the number of ships in the Athenian contingent at Troy.52 In the epics, as in early Greece, popular assemblies are often called and public decisions are notionally made by the people at large, but political power lies in the hands of aristocrats who dominate assembly proceedings and may prefer to take decisions in closed council; they also act as judges in private disputes. In archaic communities, aristocracies were known by a range of local names, but the generic term basileis (‘lords’ or ‘princes’) used in the epics for aristocrats of the heroic age is also used by the poet Hesiod for those who hold power in his own day and in his own community.53 By the middle of the seventh century, aristocratic councils and popular assemblies

18

The Homeric World

were turning into formal organizations with regulated membership, duties and privileges, but until this process of institutionalization set in, councils and assemblies were presumably informal, loosely organized bodies much as they are described in Homer.5 Heroic communities, however, are ruled by hereditary monarchs, whereas our literary sources, whose information on the subject is admittedly not very abundant or reliable, claim that in most parts of Greece, by the end of the eighth century, kings had been replaced by elected, fixed-term magis­ trates.55 Some scholars conclude that Homeric kingship represents the reality of an earlier period, dating perhaps to the ninth century or the very beginning of the eighth.56 Yet one can see why poets would have given a place to royalty in the heroic world even when it had become rare in the real world. If the Greeks knew anything about Mycenaean governmental structures, it was that there had been kings. All their legends agreed that hereditary monarchs ruled during the heroic age and for centuries after­ wards: epic poets, therefore, could hardly have failed to introduce kings into their scripture, as part of a conscious attempt to recreate the past. On the other hand, the epic picture of kingship, and of leadership more generally, is unlikely to be purely a figment of poetic imagination, since it is consistent in itself and compatible with anthropological models of political organization in simple societies.57 The obvious model for heroic kingship, I would suggest, were the informal positions of power carved out for them­ selves by leading aristocrats of the poets’ own world. Features such as the precarious position of Homeric rulers, and the importance of both force and reciprocity in maintaining it, could well be based on power relations among aristocrats in the late eighth or seventh century. The poets’ historical imagination thus need not have been taxed beyond substituting a hereditary for a fixed-term position at the top of the hierarchy. This cannot have been a difficult leap to make. By 650 BC, ambitious ‘tyrants’ were making the change not only in thought but in practice when they dispensed with existing magistracies and set themselves up as would-be hereditary rulers. Relations between rulers and their cities are in the epics normally, and plausibly, conducted through ties of kinship and friendship, by means of gifts and favours, but there are occasional hints in the Iliad of an established hierarchy in which the rulers of certain towns have authority over others in their region, and Agamemnon has supreme power over them all. The Greeks, moreover, are presented as a unity, ‘the Panakhaians’, when their enemies are simply a coalition of ‘Trojans and allies’. 58 Here, surely, we are indeed dealing with poetic fantasy: it certainly does not correspond to either the current or the Mycenaean situation, and there is no other evidence in legend for a tradition that Greece was once unified. Yet the fantasy has roots in the contemporary world. At the end of the eighth century, ‘panhellenic’ sanctuaries and festivals, attended by all Greeks and by Greeks alone, began to acquire

Homer and Early Greece

19

ever greater importance. Evidently, a sense of Greek cultural identity in opposition to outsiders was emerging, and this new self-awareness was given expression in the fiction of the heroic world as a political unity. Just like epic geography and material culture, the political world of the epics thus contains an element of fantasy, inspired partly by contemporary ideology and partly by an attempt to recreate the past. But once again fantasy is given only limited scope. So far as we can tell, the epic picture is in almost all respects a reflection of the poets’ own world. Homeric Society, Economy and Culture Even in antiquity, when people generally believed that Homer otherwise provided more or less accurate information about the distant past, it was assumed that the poet projected onto his heroes his own customs, norms, and values. This idea was the basis of some outrageous theories: one scholar argued that Homer must have been a Roman because his heroes play pessoi, the ancient equivalent of draughts, and spontaneously rise from their seats when a superior enters, just as the Romans did; others claimed that Homer must have been an Egyptian because, like the Egyptians, the heroes ‘kiss one another on the mouth’. 59 Silly as the results may sometimes have been, the principle is sound. As it was put by whoever wrote the Life o f Homer attributed to Herodotos: ‘when dealing with the customs practiced among men, it is likely that such a great poet would put in his poems either the best he could find, or his own ancestral customs’ (37). It is one thing to take liberties with geography and material culture, or make minor changes to the surface of the political system, but quite another for poets to create, and for audiences to understand, a world that differed much from their own in routine behaviour, norms and values. In these areas the oral tradition would be most responsive to change, and legends would contain the fewest clues for historical reconstruction. One might cite the heroes’ concern with honour, hybris and shame, indeed their ethics at large, or their religious concepts and cult practices: in each of these important respects they are undeniably very close to archaic and classical Greeks. Pseudo Herodotos, for example, believed that he could tell Homer’s place of birth by his descriptions of animal sacrifice, since these followed the exact ritual still in use among the Aeolians (ibid.). But matters are not always so straightforward. Poets would not, or not always, have reproduced their own social world pure and simple. Customs varied considerably from one city to the next and, given the wide circulation of their work, poets might have tried to avoid referring to local peculiarities, creating instead a composite of the ‘best’ Greek customs known to them. What is more, in every society there is a gap between ideal and reality, and it is likely that the heroic world incorporated what was ‘best’, rather than what was ‘normal’, in contemporary society. Funerary practices, for instance, were an area of custom in which the

20

The Homeric World

Greeks were keenly aware of considerable regional differences. This is perhaps why it is so difficult to find an exact parallel for Homeric funerals. Archaeology reveals the existence of many of the basic elements - cremation, interment of ashes in a tomb marked by a burial mound, funeral games to mark the occasion —in both the eighth and seventh centuries and earlier (though not in the Mycenaean period), but the details always differ. There is variation even within the epics: Eëtion is cremated in armour ill. 6.41718), but noone else is; Patroklos’ and Akhilleus’ ashes are placed in a golden ‘amphora’ {0d. 24.71—9), but Hektor’s in a golden ‘box’ {Od. 24.792—8). It may well be, therefore, that the poets avoided drawing too closely on any particular form of burial rite, but created a generic heroic funeral which would appeal, and make sense, to a wide audience.60 The heroic habit of keeping vast herds and consuming large quantities of meat illustrates how a contemporary ideal may be represented as a historical reality. It has been thought that a pastoral economy may have existed before the eighth century, and that the epics reflect this. However, the Homeric picture is better understood as a wish-fulfilling fantasy of the past. In the archaic period, when the Greek economy was predominantly agrarian, only rich men kept sizable herds and meat was eaten as a prestige food; in these circumstances, it would not be surprising if people imagined that long ago men were able to enjoy these luxuries on a scale that in the present day even wealthy men could only dream of. It is worth noting once again that these fantasies are relatively modest: the scale of livestock- and slave-owning in the heroic world does not begin to approach the truly vast proportions reached in the Mycenaean age.61 Doubts about the essentially contemporary nature of Homeric society have been raised, on the grounds that the epics simultaneously feature the custom, unknown to classical Greeks, who thought it quaint (Aristotle, Politics 1268b38—42), of offering bridewealth when taking a woman in marriage, and the custom of giving dowries, which continued to be normal practice. One anthropological model suggests that these two customs are not normally compatible. It has been argued, therefore, that the epic tradition here, and perhaps elsewhere, too, presents a composite drawn from two distinct historical periods. The comparative evidence, however, is not conclusive, and since we have found nowhere else any sign of substantial elements preserved from earlier stages of the tradition, we should be surprised to find these in the sphere of social customs and cultural values, of all places. It is much more probable that our epics reflect an (unusual) historical situation in which dowry and bridewealth coexisted, and that the latter did not fall out of use until after their composition.62 Bridewealth is not the only aspect of Homeric society and culture for which there is virtually no evidence outside the Iliad and Odyssey. In Homeric concepts of age, gender and class, in the nature of military organization, war and battle, and in relations of kinship, friendship, commensality and

Homer and Early Greece

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gift-giving, there is much that is familiar from archaic and classical Greece, but in each of these domains there is also a good deal that is unique to the epics.63 In principle, it is possible that some, or all, of this is a poetic fiction or a relic from the distant past. Each case must, of course, be judged on its merits. Our survey of the Homeric world, however, has shown that ‘heroizing’ distortions in the Iliad and Odyssey tend to be limited, moderate and detectable, and that the poems otherwise reflect only contemporary Greece. Thus, unless we find strong arguments to the contrary, we ought to favour the possibility that we are dealing with a range of contemporary customs and ideas fallen into disuse soon after the composition of the poems. If this is correct, the epics provide us with evidence for significant change in many areas of life in the seventh century BC. Change is evident already in the works of poets of the very generation in which, we have suggested, the epics were composed; indeed, there are a few tantalizing hints of new developments even within the epics themselves.64 Here, then, lies the greatest potential value of the Iliad and Odyssey as historical sources: they preserve for us many aspects of the aristocratic society and culture of which epic poetry used to form a part, but which was being transformed even as the changing social function of epic poetry led to the freezing of the oral tradition and the creation of our poems.

Notes 1. Development of modern attitudes towards Homeric society’s place in history: Morris (1997). For the current consensus that there is virtually no Mycenaean material in the epics, see the New Companion to Homer (Morris and Powell 1997, esp. xvii, 533, 625), in contrast to its predecessor (Wace and Stubbings 1962). Contrast also the studies on Homer und Mykene by Patzek (1992) and Heubeck (1984) (also, e.g., Giovannini 1989; Dickinson 1986) with Webster’s From Mycenae to Homer (1958) and Nilsson’s Homer & Mycenae (1933) (also, e.g., Luce 1975; Page 1959). More recent defenders of a sizable Mycenaean element in Homer include Hood (1995) and Hooker (1988). Historicity of the Trojan War: Kirk (1990: 36-50); Davies (1984); Hainsworth (1984); Finley et al. (1964: 1-20). 2. Alienation: Xenophanes FF 10—12 Diels-Krantz (from 540s BC onwards); allegorization: Theagenes of Rhegion, Diels-Krantz no. 8 (520s BC). See Lamberton (1997: 35, 43). 3. The date of c. 800 BC for the introduction of the alphabet may not be incontrovertible, but does have a powerful case to support it. From the eighth century onwards an increasingly large number of clay pots are inscribed with names, alphabets, sentences and verses. Of the very large number of pots from earlier centuries none bears any text, which strongly suggests that, at the time, the Greeks had no system of writing. Some (including Ruijgh 1995: 26 -47 , and Bernal 1990), however, use arguments based on the relation between Greek and Phoenician letter forms to suggest much earlier dates; for a survey of these argu­ ments, and alternative explanations, see Wilson (forthcoming). Epic already written down c. 800 BC: Powell (1991; 1997). 4. Ten generations after Orpheus (or Mousaios): Pherekydes FGH 3 FI67;

22

The Homeric World

Hellanikos FGH 4 F5; Damastes FGH 5 Fl 1 ; Gorgias, F25 Diels-Krantz. Ephoros (FGH 70 F102) said Homer ‘was famous’ in 876, which may mean a date of birth in 906; the Marmor Parium (FGH 239 A29) gives 907/6; Suda s.v. Homeros: 908 (132 years before the first Olympiad); Vita Homeri Scorialensis: c. 894/3 (290 years after the Trojan War). On the lack of foundation for ancient dates for the Trojan War: Burkert (1995). 5. Theopompos FGH 115 F 205; Euphorion FHG iii, 72 F 1. Presumably they were among ‘the chronographers’ who, according to Strabo (1.2.9), dated Homer around the time of the Kimmerian invasion of Asia Minor, i.e. in the mid-seventh century. 6. Eratosthenes FGH 241 F9. ‘Most people’: [Plutarch], Life of Homer (II). At time of Ionian migration: Philokhoros FGH 328 F211 (and Aristarkhos cited ibid.); at time of foundation of Smyrna: [Herodotos], Life of Homer 38. According to Apollodoros (FGH 244 FF61-63), Homer was born 100 years after the Ionian migration, i.e., 944/3 BC. 7. Krates, cited at FGH 241 F9, in [Plutarch], Life of Homer (II), Vita Homeri Romana. Delphic oracle: Contest of Homer and Hesiod 314. 8. Byzantine scholars: Tzetzes, Chil. 645—6; Isaac Porphyrogenitos, Introduction to Homer 10. Quotation from a letter by Paul-Louis Courier (1805), cited in Albracht (1886: 4). 9. The epics were composed in an artificial poetic language, which unfortu­ nately means that we cannot date them through comparison with the more colloquial language of other poetry or inscriptions (contra Visser 1997: 12, n. 29); Ruijgh (1995: 17-21). 10. Janko shows that the linguistic differences between the Iliad and Theogony are four times greater than those between the Theogony and Works and Days, and five times greater than those between the Iliad and Odyssey. He proceeds to guess (1982: 23 0 -1) that the differences between Hesiod’s two poems imply a gap of at least ten years, and assumes a steady rate of change: this produces a gap of at least forty years between the Iliad and Theogony, and eight years between the Iliad and Odyssey. His other calculations (ibid., Table 47) are based on randomly chosen intervals of 20, 40, 60 or 80 years between the Iliad and Theogony —or, to be precise, on intervals imposed by the equasion of the lowest common denominator (0.15) of the four points on the arbitrarily chosen scale [Iliad 0; Theogony 3; hence Odyssey 0.6; WD 3.75] with units of 1, 2, 3 or 4 years to produce round numbers. 11. The Theogony is dated by supposed borrowing from it by Semonides and by an assumed reference to the Lelantine War (the date of which is established by tenuous criteria). The Odyssey is dated by vase-paintings of the adventure with the Cyclops (see below) and by allusions to colonization (see below). 12. The notion of direct ‘borrowing’ was rejected already by Rothe (1910: 1 1 9 20). It has also been argued that the epics incorporate verses adapted from Hesiod, and thus post-date him (e.g. West 1995: 208-9 ; Ballabriga 1990: 2 2 -5 ; Bethe 1922: 303-10). Explicit direct quotation of an epic verse first occurs in the late sixth century, in Simonides (eleg. F8 West); even if the fragment belongs to the late seventh-century Semonides, as Latacz claims (1996: 59—60), we can infer only that the line was already part of the poetic tradition, not that the Iliad existed. It is another century before we find the Iliad and Odyssey mentioned by title (Herodotos 11.116 -17 ; IV.29). 13. So also West (1995: 205); Seaford (1994: 145); contra Latacz (1996: 61-3); Graham (1995: 6-7); Powell (1991: 208-9). The next earliest evidence (high­ lighted by West 1988: 15 1-2 , n. 9; 1995: 206-7) comes c. 600 BC: a fragment of Alkaios (F44 L-P) describes Akhilleus’ appeal to Thetis, and Thetis’ appeal to Zeus,

Homer and Early Greece

23

which arc vital to the plot of the Iliad. Even this strictly proves only that the outline of the story of the Iliad was current. 14. On heroic scenes in Greek art, see Snodgrass (1997: esp. 578—9 on the Cyclops vases, used as a dating criterion by, for example, Graham 1995: 7); Ahlberg-Cornell (1992); Fittschen (1969); Johansen (1967). Those who favour a later date for the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey insist that scenes specifically drawn from our epics are not identifiable until the late sixth century: Seaford (1994: 146); Stanley (1993: 279); Ballabriga (1990: 19-20); Jensen (1980: 102-6). 15. Performance every fourth year, instituted by earlier generations: Lykourgos, Against Leokrates 102. Attribution to Hipparkhos: [Plato], Hipparkhos 228b—229b; to Peisistratos: e.g. Cicero, De Oratore 111.34.137; Strabo IX. 1,10; Pausanias VII.26,13; Josephus, Against Apion 1.2,10 12; Aelianos, VH 13,14. Jensen (1980) has sources in full. Occasional attributions to Solon (Plutarch, Solon 10; Diogenes Laertius 1.48, 57) derive from the fact that a couple of lines from the Iliad were believed to have played a part in a political dispute of Solon’s time (see below). 16. The pre-existence of a written text is (rightly, I believe) assumed by most scholars. Writing down in sixth century of texts already (more or less) ‘fixed’ in oral tradition: Cook (1995: 3); Seaford (1994: 144-54); Stanley (1993: 284-91); Nagy (1992: 4 5 -5 1); Kirk (1962: 301-2). Largely new sixth-century composition: see below, n. 20. 17. Scholion C to Pindar, Nemean Odes 11,1; see Ballabriga (1990: 17—18); Burkert (1979). 18. Most Hymns end with a reference to ‘another song’ to follow; twice the reference is specifically to a song about heroes (3 1 ,1 8 -1 9 and 3 2 ,18-19); there is one appeal to the god to help the singer ‘win this contest’ (6,19-20). See below on Terpander. 19· Scholion C to Pindar, Nemean Odes 11,1, mentions both the insertion of verses (see also scholion E) and the performance in Syrakuse in the 69th Olympiad (504— 501 BC). 20. So Ballabriga (1990: esp. 26-9); Sealey (1990: 129-31); Jensen (1980); Bethe (1914: 50-5); 1922: 294-371). Jensen (1980: 153-4) attributes their composition to Kynaithos himself (with Onomakritos as his scribe; ibid, 160-6), but if so, given that our sources seem to know quite a bit about both these figures, it is odd that there is never any mention of their role in publishing ‘Homer’, which would surely have been their greatest claim to fame. 21. Only one song is performed in public, accompanied by dancing {Od. 8 .2 5 6 369), and, in view of the argument set out below, it is significant that this public song is in effect a Hymn to Hephaistos, rather than an epic song about heroes. 22. Nestor’s Cup: see above, n. 13; Murray (1994). Dipylon oinochoe: Jeffery (1990: 68); Chadwick (1996: 2 1 8 -2 1), however, argues that the context is not convivial but funerary. 23. The evidence for Terpander is conveniently gathered by Campbell (1988: 294-313), and his numbers for the testimonia will be given at the end of each of the following few notes. Hellanikos (FGH 4 F85ab) claimed that Terpander was born in the time of Midas (738-696) and listed him as first victor in the Spartan Karneia (in the 26th Olympiad, 676-3). The Marmor Parium (FGH 239 A 34) dates his introduction of a new style of music to 645/4; Eusebios, Chron. Ol. 34.3 (or 34.4) dates the peak of his career to 642/1 (or 641/0). Glaukos of Rhegion (FHG ii; 23 F2) placed Terpander before Arkhilokhos, but Phanias (F33 Wehrli) placed him later. The odd one out is the third-century philosopher Hieronymos (F33 Wehrli), who dated him to the time of the legendary lawgiver Lykourgos. (Testimonia 2—6 Campbell.)

24

The Homeric World

24. New melodies and new lyre: Suda, s.v. Terpandros. New melodies: Marmor Parium (FGH 239 A 34); Pollux 4.66; [Plutarch], On Music 1132cd, ll4 0 f. New lyre: Terpander F6 Campbell; Aristotle, Problemata 920a; [Plutarch], On Music 1141 c; cf. Timotheus, Persians 221 K (10 strings), and Plutarch, Moralia 238c = Inst. Lak. 17 (one extra string). Invention of skolia and barbitos'. Pindar FF124b, 125 S-M (cited by Athenaios 635de; [Plutarch], On Music 1ΐ4 0 β · (Testimonia 1, 3, 12— 20 Campbell.) 25. Herakleides of Pontos, the fourth-century philosopher, said ‘that Terpander . . . setting to music his own hexameters and Homer’s, sang them in contests’ (FI57 Wehrli, cited in [Plutarch], On Music 1132c); the first-century scholar Alexander Polyhistor said ‘that Terpander imitated the hexameters of Homer’ (FGH 273 F77, cited in [Plutarch], On Music 1132f); Plutarch described him as ‘the best singer to the lyre of his day and a praiser of the deeds of heroes’ {Moralia 238c = Inst. Lak. 17). Terpander’s role as a performer of Homeric epic may have inspired the idea that he was a great-grandson of Homer himself (Suda, s.v. Terpa?idros). (Testimonia 1, 17 -18 , 21 Campbell.) 26. [Plutarch], On Music 1 1 32d (T19 Campbell): ‘Terpander also composed prologues in hexameters to be sung to the lyre’; [Plutarch], On Music 1133c (Terpander F8 Campbell): ancient singers to the lyre, ‘acquitting themselves of their obligations to the gods as they liked, immediately went on to the poetry of Homer and the others. This is clear from the prologues of Terpander.’ Performance at contests, see n. 25; specifically at the Karneia, see n. 23; winner at Pythia: [Plutarch], On Music 1 132e (T6 Campbell). [Plutarch], On Music 1134b, attributing to Terpander the ‘first organization of matters concerning music in Sparta’, may mean the institution of the song contest at the Karneia itself. Terpander FI Campbell is part of a line from a Homeric Hymn to Apollo (21.1) which the Hellenistic scholar Aristarkhos attributed to Terpander; FF2, 6 and 7 are hexa­ meters addressing Apollo and referring to Sparta, and would fit the bill, too. 27. Euripides, Alkestis 4 5 5 ff, suggests that ‘hymns without lyre music’ were performed at the Karneia by the late fifth century. Perhaps the end of the dominance at the Karneia of Lesbian singers to the lyre, referred to by [Plutarch], On Music 1133d (who names two singers after Terpander), came when lyre accom­ paniment was abandoned at this festival. 28. The importance of the religious contexts in which epics were performed has recently begun to be recognized. Taplin (1992: 39—41), too, argues that the most likely reason for the composition of our epics is performance at seventh-century religious festivals; Nagy (1995) uses comparative evidence from India to suggest that adoption at a festival is a key factor in gaining more than local recognition for an epic; Janko (1990: 329) raises (but dismisses) the idea that a ritual function might encourage a freezing of the oral tradition. Note that Carter (1995) envisages performance at religious festivals already in the Bronze Age (but cannot explain the very different setting suggested by the poems themselves). Stanley (1993: 2 9 1—3) notes that writing down the epics might have benefited the guild. Of all the known poets of the mid-seventh century, Terpander himself is the most plausible candi­ date for the role of monumental composer, but this composer may equally be a poet who has remained anonymous, and it is even possible that the epics were created by several members of a guild in close collaboration (Seaford 1994: 151-2). 29. For a comprehensive and clear survey of the issues: Ruijgh (1995). Perhaps most influential, recently, has been West (1988). 30. Ruijgh (1995: 63—92); West (1988: 156—9). Sceptical comment: Chadwick (1990: 176-7).

Homer and Early Greece

25

31. Sherratt (1990: esp. 817-20 ); Snodgrass (1974); Kirk (I960); Page (1959: 218-96). 32. See, e.g., Thomas (1992), Edwards (1990), Morris (1986: 83 -91), drawing on the work of Vansina (1985, 1965), Finnegan (1977) and Goody and Watt (1968). 33. Rise of hero cult: De Polignac (1995: 138-43); Antonaccio (1993); Morris (1988); Snodgrass (1988); Whitley (1988). The idea that the spread of epic poetry was responsible for the rise of hero cult and an interest in the heroic past was mooted by Coldstream (1976; 1977: 3 4 1-8 ) and supported by Latacz (1988: 16 0 4) and West (1988: 151; 1995: 205), but the reverse relationship has since been suggested by others (see below, n. 35). The spread of cult at Mycenaean graves from c. 735 BC (De Polignac 1995: 138) is most significant for our purposes; other expressions of interest in the heroic past appear rather earlier, c. 750 BC. 34. II. 12 .22-3 ; Hesiod, WD 15 6 -7 3 ; Alkaios F42, 1 3 -1 6 West; Homeric Hymns 31 and 32. The passage in the Iliad is the only explicit statement in the epics on the nature of the heroes, but cannot be explained away as a ‘late’ addition, since everywhere in the poems it is evident that the heroes have superhuman strength and close contact with the gods, both of which are surely meant to indicate their semi-divine status. See below, n. 35. 35. The likelihood that the rise of hero cult had a significant impact on the epictradition has been noted by Raaflaub (forthcoming); Crielaard (1995: 266—73); Seaford (1994: 180-90); Patzek (1992: 13 7 -4 3 , 159-85); Tausend (1990); Kullmann (1988: 186). 36. II. 2 .5 57-8 is inconsistent with 8.224 = 11.7; 4 .2 73-8 4 and 327-8 ; 13 .6 8 1-2 . Later insertion under Peisistratos was already suspected in antiquity (Strabo IX. 1,10, citing the Megarian version of the two lines), but more often (surely wrongly) attributed to Solon as leader in the war against Megara (see above, n. 15). The whole Athenian entry is unique in naming only the city of Athens while ignoring the other major towns of the region, and may have been revised for the occasion. 37. The geography of Greece is set out in most detail in the Catalogue of Ships (II. 2.484 770), studied in great detail by Visser (1997) and Kirk (1990: 168—240), and more briefly by Anderson (1995) and Patzek (1992). See Giovannini (1969) for a well argued case against those (such as Page 1959: 11 8 -7 7 ; Hope Simpson and Lazenby 1970) who would see in the Catalogue primarily a reflection of Mycenaean geography. For surveys of Homeric knowledge of the world outside Greece: Crielaard (1995: 224-35); Dickie (1995: 35-51). 38. Interest in overseas settlement: Od. 6 .4 -10 ; 9 .1 1 6 -4 1 ; ‘Sicilians’ (Sikeloi) as trading partners: Od. 20 .381—3; travel to ‘Sikania’, another name for Sicily: 24.306-7; note also the ‘old Sicilian woman’ who is a slave of Laertes (24.211, 366, 389). Evidence for contact with Italy and Sicily: Crielaard (1995: 23 1—3, 236—9). Dickie (1995: 35—7), effectively argues against the view of Ballabriga (1990: 26) that the Odyssey post-dates the Greek settlement in the Lipari Islands (580 BC). 39. 'The house of Ortilokhos’ (in Pherai, Od. 3.488-90) is described as lying in Messenia and Sparta (Lakedaimon) at the same time (Od. 2 1 .13 -16 ), and it is the king of Sparta who comes to the aid of Ortilokhos’ grandsons in battle (Od. 5 .5 4 1 63). The Catalogue of Ships pointedly ignores Messenia, but lists ‘Messe’ as part of the Spartan contingent (II. 2.582); it is perhaps because Pherai and its neighbours are thought of as Spartan territory that Agamemnon can make a gift of them to Akhilleus (II. 9-149-5 6, 29 1-8). See Dickie (1995: 36-7); Kullmann (1993: 1 4 0 2; 1988: 194-6); Giovannini (1969: 27-8).

26

The Homeric World

40. ‘Egyptian Thebes’: Burkert (1976); his argument that the reference to its wealth must date to after the sack of the city in 663 BC is less compelling, but reinforced by the attractive recent suggestion (West 1995: 2 1 1 -1 8 ) that the washing away of the Greek fortification wall at Troy (II. 12.8—33) might be based on a parallel sequence of events at Babylon in 689 and 677 BC. Delphi: Morgan (1990: 127; ‘Perachora . . . attracted a wealth of offerings of all descriptions unequalled at Delphi until the seventh century’; 143-4). 41. For the odd kingdom attributed to Agamemnon, and the likelihood that it is a poetic fiction based on the need to give Mycenae a territory in proportion to its impressive (still visible) ruins, without trespassing on the territory of Argos: Kullmann (1993: 13 3 -5 , 144); Giovannini (1969: 26-9). Mycenaean texts happen to provide fairly precise information about the geography of Pylos, but there is little overlap with the epics: Luce (1975: 93-4). 42. Od. 6.162—3, as interpreted by Taplin (1996). 43. Large, seated cult statue: Crielaarcl (1995: 263—5); Sale (1994: 98); Lorimer (1950: 442-9), who show that archaeological evidence implies a mid-seventhcentury date at earliest (and that Mycenaean parallels do not exist, pace Powell 1991: 206), but consider the late eighth century an outside possibility. Statue and peplos as a sixth-century addition: Sealey (1990: 130—1), Lorimer (1950: 442—9), Bethe (1922: 310-20). Lamp: Od. 19-3343; its significance in Athenian cult is noted by Cook (1995: 164-8) (cf. the gratuitous reference to Athena entering ‘the house of Erekhtheus’, Od. 7.80—1; and perhaps to the Phrontis cult at Sounion, Od. 3.278-83). Mycenaean lamps are known, but none afterwards until c. 700 BC: Lorimer (1950: 5 0 9 - 1 D (contra Powell 1991: 201-2). 44. See Van Wees (forthcoming a). 45. See Van Wees (1994: 131-40). 46. Narrative art: Crielaard (1995: 214 —24). More abstract and therefore less reliable analogies between the epics and visual art have sometimes been adduced: Bethe (1922: 328), saw similarities in (sixth-century) monumental scale; Taplin (1992: 33-4), sees a shared (seventh-century) dynamism; O’Donnell (1995) argues for parallels in (eighth-century) structure. Brooch (Od. 19-226—3 1): Crielaard (1995: 217); Lorimer (1950: 5 1 1-15 ); Studniczka in Bethe (1922: 385-8); Gorgoneion (II. 11.36-7): Burkert (1976: 19); Lorimer (1950: 19 0-1), Bethe (1922: 323-5). Contra: Kirk (I960: 195-6); Powell (1991: 202-4). 47. Morris (forthcoming), Mazarakis-Ainian (1997: esp. 363—7); Lang (1996: 7 8 -117 ), Van Wees (1992: 4 1 -4 , 49-55). Contra: Sherratt (1990: 817 -2 1). 48. Raaflaub (1997: 62 9-3 3; 1993: 4 6 -5 9 ; 1991: 239-47); Crielaard (1995: 239-65); Sale (1994); Murray (1993: 62-5); Van Wees (1992: 28-36); Scully (1990); Morris (1986: 100-4) (all dealing not only with the material aspects of the polis, but also with its political organization; see further below). Before the eighth century, temples existed only in Crete; elsewhere in Greece the earliest temples date to c. 800 BC (at Perachora perhaps 825 BC; the ‘heroon’ at Lefkandi, cited by Powell (1991: 195), is not a temple); the date of the earliest Greek city wall (at Smyrna) has been revised from 850 to 800 BC (Murray 1993: 64). Alleged absence of the polis from Homer: Seaford (1994: 1-13); Donlan (1989; 1985); Halverson (1985); Finley (1977); also Winter (1995: 259-60), who, however, attributes it to a denial of contemporary reality in favour of heroic ideology; cf. Kullmann (1995, 1992). 49. Patzek (1992: 19.34), on the helmet (which is, however, a precious heirloom, not an ‘effective and inexpensive’ item), and 19 7-20 2, for the cup (also Lorimer 1950: 328—35). ‘Shining’ and ‘scented’ cloth has recently been named as another

Homer and Early Greece

27

element of Mycenaean material culture (Sheimerdine 1995), but there is some later evidence for it, too. 50. Raaflaub (forthcoming); Van Wees (1994: 13 1—3; 1992: 17—21). Contra: e.g. Page (1959: 232-42). 51. Van Wees (1994: 133-4); Patzek (1992: 188-93); Giovannini (1989: 30-2). Contra: e.g. Luce (1975: 58-64). 52. Polis in Homer: see above, n. 48. Scale: according to Pollux VIII. 108, each of the 48 naukrariai (administrative units which featured in Solon’s laws, and, according to Herodotos V .71, functioned already in the seventh century) provided one ship. It is likely that Athens already had two ‘state’ vessels as well, giving a total of 50, as at 11. 2.556. Even if this is part of a sixth-century revision of the passage (n. 36, above), it confirms the general realism of the scale (40 or 50 ships being the normal size of a Greek contingent), as does the fact that the Homeric army is proportionally smaller than the Greek forces at Plataia in 479 BC (Van Wees 1988: 23). Implied population size: Van Wees (1992: 269-71). 53. Van Wees (1992: 31, 7 8 -8 9 , 274-80); Carlier (1984: 137-240). 54. Raaflaub (1993: 6 4 -8 , 81). The earliest evidence for formalization is prob­ ably the Great Rhetra at Sparta (Plutarch, Lykourgos 6) which fixes the size of the council of elders and makes provision for regular assemblies; this may date to a little before 700 BC, and, if so, is exceptionally early. The next evidence comes from an inscribed law of Dreros (ML 2), c. 650 BC, which refers to ‘demioi} and ‘the twenty from the city’ - presumably formal bodies. Some see hints of formalization already in the epics: Vlachos (1974: 58-65), argues that the council of the Phaiakians is imagined as formalized and representative; Sale (1994: 9 1—4), argues that the elders at Troy, too, are modelled on a formal council. 55. Best attested are the archons in Athens: as Rhodes (1981: 65-6) shows, there was a tradition that the last king had been Hippomenes, who was succeeded by the first (ten year) archon in 71.4/13 BC (and then by annual archons in 683/2). This relatively plausible story was later superseded by one that dated the archonship back to 1069/8. 56. Homeric rulers as Dark Age kings: Finley (1977); as Dark Age ‘chiefs’: Donlan (forthcoming; 1997: 6 4 9-6 7 (dating them to c. 800 BC); 1994; 1982a; 1982b); Qviller (1995; 1981); as Dark Age ‘big men’ (that is to say, leaders whose dominance rests primarily on personal merit, rather than hereditary status): U lf (1990); Rihll (1992; 1986); Drews (1983). Homeric kings representing a range of different types of ruler: Deger (1970). 57. As those who see in Homeric kings a reflection of Dark Age chieftains have pointed out (see n. 56, above); see also Carlier (1984: 137-240); Van Wees (1992: 3 1 -2 , 281-98). Kings as a poetic figment: Osborne (1996: 149-51); Dickinson (1986); Geddes (1984). 58. Van Wees (1992: 3 6 -4 0 , 57-8); Ulf (1990: 118-25). 59- As reported in the Vita Homeri Romana. 60. Synthesis of local and regional differences by epic poets: Raaflaub (1997: 627); Nagy (1995: 10); Whitley (1991). The general similarity of late eighth- and seventh-century burials to the epic picture are sometimes explained, conversely, as the result of aristocratic imitation of the imaginary funerals of the epics (Coldstream 1977: 349-52). 61. Dark Age pastoral economy: Donlan (1997: 654—7, 666); Raaflaub (1997: 646-7). For the much larger scale of livestock- and slave-owning in Mycenae, see Carlier (1984: 120-2). 62. Inconsistency in custom: Osborne (1996: 148-9); Snodgrass (1974). Others

28

The Homeric World

argue that the two customs are compatible: Seaford (1994: 16 -17); Perysinakis (1991); Morris (1986: 105—14); Finley (1981: 237—41). 63. Age: Van Wees (1997a); gender and class: Van Wees (forthcoming a and b). For military organization and other aspects of Homeric society, see the overviews of Raaflaub (1997; 199Ό; Murray (1993); Van Wees (1992); Ulf (1990); Andreev (1988); Finley (1977). 64. I am thinking here of two passages in the Iliad: one, I believe, is the only place in the poem where the tactics of phalanx warfare are approximated (17 .3 5 2 65); the other mentions ‘tribes and phratries’ as combat units, and is inconsistent with military organization elsewhere in the poem: Van Wees (1997b: 6 6 9-7 0, 6 8 5 -6 , 691-2).

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Davies, J.K . (1984) ‘The Reliability of the Oral Tradition’, in L. Foxhall and J.K.

Davies (eds) The Trojan War: Its Historicity and Context, Bristol, 8 7 -1 1 0 . Deger, S. (1970) Herrschaftsformen bei Homer, Vienna.

De Polignac, F. (1995) Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State, Chicago-London. Dickie, M. (1995) ‘The Geography of Homer’s W orld’, in O. Andersen and M. Dickie, 29—56. Dickinson, O.T.P.K. (1986) ‘Homer, the Poet of the Dark Age’, G&R 33, 20-37. Donlan, W . (1982a) ‘Reciprocities in Homer, CW 75, 137-75. ------ (1982b) ‘The Politics of Generosity in Homer’, Helios 9, 1-1 5 . ------ (1985) ‘The Social Groups of Dark Age Greece’, CPh 80, 293-308. ------ (1989) ‘The Pre-State Community in Greece’, £0 64, 5—29. ------ (1994) ‘Chief and Followers in Pre-State Greece’, in C. Duncan and D. Tandy From Political Economy to Anthropology, Montreal, 34—51. ------ (1997) ‘Homeric Economy’ in I. Morris and B. Powell, 649-67. ------ (forthcoming) ‘Political Reciprocity in Dark Age Greece’, in C. Gill, R. Seaford and N. Postlethwaite (eds) Reciprocity in Ancient Greece, Oxford. Drews, R. (1983) Basileus. The Evidence for Kingship in Geometric Greece, New Haven-London. Edwards, M.W. (1990) ‘Neoanalysis and Beyond’, CA 9, 3 1 1-2 5 . Finley, M.I. (1977) The World of Odysseus, 2nd ed., Harmondsworth. ------ (1981) ‘Marriage, Sale, and Gift in the Homeric W orld’, in B.D. Shaw and R.P. Sailer (eds) Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, Harmondsworth, 233—45. Finley, M.I. et al. (1964) M.I. Finley, ‘The Trojan W ar’; J.L. Caskey, ‘Archaeology and the Trojan W ar’; G.S. Kirk, ‘The Character of the Tradition’; D.L. Page, ‘Homer and the Trojan W ar’, j r ó 84, 1-20. Finnegan, R. (1977) Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context, Cambridge. Fisher, N. and Van Wees, H. (eds) (forthcoming) Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence, London. Fittschen, K. (1969) Untersuchungen zum Beginn der Sagendarstellungen bei den Griechen, Berlin. Geddes, A.G. (1984) ‘W ho’s Who in “Homeric” Society?’, CQ 34, 17 -36. Giovannini, A. (1969) Etude historique sur les origines du catalogue des vaisseaux, Bern. ------ (1989) ‘Homer und seine W elt’, in Vom frühen Griechentum bis zur römischen Kaiserzeit, Stuttgart, 25—39Goody, J. and Watt, I. (1968) ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in J. Goody (ed.) Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge, 27-84. Graham, A.J. (1995) ‘The Odyssey, History, and Women’, in B. Cohen (ed.) The Distaff Side. Representing the Female in Homer's Odyssey, New York-Oxford, 1—16. Hainsworth, J.B. (1984) ‘The Fallibility of the Oral Tradition’, in L. Foxhall and J.K . Davies (eds) The Trojan War: Its Historicity and Context, Bristol, 1 1 1 —35. Halverson, J. (1985) ‘Social Order in the Odyssey', Hermes 113, 129—45. Heubeck, A. (1984), ‘Homer und Mykene’, Gymnasium 91, 1—14. Hood, S. (1995) ‘The Bronze Age Context of Homer’, in J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, 25-32. Hooker, J.T. (1988) ‘From Mycenae to Homer’, in J.H. Betts et al. (eds) Studies in Honour of T.B.L. Webster, Vol. II, Bristol, 57-64. Hope Simpson, R. and Lazenby, J. (1970) The Catalogue of Ships in Homer's Iliad, Oxford. Janko, R. (1982) Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns, Cambridge. ------ (1990) ‘The Iliad and its Editors’, CA 9, 326-34.

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Jeffery, L.H. (1990) The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, revised ed., Oxford. Jensen, M.S. (1980) The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, Copenhagen. Johansen, K. Friis (1967) The Iliad in Early Greek Art, Copenhagen. Kirk, G.S. (I960) Objective Dating Criteria in Homer’, MH 17, 189-20 5. ------ (1962) The Songs of Homer, Cambridge. ------ (1990) The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. II: Books 5 - 8 , Cambridge. Kullmann, W . (1988) “ Oral Tradition/Oral History” und die frühgriechische Epik’, in J. von Ungern-S tern berg and H. Reinau (eds) (1988) Vergangenheit in mündlicher Überlieferung, Stuttgart, 184-96. ------ (I 992) Homerische Motive, Stuttgart. ------ (1993) ‘Festgehaltene Kenntnisse im Schiffskatalog und im Troerkatalog’, in W. Kullmann and J. Althoff (eds) Vermittlung und Tradierung von Wissen in der griechischen Kultur, Berlin, 129—47. ------ (1995) ‘Homers Zeit und das Bild des Menschen der Mykenischen Kultur’, in O. Andersen and M. Dickie, 57-75. Lamberton, R. (1997) ‘Homer in Antiquity’, in I. Morris and B. Powell 1997, 33-54. Lang, F. (1996) Archaische Siedlungen in Griechenland. Struktur und Entwicklung, Berlin. Latacz, J. (1988) ‘Zu Umfang und Art der Vergangenheitsbewahrung in der mündliche Überlieferungsphase des Heldenepos’, in T. von Ungern-Sternberg and H. Reinau, 15 3-8. ------ ( 1996) Homer. His Art and bis World, Ann Arbor. Lorimer, H.L. (1950) Homer and the Monuments, London. Luce, J.V. (1975) Homer and the Heroic Age, London. Mazarakis-Ainian, A. (1997) From Rulers' Dwellings to Temples. Architecture, Religion, and Society in Early Iron Age Greece, Jonsered. Morgan, C. (1990) Athletes and Oracles: The Transformation of Olympia and Delphi in the Eighth Century BC, Cambridge. Morris, I. (1986) ‘The Use and Abuse of Homer’, CA 5, 8 1—138. ------ (1988) ‘Tomb Cult and the ‘‘Greek Renaissance”: the Past in the Present in the Eighth Century BC’, Antiquity 62, 7 5 0 -6 1. ------ (1997) ‘Periodization and the Heroes: Inventing a Dark Age’, in M. Golden and P. Toohey (eds) Inventing Ancient Culture, London-New York, 96—131. ------ (forthcoming) ‘Archaeology and Archaic Greek History’, in N. Fisher and H. Van Wees. Morris, I. and Powell, B. (eds) (1997) A New Companion to Homer, Leiden-New York. Murray, O. (1993) Early Greece, second edition, London. ------ (1994) ‘Nestor’s Cup and the Origins of the Greek Symposion , AI0N 1, 4 7 -54 . Nagy, G. (1992) ‘Homeric Questions’, ΤΑΡΑ 122, 17 -60. ------ (1995) ‘An Evolutionary Model for the Making of Homeric Poetry: Comparative Perspectives’, in J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, 163-79· Nilsson, M. (1933) Homer and Mycenae, London. O’Donnell, M.D.S. (1995) ‘Reading Pictorial Narrative’, in J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, 3 15 -3 4 . Osborne, R. (1996) Greece in the Making, 12 0 0 -4 7 9 BC, London. Page, D.L. (1959) History and the Homeric Iliad, Berkeley. Patzek, B. (1992) Homer und Mvkene. Mündliche Dichtung und Geschichtsschreibung, Munich. Perysinakis, I.N. (1991) ‘Penelope’s ΕΕΔΝΑ Again’, CQ 41, 297-302.

Homer and Early Greece

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Powell, B.B. (1991) Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge. Qviller, B. (1981) ‘The Dynamics of the Homeric Society’, SO 56, 10 9-55 .

____(1995) ‘The World of Odysseus Revisited’, SO 70, 2 4 1-6 1 . Raaflaub, K.A. (1991) ‘Homer und die Geschichte des 8. Jh.s v. Chr.J, in J. Latacz (ed.) Zweihundert Jahre Homer-Forschung, Stuttgart, 205-56. ____ (1993) ‘Homer to Solon. The Rise of the Polis. The Written Sources’, in M.H. Hansen (ed.) The Ancient Greek City State, Copenhagen, 4 1 -1 0 5 . ____ (1997), ‘Homeric Society’, in I. Morris and B. Powell, 624-48. ------ (forthcoming) ‘A Historian’s Headache: How to Read “Homeric Society”?’, in N. Fisher and H. Van Wees. Rhodes, P.J. (1981) A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politela, Oxford. Rihll, T. (1986) ‘ “Kings” and “Commoners” in Homeric Society’, LCM 11.6, 8 6 -9 1. -------(1992) ‘The Power of the Homeric Basileis\ in Homer 1987. Proceedings of the Third Greenbank Colloquium, Liverpool, 39-50. Rothe, C. (1910) Die Ilias als Dichtung, Paderborn. Ruijgh, C.J. (1995) ‘D’Homère aux origines protomycéniennes de la tradition épique’, in J.P. Crielaard, 1—96. Sale, W.M. (1994) ‘The Government of Troy: Politics in the Iliad, GRBS 35, 5- 10 2 . Scully, S. (1990) Homer and the Sacred City, Ithaca-London. Seaford, R. (1994) Reciprocity and Ritual. Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City State, Oxford. Sealey, R. (1990) Women and Law in Classical Greece, Chapel Hill-London. Shelmerdine, C.W. (1995) ‘Shining and Fragrant Cloth in Homeric Epic’, in J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, 99—107. Sherratt, E.S. (1990) ‘ “Reading the Texts”: Archaeology and the Homeric question’, Antiquity 64, 80 7-2 4. Snodgrass, A. (1974) ‘An Historical Homeric Society?’, JHS 94, 11 4 —25. ------ (1988) ‘The Archaeology of the Hero’, ΑΙ0Ν 10, 19-26. ------ (1997) ‘Homer and Greek A rt’, in I. Morris and B. Powell, 560-97. Stanley, K. (1993) The Shield of Homer. Narrative Structure in the Iliad, Princeton. Taplin, O. (1992) Homeric Soundings. The Shaping of the Iliad, Oxford. ------ (1996) ‘Dendrochronology in Odyssey 6: Time Past, Present, and Future in Homer’, Omnibus 32, 27—30 = Epea Pteroenta 6 (1996), 17—20. Tausend, K. (1990) ‘Sagenbildung und Heroenkult’, Gymnasium 97, 145-53. Thomas, R. (1992) Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece, Cambridge. Ulf, C. (1990) Die homerische Gesellschaft, Munich. Ungern-Sternberg, J. von and H. Reinau (eds) (1988) Vergangenheit in mündlicher Uberlieferung, Stuttgart. Vansina, J. (1965) Oral Tradition, London. -------(1985) Oral Tradition as History, London. Van Wees, H. (1988) ‘Kings in Combat: Battles and Heroes in the Iliad, CQ 38, 1-2 4. ------ (1992) Status Warriors. War, Violence and Society in Homer and History, Amsterdam. ------ (1994) ‘The Homeric Way of War: The Iliad and the Hoplite Phalanx (I) and (II)’, G&R 41, 1 -1 8 ; 13 1-5 5 . ------ (1997a) ‘Growing up in Early Greece’, in A. Sommerstein and C. Atherton (eds) Education in Greek Fiction, Bari, 1—20. ------ (1997b) ‘Homeric Warfare’, in I. Morris and B. Powell, 66 8-9 3.

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------ (forthcoming a) ‘Greeks Bearing Arms. The State, the Leisure Class, and the Display of Weapons in Archaic Greece', in N. Fisher and H. Van Wees. ------ (forthcoming b) ‘A Brief History of Tears. Gender Differentiation in Archaic Greece’, in J. Salmon and L. Foxhall (eds) When Men Were Men, London. Visser, E. (1997) Homers Katalog der Schiffe, Stuttgart. Vlachos, G.C. (1974) Les sociétés politiques homériques, Paris. Wace, A J.B . and Stubbings, F.H (eds). (1962) A Companion to Homer, London. Webster, T.B.L. (1958) From Mycenae to Homer, London. West, M.L. (1988) ‘The Rise of Greek Epic J H S 108, 15 1-7 2 . ------ (1995) ‘The Date of the Iliad Ί MH 52, 203-19Whitley, J. (1988) ‘Early States and Hero Cults: A Reappraisal’, JHS 108, 173-82 . ------ (1991) ‘Social Diversity in Dark Age Greece’, BSA 86, 3 4 1-6 5 . Wilson, J.-P. (forthcoming) ‘The Origin of the Alphabet: an Historical Perspective’. Winter, I.J. (1995) ‘Homer’s Phoenicians’, in J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, 2 4 7 -7 1.

A. Historical and Archaeological Background

22 An Historical Homeric Society?* A.M. Snodgrass ^Source: Jo u rn al of Hellenic Studies v o i. 9 4 , 1 9 7 4 , p p . 1 1 4 - 2 5 .

I begin with two modern texts, both as it happens printed on the first page of earlier issues of this journal, and each, I think, expressive of a strong body of opinion in Homeric scholarship, at least in the English-speaking coun­ tries, at the time of their writing. First, Miss Dorothea Gray in 1954: ‘Belief in an historical Homeric society dies hard’. 1 Secondly, Professor Adkins in 1971: Ί find it impossible to believe . . . that the bards of the oral tradition invented out of their own imaginations a society with institutions, values, beliefs and attitudes all so coherent and mutually appropriate as I believe myself to discern in the Homeric poems. This aspect of the poems is based upon some society’s experience’.2 Miss Gray’s prophecy, whether or not one shares the misgivings that it embodied, was thus soundly-based: the seven­ teen years between these two quotations have indeed witnessed a powerful revival of the belief that the social system portrayed in the Homeric poems, and with it such attendant features as the ethical code and the political structure, are in large measure both unitary and historical. One good reason for the vitality of this belief is the simple fact that it has been alive since Classical times. Another is that it has received support from several influ­ ential recent works: if pride of place should be given to M.I. Finley’s The World o f Odysseus, on whose conclusions Professor Adkins expressly says that he takes his stand,3 a number of others should be acknowledged also. Whereas Finley located the social system of the Odyssey most probably in the tenth and ninth centuries B.c., A. Andrewes in his book The Greeks extends this type of inference when he argues for an historical origin in the ‘migration period’ of the twelfth and eleventh centuries for the Homeric political system.4 As influences on the other side, one may mention T.B.L. Webster’s work in isolating Mycenaean practices and features, whose divisive effect on the social pattern is apparent;5 while G.S. Kirk has a significantly entitled chapter in his The Songs o f Homer, ‘The cultural and linguistic amalgam (my italics).6 Most recently, the early chapters in the

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The Homeric World

German Archaeologia Homerica7 have shown a certain tendency to discern a consistent and historical pattern in the allied area of the material and technological practices of the poems. It is true that in one chapter the author is led to conclude that the metallurgical picture of the Iliad is substantially earlier than that of the Odyssey, and that the date of composi­ tion of the former poem must accordingly be very much earlier.8 But this is only because he is pressing the arguments for the ‘historical’ case one step further: the historical consistency of the metallurgical pictures in each of the two poems is, for him, so apparent and so precise that each can and must be given an historical setting, even if the two are separated by a long period. Unity of authorship and background between the Iliad and Odyssey is indeed a quite separate issue, though an important one; the division of opinion here may cut right across the line of division as to whether Homeric society is historical or not. But it is an important element of Professor Adkin’s argument that he maintains the identity of the social system as between the Iliad and Odyssey; and that he links the equally unitary Homeric ethical code with this social system. Not all scholars would agree with this; indeed the ‘fundamental differences . . . in their social and ethical relations’ were among the factors which led Professor Page9 to conclude that the same man did not compose the Iliad and Odyssey. I do not wish to enter this debate, since to do so would be to beg the question on which I wish to argue, namely whether the social system is consistent and identical within each poem. But, for what it is worth, my inclination is to fall back on the familiar observation that the one poem shows the heroic world on a war footing, while the other shows it at peace; and to attribute the differences rather to this than to any deeper dichotomy. If, therefore, it seems reasonable to follow Adkins in speaking of a ‘Homeric society’ common to both poems, we can now proceed to the central question. Do the features of this society show the degree of coherence and mutual appropriateness that Professor Adkins sees, and which is perhaps a necessary precondition of that society’s being historical?10 First, there is a subsidiary question which may arise, since a precondition need not be a guarantee: even if the society is shown to be so cohesive, will that necessarily make it historical? Could there not be other explanations of such a picture, if it were shown to exist? Perhaps an oral poet of genius could construct a truly consistent society, by sifting and selecting the traditional material at his disposal, and shaping it to fit the elements of his own creation—one more consistent, indeed, than the untidy compromises which history often produces. At least one scholar11 has pursued this line of argument, to arrive at the opposite conclusion to that of Adkins: Homer’s society is idealised, and cannot represent any single historical society, because it is too cohesive and unmixed. Another approach is that of A.A. Long, who has both expressed doubt about Adkins’ conclusion and challenged the basis for it; ‘The plain fact is’, he writes, ‘that a

Historical and Archaeological Background

37

consistent pattern of society does not emerge from Homer’.12 This and other arguments lead him to doubt Adkins’ assumptions that Homeric society has ‘some autonomous existence, outside the poems’, or that Homer is concerned to represent ‘the life and values of any actual society’.13 Faced with this bewildering conflict of views, one might be tempted to abandon all hope of reaching a conclusion. Let us, however, postpone such despair until it is forced upon us, and return to our primary question. It is perhaps most fruitful to concentrate on institutions, where the arguments have a better chance of being of a factual nature. The field of marriage settlements has long proved an attractive one here. Homeric marriages present a number of apparently inconsistent features; but scholars have argued that these ‘inconsistencies’ are in part the result of misunder­ standing, 1 or alternatively that, though real, they are nevertheless compa­ tible with a single and historical social system.15 Let us first look at the Homeric evidence. It is commonplace, in both poems, for a marriage to be accompanied or preceded by lavish gifts from the suitor to the bride’s kin.16 But alongside this picture of what E.R. Dodds has called ‘women at a premium’, we also have ‘women at a discount’; again, instances of the situation in which a dowry is paid by the bride’s kin to the bride and bridegroom occur in both poems.17 Rather than simply asking whether both practices could co-exist in a single social system, we should do better to call in anthropological evidence on this whole matter. For a start, this will tell us that any simple division into ‘bride-price’ and ‘dowry’ practices is misleading. Human societies also show a third common practice known as ‘indirect dowry’, in which the groom pays over property to the bride, which is then used to endow the newly-established household. It is called indirect dowry because it shares with the plain dowry system this aim of conferring property upon the newly-married couple. But if marriage-settlements are described in careless or poetic language, there is a likelihood that indirect dowry and bride-price w ill become confused, since these are the two situations in which the bridegroom has to pay. To return to Homer. It could be argued that the confusion just mentioned has happened in the interpretation of the Homeric poems; that some or all of the so-called ‘bride-price’ practices noted in Homer (above, n. 16) are in reality cases of indirect dowry; indeed a somewhat similar line of argument, although with very different terminology, was followed as long ago as 1912 by G. Finsler.18 If this were true, it would much increase the likelihood that Homer’s picture of marriage-settlements is unified and consistent, for dowry and indirect dowry were and are to this day often found together in the same society. But this explanation, although attractive in a number of cases, fails when it encounters a hard core of episodes which cannot be cases of indirect dowry, since we are explicitly told that it is the bride’s kin (usually her father) who secure the suitor’s gifts, and not the bride.19 To cite three Odyssey passages: Eumaeus relates

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The Homeric World

chat King Laertes and his wife married their daughter off to someone in Same, ‘Σάμηνδ’ εδοσαν και μυρί3ελοντο (Ο 367); then there is the story o f Neleus offering his daughter’s hand in return for the cattle of Phylakos (o 231); again and most explicit of all, Hephaistos on detecting Aphrodite in adultery threatens to make her father Zeus hand back ‘πάντα . . . . εεδνα\οσσα oi έγγυάλιξα κυνώπιδος εϊνεκα κούρης’ (θ 318). It seems more than likely that each of the three forms of marriage prestation mentioned above is present in Homer. What is the likelihood of the co-existence of all these practices in a single society? It will probably be sufficient to concentrate on the two extreme practices of dowry and ‘bride-price’ (I retain the inverted commas for a reason that will shortly be explained), for a society combining these two might be expected to take indirect dowry in its stride. Theoretically at least, one and the same society could combine these two practices in one and the same marriage; or it could use them on different marriage-occasions in the same social milieu; or it could practise them in marriages at two different social levels. The third of these possibilities is the easiest to envisage, and is indeed well-attested in the anthropological record;20 but it will not do for Homer, since the Homeric passages on marriage are almost exclusively concerned with the practices of one class, the άριστοι. There remain the other two alternatives. Of these the first possibility, whereby both practices take place together on the same occasion, has been advocated in another closely-argued study by M.I. Finley (above, n. 14). He believes that the socalled ‘bride-price’ in Homer is not a price at all, but a gift of goods passing from the bridegroom (and sometimes also from unsuccessful suitors) to the bride’s father, which had its recompense in a counter-gift or dowry, from which he and his wife would benefit, and in the wife herself; together these would be equated in value, as far as possible, with the gifts passing in the other direction, to make a fair exchange. To this view there is at least one objection: that in all the Homeric references to marriages, there is only one doubtful case, so far as I know, in which the two contrasting practices seem to be associated with one and the same marriage. The possible instance is the marriage of Hektor and Andromache.21 In X 472 we are told that Hektor won his wife 'έπεί πόρε μυρία εδνα’; while in Z 394 and X 88 Andromache is described as πολύδωρος. Both phrases are in some degree ambiguous: the former, a much-repeated formula, does not identify the recipient of the μυρία εδνα, and so could easily be seen as a description of indirect dowry rather than of bride-price; while the adjective πολύδωρος (with parallel words like ήπιόδωρος) has a wide variety of possible meanings besides the favoured interpretation of ‘richly dowered’. This latter, I admit, is the translation supported by the scholiasts; on the assumption that it is correct, I am more inclined to believe that we have here an instance of the commonly-attested (above, p. 000) combination of dowry and indirect dowry, than that this passage alone should be proof of

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39

the exchange of gifts on the same marriage-occasion. It is relevant, if hardly conclusive, to cite here the famous offer of Agamemnon to Achilles in I 146 (= I 288), where Agamemnon expressly renounces the one practice (apparent bride-price) in favour of the other (lavish dowry). I appreciate that Finley’s type of exchange transaction would conform exactly to the pattern of giftexchange whose operation, in a wide variety of other Homeric situations, he himself has so clearly demonstrated. But these other situations are in general ‘open-ended’ ones in whose field etiquette operates unfettered—hospitality, departure, diplomacy, payments for services rendered, desired or anticipated— whereas a marriage is a formal and contractual thing. A much more substantial point, to my mind, is that anthropological evidence shows the exchange of gifts at marriages, in the way envisaged by Finley, to be exceedingly rare in Eurasia and Africa at any time. Where it does occur (mainly in America and the Pacific), it is largely confined to the simpler societies which do not practise agriculture. For Homer’s society, it would be unexpected and indeed inappropriate.22 There is, besides, the argument to be considered below: that bride-price and dowry are but respective parts of two contrasting modes of property-transmission. Both modes, together with other more or less closely associated practices, are clearly detectable in Homer, which should make it easier to accept that true bride-price is present too. It remains to consider briefly the remaining possibility mentioned earlier: that marriages among the Homeric ά ρ ισ το ί were sometimes attended by bride-price practice, sometimes by dowry (with or v/ithout indirect dowry). If this were so, there would have to be factors influencing the choice of practice. The likeliest would perhaps be that, according to fine social gradations within the general class of the nobility, the relative status of the bride’s family and the bridegroom’s would decide in which direction the gifts passed. Marriage-settlements have often contributed to the nuances of social precedence dear to the hearts of aristocrats; the rationale is usually that the preponderance of gifts should pass from the less socially elevated side of the marriage to the more elevated.23 But again we have to ask, is this true of Homer? And again the answer must be negative. By what rationale should Hektor, the eldest and most prominent son of the king of Troy, be required to offer a lavish bride-price (or indirect dowry) for the daughter of the relatively obscure king of Thebes? (X 472). Or the great Neleus of Pylos to do likewise for the daughter of a king of Orchomenos? (λ 281). Conversely, why should King Ikarios offer his much-admired daughter Penelope to an unspecified nobleman from Dulichion, Same, wooded Zakynthos or rocky Ithaka with a large dowry, as it is repeatedly predicted that he will? (a 277 etc.). The explanation in terms of ‘marriage up or down’, it seems, w ill hardly fit the Homeric pattern. Nor, to be briefer still, will another possible way of rationalising different practices, namely the incidence of marriage abroad. There is no consistent differentiation between

40

The Homeric World

marriages contracted locally and those involving more distant families: each kind of marriage shows both kinds of practice.2 1For other potential bases of differentiation, the Homeric descriptions are not sufficiently circumstantial to provide the evidence. It seems to me that another, altogether simpler explanation of the diversity of Homeric marriage-settlements is beginning to force itself upon us: namely, that Homer is describing a mixture of practices, derived from a diversity of historical sources. For such a conclusion there is, I think, some further support which emerges from broadening the scope of the anthro­ pological argument; for marriage-settlement is, after all, but a part of the whole spectrum of inheritance, property and kinship patterns. Before calling on this evidence, however, let me freely confess to the dangers attendant on such a procedure; dangers which go beyond the invariable disadvantages of apealing to a different discipline in which one is not well versed. My justification for using this evidence is that I shall not claim that it is in any way decisive or final, for it manifestly is not; merely it seems to me to suggest tendencies which, taken together, appear to shift the balance of probability in favour of the tentative conclusion, reached above in the particular context of marriage-settlements, and capable of a wider applica­ tion in the social system as a whole: that Homer’s picture is composite. From the enormous body of data tabulated in G.P. Murdock’s World Ethnographic Atlas, which covers no less than 863 human societies from all over the world, and of many different stages of development, Dr J.R . Goody has in a recent paper extracted some interesting conclusions in the field of inheritance, property and marriage. 25 I am aware that a compilation such as the Ethnographic Atlas must present a simplified picture of human institu­ tions, in which the various components have to be isolated and coded in a way that must gloss over many individual variants: to take an example, one of the features whose presence or absence is recorded is endogamy, which is extended to cover any tendency to marry within a certain range of kin, caste or local group— whereas one might argue that in reality these are not all merely variants of the same phenomenon. Nevertheless, when consistent and repeated patterns emerge from such data, it is surely legitimate to identify the patterns and to offer one’s explanation for them. This is what Goody has done. In categorising the societies, Goody shows that transmission o f property is an important variable, often determining other practices in associated fields. He demonstrates this by dividing the societies into two categories based on property-transmission, and then testing the correlation of these categories with other variables. The results seem to me to be sufficiently positive to be significant. His first category consists of those societies which exhibit ‘diverging devolution’, whereby property is distributed among kin of both sexes; his second, of the ‘homogeneous devolution’ societies, where

Historical and Archaeological Background

41

property passes through kin of the same sex only. In the first, diverging devolution category, there is a very strong association with the nuclear family; this, rather than any broader descent-group, is the emphasised social unit. Another very common form of diverging devolution is the system of dowry and/or indirect dowry,“5 a point particularly relevant to the previous section of this discussion. Again within the field of marriage, there is a further, if looser, correlation with the tendency to celebrate weddings with elaborate ceremonial.27 But from this point on, Goody tests the correlation of diverging devolution with a number of quite diverse variables; they number a dozen or so, of which perhaps six allow for some sort of check with the Homeric evidence. I give these in order of the strength of the correlation with diverging devolution: A B C D

Monogamy. The use of the plough. A complex stratification by caste or by class. A kinship terminology sufficiently complex to distinguish siblings from cousins. E Alternative residence for married couples with either group of ‘in-laws’ (‘ambilocaO or independently (‘neolocal’), rather than automatic residence with either the wife’s family (‘uxorilocal’) or the husband’s (‘virilocal’). F Endogamy, as defined above. Goody’s second category, that of the homogeneous devolution societies, naturally tends to be associated with the opposite features to the above. For example, such societies tend to allow wide freedom in the choice of spouse, and to practise polygamy (invariably in the form of polygyny on the part of the men); they are also often associated with ‘classificatory’ kinship-terminology, and with no elaborate social stratification. More important is their correlation with the reverse of the more or less defini­ tional characteristics of diverging devolution which were mentioned earlier: homogeneous devolution societies are based on the patrilineal or matrilineal descent group, even though they may well retain the nuclear family with this; and (again important for our purposes) they practise bride-price rather than dowry or indirect dowry. Where does Homeric society stand in relation to these two contrasting patterns? Hellenists w ill at once recognise several features of the first, diverging devolution type of social system as being familiar from Homer. A dowry system (with, less certainly, indirect dowry as well) is as we have seen present in Homer. Actual marriage ceremonial, to judge from the double wedding celebrated at Menelaos’ palace in δ 3 ff., and from the scenes on the Shield of Achilles (Σ 491 fif), is quite elaborate. Turning to the other variables listed above, it will probably be agreed that in its strict sense monogamy (A) is common practice for the Homeric hero (though not

42

The Homeric World

invariable, as will be shown below); perhaps the clearest case is that of Menelaos who, when it becomes clear that Helen can bear him no further children after Hermione, begets a son and heir by a slave-woman rather than take a second wife (δ 11). Use of the plough (B), it goes without saying, is familiar in Homer. As to kinship-terminology (D), it is certainly true that Homer once uses the word άνέψιος (I 464), thus making the distinction between cousin and brother (άδελφεός) in much the same way that later Greeks did; but here there is again some contrary evidence to take into account (see below). On the residence of married couples (E), there is perhaps enough evidence to show that Homer’s picture corresponds once again to the diverging devolution pattern: for example, it seems that the presence of an heiress such as Nausikaa (ζ 244-5) or the daughters of Priam or Nestor, could lead to an ‘uxoriiocal’ marriage even though the general pattern may have been ‘virilocal’. The remaining two variables, (C) and (F), I find it difficult to evaluate with respect to Homer. In many respects his society is very highly stratified (C), and there seems to be a corresponding inhibition against marrying outside one’s class (F); yet the forms of endogamy whereby marriage within a kinship or a local group is favoured seem largely foreign to Homer. But as hinted above, there is perhaps a methodological flaw here in the compilation of the data. Overall, the evidence so far considered encourages the view that Homer’s society is broadly of the diverging devolution type. Once we turn to the contrasting pattern of homogeneous devolution, however, we find equally positive correspondences with Homer. These begin at the most basic level. The oikos is the hub of Homer’s whole social system, as champions of the historical Homeric society like Finley28 and Adkins29 have rightly insisted. But what are the characteristics of the Homeric oikos? In most of the cases where we have explicit description, it is no more nor less than the patrilineal extended family of the homogeneous devolution pattern in ancient dress. The nuclear family, although known to Homer, is to say the least not his general norm. It might seem possible to explain away the extravagantly diffuse oikos of Priam, which includes fifty sons and their wives, and twelve daughters and their husbands (Z 242 ff.), as a piece of foreign exoticism contrasted with Achaean practice. But then we find that Nestor’s oikos similarly includes both sons and sons-in-law (γ 387 etc.); that Menelaos’ son (though not his daughter) is apparently destined to live at home after marriage (δ 10 f.); and that the less conven­ tional menage of Aeolus (K 5—12) also represents a larger descent group under one roof. As Finley writes,30 ‘Normally, the poems seem to say, although the evidence is not altogether clear and consistent, the sons remained with their father in his lifetime’—and the same is frequently true of the daughters. Here then we seem to find a basic characteristic of homogeneous devolution represented in Homeric society. Nor is it the only one. As we have seen, bride-price is apparently embedded in the Homeric

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43

tradition. Polygamy rears its head in Troy, where Priam is resolutely polygynous (X 48 etc.); the temptation may again be felt to treat this as conscious exoticism, but the example of Priam’s oikos (see above) does not encourage such an explanation. Next, under the heading of kinship-terminology (D), let us note the curious occurrence of κασίγνητος, a word frequently used elsewhere to denote a sibling, in the sense of ‘first cousin’ in O 545;31 this imprecision contrasts sharply with the usage of άνέψιος noted previously. Finally, if it can legitimately be counted as a feature of homo­ geneous devolution, let us recall Homer’s apparent avoidance of certain important forms of endogamy (above). On the criterion of property-transmission, therefore—and I stress that this is the basis of the dichotomy employed here— it appears that the Homeric social system has characteristics of two different patterns of society. How much does this imply? The two patterns are opposed; not, however, totally inter-exclusive. I am not for one moment claiming that all the features so far noted could not be observed in one and the same society; anthropological laws are not so inflexible as that. Nor, incidentally, in the matter of marriage-settlements, are linguistic laws sufficiently restrictive to prevent the same society from using the same word, such as έ'δνα, along with its cognates, to cover every possible form of marriage-prestation— bride-price, dowry, indirect dowry—as seems to be the case in Homer. In all such cases, a degree of overlap between different systems would not be unexpected, and such overlap would most naturally occur in the circum­ stances either of a geographically marginal, or of a chronologically transi­ tional culture, between opposed norms. There is little to prevent anyone from explaining the Homeric picture in such a way, and thus seeking to preserve its unitary and historical quality. The evidence, as I said at the outset, is not finally decisive; I have rehearsed it simply because, cumula­ tively, it seems to me difficult to reconcile with the belief that Homer’s society is unitary and historical. The evidence is naturally strongest where Homer seems to portray, as normal features of his society, practices which are not often combined in reality. To give one example, homogeneous devolu­ tion features such as bride-price and the patrilineal descent-group are seldom found together with diverging devolution features such as mono­ gamy; 32 in this particular instance, of 344 homogeneous devolution societies in the Ethnographic Atlas, monogamy was present in only 29^ Yet Homer, it seems to me, presents all the three features mentioned as being normal in his society. Even here, I concede that there is subjectivity involved in assessing what is ‘normal’ for Homer; and in these circumstances it would be unwarranted to try to press this evidence any further. I will leave it to exert such persuasive force as it may possess on its own.

To return briefly to the matter of marriage-settlement with which we were originally concerned, it may be thought significant that the marriage

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The Homeric World

practices of each of the main types are described by Homer in strongly formulaic language. One may cite the repeated formula for bride-price or indirect dowry, επεί πόρε μυρία εδνα’ (the subject of πόρε being the bridegroom), and the pair of lines twice used of the bride’s kinsmen in the dowry situation, οι δε γάμον τεύξουσι καί αρτυνέουσιν εεδνα |πολλά μάλ", όσσα εοικε φίλης επί παιδός επεσθαι’. This fact, however, will hardly be used by Homeric scholars these days as an argument for the great antiquity, still less the historical contemporaneity, of the practices so described. On the latter point at least, it must now be accepted that formulae relating to the same area of activity could and did originate in different periods of the growth of the Epic. In another article, Miss Gray showed33 that, for example, the traditional shield-phrases 'άσπίδος ευκύκλου 3 and ασπίδος αμφιβρότης 3 should derive from two different historical stages in the development of the shield. Those who maintain that Homeric society is unitary and historical are bound to ask themselves the question, to what time and place that society belongs. 3/1 The two answers which might seem, prima fa cie, to be the likeliest, can be shown to be improbable on other grounds: namely the historical period in which the story of the poems is ostensibly set, the later Mycenaean age, and the period in which the poems reached their final form and in which the historical Homer most probably lived, the eighth century B.c. A fully Mycenaean setting is rendered almost impossible by the evidence of the Linear B tablets, whose picture has been shown, by Finley more than anyone else, to be quite inconsistent with Homer, especially in the field of social and political structure. A purely contemporary origin, though it may not be excluded by the ubiquitous and pervasive presence of formulae, affecting social life as much as other aspects, would surely be in utter conflict with the other evidence that we have for eighth-century society, from Hesiod and from archaeological sources. It is a surprise to encounter such primitive features as bride-price and polygamy in Homer at all; that they should have been taken, as normal features, from the Greek society of his own day is almost unthinkable. This means that, if one is set on an historical explanation, the likely models are narrowed down to two periods, the ‘Age of Migrations’ between the fall of the Mycenaean citadels around 1200, and a lower date in the region of 1000; and the ensuing two centuries, a more settled period which in my view forms the central part of the Dark Age. In inclining as he does towards tenth- and ninth-century Greece as the historical basis for the world of Odysseus (see n. 34), Finley makes a telling point. ‘If it is to be placed in time’, he writes, ‘as everything we know about heroic poetry says it must . . .’ (my italics), and so on. I concede the general truth of this. Finley’s favoured comparisons are with the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied, of which this is evidently true; and to these one could add a parallel not used by him, the ‘Ulster Cycle’ of prose epic about which

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my Edinburgh colleague Professor K.H. Jackson has written with such authority. ‘This whole picture of the ancient Irish heroic way of life’, he concludes,35 ‘as it is seen in the oldest tales is self-consistent, of a very marked individuality, and highly circumstantial. One can hardly doubt that it represents a genuine tradition of a society that once existed’. This is independent and striking confirmation for Finley’s view. But there is a welltried counter to such analogy between Homer and other Epic: this is to say that the qualitative distinction between Homeric and most other, perhaps all other Epic is such as to invalidate these analogies.36 The argument may perhaps be too well-worn today to carry the conviction that it once did, without detailed substantiation of a kind that I am not competent to provide. Nevertheless I firmly believe that it is soundly based. In support of this whole position, I wish now to draw some analogies, not outside but within the Homeric Epic, that is with topics other than the social system. inevitably, it is with the material aspects of culture that we have the most secure external evidence. I wish to discuss briefly certain aspects37— specifically, metal-usage, burial-practices, military equipment and tem­ ples—which figure in the cultural background of the poems, and which may provide valid analogies with the social features. For metal-working, it should be generally appreciated, as a result of Miss Gray’s article with which I began (see n. 1), that Homer’s picture is a very curious one. His exclusive use of bronze, for every sword and every spear­ head mentioned in both poems, is the point of greatest significance; for these are the two supreme weapons of the Epic. There is no period of Greek history or prehistory, later than the first half of the eleventh century b.c , of which such a picture would be representative. Professor Kirk rightly observes38 that afterwards bronze continued to be used ‘often enough, for spear- and arrowheads and even for axes’. But for Homer, arrowheads and axes are of secondary importance; and for Homer bronze is used, for the two prime offensive weapons, not ‘often enough’ but always. Such a culture never existed after the end of the Bronze Age; the formulae on which the picture is based—although the language is not exclusively formulaic—can only have originated in either the full Mycenaean period or its immediate aftermath. But this simple assertion at once faces us with the other aspects of Homer’s metallurgy which conflict utterly with this: first and foremost, that iron is not only known to Homer as a working metal and a trading commodity, but is actually the normal metal for his agricultural and industrial tools. Historically, iron for tools was adopted, if anything, rather later than iron for weapons; it follows therefore that no historical society, at least in the relevant part of the ancient world, ever showed even fleetingly the combination of metal-usages found in Homer. The central era of the Dark Age, the tenth and ninth centuries, is in some ways the least appropriate of all periods to look to for an historical setting for Homer’s

46

The Homeric World

metallurgy, for at this time the dependence on iron reached its peak, to recede a little in the eighth and seventh centuries and give way to that partial recourse to bronze which prompted Professor Kirk’s statement quoted above. On burial-practices, there is no unanimity today, any more than in the past. To quote two very recent books, Professor Finley in his Early Greece still holds that ‘The Iliad and Odyssey remain firmly anchored in the earlier Dark Age on this point {sc. burial rite)’; while Dr Kurtz and Mr Boardman are equally sure that Homer’s picture ‘is almost wholly in keeping with Geometric and later Greek practice’, which is not at all the same thing.39 My own view, predictably, is that Homer’s burial practices are not firmly anchored in, nor wholly in keeping with, anything. His heroes cremate each other, maybe, because that was the rite with which Homer was most familiar. But from this point on, historical verisimilitude disappears. For it is not true that at any one period all Greece, nor even all Ionia, cremated. In Homer, the heroes are cremated singly or en masse according to the dictates of the story. When, as regularly happens, a tumulus is erected over a single cremation (whereas historically the tumulus almost always contains a multiple burial), we may again suspect that the requirements of the plot are the overriding factor. A few elements of the funerary practice may be culled from the Bronze Age: the fairly lavish provision of possessions for the deceased, the occasional use of horse-sacrifice, the idea of cenotaphs, possibly the funerary games. Although it is agreed that the great Homeric funerals are among the most magnificent set-pieces in the poems, it seems certain that no Greek ever witnessed in real life the precise sequence of events narrated in Patroklos’ funeral. Life may imitate art, but it cannot match it. What need be said about Homeric fighting-equipment beyond the fact, today I hope accepted, that it is composite and shows internal inconsis­ tency? To illustrate this, it may be enough to recall that the same hero repeatedly sets out to fight with a pair of throwing-spears and is then found in action with a single heavy thrusting-spear (cf. e.g. Γ 18 and 338; Λ 43 and 260; Π 139 and 801). But there is another conclusion to be drawn from Homeric weaponry and armour: this is, that whatever conspicuous item of equipment we choose to focus our attention on—the fairly common bronze corslets, bronze greaves, and bronze helmets, the pair of throwing-spears which is clearly the hero’s regular armament, the occasionally metal-faced shield, the silver-studded sword-hilt—argument may rage as to whether their historical origin lies in the Mycenaean period or in the improved equipment of the poet’s own day, the eighth century; but the one period at which virtually no evidence for their existence is to be found is the tenth and ninth centuries, and it could be added that there is but slight indication of their presence in the preceding Age of Migrations. 40 Something of a pattern may thus be emerging from the categories of

Historical and Archaeological Background

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material culture that we have been considering. The historical models for each feature can be looked for either early (that is in the full Bronze Age) or late (that is in the poet’s own times). They show a remarkable reluctance to reveal themselves in the intervening four centuries, between about 1200 and 800. The same lesson is provided by the study of the Homeric temple. There are now free-standing religious buildings, worthy of the name νηός and conforming to the Homeric references, known from Bronze Age Greece. I would cite the structure found by Professor Caskey at Ayia Irini on Keos, and the temples of Mycenaean date at Kition in Cyprus which Dr Karageorghis has recently excavated. There is also the smaller shrine which Lord W illiam Taylour has uncovered at Mycenae. At the other end of the time-scale, the revival of the temple in historical times, in the light of the latest chronological evidence, can barely if at all be traced back before 800 B.c. on any Greek site. Of the earlier so-called temples that have been claimed, either the identification as a temple, or the ascription to the ninth century (occasionally the tenth) is doubtful—sometimes both/11 This archaeological evidence has, I fear, been rather summarily presented here. But my aim is the fairly limited one of showing that, in certain aspects of the material world he portrays, Homer, besides in some cases combining features from different historical eras, also displays certain tendencies in the choice of those eras. The reasons for these tendencies may be of the simplest kind—perhaps that the poet’s desire is to portray a materially impressive culture, and that this inevitably leads to the choice of either the Mycenaean world which had been impressive in this way, or to the contemporary world which was becoming so, but to avoid the less well-endowed intervening periods. But a question remains: would similar factors operate in the more intangible world of social relations? Professor Finley again has a ready answer to such suggestions:42 ‘The comparative study of heroic poetry shows, I think decisively, that the society portrayed tends to be relatively (though not entirely) “modern”, for all the pretence of great antiquity and for all the archaism of the armour and the political geography’. I would disagree with him over one point: what we have in Homer is surely not just archaism in material culture, but artificial conflations of historical practices, a few features such as the provision of twin spears being probably of decidedly recent origin. But this must not be allowed to distract us from the fundamental question: is it possible to have social institutions operating quite independently of material culture in a literary world? I wish to argue, not that it is quite impossible, but that it is unlikely to have happened with Homer. For consider certain of the characteristics of Homeric society that Finley and Adkins have described so well. It is strongly success-orientated and strongly materialistic; among its most pervasive features are the ceremonial exchange of gifts in a wide variety of situations, in which it insists on the actual exchange value and not merely the aesthetic or sentimental value of

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The Homeric World

the gifts, and also the equally ceremonial feasting. These are activities whose successful operation demands quite a high material standard of living: for kings to exchange mean gifts is not merely unheroic from a literary point of view, it is socially ineffective in real life; for a host to entertain an uninvited group of long-term guests on skimpy fare is, equally, not merely unheroic but historically improbable. A society that cannot afford to perform such ceremonial lavishly will not practise it at all. Now all the evidence yielded by the archaeology of the settlements and graves of the earlier Dark Age suggests that here, at any rate, was a society that could afford nothing of the kind. Precious metals are for long totally unknown; bronze utensils and other large metal objects are exceedingly rare; while in one particular field, that of the funerary feasts, we are luckily able to make a precise comparison between Homer and archaeology. We find differences not only in degree, but in kind. The quantities of animal bones found beside Dark Age graves are relatively modest, and represent cut joints of meat rather than Homer’s whole carcasses; furthermore, the beef and pork so prominent in Homer are far eclipsed by the cheaper mutton and goat’s meat.43 If challenged on the validity of archae­ ological evidence in such contexts, I would point not only to the obvious contrast with Mycenaean Greece, but to the example of a contemporary society in another part of Europe, the Urnfield Culture of East Central Europe, whose cemetery-sites produce evidence of just such a lavish society as we would expect from Homer’s description: graves with quantities of elaborate bronzework, and with the accoutrements of feasting and of war particularly conspicuous. Another instance could be found in the rich tombs of the eighth century at Salamis in Cyprus.44 Clearly, therefore, it is possible for archaeological evidence to match up to a literary picture thus far. If, on the other hand, the objection were made that Homer’s picture, though glorified by poetic licence, is yet fundamentally rooted in the historical society of the Dark Age, then one could indicate other qualities in the archaeological record of the period, which would have required Homer not merely to exaggerate but positively to contradict. There are, for instance, signs of drastic depopulation, and of the interrupted communications which naturally accompanied this. Homeric society does not admit of either circumstance. Another point about the centuries of the Dark Age is that their memory was not retained, let alone treasured, by any Greek writer of whom we know. Hesiod regarded the era as one of unrelieved disaster; later Greeks found themselves embarrassed by their total ignorance of these years. It is fair to ask how this happened, if Greek society of that period possessed anything resembling the striking qualities of Homeric society, its selfreliance, its extreme competitiveness, its prodigious acquisitiveness and generosity, the functional simplicity of its ethics. If such a society had flourished at so relatively recent a time, would not its ideals and values have inevitably seeded themselves more widely in early Greek thought? In the later part of this paper I have concentrated on one particular

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period, roughly the tenth and ninth centuries b .c ., in order to assess its claim to have provided the model for Homeric society. It may be felt that the preceding Age of Migrations, for example, has escaped scrutiny in this connection. But I hope to have made clear that some at least of these arguments apply to any identification, of whatever period, of an historical society which might be faithfully reflected in Homer. For it seems to me that such identifications involve, in one respect, a certain derogation from Homer’s artistic standing. If Homer really preserved, like a faded sepia photograph, a faithful image of a real society that belonged, not to his own times nor to the period which had provided such historical background as there was for the actual events he described, but to the period which hap­ pened to be most influential in the formation of this aspect of the Epic tradition; then indeed he was on a footing with the forgotten and anonymous authors of the Chanson de Roland or the Cattle Raid o f Cooley or any one of the numerous epics and sagas of normal type. For an oral poet who adopts, entire, from his predecessors of a certain period, something as pervasive as a social framework, becomes in my view not merely traditional but derivative. To an important extent, he can make his characters behave in the way that people actually behaved at that time, and in no other way. The scope for creative contributions is sharply inhibited. If he does extend this social pattern himself, he must do it with such scrupulous care as to obliterate his own tracks completely. This is no doubt one reason why no author’s name has survived for the Nibelungenlied, the Ulster Cycle, the Icelandic sagas and those others of even the finest non-Homeric epics in which such social and historical verisimilitude is to be found. By contrast, a poet who is also traditional, and ultimately just as indebted to predecessors, but who depends on predecessors of many periods, and admits elements from his own experience and imagina­ tion into the bargain, is far freer. He can select, he can conflate, he can idealise. Unless he is pedantically careful, minor inconsistencies will creep in, of the kind we have been discussing; but his scope for creativity, even though the picture he paints is not truly fictional, will be greater. This is a subjective argument to end with, but the fact that the Homeric poems are attached to a name, and that, even if we doubt the existence of an eighth-century poet called Homer, we are nevertheless aware, in reading the Iliad and Odyssey, of being at least intermittently in the presence of poetic genius, is a strong hint that Homeric Epic conforms to the second of the two pictures sketched above, and not the first. At all events, I offer this as a further argument against the existence of an historical Homeric society. 43

Notes 1. JHS 74 (1954), 1. 2. JHS 91 (1971), 1.

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3. Ibid., 2. 4. Greeks (1967), 45. 5. See e.g. Prom Mycenae to Homer (1958), chapter 4; and in A Companion to Homer (ed. A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stubbings, 1963), 45 2-6 2. 6. The Songs of Homer (1962), chapter 97. Archaeologia Homerica (ed. F. Matz and H.-G. Buchholz), Göttingen, 1967—. 8. Ibid., Kapitel C, E. Bielefeld, Schmuck (1968), 65; cf. more fully Gnomon 42 (1970), 157-99. The Homeric Odyssey (1955), 157. 10. By ‘historical’, throughout this paper, I mean ‘derived from one single period of history’; a conflation of features from a diversity of historical periods I prefer to call ‘composite’. 11. Alasdair MacIntyre, A short history of Ethics (1968), 8. 12. JHS 90 (1970), 137, n. 58. 13. Ibid., 122. 14. M.I. Finley in Revue Internationale des Droits de VAntiquité (3e ser.), 2 (1955), 16 7 -9 4 , followed in this important respect by W .K. Lacey, JHS 86 (1966), 55-69· 15. G.M. Calhoun in A Companion to Homer (above, n. 5), 452. 16. I give a bald list of those passages which seem to me to illustrate this: Λ 243, N 365 (where the ‘price’ is a feat rather than a payment), Π 178, 190, X 472, Θ 318, λ 281, o 16, 231, 367, π 391, τ 529, φ 161. 17. Again, while several instances are ambiguous, this practice seems exempli­ fied by Z 191, 251, 394, 1 147 = 269, X 51, a 277 = β 196, β 54, 132, δ 736, η 311, υ 341, ψ 227, ω 294.

18. Hermes 47 (1912), 4 1 4 -2 1 . The interpretation of εδνα as meaning ‘indirect dowry’ in certain passages receives notable support from the scholiasts, ibid., 41919- Cf. Finley, op. cit. (above, n. 14). 20. See e.g. Nur Yalman, Under the Bo Tree (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), esp. chapter 8 and pp. 303—4. 21. There is a further case where both practices appear to be associated with a hypothetical future occasion, the re-marriage of Penelope: contrast O 16 etc. (apparent bride-price) with a 277 etc. (dowry). But the case is weaker because the identity of the bridegroom is undecided, and in any case I would apply here the same explanation (;mutatis mutandis) as in the case of Hektor and Andromache. The marital fortunes of Penelope are indeed a constant embarrassment to those who believe in a consistent social pattern in Homer, since the ultimate responsibility is distributed between herself, her father and her son, and the political control of Ithaka is also implicated. Even Finley describes the case as an ‘often self­ contradictory amalgam of strands’ [op. cit. (above, n. 14), 172, n. 19]. W .K . Lacey (above, n. 14, 6 1 -6 ) has bravely striven to discern consistent principles behind the various situations envisaged for Penelope; but his explanation seems to me to posit an improbable and indeed almost legalistic fidelity on the poet’s part. 22. See J.R. Goody, ‘Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia’, especially Appendix II, in Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology), ed. J.R. Goody and S.J. Tambiah, forthcoming. 23. I think especially of the hilarious negotiations between Baron Ochs and the Marschallin’s notary in the first act of Der Rosenkavalier. 24. Contrast Neleus and Chloris (λ 281, see above) with Odysseus and Nausikaa (hypothetical, η 314) for marriages abroad; Polymela and Echekles (Π 190) with Laothoe and Priam (X 51) for more local marriages. 25. ‘Inheritance, Property and Marriage in Africa and Eurasia’, Sociology 3 0 9 6 9 ), 55-76.

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26. ‘Inheritance, Property and Marriage in Africa and Eurasia’, Sociology 3 (1969), 56. 27. Ibid., 57. 28. E.g. The World of Odysseus (1956), 66 f. 29. E.g. Merit and Responsibility (I960), 35 f. 30. Op. cit. (above, n. 28), 72. 31. I am indebted to Mrs S.C. Le M. Humphreys for this and several other valuable observations. 32. Goody, op. cit. (above, n. 25), 62—3 with Table V. 33. CQ 41 (1947), 10 9 -2 1 , esp. 12 0 -1. 34. E.g. Adkins, JHS 91 (1971) 1; Finley, The World of Odysseus, 55. 35. The Oldest Irish Tradition (1964), 28. 36. C f, on methods of composition, Kirk, The Songs of Homer, 95. 37. Some of these points are discussed in my book The Dark Age of Greece (1971), 388-94. 38. The Songs of Homer, 182. 39- M.I. Finley, Early Greece: the Bronze and Archaic Ages (1970), 84; D. Kurtz and J. Boardman, Greek Burial Customs (1971), 186. 40. I refrain from introducing chariots into this question, since the widespread assumption that Homer’s chariotry is a half-understood memory of the true Bronze Age practice has been questioned by J.K . Anderson (AJA 69 (1965), 349-52). But it remains true that, for chariots as well, the tenth and ninth (and indeed the eleventh) centuries in Greece have little or no evidence to offer. 41. Cf. The Dark Age of Greece, 4 0 8 -1 2 , 42 2-3 . 42. Historia 6 (1957), 147, n. 1. 43. Cf. The Dark Age of Greece, 3 7 9 -8 0 and n. 20. 44. As was kindly pointed out to me by Mr V.R. d’A. Desborough. 45. An earlier version of the paper was delivered to the Oxford Philological Society on May 12, 1972. It would be invidious to single out any of the numerous members from whose contributions to the subsequent discussion I benefited. But on the anthropological side I gratefully acknowledge my debt to Dr Jack Goody and my colleague, Professor James Littlejohn, much as I fear I have oversimplified their views on complex subjects; while among Classical colleagues I owe a special debt to Mr D.B. Robinson.

23_______________________ The Use and Abuse of Homer* I. Morris ^ Source: Classical Antiquity, v o i. 5 , 1 9 8 6 , p p . 9 4 - 1 1 5

This section is a detailed discussion of some of the principal arguments that have been raised against an eighth-century source for the Homeric social structure. I have claimed that comparative evidence makes an eighthcentury date for the material from which Homer’s Heroic World is put together almost certain, but it is always possible to argue that the Iliad and Odyssey are unique in this and are not based upon the lived experience of poet and audience, just as they are unique in the genius of Homer’s language. To fly in the face of the overwhelming probability of the comparative evidence, though, the case for non-eighth-century origins for the institutions of the Heroic Age would have to be strong indeed; but in what follows it will be seen that there is nothing in the poems to rule out the eighth century as the source of the institutions and interactions we find in Homer. The earliest date currently advocated for Homer’s world is the Late Bronze Age, the period in which the Trojan War is ostensibly set. In the decades following Schliemann’s successes at Troy and elsewhere, it was often assumed that Homer was describing this thirteenth-century world fairly faithfully, with just a few anachronisms.1 There are certainly still many “Mycenaeanists” around, arguing that Homer contains a substantial core of genuine Bronze Age memories (to a greater or lesser extent), but I w ill not discuss the Bronze Age “survivals” in any detail here. Instead, I shall simply quote the closing paragraph of Finley’s seminal essay on property and land tenure in Homer and the Linear B tablets, from which I take my position: “The Homeric world was altogether post-Mycenaean, and the so-called Mycenaean reminiscences and survivals are rare, isolated and garbled. Hence Homer is not only not a reliable guide to the Mycenaean tablets; he is no guide at all.”2 The few memories of Mycenaean objects, as Finley stressed, are not relevant to the central question of this section, the origin of the institutions incorporated in Homer’s Heroic Age. No one would argue

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coday that the palace system of the Late Bronze Age is in any way indicated in Homer; the structures of his society were not drawn from the Mycenaean world. A more serious case has been made for an Early Dark Age date for Homeric society. Anthony Andrewes suggested that the institutions in Homer were handed down within an oral tradition from the twelfth or eleventh century to the eighth century, and so were three to four hundred years out of date when the poems were written down. 3 The arguments used by Andrewes are similar to those advanced by Finley in favor of the tenth and ninth centuries as the World of Odysseus, and the discussion below, while dealing primarily with Finley’s case, is also intended as a reply to Andrewes’ dating. Finley seems to arrive at his dating almost out of desperation, in that he feels that the world Homer describes could not belong in the eighth century and must therefore be an earlier one. He sums up his argument: “If, then, the world of Odysseus is to be placed in time, as everything we know from the comparative study of heroic poetry says that it must, the most likely centuries seem to be the tenth and ninth.”4 Finley supports the possibility of a “frozen” society with an analogy drawn from the twelfth-century a .d . Song o f Roland. Roland describes (very inaccurately) a campaign in 778, but Finley claims that “the background of Roland is the France of about a century before the poet’s own time.”5 Such a purely formal analogy, however, is hardly relevant to Homer, because there is a fundamental difference between the Greek bard and the nameless medieval poets of epics such as El Cid and Roland', the latter were almost certainly literate clerics.6 The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Much of the discussion in section I is not relevant to the creative processes of literate poets, who belong within an entirely different tradition of writing, as opposed to recitation. As first pointed out by Mireaux, the poet of Roland probably made use of other written texts as sources, particularly the text of an earlier epic composed about 1000 a .d .7 Even so, however, there is relatively little belonging to a pre-twelfthcentury world in the social background of Roland\ as Bowra says, We can hardly doubt that, when the poet of our Roland set out to describe a battle with the Saracens, he made them behave as recent history had taught him they might . . . Roland is quite as important a document for the understanding of the twelfth century as any chronicle, since it takes us into the workings of the crusader mentality.8 Even the heroic poetry of literate bards describes a society built primarily from contemporary concepts, and it seems impossible to find any parallel of an oral poem that preserves a bygone society to even the very limited extent of the Song o f Roland. For example, Paul Radin, analyzing a myth of the

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The Homeric World

Winnebago, an Eastern Sioux tribe from the area of modern Wisconsin, feeling that the society in the story was unrelated to that of the twentiethcentury Winnebago, argued that it must therefore describe a situation in the distant past. This has since been shown not to be the case; Lévi-Strauss was able to demonstrate that the same myth was in fact intimately tied to contemporary Winnebago culture, forming part of a complex structural scheme underlying Winnebago mythology in general.9 It has been noted that the Tamil Anthologies o f Love Songs show differing relationships between the kings and the commoners, which may represent different historical stages;10 but it is not clear at which stages in the first to the tenth century a .d . any of these poems were written down, and the chronological development is more likely to be linked to the dates of the poems themselves than to memories of a variety of past worlds,11 therefore providing no parallel case for Finley’s model. Chadwick held that there was a general Northern European Heroic Age, remembered in oral poems several centuries later than the Völkerwanderung in which most of the stories were set, but this too seems to be a faulty formulation.12 The core of Finley’s argument against an eighth-century date is the absence of institutions that he feels must have existed at the time of the poet. His writings are a little vague as to what we should expect to find in Homer and do not,13 but the questions he raised demand very serious consideration. What is missing from Homer that existed in the eighth century? Finley tells us “neither poem has any trace of the polis in its political sense” and goes on to point out that in Homer we find “no Ionia, no Dorians to speak of, no writing, no iron weapons, no cavalry in the battle scenes, no coloniza­ tion, no Greek traders, no communities without kings.”14 In The Ancient Greeks he had also called attention to the absence of overpopulation and the Olympic games as typically eighth-century features in Homer (p. 26). Of these objections, the question of polis institutions is the most serious one. It must be pointed out that we know relatively little about the precise form of the polis in the eighth century; Finley tells us that the argument can be circular if we claim that Homer describes the eighth century faithfully, since we know so little of it ,15 but equally there is a danger of circularity if we claim that we can see that Homer does not describe this eighth-century world. In spite of this initial problem, there seem to me to be reasonable grounds to think that the Homeric institutions are based on those of the eighth century. I w ill return to institutions later, since it is around these that the main arguments will cluster; but first I will consider Finley’s other objections to the eighth century. His list of absent features in The World o f Odysseus makes curious reading, followed as it is by the assertion that the Homeric world belongs to the tenth and ninth centuries. Of the items he gives as missing, the Dorians, Ionians, iron weapons, and cavalry were surely as present in Greece in the

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centh century as in the eighth, and their exclusion from the poems does not constitute an argument against either date.16 All these features may be taken under the heading of the epic distance. As we have seen, certain surface features of the poems were deliberately archaizing or fantasizing to foster the awareness in the audience that the story was not of their world, although the underlying assumptions about social structure and human nature were not affected. These features fall into the same class as the talking rivers and horses, as a patina of archaism or fantasy on the surface of a world founded in the shared experience of the poet and audience— that is, the epic distance. The epic distance does not affect the reality or other­ wise of the assumptions about society expressed in Homer, as Finley himself points out,17 and cannot be said to rule out an eighth-century world any more than one in the tenth century. The absence of writing in the poems has been touched on above and will be returned to, but it obviously constitutes a very poor argument against an eighth-century world. No colonization? Once again, this is hard to use as an argument favoring an Early Dark Age date over the eighth century. Finley here assumes that the colonial foundations of the eighth century were different from those of the tenth and ninth centuries in Ionia and the Cyclades, but where coloni­ zation does crop up (vi. 7-10) he tells us that Homer’s account of Selleria “could equally reflect the first Greek settlements in Ionia about or soon after 1000 B.c.” as the eighth-century foundations.18 If this is so, why does the absence of colonization rule out the eighth century, but not the tenth? The argument is again a circular one, with no bearing on the date of Homer’s world. Similarly, Menelaos’ desire to move Odysseus and all the Ithacans to the Argolid (iv. 174-77) could reflect any stage of post-Bronze Age history. It is quite possible that eighth-century colonization was not so very different in its organization from the establishment of new settlements across the whole Dark A ge;19 the relative infrequency of colonies in the poems is no argument in favor of a society based in the earlier period. Our evidence on Greek traders is insufficient to tell whether this is an argument against the eighth century. Limited amounts of Dark Age Greek pottery have been found in the Near East, and a few Oriental objects in Greece,20 but we simply cannot say who transported them, or why. Recent excavations at Lefkandi suggest the possibility that there was direct contact between Greece and Egypt in the tenth century b .c:. and that the volume of traffic between Greece and the Near East has been under­ estimated.21 The Odyssey has stories about Greeks sailing to Egypt (xiv. 425—58; xvii. 424-27), albeit for plunder; and Odysseus was taken for a trader in Phaeacia (viii. 159—64). The Phoenicians were probably still active throughout the eighth century,22 and their activity (e.g., xv. 415-84) does not indicate an early date. Finley found in Homer “no communities without kings,” and took this

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The Homeric World

as evidence for an Early Dark Age date, on the assumption that Dark Age monarchs were gradually replaced by oligarchies in the eighth century.23 According to tradition, kingship was still important in the period to which Homer is assigned; the monarchy is said to have continued until 753/52 b.c. at Athens, and 747 b.c. at Corinth, while at Sparta the first eponymous ephor took office in 755/54 b.c. Of course, these dates are to be regarded with a great deal of caution, but it is not so immediately apparent as Finley implies that kingship is a pre-eighth-century feature. Nicolai has suggested that the Iliad belongs to a mid-eighth-century movement away from kingship.24 In fact, if Herodotus is believed, the monarchy at Argos may have dragged on into the early sixth century.25 However, Finley may be more seriously challenged by asking a still more fundamental question: do all Homer’s communities have kings? Much depends here on the definition of king. If we take it to mean an hereditary male monarch, it can be shown that the Homeric basileus was perhaps not a king at all, and that the equation of basileus with king was made only in the sixth century B.c. and later. In an important study, Fritz Gschnitzer argued that basileus often meant only “nobleman” in Homer and found only nine occurrences where the word suggested an exclusive hereditary position.26 In a recent book Robert Drews has gone still further, suggesting that in Homer basileus almost always meant only “highborn leader,” with true hereditary monarchy almost entirely absent. Where Homer wished to indicate a “real” king, he suggests, he used the Mycenaean word anax,27 Drews’ thesis is that Dark Age communities, which he somewhat loosely terms poleis, were headed by groups of competing basileis, as we see on Ithaca in the Odyssey, and that “kingship” was largely absent from Homer’s world. Drew’s picture is rather one-sided, in that there obviously was a large element of heredity in the leadership of the communities at Ithaca, Pylos, Mycenae, and Sparta in the Odyssey, and Troy in the Iliad ,28 but it chal­ lenges Finley’s use of kingship as an argument against an eighth-century basis for the Homeric polities. Homer’s basileis have much in common with Hesiod’s, those of the Hymn to Demeter (678—625 B.c. on Janko’s dating) and even Tyrtaeus’.29 They certainly cannot be used to preclude Homer’s own world as the ultimate background of the poems. Finley’s claim that Homeric society is not so “over-populated” as eighthcentury Greece is interesting.30 It has long been assumed that the wave of colonies established after ca. 750 b.c. stemmed from population pressure, and that the eighth century was a time of rapid demographic expansion after three hundred years when the Aegean had been thinly settled.31 The figures given in Homer are perhaps little use; the huge numbers of warriors in the Iliad (2.494—877; 8.562—5), the 4,500 men sacrificing with Nestor at Pylos (iii. 7-8), and the remarkably numerous suitors from Dulichium, Same, Zacynthus, and Ithaca (xvi. 247-50) would doubtless be dismissed by Finley as poetic exaggeration, and he is presumably referring to the pattern

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of settlement in Ithaca. There was, it seems, unoccupied land available to be taken under cultivation in Ithaca (xxiv. 206-7); but so too was land available in the late eighth and early seventh centuries for Hesiod’s father, an immigrant to Boeotia from Asia Minor (WD 635-40). The eighth and seventh centuries seem to have been a time of the infilling of the landscape, and the establishment of many new small settlements.32 Otherwise, it is hard to see any evidence on this in Homer, and to argue ex silentio that the Homeric world is a pre-eighth-century one would be very illogical. Continuing with the arguments, we come to the contrast of Patroclus’ funeral games with the Olympic games.33 There is nothing in the games for Patroclus that suggests anything other than an eighth-century date. Turning to Hesiod again, we find him singing at the funeral games of Amphidamas in Chalcis (WD 654—57), and it has even been argued that the Theogony was composed to be sung at these games.34 Funeral games and Panhellenic games coexisted in the eighth century and later. It is worth noting that the absence of Panhellenic games in Homer is not very surprising. The list of victors in the stadion at Olympia compiled by Hippias of Elis around 400 b.c suggests that the games had a very local color until the seventh century. The first winner from outside the Western Peloponnese was Diodes of Corinth in 728 b.c.; and the first from outside the Peloponnese as a whole Orsippos and Menos of Megara in 720 and 704 b.c. Nor are the Panhellenic sanctuaries where the games were held overly neglected. These only began to flourish and to attract offerings from all over Greece in the very last years of the eighth century35 and accordingly receive only a few passing mentions in Homer (2.459—66; 20.403—5; vi. 162—67).36 The same chronological considerations apply to cult activities at Mycenaean tombs, which receive only oblique references in Homer.yl None of these arguments, then, provides any grounds at all for rejecting an eighth-century base for the poems. Finley’s most serious criticism is that the polis institutions, which were surely beginning to appear in the eighth century, are entirely absent in Homer. If justifiable, this claim would be a serious objection to my argument on general grounds that Homer’s oral poetry must be related to the society in which it was performed. However, I do not find such a dearth of evidence for eighth-century polis institutions in the poems as does Finley. It is on institutions, of course, that the case must be decided. Finley was correct to point out that the walls, docks, and so forth of Scheria did not constitute a p o l i s h Unfortunately, Finley did not go on to elucidate exactly what he would require to find in Homer to accept an eighth-century basis, saying just “the social organisation of the world of Odysseus was inadequate for the tasks we know some poleis contemporary with Homer to have performed.”39 We might begin at the obvious point, with the political organization of Ithaca. Runciman, taking a stance close to Finley’s, has defined Ithaca as a

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“sem i-state,” with well-defined sociocentric statuses, but not, he suggests, about to develop into a true state.40 This contrasts to some extent with the view of the eighth and seventh centuries as a period of state formation in Greece,41 but the concepts of dike and the polity are perhaps not so far from Hesiod's (e.g., WD 220-73) 42 Finley rightly stresses the importance of the oikos in the organization of life in Homer but concedes that the agora and themis were familiar concepts in Ithaca/3 The distinction between public and private business was well understood (ii. 32, 44—45). That no assembly had been called in nineteen years is indeed strange (ii. 26-27) but perhaps no more strange than the whole episode of the years of courtship of Penelope.44 Perhaps this baffling situation was the result of Homer telling the received story, but basing his tale in the assumptions about social action of his eighth-century culture, leading to an anomalous situation where Ithaca had to have remained frozen in political terms for twenty years. There are other examples of this sort of thing: Fränkel’s discussion of fate and the gods,45 and the strange passage in the Iliad where in the tenth year of the war Priam does not recognize the Achaean leaders (3.161—242). The powers of the Ithacan assembly were considerable. It could have imposed a heavy fine on Haliserthes (ii. 192-93), and it could conceivably have sent all the suitors into exile (xvi. 381—82). The Ithacan dèmos, acting outside the context of the formal assembly, had in the previous generation been able to act concertedly against the anti-Thesprotian policy of Antinous’ father, who would have been lynched but for Odysseus’ inter­ vention (xvi. 424—30). The assembly of the warriors at Troy was less powerful but represents a very different political context. It could make its wishes felt by applauding and cheering (e.g., 1.22—23), but decisions rested in the hands of the basileisy particularly Agamemnon (e.g., 1.376—79). On occasion, the assembly could even be dissolved and the final say placed in the hands of a gathering of nobles at dinner (9.68—70). In Phaeacia, Alcinous tells his elders that they will be summoned the following day to discuss Odysseus’ passage home (vii. 189—96); but when they appear Alcinous simply informs them that he has already made his decision (viii. 28-40). There is nothing about any of these community-level decision-making processes that precludes an eighth-century origin. The Ithacan assembly, with its wide power, might well have been able to organize the same sort of activities that the Greek cities of the eighth century undertook. The evidence is of course inconclusive, since the Ithacans had no desire to send out a colony and we have little idea of what else assemblies of the eighth century did; but it certainly cannot be used as an argument against an eighth-century basis. The debates at Troy could equally well fit in an eighth-century situation; indeed, the public acclamation and the ability of the nobles to overturn the wishes of the assembly recall nothing so much as

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Plutarch’s account of the Spartan constitution (Lycurgus 6), which probably dates to the seventh century.46 The Spartans had been able to found a colony at Taras in the late eighth century47 with a political organization which was probably no more evolved than the Homeric. Finally, Alcinous’ autocracy contains no hint that the Phaeacians would not have been able to carry out the activities that the Greeks managed in the eighth century. Another area where we might hope to gauge the level of political organization is in the resolution of disputes within the community. One of the most common definitions of the state is the surrender of the right to use force to settle personal disputes, with this prerogative being confined to a centralized authority.48 This certainly seems to be what happens in Hesiod (WD 28-39, 247-64; Theog. 81-90). In Homer, three ways to settle disputes can be identified. The first is through strife. The numerous examples of men fleeing their homes to escape the vengeful kinsmen of a murder victim (e.g., i. 298-300; xvi. 97—98) are testimony to this but are not very significant in this argument. As late as the fourth century B.C., it could still be felt that killing to protect or avenge the family was still perfectly acceptable behavior (e.g., Plato Laws 874B—D). There is even a tradition that the founders of Syracuse in the 730s were banished from Corinth after a drunken killing (Plut. Moralia 772; scholiast on Ap. Rhod. iv. 1212). Homicide remained a private rather than a public matter even in the developed city state, and so it is no surprise to find that it was so in the eighth century; and no surprise to find it so in Homer if his world is based on this period. MacDowell4:> suggested that Iliad 12.421—24 represents an example of two farmers settling a dispute over ownership of land by fighting it out. If δηρίάασθον in line 421 is to be taken literally as meaning fighting, we still have no more than two squabbling farmers, used in a simile to illustrate the story. There is nothing to suggest that this was actually seen as a way to settle the dispute over their common boundary. Iliad 23.553—54, Antilochus’ offer to fight for his prize in Patroclus’ funeral games, is more serious. Homer tells us that Achilles was delighted by Antilochus’ offer of violence (23.557). It is significant that this dispute was purely a matter of honor, although it may be anachronistic to distin­ guish between matters of honor and legal concerns in the Homeric world (at least within the class of aristoi). Violence was used to settle at least some classes of dispute in the Iliad. Disputes could also be settled by private agreement between the litigants (e.g., 9-632-36; xxi. 15-30), by the judgment of a basileus (2.205-6; 9.98-99; 18.497-508; 23.485-87; iii. 244-45), or by a group of elders, often under the gaze of the demos (1.237—39; 11.807; 16.387; 18.497; xii. 439-40). Finley recognized all three types of litigation50 but dismissed all ten cases where a third party resolved the issue (eleven if we count Odyssey book ii,

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where Telemachus tried to persuade the dèmos to intervene) as anachronism “which slipped by the poet,”51 leaving him with a “primitive” level of settlement at the oikos level, which he sees as the real way to resolve disputes in Homer. Such special pleading, separating out “early” and “late” strata in the poems, is always open to question. .1 would suggest instead that all three levels of arbitration existed simultaneously in the eighth-century world. Doubtless some disputes could be settled by a fight, but others were resolved by discussion between the two parties, and where this failed, the decision of a third party could be called upon. The scene on the Shield of Achilles shows us part of this progression. The defendant wished to settle the case out of court, as it were, paying a fine (18.499), but the wronged party had refused this, with the result άμφω δ’ ιέσθην επί ίστορί πείραρ έλέσθαι (18.501). Hesiod’s story (WD 37-39) is another example: after he and Perses had divided up their klêros, an agreement within the oikos, Perses seized the greater part. Since the dispute could not be settled, it became a public matter, and the δωροφάγοι βασίλήες were called in. For all we know they may have passed through the stage of the two farmers in Iliad 12.421—24, wrangling over the horoi in the fields, before a settlement favorable to Perses was reached. The coexistence of various levels of litigation, from the oikos up to the basileus, should be no surprise. The decisions at community level are not anachronisms, nor are the lower levels of settlement survivals. The same pattern of an escalating scale of judgments can be seen all over the world.52 Finley’s claim that the world of Odysseus was one “of strictly private rights privately protected”53 is not accurate. The settlement of disputes was not governed by rigid rules, but a level of integration above that of the house­ hold was recognized in Homer, and the Homeric pattern of judgments does not seem very different from the Hesiodic. The community could settle disputes that threatened its equilibrium, just as it could reach decisions of the type Greek communities must have made in the eighth century b .c . The Homeric institutions are in no way incompatible with a background drawn from the eighth century. Essentially the same conclusions have been reached in a number of studies of the polis in Homer: the Classical type of city-state is absent, but we can observe the rudimentary outlines of a polity on the verge of statehood.54 We do not see the developed polis on Ithaca, but neither is Homeric society so alien when compared with what we find in Hesiod or even Tyrtaeus that we must try to push it back into the mists of the Dark Age, as Finley did. This discussion is not intended to be any sort of exhaustive analysis of the institutions of the Homeric world; rather, it shows that two of the most important of the institutions studied by Finley, the two that he claimed dictated an Early Dark Age date for the Homeric world, are not really so incompatible with Homer’s own day. They certainly do not give reason to

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overturn the arguments of section I, which made an eighth-century origin for the poetic world seem inescapable. We can now return to Finley’s summary of his position: “If, then, the world of Odysseus is to be placed in time, as everything we know from the comparative study of heroic poetry says it must”—so far we can agree— “the most likely centuries seem to be the tenth and ninth.”55 This, as we have seen, is not so. Everything we know from the comparative study of oral poetry, of which oral heroic poetry is but one group and which forms a far more relevant analytical category than confusing the products of oral and literate cultures, points to a date late in the eighth century, and Finley’s claims that what we know of the eighth century and what the Odyssey tells us “are simply not the same”56 cannot be upheld. If the Homeric poems are to inform us about early Greece at all, it will be Greece in the eighth century B.C., and not the Early Dark Age. Finley is by no means the only opponent of the poems as evidence for the structure of eighth-century Greece. There is also an important school of thought which sees the Homeric poems as an artificial conflation of elements spanning the whole period of the composition of oral poetry, and no use as an historical source for any specific period within this half-millenium or more. The most important contribution to this position has been made by Anthony Snodgrass in his article “An Historical Homeric Society?” The discussion that follows w ill be confined to a critique of Snodgrass’s position, although the counter arguments will lead us into many different areas. Snodgrass argued that two of the areas of social life at the core of the Homeric world—marriage and the devolution of property—show so many inconsistencies that they cannot have belonged to a single functioning society. This argument is extremely important, since it is in just such spheres as kinship where we should expect to find the world-view that Homer and his audiences took for granted in the eighth century. If Snodgrass’s arguments can withstand criticism, they will constitute a serious objection to the position outlined in section I, that the Homeric world must be based on the culture of a single historical moment. The first part of Snodgrass’s article57 is concerned with patterns of marriage. It is claimed that two types of marriage settlement, bridewealth and dowry, can be seen operating alongside one another in the poems, and that these two forms are incompatible. Snodgrass notes that it is not uncommon to find bridewealth in one class and dowry in another within a single society, but stresses that all the marriages for which we have information in Homer are those of the aristoi, the upper class.58 Nor is there any consistent pattern linking the relative status of the wife-givers and the wife-takers to the form of marriage settlement. Objections that bride­ wealth and dowry are not so opposed as Snodgrass claimed generally do not seem to take this into account, and cannot be used as a refutation of

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Snodgrass’s case, although Rowlands made the very good point that we should allow a great deal more flexibility within Homeric marriage.59

The evidence used by Snodgrass must be discussed in detail. Finley and Snodgrass have both provided lists of the occurrences in the poems of marriages accompanied by the transfer of gifts from the bridegroom or his kin to the bride’s kin, and from the bride’s kin to the groom, sometimes via the bride herself, respectively referred to as bridewealth and dowry. The thirteen cases of bridewealth, the passage of gifts or services from the groom or his kin to the kin of the bride, seem clear enough and unequi­ vocal. Snodgrass points out that there is no evidence whatsoever for what Goody calls “indirect dowry,” where the groom’s gifts are passed on to the bride by her kinsmen in order to establish a joint conjugal fund.61 The fourteen cases of “dowry” are less clear. Finley, seeking empirical support for his thesis that the marriage ceremony formed part of a wider exchange of gifts in the Homeric world, took these cases as evidence for a return flow of gifts from the bride’s kin to the bridegroom, following initial gifts or services which had moved in the opposite direction.62 However, as Snodgrass pointed out, there is a striking lack of evidence for gifts flowing in both directions within a single Homeric marriage;63 furthermore, the general exchange of gifts at marriage is associated mainly with very simple societies without settled agriculture and social and economic stratification, which patently does not include the Homeric world.64 Snodgrass concluded that two separate marriage practices within the class of aristoi are visible, and that these represent two historically distinct layers in the poems, which are thereby revealed as an unhistorical conflation.65 Snodgrass’s criticisms of Finley’s account are to a great extent justified; but perhaps another criticism could be leveled at both scholars—that of exaggerating the contrast between the forms of marriage settlement found in Homer. I will try to demonstrate in what follows that most of the examples of “dowry” in Homer are no such thing, and that the standard form of aristos marriage seems to be that suggested by Lacey66—gifts offered in both directions (δώρα) to establish good relations between the bride’s kin and potential suitors; bidding of gifts (εεδνα) by the suitors; acceptance of the best offer by the bride’s guardian, her κύριος; and usually, the movement of the bride to take up residence with her husband in his father’s home (virilocal residence) or in a new location (neolocal). The Classical Athenian dowry system (προίξ) is entirely different from what we find in Homer,67 and no trace of true Greek dowry can be seen in the marriage practices of the aristoi. I will demonstrate these claims by a complete review of the cases of “dowry” in Homer. 6.192—95. The Lycian king offers Bellerophon his daughter’s hand and half his kingdom if he will settle in Lycia. This uxorilocal residence is

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different from the usual Homeric pattern but is nevertheless consistent with it.68 In any monogamous society, there will often be cases where a family has no heir to receive its property; Goody has suggested that in typical agrarian communities, as many as one-third of all farms may have no son at the end of the developmental cycle, and one-sixth no child at all.69 Further, marriage must not be treated as a rigid institution, and there will often be cases where living heirs are passed over in favor of a particularly desirable son-in-law, attracted into a wealthy family by such a filiacentric marriage. The result is a high proportion of uxorilocal marriages within any normally virilocal system, reversing the usual pattern.70 As Goody puts it, The “appointed” daughter acts as a social male, producing children for her own natal group. The incoming son-in-law on the other hand acts like an adopted child, since in return for enjoying the property . . . he looks after not only his wife but her surviving parents as well.71 Through such a strategy, the wife-givers and wife-receivers mutually benefit. Odysseus' invented story of winning a wife in a rich family through his valor (xiv. 211-13) may refer to a similar situation. One thing is clear: this marriage is complementary, rather than contradictory, to the normal virilocal Homeric marriage.

6.251. Hecabe is described as Hector’s ήπιόδωρος μήτηρ. Snodgrass notes that well-dowered is rather a dubious translation for ήπιόδωρος, and Lacey holds that it is totally unconnected with dowry. In the Penguin text, E.V. Rieu translated the word as “gracious.” All in all, this does not seem a very convincing example of dowry.72 6.394. Andromache is called Hector’s αλοχος πολύδωρος. The word πολύδωρος, like ήπιόδωρος, is given as “richly dowered” by scholiasts, but Snodgrass again notes various other possibilities. Lacey’s distinction between εεδνα, gifts passing from the groom to the bride’s father after an agreement to marry has been reached, and δώρα, gifts exchanged in both directions to establish goodwill before the match has been arranged, is important here.73 If this distinction is valid, then πολύδωρος should be read as “bringing many gifts,” in either direction. For a parallel to Lacey’s δώρα/εεδνα distinction in an ethnographic context, the vaygu'a relationship of the Trobriand Islanders can be cited. This is somewhat similar to the ξενίη guest-friendship relationship in Homer.74 The δώρα exchanged before the εεδνα is given are paralleled by the Trobrianders’ gifts called pari and vaga\ once a pari has successfully elicited a vaga gift, the real gift exchange of the celebrated kula begins, and the full vaygu’a relationship is initiated. The Trobriand terminology is at least as precise as the Homeric, and there is nothing unusual about the division into δώρα and εεδνα suggested by Lacey. Πολύδωρος will be discussed

64

The Homeric World further with reference to xxiv. 294, but we can note here that translating it as “well-dowered” is only one, and probably not even the most likely, possibility; and to reject the Homeric marriage system, going against the arguments of section I, on the basis of one possible reading of this word would be rash indeed. 9.146-48. Agamemnon, in offering Achilles one of his daughters, says that he will give her άνάεδνον —without εεδνα. This only emphasizes the fact that a wedding was usually accompanied by εεδνα passing from the groom or his kin to the bride’s κύριος. Agamemnon goes on to say: “Moreover, I will give [Achilles] many gifts (μείλια), more than anyone ever gave with his daughter.” In this context, we should perhaps take the μείλια of line 148 as reflecting an attitude similar to the king of Lycia’s toward Bellerophon. The whole point of Agamemnon’s offer to Achilles is that it was supposed to have been irresistibly tempting. The issue at stake here is not so much the marriage as Achilles performing a great service for Agamemnon by returning to the battle. The phrase ο σ σ ’ OÖ πώ τις έή έπέδωκε θυγατρί, following as it does immediately upon the renunciation of the right to εεδνα, is obviously reconcilable with the idea of εεδνα, as was seen by Lacey and Vernant.75 22.51. Priam tells us his wife Laothoe would be able to ransom her children Lycaon and Polydoros, because her father Altes gave her a great fortune. This implies that Altes’ settlement remained under the control of Laothoe, rather than coming to Priam. This is certainly a case of dowry, or pre-mortem inheritance, as Goody classifies it.76 However, Goody notes that it is vitally important to establish who gets control of the gifts bestowed in such a dowry.77 Altes’ gifts to Laothoe are very different from, for instance, Classical Athenian dowry (προίξ), which came under the husband’s control. This case seems more like the Archaic φερνή, or trousseau, than a προίξ; there is no reason at all to suppose that it represents a distinct historical stage in the poems, opposed to εεδνα, and it is easily accommodated within this view of Homeric practices. i. 277—78 (= ii. 196—97). Athene is visiting Telemachus and advises him to send Penelope back to Icarius if she wishes to remarry, saying άρτυνέουσίν εεδνα /πολλά μάλ’. Finley and Snodgrass both translate this as “they will arrange a large dowry for her,” although Homer specifically used εεδνα, rather than a word for gifts such as δώρα or μείλια. The sense here is surely “they will contrive many fine gifts (εεδνα)”—that is, attract rich εεδνα, with no mention of dowry at all. ii. 53. Snodgrass again follows Finley in rendering έεδνώσαιτο θύγατρα as “that he may himself dower his daughter.” Finley admitted the “virtual unanimity” of commentators and translators that this refers to

Historical and A rchaeological Background

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εεδνα passing from the groom to the bride’s kin.78 To treat it as an example of dowry would probably be a mistake. ii. 132-33. This passage has been discussed in detail by Lacey.79 He sees it as an example of δώρα that Telemachus will be forced to send to Icarius if he returns Penelope to him against her will, to soothe the bad feeling it would cause by implying disrespect for Icarius’ line. On this reading, dowry gifts do not come into the picture.80 Snodgrass dismissed Lacey’s case in a footnote on the grounds of its “improbable and indeed almost legalistic fidelity on the poet’s part,’’ and read πολλ" άποτίνεΐν as referring to the return of a dowry.81 There is nothing improbable in Lacey’s explanation. The giving of gifts is one of the most common ways of smoothing over a rift in the social fabric.82 It is not at all difficult to believe that Telemachus would have to give Icarius gifts for slighting him, and Lacey’s idea is perfectly valid. iv.736. Penelope speaks of Dolios, “the slave whom my father gave me when I came here”—again a case of φερνή rather than προίξ, the slave apparently being Penelope’s rather than Odysseus’. Lacey too charac­ terizes this as a δώρον, not dowry. vii. 134. Alcinous’ offer to Odysseus is similar to the offers to Bellerophon (6.192-95) and Achilles (9.146-47); not a case of dowry, but an attempt by a βασιλεύς to lure a particularly desirable son-in-law into his οίκος —put another way, a filiacentric, uxorilocal marriage, quite com­ patible with the Homeric system. xx.342. Lacey treated Telemachus’ offer of ασπετα δώρα with Penelope as δώρα offered before he, as κύριος, would invite offers of εεδνα for her hand.83 As with ii. 132—33, this is surely the most economical view. xxiii. 228. Penelope refers to another slave “whom my father gave me when I came here.” As with iv.736, this is a δώρον, part of a φερνή, rather than a προίξ. xxiv. 294. Here Laertes mentions “constant Penelope,” Odysseus’ άλοχος πολύδωρος. A. T. Murray, in the Loeb translation, rendered this as “his wife, wooed with many gifts,” offering “bountiful” as an alternative for πολύδωρος.84 “Well-dowered” is again, as with 6.394, just one possi­ bility. Finley used this passage to treat πολύδωρος as an antonym of άλφεσίβοΐα, reading it as “ ’bringing many gifts’ to the husband.”85 “To the husband” is supplied by Finley; all we can say is that πολύδωρος probably carries the implication of “bringing many gifts,” but the direction of the flow cannot be specified. The use of Polydoros as a personal name for one of Priam’s sons (22.51) suggests that it may even be best to see the word as implying gifts in a metaphorical sense, with the meaning of “bountiful” suggested by Murray.

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The Homeric World

This brief review of the occurrences of £‘dowry’’ should be enough to show that Snodgrass’s case for the inconsistency of the marriage practices of the Homeric aristoi is very weak. Certainly some elements are rather complex, but Lacey’s explanations are convincing.86 Πολύδωρος can indeed be translated as “well-dowered,” and the cases I have treated as φερνή, be taken as dowry, but the argument will then rest on two debatable readings. It is in no way strong enough to refute the arguments made in section I above that the Homeric society is drawn from the real society of the eighth century in which the poet and his audiences moved. The second part of Snodgrass’s article87 picks up themes which have been fully developed by Jack Goody in a number of works. Goody has drawn a distinction between two principal modes of devolution of property found in human societies, the homogeneous and the diverging. Working mainly from the information coded in the Ethnographic Atlas, Goody demonstrated statistically significant links between the two forms of devolution and corresponding types of social structure. Diverging devolution is associated with societies practicing plough agriculture, which provides the potential for some households to become significantly wealthier than others in the same community. The result is a tendency toward economic and social stratification, and the corresponding desire of parents to preserve their children’s status vis-à-vis that of other members of the community. This is achieved through the mechanisms of diverging devolution, which allows children of both sexes to be matched with members of equally wealthy or even wealthier families in their marriages (“homogamy” and “hypergamy”). Very often women will only be residual heirs, in the event of the absence of male children, as in the case of the Classical Athenian epiklêros\ and, as happened at Athens, the result is a general tendency toward lineage endo­ gamy (marriage within a fairly restricted descent group, at Athens often the oikos group). Dowry functions as a form of pre-mortem inheritance. Further consequences of the system include an emphasis on monogamy, and a “descriptive” rather than “classificatory” kinship terminology that serves to isolate the nuclear family from the wider descent group. The other side of the coin is homogeneous devolution. This tends to occur in simple agricultural systems, particularly among hoe cultivators, where there is little opportunity for major differences in wealth to appear within a community. Property is usually passed down unilineally, with the non­ inheriting sex not even acting as residual heirs; where there is no heir of the appropriate sex within the nuclear family, property will devolve to collaterals within the wider descent group. That is, in a patrilineal society, if a man has no sons, his property will go to a brother rather than to his daughters. Marriage is often polygynous, and bridewealth, which is to some extent a device for rationing the distribution of women, is common. Bridewealth passes to the kin of the bride and functions as a societal rather than a conjugal fund, doing nothing to ensure the status of the married couple.

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Consequently, the ambilocality associated with heiresses in the diverging devolution system is absent. Often the items used as bridewealth constitute a distinct sphere of exchange, not utilized in social contexts other than marriage. Exogamy (rules specifying marriage outside particular descent groups) is the rule, accompanied by a classificatory kinship terminology.88 The whole idea of using the Ethnographic Atlas in cross-cultural studies of marriage institutions can be criticized,89 but the results of Goody’s work are nevertheless most striking. Furthermore, as Goody points out, the very fact of the groupings involved in the codes in the Atlas should increase the significance of any positive results obtained.90 Snodgrass suggests that in Homer we see elements of both Goody’s modes of devolution, and that this implies that there is at least a possibility that the Homeric world is drawn from several historically distinct cultures. I will argue below that this is probably not so, that Homeric society belongs to a form of Goody’s diverging devolution, and that it is fully consistent with subsequent well-documented developments in the Archaic and Classical periods. This may seem paradoxical at first, since I have been at great pains to show that the instances of dowry cited by Finley and Snodgrass are in fact no such thing. Dowry is one of the central institutions of diverging devolution, serving to preserve the status of households; but as Finley commented in connection with land tenure, we must expect to find in ancient societies institutions that are appropriate to the needs of the groups practicing them.91 Thus, Gernet points out that within the closed world of the polis, endogamous προίξ marriages were appropriate, “as opposed to the earlier system followed by the noble fam ilies, in which marriages were made with foreigners’’ (Emphasis added). Π ρ ο ίξ-marriages of the Athenian type functioned, as Goody says, to safeguard the status of a family within the community and to insure the continuity of the oikos. There was in Classical Athens a strong tendency toward ö/£öj-endogamy, and Goody has used the Athenian adoption practices and the celebrated epiclerate as model examples of diverging devolution in action.92 Gernet and Vernant both argued that the appearance of the polis marked a radical change in marriage settlements from εεδνα to π ρ ο ίξ,93 but we should note that Goody has demonstrated that it is not the state but economic stratification that is the prime causal mechanism in the development of diverging devolution.94 Such stratification can be traced in the archaeological record throughout the Dark Age and did not suddenly appear with the polis in the seventh century, let alone in the fifth,95 and I would contend that diverging devolution was probably the norm in much of Greece, certainly from the Late Bronze Age onward, and possibly from much earlier still, acting to preserve the differences in wealth between households. So how are we to explain the Homeric practices? Is this, as some would hold, pure poetic fantasy? I think not. There are two points to make here.

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The H(merk World

The first is that the Homeric marriage-payments are rather different from the bridewealth practices observed in many African societies, where large prestations often form a “circulating fund” tying together the families within a society. In particular, the marriage gifts may belong to a restricted sphere of exchange, only being reusable in the form of another bridewealth payment. Neither this feature nor the. creation of “linked” couples and the importance of the mothers brother96 are apparent in Homer. Homeric payments are not a simple form of bridewealth. The second point is the context of Homeric marriages. It is summed up most clearly by Finley: all marriages about which we are informed occurred exclusively among the most powerful nobles and chieftains, so that it is impossible to say anything at all about the law or customs of marriage among commoners . . . the marriages in the Iliad and Odyssey were between outsiders, that is to say, between a man from one community and a woman from another. This fact is to be explained by the circumstance that the characters all moved in the highest circles, in which marriage was an important instrumentality for the establishment of ties of power among chieftains and kings. . . . Marriage was, of course, a major social occasion, and particularly so in the upper social classes in which Homeric heroes moved. There a marriage was, among other things, a political alliance; in fact, marriage and guest-friendship were the two fundamental devices for the establishment of alliances among nobles and chieftains.97 There are many recorded cases of societies where the upper class and the commoners had very different marriage practices,98 but the point can be made most precisely through a study of the institutions of marriage in Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. According to Gernet and Vernant, and almost certainly if Goody’s model is correct, a fairly fully developed marriage system of the έγγύη type accompanied by προίξ will have been operating within very many Archaic poleis after 700 b.c. And yet, down to the end of the sixth century, we find many aristocrats continuing to behave in a manner very similar to the Homeric aristoi. Women acted to some extent as αγάλματα, as they had done for Homer, being exchanged between households in different communities in order to establish political alliances. In the 630s, the Athenian aristocrat Cylon used his marriage to the daughter of Theagenes, tyrant of Megara, to enlist help in a failed coup at Athens (Thuc. 1.126); around 573 b.c. we hear of a very Homeric αγών for the hand of Agariste, daughter of Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon (Hdt. 6.127); and in the 550s Peisistratos married Megacles’ daughter in order to build up a power base for his second coup at Athens (Hdt. 1.60).99 W ith the increasing institutionalization of the polis, such exogamous aristocratic marriages probably largely faded out after 500 b.c. (although

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they continued among the Sicilian tyrants of the fifth century); but for nearly two hundred years previously, class in-marriage of the Homeric type had prevailed over clan in-marriage of the Classical type among the aristocracy. It is likely that the commoners were practicing the more typical forms of diverging devolution at this tim e.100 My argument is simply that the situation that seems to have been current in the Archaic period could well have applied in the eighth century and earlier too. If Goody’s diverging/homogeneous devolution distinction is to be considered as a possible objection to the “historicity” of the Homeric world, it must be accepted that the societies of Archaic Greece were cases of diverging devolution where the aristocracy could follow an alternative marriage strategy. If so, then there is no reason to deny this for the eighth century; and if it is not accepted, then the relevance of Goody’s arguments for early Greece must be rejected along with it. Perhaps it is not even necessary to consider what Homer and his audi­ ences may have thought about the marriages of the kakoi; such things simply did not belong in the heroic world. Only once does the question of non-elite marriage surface. In the Odyssey, Eumaeus says Odysseus would give him “a house, a piece of land (κλήρος), and a much-wooed wife” adding that these are “things which a well-disposed master (αναξ) gives to a slave (οίκήϊ) who has labored much for him” (xiv.63—65). If a bard ever had reason to sing of the marriages of commoners, I feel he would do so in terms of current practice; but there is simply no evidence, and certainly nothing in the poems, to suggest that Homer was drawing on anything beyond his own eighth-century concepts. Returning to the other features of diverging devolution, plough agri­ culture is of course the norm in Homer. Monogamy is also generally practiced, and certainly the rare exceptions such as Priam are no more common than is normally the case in otherwise monogamous cultures.101 Kinship terminology was largely descriptive, distinguishing between the brother, άδελφεός, and cousin, ανεψιός; the occurrence of κασίγηντος (15.545) is not such an important exception as Snodgrass suggests.102 We can see a parallel very limited use of classificatory language in the Gortyn Code, which clearly belongs to a society of the diverging devolution type.103 Nor is the tendency for sons to remain at home with their fathers until the latter’s death worrying; this is again hinted at in the Gortyn Code (Col. IV.24ff). In any case, the chances are that in eighth-century Greece most fathers would die while their sons were still in their late teens and hence either unmarried or newly married.104 Finally, Homeric society is rigidly stratified into aristoi and kakoi, at least to some extent on the basis of landholdings and clientship based on land, characteristic of diverging devolution;105 and marriage is very definitely restricted by class, although again the alliance function of aristocratic marriages means we cannot identify any tendencies to oi/èor-endogamy lower

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The Moinerie World

down the scale. The dominant role of men in agricultural practices and the prohibition of female premarital sex, two more features of diverging devo­ lution omitted by Snodgrass, also feature prominently in Homeric society and the poetry of the Archaic period. Summing up, I argue that Homeric society conforms to Goody’s posi­ tion that diverging devolution is characteristic of the major Eurasian civilizations,106 and that Homer does not contain the inconsistencies that Snodgrass discussed. The gaps in the evidence are tantalizing, but as we have seen, the balance of probability seems to be in favor of a consistent basis to the society of the poems, derived from Greece in the eighth century b .c . The arguments of this section have probably not done full credit to the subtleties of Finley’s and Snodgrass’s cases, but it does seem from my understanding of them that neither offers a serious objection to the thesis advanced in section I. There are, of course, many other opponents of an eighth-century Homeric world, but a full survey would be impossible. Geddes has recently revived Calhoun’s rather idiosyncratic ideas of the organization of the societies in the poems,107 but his claims seem strangely unable to answer Finley’s position of the essential consistency of Homer in The World o f Odysseus. There seems to be no reason to doubt the conclusion that Homeric society is derived from the real world in which Homer and his audiences lived.

Notes 1. For example, Leaf 1915; Nilsson 1933. 2. Finley 1981, 232; cf. Finley 1964; Finley 1977, 3 1 -4 2 ; Finley 1978, 159-77. On similar lines, Vidal-Naquet 1963; Vidal-Naquet 1965, 115. 3. Andrewes 1961; Andrewes 1967, 4 1 -4 8 . 4. Finley 1978, 48. 5. Finley 1978, 47. 6. Bowra 1952, 516 (the Cid) and 5 3 2-3 6 (Roland5. 7. Mireaux 1943; also Bowra 1952, 532. Finley’s class of comparanda is further criticized by Davies (1984, 87—88) and Hainsworth (1984, 11 2 —13). 8. Bowra 1952, 533, 535. The same position on the society of the poems is generally adopted by most medievalists, e.g., Duby 1974; Duggan 1980. 9. Radin 1948, 7 4 -7 7 ; Lévi-Strauss I960. 10. Kailasapathy 1968, 76—77. 11. Kailasapathy 1968, viii. 12. Finnegan 1977, 247-50. 13. Finley 1963, 2 5 -26 ; Finley 1978, 34, 48, 154-58. 14. Finley 1978, 34, 48. 15. Finley 1978, 154. 16. The exclusion of these features is never complete; iron-working creeps in in

Historical and Archaeological Background

71

che similes and non-military situations, the chariots are made to act like horses, and a “Dorian” tribal order occurs in some places. See Craik 1982. 17. Finley 1978, 157. 18. Finley 1978, 156. 19- Bérard 1982. 20. Snodgrass 1971, 1 1 3 -1 7 . 21. Popham et al. 1982a, 247. 22. Coldstream 1977, 103 and 240-42. 23. For this view, see (among others) Starr 1961a; Thomas 1966a; Andreev 197924. Nicolai 1983; cf. Qviller 1981. 25. On the Argive monarchy, see Kelly 1976, 9 4 -1 1 1 , for a sixth-century Pheidon; and Tomlinson (1972) and Cartledge (1979) for a more conventional seventh-century dating. 26. Gschnitzer 1965, especially p. 101. See also Ehrenberg 1969, 13. 27. Drews 1983, 9 8 -10 5 . 28. See the reviews of Cartledge (1983a) and Donlan (1984). 29- Drews 1983, 105—8. 30. Finley 1963, 26. 31. See Snodgrass 1971, 36 7-6 9; Snodgrass 1977; Snodgrass 1980a, 15-24; Desborough 1972, 19 -2 0 ; Coldstream 1977, 36 7-6 8; O. Murray 1980, 65-66. 32. Snodgrass 1977; Cherry 1982 (on Melos; see the modifications of the survey data suggested by R. Catling [1984]). 33. Finley 1963, 26. 34. West 1966, 4 4 -4 5 ; Wade-Gery 1949, 87. 35. Rolley 1983. On the subject of chronology, it has been suggested that the Olympic games may have begun in the later seventh century rather than in 776 u.c. (Lévy 1978, with references). 36. See also Wade-Gery 1952, 2-3. 37. Hadzisteliou-Price 1973; Snodgrass 1982. 38. Finley 1978, 155, criticizing Snodgrass 1971, 435. 39. Finley 1978, 156. 40. Runciman 1982. 41. Snodgrass 1980a, 2 6 -3 5 ; Renfrew 1982. 42. Ehrenberg 1937, 155. 43. Finley 1978, 79. 44. Finley 1978, 89. 45. Frankel 1975, 57-58. 46. Forrest 1968, 55—58. This is not meant to imply that the balance between basileus, council, and assembly in Homeric Ithaca or at Troy was the same as that found in eighth- or seventh-century Sparta, only that the Homeric and Archaic systems are not so radically different as Finley assumed. 47. Dated to 706 b .c . by Eusebius; for the archaeological chronology, see Coldstream 1968, 104; LoPorto 1971, 358; Graham 1982, 112. 48. E.g., Service 1971, 163; Service 1975, 87 -90 ; Sahlins 1972, 178-79. 49- MacDowell 1978, 1 1 -1 2 . 50. Finley 1978, 1 0 8 -1 1 1 . 51. Finley 1978, 110. 52. See Roberts 1979, chs. 4, 8, and 9, and the essays reprinted in Bohannan 1967. 53. Finley 1978, 110.

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The Homeric World

54. See Thomas 1966b; Luce 1978; Lloyd 1983- On the oikos and the polis in Hesiod, Millett 1984, 9 3 -10 3 and 109 n.16. 55. Finley 1978, 48. 56. Finley 1978, 33-34. 57. Snodgrass 1974, 1 1 5 -1 8 . 58. Snodgrass 1974, 116. 59- Rowlands 1980, 23; see also Brent Shaw and Richard Sailer in Finley 1981, 296; Qviller 1981. For a more general discussion, see Goody 1973, 47; Keesing 1976, 270. 60. Finley 1981, 290 n.16; Snodgrass 1974, 115 nn.l6, 17. On the bridewealth/dowry distinction, see Radcliffe-Brown 1950, 43—5361. Snodgrass 1974, 116; Goody 1973, 1-2. Further examples of gifts to the bride’s kin can be added from Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women— fr. 7 .9 -1 0 M-W; 14 .15—20; 22; 68 part 1.2 1—100. The only dubious case is fr. 211.8 M-W, which was restored by Wilamowitz to read φ τ’άλοχον πολύ]δωρον Όλύμπίος εύρύοπα Ζευς, if this restoration is correct, this is an example of an άλοχος πολύδωρος, as discussed in the text for 6.394 and xxiv.294. M. L. West (1985, 12 5 -7 1) would date the poem to the late sixth century, but repeating eighthcentury elements. His book does not take account of Janko’s study. Janko (1982, 198) concedes that the Catalogue is problematic but places it in the early seventh century (1982, 200). 62. Finley 1981, 2 3 8 -4 1. 63. Snodgrass 1974, 116. 64. Goody 1973, 51. 65. Snodgrass 1974, 117. 66. Lacey 1966. 67. Vernant 1980, 56. 68. Lacey 1966, 5969. Goody 1973, 7; Goody 1976, 92, 133-34. 70. Goody 1976, 93; Humphreys 1978, 162. 71. Goody 1976, 94. 72. Snodgrass 1974, 117; Lacey 1966, 58; Rieu 1950, 124. 73- Lacey 1966, 57. 74. Malinowski 1922, 439; Mauss 1966, 25-26. 75. Lacey 1966, 59; Vernant 1980, 68 n.26. 76. See Goody 1962, 3 15 -2 0 ; Goody 1973, 17. 77. Goody 1973, 20. 78. Finley 1981, 293 n.46. 79- Lacey 1966, 6 1—66. 80. As explicitly pointed out by Lacey (1966, 65 n.52). 81. Snodgrass 1974, 117 n.21. 82. For example, Radcliffe-Brown 1922, 81; Mauss 1966, 17 -1 8 , 92 n.3. 83. Lacey 1966, 57-58. 84. A. T. Murray 1919, 423. 85. Finley 1981, 293 n .4l. 86. Lacey 1966; Lacey 1968, 39-44. 87. Snodgrass 1974, 1 1 8 -2 1 . 88. See Goody 1973; Goody 1976. For a slightly different consideration of the egalitarian nature of bridewealth, see Meillassoux 1981, 6 1—74. 89. E.g., Leach 1982, 18 0 -8 1. 90. Goody 1973, 22; see also Köbben 1967. 91. Finley 1968, 31.

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92. Goody 1976, 14, 7 1 -7 2 . 93. Vernant 1980, 56-57. 94. Goody 1976, 8-40. 95. See Morris 1987; for a contrary view of the rise of a peasantry and aristocracy in Geometric Greece sec Starr 1977. 96. Radcliffe-Brown 1950, 50-53. 97. Finley 1981, 234, 235, 238; Snodgrass (1974, 116) is in full agreement. 98. For modern Sri Lanka, see Yalman 1967, ch. 8; for medieval Western Europe, see Goody 1976, 43—46; and more generally, see Goody 1973, 19. 99. Other examples include Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus, who married the daughter of Aristocrates of Arcadia in the seventh century; their daughter went on to marry Periander of Corinth (Diog. La. 1.94). According to Ath. Pol. 17.4, Peisistatos of Athens also married the daughter of Gorgilus of Argos, subsequent to her own marriage to Archinus of Ambracia. See Lacey (1968) for further examples, and Gernct (1968, 344-59). It will be noted that these examples of Archaic marriages never mention prestations. Quite possibly these declined in the seventh century, with the general movement away from interpersonal gift exchange, and the transfer of the word α/αλμα from this category of prestation (as seen in Homer) toward specifically religious offerings, and ultimately its restriction to religious statuary alone (Morris 1986). The important feature shared by the Homeric and Archaic marriages is their exogamous, alliance basis, as part of the personalized nature of early Greek politics. 100. If it is argued that the commoners may also have practiced out-marriage in the Archaic period, then early Greece forms an unusual exception to Goody’s typology. In that case, any inconsistencies in the Homeric marriage pattern could hardly be used as evidence that the society is unhistorical. 101. E.g., Goody 1976, 17. 102. Snodgrass 1974, 120. 103. Cols. V II.17-IX .24 and X II.6-19. See W illetts 1967, 18 -2 7 ; Willetts 1982, 245. 104. For some relevant figures, see Goody 1976, 58. 105. On landholdings, see Finley 1978, 60; Goody 1976, 109106. Goody 1973, 23; 1976, 13. 107. Calhoun 1934; Geddes 1984.

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Cherry, J. F. (1982) “Appendix A: Register of archaeological sites on Melos,” in A. C. R e n f r e w and J. Wagstaff, eds., An Island Polity (Cambridge) 291-309C o ld s t r e a m , J. N. (1968). Greek Geometric Pottery (London). ------ (1977) Geometric Greece (London). Craik, E. (1982) “Homer’s Dorians,” Liverpool Classical Monthly 7, 94—101. Davies, J. K. (1984) “The reliability of the oral tradition,” in L. Foxhall and J. K. Davies, eds., The Trojan War: Its Historicity and Context (Bristol) 87—110. Desborough, V. R. d’A. (1972) The Greek Dark Ages (London). Donlan, W . (1984) Review of R. Drews, Basileus, in Classical World 77, 2 0 1-2 . Drews, R. (1983) Basileus: The Evidencefor Kingship in Geo?netric Greece (New Haven). Duby, G. (1974) The Early Groivth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Tivelfth Century (Ithaca). Duggan, J. J. (1980) “Legitimation and the hero’s exemplary function in the Cantar de mio Cid and the Chanson de Rolandf in J. M. Foley, ed., Oral Tradi­ tional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Lord Bates (Columbus, Ohio) 2 17 —34. Ehrenberg, V. (1937) “When did the polis rise?” JHS 57, 147—59------ (1969) The Greek State. 2nd ed. (London). Finley, M. I. (1963) The Ancient Greeks (Harmondsworth). ------ (1964) “The Trojan W ar,” JHS 84, 1-9. ------ (1968) “The alienability of land in ancient Greece: a point of view,” Eirene 7, 25-32. ------ (1977) “Lost: the Trojan W ar,” in M. I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity (Harmondsworth) 3 1-4 2 . ------ (1978) The World of Odysseus. Revised ed. First published 1954. (London; reprinted Harmondsworth 1979). ------ (1981) Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London; reprinted Harmonds­ worth 1983). Finnegan, R. (1977) Oral Poetry (Cambridge). Forrest, W . G. (1968) A History of Sparta, 9 5 0 -19 2 b.c. (London). Frankel, H. (1975) Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford; first published in German, 1962). Geddes, A. G. (1984) “W ho’s who in ‘Homeric’ society?” CQ 34, 17 -36. Gernet, L. (1968) “Les mariages des tyrans,” in L. Gernet, Anthropologie de la Grèce ancienne (Paris) 34 4-5 9. First published 1953. Goody, J. R. (1962) Death, Property and the Ancestors (London). ------ (1973) “Bridewealth and dowry in Africa and Eurasia,” in J. R. Goody and S. J. Tambiah, eds., Bridewealth and Dowry, Cambridge Papers in Social Anthro­ pology 7, 1-5 8. ------ (1976) Production and Reproduction (Cambridge). Graham, A. J. (1982) “The colonial expansion of Greece,” CAH III: 3, 2nd ed. (Cambridge) 8 3 -16 2 . Gschnitzer, F. (1965) “Β ΑΣΙΛΕ ΥΣ. Ein terminologischer Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte des Königtums bei den Griechen,” Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 11, 9 9 -1 1 2 . Hadzisteliou-Price, T. (1973) “Hero-cult and Homer,” Historia 22, 129-42. Hainsworth, J. B. (1984) “The fallibility of an oral heroic tradition,” in L. Foxhall and J. K. Davies, eds., The Trojan War: Its Historicity and Context (Bristol) 1 1 1 -3 5 . Humphreys, S. C. (1978) Anthropology and the Greeks (London). Janko, R. (1982) Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns (Cambridge). Kailasapathy, M. (1968) Tamil Heroic Poetry (Oxford). Keesing, R. M. (1976) Cultural Anthropology (New York).

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Kelly, T. (1976) A History of Argos to 500 BC (Minnesota). Kobben, J. F. (1967) “Why exceptions? The logic of cross-cultural analysis,” Current Anthropology 8, 3-34. Lacey, W. K. (1966) “Homeric ΕΔΝΑ and Penelope’s ΚΥΡΙΟΣ,"JHS 86, 55-68. -------( 1968) The Family in Classical Greece (London; reprinted Auckland, 1980). Leach, E. R. (1982) Social Anthropology (London). Leaf, W. (1915) Homer and· History (London). Lévi-Strauss, C. (I960) “Four Winnebago myths: a structural sketch,” in S. Diamond, ed., Culture in History (New York) 3 5 1—62. Levy, E. (1978) “Notes sur la chronologie athénienne au VIe siècle,” Historia 27, 5 1 3 -2 1 . Lloyd, C. (1983) “Greek urbanity and the polis,” in R. T. Marchese, ed., Aspects of Graeco-Roman Urbanism, British Archaeological Reports, International Series 188 (Oxford), 1 1 -1 6 . LoPorto, F. G. (1971) “Topografia antica di Taranto,” Taranto nella civiltà della Magna Grecia: Atti del decimo convegno di studi sulla Magna Grecia (Naples) 343-85. Luce, J. V. (1978) “The polis in Homer and Hesiod,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Acadeiny 78, 1-1 5 . MacDowell, D. (1978) The Law in Classical Athens (London). Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London). Mauss, M. ( 1966) The Gift (London; originally published in French, 1924). Meillassoux, C. (1981) Maidens, Meal and Money (Cambridge). Millett, P. C. (1984) “Hesiod and his world,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 210, 8 4 -1 1 5 . Mireaux, E. (1943) Le Chanson de Roland (Paris). Morris, 1. M. (1986) “Gift and commodity in Archaic Greece,” Man n.s.21: 1. ------ (1987) Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge). Murray, A. T. (1919) Homer, The Odyssey II (Harvard). Murray, O. (1980) Early Greece (London). Nicolai, W. (1983) “Rezeptionssteurung in der Ilias,” Philologus 127, 1—12. Nilsson, Μ. P. (1933) Homer and Mycenae (London). Popham, M. R., E. Touloupa, and L. H. Sackett (1982a) “Further excavation of the Toumba cemetery at Lefkandi, 19 8 1 ,” BSA 77, 213 —48. Qviller, B. (1981) “The dynamics of the Homeric society,” Symbolae Osloenses 56, 109-55 . Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1922) The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge). ------ (1950) “Introduction,” in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and D. Forde, eds., African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Oxford) 1—85. Radin, P. (1949) The Ctdture ofthe Winnebago: As Described by Themselves (Bloomington,

Indiana). Renfrew, A. C. (1982) “Polity and power: interaction, intensification and exploita­ tion,” in A. C. Renfrew and M. Wagstaff, eds., An Island Polity (Cambridge) 264-90. Rieu, E. V. (1950) The Iliad (Harmondsworth). Roberts, S. (1979) Order and Dispute: An Introduction to Legal Anthropology

(Harmondsworth). Rolley, C. (1983) “Les grandes sanctuaires panhelléniques,” in R. Hägg, ed., The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century B.C. (Stockholm) 109—114. Rowlands, M. J. (1980) “Kinship, alliance and exchange in the European Bronze Age,” in J. Barrett and R. Bradley, eds., Settlement and Society in the British Later Bronze Age, British Archaeological Reports 83 (Oxford) 15-55.

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Runciman, W. G. (1982) "Origins of states: the case of Archaic Greece,'' Compara­ tive Studies in Society and History 24, 3 5 1-7 7 . Sahli ns, M. D. (1972) Stone Age Economics (Chicago). Service, E. R. (1971) Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. 2nd ed. (New York). ------ (1975) Origins of the State and Civilization (New York). Snodgrass, A. M. (1971) The Dark Age of Greece (Edinburgh). ------ (1974) “An historical Homeric society?’’ JHS 94, 114 -2 5 . ------ (1977) Archaeology and the Rise of the Greek State (Cambridge). ------ (1980a) Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (London). ------ (1982) "Les origines du culte des héros en Grèce antique,” in G. Gnoli and J.-P. Vernant, eds., La Mort, les morts, dans les sociétés anciennes (Cambridge) 10 7 -19 . Starr, C. G. (1961a) "The decline of the early Greek kings,” Historia 10, 129—38. ------ (1977) Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 8 0 0 -8 5 0 B.C. (Oxford). Thomas, C. G. (1966a) "The roots of Homeric kingship,” Historia 15, 387-407. ------ (1966b) "Homer and the polis,” PdP 21, 5—14. Tomlinson, R. A. (1972) Argos and the Argolid from the End of the Bronze Age until the Roman Occupation (London). Vernant, J.-P. (1980) Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (Brighton; first published in French, 1973). Vidal-Naquet, P. (1963) "Homère et le monde mycénien,” Annales, économies, sociétés, civilisations 18, 703—19. ------ (1965) "Economie et société dans la Grèce ancienne: l’œuvre de Moses I. Finley,” Archives européenes de sociologie 6, 11 1-4 8 . Wade-Gery, H. T. (1949) "Hesiod,” Phoenix 3, 8 1-9 3 . ------ (1952) The Poet of the Uiad (Cambridge). West, M. L. (1966) Hesiods Theogony (Oxford). ------ (1985) Hesiods Catalogue of Women (Oxford). Willetts, R. F. (1967) The Law Code of Gortyn (Berlin). ------ (1982) “Cretan laws and society,” CAH III: 3. 2nd ed. (Cambridge) 23 4-4 8. Yalman, N. (1967) Under the Bo Tree (Berkeley).

24 ‘Reading the Texts’: Archaeology and the Homeric Question* E.S. Sherratt ♦Source: Antiquity, voi. 64, 1990, pp. 807-24.

My basic conclusion is that certain ‘event-related’ structures do not restructure easily. It is my hypothesis that a certain clustering of anomalous features will show the trace of the survival of a structure from ‘life’. Pure text were it to exist, would, in contrast, present almost no barriers to quite arbitrary restructuring. Ardener 1988: 31

Introduction The Homeric epics — the Iliad and the Odyssey - are among the oldest European literary documents. Traditional sources and linguistic evidence suggest that they were substantially fixed in the form in which they have come down to us sometime around 700 b c , at the dawn of literate Greek history (Janko 1982); but it is clear that they contain echoes of an even older, orally remembered past. As such, they are bound up with the problem of the relationship of ‘history’ to oral tradition, which is not by any means confined to ancient Greece (Vansina 1975; Sahlins 1985: ch. 2). The perceived status of the events, society and material culture presented in the epics has fluctuated between history, legend, myth and fantasy, reflecting both the changing attitudes of literary scholars to the nature of their composition (the ‘Homeric Question’), and the varying desires of historians and archaeologists to make use of the historical, social or ideolo­ gical information they potentially contain. They are an area where literature, archaeology and history meet, in texts which have often seemed to provide some of the most tantalizing glimpses of protohistorie societies whose material remains are known from the archaeological record. But the precise relationships between these glimpses and the formation of the texts - which crucially affects the way we use the latter —are still a matter of

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continuing debate. Students of literature or linguistics, historians and archaeologists have each had their own way of approaching the problems, and, as a result, have tended to arrive at what often appear to be incompat­ ibly different answers.

Literary Approaches Central to this are the implications of the ‘Homeric Question’ which, in its wider sense (the circumstances of their formation and final composition), is not just a problem for those with a literary interest in the Homeric epics but one which also has some bearing on the historical status of their content. Since Milman Parry in the 1920s demonstrated the presence of the char­ acteristics of orally composed and transmitted poetry in the epics, it has been widely (though not universally) accepted that they are ultimately the product of an oral bardic tradition (Parry 1971; for a discussion of subse­ quent work on this aspect of Homer see Householder & Nagy 1972: 19ff.)· W ithin this constraint, however, opinions have varied among literary critics and others as to the precise implications of what Parry & Lord (I960) have termed the epics’ oral-formulaic mode of composition, in particular over the relative roles of a long-standing tradition of transmission and of the creative genius of one poet —Homer —in shaping the Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them. This is essentially a question of emphasis. For some Homerists the latter is of prime importance, to the extent that the epics may be seen as essentially the work of one poet who, sometime in the years around 700 b c , travelled about Greece collecting and combining a wealth of topographical detail with various tales and traditions (some inherited in verse form, others not) and composed them into poetic works which transcend the inheritance of both subject matter and technique which lay behind them (Taplin 1986: 70f.; Rubens & Taplin 1989)· Others, over the years, have taken a less cataclysmic view. Most, however, insist - quite justifiably - on the integral unity of each of these two long epics, and maintain that a single individual was responsible for shaping the final structure of each and ensuring its integrity through various internal linking and unifying elements, such as the prophetic cross-references contained in many of the speeches (Rutherford 1985).

Archaeological Approaches For those concerned primarily with the historical and cultural background to the epics as revealed through the archaeological record, greatest interest has lain in identifying the chronological period in which the greater part of their material or cultural content - if not their actual composition —can

Historical and Archaeological Background

79

best be set. Here too there have been distinct shifts of emphasis, shifts which have ranged from the Late Bronze Age (Mycenaean) era in Greece to various points in the Early Iron Age (Figure 1). From the time when Schliemann first claimed to have found the graves of Agamemnon and his companions within the citadel at Mycenae in 1876 (Schliemann 1880: 336-45), there arose a growing conviction among archaeologists (if not among Classical scholars) that the material setting and historical back­ ground of the epics was essentially that of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean

Date

Age

Pottery

Other Early Historic

700 Geometric 800

Early Iron

900

Age Protogeometric

1000 (Submycenaean) 1100 Mycenaean (Late Helladic)

me

PostPalatial

) } l ) ) } } 1 ) ) } ) ) ) } }

'D

a r

k A S e'

1

1200 Late 1300

Bronze Age

1400

Mycenaean (Late Helladic) IIIB

Palatial

Mycenaean (LH) IIIA

(Early Palatial)

Mycenaean (Late Helladic) II Pre-Palatial

1500 Mycenaean (Late Helladic) I 1600

Figure 1 Chart showing archaeological divisions of the Greek Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age with approximate absolute dates

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The Homeric World

world. Although Schliemann’s identification of Homer’s Mycenae with that of the early Mycenaean Shaft Graves was soon rejected as too early by about 300 years - largely on the basis of the historical Greeks’ own traditional dates for such events as the Trojan War - the belief in a basically Late Bronze Age setting persisted through such writers as Allen (1921), Nilsson (1933), Page (1959), Wace & Stubbings (1962), Biegen (1962), Mylonas (1966: 213ff.), and on down to Luce (1975) and Wood (1985) in the last two decades. Meanwhile, Lorimer (1950) and Gray (1947; 1954; 1955; 1958; 1968), while maintaining the Late Bronze Age basis of the events and much of the world portrayed in the poems, stressed the archaeological grounds for regarding the epics as heavily interwoven with the material culture of later periods. By the 1950s, on the other hand, Finley (1954 £1956]; 1957) was arguing strongly for a primary setting in the 10th and 9th centuries - though less on grounds of the material record than on the type of society he saw portrayed in the epics. Later, Snodgrass (1971: 389; 1974) was to argue for a selective mixture of (palatial) Mycenaean and 8thcentury elements with little in between; while the emphasis above all on the 8th century was also taken up by Kurtz & Boardman (1971), and —again concentrating mainly on the poems’ social institutions - by Morris (1986). Finally, Dickinson (1986) returned to the chronological setting proposed by Finley (though in this case more explicitly in terms of the material record) and placed the background and creation of the epics in the period between c. 1200 and the end of the 9th century. These apparently quite different conclusions represent the answers to different questions, each of which arises from a different view of the social function of the epics and stresses the importance of different aspects of their content. At one extreme, many archaeologists have been content to regard them as little more than entertaining accounts of historical or semi-historical events, people or societies which can be assigned to chronological periods with the help of the archaeological record. What is important here is the assumption of an accretion of continuous but gradually fading traditions (in poetic or other form) which underlie and inform the finished epics and which can be traced through the social or material reflections they contain. At the other extreme, other archaeologists and historians have stressed the primary rôle of epic in the establishment and enhancement of social and political structures, and concluded that the art of the poets lay in weaving a complex web of social ideology and material symbolism in which even the smallest detail played a part. On this view (which presupposes a sustainedly attentive and reflective audience) the final version as an integrated whole is all that counts (cf. Morris 1986); and the task of the archaeological or historical interpreter is to identify the messages encoded in the poems and match them to the social and political circumstances most likely to have produced them.

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81

The Archaeology of the Texts It seems to me that there must be some systematic method of combining aspects of these contrasting approaches, while keeping sight of the implica­ tions both of oral delivery and of an oral-formulaic technique of composi­ tion, which appear to impose a restraint on the extremes of both views. To begin with, we can consider three sample passages from the Iliad. The first, from Iliad xxiii, concerns a prize offered in the games which accompanied Patroklos’ funeral {Iliad xxiii. 826—35, translated Latti more (1951)): Now the son of Peleus set in place a lump of pig-iron, which had once been the throwing-weight of Eëtion in his great strength; but now swift-footed brilliant Achilleus had slain him and taken the weight away in the ships along with the other possessions. He stood upright and spoke his word out among the Argives: ‘Rise up, you who would endeavour to win this prize also. For although the rich demesnes of him who wins it lie far off indeed, yet for the succession of five years he will have it to use; for his shepherd for want of iron will not have to go in to the city for it, nor his ploughman either. This will supply them. We have here what seems to be a rather odd situation. A lump of unworked iron (the Greek solos autokhoonos is unclear, but conveys the sense of something which is rough and unshaped and produced —literally ‘selfcast’ — without the intervention of metalworking techniques) has been regarded as a prized possession for a long time, first as the favourite throwing-weight of a king and hero, then as something worth taking as a spoil of war, then as worth having as a prestigious prize. Yet it is suddenly — almost as an afterthought —recognized as having its prime desirability in a potential for utilitarian use, as a source of agricultural and pastoral tools. The second passage comes in Iliad xix—xx, a long account of the battle between Achilles and the Trojans. In Iliad xix. 369—91 Achilles arms him­ self before the battle. He puts on greaves and a cuirass, takes up a sword, a huge and massive shield (described in detail in a lengthy digression), and finally arms himself with a spear {Iliad xix.387-91, translated Lattimore): Next he pulled out from its standing place the spear of his father, huge, heavy, thick, which no one else of all the Achaians could handle, but Achilleus alone knew how to wield it, the Pelian ash spear which Cheiron had brought to his father from high on Pelion, to be death for fighters in battle. A little further on, in the thick of the battle, Achilles throws this spear at Aineias (Iliad xx.273f·)· He misses and it sticks firmly in the ground

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The Homeric World

(xx.279-80), and Achilles is left without a spear. Divine intervention comes to his aid in the form of Poseidon who pulls the spear out of Aineias’ shield (where it now seems to be stuck) and brings it back to deposit it at Achilles’ feet (xx.321-4). Apparently having learnt no caution, Achilles again throws his spear at Polydoros and impales him so that the spear ends up right through his body (xx.413—18). One might have thought that this too would have caused difficulties for our hero, but just a few lines further on (xx.446) there he is with spear in hand again, this time with no explanation as to how it was retrieved. In the same passage Hector appears to have similar difficulties with spears. Having earlier armed himself with an elevencubit-long spear (something like 4 m in length) {Iliad viii.493f: repeated in vi.318f.; c f xiii.830), Hector too indulges in some spear-throwing in the thick of battle. In this case Athene, deflecting the spear from its target, brings it back like a boomerang to Hector’s feet (xx.438f.). The third passage concerns Aias’ shield, an extraordinary affair which, as Aias enters the battle in Iliad vii.219 is described as tower-like {eilte purgon). It is made of seven layers of oxhide to which an eighth layer of bronze has been added, apparently as an afterthought (vii.223). As if this were not enough, this shield, a few lines further on in the thick of the fight, suddenly acquires a boss {messoli epomphalion\ vii.267) which has no part in the original description. Hector too has a very odd shield, at one point described as extending from his neck to his ankles {Iliad vi. 117) and at another as completely circular (vii.250). That is a shield worth trying to imagine! W hile these oddities have often been dismissed as examples of the inconsistencies and discrepancies one might expect in poetry simultaneously composed and recited orally, the archaeological record suggests that what we have in each case is the juxtaposition or superimposition of more than one chronological reflection. Taking iron first, the development of iron use and technology - and resulting cultural attitudes to iron - show a relatively clear pattern in the Aegean. In the period between c. 1600 and c. 1200 we have several small objects of iron in Aegean contexts, of a size and nature which required a minimum in the way of working (Pleiner 1969: 8—9). Most of these are personal ornaments or other trinkets: iron rings with gold or gold-plated bezels, bronze rings plated with gold and iron, and iron studs set in gold (Buchholz & Karageorghis 1973: 26-7). The frequent combina­ tion of iron with gold suggests that iron was regarded at this time as an exotic luxury with intrinsic value as a precious metal, no doubt enhanced by its obvious magnetic properties (which may also be obliquely reflected in a recurrent line in the Odyssey: xvi.294, cf. xix.13). From c. 1200 bc onwards, the first small iron blades appear in the Aegean in the form of knives with bronze rivets which are almost certainly imports from the East Mediter­ ranean. The breakthrough in blade technology in Greece itself comes some­ time around the middle of the 11th century when the first all iron dagger (or curtailed sword) appears, closely followed by full-sized iron swords

Historical and Archaeological Background

83

(Snodgrass 1971: 217 ff.; 1980). Not long after, by the beginning of the 10th century the technology required for more difficult objects like spear­ heads (which, unlike their bronze counterparts, could not be cast) had been mastered, and, once this was in place, there is little doubt that objects like axes, ploughshares etc., which are more rarely found in archaeological contexts, were also made. To sum up: the first part of the passage in Iliad xxiii concerning the prize would seem to accord best with an attitude to iron which prevailed between the 16th and 12th centuries, while the second part belongs to a time from c. 1000 on when iron tools were regularly produced in Greece. The spears of the second passage present a less clear picture, but one which nevertheless also corresponds to a distinct chronological pattern. The spearheads of the early Mycenaean period are vast affairs - fully comparable with Hector’s eleven-cubit spear (cf. e.g. Dickinson 1977: 70; Karo 1930-33: plates LXXII.215, XCVI.902, 910, 933, XCVII.449). Representational evidence of this period - which is likely to correspond closely with the self-image which a contemporary warrior class wished to project - shows them in use in close combat (Crouwel 1981: 121; c f e.g. Karo 1930—33: plate 24; Sakellariou 1974; Lorimer 1950: figure 8 and possibly figure 7 but cf. Lorimer 1950: 144-6); and, indeed, it is hard to imagine how else they could be used. The introduction and use of a throwing spear is more problematic. Although much smaller javelins occur in graves from early in the Late Bronze Age, there is no representational evidence that the early Mycenaeans thought of themselves as using these in military contexts; and indeed the ideal of close combat indicated both by representations and the nature of fighting equipment tends to exclude this. During the palatial period of the later l4th -13th centuries representational evidence for paired spears —a good sign that their bearer might be thinking of throwing one of them —is associated exclusively with hunting scenes. Towards the end of the 13 th century new and smaller types of spearheads enter the Mycenaean repertoire (Desborough 1964: 66—7; cf. Sandars 1978: 9 Iff.), and for the first time in 12th-century (post-palatial) representations we see paired spears carried in what are apparently military settings (Crouwel 1981: plate 59; Popham & Sackett 1968: figure 43), and at least one instance of spears being thrown in battle (Dakoronia n.d.). Paired spears of equal size begin to appear in graves from the 12th century onwards (Snodgrass 1964: 136), and are the norm in 8th-century Attic representa­ tions of warfare where spears are also sometimes seen hurtling through the air (Ahlberg 1971). Thus in Iliad xix—xx we again seem to have some chronological superimposition: with Achilles starting with a spear which would seem most at home in the 13th century or considerably earlier, and finishing with one which acts as though it belongs in the 12th century at the earliest, and possibly several centuries later. Finally, shields. The unwieldy, tower-like (rectangular or figure-of-eight)

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The Homeric World

hide body shields of the early Mycenaean period, extending from neck to ankle, and known only from representational evidence, are all of a package with the close combat weaponry associated with them; and they show every sign of gradually becoming redundant once bronze body armour - of the kind found in a late 15th- or early 14th-century tomb at Dendra (Buchholz & Karageorghis 1973: no. 712), and depicted on the Knossos Linear B tablets of similar date and on the later tablets from Pylos (Ventris & Chadwick 1973: 375, 380, ideograms 162-3) - becomes the warrior norm towards the end of the pre-palatial or early in the palatial period. Although figure-of-eight shields continue to appear as decorative — or possibly symbolic —motifs in ivory and faience work, there is no sign in the 14th and 13th centuries that they were actually part of regular warrior equipment used in battle. In fact, the tablets from Knossos and Pylos which record military equipment are strikingly silent on the subject of shields, as are representations of military scenes in this period. This is not really surprising. Anyone wearing armour like that found at Dendra would have quite enough to manage without manoeuvring a shield as well. At the very end of the 13th century - as part of the same new package of equipment which included smaller throwable spears and the slashing sword —we see the appearance of smaller hand-held targes (e.g. Lorimer 1950: figure 9). These, and somewhat larger shields in a variety of circular, sub-circular or other shapes, intended to protect the trunk, appear quite frequently on 12th-century and later representations (e.g. Crouwel 1981: plates 53, 59; Lorimer 1950: plates II.2, III.3; Catling 1977: figure 34) and continue to appear on those of the 8th century (8 the disguised Athena complains of the behaviour of the suitors, and says that any man who was prudent, pinutos, would be angry at seeing many aischea. Here, we might suppose, aeikea, aeikeliös, and aischea are instances of words related apparently (from their kinship with aischron and similar words) to the most powerful system of values, but nevertheless used in ‘quiet’ contexts. The use of these words, however, requires further examina­ tion; for the fact that it seems possible to replace them here by ‘wrongful’, ‘wrongfully’, and ‘wrongs’ proves nothing. The exact flavour is only indi­ cated when the full range of these terms is considered. Aeikelios evidently does not correspond to ‘wrongfully’: that is to say,

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since the term is used to bring discredit upon someone, it is not the suitors who are discredited here. Neither aeikelios nor aeikeliös is used on any occasion to decry breaches of the co-operative virtues. When Odysseus says that he fears that the Phaeacian youth may defeat him at running,39 since he has been weakened aeikelios by his privations at sea, he is using the word as it is normally used.40 To find oneself in a condition which can be characterized as aeikelios, or to undergo experiences which are aeikelia, is to be situated as an agathos may not be situated and remain fully agathos. That is to say, it is to have one’s military or social success, one’s reputation for that success, or one’s physical prowess, impaired in some manner; and the discussion of arete has made it clear that to be in such a condition in Homeric society is a reproach to oneself alone, save when one is the dependent of another. In these circumstances, the master of the house should not allow his dependent to come into such a condition. Accordingly, the condition of his serving-maids is a reproach to Telemachus too: for though they could not, qua serving-maids, be agathai, they need not be thus mishandled. The effect of aeikelios, then, is to draw attention to the pitiable condition of the serving-maids, a condition into which, however, it is not aischron for the suitors to bring them. Similarly, when Penelope chides Telemachus41 for allowing the ‘beggar’ to be thus maltreated, aeikisthêmenai, both the situation and the rebuke are the same. The ‘beggar’ and Telemachus are each discredited, for each has in his own way fallen short of arete. The suitors are not reproached at all: to do kaka, to do harm, is not to be kakos; to be kakos is to be the sort of person to whom kaka may be done with impunity, since he cannot defend himself: and it is this condition which is aischron. Aischos and aischea behave in a similar manner. Both may normally be rendered ‘insults’, provided that it is remembered that it is only aischron to receive insults, not to deliver them.42 Accordingly, in the passage from Odyssey i quoted above, Telemachus, not the suitors, should feel ashamed, for it is he whose condition is aischron. Any feeling of quiet values derives from the fact that, as is said, a pinutos, a prudent man, should feel anger, nemesis, at the sight: just as when Menelaus in the l l i a d ^ referring to Paris’ abduction of Helen, says that the Trojans have no lack of insult and aischos to heap upon him, the feeling of quiet values is derived from Menelaus’ threat in the following lines that Zeus Xeinios will avenge the aischos. In itself the aischos is shameful to Menelaus alone. The nemesis of the pinutos will be discussed below; here it suffices to show that aischea are in no sense ‘wrongs’. Other terms, however, are less clear than those already discussed. The word aeikës, for example, is certainly used on many occasions to decry military and social failure. Anyone defeated and. killed in Homer may be said to have met an end which is aeikes\44 and here naturally it is the vanquished, not the victor, who is discredited.45 No judgement in terms of quiet values is thereby passed upon anyone. Similarly, Andromache

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laments that her son Astyanax will fall into slavery and be forced to perform actions, erga, which are aeikea: menial tasks such as the agathos, in virtue of his social position, need never perform. Thus far aeikes conforms to the usage of arete and agathos\ and that Clytemnestra’s adultery, and her murder of Agamemnon, should also be spoken of as an ergon aeikes is not surprising, since it has already been shown that such actions detract from a woman’s arete. We have no reason to suppose that men’s actions will be similarly treated. Yet it is said of Aegisthus that he plotted aeikea against Agamemnon;46 Penelope, complaining of the behaviour of the suitors in the palace of Odysseus, refers to their aeikea erga;47 and Achilles intended aeikea erga to the corpse of Hector, when he proposed to drag it about the walls of Troy.48 It is difficult to interpret these passages on the analogy of aeikeliös and aischea, to maintain, that is, that these aeikea erga are discreditable to the person who suffers them and to him alone. In all cases where ergon aeikes refers to a defeat, military or social, it is the person who performed’ the ergon aeikes who is discredi ted ;4y and it is unreasonable to expect a different idiom in these passages. Here then, it seems, we have a term of value which, unlike those so far considered, spans both co-operative and competitive excellences. There are other terms whose behaviour is similar, notably the group of words related to aidos, shame. When Hera shouts to the Greeks50 Aidosy for shame! base elenchea\ the aidos is closely related to defeat and elenchos. But it may be said of the suitors that they have no share of aidos;51 Agamemnon in his relations with Achilles displays shamelessness, anaideiê,52 and the suitors in their dealings with the household of Odysseus are regularly said to be shameless, anaideis;53 while Diomedes54 and Telemachus,55 as a result of the aidos which they feel before their elders and betters, may well fail to act as is best to secure perfectly justified ends: and here aidos evidently approximates to ‘bashfulness’. Kalon, too, deserves consideration. On two occasions we find56 It is not kalon or just, dikaion, to maltreat any of Telemachus’ guests. Further, when Antinous is discourteous to Odysseus the ‘beggar’, Eumaeus

Antinous, esthlos though you are, your words are not kala. Again, Odysseus in Phaeacia, replying to Euryalus who has taunted him, says 58 Stranger, what you say is not kalon: you seem to be a presumptuous man.

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He contrasts Euryalus with the man who has gentle aidos. In the Iliad Achilles says to Phoenix, his companion,59 It is kalon to join me in troubling anyone who troubles me. Agamemnon, in the Assembly of Iliad xix, says, appealing for fair treatment,60 It is kalon to listen to a man who is standing up to speak, and unseemly to interrupt him. Such usages seem very hopeful. Strictly, kalon is the contrary of aischron, and hence should be very powerful: and if the period discussed in the present work is considered as a whole, the coupling of kalon and dikaion must seem very ‘advanced’, for it is precisely this coupling which is found, centuries later, in the ‘moralizers’ of fifth-century Athens. Unfortunately, closer examination belies this hope. Kalon does not behave as the contrary of aischron in Homer: it is not used to glorify victory as aischron is used to decry defeat. Such functions are discharged by other words;61 and accordingly kalon has in Homer no real link with the competitive excellences, from which alone it could draw real power.62 Its real weakness is seen in the speech of Eumaeus, quoted above. Eumaeus can maintain that Antinous has said words which are not seemly, ou kala, but he cannot say that Antinous becomes kakos or not esthlos as a result: for being agathos or esthlos, as has been shown, is not affected by such considerations. Antinous remains agathos: his arete is unsmirched by his ill-mannered behaviour. Had it been possible successfully to use ou kalon to oppose the claims of the agathos to do as he pleases, Nestor would have said that Agamemnon’s robbing Achilles of Briseis was ou kalon, and Apollo would have claimed the same of Achilles’ maltreatment of Hector. Evidently it is not possible. Ou kalon, then, in Homer, since it is not used to decry failure, is not an equivalent of aischron either in usage or in emotive power. Ou kalon is opposed to agathos in ‘quiet’ contexts, but is not strong enough to override it: aischron would be strong enough to override it, but is not so used. In order to restrain the claims of the agathos to do as he pleases, it would be necessary to say63 This is aischron even for future generations to hear of with reference to breaches of the quiet virtues: and this cannot be said. The demands of success are too strong in the case of men. It can be said of Clytemnestra that she64 Brought aischos upon women even of future generations,65 even those who are virtuous.

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Ic can be said, for, as a result of the nature of women’s arete, Clytemnestra has shown herself to be kaki by her actions. Similar condemnation of Agamemnon and the suitors is not found, and, persuasive definitions apart, cannot be expected; for no matter what their breaches of the quiet virtues, men remain agathoi; and to be agathos cannot be aischron, nor involve a man in aischos. This use of kalon, then, can have little effect in the last resort. There remain aidos and aeikes: but the effect of these upon the concept of moral responsi­ bility must be small. True, they span both competitive and co-operative excellences: but this is only one condition of usefulness. They must also be key terms of value: and this they are not. Aischron, agathos, arete, kakos, and elencheie are, for excellent reasons, the key terms of value; and though a word which spans both groups of excellences will have the emotive power of the key terms of value when it is associated with them, it must have a very much reduced emotive power when it is associated with terms which commend the co-operative excellences. The aidos which the Greeks should feel at defeat66 is powerful, for it is associated with a condition of elencheie'. but the aidos which might have restrained the suitors would have been a much weaker emotion, for should they be anaideis, in the sense of‘not pinutoi , and successful, they run no risk of elencheie. The distaste felt by a man for aeikea erga, too, must vary according to the applicability of the key terms. Naturally, to say that this distaste, this aidos, is weaker when the quiet virtues are in question is not to say that it does not exist; and it must be such aidos which holds Homeric society together, in so far as it is held together, for a society of agathoi with no quiet virtues at all would simply destroy itself. But, as will be evident when Agamemnon’s ‘apology’ is considered below, as soon as a crisis forces the essential framework of values into view, the competitive values are so much more powerful than the co-operative that the situation is not treated in terms of the quiet values at all; and as it is precisely with such crises that the concept of moral responsibility is concerned, it is evident that such terms as aidos and aeikes, however useful to society in general, cannot affect the development of the concept of moral responsibility, for they are ineffective at the crucial moment. Accordingly, in future chapters it will be unnecessary to discuss these terms, for their value in commending quiet moral excellences is pre­ cisely that of the words which specifically commend those excellences. It will be sufficient to discuss the history of the specific terms, dikaios, saophron, &c., in relation to the key terms of value.

D. The Results (i) The Claims o f Society The nature of the Homeric system of values is now clear. It is a system based on the competitive standard of arete, a standard which, while not involving the co-operative excellences at all, gives society a strong claim against the

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agathos, but the agathos an equally strong claim against society. Both of these claims affect the concept of moral responsibility, as does the sanction which maintains the system. These topics may conveniently be discussed separately. The effects of society’s claim against the agathos require little illustration. We have already seen that arete is used to commend skills, physical gifts, or inherited social advantages. None of these can be attained merely by good intentions; indeed, intentions are almost irrelevant. To a modern reader courage might appear to differ from the other qualities commended in being more dependent upon the will; but it is aischron to fail, in war or in peace, whatever one’s intentions. Two examples in which moral error is contrasted with mistake or inca­ pacity will serve to illustrate this. In Iliad vi Hector rebukes Paris on finding that he is not on the field of battle: 67 No right-thinking man would pour scorn upon your deeds of war, for you are alkimos. But you shirk hekon, of your own accord, and are unwilling to fight: and my heart is grieved when I hear aischea, insults, against you in the mouths of the Trojans. Paris is alkimos\ a word which naturally spans both courage and the physical endowments necessary to a Homeric warrior, since this system of values allows no distinction between the two: so when Hector points out that it is aischron (or that he has been hearing aischea about it) for Paris to shirk fighting in a war of which he is the occasion, the rebuke stirs him on. But if Paris were not alkimos, then anyone might pour scorn upon his deeds of war’: it would still be aischron for him not to be a successful warrior, even if physical disability prevented him from fighting. However good his inten­ tions, he would be kakos, analkis, no use for protecting society. We may compare two similar speeches uttered by Hector. When Andromache urges him to remain in safety within the walls of Troy, he ,· 68 replies: I feel shame, aideomai, before the Trojans, both men and women, if like a kakos I skulk away from the war. Later, when Hector discovers that by leading the Trojan army into the field he has exposed it to needless danger, he says:69 But now, since I have ruined the people by my folly, I feel shame, aideomai, before the Trojans, both men and women, lest some day some base fellow (someone more kakos than I) may say ‘Hector by trusting in his might has ruined the people’.

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He concludes that as a result of this, Polydamas will be the first to bring elencheie upon me. In the first of these passages, Hector rejects the suggestion that he should behave in a cowardly manner; in the second, he has made a mistake, perhaps as a result of overconfidence, but a mistake for all that, not a moral error. So we should distinguish; yet these situations are treated in precisely the same manner. In both cases, Hector feels aidos before the Trojans; aidos in the highest degree, since it is associated with defeat:70 from which it is apparent that when arete is in question, results are so important that intentions are not considered at all. (it) The Agathos and the Sanction o f Ho?neric Society We may now turn to consider the sanction employed by Homeric society to ensure that its agathoi display arete, and its effects on the ascription of responsibility; for though success is per se desirable for the agathos, it is inconceivable that any society should take no steps to ensure that its highest standards of behaviour are maintained. This sanction is overtly ‘what people w ill say’, as is made quite clear when the suitors protest that the disguised Odysseus must not be allowed to attempt to draw the bow which they have failed to draw. Eurymachus does not fear that, even should the ‘beggar’ succeed, Penelope will marry him :71 No; we feel shame at what men and women w ill say—lest at some time some base fellow from among the Greeks should say: ‘Surely very inferior men are wooing the wife of an excellent man, for they cannot draw the bow; and yet some wandering beggar has come and drawn the bow with ease and shot through the line of axes.’ So they w ill say: and these things would become elenchea for us. What people will say, the demon phatis, is recognized to be the most important standard. Public opinion w ill mock the suitors’ failure in itself, but it will also mock them if, agathoi, rich and powerful warriors, as they are, they are worsted by a beggar, a kakos or deilos. The standard is the same for women, though naturally different actions are expected and different actions reprehended.72 For both men and women it is not what has been done that matters, but what people say has been done. So when Zeus terrifies Diomedes’ horses with a flash of lightning,7'0 Nestor, who is acting as his charioteer, immediately counsels retreat. Diomedes replies that if he retreats Hector will be able to say that Diomedes once gave ground before him. Nestor reassures him: ‘What a thing to say. Even if Hector does call you kakos and analkis, the Trojans and their wives whose husbands you have slain will never believe it.’ Nestor cannot say, ‘Don’t worry. It isn’t true.’ If

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the Trojans did believe it, Diomedes would incur elencheie, and there is nothing more important than this: he would feel terrible aidos were such a thing to happen. Here too it is evident that facts are of much less importance than appearances, and hence that intentions are of much less importance than results. The Homeric hero cannot fall back upon his own opinion of himself, for his self only has the value which other people put upon it. Diomedes’ bravery is worth nothing unless his fellows believe him to be brave; and what other people believe about his actions is quite independent of his own intentions, and may be quite at variance with them. Thus the neglect of intentions which is necessitated in certain important circumstances by the state of Homeric society is reinforced by that society’s standard of values. It is not necessary to suppose, however, that the state of society created that scheme of values which constitutes a shame-culture.74 A feeling of pain and anger is the natural response to failure, whether or no anything of importance hangs on that failure. So elencheie results from failure in the games not because the games are a training for war, but because the hero feels shame at failure per se, and other people w ill mock it per se. Even in a society which is able to distinguish clearly in theory between moral error and failure, the feeling of shame plays its part in confusing the distinction in practice, when emotions are sufficiently aroused. There is no reason to explain the existence of this system of values, for it springs from what is primitive and primary: it would be better to say that society is not yet sufficiently well organized to allow the reflection (or coercion) which might produce a different system. (Hi) The Claims o f the Agathos Society’s claims against the agathos, then, and the sanction employed to enforce them, both entail that intentions are widely ignored, with the result that moral error and mistake cannot be distinguished. The agathos, however, has himself the strongest of claims against society;75 and this too affects ascriptions of responsibility. To complete this chapter, we may consider a number of situations in which the claims of the agathos and the nature of his society produce results which to the modern reader must appear highly unusual. If the agathos chooses to make use of his advantage, his fellows may grow angry with him, and attempt to restrain him by force; but if for any reason they are unable to do this, his claim to act as he pleases in respect of the co­ operative excellences is stronger than any claim they can bring against him;76 and if he feels that any thwarting of his desires would be failure, the aidos which he feels at not being agathos must be stronger than the aidos which he feels at not being pinutos. Agamemnon chooses to push his claim to the hilt against Achilles. He fails, and is finally convinced that he was in some sense ‘wrong’ to deprive

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Achilles of Briseis. The passage must be considered in some detail, since it shows the manner in which responsibility is felt in the most powerful group of values. Agamemnon says:77 Often indeed did the Greeks tell me this, and abused me.78 But I am not the cause, aitios, of this. No; Zeus and moira and the Fury who walks in darkness are the cause; for they put fierce blindness, ate, into my mind in the assembly on that day when I deprived Achilles of his prize. But what could I do? The god brings all things to pass. He goes on to say that Ate (personified) can blind anyone; that once she even blinded Zeus, and was cast out of heaven for it. After a long digression on this subject, he continues: So I too, since mighty Hector has been killing Greeks by the sterns of the ships, am unable to forget the blindness by which I was first blinded. But since I was blinded and Zeus took away my wits, 1 am willing to make amends and give abundant recompense. The sense in which Agamemnon believes he was ‘wrong’ appears from the second passage. Since Hector is now killing Greeks by the Greek ships, Agamemnon cannot forget the blindness (or the goddess) by which he was first blinded. That is to say, it is blindness, ate, to dishonour the man who is aristos, because one will probably feel the lack of him if he sulks in his tent; and only if one does feel the lack will one consider it to be ate. Agamemnon, under the influence of anger, has made a mistake; he is ‘wrong’ in the sense that he has miscalculated the effect of the loss of Achilles. We have only to compare the parallel which he draws with Zeus to realize that this is the light in which Agamemnon sees it. Zeus too was blinded by ate\ but it was not a moral blindness. Ate simply saw to it that Hera’s deception of Zeus was successful: the function is that of Sleep in Iliad xiv. Zeus promised Hera that the man born of his blood that day should rule— meaning Heracles. Hera saw to it that the birth of Heracles was delayed, and that of Eurystheus, a child equally of Zeus’ blood, advanced; and the promise was fulfilled in the person of Eurystheus. Zeus made a mistake: if there was a moral error, it was Hera’s. Thus ate too spans mistake and moral error: like Hector above,79 Agamemnon does not distinguish the two. The reason is clear. Both in his relations with Achilles and as leader of the Greeks against the Trojans, Agamemnon is regarded by himself and his followers as agathos. Qua more powerful chieftain (and hence ameinon in a sense, though Achilles attempts to use agathos differently80) he has a claim to take Briseis if he will; qua leader of the Greeks, he must maintain himself as an agathos, and not fall into elencheie, as would be the case should the Greeks fail to take Troy. The

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one is permitted, the other demanded, by this competitive system of values. Agamemnon believed these two purposes to be compatible: having discov­ ered this to be false, he relinquishes the minor purpose in order to achieve the major, and acknowledges that he has made a mistake. The fact that Agamemnon has incurred social disapproval for his failure gives the trans­ action an appearance o f ‘quiet’ morality which it does not possess. The only aspect of arete in which Agamemnon has fallen short is success in war: the quieter virtues are so much less important that Agamemnon does not see the transaction in this light at all. In these circumstances, to plead ate cannot be an attempt to evade responsibility for one’s actions, even if one says roundly Ί am not aitios\ and maintains that no fewer than three gods were the cause: an assertion which may imply that the mistake is a curious one,82 and one which the agent feels he would not ‘normally’ have made, but which does not make the mistake anything other than a mistake. The reason is twofold. Firstly, it has been shown that only in special cases, of which this is not one, may responsibility be laid upon a god. These cases are ‘literary’; and here we have not ‘Literature’, but ‘Life’, for Zeus, moira, and the Fury were not represented as deceiving Agamemnon in Iliad i. Agamemnon is thus speaking as men in Homeric society must have spoken in life, not making a statement which only the poet, from his position of omniscience, can know to be true. Secondly, since Agamemnon regards his action as a mistake, the sense of ‘responsibility’ is peculiar: in this sense responsibility is not moral, but cannot be avoided. No man can expect to evade the consequences of his mistakes: a man is very fortunate if he is able to rectify them. Thus Agamemnon ‘must’ recompense Achilles to rectify his mistake and bring Achilles once again into the fighting: he has no alternative. Such are the implications of the competitive scheme of values. Moral responsibility has no place in them; and the quieter virtues, in which such responsibility has its place, neither have sufficient attraction to gain a hearing nor are backed by sufficient force to compel one. In some cases the gods guarantee the quieter values; but this aspect of Homeric belief must be left till the next chapter [not reprinted here]. On the human level, chieftains can settle disputes among their own followers, their position being strong enough to enable them to do it; but disputes between chief­ tains of equal power, if they are sufficiently angry to refuse arbitration, as, given their competitive scheme of values, they are only too likely to do, cannot be settled easily. 8d The organization to coerce them does not exist: and since any concession might be regarded by public opinion as a sign of failure or weakness, and failure is aischron, than which nothing is worse, there is always the danger that such a situation as arose between Agamem­ non and Achilles will occur again. This point will become clearer if the manner in which this society treated homicide is considered. The Homeric poems provide a full and varied

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selection of cases of homicide, of which those of Theoclymenus, Patroclus, the attempted murder of Telemachus, and Odysseus’ killing of Antinous are the most interesting. Theoclymenus introduces himself to Telemachus thus:8 1 I too have fled from my native land, for I have killed a man of my own tribe.85 There are many kinsmen of the dead man86 in Argos, and they hold sway over the Greeks. I am running away, fleeing from black death at their hands, since it is now my lot to wander among men. We may presume that the homicide was intentional: at all events, Theoclymenus does not deny it. Patroclus’ ghost, however, recalls a different kind of homicide. He reminds Achilles of the day87 when Menoetius brought him from his home When I killed the son of Amphidamas—child as I was, and not intend­ ing to kill— in anger over a game of dice. Patroclus was a child, he did not mean to kill, he acted in anger: any punishment which fell to him would a fortiori fall to an adult who killed in anger. Again, when Odysseus shoots down Antinous, the suitors, until he discloses his identity, are under the impression that the supposed beggar has killed accidentally;88 and yet they threaten him with instant death. Theoclymenus was probably a wilful murderer. Patroclus was a child, and acted without premeditation, in anger, with some provocation. Odysseus is believed to have killed by accident. Yet clearly the penalty for each is the same: unless the killer takes himself, or is taken, out of reach of the offended parties, whether relatives or, as seems to be the case in the last example, some other body of people with whom the dead man is associated, he w ill be killed in his turn. W ith this may be compared the advice of Antinous to the suitors when Telemachus evades their ambush. They should kill him before he reaches the city, lest he call an assembly;89 for, if Telemachus is not prevented from speaking, the suitors may be driven from their homes. Presumably if they did not go, they would suffer the same fate as a murderer. This is an extreme case of nemesis, social disapproval, which would naturally manifest itself in hostile action, not merely in words. Hence as regards punishment no distinction is drawn between deliberate homicide, homicide with provoca­ tion or without premeditation, accidental homicide, and (possibly) attempted homicide.90 The reason is clear. The society of the Homeric poems, however much the author may imply that the manner of living of the Cyclopes is old-fashioned, inasmuch as each administers justice to his own children and dependents and has nothing to do with his neighbours, is in feeling and in its terms of value,

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which help to maintain the status quo, still much more an agglomeration of individual ‘Cyclopean’ households than an integrated society.91The assembly, when it is summoned, may decide ordinary matters of justice, dike, between households. Homicide, however, is too great a strain: society, as we see it in the poems generally, is not strong enough to control the emotional stresses of such an act. Accordingly, punishment is left to the individual families, who slay the slayer, if he is not quick enough to escape, or ensure that he is driven from his patrimony. It is not a question of war between the two families: his own household gives no help to the murderer. Given anger uncontrolled by a court of law, combined with the fact that it is aiscbron that a member of one’s family should be killed without requital and that intentions are generally irrelevant, it is difficult to see how a graduated system of punishments could have been devised; and the Homeric practice does at least prevent the outbreak of vendetta between the families. ‘Pollution’, so important later, plays no active part in the beliefs of Homeric man. Theoclymenus has killed a man of his own tribe; yet Tele­ machus, in sharp contrast to fifth-century Greek practice, takes him on board ship without a qualm; and it is the custom that exiled murderers should take refuge at another king’s court, where they are welcomed.92 There is no supernatural danger in consorting with a murderer. Odysseus’ treatment of the suitors betrays a similar attitude. Having slain Antinous, he reveals himself and says:93 Dogs, you did not think that I would return home from Troy; for you have consumed my possessions, lain with my maidservants by force, and wooed my wife while I was yet alive, fearing neither the gods who inhabit broad heaven, nor yet that there would be any retribution from men hereafter: but now the doom of death is upon you all. The chief crime of the suitors is that they have disregarded Telemachus and ravaged Odysseus’ possessions.94 This they have done deliberately, and the act constitutes a declaration of war on the house of Odysseus. Homer says of them that they have staked their heads on the success of the venture: a phrase which he uses elsewhere of pirates.95 The suitors can make no attempt to justify themselves on this count. Eurymachus96 attempts to lay all the blame on the dead Antinous; but that there is blame cannot be denied. Odysseus, however, also charged the suitors with having wooed Penelope while he was still alive; but, though none of them supposed that he was still alive, none of the suitors attempts to say ‘We didn’t know.’ They have wooed a woman whose husband is in fact alive; and unless they can buy him off, as Eurymachus tries to do, or are strong enough to prevent it, he will kill them.97 The reasons are clear: anger, the shame of letting such an insult go unavenged (for unless Odysseus does something heroic, the situation is

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comic: and where the standard of a man’s worth is public opinion, no man can afford to be mocked), and the fact that one must protect one’s own property or perish oneself. This is a hard society: it can rarely spare a thought for intentions. Homeric values, however, suit Homeric society, inasmuch as they commend those qualities which most evidently secure its existence. Life is a matter of skill and courage; hence skill and courage are most highly commended. Wrong-doing is not admired by those who suffer from it; but right-doing, ‘quiet’ virtue, is less highly admired by society as a whole than skill and courage, for the latter are more evidently needed. That the organization of society, its values, and the sanction by which those values are sustained all lead to the ignoring of intention is unfortunate, but of less importance than the possible inability of the basic social unit, the house­ hold, to hold its own against other such units; and accordingly the problems are not keenly felt. Systems of values, however, persist while societies develop; and the Homeric system conflicts violently with any form of society which attempts to allot reward or punishment to an action simply on the basis of the characteristics of that action, irrespective of any other claims to consideration the agent may possess. The persistence of the one system is certain to confuse any attempt to introduce the other. Signs of such confusion existing already in Homer may be seen in the chariot race of Iliad xxiii. We regard a race as a trial of prowess on a particular day. Whether or no the best man wins, the winner deserves the first prize, the second the second prize, and so on; but when Eumelus comes in last, Diomedes, who won, is given the first prize, but Achilles proposes to give the second prize to Eumelus, since98 The man who is aristos has finished last. Everyone approves of Achilles’ decision except Antilochus, who finished second. His protest is successful, but he does not say ‘This is unreasonable. I never heard of such a thing’, but ‘Eumelus should have prayed to the gods, and anyway you can easily give him another prize.’ That is to say, he does not regard it as unreasonable that, even in a race, a man’s arete should be held to be more important, for the purpose of distributing prizes, than his actual performance. On the other hand, though Menelaus is ‘mightier in arete and in strength’,99 he insists that this must not be the reason why he should be placed second rather than Antilochus; the reason is that Antilochus has broken the rules by crowding and crossing. And yet he also says to Antilochus ‘You have brought shame upon my arete ;li)0 and nothing is more important than this. This is a hopeless tangle of values. Unless the allotment of prizes bears some relation to the result of the race, there is no point in running at all, since the prizes could be distributed before the race starts. Accordingly,

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some attention must be paid to the result; and yet clearly in this society some attention must be paid to the arete of the respective competitors as well. Such a situation can only lead to doubt, confusion, and argument. In a chariot race, this may be unimportant; but we have here in microcosm the tangle of values which prevailed in the Athenian law-courts and assembly, with such disastrous results. The problem is a serious one; and since it is closely related to the problem of moral responsibility, the successive attempts at its solution must be considered in subsequent chapters.101 Indeed, the fact that, when the protection of oneself and one’s associates is in question, moral error and mistake are not and cannot be distinguished in many cases, while competitive excellences completely override the quieter moral virtues in cases where they can, sets the most serious problem for moral responsibility in the centuries after Homer. The problem on the practical level is clear; and on the theoretical level too there are serious difficulties. Since the attainment of success and fame, both desirable in themselves, and the avoidance of failure and disgrace, both undesirable, are the chief aims of Homeric man,102 aims whose fulfilment is unconditionally demanded of him, and since this, as has been seen, results in the complete unimportance of intentions, it follows that all action taken to these ends must be seen in terms of successful and unsuccessful calculation, of hitting or missing the mark. The psychological ‘picture’ must be one of calculation; and though common sense may succeed in using this picture, philosophical analysis may well feel the effects. In Homer, however, and for centuries thereafter, it is the practical difficulties which are the most pressing. In the attempted solution of these difficulties certain beliefs about the gods which are found already in Homer have their part to play. These beliefs will be considered in the next chapter [not reprinted here].

Notes 1. This list is not exhaustive. Other words will be added as the discussion demands them. 2. The Odyssey seems more developed in that the quieter values are more evidently supported by the threat of divine sanctions than in the Iliad. The terms under discussion here, however, undergo little change other than what would be expected in passing from a poem of war to one of (comparative) peace. 3. Odyssey iv. 778, xxii. 204. 4. Cp. Finley, The World of Odysseus, p. 138. 5. Iliad ii. 365, cp. Odyssey viii. 512. 6. Iliad XV. 642, xiii. 277. 7. Odyssey xv. 324, cp. Iliad i. 80. 8. Iliad ii. 284 ffi, cp. 119 ff. 9- Odyssey xiv. 37 f. 10. Odyssey xviii. 223 ff. 11. In the society for which ‘Homer’ was composing, on the other hand, these

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values may well have become anachronistic, cp. Finley, op. cit., p. 35, on democ­ racy in Chios. 12. Iliad xii. 310 ff. 13. On this topic cp. Frisch, Might and Right in Antiquity, pp. 78 ff. and Finley, op. cit., p. 106. 14. For the exact sense in which this statement must be understood, cp. Finley, op. cit., pp. 93 ff. 15. Ibid., pp. 63 ff·, 116 ff. 16. Ibid., pp. 100 ff. 17. i.e. Some part of the epic devoted to the exploits of one particular hero. 18. Ibid., pp. 102 ff. 19- p. 10 [not reprinted here]. 20. Odyssey xxi. 314 ff. 21. Odyssey xxiv. 193. 22. Odyssey xi. 384. 23. Kakotes is not used o f men to decry breaches of the quiet virtues. At Iliad iii. 366, Menelaus says Ί thought I should punish Paris for kakotes . Liddell and Scott, ed. 9, render kakotes as ‘wickedness'. But there is nothing to indicate that Homer is speaking of Paris’ kakotes, which would entail such a translation. Kakos and kakotes in Homer normally decry failure {Iliadx. 71, Odyssey v. 290, 379, xvii. 517, &c.); so it is clear that the poet is speaking of Menelaus’ kakotes, his evil plight resulting from the elencheie to which Paris’ act has brought him. (This is the view of Ebeling, Lexicon Homericum, s.v.) Since Homer knows only one sense of kakotes, there can be no ambiguity here. {Odyssey iv. 167 is another passage in which, though the actual sense is quite clear, the translation ‘wickedness’ would make sense.) 24. Saophron and saophrosunë are the Homeric forms of the words which will appear later as söphrôn and söphrosunë. 25. Iliadi. 275 ff. 26. Iliad i. 131 f. 27. Iliad xxiv. 53. 28. Accordingly, when Finley says (op. cit., p. 130) that Achilles’ refusal of penal gifts (and later his treatment of Hector’s body) ‘placed him temporarily beyond the pale’ and ‘marked him as a man of unacceptable excesses’, this state­ ment must be read with the claims of the agathos in mind. Achilles, in his relations with Agamemnon and with Hector’s corpse, is doubtless anaides, cp. p. 43; but what he is doing is not aischron, and he remains agathos, ‘within the pale’. 29. Odyssey iii. 375 f. 30. Cp. for this phrase C. L. Stevenson in Mind, 1938, pp. 331 ff., where its usage is explained at length. 31. Odyssey xxi. 331 ff. 32. Odyssey xvi. 418 ff. 33. Cp. Finley, op. cit., pp. 68 ff., 119 ff. 34. ούδ3οσίη. 35. Iliad ix. 341 f. 36.

έχέφρω ν.

37. Odyssey xvi. 108 ff. 38. Odyssey i. 228 f. 39. Odyssey viii. 231. 40. Cp. Odyssey iv. 244, vi. 242, ix. 503, xiv. 32, xvii. 357, &c. 41. Odyssey xviii. 222. 42. When, Iliad iii. 38, &c., one hero addresses another with words which are aischra, i.e. insults, the meaning is certainly not that these words are shameful to

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the speaker. There is nothing in the society depicted in the poems to suggest such a conclusion. It is the man insulted who should feel ashamed. 43. Iliad xiii. 623. 44. άεικέα πότμον επεσπον. 45. Cp. Odyssey ii. 250, iv. 339 f., Iliad iv. 396, &c. 46. Odyssey iv. 533. 47. Odyssey iv. 694 f. 48. Iliad xxii. 395, xxiii. 24. 49. Iliad xiv. 13, xix. 132 f., xxiv. 733, and cp. Odyssey xxii. 432 and xx. 394, which do not refer to defeat. 50. Iliad V. 787. 51. Odyssey xx. 171. 52. Iliad i. 149. 53. Odyssey i. 254, xiii. 376, &c. 54. Iliad X. 238. 55. Odyssey iii. 24. 56. Odyssey xx. 294 f., xxi. 312 f. 57. Odyssey xvii. 381. 58. Odyssey viii. I 6 6 . 59- Iliad ix. 6 1 5 . 60. Iliad xix. 7961. κλέος, κύδος, &c. 62. Nevertheless, the linking of kalon and dikaion might appear hopeful for the future: when kalon became the true contrary of aischron, it might have drawn dikaion with it. This is over-optimistic: the occurrence of a link between kalon and dikaion in these instances indicates the difficulties facing any extension of the usage. It is not kalon or dikaion for one guest to insult another precisely because in this situation all competition should be abandoned, since the safety of both is guaran­ teed by their host: a situation which does not exist between household and house­ hold in this society. In fifth-century Athens, the city should have stood in this relationship to all its citizens; but as will be seen in Chapter XI [not reprinted here], traditional habits of thought, combined with certain practical needs, kept the relation between households competitive; with the result that kalon, in so far as it became the true contrary of aischron, could not readily be linked with dikaion. 63. Iliad ii. II 9 . 64. Odyssey xi. 433. 65. Reading έσσομένησι. 66. p. 28967. Uiad vi. 521 ff. 68. Iliad vi. 442 ff. 69. Iliad xxii. 104 ff. 70. Cp. p. 290. 71. Odyssey xxi. 323 ff. 72. Cp. Nausicaa, Odyssey vi. 255 ff. 73. Iliad viii. 147 ff. 74. For this cp. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 17 fi, with n. 106. 75. We may compare Iliad ix. 496 ffi, for the claims of arete: The gods have more arete than men; and yet they may be swayed by prayer. Cp. also Iliad xv. 185. 76. Finley, op. cit., p. 72, says: ‘Even in the distribution of booty . . . the head of the oikos (household) or . . . king or commander-in-chief . . . was obviously bound by what was generally deemed to be equitable. The circumstance that no one could punish him for flouting custom, as in the conflict between Agamemnon

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and Achilles, is irrelevant to the issue. For the very fact that just such a situation gave the theme for the Iliad illustrates how dangerous the violation could be. In this world custom was as binding upon the individual as the most rigid statutory law of later days.’ This reflects the general situation: agathoi must be pinutoi most of the time, if only from lack of opportunity to be anything else. It must be emphasized, however, that to say that Agamemnon ‘was (normally) bound by what was agreed to be equitable’ is not to say that Agamemnon was either legally or morally bound to act equitably. Since ‘no one could punish him for flouting custom’ (and since there are no laws to enjoin this), he cannot be legally bound; and since Homeric society cannot even censure Agamemnon effectively provided that his flouting of custom does not entail, as it does in the Iliad, failure to perform those functions which society demands of him, he cannot be morally bound either. 77. Iliad xix. 85 ff. and 134 ff., cp. viii. 237. 78. The word I have translated ‘abuse’ (νείκείειν) covers the senses ‘chide’, ‘rail at’, ‘upbraid’ (Liddell and Scott, s.v.). ‘Upbraid’ or ‘chide’ might seem more in point here: I have selected ‘abuse’ to emphasize that in a society which does not distinguish between moral error and mistake, it is impossible to distinguish mockery, abuse, and rebuke. There is only one situation: unpleasant words directed at a man who has in fact fallen short of the expectations of society. 79. p. 292. 80. Iliad i. 244. Achilles claims to be aristos of the Greeks on the basis of his prowess as a warrior. 81. Accordingly, when Greene, Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought, p. 21, says that ‘Agamemnon is merely trying to excuse himself’, he is concealing the true facts of the situation. Similarly, Chantraine, ‘Le divin et les dieux chez Homère’, Entretiens Fondation Hardt I, Geneva 1954, pp. 48-49, says that Agamemnon is not ‘coupable’ for his errors. I have argued against this in the text. Chantraine’s other example is no more satisfactory. At Odyssey xxiii. 11 ff., Eurycleia is certainly not excused because, as Penelope thinks, the gods have made her mad. At line 21, Penelope expressly says that if any of the other servants had behaved as Eurycleia has done she would have been punished: Eurycleia escapes because she is an old family retainer. Again, Helen is not trying to avoid respon­ sibility, Odyssey iv. 261, when she says that Aphrodite sent ate upon her, nor is it for this reason that Menelaus has not killed her. By Homeric standards a wife, particularly a Helen, is a valuable possession; it would be foolish to destroy it, once recovered. (The claims of the story, too—Odyssey iv makes a very pleasing narrative—doubtless have their part to play in keeping Helen alive for Homer.) 82. Cp. Dodds, op. cit., chap., i passim. 83. Cp. Achilles’ language of himself, Iliad i. 293. Agamemnon would have felt the same if he had withdrawn from his position, though he was in the wrong; cp. E. Phoen. 510 ff. for the general attitude. Note, too, how this scale of values makes it incumbent on a man to die fighting; which may be admirable in war, but will lead to less desirable results in peace, cp. Odyssey xxiv. 433 ff. 84. Odyssey xv. 272 ff. 85. ανδρα κατακτάς εμφυλον. 86. κασίγνητοί τε εται τε. 87. Iliad xxiii. 85 ff. 88. Odyssey xxii. 27 ff. 89- Odyssey xvi. 380 ff. 90. Patroclus’ statement that he was a child and did not mean to kill may have made some difference to the attitude of non-interested parties to him, though such people evidently gave a ready welcome even to wilful murderers; but clearly it

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made no difference at all to the attitude of the avengers; and this alone is relevant here, since they alone control the punishment he would receive. On the other side, there might be some difference in treatment if the kinsmen were particularly enraged by the enormity of the crime. The case of Melanthius, Odyssey xxii. 126 ff., suggests that Homeric society was used to torture. 91. True, the suitors fear that Telemachus may be able to raise the whole people against them; but this is unusual (cp. Finley, op. cit., pp. 100 ff.). He should, Odyssey xxiv. 455 ff., have been able to raise the people against the suitors when they forced their way into his house; there shoidd, Odyssey i. 228 ff., have been a general feeling of nemesis, social indignation, against the suitors; and this nemesis should be translated into action, and could be, if the people as a whole felt it. But everything depends on feeling, not organization; normally each household must look after itself, and the suitors can rely on being undisturbed. 92. The thambos, awe, which is said to seize those who look on when the murderer arrives at the house of some wealthy man in the late book Iliad xxiv may be a hint of the belief in pollution; and the peculiar treatment of the minstrel, Odyssey iii. 270 f., suggests the treatment of Antigone, S. Ant. 775 ff. and 1042, which is adopted to avoid pollution. Since the belief in pollution is Indo-European, mention of it must have been deliberately suppressed by Homer and the society for which he was writing. Evidently the society had not the language of pollution as we know it in fifth-century Athens: the use of the phrase katharos thanatos, Odyssey xxii. 462, to mean (apparently) a ‘quick, easy, death’ indicates this, for where there is a belief in pollution no death is katharos. On this topic, and on homicide in Homer generally, cp. G. M. Calhoun, The Growth of Criminal Law in Ancient Greece, chap, ii, and Frisch, op. cit., pp. 110 ff. 93. Odyssey xxii. 35 ff. 94. To protect one’s own possessions (and if possible acquire more) is, given the structure of Homeric society, an ever-pressing necessity. Hence the importance laid on the suitors’ wasting of Odysseus’ possessions throughout the Odyssey (xviii. 144, &c.). In addition to security, possessions bring honour, time: one becomes more worthy of respect (