THE WORLD OF ODYSSEUS

M . I . F I N L E Y

I n t r o d u c t i o n b y
B E R N A R D K N O X

Introduction vii
Preface xix
Map xxii
1. Homer and the Greeks 5
2. Bards and Heroes 18
3. Wealth and Labor 46
4. Household, Kin, and Community 71
5. Morals and Values * 109
Appendix I: The World of Odysseus Revisited 147
Appendix II: Schliemann's Troy-One Hundred Years After * 166
Bibliographical Essay 187
Index of Passages Quoted 197
General Index 201.

INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER 1

HOMER AND THE GREEKS

"By the general consent of criticks," wrote Dr. Johnson, "the first
praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of
all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions." He was thinking
of John Milton then, and he concluded his life of the English poet with these words:
"His work is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the
first." That title had been pre-empted for all time by Homer, whom the Greeks called
simply "the poet."

No other poet, no other literary figure in all history, for that matter, occupied a
place in the life of his people such as Homer's. He was their pre-eminent symbol of
nationhood, the unimpeachable authority on their earliest history, and a decisive figure
in the creation of their pantheon, as well as their most beloved and most widely quoted
poet. Plato tells us that there were Greeks who firmly believed that Homer "educated
Hellas and that he deserves to be taken up as an instructor in the management and culture
of human affairs, and that a man ought to regulate the whole of his life by following this
poet." ¹* Faced with such a judgment, on first looking into the Iliad
or Odyssey

* References to numbers may be found under "Source References" at the back of
the book.

one anticipates a Bible or some great treatise in philosophy, only to find two long
narrative poems, one devoted to a few days in the ten-year war between Greeks and Trojans,
the other to the homecoming troubles of Odysseus (whom the Romans knew as Ulysses).

Homer was a man's name, not the Greek equivalent of "Anonymous," and that is
the one certain fact about him. Who he was, where he lived, when he composed, these are
questions we cannot answer with assurance, any more than could the Greeks themselves. In
truth, it is probable that the Iliad and the Odyssey which we read were the
works of two men, not of one. They stand at the beginning of extant Greek literature and
hence of European letters-along with the writings of Hesiod, who lived in central Greece
in the district called Boeotia. Modern students think that the Iliad surely and the
Odyssey probably were not composed on the Greek mainland but on one of the islands in the
Aegean Sea or still farther east on the peninsula of Asia Minor (now Turkey And they think
that the period between 750 and 650 as the century of this earliest literature.

For the long history of the Greeks before the time of Homer and Hesiod there is only
the mute testimony of the stones, the pottery, and the metal objects unearthed by
archaeologists. Intricate analysis of the remains and of place names has demonstrated that
people speaking the Greek language, but ignorant of the art of writing, first appeared on
the scene about 2000 B.C. Where they came from originally no one knows. In Plato's day,
some fifteen hundred years later, they were to be found scattered over a tremendous
territory from Trebizond near the eastern end of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean shores
of France and North Africa-perhaps five or six million souls all

told. These migrants were not the first inhabitants of Greece by any means, nor did
they come as highly civilized conquerors overwhelming savage tribes. Archaeologists have
discovered ample evidence of relatively advanced pre-Greek civilizations, some traced back
well into the Stone Age, before 3000 B.C. By and large, the level of social and material
development in the area was much superior to that of the newcomers. When the people whose
language was Greek arrived, they came not in one mass migration, not as a sweeping
destructive horde, not in a great trek across the difficult mountain terrain of northern
Greece, not as an organized colonizing expedition, but rather in a process of infiltration
lasting nearly a thousand years.

The human mind plays strange tricks with time perspectives when the distant past is
under consideration: centuries become as years and millennia as decades. It requires
conscious effort to make the necessary correction, to appreciate that an infiltration over
several centuries would not appear to the participants as a single connected movement at
all; that, in other words, neither the Greeks nor the natives into whose world they came
were likely to have any idea that something big and historic was taking place. Instead
they saw individual occurrences, sometimes peaceable and in no way noteworthy, sometimes
troublesome and even violently destructive of lives and ways of life. Biologically and
culturally these were centuries of thorough intermixture. There is a clear reminiscence of
the situation in the Odyssey, when Odysseus says, jumbling Greek and aboriginal
names together: "There is a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark sea...and
in it are many men beyond number and ninety cities. And there is a mixture of tongues;
there are Achaeans there, and great-hearted EteoCretans, and Cydonians and Dorians of the
waving hair and

illustrious Pelasgians." ² Skeletal remains show the biological fusion;
language and religion provide the chief evidence with respect to culture. The end product,
after a thousand years or so, was the historical people we call the Greeks. In a
significant sense, the original migrants were not Greeks, but people who spoke Greek and
who were to become one element in a later composite which could lay proper claim to the
name. The Angles and Saxons in Britain offer a convenient analogy: they were not
Englishmen, but they were to become Englishmen one day.

It was to take the Greeks more than a thousand years to acquire a name of their own-and
today they have two. In their own language they are Hellenes, and their country is Hellas.
Graeci is the name given to them by the Romans and later adopted generally in Europe. In
antiquity, furthermore, their eastern neighbors used still a third name for them-lonians,
the lavones of the Old Testament. And all three are late, for we find none of them in
Homer. He called his people Argives, Danaans, and, most frequently, Achaeans. Now
Achaeans, it so happens, appear quite early in non-Greek sources. In the great Hittite
archive discovered at Boghaz-Keui in North Central Turkey there are several references in
the period 1365-1200 B.C. to a kingdom called in Hittite Achchiyava, one of whose rulers
was named Atarshiyash. On linguistic grounds, it is reasonable to identify Achchiyava with
Achaea, and perhaps Atarshiyash with Atreus, in the Homeric poems the father of Agamemnon,
the Greek commander-in-chief, and of Menelaus, king of the Spartans and husband of Helen
of Troy. Achchiyava cannot be located with any certainty, but the probability is that it
was either the island of Rhodes or some place on the

Greek mainland. But wherever it was, it was only a local kingdom within the total Greek
area, and nothing more.

It is idle to speculate when the word Achaean came to be applied to all Greeks, or why.
In 1350 B.C. it was surely not. Near the end of the following century we meet the Achaeans
again, this time as participants with other peoples in a great but unsuccessful sea raid
on Egypt. The victorious monarch, the Pharaoh Merneptah, had the list of his captives and
trophies inscribed on the walls of the temple at Karnak on the Nile. One entry refers to
the Achaeans, "whose hands were carried off, for they had no foreskins." ³
Circumcision was a common enough practice in the eastern Mediterranean but it was
absolutely unknown among the Greeks in historical -times. -The people Achchiyava who were
powerful enough to raid Egypt and Hittite territory were evidently still in the formative
stage of becoming Greeks, still non-Greek as well as Greek. When the local name
"Achaean" became the word for all the Greeks, even if not the exclusive word and
even if only for a brief period before it was replaced by "Hellene," the
formative period may be considered ended: the common name is a symbol that Greek history
proper had been launched.* For us, that means with the Iliad .

It goes without saying that the formation of a Greek people and a Greek civilization
was not a planned process or in any narrow sense a conscious one. Trial and error and
imitation were the chief techniques, so that a measure of social and cultural diversity,
often of the most striking kind, was characteristic of Hellas in its infancy. Indeed the
tempo and direction of change continued to vary throughout Greek history.

* After Homer, both Achaea and Argos survived as local place names,
districts in southern Greece.

One element, however, was remarkably stable all the time. The language with which the
migrants entered Greece is classified as a member of the numerous Indo-European family,
which includes the ancient languages of India (Sanskrit) and Persia, Armenian, the Slavic
tongues, several Baltic languages (Lithuanian, for instance), Albanian, the Italic
languages, among which are Latin and its modern descendants, the Celtic group, of which
Gaelic and Welsh have retained some vitality to our own day, the Germanic languages, and
various dead languages once spoken in the Mediterranean region, like Hittite (now
recovered), Phrygian, and Illyrian.

For a very long time, until about 300 B.C., Greek was a language of many dialects. But
the differences among them were chiefly in matters of pronunciation and spelling, less
frequently in vocabulary and syntax. They were considerable, but still not so great as to
render a speaker in one dialect utterly unintelligible to men brought up on another,
perhaps no more so than in the extreme modem instance of a Neapolitan coming to Venice.
Even the artificial poetic dialect of Homer, with its Aeolic base embedded in an Ionian
frame and its many coined words and forms made necessary by the meter, was apparently
understood well enough by the uneducated as well as the learned all over the Greek world.

Exactly when the Greeks began to write has been a secret locked in the undeciphered
tablets of Crete and Mycenae; the most recent investigations suggest the date may go back
as far as 1400 B.C. The decisive point, however, came considerably later, when the Greeks
took over the so-called Phoenician alphabet. With the signs came the Phoenician names for
the letters so that perfectly good Semitic words-aleph, an ox; bet al house-were turned
into Greek nonsense syllables, alpha, beta,

and so on. The actual borrowing process can be neither de scribed nor dated very
closely: the guesses range between 1000 and 750 B.C. The one thing that is certain about
the operation is its deliberate, rational character, for whoever was responsible did much
more than imitate. The Phoenician sign system was not simply copied; it was modified
radically to fit the needs of the Greek language, which is totally unrelated to the
Semitic family. Equipped with this remarkable new invention, the Greeks could now record
everything imaginable, from the owner's name scratched on a clay jug to a book-length poem
like the Iliad . But what they wrote down and what remains today are utterly
disproportionate in their bulk. Ancient literature, broadly understood to include science,
philosophy, and social analysis, as well as belles-lettres, faced a severe struggle for
survival. The works of Homer and Plato and Euclid were written by hand on scrolls, usually
of the papyrus reed. From the originals, copies were made, always by hand, on papyrus or
later on parchment (vellum). None of these materials is everlasting. What survived was,
apart from some accidental exceptions, what was deemed worthy of being copied and recopied
for hundreds of years of Greek history and then through more hundreds of years of
Byzantine history, centuries in which values and fashions changed more than once, often
radically.

How little came through this sifting process is easily illustrated. The names of some
150 Greek authors of tragedy are known, but, apart from odd scraps quoted by later Greek
or Roman authors and anthologists, the plays of only 3, Athenians of the fifth century
B.C., are extant. Nor is that the end of it. Aeschylus wrote 82 plays, and we have 7 in
full; Sophocles is said to have written 123, of which 7 still exist; and we can

read 19 of Euripides' 92. What we read, furthermore, if we read the Greek original, is
a text laboriously collated from medieval manuscripts, usually from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries of our era, the end product of an unknown number of recopyings, and
therefore always of possibly distorted transcription. Only in Egypt was it possible for
written papyrus texts to last indefinitely, thanks to the natural dehydration provided by
the peculiar climatic conditions. Egypt came under Greek control in the empire of
Alexander the Great, after which there was extensive migration of Greeks to the Nile. From
the third century B.C. to the Arab conquest a thousand years later, Greek was the language
of letters in Egypt, and many of the papyrus finds contain literary fragments that are
much older than the medieval manuscripts. In a few cases-the works of the lyric poet
Bacchylides, some comedies of Menander, the mimes of Herondas, Aristotle's little book on
the Athenian constitution --the papyri have even brought back to light notable works that
had been altogether lost. Their number is so small, however, as to underscore the fact
that the process of elimination had been under way long before the monkish copyists of
medieval Christendom. In the library established at Alexandria by the Greek rulers of
Egypt in the third century before Christ, the greatest library of the ancient world, only
74 or 78 of Euripides' 92 plays were available, revealing a considerable loss in the
relatively short span of two centuries. At Alexandria and elsewhere scholars and
librarians then resisted the process of desuetude, preserving many works in which general
interest had declined or died out altogether. But in the early centuries of the Christian
era there was an end even to such efforts, and the disappearance of ancient books
proceeded rapidly. The papyri of Egypt also make it abundantly clear that, in

the struggle for literary survival, Homer was without a rival. Of all the scraps and
fragments of literary works found in Egypt that had been published by 1949, there is a
total of 1233 books by authors whose names are identifiable. This figure represents
individual copies, not separate titles. Of the 1233, nearly one-half-555, to be
precise-were copies of the Iliad or Odyssey, or commentaries upon them. The Iliad
outnumbered the Odyssey by 380 to 113. The next most "popular" author was
the orator Demosthenes, with 74 papyri (again including commentaries), followed by
Euripides with 54 and Hesiod with 40. Plato is represented by but 36 papyri, Aristotle by
6. These are figures of book-copying among the Greeks in Egypt after Alexander, to be
sure, but all the evidence indicates that they may be taken as fairly typical of the Greek
world generally. If a Greek owned any books-that is, papyrus rolls-he was almost as likely
to own the Iliad and Odyssey as anything from the rest of Greek literature.
There were thinkers among the Greeks who doubted that this was good or desirable. To those
who called Homer the teacher of Hellas, Plato replied: Yes, he is "first and most
poetical among the tragic poets," but a proper society would bar all poetry
"with the sole exception of hymns to the gods and encomia to the good. ⁴
Two centuries earlier the philosopher Xenophanes had protested that "Homer and Hesiod
have attributed to the gods everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among men:
theft, adultery, and deceit." ⁵ Like Plato, he recognized the tremendous
hold Homer had on the Greeks, and he thought that the effect was all bad. Homer, it is
essential to recall, was not just a poet; he was a teller of myths and legends. The
mythmaking process had of course begun among the Greeks many centuries earlier, and it

went on continuously wherever there were Greeks, always by word of mouth and always
ceremonially. It was activity on the highest social level, not just the casual daydreaming
of a poet here, a more imaginative peasant there. The essential subject matter of myth was
action, not ideas, creeds, or symbolic representations, but happenings, occurrences-wars,
floods, adventures by land, sea, and air, family quarrels, births, marriages, and deaths.
As men listened to the narratives, in rituals, at ceremonial games, or on other social
occasions, they lived through a vicarious experience. They believed the narrative
implicitly. "In mythical imagination there is always implied an act of belief.
Without the belief in the reality of its object, myth would lose its ground." ⁶
That may be true of savages, one may object at this point, but the Greeks were not
savages. They were too civilized to believe that it was the god Poseidon who bodily
prevented Odysseus from reaching his home in Ithaca, or that Zeus impregnated Leda in the
guise of a swan, or that there were witches like Circe with the power to turn men into
swine. These are symbolic tales, allegories, parables, perhaps dreamlike reflections of
the unconscious, conveying elaborate ethical and psychological analyses and insights.
Nothing could be more wrong. Where he is able to study myth which is still alive" and
not "mummified," not "enshrined in the indestructible but lifeless
repository of dead religions," the anthropologist discovers that myth "is not of
the nature of fiction ... but it is a living reality, believed to have once
happened."⁷ The Greeks of Homer were not primitive men, like Malinowski's
Trobrianders; they lived in what is often called, by convention, an archaic society. And
the Greeks of the succeeding centuries were remarkably civilized people. Yet the

bitterness of Xenophanes in the sixth century B.C. and of Plato in the fourth proves
precisely that, with respect to myth, many of their fellow citizens shared the Trobriander
view, or at least were closer to it than to the symbolist view. Plato himself had no
doubts about the veracity of the history in Homer; it was the philosophy and morality that
he rejected, the notions of justice and the gods, of good and evil, not the tale of Troy.
We must not underestimate the intellectual feat that it was for later generations to
separate out the strands of the Homeric tales, to recreate the Trojan War without the
arrows of Apollo or the Odyssey without the gale-producing breath of Poseidon. Few
Greeks ever attained the outright rejection of the traditional myth found in Xenophanes.
Between that extreme and the primitive acceptance in full there were many intermediate
points, and Greeks could be found at each. Writing toward the end of the fifth century
B.C., the historian Herodotus said, "The Hellenes tell many things without proper
examination; among them is the silly myth they tell about Heracles." That myth
describes how Heracles (now better known in the Latin form, Hercules) went to Egypt, was
about to be sacrificed to Zeus, and at the last moment slew all his captors. How silly,
says Herodotus, when a study of Egyptian customs reveals that human sacrifice was
unthinkable among them." But Herodotus had no difficulty in believing that Heracles
actually existed once upon a time. In fact, he thought there had been two. Herodotus was a
widely traveled man; he found what he identified as Heracles myths and Heracles cults, or
parallels, everywhere, in Phoenician Tyre and in Egypt as well as among Hellenes. He tried
to sift out truth from fable and to reconcile contradictions and discrepancies. Among the
conclusions to which he came were that the name Heracles was originally Egyptian -- for

which Plutarch later accused him of being a "barbarian-lover" -- and that
there were actually two figures of that name, one a god, the other a hero. What else could
Herodotus have done? The accumulated tradition of centuries of myths and legends, sacred
and profane, was all there was in the way of early Greek history. Some of it was obviously
self-contradictory from the beginning. In one respect the ancient Greeks were always a
divided people. They entered the Mediterranean world in small groups, and even when they
settled and finally took control they remained disunited in their political organization.
By Herodotus's time, and for many years before, Greek settlements were to be found not
only all over the area of modern Hellas but also along the Black Sea, on the shores of
what is now Turkey, in southern Italy and eastern Sicily, on the North African coast, and
on the littoral of southern France. Within this ellipse of some fifteen hundred miles at
the poles, there were hundreds and hundreds of communities, often differing in their
political structures and always insisting on their separate sovereignties. Neither, then -
nor. at any time in the ancient world was there a nation., a single national territory
under one sovereign rule, called Greece (or any synonym for Greece).

Such a world could not possibly have produced a unified, consistent national mythology.
In the early centuries, when myth-creation was an active process in its most vital and
living stage, the myths necessarily underwent constant alteration. Each new tribe, each
new community, each shift in power relations within the aristocratic elite, meant some
change in the genealogies of heroes, in the outcome of past family feuds, in the delicate
balances among men and gods. Obviously the new

version developed in one area did not coincide with the old, or new, versions known in
dozens of other areas. Nor was agreement sought. Neither the myth-tellers nor their
audiences were scholars; they were participants in their own social activities and they
were not in the least concerned with the myths of others. It was altogether another world
when a historian like Herodotus engaged in the study of comparative mythology. Then it
became necessary to manipulate the traditional accounts -- manipulate, but not discard.
They were checked for inner consistency, corrected and amplified with the knowledge
acquired from the very much older records and traditions of other peoples-Egyptians and
Babylonians, in particular-and rationalized wherever possible. Thus purified, they could
be retained, as history if not as anything more. A human society without myth has never
been known, and indeed it is doubtful whether such a society is at all possible. One
measure of man's advance from his most primitive beginnings to something we call
civilization is the way in which he controls his myths, his ability to distinguish between
the areas of behavior, the extent to which he can bring more and more of his activity
under the rule of reason. In that advance the Greeks have been pre-eminent. Perhaps their
greatest achievement lay in their discovery-more precisely, in Socrates' discovery-that
man is "that being who, when asked a rational question, can give a rational
answer." ⁹ Homer was so far from Socrates that he was not even cognizant
of man as an integrated psychic whole. Nevertheless, Homer occupies the first stage in the
history of Greek control over its myths; his poems are often pre-Greek, as it were, in
their treatment of myth, but they also have flashes of something else, of a genius for
ordering the

world, for bringing man and nature, men and the gods, into harmony in a way that
succeeding centuries were to expand and elevate to the glory of Hellenism. If it is true
that European history began with the Greeks, it is equally true that Greek history began
with the world of Odysseus. And, like all human beginnings, it had a long history behind
it. For history, as Jacob Burckhardt remarked, is the one field of study in which one
cannot begin at the beginning.

CHAPTER 2

BARDS AND HEROES

The tale of man's decline and fall has been told in many ways. One elaborately
patterned version, probably Iranian in origin, had man destined to pass through four ages,
four steps taking him farther and farther from justice and morality, from the paradise in
which the gods had originally placed him. Each age was symbolized by a metal: in
descending order, gold, silver, bronze or copper, and iron. In due course this myth
traveled west to Greece. But when first we meet it there, in the Works and Days of Hesiod,
it has acquired an altogether new element. Between the age of bronze and the iron age of
the present, a fifth has intruded. "But when the earth had covered this (bronze)
generation also, Zeus the son of Cronus made yet another, the fourth, upon the fruitful
earth, which was nobler and more righteous, a godlike race of hero-men who are called
demi-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless earth. Grim war and dread
battle destroyed a part of them, some in the land of Cadmus at seven-gated Thebes when
they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, and some, when it had brought them in ships over
the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired Helen's sake: there death's end en-

shrouded a part of them. But to the others father Zeus the son of Cronus gave a living
and an abode apart from men, and made them dwell at the ends of earth. And they lived
untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Ocean,
happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a
year..." ¹

We do not know whether it was Hesiod or some nameless predecessor who converted the
eastern myth of four ages into this Hellenic myth of five ages. Nor does it matter, for
the substance is clear. A separate Greek tradition was imposed on the ill-digested
importation, and the fusion was loosely and carelessly accomplished. By the time the
eastern myth came to Greece the Hellenes had firmly fixed in their past history an age of
heroes. Under no circumstances would they surrender that brief period of honor and glory.
Instead they inserted it into the sequence of metals, leaving it to modern scholars to dig
out the crudities and the contradictions and to piece out explanations.

That there had once been a time of heroes few Greeks, early or late, ever doubted. They
knew all about them: their names, their genealogies, and their exploits. Homer was their
most authoritative source of information, but by no means the only one. Unfortunately,
neither Homer nor Hesiod had the slightest interest in history as we might understand the
notion. The poets' concern was with certain facts of the past, not with their relationship
to other facts, past or present, and, in the case of Homer, not even with the consequences
of those facts. The outcome of the Trojan War, the fall and destruction of Troy and the
fruits of Greek victory, would have been of prime importance to a historian of the war.
Yet the poet of the Iliad was utterly in-

different to all that, the poet of the Odyssey scarcely less so. Similarly with
the ages of man. In the Zoroastrian version there is a mathematical precision: each age
was of 3000 years, and in each law and morality declined by one-fourth. In Hesiod there is
not even a whisper about date or duration, just as Homer gives no indication of the date
of the Trojan War Other than "once upon a time."

Later Greeks worked the chronology out in detail. Although they did not reach entire
agreement, few departed very far from a date equivalent to 1200 B.C. for the war with Troy
and a period of four generations as the age of the heroes. Homer, they decided, lived four
hundred years later, and Hesiod was his contemporary-in one tradition, even his cousin.

Heroes are ubiquitous, of course. There are always men called heroes; and that is
misleading, for the identity of label conceals a staggering diversity of substance. In a
sense, they always seek honor and glory, and that too may be misleading without further
definition of the contents of honor and the road to glory. Few of the heroes of history,
or of literature from the Athenian drama of the fifth century B.C. to our own time, shared
the singlemindedness of their Homeric counterparts. For the latter everything pivoted on a
single element of honor and virtue: strength, bravery, physical courage, prowess.
Conversely, there was no weakness, no unheroic trait, but one, and that was cowardice and
the consequent failure to pursue heroic goals.

"O Zeus and the obr /ther gods," prayed Hector, "grant that this my son
shall become as I am, most distinguished among the Trojans, as strong and valiant, and
that he rule by might in Ilion. And then may men say, 'He is far braver than his father,'

as he returns from war. May he bring back spoils stained with the blood of men he has
slain, and may his mother's heart rejoice." * There is no social conscience in these
words, no trace of the Decalogue, no responsibility other than familial, no obligation to
anyone or anything but one's own prowess and one's own drive to victory and power.

The age of heroes, then, as Homer understood it, was a time in which men exceeded
subsequent standards with respect to a specified and severely limited group of qualities.
In a measure, these virtues, these values and capacities, were shared by many men of the
period, for otherwise there could have been no distinct age of heroes between the bronze
and the iron. Particularly in the Odyssey the word "hero" is a class term
for the whole aristocracy, and at times it even seems to embrace all the free men.
"Tomorrow," Athena instructed Telemachus, "summon the Achaean heroes to an
assembly"2 by which she meant "call the regular assembly of Ithaca." That
in fact there had never been a four-generation heroic age in Greece, in the precise,
self-contained sense of Homer, scarcely requires demonstration. The serious problem for
the historian is to determine whether, and to what extent, there is anything in the poems
that relates to social and historical reality; how much, in other words, of the world of
Odysseus existed only in the poet's head and how much outside, in space and time. The
prior question to be considered is whence the poet took his ideas about that world and his
stories of its wars and its heroes' private lives.

* Iliad 6.476-81. A problem of translation may be noted here. In Homeric
psychology, every feeling, emotion, or idea was attributed. to an organ of the body, such,
as the heart or the -- unidentifiable -- thymos. Sometimes the feeling itself was given
the name of the organ. Such phrases are scarcely translatable. I have usually rendered all
these words by "heart," to fit our customary metaphorical usage, although the
sense in Homer is much more literal.

The heroic poem, a genre of which the Iliad and Odyssey are the greatest
examples, must be distinguished from the literary epic like the Aeneid or Paradise Lost.
Heroic poetry is always oral poetry; it is composed orally, often by bards who are
illiterate, and it is recited in a chant to a listening audience. Formally, it is at once
distinguishable by the constant repetition of phrases, lines, and whole groups of lines.
The coming of day is nearly always, in Homer, "And when rosy-fingered Dawn appeared,
the child of morn." When a verbal message is sent (and Homeric messages are never in
writing), the poet has the messenger hear the exact text and then repeat it to the
recipient word for word. Athena is "owl-eyed," the island of Ithaca "sea
girt," Achilles "city-sacking." Yet this is no simple, monotonous
repetition. There are thirty-six different epithets for Achilles, for example, and the
choice is rigorously determined by the position in the line and the required syntactical
form. It has been calculated that there are some twenty-five formulaic expressions, or
fragments of formulas, in the first twenty-five lines of the Iliad alone. About
one-third of the entire poem consists of lines or blocks of lines which occur more than
once in the work, and the same is true of the Odyssey.

Sophisticated readers of printed books have often misunderstood the device of
repetition as a mark of limited imagination and of the primitive state of the art of
poetry. Thus French critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries placed Vergil above
Homer precisely because the former did not repeat himself but always found a new phrasing
and new combinations. What they failed to perceive was that the repeated formula is
indispensable in heroic poetry. The bard composes -directly before-his audience; he does
not recite memorized lines. In 1934, at the request of Professor Milman Parry, a
sixty-year-old Serbian bard who

could neither read nor write recited for him a poem of the length of the Odyssey,
making it up as he went along, yet retaining meter and form and building a complicated
narrative. The performance took two weeks, with a week in between, the bard chanting for
two hours each morning and two more in the afternoon.

Such a feat makes enormous demands in concentration on both the bard and his audience.
That it can be done at all is attributable to the fact that the poet, a professional with
long years of apprenticeship behind him, has at his disposal the necessary raw materials:
masses of incidents and masses of formulas, the accumulation of generations of minstrels
who came before him. The Greek stock included the many varied and hopelessly contradictory
myths that had been created in connection with their religious rites; all kinds of tales
about mortal heroes, some fanciful and some reasonably accurate; and the formulas that
could fit any incident: the coming of dawn and of the night, scenes of combat and burial
and feasting, the ordinary activities of men-arising and eating and drinking and dreaming
-- descriptions of palaces and meadows, arms and treasure, metaphors of the sea or of
pasturage, and so on beyond enumeration. Out of these building blocks the poet constructs
his work, and each work -- each performance, in other words-is a new one, though all the
elements may be old and well known.

Repetition of the familiar is equally essential for the audience. To follow a long and
many-faceted tale, often told over many days and nights, chanted in a language that is not
the language of everyday speech, with its metrically imposed artificial word order and its
strange grammatical forms and vocabulary, is also no mean achievement, made possible by
precisely

the same formulaic devices that are indispensable for the creator. Poet and audience
alike rest frequently, so to speak, as the familiar rosy-fingered Dawns and the messages
repeated word for word roll forth. While they rest, the one prepares the next line or
episode, the others prepare to attend to it.

Now it is possible, as has recently been argued, that the Iliad as we know it
was composed in writing, and not orally. And it is nearly indisputable that the Iliad
has a quality of originality and genius beyond all other heroic poems, even the best of
them-Beowulf, for instance, or The Cid or The Song of Roland. Even so, both the Iliad
and the Odyssey reveal in fullest measure all the essential characteristics of
unwritten heroic poetry the world over. Behind them lay long practice in the art of the
bard, which had evolved the remarkable but totally artificial dialect of the poems, a
dialect which no Greek ever spoke but which remained permanently fixed as the language of
Greek epic. Behind them, too, lay the generations that had created the formulaic elements,
the building blocks of the poems.

With the Iliad and the Odyssey Greek heroic poetry reached its glory.
Soon the bard who composed as he chanted began to give way to the rhapsodist who was
primarily a reciter of memorized lines, and to the hack who prepared rehashed versions
with scant literary merit. New forms composed in writing, the short lyric and then the
drama, replaced the oral epic as the vehicles of artistic expression. Just when the shift
occurred is disputed by the experts without end, and without a semblance of agreement. One
plausible view is that the Iliad took roughly, but not precisely, the form in which we now
have it in the eighth century before Christ, more likely in the latter

half of the century than in the earlier; that Hesiod flourished a generation or so
later; and that the Odyssey was composed still another generation or two after
Hesiod.

Such a dating scheme, with two Homers a hundred years apart, seems at first thought to
be impossible. For more than two thousand years men of taste, intelligence, and expert
knowledge never questioned the tradition that one man wrote both the Iliad and the
Odyssey, and their unanimous judgment had the support of the style and language of the,
poems, which are virtually indistinguishable. But once the technique of ancient bardic
composition was rediscovered, and with it the secret of the deceptive uniformity of style,
then the really great differences between the two poems could be seen in their full
perspective. Some of these differences had already drawn comment in antiquity. The Roman
Pliny noted that there is- more magic in the Odyssey, and he was right to a degree.
In the Iliad the interventions of the gods have the character of minor miracles, but not
even Achilles possess magical powers, though his divine mother Thetis watches over him
constantly. The Odyssey has similar interventions, but it also has the Circe
episode, which rests on a series of magical formulas in the most precise sense and form.

A more striking distinction is to be observed in the relations between the heroes and
the gods. Although the basic decisions are made on Olympus in both tales, in the Iliad
the gods interfere spasmodically, in the Odyssey Athena leads Odysseus and
Telemachus step by step. The later poem opens in heaven with Athena's appeal to Zeus to
bring the hero's trials to an end, and it closes when the goddess puts a stop to the blood
feud between the hero and the kinsmen of the suitors he had killed. Even the motivation of
the gods differs; in the Iliad it is per-

sonal, the expression of the likes and dislikes of individual deities for one hero or
another, whereas in the Odyssey the personal element has been supplemented, in part
and in stiff rudimentary fashion, by the requirements of justice.

The Iliad is filled with the action of heroes. Even when it departs from its
central theme, the wrath of Achilles, its attention never wavers from heroic deeds and
interests. The Odyssey, although shorter, has two distinct and essentially
unconnected themes: the fairy-tale wanderings of Odysseus and the struggle for power in
Ithaca. Given its location in an age of heroes, the Odyssey _ has only one proper
hero, Odysseus himself. His companions are faceless mediocrities. His son Telemachus is
sweet and dutiful, and when he grows up he may develop into a hero, but the poet does not
take him that far. The suitors for Penelope's hand are villains-an incongruity, because
"hero" and "villain" are not yet proper antonyms; they are not even
commensurable terms; hence there are no villains in the Iliad . Penelope herself is
little more than a convenient "mythologically available character.3 Penelope became a
moral heroine for later generations, the embodiment of goodness and chastity, to be
contrasted with the faithless, murdering Clytaemnestra, Agamemnon's wife; but
"hero" has no feminine gender- in the age of heroes.

Finally, the Iliad is oriented eastward, from the vantage point of Greece, the
Odyssey to the west. Greek relations with the west began relatively late, not before the
middle of the eighth century B.C., in rather tentative fashion, to become, in the
following century, extensive penetration and migration into Sicily, southern Italy, and
beyond. The presumption is, then, that the Odyssey reflects this new aspect of
Greek history by taking traditional materials and facing them westward. This

is not to say that the travels of Odysseus in Never-Never Land can be retraced on a
map. All attempts to do just that, and they have been numerous from ancient times on, have
foundered. Even the topographical detail of Odysseus' home island of Ithaca can be shown
to be a jumble, with several essential points appropriate to the neighboring isle of
Leucas but quite impossible for Ithaca.

Despite these differences, however, the Iliad and Odyssey stand together
as against the poems of Hesiod, particularly his Works and Days. For all his use of the
language and the formulas, Hesiod does not properly belong with the heroic poets. Whenever
he treats of matters that are not obvious myth, when he deals with human society and human
behavior, he is always personal and contemporary in his outlook. Neither heroes nor
ordinary mortals of a past age are his characters, but Hesiod himself, his brother, his
neighbors. Hesiod is wholly a part of the iron age of the present, specifically of the
archaic Greek world of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.

Not so the Iliad or Odyssey. They look to a departed era, and their substance is
unmistakably old. The Odyssey in particular encompasses a wide field of human
activities and relationships: social structure and family life, royalty, aristocrats, and
commoners, banqueting and plowing and swineherding. These are things about which we know a
little as regards the seventh century, in which the Odyssey was apparently
composed, and what we know and what the Odyssey relates are simply not the same. It
is enough to point to the polis (city state) form of political organization, widespread in
the Hellenic world by then. On the island of Chios, which made the strongest claim to
being "Homer's" birthplace, the polis had even moved to democracy, on the
evidence of a fragmentary stone inscrip-

tion scarcely later in date than the Odyssey. Yet neither poem has any trace of a polis
in its classical political sense. Polis in Homer means nothing more than a fortified site,
a town. The poets of the Iliad and Odyssey, unlike Hesiod, were basically
neither personal nor contemporary in their reference.

In our present texts, each poem is divided into twenty-four "books," one for
each letter of the Greek alphabet. This was a late arrangement, the work of the
Alexandrian scholars, and its arbitrariness is apparent. The individual books vary in
length and they do not always have unity of content, although many are so self-contained
that one is tempted to think of them as having been planned for recitation at a single
sitting. Properly to dissect the poems, one must read them without reference to the
Alexandrian division. Then it becomes clear how in the Odyssey the story of the
Trojan War, the struggle with the suitors, and a fairy tale, the adventures of a Greek
Sinbad the Sailor, were all stitched together-a rhapsodist was literally a "stitcher
of songs"-along with many little pieces, like the myth of the adultery between Ares
and Aphrodite, myths of the afterlife, or the account of the kidnapping of a young prince
and his sale into slavery (the swineherd Eumaeus). The Iliad may not have as
obviously independent large pieces, but the snippets are innumerable. Each reminiscence
and genealogic tale could have circulated, and unquestionably did, as an independent short
heroic poem. The account of the funeral games for Patroclus was appropriate, with no more
alteration than a change in the names, whenever the narrative required the burial of a
hero. The bits of Olympian mythology fit anywhere. The genius of the Iliad and
Odyssey does not lie in the individual pieces, or even in the language, for that was all a
common stock of materials available to any bard in excessive

quantity. The pre-eminence of a Homer lies in the scale on which he worked and in the
freshness with which he selected and manipulated what he inherited, in the little
variations and inventions he introduced-in the stitching. Paradoxically, the greater the
mass of accumulated materials, the greater the poet's freedom, given a desire and the
ability to exercise it. Through his unparalleled skill in choice of incidents and
background formulas and in his combinations, a Homer could create a world in his own
image, strikingly different in certain essentials from what older bards had passed on to
him, and yet, in appearance, remain within the fixed path of bardic tradition, and, in
fact, retain a large part of that traditional world.

Merely as narrative, the Iliad and Odyssey together, for all their
unprecedented length, omit very much of what was in their time the accepted history of the
Trojan War and its aftermath. This was a matter of free decision, for the poets knew the
whole history well, as they assumed their audiences did too. Then other long, clearly
inferior epics were composed from the traditional stock, until there was a cycle of seven
poems, telling the story from the creation of the gods to the death of Odysseus and the
marriage of Telemachus and Circe. For a time they were all attributed to Homer; the Homer
whom Xenophanes attacked was probably a collective name for the Trojan cycle.* However,
the incomparable qualities of the Iliad and Odyssey were early apparent,
although not until the fourth and third centuries B.C. was it concluded that Homer did not
write the rest of the cycle as well. The other poems survived for five or six hundred
years thereafter and then they

* Xenophanes was born about 570 B.C., perhaps no more than two generations after the
composition of the Odyssey. The sharpness of his critique thus testifies to both the
enormous popular appeal of the poems and the rapidity of their acceptance.

disappeared, except for a few verses in anthologies or quotations.

Conceivably the bards who finally shaped the Iliad and Odyssey did so in
writing. However, the diffusion of the two poems was oral. The Greek world of the eighth
and seventh centuries B.C. was deeply unlettered, despite the introduction of the
alphabet. In fact, Greek literature continued to be oral for a very long time. The
tragedies, for example, were surely composed in writing; but they were read by men who
could be counted perhaps in the hundreds, and they were heard and reheard by many tens of
thousands all over Hellas. The recitation of poetry, heroic, lyric, or dramatic, was
always an essential feature of the numerous religious festivals. The origins of that
practice are lost in the prehistoric era, when myth was often ritual drama, the vivid
re-enactment before the assembled people of the procession of the seasons or whatever
other phenomenon inspired the ceremony. In historical times ritual drama lived on and
continued to flourish I the Demeter cult and other rites known collectively as
"mysteries." But they were no longer the great festive occasions of dramatic
performance and poetic recitation. Homer's place was in the official celebrations honoring
the Olympic gods, some pan-Hellenic, like the quadrennial Olympic games dedicated to Zeus,
others pan-Ionian, like the festival of the Delian Apollo, still others purely local, like
the annual Panathenaic in Athens. There ritual drama was gone, except for vestigial
remains; instead, the gods were celebrated by other means, which invoked a less direct and
less "primitive" communion between men and the immortals.

In large part the reciters and performers were professionals, and it is one of the
interesting facts of social history that in

many sectors of the world they were among the first to break the primeval rule that a
man lives, works, and dies within his tribe or community. There is a hint of this in the
Odyssey when the swineherd Eumaeus, berated for having brought a foreign beggar to the
banquet in the palace, disingenuously countered the charge with a rhetorical question:
"For who ever summons a stranger from abroad and brings him along, unless he be one
of the craftsmen (demioergoi), a seer or healer of ills or worker in wood, or even an
inspired bard who can charm with his song?" 4 The frame of reference here is, of
course, the private, purely secular feast, not a religious festival. But the traveling
ritual player-even the organized company, such as the Arioi of the Society Islands and the
Hula of Hawaii-is known from much more primitive societies, Traveling artists were
important in Greece throughout its history. Plato's Ion takes its name from a rhapsodist,
Ion of Ephesus in Asia Minor. When the dialogue opens, Ion tells Socrates that he has just
come from Epidaurus, where he won first prize for his Homeric recitation at the
quadrennial games to Asclepius, and that he fully expects to be equally successful in the
coming Panathenaic festival in Athens.

The combination of oral transmission and lack of political centralization could in time
have led to many Iliad s, diverging further and further from the
"original." The temptation to tamper with the text must have been great, on
political grounds alone. As the unchallenged authority on early history, Homer was often
an embarrassment-to the Athenians, for example, whose pathetically small role in the great
"national" war against Troy was increasingly incommensurate with their ascending
role in Greek political affairs. But in her sharp sixth-century struggle with Megara for
control of the island of Salamis, which dominates the Athenian harbor, Athens was able to
justify her claim on historical grounds. "Ajax," says the Iliad ,
"brought twelve ships from Salamis, and bringing, he stationed them alongside the
hosts of the Athenians." ⁵ To this Megara had but one answer - for neither
the accuracy of Homer's history nor its relevance in territorial disputes was subject to
question - and that was to charge forgery. The "and bringing" clause, said the
Megarians, was a deliberate Athenian interpolation, not part of the genuine text at all.

In the Salamis case the Alexandrian scholars in later centuries tended to agree with
Megara. The forger, they thought, was Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens from 560 to 527 B.C.,
who, together with Solon, had taken Salamis from Megara. Far more important, it was
Pisistratus who was widely reputed to have settled the problem of an authentic Homeric
text once and for all by having it fixed by experts and committed to writing in a formal
edition, so to speak. There was a competing tradition which assigned this role to Solon,
author of the great Athenian constitutional reform of 594 B.C. In the words of Diogenes
Laertius, who wrote his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in the third century
after Christ, but who is here quoting a fourth-century B.C. author of a Megaran History,
it was Solon who "prescribed that the rhapsodists shall recite Homer in fixed order,
so that where the first leaves off, the next shall begin from that place." ⁶

That there was a relatively ancient sixth-century Athenian recension at the root of our
present texts of the Iliad and Odyssey seems to have been demonstrated from
a close study of the dialect of the poems. There is some reason to accept the tradition
that Pisistratus was the sponsor of that "edition." The attribution to Solon
sounds suspiciously like a late effort

to transfer the credit from a tyrant to the man who had become to the Greeks the
counter-symbol, the constitutional, moderate aristocrat, at once against tyranny and
despotism and against "mob rule."

A Pisistratean Homer poses two problems. The first and simpler of the two is this: Our
present texts of the poems derive from medieval manuscripts, none earlier than the tenth
century, and from numerous fragments on papyrus, a few as old as the third century B.C.
How much was the text changed from the time of Pisistratus, through copyists' errors,
censorship, or any of the other ills that plague all ancient texts in their transmission
by hand? The answer, based primarily on a comparison with the extensive quotations from
Home in Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek writers, is: substantially little; and
remarkably little indeed, apart from verbal changes of interest only to the philologist.

But how close was the sixth-century Athenian edition to the original? Here we have
little to go on. One thing seems sure: there was no excessive tampering with substance.
The Athenian editors may have permitted their own linguistic habits to creep in now and
then. Perhaps they even added the line about Ajax lining up his twelve ships alongside the
Athenians. But they did not consciously modernize the poems, of that we can be fairly
certain, and they did not tailor the political implications in any radical way to the
needs of sixth-century Athenian foreign affairs. Had they attempted to do so, they could
scarcely have succeeded. The poems were already too well known and too deeply enshrined in
the minds of the Greeks, and in a sense in their religious emotions. Besides,
sixth-century Athens absolutely lacked the authority, political or intellectual, to

force a corrupted and distorted Homer on the other Hellenes. None of this is decisive,
to be sure, but it permits the historian to work with his Iliad and his Odyssey,
cautiously and always with suspicion, yet with a reasonable assurance that basically he is
working with a fair approximation of eighth- and seventh-century poems.

Through all this dark history of the early transmission, public performance, and
textual preservation of the poems, a key role may have been played by a group on the
island of Chios who called themselves the Homerids, which means, literally, the
descendants of Homer. Their beginnings are lost, but they survived at least into the
fourth century B.C., for Plato writes in his Phaedrus: "but some of the Homerids, I
believe, recite two verses on Eros from the unpublished poems." ⁷ For all
we know, the Homerids may in fact have been linked to "homer" by kinship. Among
modern Slavonic bards there are outstanding instances of transmittal of the skill within a
family for several generations, and family specialization in various crafts is a common
enough phenomenon in primitive and archaic societies. But it really matters little.
Whether kin in fact or by accepted fiction, the Homerids were the recognized authorities
on Homer for two or three centuries. And we may be sure that they would have been zealous
in opposition to any effort, by Pisistratus or by anyone else, to undermine their superior
knowledge and weaken their special professional position by producing a thoroughly
rewritten text.

In one respect the Homerids themselves were able to introduce a false note. Commonly
rhapsodists prefaced their recita-

tions by short prologues, sometimes of their own composition. To that extent they
represented a transitional form between the bard and the actor. As the recognized
possessors of Homer's "unpublished writings," members of the Homerid guild could
claim direct Homeric authorship for the prologues they wrote. The few which are still
extant were collected in later antiquity and combined with five longer myth poems under a
single title, Homeric Hymns, misleading in both its terms. Some of these thirty-three
poems very probably originated among the Homerids in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.
The most extensive of them was addressed to Apollo; its first section closes with these
highly personal lines:

"Remember me in after time whenever any one of men on earth, a stranger who has
seen and suffered much, comes here and asks of you: 'Who think ye, girls, is the sweetest
singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?' Then answer, each and all, with
one voice: 'He is a blind man, and dwells in rocky Chios: his lays are evermore supreme.'
As for me, I will carry your renown as far as I roam over the earth to the well-placed
cities of man, and they will believe also; for indeed this thing is true." ⁸

Even Thucydides, the most careful and in the best sense the most skeptical historian
the ancient world ever produced, explicitly accepted Homer'' authorship of this hymn, and
the personal allusion of the final lines. ⁹ That was a truly astonishing error
in judgment. The language of the "hymns" is Homeric, and the comparison ends
right there; they are on a lower plane not only as literature but in their conceptual
world, in their view of the gods.

"For indeed this thing is true." If the Greeks were pressed

to explain how their Homer, the blind minstrel, could sing truly of events four hundred
years before his time, as they believed almost without an exception, they would have
pointed to tradition handed down from generation to generation, and they would have
pointed to the divine spark. "An inspired bard," said Eumaeus the swineherd; and
the Greek word thespis means literally "produced or shown by a god." And thespis
provides the necessary frame of reference for the opening line of the Iliad :
"Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles."

Hesiod began his Theogony with a longer introduction, in which the simple
invocation has become a full-blown vision and personal revelation:

"And one day they (the Muses) taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding
his lambs under holy Helicon, and this word first the goddesses said to me ...:

"'Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how
to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter
true things.'

"So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a
rod, a shoot ofquestion - and that was to charge forgery. The sturdy olive, a question - and that was to charge forgery. The marvelous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to
celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime; and they bade me sing of
the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first
and last."

Hesiod's divine voice sounds like a direct quotation of the description of the
soothsayer Calchas, "who knew things that were and things that shall be and things
that were aforetime." ¹⁰ This close link between poetry and divine
knowledge of the past and future found its personification in Orpheus, the sweet

singer of legend in whose name a mass of mystical and magical writing piled up through
the centuries. As if to underscore the point, when the Greeks came to give Homer a
genealogy, as inevitably they would, they traced his ancestry back ten generations,
precisely to Orpheus.

It would be wrong to turn such things aside as mere poetic fancy. When the bard Phemius
said in the Odyssey, "I am self-taught; the god has implanted in my heart
songs of all kinds," ¹¹ to the poet and his audience that meant what it
said and was to be taken like everything else in the poem, like the story of Odysseus and
the Cyclops, or of Odysseus identifying himself by his ability to wield the bow no one
else had the strength to pull. The best witness is Odysseus himself. In the palace of King
Alcinous of the Phaeacians, where the hero had appeared incognito, there was a bard named
Demodocus, to whom "God had given the art of song above all others." ¹²
After he had told various tales about the Trojan War, Odysseus said to him:
"Demodocus, I praise you above all mortal men, whether it was the Muse, daughter of
Zeus, who instructed you, or indeed Apollo. For you sing truly indeed of the fate of the
Achaeans ... as if you yourself had been present or had heard it from another." ¹³
Earlier Demodocus's precise knowledge had already been explained: "For so Phoebus
Apollo had told him in prophecy." ¹⁴

Still another echo is available, in a man who neither knew of Homer nor shared his
inherited formulas, a nineteenth-century Kara-Kirghiz bard from the region north of the
Hindu Kush: "I can sing every song; for God has planted the gift of song in my heart.
He gives me the word on my tongue without my having to seek it. I have not learned any of
my songs; everything springs up from my inner being, from myself." ¹⁵

The historian's verdict, obviously, can rest neither on faith in the divine origin of
the poems nor on the once common notion that sufficient antiquity is a proper warrant of
truth - "we have the certainty that old and wise men held them to be true," says
the preface to the Heimskringla, the saga of the Norse kings. ¹⁶ The historian,
having established the point that neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey was
essentially contemporary in outlook, must then examine their validity as pictures of the
past. Was there ever a time in Greece when men lived as the poems tell (after they are
stripped of supernatural intervention and superhuman capacities)? But first, was there a
Trojan War?

Everyone knows the exciting story of Heinrich Schliemann, the German merchant with a
vision and a love for the language of Homer, who dug in the soil of Asia Minor and
rediscovered the city of Troy. Some three miles from the Dardanelles, at a place now
called Hissarlik, there was one of the mounds that are the almost certain signs of ancient
habitation. By careful analysis of topographical detail in ancient writings, Schliemann
concluded that under this mound were the remains of the city of Ilion, which later Greeks
had established on what they thought was the site of Troy and which outlived the roman
Empire for a good many centuries. When he tunneled into the mound he found layers of
ruins, the oldest of which, we now know, dates from about 3000 B.C., and two bore
unmistakable signs of violent destruction. One of these layers, the seventh according to
more recent excavators, was no doubt the city of Priam and Hector. The historicity of the
Homeric tale had been demonstrated archaeologically.

It is a shame to upset such a pretty and rare success story, but there are enough
disturbing facts to compel the conclusion that 'there is something wrong either with
Schliemann's Troy

or with Homer's." ¹⁷Without entering into technical archaeological
analysis, we may point to the battle terrain. The Iliad is filled with details, for
that is the stuff of heroic narrative. Basically they are so consistent that a serviceable
map of the area can be drawn from the poet's specifications. That map and the region of
Hissarlik fail to coincide, and the discrepancies are so crucial that it has been proved
impossible to recreate essential scenes of the Iliad on the actual site.

More interesting than the disappearance of the city is the total disappearance of the
Trojans themselves. To begin with, as a nationality in the Iliad they are quite
without distinguishing characteristics. They are a s Greek and as heroic as their
opponents in every respect. If the opening line of the Iliad introduces Achilles,
the closing line bids farewell to Hector, the chief Trojan hero: "Thus they performed
the funeral rites for Hector, tames of horses." Hector is a Greek name (unlike the
name of Hector's father, Priam), and as late as the middle of the second century after
Christ travelers who came to Thebes in Boeotia on the Greek mainland were shown his tomb,
near the Fountain of Oedipus, and were told how his bones had been brought from Toy at the
behest of the Delphic oracle. This typical bit of fiction must mean that there was an old
Theban hero Hector, a Greek, whose myths antedated the Homeric poems. Even after Homer had
located Hector in Troy for all time, the Thebans held on to their hero, and the Delphic
oracle provided the necessary sanction.

Among the Trojan allies there were peoples who were certainly non-Greek. It was for one
of them, the Carians, that the poet reserved the epithet barbarophonoi (barbarous-talking,
that is, unintelligible). The Carians are well known historically;

the tomb of their fourth-century king, Mausolus, gives us our word mausoleum. Other
Trojan allies are also historically identifiable, and that serves to underscore the
curious fact that the Trojans themselves, like Achilles' Myrmidons, have vanished so
completely. Even if we were to accept the ancient explanation for the disappearance of the
city, that it was so thoroughly demolished by the victors that 'there is no certain trace
of walls" ¹⁸- which would involve us in new difficulties with Schliemann
and his successors, who found traces of walls - it is hard to discover a parallel for the
mysterious failure of the people themselves to leave any traces.

On the Greek side there is a high correlation between the important place names given
in the Iliad and the centers of the so-called Mycenaean civilization rediscovered
by modern archaeologists, although the poverty of the finds in Odysseus' Ithaca is a
notable exception. This civilization flourished in Greece in the period 1400-1200 B.C.,
and here the name of Schliemann as the first discoverer must remain unchallenged. But
again Homer and archaeology part company quickly. On the whole he knew where the Mycenaean
civilization flourished, and his heroes lived in great Bronze Age palaces unknown in
Homer's own day. And that is virtually all he knew about Mycenaean times, for the
catalogue of his errors is very long. His arms bear a resemblance to the armor of his
time, quite unlike the Mycenaean, although he persistently casts them in antiquated
bronze, not iron. His gods had temples, and the Mycenaeans build none, whereas the latter
constructed great vaulted tombs in which to bury their chieftains, and the poet cremates
his. A neat little touch is provided by the battle chariots. Homer had heard of them, but
he did not really vis-

ualize what one did with chariots in a war. So his heroes normally drove from their
tents a mile or less away, carefully dismounted, and then proceeded to battle on foot.

The key to the Homeric confusion lies in the bardic technique. The raw materials of the
poem were the mass of inherited formulas, and as they passed through generations of bards
they underwent change after change, partly by deliberate act of the poets, whether for
artistic reasons or from more prosaic political considerations, and partly by carelessness
and indifference to historical accuracy, compounded by the errors that are inevitable in
oral transmission. That there was a Mycenaean kernel in the Iliad and Odyssey
cannot be doubted, but it was small and what little there was of it was distorted beyond
sense or recognition. Often the material was self-contradictory, yet there was no bar to
its use. Poetic convention demanded traditional formulas, and neither the bard nor his
audience checked the details. The man who started it all by abducting Helen is named both
Alexander, which is Greek, and Paris, which is not (just as his city had two names, Ilion
and Troy); he is both a contemptible, unheroic coward and a true hero. As usual, later
generations began to seek explanations, but not the poet of the Iliad .

We may take it for granted that there was a Trojan War in Mycenaean times; more
correctly, that there were many Trojan wars. War was normal in that world, and the
Achchiyava reference in Hittite records shows that the ancestors of the Hellenes of
history fought in Asia Minor. It is even conceivable that the war was fought over a woman.
"The people of Asia," says Herodotus, "when their women were seized, made
no issue of it, whereas the Greeks, on account of a single Lacedaemonian

woman, collected a great expedition, came to Asia, and destroyed the power of Priam. ¹⁹

But a ten-year war, or a war of any smaller number of years, is out of the question.
"Would that I were in the prime of youth and my might as steadfast as when a quarrel
broke out between us and the Eleans over a cattle raid ... Exceedingly abundant was then
the booty we drove out of the plain together, fifty herds of cattle, as many flocks of
sheep, as many droves of swine, as many wide herds of goats, and a hundred and fifty bays,
all mares ... And Neleus was glad at heart that so much booty fell to me the first time I
went to war." ²⁰

This was a typical "war" as narrated by Nestor, a raid for booty. Even if
repeated year after year, these wars remained single raids. There is a scene in the third
book of the Iliad in which Helen sits alongside Priam on the battlements of Troy
and identifies Agamemnon, Odysseus, and a few other Achaean heroes for the old king. That
could make sense at the beginning of the war; it can make no sense in the tenth year
(unless we are prepared to believe that the poet could find no better device by which to
introduce some details of no great importance). It could also make sense in a brief war,
and perhaps this is an illustration of the way in which one traditional piece of the story
was retained after the war had ballooned into ten years and the piece had become
rationally incongruous. While the war was growing, furthermore, the bards neglected to
make proper arrangements for recruits to replace the fallen men, for the feeding of
besiegers and besieged, or for the establishment of some sort of communication between the
battlefield and the home bases of the Greeks.

The glorification of insignificant incidents is common in

heroic poetry. The French Song of Roland tells of a great battle at Roncevaux in the
year 778 A.D., between the hosts of Charlemagne and the Saracens. Like Homer, the poet of
the French epic is unknown, but he certainly lived in the twelfth century, at the time of
the Crusades. Unlike Homer, he could read and he had access to chronicles, which he
explicitly says he used. But the facts are these: the actual battle of Roncevaux was a
minor engagement in the Pyrenees between a small detachment of Charlemagne's army and some
Basque raiders. It was neither important nor crusade-like. The twelve Saracen chieftains
of the poem and their army of 400,000 are pure invention; some even have German or
Byzantine names. And all the details of the background are wrong.

The Song of Roland can be checked against written records. The Iliad and the
Odyssey cannot, and, insofar as historical detail is concerned, there is no way of
reversing the process of distortion and re-establishing the original kernel. Comparison
with other examples of the genre leads to what Rhys Carpenter has called the "theorem
... that the more an oral poet seems to know about a distant event the less he really
knows about it and the more certainly he is inventing." ²¹

The Song of Roland also shares another negative with the Iliad and Odyssey. It
is not contemporary in its social conditions, its politics, and its details of wars and
warriors. Not that it lacks realism. On the contrary, it is of the essence of heroic
poetry that, "since heroes move in what is assumed to be a real world, their
background and their circumstances must be depicted," always "with realism and
objectivity." ²² Specifically, the background of Roland is the France of
about a century before the poet's own time, as if the formulas and the traditions coming
down from the days of Charlemagne froze about the

year 1000 and then on with little further change. This suggests what hints in Greek
literature and comparative studies tend to confirm, that the Homeric picture is analogous.
The world of Odysseus was not that of the seventh century B.C., neither was it the
Mycenaean age five or six or seven hundred years earlier. * If it is to be placed in time,
as everything we know about heroic poetry says it must, the most likely centuries seem to
be the tenth and ninth. By the long years of wandering and infiltration were over, the
mixture of race and culture had been completed, the catastrophe that brought down
Mycenaean civilization and made itself felt all over the eastern Mediterranean had been
forgotten. The history of the Greeks as such had begun.

Essentially the picture of the background offered by the poems is a coherent one.
Anachronistic fragments cling to it in spots, some too ancient and some, particularly in
the Odyssey, too recent, a reflection of the poet's own time. For historical study,
the accuracy of the background is quite separable from the demonstrable inaccuracy of the
episodes and the narrative detail, the action. "Homer," wrote Aristotle,
"is praiseworthy in many respects, and especially because he alone of poets perceives
the part he should take himself. The poet should speak as little as possible in his own
person ..." ²³ But this technical virtue, become a vice to poets of
another world, should not mislead us, as it did not less gifted a critic than Coleridge.
"There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric

* Important new evidence for this conclusion comes from the widely publicized
suggestion by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick that the language of the Mycenaean tablets
is Greek. Their first tentative readings, published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for
1953, reveal (if they are right) a world altogether unlike the Homeric, one that was
materially far more advanced, as we already knew from the archaeology; and institutionally
more complex and reminiscent of the ancient Near East

poetry," was the judgment of Coleridge the romantic, neither the
"subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is himself before himself in everything
he wrote," nor the "subjectivity of the persona, or dramatic character, as in
all Shakespeare’s great creations." ²⁴ This standing at a distance
from his characters and their behavior, which is the mark of Homeric technique, had
nothing to do with indifference, with disinterest, with an unwillingness to become
involved. The poet transmitted his inherited background materials with a deceptively cool
precision. That enables us to treat his materials as the raw materials for the study of a
real world of real men, a world of history and not of fiction. But it also besets our
analysis with traps, for the temptation is ever present to ignore the implications in the
poet's conscious selectivity and to brush aside apparent confusions and contradictions in
social or political matters (as distinct from narrative incidents) as nothing more than
the carelessness of a bard who really did not care.

Of course there must be something of a historian's license in pining down the world of
Odysseus to the tenth and ninth centuries before Christ. And that license must extend
still further. There are sections in the poems, such as the tale of the adultery of Ares
and Aphrodite or the scene in Hades in the final book of the Odyssey, which appear
to have a later origin than other sections. By license, we here ignore the distinction for
the most part, just as we sometimes speak of one Homer, as if the Iliad and Odyssey
were contemporaneous works, the products of one man's creation. Some distortion results,
but the margin of error can be held to a rather acceptable minimum, because the patterns
we draw rest on an over-all analysis of the poems, not on any one single verse, segment,
or narrative incident; because all parts early or late, were build so much

from the old formulas; and because later Greek history and the study of other societies
together offer a great measure of control. It is convenience, finally, rather than
license, that suggests retention of the ten-year war, and of Achilles and Hector and
Odysseus and all the other famous names, as useful labels for unknown King X and Chieftain
Y.

CHAPTER 3

WEALTH AND LABOUR

In the second book of the Iliad the poet catalogues the
contending hosts, in the case of Greeks by the names of their chief leaders and the number
of ships each brought with him. 'But the multitude (i.e. the commoners] I could not relate
nor name, not if I had ten tongues, nor ten mouths' (II 488-9). The list totals 1186
ships, which, at a minimum computation, means over 60,000 men, a figure as trustworthy as
the 400,000 Saracens of the Song of Roland. The world of Odysseus was a small one in
numbers of people. There are no statistics and no ways of making good guesses, but the
five-acre sites of the archaeologists, together with what is known from later centuries,
leave no doubt that the populations of the individual communities were to be reckoned in
four figures, often even in three, and that the numbers in the poems, whether of ships or
flocks or slaves or nobles, are unrealistic and invariably err on the side of
exaggeration.

One of the smallest contingents in the catalogue of ships
was led by Odysseus, a mere twelve (Agamemnon had one hundred and provided sixty others
for the inland Arcadians). He is announced as king of the Cephallenians, who inhabit three
adjacent islands in the Ionian Sea, Cephallenia, Ithaca, and Zacynthus, together with two
sites apparently on the near-by mainland. But it is with Ithaca specifically that he is
always directly identified. And it is on the island of Ithaca, not in the Never-Never Land
through which he later wandered, that the world of Odysseus can chiefly be examined.

The island population was dominated by a group of noble
families, some of whose men participated in the expedition against Troy while others
remained at home. Among the latter was Mentor, to whose watchful eye Odysseus entrusted
his young wife, Penelope, who came from another district, and his only child, his newborn
son Telemachus, when he himself went off.

For twenty years there was a strange hiatus in the
political leadership of Ithaca. Odysseus's father, Laertes, did not resume the throne,
though still alive. Penelope could not rule, being a woman. Mentor was no guardian in any
legal sense, merely a well- intentioned, ineffectual figure, and he did not function as a
regent.

For ten years a similar situation prevailed throughout the
Greek world, while the kings, with few exceptions, were at war. With the destruction of
Troy, and the great homecoming of the heroes, life was resumed in its normal ways; The
fallen kings were replaced; some who returned, like Agamemnon, ran into usurpers and
assassins; and the others came back to the seats of power and its pursuits. But for
Odysseus there was a different fate. Having offended the god Poseidon, he was tossed about
for another ten years before he was rescued, largely through the intervention of Athena,
and permitted to return to Ithaca. It was this second decade that perplexed the people at
home. No one in all Hellas knew what had befallen Odysseus, whether he had died on the
return journey from Troy or was still alive somewhere in the outer world. This uncertainty
laid the basis for the second theme of the poem, the story of the suitors.

Again there is trouble with numbers. No less than 108
nobles, 56 from Ithaca and the other islands ruled by Odysseus, and 52 from a neighbouring
island kingdom, says the poet, were paying court to Penelope. She was to be forced to
choose Odysseus's successor from am9ng them. This was no ordinary wooing, ancient style or
modern. Except that they continued to sleep in their own homes, the suitors had literally
taken over the household of the absent Odysseus and were steadily eating and drinking
their way through his vast stores; 'not twenty men together have so much wealth',
according to his swineherd Eumaeus (14.98-g). For three years Penelope had defended
herself by delaying tactics, but her power of resistance was wearing down. The ceaseless
carouse in the house, the growing feeling that Odysseus would never return, and the
suitors' open threat, made publicly to Telemachus, 'to eat up your livelihood and your
possessions' (2.123), were having their effect. Just in time Odysseus re-

appeared, disguised as a wandering beggar. By employing
all his craft and prowess, and a little magic, he succeeded in slaughtering the suitors,
and, with the final intervention of Athena, in reestablishing his position as head of
his household and king in Ithaca.

Abroad, Odysseus's life was one long series of struggles
with witches, giants, and nymphs, but there is none of that in the Ithacan story. On the
island we are confronted with human society alone (including the ever-present Athena, to
be sure, but in a sense the Greek gods were always a part of human society, working
through dreams, prophecies, oracles, and other signs). The same is true of the Iliad. For
the story of the few days between the insult by Agamemnon and the death of Hector at the
hands of Achilles, as for the main plot of the Ithacan theme, the nobility provides all
the characters. The Odyssey parades other people of the island, but largely as stage props
or stock types: Eumaeus the swineherd, the old nurse Eurycleia, Phemius the bard, the
nameless carvers of the meat', the sailors and housemaids and miscellaneous retainers.
The poet's meaning is clear: on the field of battle, as in the power struggle which is the
Ithacan theme, only the aristocrats had roles.

A deep horizontal cleavage marked the world of the Homeric
poems. Above the line were the aristoi, literally the 'best people', the hereditary
nobles who held most of the wealth and all the power, in peace as in war. Below were all
the others, for whom there was no collective technical term, the multitude. The gap
between the two was rarely crossed, except by the inevitable accidents of wars and raids:
The economy was such that the creation of new fortunes, and thereby of new nobles, was out
of the question. Marriage was strictly class-bound, so that the other door to social
advancement was also securely locked.

Below the main line there were various other divisions,
but, unlike the primary distinction between aristocrat and commoner, they seem blurred and
they are' often indefinable. There is no generic word in the poems meaning 'peasant' or
'craftsman', and that is right. This world, as we have already seen, lacked the neatly
labelled hierarchical strata of the world of the Linear B

tablets or of the ancient Near East. Not even the contrast
between slave and free man stands out in sharp clarity. The word drester, for
example, which means 'one who works or serves', is used in the Odyssey for the free and
the unfree alike. The work they did and the treatment they received, at the hands of their
masters as in the psychology of the poet, are often indistinguishable.

Slaves existed in number; they were property, disposable
at will. Mostly, to be precise, there were slave women, for wars and raids were the main
source of supply: there was little ground, economic or moral, for sparing and enslaving
the defeated men. The heroes as a rule killed (or sometimes ransomed) the males
and-carried off the females, regardless of rank. Before offering up his prayer for his
son, Hector, who knew his own doom, said to his wife: 'But I care not so much for the
grief of the Trojans hereafter. ..as for yours, when one of the bronze-clad Achaeans
will carry you off in tears; and you will be in Argos, working the loom at another woman's
bidding, and you will draw water from Messeis or Hypereia, most unwillingly, and great
constraint will be laid upon you' (VI 450-8).

Hector did not need Apollo's aid in foretelling the
future. Never in Greek history was it otherwise; the persons and the property of the
vanquished belonged to the victor, to be disposed of as he chose. But Hector showed gentle
restraint, for his prophecy was not complete. The place of slave women was in the
household, washing, sewing, cleaning, grinding meal, valeting. If they were young,
however, their place was also in the master's bed, Briseis in Achilles's, Chryseis in
Agamemnon's. Of the old nurse Eurycleia, the poet reports that 'Laertes bought her with
[some of] his possessions when she was still in the prime of youth ...but he never had
intercourse with her in bed, and he avoided the anger of his wife' (1-430-3). It was the
rarity of Laertes's behaviour, and the promise of his wife's wrath, that warranted the
special comment. Neither custom nor morality demanded such abstinence.

It is idle to seek for numbers here. Odysseus is reported
to have had fifty female slaves, but that is surely a convenient round figure, used for
the household of King Alcinous of the Phaeacians

too. A few men were also in bondage, such as the swineherd
Eumaeus, an aristocrat by birth, who had been kidnapped when a child by Phoenician traders
and sold into slavery. Male slaves worked in the home, like the women, and also in the
fields and vineyards, never abroad as servants or orderlies.

Of the Ithacans who were neither slaves nor nobles, the
bulk of the community, some were presumably 'free' herders and peasants with their own
holdings (though we must not assume that 'freedom' had precisely the same connotation and
attributes as in later, classical Greece or in modern times). Others were specialists,
carpenters and metal workers, soothsayers, bards and physicians. Because they supplied
certain essential needs in a way that neither the lords nor the non-specialists among
their followers could match, these men, a handful in numbers, floated in mid-air in the
social hierarchy. Seers and physicians might even be nobles, but the others, though they
were close to the aristocratic class and even shared its life in many respects, were
decidedly not of the aristocracy, as the treatment and behaviour of the bard Phemius
attest.

Eumaeus, we remember, called the elite among these
specialists demioergoi, literally 'those who work for the people' (and once
Penelope attached the same classificatory label to the heralds). From the word, used in
the Homeric poems only in these two passages, it has been suggested that the demioergoi
operated in a way well known among primitive and archaic groups, the Kayla of Algeria, for
instance: 'Another specialist is the blacksmith, who is also an outsider. The villagers
lend him a house, and each family pays him a fixed portion of his yearly salary in grain
and other produce.'* Unfortunately the evidence for the world of Odysseus is far from
clear or decisive. Once when Nestor, at home, wished to make sacrifice, he ordered his
servants, ' "Bid the goldsmith Laerces come here, that he may gild the horns of the
cow." ...And the smith came, with the smith's tools in his hands, the instruments of
his craft, anvil and hammer and well- made fire-tongs, with which he worked the gold.
...And the old * C.S. Coon, Caravan: The Story of the Middle East (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1952), p. 305

horseman Nestor gave gold, and the smith then skilfully
gilded the horns' (3-425-38). Neither the status of the goldsmith nor even his domicile is
indicated here, unlike the passage in the Iliad about the great 'unwrought mass of iron'
which Achilles offered from his booty for a weight-throwing contest. The iron was to be
both the test and the prize for the winner. He will have it, said Achilles, 'to use for
five full years, for br /neither the shepherd nor the ploughman will have to go into town for
lack of iron, but this will furnish it' (xxiii 833-5).

Although nothing is ever said about remuneration, it does
not necessarily follow that each family, in the community gave the smith, or the other
demioergoi, a fixed annual maintenance quota. They could have been paid as they worked,
provided only that they were available to the public, to the whole demos. That avail-
ability would explain the word well enough.

Eumaeus indicated still another special quality of the
demioergoi when he asked 'who ever summons a stranger from abroad ...unless he be one of
the demioergoi' (again with a parallel among the Kabyle). Were they, then, travelling
tinkers and minstrels, going from community to community on a more or less fixed schedule?
Actually the logic of Eumaeus's question is that all invited strangers are craftsmen, not
that all craftsmen are strangers. Some were but most were probably not, and, of those who
were, none Deed have worked on a circuit. The heralds were certainly permanent, regular,
full-scale members of the community. The bards may have wandered a bit (in the poet's own
day they travelled all the time). Regarding the others, we are simply not informed.

Indispensable as the demioergoi were, their contribution
to the quantity of work performed on an estate was a small one. For the basic work of
pasturage and tillage in the fields, of stewardship and service in the house, there was no
need of specialists: every man in Ithaca could herd and plough, saw and carve, and those
commoners who had their own holdings worked them themselves. Others made up the permanent
staffs of Odysseus and the nobles, such men as the unnamed 'carvers of the meat', who were
an integral part of the household. Still others, the least fortunate,

were thetes, unattached propertyless labourers who
worked for hire and begged what they could not steal.

'Stranger,' said the leading suitor Eurymachus to the
beggar (Odysseus in disguise), 'would you be willing to work as a thes if I should
take you in my service, on a farm at the border -- you can be sure of pay -laying walls
and planting tall trees? There I would furnish you ample grain and put clothes on your
back and give you shoes for your feet.' Ample grain and clothes and shoe~ make up the
store of a commoner's goods. But Eurymachus was~ mocking, 'creating laughter among his
companions', at the direc1 inspiration of Athena, who 'would by no means permit the
arrogant suitors to refrain from heart-rending scorn, so that the pain might sink still
more deeply into the heart of Odysseus son of Laertes' (18.346-61).

A little of the joke lay in the words, 'you can be sure of
pay'. No thes could be sure. Poseidon once angrily demanded of Apollo why he of all the
gods should be so completely on the side of the Trojans. Have you forgotten, Poseidon
asked, how, on order from Zeus, 'we worked as thetes for one year, for an
agreed-upon pay', for Laomedon, king of Troy, building the wall around the city and
herding cattle? And how, at the end of the year, Laomedon 'deprived us of our pay and sent
us off with threats?' (XXI 441-52). The real joke, however, the utter scornfulness of
Eurymachus's proposal, lay in the offer itself, not in the hint that the pay would be
withheld in the end. To see the whole point we turn to Achilles in Hades rather than to
Poseidon on Olympus. 'Do not speak to me lightly of death, glorious Odysseus,' said the
shade of Achilles. 'I would rather be bound down, working as a thes for another, by
the side of a landless man, whose livelihood was not great, than be ruler over all the
dead who have perished' (II -489-91).

A thes, not a slave, was the lowest creature on earth that
Achilles could think of. The terrible thing about a thes was his lack of attachment, his
not belonging. The authoritarian household, the oikos, was the centre around which life
was organized, from which flowed not only the satisfaction of material needs, including
security, but ethical norms and values, duties, obligations and responsibilities, social
relationships, and relations with the

gods. The oikos was not merely the family, it was all the
people of the household together with its land and its goods; hence 'economics' (from the
Latinized form, oecus), the art of managing an oikos, meant running an estate, not
managing to keep peace in the family.

Just what it meant, in terms of customary or legal
obligation and in a man's own familial life, to be a permanent but free member of the
oikos of another is by no means clear. We are not helped by the poet's aristocratic
vantage-point, which normally saw more social harmony than was presumably the case in
reality. Negatively, membership in the oikos of another meant considerable loss of
freedom of choice and of mobility .Yet these men were neither slaves nor serfs nor
bondsmen. They were retainers (therapontes), exchanging their service for a proper
place in the basic social unit, the household-a more tenuous membership, perhaps, but
one that gave them both material security and the psychological values and satisfactions
that went with belonging. Altogether the chief aristocrats managed -by a combination of
slaves, chiefly female, and a whole hierarchy of retainers, supplemented by thetes
-to build up very imposing and very useful household forces, equipped to do whatever was
required of a man of status and power in their world. The hierarchy of retainers, it
should be added, reached very high indeed. As a child Patroclus was forced to flee his
home. Peleus received him in his palace and 'named him retainer' of young Achilles (xxiii
90). The analogy that comes to mind at once is that of the noble page in some early
modern-court, just as 'lord Eteoneus, the ready retainer of Menelaus' (4.22-3) who met
guests at the door and poured the wine for them, might well have been the counterpart of a
Lord Chamberlain.

A thes in Ithaca might even have been an Ithacan, not an
outsider. But he was no part of an oikos, and in this respect even the slave was better
off. The slave, human but nevertheless a part of the property element of the oikos, was
altogether a nice symbol of the situation. Only twice does Homer use the word that later
became standard in Greek for a slave, doulos, which seems etymologically tied to
the idea of labour. Otherwise his word is dmos,

with its obvious link with doma or domos, a house;
and after Homer and Hesiod dmos never appears in literature apart from a few
instances of deliberate archaizing, as in Sophocles and Euripides. The treatment of the
slaves looks more 'patriarchal' than the pattern familiar from plantation slavery.
Eumaeus, a favourite slave, had even been able to purchase a slave for himself. To be
sure, a dozen of the slave girls were hanged in the midst of the carnage of Odysseus's
successful return, but it was the method of their execution alone that distinguished them
from the lordly suitors, who died by the bow and the spear.

There was little mating of slave with slave because there
were so few males among them. Nearly all the children born to the slave women were the
progeny of the master or of other free males in the household. Commonly, in many different
social systems, as among the Greeks later on, such offspring were slaves like their
mothers: 'the belly holds the child', say the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara in explanation.
Not so in the world of Odysseus, where it was the father's status that was determinative.
Thus, in the fanciful tale with which Odysseus sought to conceal his identity from Eumaeus
immediately upon his return to Ithaca, his father was a wealthy Cretan, his mother a
'bought concubine'. When the father died, the legitimate sons divided the property, giving
him only a dwelling and a few goods. Later, by his valour, he obtained to wife the
daughter of 'a man of many estates' (14.199-212). The slave woman's son might sometimes be
a second-class member of the family, but even then he was part of that narrower circle
within the oikos as a whole, free and without even the stigma of bastardy in our sense,
let alone the mark of slavery.

Fundamentally the difference between the ordinary land-
owner and the noble (and then among the nobles) lay in the magnitude of their respective oikoi,
and therefore in the numbers of retainers they could support, which, translated into
practical terms, meant in their power. Superficially the difference was one of birth, a
blood-distinction. At some past point, remote or near in time, either conquest or wealth
created the original separation. Then it froze and continued along hereditary lines; hence
the endless recitation of genealogies, more often than not starting

from a divine ancestor (and therefore blessed with divine
sanction). In perfect contrast, of the half-dozen or so craftsmen who are dignified with a
personal name in the poems, not one has a patronymic, let alone a genealogy.

The nature of the economy served to seal and preserve the
class line. Wherever the wealth of the household is so decisive, unless there is mobility
in wealth, unless the opportunity exists to create new fortunes, the structure becomes
castelike in its rigidity. This was the case in Ithaca. The base of the oikos was its
land, and there was little possibility, under normal, peaceful conditions, to acquire new
land in the settled regions. Hypothetically one might push beyond the frontier and take up
vacant land, but few men actually did anything so absurd and foolhardy, except under the
most violent compulsions. It was not out of mere sentiment for the fatherland that
banishment was deemed the bitterest of fates. The exile was stripped of all ties that
meant life itself; it made no difference in this regard whether one had been compelled to
flee or had gone from home in the search for land by free choice.

The primary use of the land was in pasturage. To begin the
story of his adventure among the Cyclopes, which he told at the court of Alcinous,
Odysseus underscored the primitive savagery of the one-eyed giants. First of all, they had
not learned the art of agriculture: 'they neither plant anything nor till' (9.108).
Nevertheless, Odysseus's own world was more one of pasturage than of tillage (unlike the
Greek world at the time of Homer himself and of Hesiod, when agriculture had moved to the
fore). Greek soil is poor, rocky and waterless, so that perhaps no more than twenty per
cent of the total surface of the peninsula can be cultivated. In places it once provided
excellent pasturage for horses and cattle; virtually all of it is still, in our day, good
for the smaller animals, sheep and pigs and goats. The households of the poems carried on
a necessary minimum of ploughing and planting, especially on orchard and vine-land, but it
was their animals on which they depended for clothing, draught, transport, and much of
their food.

With their flocks and their labour force, with plentiful
stone

for building and clay for pots, the great households could
almost realize their ideal of absolute self-sufficiency. The oikos was ~above all a unit
of consumption. Its activities, in so far as they were concerned with the satisfaction of
material wants, were guided by one principle, to meet the consuming needs of the lord and
his people; if possible by the products of his estates, supplemented by booty. But there
was one thing which prevented full self- sufficiency, a need which could neither be
eliminated nor satisfied by substitutes, and that was the need for metal. Scattered
deposits existed in Greece, but the main sources of supply were outside, in western Asia
and central Europe.

Metal meant tools and weapons, but it also meant something
else, perhaps as important. When Telemachus had concluded his visit at the palace of
Menelaus in Sparta, in search of news about his father, his "host offered him, as a
parting gift, 'three horses and a chariot-board of polished metal and. ..a fine goblet'.
The young man demurred. ' And whatever gift you would give me, let it be treasure. I will
not take horses to Ithaca. ...In Ithaca there are neither wide courses nor any meadowland'
(4.59°-605). The Greek word customarily rendered by 'treasure' is keimelion,
literally something that can be laid away. In the poems treasure was of bronze, iron, or
gold, less often of silver or fine cloth, and usually it was shaped into goblets, tripods,
or cauldrons. Such objects had some direct use value and they could provide aesthetic
satisfaction, too-characteristically expressed by reference to the costliness of the raw
materials and to the craftsmanship applied to them -but neither function was of real
moment compared to their value as symbolic wealth or prestige wealth. The twin uses of
treasure were in possessing it and in giving it away, paradoxical as that may appear.
Until the appropriate occasion for a gift presented itself, most treasure was kept hidden
under lock and key. It was not 'used' in the narrow sense of that word.

When Agamemnon was finally persuaded that appeasement of
Achilles was absolutely essential to prevent the destruction of the Achaean forces, he
went about it by offering amends through gifts. His offer included some to be presented at
once; others on condition of victory. And what a catalogue it was: seven cities, a

daughter to wife with a great dowry 'such as no one ever
yet gave with his daughter', the girl Briseis, over whom the quarrel had broken out, seven
captive women from Lesbos skilled in crafts, twelve prize-winning racehorses, and his
choice of twenty Trojan women when the war was won. These, apart from the horses, were the
utilitarian gifts. But Agamemnon began with none of them; first came 'seven tripods that
have never been on the fire and ten talents of gold and twenty glittering cauldrons', and
further on, from the anticipated Trojan spoils, as much gold and bronze as his ship would
hold.* That was treasure, and its high importance is marked by the care with which it is
enumerated here and again later in the poem. Menelaus's gift to Telemachus, all treasure,
reappears four more times in the Odyssey, in three different books. The poet rarely
overlooked an opportunity to revel in the value of specific gift-objects.

Whatever its purpose or its source, metal created for the
individual oikos a special problem in the distribution of goods. For the most part
distribution was internal and hence no problem at all. Since there has never been a world
of Robinson Crusoes, the simplest human groups perforce have a mechanism, and it is the
same one that served, with some extension, even the most elaborate princely oikos. All the
productive work, the seeding and harvesting and milling and weaving, even the hunting and
raiding, though carried on by individuals, was performed on behalf of the household as a
whole. The final products, ready for consumption, were gathered and stored centrally, and
from the centre they were redistributed-in the authoritarian household, by its head at a
time and in a measure he deemed appropriate.

It made no difference in essence whether the family
members within the household were no more than a husband, wife, and child, or whether the
oikos was that of Nestor at Pylos, with six adult sons and some sons-in-law. The sons
possessed arms and * IX (2 (-56. In Plato's will, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, Lives
3.41-3, the itemized bequest included 'three minas of silver, a silver bowl weighing, 165
drachmas, a small cup weighing 45 drachmas, a gold ring and gold earring weighing 4 1/2
drachmas together'. This is treasure, now narrowed to gold and silver, and like
Agamemnon's it was made up indifferently of metal and metal objects.

treasure of their own, from gifts and booty, as the wives
and daughters had their fine garments and jewels. But unless the males left the paternal
household and established their own oikoi, their personal property was an essentially
insignificant factor. Normally, the poems seem to say, although the evidence is not
altogether clear and consistent, the sons remained with their father in his lifetime.

Architecturally the heart of the system was the storeroom.
Preparing for his journey to Pylos, Telemachus 'went down to his father's spacious,
high-ceilinged storeroom, where gold and copper lay piled up, and clothing in chests, and
fragrant oil in plenty; and there stood jars of wine, old and sweet, filled with the
unmixed drink, close together in a row along the wall' (2.337-42). And of eourse it
contained arms and grain in quantity. More than three hundred years after Homer the
Athenian Xenophon, a gentleman farmer and no tribal chieftain or king, still placed proper
care of the storeroom high on the list of wifely virtues.

It was when distribution had to cross oikos lines that the
creation of new and special devices became necessary. Wars and raids for booty,
indistinguishable in the eyes of Odysseus’s world, were organized affairs, often
involving a combination of families, occasionally even of communities. Invariably there
was a captain, one of whose functions was to act as the head and distribute the booty, all
of which was first brought to a central storage point. Division was by lot, much like the
division of an inheritance when there were several heirs. For example, not all of
Odysseus’s homecoming adventures were tragic. Two or three times he and his men had
the pleasant opportunity to raid. 'From Ilion,' he began the account of his wanderings,
'the wind bore me near to the Cicones, to Ismarus. There I sacked the city and killed the
men; taking the women and many goods, we divided them, so that no one might go cheated of
his share through me.'* Forcible seizure followed by distribution in this fashion, was one
way to acquire metal or other goods from an outside source.

* 9.39-42. The final line al1o appears in XI 705.

Some scholars, hunting for a kernel of historical truth in
the tale of the Trojan War, conjecture that it was a mass raid for essential supplies.
There is not a whisper in the poems to support that interpretation, and not much else to
be said in its favour, but there were no doubt small-scale wars to such a purpose, against
other Greeks as well as against barbarians. However, the violent solution was neither
always feasible nor even always desirable; if the aggrieved party were strong enough it
invited retaliation, and there were times and conditions when even the fiercest of the
heroes preferred peace. An exchange mechanism was then the only alternative, and the basic
one was gift-exchange. This was no Greek invention. On the contrary, it is the basic
organizing mechanism among many primitive peoples, as in the Trobriand Islands, where
'most if not all economic acts are found to belong to some chain of reciprocal gifts and
counter-gifts'.*

The word 'gift' is not to be misconstrued. It may be
stated as a flat rule of both primitive and archaic society that no one ever gave
anything, whether goods or services or honours, without proper recompense, real or
wishful, immediate or years away, to himself or to his kin. The act of giving was,
therefore, in an essential sense always the first half of a reciprocal action, the other
half of which was a counter-gift.

Not even the parting gift was an exception, although there
an element of risk intruded. The last of the recognition scenes in the Odyssey, between
the hero and his aged father, began in the customary fashion, with Odysseus claiming to be
someone else, a stranger from another land in search of information about 'Odysseus'. Your
son, he said to Laertes, visited me about five years ago and received the proper gifts.
'Of well-wrought gold I gave him seven talents, and I gave him a bowl with flower designs,
all of silver, and twelve single cloaks and as many carpets and as many fine mantles, and
as many tunics besides, and in addition four pretty women skilled in excellent work.'
Laertes wept, for he had long been satisfied that his son had perished, and he could

think of no better way to reveal that fact to the stranger
than by * B. Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London: Kegan Paul, 1926), p.
40.

commenting on the gift situation. 'The countless gifts
which you gave, you bestowed in vain. For if you had found that man still alive in the
land of Ithaca, he would have sent you on your way well provided with gifts in return'
(24.274-85).

Then there is the interesting scene in the opening book of
the Odyssey, in which the goddess Athena appeared to Telemachus in the shape of Mentes, a
Taphian chieftain. When she was ready to part, the young man followed the expected custom:
'Go to your ship happy in your heart, bearing a gift, valuable and very beautiful, which
will be your treasure from me, such as dear guest-friends give to guest-friends.'. This
created a very delicate situation for the goddess. One did not refuse a proffered gift,
yet she could not accept it under the false pretence of her human disguise. (Gods as gods
not only accepted gifts from mortals, they expected and demanded them.) Being the
cleverest of the gods, Athena unhesitatingly found the perfect solution. 'Do not detain me
any longer as I am eager to be on my way. The gift, which the heart of a friend prompts
you to give me, give it to me on my return journey that I may carry it home; choose a very
beautiful one, that will bring you a worthy one in exchange' (1.31 1-8).

Telemachus had said nothing about a counter-gift. Yet he
and 'Mentes' understood each other perfectly: the counter-gift was as expected as the
original gift at parting. That was what gift-giving was in this society. The return need
not be forthcoming at once, and it might take several forms. But come it normally would.
'In a society ruled by respect for the past, a traditional gift is very near indeed to an
obligation. # No single detail in the life of the heroes receives so much attention in the
Iliad and the Odyssey as gift-giving, and always there is frank reference to adequacy,
appropriateness, recompense. 'But then Zeus son of Cronus took from Glaucus his wits, in
that he exchanged golden armour with Diomedes son of Tydeus for one of bronze, the worth
of a hundred oxen for the worth of nine oxen' (VI 234-6). The poet's

* 'Guest-friend' is explained in Chapter 4. # Marc Bloch,
in Cambridge Economic History, vol. I, 2nd ed. by M. M. Postan (Cambridge
University Press, 1966), p. 274, writing about the early Germanic world described by
Tacitus.

editorial comment, So rare for him, reflects the magnitude
of Glaucus's mistake in judgement.

There was scarcely a limit to the situations in which
gift-giving was operative. More precisely, the word 'gift' was a cover-all for a great
variety of actions and transactions which later became differentiated and acquired their
own appellations. There were payments for services rendered, desired or anticipated; what
we would call fees, rewards, prizes, and sometimes bribes. The formulaic material was rich
in such references, as in the lines with which Telemachus and twice Penelope responded to
a stranger's favourable interpretation of a sign from the gods: 'Stranger, would that
these words be fulfilled! Speedily should you become aware of friendship and many gifts
from me, so that whoever met you would congratulate you.'*

Then there were taxes and other dues to lords and kings,
amends with a penal overtone (Agamemnon's gift to Achilles), and even ordinary loans -and
again the Homeric word is always 'gift'. Defending himself for having lent Telemachus a
ship with which to sail to Pylos and Sparta seeking information about Odysseus, a young
Ithacan noble made this explanation: 'What can one do when such a man, troubled in heart,
begs? It would be difficult to refuse the gift' (4.649-51 ). In still another category,
payment for service was combined with the ceremonialism necessary to an important event.
There is much talk in the Odyssey about the 'gifts of wooing', and the successful suitor,
who reminds one of nothing so much as the highest bidder at an auction, in turn received
his counter-gift in the dowry, which normally accompanied the bride. The whole of what
we call foreign relations and diplomacy, in their peaceful manifestations, was conducted
by gift-exchange. And even in war occasions presented themselves, as between Diomedes
and Glaucus, for example, or Ajax and Hector, when heroes from the two contending sides
stopped, right on the field of combat, before the approving eyes of their fellow-heroes,
and exchanged armour.

Odyssean trade differed from the various forms of gift-

* 15.536-8; 17.163-5; 19.309-11.

exchange in that the exchange of goods was the end itself.
In trade things changed hands because each needed what the other had, and not, or only
incidentally, to compensate for a service, seal an alliance, or support a friendship. A
need for some specific object was the ground for the transaction; if it could be satisfied
by oilier means, trade was altogether unnecessary. Hence, in modem parlance, imports alone
motivated trade, never exports. There was never a need to export as such, only the
necessity of having the proper goods for the counter-gift when an import was unavoidable.

Laertes bought Eurycleia 'with [some of] his possessions
... and he gave the worth of twenty oxen' (1-430-1). Cattle were the measuring-stick of
worth; in that respect, and only in that sense, cattle were money. Neither cattle,
however, nor anything else served for the various other, later uses of money. Above all,
there was no circulating medium like a coin, the sole function of which was to make
purchase and sale possible by being passed from hand to hand. Almost any useful object
served, and it is noteworthy that the measure of value, cattle, did not itself function as
a medium of exchange. Laertes bought Eurycleia for unspecified objects worth twenty oxen;
he would never have traded the oxen for a slave.

A conventional measuring-stick is no more than an
artificial language, a symbol like the xylem, z of algebra. By itself it cannot decide how
much iron is the equivalent of one cow, or how much wine. In Adam Smith's world that
determination was made through the supply-and-demand market, a mechanism unknown in Troy
or Ithaca. Behind the market lies the profit motive, and if there was one thing that was
taboo in Homeric exchanges it was gain in the exchange. Whether in trade or in any other
mutual relationship, the abiding principle was equality and mutual benefit. Gain at the
expense of another belonged to a different realm, to warfare and raiding, where it was
achieved by acts (or threats) of prowess, not by manipulation and bargaining.

The implication that exchange rates were customary and
conventional seems unavoidable. That is to say, there was no constituted authority with
the power to decree a set of equations –

so much of x for so much of y. Rather the
actual practice of exchange over a long period of time had fixed the ratios, and they were
commonly known and respected. Even in the distribution of booty, where a central
authority, the head of the oikos or a king or commander-in-chief, took charge, he 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 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. And the
participant in an exchange, it may be added, had the advantage over the passive
participant in the distribution of booty. He could always refuse to go through with the
transaction if the rules were manifestly being upset, or if he merely thought they were.

None of this is to say that no one ever deliberately
profited from an exchange. But the exceptional instance is far less noteworthy than the
essential point that, in a strict sense, the ethics of the world of Odysseus prohibited
the practice of trade as a vocation. The test of what was and what was not acceptable did
not lie in the act of trading, but in the status of the trader and in his approach to the
transaction. So crucial was the need for metal that even a king could honourably voyage in
its search. When Athena appeared to Telemachus as Mentes, the Taphian chieftain, her story
was that she was carrying iron to Temesa in quest of copper.* That gave no difficulties,
and her visit ended with the colloquy regarding costly gifts between guest-friends.

A stranger with a ship was not always so welcome or so
free from suspicion. He might have been Odysseus before Ismarus, or Achilles: 'Twelve
cities of men have I destroyed from shipboard and eleven on foot, I say, in the fertile
region of Troy; from all these I took out much good treasure' (IX 328-31). No wonder *
Neither Taphos nor Temesa is otherwise known as a place-name, and the many attempts, all
failures, to identify them with one or another mining region illustrate once again the
futility of such 'historicizing' of the Homeric poems.

that some Greeks eventually objected to Homer as theteacher of the Hellenes. Glorification of piracy, disapproval of theft (seizure of goods
by stealth) and encouragement of robbery (seizure of goods and persons by physical
prowess) -truly this seemed a world of mixed-up moral standards. 'Theft of property is
mean,' protested Plato (lAws94IB), 'seizure by force shameless; none of the sons of Zeus
delighted in fraud or violence, nor practised either. Therefore, let no one be falsely
persuaded by poets or by some myth-tellers in these matters.'

Yet there was a pattern and a consistency in the moral
code; and it made sense from the premises. The distinctions rested on a specific social
structure, with strongly entrenched notions regarding the proper ways for a man to behave,
with respect to property, towards other men. Upon his arrival among the Phaeacians, but
before he had identified himself and told of his wanderings, Odysseus was entertained by
King Alcinous. Following the feast, the younger nobles competed in athletics. After a time
the king's son Laodamas approached Odysseus and invited hil11 to participate.

'Come, stranger and father, you enter the games, if
perchance you are skilled in any; you seem to know games. For there is no greater fame for
a man, so long as he is alive, than that which is made by foot and hand.'

Odysseus asked to be excused, pleading the heavy burden of
his sorrows. Another young aristocrat then interposed. 'No indeed, stranger, I do not
think you are like a man of games, such as there are many among men; but like one who
travels with a many-benched ship, a master of sailors who traffic, one who remembers the
cargo and is in charge of merchandise and coveted gains' (8.145-64).

The insult was unbearable under all circumstances, and to
Homer's audience it must have carried an added barb when directed against Odysseus. There
was something equivocal about Odysseus as a hero precisely because of his most famed
quality, his craftiness. There was even a soft spot in his inheritance: his maternal
grandfather, the goodly Autolycus, 'surpassed all men in thievishness and the oath, for
that was a gift to him from the

god Hermes' (19. 395-7). Later the doubts of many Greeks
turned to open contempt and condemnation. 'I know full well,' said Philoctetes in the
Sophoclean play of that name (lines 407-8), 'that he would attempt with his tongue every
evil word and villainy.' What saved the Homeric Odysseus was the fact that his guile was
employed in the pursuit of heroic goals; hence Hermes, the god of tricks and stealth, may
have given him the magic with which to ward off Circe the witch, but it was Athena who was
his protector and his inspiration in his heroic exploits. To the insult in Phaeacia he
first replied with an indignant speech, but Odysseus, of all men, could not establish his
status with words. Having finished his reply, he leaped up, seized a weight greater than
any the young men had cast, and, without removing his garment, threw it far beyond their
best mark.

Possibly there were men, a very few from among those who
were hot men of games, living in the interstices of society, who travelled in many-benched
ships and trafficked. Yet there is no single word in either the Iliad or the Odyssey that
is in fact a synonym for 'merchant'. By and large, the provisioning of the Greek world
with whatever it obtained from the outside by peaceful means was in the hands of
non-Greeks, the Phoenicians in particular. They were really a trading people, who sailed
from one end of the known world to the other, carrying slaves, metal, jewellery, and fine
cloth. If they were motivated by gain -'famed for ships, greedy men' (15415-6) -that was
irrelevant to the Greeks, the passive participants in the operation.

The need for metal, or any similar need, was an oikos
affair, not an individual matter. Its acquisition, whether by trade or by raid, was
therefore a household enterprise, managed by the head. Or it could be larger in scale,
involving many households acting, cooperatively. Internally, the situation was altogether
different. Trade within the household was impossible: by definition: the oikos was a
single, indivisible unit. Because a large sector of the population was enmeshed in the
great households, they too were withdrawn from any possibility of trade, external or
internal. The thetes, finally, were absolutely excluded; having nothing, they had nothing
to exchange.

That leaves the non-aristocratic, small-scale herders and
peasants. In their households shortages were chronic, if not absolute as a consequence of
a crop failure or a disaster to their flocks, then partial because of an imbalance in the
yield. Their troubles are not the subject of heroic poetry, and neither the Iliad nor the
Odyssey is informative in this regard. The inference is permissible, however, that some of
their difficulties were alleviated by barter, primarily with one another, and without the
instrumentality of a formal market, absolutely unknown in this world. They exchanged
necessities, staples, undoubtedly on the same principles of equivalence, ratios fixed by
custom, and no gain.

Herders and peasants, including the thetes, always had
another resource to draw upon. They could work. Unlike trade, skill with the hands,
labour, was never greeted with contempt in the poems; in that area, the society's moral
judgement was directed not to the act itself but to the person and the circumstance. Back
in Ithaca, but still disguised as a beggar, Odysseus, in reply to Eurymachus's mocking
offer of employment, challenged the suitor to a ploughing contest-just as, in his proper
guise, he boasted of his superior bowmanship or his weight throwing. But Odysseus was not
required to plough in order to live. In fact, it is obvious that, though he knew how to
till and herd and build a raft, he rarely did any work on his estate except in sport. That
was the great dividing-line between those who were compelled to labour and those who were
not. Among the former, the men with the inspired skills, the bards and the metalworkers
and the others, were an elite. Above all, the test was this, that 'the condition of the
free man is that he does not live under the constraint of another'.* Hence there was a
line between those who, though they worked, remained more or less their own masters as
independent herders and peasants, and on the other side the thetes and the slaves
who laboured for others, whose livelihood was not in their own hands. The slaves, at
least, were usually the victims of chance. The thes was in a sense the worst of all: he
voluntarily contracted away his control over his own labour, in other words, his true
freedom.

* Aristotle, Rhetoric 1367a32, writing with specific
reference to labour.

Much of the psychology of labour, with its ambivalence
between admiration of skill and craft and its rejection of the labourer as essentially and
irretrievably an inferior being, found its expression on Olympus. Having humanized the
gods, the bard was consistent enough to include labour among the heavenly pursuits. But
that entailed a certain difficulty. Zeus the insatiable philanderer, Apollo the archer who
was also a minstrel, Ares the god of battle -these were all embodiments of noble
attributes and activities, easily re-created in man's image. But how could the artisan who
built their palaces and made their weapons and their plate and their ornaments be placed
on equal footing with them, without casting a shadow over the hierarchy of values and
status on which society rested? Only a god could make swords for gods, yet somehow he must
be a being apart from the other gods.

The solution was neatly turned, very neatly indeed. The
divine craftsman was Hephaestus, son of Hera. His skill was truly fabulous, and the poet
never tired of it, lingering over his forge and his productions as he never sang of the
smith in Ithaca. That was the positive side of the ambivalence. The other was this: of all
the gods, Hephaestus alone was 'a huge limping monster' with 'a sturdy neck and hairy
chest' (XVIII 410-5). Hephaestus was born lame, and he carried the mark of his shame on
his whole personality. The other gods would have been less than human, in consequence,
were Hephaestus not to be their perennial source of humour. Once, when Zeus and Hera were
having a fearful quarrel, the limping god attempted the role of peacemaker, filling the
cups with nectar for all the assemblage. ' And unquenchable laughter was stirred up among
the blessed gods as they watched Hephaestus bustling about the palace' (1599- 600). And
the social fabric of the world of Odysseus was saved.

In fact, the mirror-image on Olympus was still more
subtle. In art and craftsmanship, Athena was frequently linked with Hephaestus, as in the
simile in which a comparison is drawn with a goldsmith, 'a skilful man whom Hephaestus and
Pallas Athena taught all kinds of craft (techne)' (6.232-4). But there was
absolutely nothing deformed or the least bit comical about Athena,

deservedly her father's favourite among the gods. It was
unnecessary to apologize for Athena's skill with her hands, for the pattern with respect
to work differed somewhat for women. Denied the right to a heroic way of life, to feats of
prowess, competitive games, and leadership in organized activity of any kind, women
worked, regardless of class. With her maids, Nausicaa, daughter of the Phaeacian king, did
the household laundry. Queen Penelope found in her weaving the trick with which to hold
off the suitors. Her stratagem, however, of undoing at night what she had woven in the
day, repeated without detection for three full years until one of her maids revealed the
secret, suggests that her labour was not exactly indispensable. The women of the
aristocracy, like their men, possessed all the necessary work skills, and they used them
more often. Nevertheless, their real role was managerial. The house was their domain, the
cooking and washing, the cleaning and the clothes-making. The dividing- line for them was
rather in the degree to which they performed the chores themselves -between those who
supervised, working only to pass the time, and those whom circumstances compelled to cook
and sew in earnest.

CHAPTER 4

HOUSEHOLD, KIN, AND COMMUNITY

The subject of heroic poetry is the hero, and the hero is a man who behaves in certain
ways, pursuing specified goals by his personal courage and bravery. However, the hero
lives in, and is moulded by, a social system and a culture, and his actions are
intelligible only by reference to them. That is true even when the poet's narrative
appears to ignore everything and everyone but the heroes.

No one who reads the Iliad can fail to be struck by the peculiar character of
the fighting. There are tens of thousands of soldiers on hand, yet the poet has eyes only
for Ajax or Achilles or Hector -or Aeneas. In itself, such a literary device is
commonplace; it is a very rare artist who has both reason and genius enough to re-create
masses of men in battle. Nor is there historical objection to the individual combat
between champions, as between Achilles and Hector, or, even more interesting in some ways,
between Ajax and Hector, ending in a draw and an exchange of gifts. The false note comes
in the full-scale fighting. There the confusion is indescribable. No one commands or gives
orders. Men enter the battle and leave at their own pleasure; they select their individual
opponents; they group and regroup for purely personal reasons. And the disorganization,
unlike the chaotic movements in a war novel like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of
Courage, does not stem from the breakdown of an original plan of action but from the
poet's concentration on his heroes as individuals. He must bring in the army as a whole
to maintain the necessary realism of the war story , but he returns to the central figures
as quickly as possible.

Off the field of battle there are hundreds of small details essentially irrelevant to
either the narrative or the action of the heroes. The hanging of the twelve slave girls,
Mentes's cargo of iron,

the purchase of Eurycleia by Laertes, Telemachus's visit to the storeroom -these odd
bits are too fragmentary to have interest as independent scenes, and in a sense they are
all unnecessary for the movement of the tale. Yet the poet introduces them on every page,
briefly, in a few phrases or lines, but with the greatest skill and attention. Both the
artistry of the narrative and the conviction with which it was received rest in large
measure on these incidentals. They underscore or elucidate behaviour, they give colour to
the proceedings, they remind the audience again and again of the truthfulness of the
account. And today they make accessible the complicated social system and its values.

In the action of the individual heroes, status was perhaps the main conditioning
factor. A man's work and the evaluation of his skills, what he did and what he was not to
do in the acquisition of goods and their disposition, within the oikos and without,
were all status-bound. It was a world of multiple standards and values, of diversified
permissions and prohibitions. With respect to work and wealth, we have seen, the
determinant was always the particular social grouping to which one belonged, not the
skills, desires or enterprise of an individual. The chief heroes were individuals, not
robots. Nevertheless, in all their behaviour, by no means in the economic sphere alone,
the implicitly indicated limits to tolerable individual initiative and deviance were
extremely narrow: among the nobles, only in the degree of one's strength and prowess, the
magnitude of one’s ambition for glory, and the development of one's sense of what was
fitting. There were variations in temperament, too, like Odysseus's outstanding craftiness
or Achilles's excessively forthright responses, but they were more puzzling than not.

Agamemnon is a convenient illustration of the far-reaching effects of status. He is
several times called 'most kingly' of the heroes at Troy, clearly not in sarcasm, yet he
was by no means the most heroic in his personal capacities or accomplishments. His
position at the head of the invading forces was not personally earned but was the
consequence of the superior position in power he had inherited, as the leader who could
bring the largest contingent, one hundred ships. His status gave him command, hence

the right to distribute the booty and select the prize of honour. His status also
prevented the aggrieved Achilles from expressing defiance other than in the passive form
of a mighty sulk, though -in valour Achilles was the admitted superior.

Or consider Telemachus. He was still a youngster, to be sure, yet there was
unmistakable irritation in Athena's 'You ought not continue your childish ways, now that
you are no longer of an age' (1.296-7). Maturity was more than chronological; a
twenty-year-old of such lineage and class was expected to grow faster and further, and to
respond sooner to circumstances requiring adult behaviour .

Athena was prodding Telemachus hard because of the grave situation created by the
suitors. She pointed to Orestes as a model. 'Have you not heard what fame illustrious
Orestes received among all men when he killed his father's murderer, wily Aegisthus?'*
Penelope's suitors had committed no murder, nor were they threatening one {later they
tried unsuccessfully to ambush and assassinate Telemachus). Nevertheless, Orestes was a
proper model for Odysseus's son, altogether apart from the hero-theme of glory and honour.
Both young men faced obligations of the same species, namely, those that stemmed from the
family, the one to avenge his father's death, the other to preserve his paternal oikos .

Orestes and Aegisthus, Telemachus and all 108 suitors were nobles. Within that single
social class, however, there was another kind of group relationship and group loyalty, the
family bond. Agamemnon, it may be noted, was supported in his right to lead the Greek
armies by the fact that his brother Menelaus. was the aggrieved party to be avenged. When
criminal acts were involved, the family, not the class (or the community as a whole), was

*1.298-300. Whenever Orestes is mentioned in the Odyssey it is never said
explicitly that he also killed his mother Clytaemnestra. Yet that is the central theme of
the Orestes tragedy in Greek drama. However one explains Homer's silence, the contrast,
and the obviously contemporary matter in the plays, notably the court scenes, indicate
once again that information taken from post-Homeric treatment of the old myths is worse
than useless in a study of the world of Odysseus. Later poets and playwrights reworked the
materials freely, and with total unconcern for history.

charged with preserving the standards of conduct and with punishing any breach.

Historically there is an inverse relationship between the extension of the notion of
crime as an act of public malfeasance and the authority of the kinship group. Primitive
societies are known in which it is not possible to find any 'public' responsibility to
punish an offender. Either the victim and his relations take vengeance or there is none
whatsoever. The growth of the idea of crime, and of criminal law , could almost be written
as the history of the chipping away of that early state of family omnipotence. The
crumbling process had not advanced very far by the time of Orestes and Telemachus, nor did
it begin in the places modern Western man, with his own peculiar ethical traditions, would
surely have selected. Homicide, as the most obvious example, remained largely a private
affair. Much as the collective conscience may have thought punishment desirable, it
failed to provide any instrumentality outside of the kinsmen. They in turn refused to
distinguish among homicides as between a justified one and a malicious one. Odysseus's
slaughter of the suitors brought their fathers and relations to arms. 'For this is
dishonour " said Antinous's father (24-433-5), 'even for those who come after to
hear, if we do not avenge the murder of our sons and brothers.' Had Athena not intervened
to close the poem, as ~he opened it, no human force in Ithaca could have prevented still
more bloodshed.

The profundity of the Greeks' kinship attachment, throughout their history, is
immediately apparent from their passion for genealogies. That never changed radically at
any time. The language of family was altered, however, and the tendency was towards
narrowing the circle. Homer has a special word, einater, for a husband's brother's
wife, to cite a clear-cut example, and that word soon disappeared from the ordinary
vocabulary. The reason for the change is not hard to find. In a household like Nestor's
there were half a dozen women whose relationship to one another was that of husband's
brother's wife. When that kind of extended family unit disappeared, when daughters went
off to their husband's homes and sons set up their own establishments

while the father still lived, the fine distinction of einaterbecame super-fine.
The more general word kedestes for every in-law was then good enough.

The coexistence of three distinct but overlapping groups, class, kin and oikos ,
was what defined a man's life, materially and psychologically. The demands of each of the
three did not always coincide; when they conflicted openly there were inevitable tensions
and disequilibriums, And then there was still a fourth group in the picture. Once Athena
had put a little backbone into Telemachus he, still at her suggestion, summoned the
Ithacans to an assembly. The first speaker, an old noble Aegyptius, asked who had called
the meeting and on what business. In reply Telemachus repeated the phrasing of the
question in part when he said, 'Neither have I heard any news that the army [i.e. Odysseus
and his men] is returning. ..nor do I disclose or speak of any other public matter.' Then
he added, 'But of my own matter, for an evil has fallen on my household, a double one'
(2-4:2-6).

The twin evils were Odysseus's failure to return and the suitors' refusal to clear out.
The suitors were altogether Telemachus's private business. But old Aegyptius thought that
the meeting had been called on a public matter, and the very existence of such a notion is
significant. The assembly (agora)* was unknown among the Cyclopes; that was the
second item listed by Odysseus as a sign of their wholly uncivilized state (the absence of
themis was the third).# An assembly is no simple institution. As a precondition it
requires a relatively settled, stable community made up of many households and kinship
groups; in other words, the imposition upon kinship of some territorial superstructure.
That means that the several households and larger family groups had

* ‘Assembly' is the original sense of agora, both the place of meeting and the
meeting itself. The market-place connotation, with which it is most commonly associated in
the modern mind, is very much later. There is not a trace of it in Homer.

# themis is untranslatable. A gift of the gods and a mark of civilized
existence, sometimes it means right custom, proper procedure, social order, and sometimes
merely the will of the gods (as revealed by an omen, for example) with little of the idea
of right.

substituted for physical coexistence at arm's length a measure of common existence, a
community, and hence a partial surrender of their own autonomy. In this new and more
complex structure of society a private affair was one that remained within the sole
authority of the oikos or kinship group, a public matter one in which the decision
was for the heads of all the separate groups to make, consulting together.

Neither the beginnings nor the early history of the Greek community can be described.
The original Greek migrants into the eastern Mediterranean region were not primitive
hunters. They were a pastoral people who, so the signs seem to say, had learned the art of
agriculture as well. Apparently their organization was tribal, modified by temporary
expedients while they were on the move. But the world they entered was far more complex,
especially soon its perimeter, where, in Egypt and the Near East, there had already been a
long experience in large-scale territorial organization. In the thousand years, roughly,
that ensued until the age of Odysseus, social and political organization had a relatively
complicated history. There was no standing still for a thousand years; nor was the
movement all in a straight line or all in one direction, up or down. These were centuries
filled with violent upheavals and catastrophes, leaving clear if not very legible imprints
on the archaeological record. When they occurred with sufficient force they brought down
institutions along with the stone walls and the lives of men.

Odysseus's Ithaca was more household- and kinship-bound, less integrally a civic
community, than many a civilized centre of earlier centuries. We are led to the conclusion
that the widespread physical destruction in Greece in the period about 1200 B.C. (which
extended to other areas of the eastern Mediterranean) also carried away much of the
existing political structure and replaced it by the unbounded kinship principle. There is
the further implication, however, that the slow return of the community was no longer a
new thing among the heroes of the poems, that agora and themis , and the idea that
there were both public and private matters, were well established in their thinking. The
assembled Ithacans were puzzled by several aspects of Tele-

machus's summons; there is no sign .of discomfort or uncertainty in how to go about the
business of an assembly.

The rules were rather simple. The assembly was normally summoned by the king at his
pleasure, without advance notice. When the men were abroad on a campaign, an assembly
could be called in the camp to consider matters pertaining to the war.* At home or in the
field there were no stated meeting dates, no fixed number of sessions. In Odysseus's
absence, Ithaca had gone more than twenty years without a meeting, yet others were
seemingly empowered to call one had they so wished, just as Achilles once assembled the
Achaeans in the field although Agamemnon, not he, was commander-in-chief. Aegyptius's
query in Ithaca implied no doubt about the validity of the assembly summoned by
Telemachus; the old man was merely curious to know who had broken the twenty-year silence.

The usual time of meeting was dawn. 'And when rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, the child
of morn, the dear son of Odysseus rose from his bed and put on his garments. ...Straight-
way he bade the clear-voiced heralds summon the long-haired Achaeans to an assembly. They
made the call, and the latter gathered swiftly indeed' (2.1-8). The one item on the agenda
was the issue the summoner wanted discussed. Whoever felt moved to speak rose to do so,
and while he talked he held the sceptre placed in his hand by the herald -in a quite
literal sense a magic wand that rendered the speaker physically inviolate. Custom gave the
eldest the first opportunity to take the floor. Thereafter the sequence was determined by
the course of the debate rather than by a fixed seniority system. And when there were no
more speakers the meeting dissolved.

The assembly neither voted nor decided. Its function was twofold: to mobilize the
arguments pro and con, and to show the king or field commander how sentiment lay. The sole
measure of opinion was by acclamation, not infrequently in less orderly forms, like the
shouting down of an unpopular presentation. The king was free to ignore the expression of
sentiment and go * At the end of the third century B.C. a meeting of the armed levy of the
Aetolian League sometimes functioned as a regular assembly of the League.

his way. That, in fact, was what introduced the theme for the Iliad . A priest
had come to the Achaean camp to ransom his captive daughter Chryseis. He made a brief plea
and 'all the other Achaeans assented by acclamation to reverence the priest and to accept
the splendid ransom; but it did not please the heart of Atreus's son Agamemnon and roughly
he sent him away'.* In great anger the god Apollo came down from Olympus and for nine days
poured arrows into the Achaean host, 'and the close-set pyres of the dead burned
continuously', until Hera took pity and bade Achilles summon an assembly. There Agamemnon,
in a violent quarrel with Achilles, bowed to Apollo, agreed to release the priest's
daughter, and then made the personal, unilateral decision to replace her in his hut with
Briseis, the prize among Achilles's captives.

Achilles spoke six times at the meeting, Agamemnon four, but throughout they addressed
each other directly, like two men wrangling in the privacy of their homes. Once Agamemnon
interrupted what he was saying to Achilles, turned to the assemblage, and announced his
decision to surrender Chryseis and the procedure to be followed to appease the god. Apart
from this one moment, the disputants talked only to each other. When Nestor intervened
near the end to urge peace between them, he too spoke only to the two heroes. Finally,
'when the two had finished fighting with quarrelsome words, they dissolved the assembly
beside the ships of the Achaeans' (I 304-5). In this instance, unlike others in the
Iliad , the army indicated no preference or sentiment of any kind.

Such a performance and so informal an institution as this sort of assembly are not
easily evaluated in parliamentary terms. A king or commander-in-chief was under no
compulsion to call a meeting, and yet the arist9Cracy, and in a certain sense even the
people, had a right to be heard, for otherwise no one other than the king could have
issued a summons. The chief nobles serve the king as a council of elders, and again there
was nothing binding about their recommendations. On one occasion, for example, King
Alcinous assembled the Phaeacian 'chieftains and leaders', * I 22-5. repeated I 376-9- 81
informed them of his decision to have Odysseus convoyed to . Ithaca, and then led him to
the feast, without even a pause for their comment or reaction.

Nevertheless, the Iliad and Odyssey are filled with assemblies and
discussions, and they were not mere play-acting. Viewed from a narrow conception of formal
rights, the king had the power to decide, alone and without consulting anyone. Often he
did. But there was themis -custom, tradition, folk-ways, mores, whatever we may
call it, the enormous power of 'it is (or is not) done'. The world of Odysseus had a
highly developed sense of what was fitting and proper. Only once in either poem did a
commoner, Thersites, a man without a claim to a patronymic, presume to take the floor at
an assembly, and he was promptly beaten down by Odysseus. Thersites behaved improperly:
the people acclaimed or dissented as they listened, they did not themselves make
proposals. That was a prerogative of the aristocrats; it was their role to advise, the
king's to take heed if he would. 'It behoves you,' Nestor told Agamemnon at a meeting of
the elders, 'more than anyone both to speak words and to listen' (IX 100). The king who
ignored the prevailing sentiment was within his right, but he ran a risk. Any ruler must
calculate on the possibility that those bound by law or custom to obey him may one day
refuse, by passive resistance or outright revolt. The Homeric assembly thus provided the
kings with a test of public opinion, as the council of elders revealed the sentiment among
the nobles.

A large measure of informality, of fluidity and flexibility, marked all the political
institutions of the age. There were lines of responsibility and power, and they were
generally understood, but they often crossed and then there was trouble. If the king in
assembly could ignore its opinion, no matter how clear and unanimous, it was equally true
that the Greek world got along as well as ever without kings for ten years-and Ithaca for
twenty. This was possible because the superimposition of a community, the territorial unit
under a king, upon the household- kinship system merely weakened the dominant position of
the latter, but only in part and only in certain respects. Primarily it was war, defensive
in particular, which was an activity of the

community, while the usual pursuits of peace, the procurement of sustenance, social
intercourse, the administration of justice, relations with the gods, and even
non-bellicose relations with the outside world, were largely conducted, as before, through
the interlocking channels of oikos , kin and class.

And kinship thinking permeated everything. Even the relatively new, non-kinship
institutions of the community were shaped as much as possible in the image of the
household and the family. The perfect symbol, of course, was the metaphor of the king as
father (on Olympus, Zeus was called 'father of the gods', which, taken literally, he was
of some but not of others). In certain of his functions-in the assembly, for example, or
in offering sacrifices to the gods-the king in fact acted the patriarch. The Greek verb anassein,
which means 'to be a lord', 'to rule', is used in the poems for both the king (basileus)
and the head of an oikos with almost complete indifference. It is equally
applicable to the gods; Zeus, for instance, 'rules (anassein) over gods and men'
(e.g. II 669).

To rule, after all, is to have power, whether over things, over men (by other men or
some god), or over men and gods together (by Zeus). But the bardic formulas sometimes add
a little touch that is extremely revealing. In five instances anassein is qualified
with the adverb iphi, 'by might', so that king's rule (but never the householder's)
becomes rule by might. This must under no circumstances be taken to imply tyranny,
forcible rule in the invidious sense. When Hector prayed for his son to 'rule by might in
Ilion' (VI 478), he was asking the gods that the boy succeed to the throne, not that he be
endowed with the qualities of a despot. And when Agamemnon named one daughter iphianassa,
he was calling her 'princess', just as iphigenia, 'mightily born', indicates royal
birth.

Iphi quietly directs attention to the limits upon the parallel between head of a
household and king. One critical test lay in the succession. The kings, like Hector, were
personally interested in pushing the family parallel to the point at which their sons
could automatically follow them on the throne as they succeeded them in the oikos .
'The king is dead! Long live the king!' 'That

proclamation is the final triumph of the dynastic principle in monarchy. But never in
the world of Odysseus was it pronounced by the herald. Kingship had not come that far, and
the other aristocrats often succeeded in forcing a substitute announcement: 'The king is
dead! The struggle for the throne is open!' That is how the entire Ithacan theme of the
Odyssey can be summed up. 'Rule by might', in other words, meant that a weak king was
not a king, that a king either had the might to rule or he did not rule at all.

In one of his frequent taunting interchanges with the suitors, Telemachus spoke rather
curiously: 'After all, here in sea-girt Ithaca there are many other kings ( basileis)
among the Achaeans, young and old, one of whom may take the place, since illustrious
Odysseus is dead' (1.394-6). This remark is different from Nestor's calling Agamemnon
'most kingly', for there the comparison was with the assembled heroes at Troy, many of
whom were in fact kings, whereas here Telemachus meant the nobles of Ithaca, not one of
whom was a king. Were this a unique passage, it could be ignored as a first crude effort
on the part of Telemachus, whose growing-up process had begun on the same day, to imitate
the guile of his father. But the oscillation between basileus as king and
basileus as chief- that is, as head of an aristocratic household with its servants and
retainers-is duplicated elsewhere in the Homeric poems and by other early writers. Nor is
this an instance of poverty of language. Behind the terminology can be felt all the
pressure of the aristocracy to reduce kingship to a minimum. Aristocracy was prior to
kingship logically, historically, and socially.. While recognizing monarchy, the nobles
proposed to maintain the fundamental priority of their status, to keep the king on the
level of a first among equals.

The fundamental conflict is laid bare in all its complexity in the opening book of the
Odyssey. Telemachus's reference to the many kings in Ithaca was said in his reply to a
challenge by the suitor Antinous: 'Never may Cronion [i.e. Zeus] make you king in sea-girt
Ithaca, which is your patrimony by birth.' Telemachus sadly conceded the probable truth of
that hope and prophecy, and went on to demand that his household, as distinct

from the kingship, be returned to him. 'Telemachus,' was the answer of another suitor,
the more guileful Eurymachus, 'it really lies in the lap of the gods, Who shall be king of
the Achaeans in sea-girt Ithaca. But you may keep your own property and be lord (anassein)
in your house' (1.386-402). Let Penelope choose Odysseus's successor as spouse, and peace
would be restored in Ithaca. The successful suitor would take the throne and Telemachus
could 'with pleasure enjoy all [his] patrimony, eating and drinking, while she attends to
the house of another' ( 20.336- 7). Otherwise the daily feasting would continue in this
curious war of attrition, until one day Telemachus would find himself with no household
worth inheriting.

The element of naked force was not at all disguised. The decision might ultimately lie
with the gods, but heroes were obligated to try to direct it by the power of their arms.
In the futile assembly that Telemachus summoned on the following day, Leocritous openly
and bluntly warned that 'if Odysseus of Ithaca himself were to Come and were eager in his
heart to drive from the palace the noble suitors Who feast in his house, yet his wife
would find no pleasure in his coming, though she yearns for him. On the contrary, just
there would he meet with evil destiny, were he to fight against greater numbers'
(2.246-51).

Leocritus was a poor prophet. But the fact is that when Odysseus returned there was no
automatic resumption of his royal position. He had to fight against heavy odds and with
all his powers of strength and guile to regain his throne. Leocritus had overlooked one
matter, the interest of Athena in Odysseus. 'I should surely have perished in my palace of
the evil fate of Agamemnon Son of Atreus, had not you, goddess, told me each thing
rightly' ( 13.383-5) .

I t may be protested that all this is to read historical significance into what is no
more than the story line of the poem. Had Odysseus not returned, we should have had no
Odyssey;' had he met the fate from which the goddess rescued him, we should have had an
altogether different tale. True; but we must remember that Odysseus is our conventional
name for King X. Stripped

of the details of myth and narrative, the diversified homecomings are precisely what
would have occurred in this world, with its delicate, easily upset balance of powers.
Nestor and Menelaus smoothly picked up the threads as they had been before the expedition,
although each in different personal circumstances; Agamemnon was murdered by Aegisthus,
his successor as spouse, master of the household, and king; Odysseus contrived to avoid
that fate, though faced with 108 potential Aegisthuses. Historically and sociologically
these tales simply mean that some kings had established such personal power and authority
that no challenge was possible, that others were challenged unsuccessfully, and that still
others learned that 'first among equals' was no position from which to look forward to a
long life of blessings and comforts, Nor was a Trojan War necessary as the igniting spark,
although obviously such an enforced absence could facilitate the mobilization of hostile
forces.

The uncertainties of kingship may be pursued one step backward in the career of
Odysseus. What about Laertes? He was an old man, indeed, but he was not senile. Why did he
not sit on the throne of Ithaca? Nestor was at least as old-about seventy in the Iliad -
and he not only ruled before and after the; war but accompanied the hosts to Troy; and
there, though his value to the army was only moral and psychological, he was a leading
member of Agamemnon’s council of elders. And then there was old Priam. In the great
crisis actual leadership fell to his son Hector, but Priam was still king beyond dispute.
After Achilles had become reconciled with Agamemnon and returned to the fray, Aeneas came
forward to challenge him to single combat. Why? asked Achilles. 'Does your heart command
you to do battle with me in the hope of being master of Priam's lordship over the
horse-taming Trojans? But no, even though you slay me, Priam will not on that account
place the prerogative in your hands; for he has sons and he is firm and not weak-minded'
(XX 179-83).

Nor is there a hint that Odysseus had usurped his father's position; on the contrary,
much of the final book of tJ1e poem is given over to a scene of love and devotion between
father and son. Yet

so far was the ex-king from authority that all the while the suitors were threatening
to destroy the very substance of his son and grandson, Laertes could do no more than
withdraw in isolation to his farm, there to grieve and lament. Nobles lived in the town,
not on their estates. Laertes, however, 'no longer comes to the town, but far off in the
fields suffers misery, with an old woman as attendant, who serves him meat and drink
whenever weariness takes hold of his limbs as he drags along the high ground of his
vineyard'.*

It is idle to guess the circumstances which brought Odysseus to the throne in place of
Laertes. The statement must suffice that long before the days when he could only drag
himself in his vineyard Laertes had proved unable to rule iphi, by might. And so,
somehow, the rule passed to his son. In a sense, what modern kings have called the
principle of legitimacy was thereby preserved, the same principle which Achilles
enunciated for Aeneas, and which he defended for his father Peleus and himself among his
Myrmidons. That was Achilles's first concern in Hades when Odysseus paid his call. 'Tell
me of excellent Peleus, if you have heard anything.' Does he still hold his rightful place
or has he been pushed aside 'because old age has him by hand and foot'? For 'I am no
longer his aid beneath the rays of the sun', protecting our rule with my might (II
-494:-503).

In Ithaca not even the arrogant suitors, for all their open threats of violence, could
altogether overlook the family claim to the throne. On the surface there is no good reason
why they went on with the game for so many years. If force had been the only factor,
Leocritus spoke truly when he said they outnumbered any possible opposition; indeed, there
was no visible opposition. Yet not only did they refrain from murdering Laertes and
Telemachus and seizing power (although they did plot at the last

* I. 189-93. Note must be taken that a far less pathetic description appears elsewhere
in the Odyssey, especially in the last book, thought by some scholars to have been
composed relatively late: 'the fine and well-tilled farm or Laertes. ...There was his
house, and around it ran many huts on every side, in which the trusty slaves ate and sat
and slept, Who worked at his pleasure' (24.205-10). It is in this book, too, that we have
the only explicit reference to Laertes ever having been king.

minute to assassinate the latter), not only did they publicly and repeatedly concede
Telemachus's claim to his oikos , but they placed the decision in the strangest
place imaginable, in the hands of a woman. There was nothing about the woman Penelope,
cither in beauty or wisdom or spirit, that could have won her this unprecedented and
unwanted right of decision as a purely personal triumph. Institutionally, furthermore,
this was a solidly patriarchal society, in which even a Telemachus could bid his mother
leave the banquet hall and retire to her proper, womanly tasks.*

As his father's heir Telemachus obviously had a measure of authority, and Athena
pointed to one way out. As for your mother, if her heart is stirred up to be married, let
her return to the palace of her father great in might. They will arrange the wedding feast
and array the many gifts, all that should go with a beloved daughter' (1.275-8). At the
assembly on the next day both Antinous and Eurymachus gave him the same advice, the latter
in the very words Athena had used. But 'wise' Telemachus demurred. 'It is bad for me to
repay a large amount to Icarius [Penelope's father],should I myself send my mother back'
(2.132- 3). The ‘large amount' was the dowry, which had to be restored under such
circumstances.

Early in the feast at which Odysseus suddenly revealed himself and slaughtered the
suitors, Telemachus made a remark to one of them which again indicated his authority, but
in a different direction. 'I do not hinder the marriage of my mother; instead, I bid her
marry whom she wishes and I also [offer to] give countless gifts. I am ashamed to drive
her from the palace, against her will, by a word of compulsion' (20.341-4). But if
Telemachus had the right to order his mother about in the matter of her marriage, either
by sending her back to her father or by compelling (or preventing) her choice from among
the wooers, how are we to explain, as fact or as law, Athena's rushing to Sparta, where
Telemachus was visiting Menelaus, and warning him to return at once? 'For her [Penelope's]
father and brother', said the goddess, care now bidding her marry Eurymachus, for he
*1.356-g; 21.350-3.

outdoes all the suitors in gifts and he has greatly increased his gifts of wooing'
(15.16-18).*

I t has been argued that behind the confusions there lay the understandable uncertainty
whether Odysseus was dead or alive, whether Penelope was a widow or not. Or perhaps the
Penelope situation had become so muddled in the long prehistory of the Odyssey that
the actual social and legal situation is no longer recoverable. Some scholars have adopted
the desperate solution of finding in the account a vestige of a mother-right system that
allegedly prevailed among the Greeks centuries before. They see similar traces in
Phaeacia, and indeed the poet uses some very strange language about Queen Arete, niece and
consort of Alcinous the king, even to underscoring her 'good wits' and her skill in
resolving quarrels among men (7.73-4). When you enter the palace, Nausicaa advised
Odysseus, pass by my father's throne and go directly to my mother and appeal to her. 'If
she should be kindly disposed to you in her heart, then there is hope that you will see
your friends, and come to your home good to dwell in, and to your native land.'# Both
Arete and Alcinous were kindly disposed, it turned out, and Odysseus was welcomed beyond
measure. After he had related many of his adventures, the queen, who was a full
participant in the feasting, contrary to all the rules of Greek society of the time,
called upon the nobles to supply gifts of treasure. 'He is my guest-friend, though each of
you shares in the honour' (11.338). Not even Clytaemnestra would have talked that way,
though she was not beyond joining in the plot to murder Agamemnon her lord.

However, one old Phaeacian noble promptly told Arete that, though her proposal was
sound, 'on Alcinous here depend deed and word' (11.346). Nausicaa, too, before she
counselled Odys-

* For the benefit of those who see in the coexistence or dowries and 'gifts or wooing'
a sign of poetic imagination, on the argument that such 'opposite' practices are
impossible in 'real lire', it is perhaps worth calling attention to the shift that has
been taking place in Greek Cypriot villages since 193° in the system or marital property
transfer. Opposing practices with respect to the provision or a house for newlyweds
coexist there today, after nearly half a century or transition : see P. Loizos in Man, 10
{1975), pp. 503-23.

# 6.313-5; repeated by Athena, 7.75-7.

seus to seek out Arete, identified herself as the 'daughter of great- hearted Alcinous,
on whom depend the force and the might of the Phaeacians' ( 16. 196-7 ) .And throughout
the very long Phaeacian section of the poem Alcinous repeatedly exercised unmistakable and
unchallenged royal authority. There are other difficulties and apparent contradictions in
Phaeacia, not surprising in view of its position halfway between the world of fantasy
Odysseus was finally leaving and the real world to which he was about to return. That a
repressed memory of ancient matriarchy is reflected in some of the verses seems a
singularly fragile argument. Neither Arete nor Penelope met the genealogical requirements
of a matrilineal kinship structure, let alone of matriarchy: Arete was the daughter of
Alcinous's elder brother; Penelope and Odysseus had no blood kinship at all.*

Whatever the explanation for Penelope's sudden acquisition of so puzzling a power of
decision, in the end the essential fact is that 'as many of the nobles as have power in
the islands, in Dulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthus, and as many as are lords in rocky
Ithaca' # -in short, virtually the whole aristocracy in and around Ithaca-were agreed that
the house of Odysseus was to be dethroned. Along with the rule, his successor was also to
take his wife, his widow as many thought. On this point they were terribly insistent, and
it may be suggested that their reasoning was this: that by Penelope's receiving the suitor
of her choice into the bed of Odysseus, some shadow of legitimacy, however dim and
fictitious, would be thrown over the new king. In his first speech to the assembly
Telemachus had said that the wooers 'shrink from going to the house of her father Icarius,
so that he might marry off his daughter and give her to whomsoever he chooses' (2.52-4).
Icarius, would, of course, have chosen the highest bidder, the one who gave the most
valuable gifts of wooing. Yet the suitors' unwillingness to follow this accepted procedure
was surely more than niggardliness. If Icarius were to select Penelope's next husband, the
successful bidder would ac-

* Among the matriarchal Iroquois, for example, the successor to a deceased chieftain
was chosen by the matron of his maternal family. # 1.245-7; repeated 16.122-4, with
variations, 19.130-2.

quire a wife but not the kingdom. Rule in Ithaca was not for Icarius, an outsider, to
bestow. That prerogative mysteriously belonged to Penelope.

And Penelope was their undoing. On instruction from Athena, she tricked the suitors
into letting the returned hero, still in his beggarly disguise, get the great bow into his
hands, which none but he could wield, and with it, supported by Telemachus and two slaves,
Philoetius and Eumaeus, he slew the interlopers. Once again the narrative detail points to
an essential element of Odyssean life: to regain his throne the king could count on no one
but his wife, his son and his faithful slaves; in other words, royal power .was personal
power. Nothing could be more misleading than the analogy of king against barons at the
close of the Middle Ages, in which the ultimate triumph of the royal principle rested on
the backing of commoners. In war the commoners of Ithaca or Sparta or Argos took up arms;
then, in the .face of the hostile outsider (and especially of an invading outsider), the
community was real and meaningful, and the king, as its head and representative, received
support and obedience. In peace he was entitled to various perquisites, and under ordinary
circumstances they were given freely. But when the lords fell out among themselves the
issue was usually one for themselves alone.

Despite the general silence of the poems on the doings of the ordinary people of
Greece, there is direct evidence on this score. Towards the close of the assembly summoned
by Telemachus, Mentor complained: 'Now, indeed, I am angry with the rest of the people
(demos), as you all sit in silence and do not upbraid the suitors and keep them in check,
they being few and you many' (2.2gg-41). At the end of the tale, when the suitors were
dead and Odysseus and his father were having their little feast of reunion at the old
man's farm, there was another gathering in the agora. This was the meeting of the irate
relatives of the victims, demanding blood vengeance. But it was no formal assembly. The
men came together because 'Rumour the messenger went about the city' with the news of the
slaughter (24-413) - Rumour, who was Zeus's messenger but had never been designated a
herald in Ithaca. The poet makes it clear that this was a

meeting of aristocrats (if there were commoners present, they came as retainers of
noble households, not as members of the community of Ithaca). Hence here he never uses
such words as demos or 'multitude'. although some translators have mistakenly
injected 'the people' into the lines.

The blood-feud rally was normal. Odysseus had himself anticipated such an action when
he said to Telemachus after the slaughter of the suitors: 'Let us consider, that all may
be for the very best. For a person who kills but one man in a country-even one for whom
there are not many left behind to help-flees, forsaking his kinsmen and his fatherland.
And we have killed the pillars of the city, the very noblest of the youths in Ithaca'
(23.117- 22). This was private vengeance. But what was the point, at the beginning of the
poem, in calling an assembly to consider what Telemachus explicitly labelled a private
matter? Throughout that meeting Telemachus never once addressed the people. He talked to
the suitors, repeating in public what he had already demanded of them in private, that
they give up their improper method of wooing. Only at the end did Mentor turn to the
demos and say: I am angry with you that you do not intervene. Telemachus had clearly
failed in his purpose, which was to try to mobilize public opinion against the suitors,
thus transforming a private matter into a public one, in effect. Realizing this, Mentor
brought the issue into the open, again without success. That is why Leocritus could answer
with a sneer, 'It is difficult to fight against greater numbers about a feast' (2.244-5).
Mentor had stressed the potential power of the demos: 'they [the suitors] being few
and you many'. Oh no, replied Leocritus, the many are disinterested and neutral, and
therefore we and our kinsmen and retainers outnumber you and the forces you can muster.
Odysseus himself would 'meet with evil destiny, were he to fight against greater numbers'
(2.250-1).

Neutrality is a state of mind, and anyone who enters the arena to fight for power must
keep his eyes and ears on the audience; their attitude may shift suddenly, and they may
swarm into the pit and take sides. After the plan to ambush Telemachus had failed,
Antinous argued with the other suitors that further delay

was perilous. Let us take him into the fields, Antinous proposed, and do away with him,
for 'the multitude no longer bear good will to us in all respects. Come, therefore, before
he calls the Achaeans together to an assembly' and tells them how we plotted against his
life. 'Hearing of these evil deeds, they will not approve. Beware, then, lest they do us
evil and drive us from our land, and we come to the country of others' (16.375-82).

Antinous feared that the demos, previously unmoved by Telemachus's appeal,
might now decide to take sides. Notably there was no reference to rights in his speech. It
was not the assertion of popular rights that he foresaw, but Telemachus's rapid coming of
age, his beginning to rule by might, and hence the danger . that he could persuade the
demos out of its neutrality and into direct action. Perhaps the memory was still with
Antinous of the day when his father had fled to Odysseus for asylum from the demos,
'for they were terribly angry because he had gone off with the Taphian pirates to raid the
Thesprotians, who were in friendly relations with us' (16-425-7).

Hypothetically, at least, the opposite possibility was also conceivable -- that the
people would shift to the position of the suitors. When Telemachus was Nestor's guest,
Nestor asked him point blank why he continued to suffer the suitors. 'Tell me, do you
yield willingly or do the people hate you up and down the land, obeying the voice of a
god?' (3.214-5). Telemachus made no direct reply then, but he was asked the identical
question on another occasion, this time by Odysseus in beggarly disguise ( 16.95-6) , and
he said that the answer was no to both alternatives. Lack of power alone caused his
passivity.

In fact, we are never told what the demos of Ithaca really thought about the
whole affair. The narrative reached its end without their intervention on either side,
despite all the questioning, the doubts and the fears, the efforts to influence public
opinion. Like Eliot's women of Canterbury, the demos of Ithaca seemed to say by its
neutrality:

King rules or barons rule; ...

But mostly we are left to our own devices,

And we are content if we are left alone.

The suitors failed to take up Antinous's proposal that they seek a solution by
murdering Telemachus. Whether his fears were warranted or not is unanswerable, for another
ending was already prepared. While the conference was going on, Odysseus was hiding in
Ithaca, and the suitors were soon to meet death at his hands. What, we may speculate,
would have happened had a chance arrow brought Odysseus down at that moment? It does not
necessarily follow that the demos would have been moved to reprisal. Nothing in the
accepted rules of behaviour, neither divine precept nor convention, demanded that they
act. Homicide was no crime in a public sense, and regicide was but a special kind of
homicide. Had Odysseus been killed, Telemachus would have faced a choice: he could play
Hamlet or he could play Orestes. That was his familial responsibility; the community had
none. 'And of the son of Atreus even you have heard, though far off,' Nestor had said to
Telemachus.; chow he came and how Aegisthus devised his evil end. But sadly indeed did he
pay for it. How good it is that a son of the man should be left, as that son took
vengeance on wily Aegisthus, his father's murderer' (3.193- 8). Telemachus's misfortune
was that, faced not with a single enemy but with 108, he came from a line of only sons and
had no blood-brothers upon whom to call.

Blood vengeance is but the most dramatic indicator that in the world of Odysseus
personal power meant the strength of the household and the family. In that sense the
personalization of kingly power went very deep. The suitors may have denied any hostile
intentions against the oikos of Odysseus, but this was an atypical situation in
every respect, and Antinous finally suggested that they kill Telemachus and divide the
estate among themselves. The rule was complete identity between king's treasury and king's
oikos , precisely as his personal retainers were his public officials. The gold and
bronze and grain and wine and fine cloth that Telemachus saw lying in the locked storeroom
belonged to his father and would come to him by inheritance, whether they had been
acquired by Odysseus as king or by Odysseus as mere nobleman. No wonder Telemachus said
with charmingly naive pathos, when it seemed that the suitors must

surely triumph, 'For indeed it is no bad thing to be a king: forthwith his house
becomes wealthy and he himself most honoured' (1.392-3).

The base of royal wealth and power lay in the holdings in land and cattle, without
which no man could have become king in the first place. While the king reigned he also had
the use of a separate estate, called a temenos, which the community placed at his
disposal. .This was the sole exception to the rule that all royal possessions and
acquisitions melted into his private oikos . Next on the list of 'royal revenues'
came booty -an all-embracing word covering cattle, metal, female captives, and whatever
else of wealth was seizable (except land, for the simple reason that wars were not fought
for territory and did not lead to its acquisition). In his disguise as a Cretan beggar
Odysseus boasted to Eumaeus of his forbr /mer glory. 'Nine times did I lead men and fleet
ships against men of another land, and very much [booty] fell to me, of which I chose what
suited me, and much 1 then obtained by lot' (14.230-3). The ruler thus not only shared
with his men in the general distribution of the spoils, equalized by the drawing of lots,
but he received an added share, by first choice. In a major expedition the
commander-in-chief took the royal share, though other kings were among his followers. 'My
hands bear the brunt of furious battle; but when the distribution comes your prerogatives
are far greater, and I go to my ships bearing something slight, but dear to me, when I am
weary of fighting' (I 165-8) .So Achilles to Agamemnon, and though 'some thing slight'
underrates the acquisitions of the 'sacker of cities', # there is no mistaking the measure
of his resentment against Agamemnon, his inferior in prowess but his superior, by right of
position, in the sharing of the fruits.

And then there were the gifts, endlessly given and endlessly talked about. No word
immediately denoting compulsion, like

*The same word was applied to a temple estate set aside for the enjoyment or a god.
With the decay of kingship in post-Homeric Greece, the latter became the sole meaning or temenos.
# 'Something slight, but dear to me' appears twice in the Odyssey, in a begging context
(6.208; 14-58).

'taxes' or even feudal 'dues', is to be found in the poems for payments from people to
ruler, apart from the context of the special prerogative in the distribution of booty and
of the meat of sacrificial animals. ' And seven well situated cities will I give him. ..,'
said Agamemnon. 'And there dwell men of many flocks and many herds, who will honour him
like a god with gifts.'* Details of this gift-giving by the people are utterly lacking;
for Ithaca it is not even mentioned. That it took its place, however, alongside booty as
an important and continuing reason why it was 'no bad thing to be a king' can scarcely be
doubted.

At times the gifts, like the benevolences of Charles I, seem something less than
voluntary. 'Come now,' said King Alcinous of the Phaeacians to the nobles feasting the
parting of Odysseus, 'let us each give him a great tripod and a cauldron; and we in turn
shall gather among the people and be recompensed, for it is burdensome for one person to
give without recompense' ( 13.13- 15). Nevertheless, it would be a false appreciation to
see nothing but euphemism in the insistence on calling such payments 'gifts'. For one
thing, they lacked the regularity of taxes or dues as well as their fixity of amount. Even
so limited a play of free choice as the time and amount of the payment gave it overtones
of sentiment and value ordinarily absent from taxation. It is difficult to measure this
psychological distinction, but it cannot be ignored for that reason. 'Honour him like a
god with gifts.' Fear the gods as one m~, they are not tax collectors, and man's
relationship to them is of another order. In the same way, a gift to a ruler, even when
compulsory for all practical purposes, is in its formal voluntarism of another order from
the fixed tax with its openly coercive character .

What was the counter-gift to the people? The answer is chiefly in the area we label
foreign affairs. The effective, powerful king gave protection and defence, by his dealings
with kings abroad, by his organization of such activities as the building of walls,

* IX 149-55. Agamemnon’s long descriptions of his proposed gift of amends to
Achilles is repeated to Achilles by Odysseus, word for word, IX 264-98; the passage quoted
here is found in lines 291-7. Agamemnon's right of disposal over seven cities is a unique
and unexplained instance in the poems.

and by his personal leadership in battle. He was 'shepherd of the people', a Homeric
commonplace that had none of the Arcadian image in it, only Goethe's 'he who is no warrior
can be no shepherd'.* Sarpedon, commander of the Lycian contingent supporting the Trojans,
made the point bluntly: 'Glaucus, why are we two the most honoured in Lycia in seats of
honour and meat and full goblets, and all look upon us as gods, and we hold a great temenos
on the banks of the Xanthus, a fine one of orchard- land and wheat-bearing land? Therefore
we must now stand in the first ranks of the Lycians and participate in fiery battle, So
that some of the Lycians armed with stout cuirasses may say, "Our kings who are lords
in Lycia are indeed not inglorious, they that eat fat sheep ,and choice honey-sweet wine;
oh no, they are also of stout might, since they fight in the first ranks of the
Lycians"' (XII 310-21).

The king gave military leadership and protection, and he gave little else, despite some
hints of royal justice (and injustice) scattered through the Odyssey, once in a lengthier
green-pastures simile: '0 lady [Penelope], no one among mortal men throughout the
boundless earth would blame you, for your fame reaches the wide heaven, as does [the fame]
of an excellent king, one who, god-fearing and ruling among men many and mighty, upholds
righteousness, and the dark earth bears wheat and barley and the trees are heavy with
fruit, and the flocks bear without fail, and the sea gives forth fish, out of [his] good
leadership, and the people thrive under him' ( 19. 107- 14 ) .This direct linking of right
rule and the fruitfulness of nature is anachronistic, as is the notion of 'god-fearing';
they belong not to the time of Odysseus but to the eighth or seventh century B.C., when
the idea of a world ordered by divine justice had entered men's minds. They belong in the
poems of Hesiod, not in the Odyssey. Everything that Homer tells us demonstrates
that here he permitted a contemporary note to enter, carefully restricting it, however, to
a harmless simile and thus avoiding any possible contradiction in the narrative itself.
The return of Odysseus to the throne of Ithaca was just and

* Quoted from H. Fränkel,Die homerischm Gleichnisse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck,
1921),p.60.

proper, but it was a matter of private action for personal interests, not the triumph
of righteousness in the public interest.

One need scarcely ask why Alcinous did not let the people make a direct gift to
Odysseus. Tripods and cauldrons were treasure, things which only the aristocracy possessed
in significant quantity. Nor would it have been fitting for the common people to provide
the gifts to speed a hero on his journey. In a society so status-bound, in which
gift-giving had a quantity of ceremonialism about it, no one could just give a gift to
anyone else. There were rather strict lines of giving, and grades and ranks of objects.
Stated in other terms, the gift and the relationship between giver and recipient were
inseparable. What went up the line from the people to their lord was one matter; what went
to an outsider was something else again, and no confusion between the two was permissible.

However the psychologists understand the affective side of this gift-giving,
functionally it took its place with marriage and with armed might as an act through which
status relations were created, and what we should call political obligations. The world of
Odysseus was split into many communities more or less like Ithaca. Among them, between
each community and every other one, the normal relationship was one of hostility, at times
passive, in a kind of armed truce, and at times active and bellicose. When the slaughtered
suitors entered Hades, the arrival en masse of the 'best men' of Ithaca was startling, and
automatically it was attributed to one of two causes. 'Did Poseidon', asked the shade of
Agamemnon, 'stir up heavy winds and high waves and overpower you in your ships? Or did
hostile men slay you on dry land while you were rustling cattle and fair flocks of sheep,
or while they were defending their city and their women?'*

In so permanently hostile an environment the heroes were permitted to seek allies;
their code of honour did not demand that they stand alone against the world. But there was
nothing in their social system that created the possibility for two communities, as such,
to enter an alliance. Only personal devices were avail-

* 24:109-13. In the earlier scene in Hades, Odysseus greeted the shade of Agamemnon
with the identical words (11.399-403).

able, through the channels of household and kin. The first of these was marriage, which
served, among other things, to establish new lines of kin, and hence of mutual obligation,
that crossed and criss-crossed the Hellenic world. Only men arranged marriages, and only a
man from whom Zeus had taken his wits would have neglected considerations of wealth,
power, and support in making his selection.

Several generations of such calculated dealing out of daughters and assorted female
relatives created an intricate, and sometimes confusing, network of obligations. That was
one reason why the heroes memorized their genealogies carefully and recited them often.
When Dioli1edes and Glaucus 'came together in the middle between the two [armies ], eager
to do battle', the former stopped and asked a question. 'Who are you, brave sir, of mortal
men? For never before have I seen you in glorious battle.' Glaucus's reply was a long
recital, full sixty-five lines, chiefly of the heroic exploits and the begettings of his
grandfather Bellerophon. His final words were: 'Of this lineage and blood I vaunt myself
to be.'

'So said he,' the poet went on, 'and Diomedes of the brave war-cry rejoiced.
..."In truth, you are my paternal guest-friend of old; for illustrious Oineus at one
time entertained excellent Bellerophon in his palace and for twenty days he kept him, and
they gave each other fine gifts of guest-friendship. ...Therefore I am now a dear
guest-friend to you in central Argos, and you [to me] in Lycia whenever I come to
your-land. So let us avoid each other's spears" .-there are Trojans enough for me to
kill, and Greeks for you. ' "Let us exchange armour with each other, so that they too
may know that we avow ourselves to be paternal guest-friends."’*

This is not comedy. Homer was no Shaw, Diomedes no chocolate-creamsoldier.
Guest-friendship was a very serious institution, the alternative to marriage in forging
bonds between rulers; and there could have been no more dramatic test of its value in
holding the network of relationships together than just such a critical

* VI 119-231. That was the occasion when Glaucus went witless and gave golden armour
for bronze.

moment. Guest-friend and guest-friendship were far more than sentimental terms of human
affection. In the world of Odysseus they were technical names for very concrete
relationships, as formal and as evocative of rights and duties as marriage. And they
remained so well thereafter: Herodotus (1.69) tells how, in the middle of the sixth
century before Christ, Croesus, king of Lydia, 'sent messengers to Sparta bearing gifts
and requesting an alliance'. The Spartans 'rejoiced at the coming of the Lydians and they
took the oaths of guest-friendship and alliance'.

The Herodotus story documents the persistence of guest- friendship; it also shows how
far the Greek world had moved from the days of Odysseus. Croesus exchanged oaths of guest-
friendship with the Spartans, but Homer knew of no such tie between Argives and Lycians or
Taphians and Ithacans-only between individuals, Diomedes and Glaucus, 'Mentes' and
Telemachus. 'Guest-friend', it is understood, is the conventional, admittedly clumsy,
English rendition of the Greek xenos in one of its senses. The same Greek word also meant
'stranger', 'foreigner', and sometimes 'host', a semantic range symbolic of the
ambivalence which characterized all dealings with the stranger in that archaic world.

The first thing we are told about the Phaeacians -immediately establishing the
Utopianism of the tale-is that they existed in almost complete isolation; in fact, that
Alcinous's father, Nausithous, had transplanted the community from Hypereia to Scheria
(both mythical places) to that very end. There is no cause to fear, Nausicaa reassured her
maids as they ran from Odysseus on the beach. 'That mortal man does not exist, neither has
he been born, who comes to the land of the Phaeacians bringing war, for we are very dear
to the immortals. We live far off, surrounded by the stormy sea, the outermost of men, and
no other mortals have dealing with us' (6.201-5). Nausicaa overstated the situation a
little. After she had escorted Odysseus to the town, Athena took over and threw a covering
of mist about 'him to ensure his safe arrival at the palace. 'Neither look at any man',
was the goddess's warning, 'nor inquire of one. For they do not readily bear with
strangers' (7.31-2).

100

That was one pole: fear, suspicion, distrust of the stranger. With it went his
rightlessness, his lack of kin to safeguard or avenge him as the case may have been,
against ill-doing. At the other pole was the general human obligation of hospitality: in
one of his attributes the father of the immortals was Zeus Xenios, the god of hospitality.
It was precisely in Phaeacia that, after the earlier forebodings, Odysseus was welcomed so
richly that King Alcinous and his court became proverbial among later Greeks for their
luxurious living. That paradox was a model of the basic ambivalence of the heroic world
toward the uninvited stranger, of the rapid oscillation between deep, well-warranted fear
and lavish entertainment.

The poet underscores his point in another way among the Cyclopes, in pure Never-Never
Land. Odysseus's opening gambit was to plead for the traditional hospitality, and
Polyphemus replied with the most open cynicism: I shall devour you last among your
company; 'that shall be my gift of hospitality' (9.370). Polyphemus stood at one pole
only; there was nothing confusing or uncertain about his unmitigated hostility to all
strangers. And again Homer had caught the right shading. We, said the Cyclops, 'give no
heed to aegis-bearing Zeus, nor to the blessed gods, in- as much as we are far better'
(9.275-6). The giant was to pay for his hybris soon enough, tricked by the superior
craftiness of god-fearing Odysseus. Behind the fairy-tale, clearly, there lay a distinct
view of social evolution. In primitive times, the poet seems to be suggesting, man lived
in a state of permanent struggle and war to the death against the outsider. Then the gods
intervened, and through their precepts, their themis , a new ideal was set before
man, and especially before a king, an obligation of hospitality: call strangers and
beggars are from Zeus' (14.57-8). Henceforth men had to pick a difficult path between the
two, between the reality of a society in which the stranger was still a problem and a
threat, and the newer morality, according to which he was somehow covered by the aegis of
Zeus.

Institutionally it was guest-friendship above. all that weakened the tension between
the poles. 'trade may have removed the enmity from the surface for a moment, but it made
no lasting

101

contribution in this area. On the contrary, trade tended to strengthen suspicion of the
outsider, for all its indispensability. The unrelieved, totally negative Homeric image of
the Phoenicians makes that absolutely clear. Once again the point is driven home in
Utopia. The Phaeacians were the ideal seamen, men who, unlike the Greeks themselves, had
no horror of the sea and no reason to dread it. 'For the Phaeacians have no pilots and no
rudders, which other ships have; but [the ships] themselves understand the thoughts and
intents of men' (8.557-9). Yet not only is there no single reference to Phaeacian trade,
but it was in Phaeacia that Odysseus received the crowning insult of being likened to a
merchant.

Guest-friendship was of an altogether different order and conception. The stranger who
had a xenos in a foreign land -and every other community was foreign soil- had an
effective substitute for kinsmen, a protector, representative and ally. He had a refuge if
he were forced to flee his home, a storehouse on which to draw when compelled to travel,
and a source of men and arms if drawn into battle. These were all personal relations, but
with the powerful lords the personal merged into the political, and then guest-friendship
was the Homeric version, or forerunner, of political and military alliances. Not that
every guest-friend automatically and invariably responded to a call to arms; that would
have been a pattern of uniformity unattained, and unattainable, in the fluid and
unstable political situation of the world of Odysseus. In this respect a guest-friend was
like a king; his worth was indirect proportion to his power. During the years of his
unexplained absence, all of Odysseus's xenoi might well have agreed with his father
Laertes when he said to one, 'the countless gifts which you gave, you bestowed in vain'
(24.283).

As the suitors entered Hades, Agamemnon's shade addressed Amphimedon in particular. 'Do
you not remember the time when I came to your house there [in Ithaca] with godlike
Menelaus, to urge Odysseus to go along with me to Ilion in the well- benched ships? And it
was a whole month before we had sailed across the wide sea, for it was with difficulty
that we prevailed

102

upon Odysseus sacker of cities.* To recruit an army among outsiders in what was, to
begin with, on1y a family feud over a stolen wife, Agamemnon naturally made the fullest
use of his guest-friends. But having called upon Amphimedon for the service of
hospitality, Agamemnon apparently did not ask for his military services. For that he went
to Odysseus, the king, with whom he had no formal relationship.

It would be an idle game to try to guess why Amphimedon stayed at home. Or why
Odysseus, having finally been prevailed upon and having raised an army, did not, or could
not, engage a larger proportion of the Ithacan nobility in the expedition. The fact is
that we are left in rather complete darkness about the way the Achaean army was put
together. Perhaps the procedure in Ithaca was the same as among Achilles's Myrmidons.
There one son from each family was chosen by lot (XXIV 397-400). More likely the methods
varied from community to community, according to the desires, interests, and, above all,
powers of the respective kings and nobles. No Greek community had been attacked or even
threatened; hence participation in the Trojan War was of no direct Concern to the demos.

Again we are reminded of the fluidity of the political scene. Agamemnon, the most
powerful of the many rulers among the Hellenes, had as his guest-friend in Ithaca not the
king, Odysseus, but one of the non-ruling aristocrats, Amphimedon. There was nothing
strange or rare about this. It was repeated allover the Greek world, just as marriage,
rigidly bound within class lines, was perfectly acceptable between king or king's son and
the daughter of a noble Who was not a king. 'First among equals' meant equality of status
with respect to the two peaceful relationships that could be established across
community lines, marriage and guest-friendship. There could be no notion of blood royal in
a world in which 'there are many other kings' in each community.

A third kind of relationship existed, however, in which inequality was expressed
-that of the retainer. While marriage

* 24-115-19. Presumably it was to Amphimedon's father, Melaneus, that Agamemnon came,
for Amphimedon would have been a child then. In what follows I continue to refer to
Amphimedon for convenience.

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and guest-friendship went outside the community -- the latter always, the former
sometimes -- retainership was a strictly internal institution, one that set up a loose
hierarchy among the nobles of a community and played a key role in the internal power
structure. The situation may be stated in another way: the retainers constituted the third
essential element of the aristocratic household, the other two being the members of the
family and the labour force (whether slaves or hirelings). 'Retainer' is a loose word, and
that is why it fits the Greek therapon. At one end of the scale it defines the free
but surely not aristocratic attendants at the palace banquets, Who performed the offices
'whereby inferiors serve their betters' (15.324). And at the other end is a hero like
Meriones, therapon of King Idomeneus of Crete. Meriones enjoys some of the proudest
epithets in the poems, such as 'the equal of fleet Ares' or 'leader of men' (XII 295,
304); he is one of the very few secondary chieftains named in the catalogue of ships; and
his battle prowess receives many lines in the Iliad . Nevertheless, it must be
assumed that Meriones, as a therapon, followed Idomeneus to Troy as a matter of
obligation, not because he had been 'prevailed upon'.

Obligations of this nature and intensity, like the obligations imposed by lineage, were
personal. That does not mean that they were arbitrary, weak or uncertain, but it does mean
that in very large measure they stood apart from and outside the bonds of community; or
better, that they stood above. It was Menelaus Who was aggrieved by the flight of Helen,
not Sparta. It was his brother Agamemnon Who assumed leadership of the war of reprisal,
not Mycenae. It was Amphimedon and Odysseus to whom Agamemnon appealed for assistance, not
Ithaca. But it was all of Troy that fought back, not out of loyalty to Paris-or even to
old Priam, Who was bound to uphold his son but because the Greek invaders threatened to
destroy them all.

The ceaseless interplay of household, kin and community, at home and abroad, created a
complex variety of individual situations and difficulties. Yet there was a kind of
fundamental pattern and a trend which, though not really discernible in the poems
themselves, can be seen through that most useful of all the in-

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struments of the historian, hindsight. The anthropologists have taught us what a
kinship society looks like in its purer forms. It is characteristic of much of the
primitive world that 'the conduct of individuals to one another is very largely regulated
on the basis of kinship, this being brought about by the formation of fixed patterns of
behaviour for each recognized kind of kinship relation.*. This is no description of the
world of Odysseus, in which the family tie, though strong, was narrowly defined, and in
which other strong and often more binding relationships were established outside the blood
group. In evolutionary terms, in so far as they may legitimately be employed, the world of
the Homeric poems had advanced beyond the primitive. Kinship was then but one of several
organizing principles, and not the most powerful one. Pre-eminence lay in the oikos ,
the large noble household with its staff of slaves and commoners, its aristocratic
retainers, and its allies among relatives and guest-friends.

Within the household, as within a lineage, the behaviour patterns of man to man (and
to woman) were graded and fixed. As between households, too, there were many customary
rules of what was proper and what was not, and we must believe that in the daily routine
of life they were obeyed as a matter of course. But a higher coercive power was largely
lacking, the community principle being still so rudimentary. Therefore, as one princely
oikos vied with another for greater wealth and power, for more prestige and a superior
status, breaches of the rules were Common enough to create the almost unbroken tension
that was the stamp of heroic existence. In time to come great moral teachers would make
much of this conflict between status, prestige, and power on the one side and divine
themis on the other. Neither the heroes nor their minstrels were systematic thinkers.
Moral principles and philosophical abstractions were no doubt inherent in their tales, but
the bards were content simply to tell the story.

'It is no bad thing to be a king', said one of the characters in the story. Yet one
need only turn the pages of Homer or read at random in the legends of the Greeks to
discover that betrayal

* A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen and
West, 1952), p. 29.

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and assassination were a most common fate among rulers. Olympian Zeus himself had
become chief of the gods only by overthrowing his father Cronus and the other Titans,
and Cronus before him found the path to power equally bloody. One may assess the meaning
of the myth-symbols as one wishes. One may allow for the fact that narrative poetry is
poetry of action, and that before the invention of romantic love, deeds of violence made
up the whole of the thematic material. Nevertheless, it is scarcely conceivable that the
tales could have remained so one-sided in their murders, rapes, seductions, fratricides,
patricides, and plottings had kingship in reality been a comfortable position of
perquisites in a regular dynastic succession.

Nor was this merely a matter of open conflict over who should hold the throne. Behind
that there emerged a more fundamental and, in the end, decisive issue. In promoting his
own and his household's interests, the king-aristocrat became the agent of the community
principle: the stronger the sense of community and the broader its powers, the greater the
king and the more secure in his position. In reply, the aristocracy demanded hegemony for
the oikos and for their class, under a king if possible, without a king if need be.
Homer records many incidents in this conflict and he makes no secret of his own preference
for kingly rule, notably in his idealization of royal rule among the Phaeacians. He gives
no clues to the outcome, but we know it well. By the time the Odyssey was written
the defeat of the kings had been so complete that kingship was gone from most of Hellas.
In its place the aristocrats ruled as a group, equals without a first among them.

And then the aristocrats found themselves with a new menace, undreamed of in the world
of Odysseus. The demos, nearly always a passive bystander in the earlier political
conflicts, began to know its own strength and capacity for rule. In the Iliad and
the Odyssey it grumbled or it acclaimed but it took orders. That was the recognized
role of inferiors, to 'honour him like a god'. On one occasion Agamemnon tried to use
psychology on his troops, with such ill success that panic set in and the whole Greek
army, become a mob,-began to embark in disorder, determined to

106

sail for home and abandon the war. Hera intervened and sent Athena to Odysseus with
instructions that he pull himself together and put a stop to the disgraceful flight.
Taking Agamemnon's sceptre, Odysseus went among the soldiers, cajoling and arguing as he
moved.

'When he came to one who was a king and a man of eminence, he stood beside him and
restrained him with gentle words. ... But whatever man of the demos [i.e. commoner]
he saw and found him shouting, him he struck with the sceptre, upbraiding him in these
words: "Good sir, sit still and hearken to the words of those who are your betters,
you who are no warrior and a weakling, who are not counted either in battle or in
council" , (II 188-202).

That principle remained unchallenged in Odysseus's day. Whatever the conflicts and
cleavages among the noble households and families, they were always in accord that there
could be no crossing of the great line which separated the aristoi from the many,
the heroes from the non-heroes.

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CHAPTER 5

MORALS AND VALUES

Much of the twenty-third book of the Iliad is given over to an account of the
funeral games staged by Achilles in honour of Patroclus. Before the assembled Achaean host
the best athletes among the heroes competed in what later became standard Greek events,
the chariot race, the foot race, boxing, wrestling, and also in weight throwing. ' And
from his ships Achilles brought out prizes, cauldrons and tripods and horses and mules and
strong oxen, and also well-girdled women and gray iron' (III 259-61). The first event,
described with fantastic power, brilliance and precision, was the chariot race won by
Diomedes. Nestor's son Antilochus barely defeated Menelaus for second place, but only
because he had fouled the Spartan king on the far turn. Fourth came Meriones, and far to
the rear poor Eumelus, thrown from his chariot when the yoke cracked, and forced to
complete the course on foot, pulling the chariot behind him.

There was a prize for each Competitor, in a sequence specified by Achilles beforehand.
Diomedes immediately took the slavebr / Woman and tripod designated for the victor. Then
Achilles proposed-remarkably, it must be said-that Eumelus be given the second prize, a
mare, as a mark of compassion for his sorry luck, and the audience assented by
acclamation, precisely as if they were sitting in formal assembly. Whereupon Antilochus
'rose and spoke of his right. "O Achilles, I shall be exceedingly angry with you if
you carry out what you have said." As for Eumelus, "he ought to have prayed to
the immortals, then he would not have come in last of all in the race. If you have pity on
him, and he is dear to your heart, you have much gold in your hut, you have copper and
sheep, you have slave women and uncloven horses. Take from these and give him an even
greater prize. ... But this one I will not give. For her, let him who will try battle at
my hand." Achilles smiled and conceded.

108

'But Menelaus also rose among them, sore at heart, full of indignation at Antilochus. A
herald placed the sceptre in his hand and bade the Argives be silent. And then the godlike
[isotheos, literally "god-equal"] man addressed them: "Antilochus,
you had been wise before, what kind of behaviour was this? You dishonoured my valour and
you interfered with my horses, pushing ahead yours, which are very inferior. But come,
chieftains and leaders of the Argives, state the right between the two of us."

Before the chieftains and leaders could state the right, however, Menelaus changed
his mind and adopted an alternative procedure. ' "Come now, I myself will state the
right, and I believe that none of the Danaans will rebuke me, for it will be straight.
Antilochus, come here, fosterling of Zeus. According to proper procedure (themis), stand
before your horses and chariot, take in your hand the thin whip with which you drove
before, and, with your hand on the horses, swear by [Poseidon] the earth-mover and
earth-shaker that you did not deliberately interfere with my chariot by a trick." But
Nestor's son, 'who had been wise' until his eagerness to win impelled him to trickery, had
recovered his wisdom by then, enough to refuse this challenge to perjure himself in the
name of Poseidon. He apologized, offered the mare to Menelaus, and restored the peace.

Homer gave this scene the outward form of a regular agora, which it unquestionably was
not. Nor did it have to be. Menelaus demanded his right and he had the choice of methods,
neither of which required an assembly. The issue between him and Antilochus could either
be submitted to arbitration, as he first proposed, or it could be decided by oath. The
two procedures were equal in validity and fully interchangeable; they were both ways of
‘stating the right', and they were both final, without appeal to any higher earthly
authority. Should the answer turn out to be crooked, rather than straight, then the gods
would have to arrange proper punishment. Had Antilochus, for example, accepted the
challenge and perjured himself, beyond a doubt Poseidon would have taken merciless
vengeance for so great an insult to his honour. But it was not the business of any mortal
to raise the charge of false swearing.

109

The earlier issue of right was between Antilochus and Eumelus. Antilochus chose a third
method, trial by armed combat. And the decision thus arrived at, had anyone taken him up;
would also have been final: to the victor goes the right. There is a nice touch here,
though an irrelevant one: between Antilochus and Eumelus there was no question of fact;
Eumelus had finished last and Antilochus would have beaten him even if he had raced
fairly. Nevertheless, Antilochus could have chosen arbitration or the oath, just as
Menelaus could have made trial with Antilochus by the sword. With variations in detail,
these were the three ways, and the only- three ways, that were available to the Homeric
heroes for the settlement of disputes over rights.

Apart from the moment when the people acclaimed Achilles's gesture of compassion for
Eumelus, the assemblage, heroes and demos alike, remained passive spectators. The defence
of a right was a purely private matter. He who felt aggrieved had the responsibility to
take the necessary steps and the right to choose from among the available methods. His kin
or his guest-friends, retainers and followers might intervene in support, but still as a
private action. Although there are a few fragmentary phrases in the poems about royal
judgements, they are contemporary notes, and therefore anachronistic, which slipped by the
poet. He was composing at a time when the community principle had advanced to a point of
some limited public administration of justice. But he was singing about a time when that
was not the case, except for the intangible power of public opinion. How imposing a factor
that was cannot be estimated, but it was surely significant and it must at times have led
to intervention by outsiders to keep the peace. The principle remained, however, of
strictly private rights privately protected. In no other way would the suitor theme of the
Odyssey have been intelligible, and without the suitors' ruthless persistence and
Telemachus's impotence there would have been no Odyssey.

Menelaus and Antilochus were equals in status. That was an essential fact, for justice
among the heroes, like justice in the aristocratic code of honour of more modem times, was
a matter for equals alone. Menelaus could no more have challenged Ther-

110

sites to an oath than a Prussian Junker could have challenged a Berlin shopkeeper to a
duel. Odysseus, we remember, stopped the panic in the Greek forces by appealing gently to
the captains and by using the club and the command on the rank and file. The poet was not
satisfied to close the scene on that note; instead, he took the opportunity to write a
little essay on social classes and the modes of behaviour proper to each. Once Odysseus
had succeeded in returning the men to the agora, the narrative took a new turn.

'Now all the others sat down and remained orderly in their seats; only Thersites the
loose-tongued kept on scolding, he whose heart was full of words, many and disorderly,
quarrelling with the kings vainly and not in good order. ...And he was the ugliest man who
came to Ilion. He was bandy-legged and lame in one foot; his two shoulders were hunched
and bent in upon his chest, and above them his head was misshapen, with sparse hair
growing on it.' The substance of Thersites's complaint was this: The devil with fighting
to amass booty for Agamemnon; let us go home.

Odysseus strode to Thersites, ordered him to cease from his reviling of kings, and
threatened to drive him naked and weeping from the assembly. 'He spoke thus and beat him
on the back and shoulders with the sceptre. And he doubled up and a big tear fell from
him, and a bloody welt rose on his back beneath the golden sceptre. Then he sat down and
was frightened; smarting with pain and looking foolish, he wiped away the tear. The
others, though they were sorry, laughed lightly at him, and this is how one would speak,
glancing at his neighbour: "Oh yes! In truth Odysseus has done countless good things
before, being preeminent in sound counsels and marshalling battles, but this is by far
the best thing he has done among the Argives, that he has stopped this foul-mouthed
slanderer from haranguing. Hardly, I think, will his arrogant heart again bid him rail at
kings with words of reproach." So spoke the multitude' (II 211-78).

Those final words, 'so spoke the multitude', protest too much. It is as if the poet
himself felt that he had overdrawn the contrast. Do not think I talk from an aristocratic
bias -that is the sense of

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the last four words. Even the commoners among the Hellenes stood aghast at Thersites's
defective sense of fitness, and, though they pitied him as one of their own, they
concurred with full heart in the rebuke administered by Odysseus and in the methods he
employed. 'This is by far the best thing he has done among the Argives' indeed, for
Thersites had gnawed at the foundations on which the world of Odysseus was erected.

Of course, Homer reflected the views and values of the aristocracy, from the opening
line of the Iliad to the final sentence of the Odyssey. But what does that
tell us? Does it mean, for example, that he is never to be trusted when he puts an idea or
sentiment on the tongue of a Thersites or a Eumaeus? To answer that question in the
affirmative would be to imagine a society in which aristocrats and commoners held two
completely contradictory sets of values and beliefs, a society such as the world has never
known. Beyond a doubt there were two standards in certain spheres of behaviour, with
respect to the ethos of work, for example, or in the protection of rights. Odysseus's
employment of the sceptre offers a fine symbol. On this occasion he had the use of
Agamemnon's sceptre, a gift from Zeus himself, fashioned by Hephaestus for the king of the
gods, given by Zeus to Pelops, from whom it passed to Atreus, from Atreus to Thyestes, and
then to Agamemnon, grandson of Pelops (it finally came to rest as a sacred relic in
Plutarch's native city of Chaeronea). The sceptre, any sceptre, was not only the symbol of
authority, it was also the mark of themis, of orderly procedure, and so it was given to
each assembly speaker in turn to secure his inviolability, as when Menelaus rose to
challenge Antilochus. Against Thersites, however, it was a club, for Thersites was of
those 'who are not counted either in battle or in council'. He harangued the assembly
without themis, he had been given no sceptre by the herald, therefore it was proper for
him to receive it across the back.

The trouble is that we simply do not know how rights were determined when commoners
were involved, whether between noble and commoner or between commoner and commoner.
Neither Homer nor his audience cared about such matters and we have no other source of
information. This unconcern goes

112

much deeper, extending to virtually the whole of the value scale. We are left to guess,
and with little to base our guesses on. The evidence of what has been called the peasant
type of heroic poetry, oral epics composed and recited among peasants rather than in the
halls of barons -a very widespread type in many regions of Europe and Asia- tends to argue
that they often told the same kind of stories, about the same kinds of heroes, with the
identical values and virtues, as the aristocratic epic of the Homeric type. Against that
there is the bitterness of Hesiod, with his peasant orientation, as well as the strong
inference that in matters of religion, at least, Homer's indifference to the common people
entailed a deliberate rejection of popular religious beliefs and practices. Presumably the
commoner of Ithaca stood somewhat in the middle, sharing many notions and sentiments
with Odysseus, but giving others a different colouring. By and large it is a useless
exercise to seek these shadings. What we have on a very rich canvas are the morals and
values of a warrior culture, and with that we must be content.

'Warrior' and 'hero' are synonyms, and the main theme of a warrior culture is
constructed on two notes -prowess and honour. The one is the hero's essential attribute,
the other his essential aim. Every value, every judgement, every action, all skills and
talents have the function of either defining honour or realizing it. Life itself may not
stand in the way. The Homeric heroes loved life fiercely, as they did and felt everything
with passion, and no less martyr-like characters could be imagined; but even life must
surrender to honour. The two central figures of the Iliad, Achilles and Hector,
were both fated to live short lives, and both knew it. They were heroes not because at the
call of duty they marched proudly to their deaths, singing hymns to God and country-on the
contrary, they railed openly against their doom, and Achilles, at least, did not complain
less after he reached Hades- but because at the call of honour they obeyed the code of the
hero without flinching and without questioning.

The heroic code was complete and unambiguous, so much so that neither the poet nor his
characters ever had occasion to debate it. There were differences of opinion -whether to
retreat in

113

battle or not, whether to assassinate Telemachus or not, whether Odysseus was alive or
dead -but these were either disagreements over matters of fact or tactical alternatives.
In neither case was extended discussion called for. Or there were critical situations in
which the knowledge available to mortals was insufficient, such as the plague that Apollo
brought upon the Achaeans when they dishonoured his priest. Then it was necessary to seek
answer from the gods, and that fell to the soothsayer Calchas (among the Trojans there was
Hector's brother Helenus, skilled in interpreting the flight of birds). Again there was no
occasion for genuine discussion: the soothsayer gave the answer, and the heroes either
obeyed or they did not, as their hearts bade them. Finally, there were moments when even
the greatest of the heroes knew fear, but then it was enough to cry 'Coward, woman!' to
bring him back to his senses.

The significant fact is that never in either the Iliad or the Odyssey is
there a rational discussion, a sustained, disciplined consideration of circumstances and
their implications, of possible courses of action, their advantages and disadvantages.
There are lengthy arguments, as between Achilles and Agamemnon, or between Telemachus and
the suitors, but they are quarrels, not discussions, in which each side seeks to overpower
the other by threats, and to win over the assembled multitude by emotional appeal, by
harangue, and by warning. Skill with words had its uses in the struggle for public
opinion- Phoenix reminded Achilles that it was he who had taught the latter 'to be both a
speaker of words and a doer of deeds' (IX 443).

The figure of Nestor is perhaps the most revealing in this regard. Eventually Nestor
became the prototype of the wisdom of old age, the voice of experience, but not once in
his interminable talking did Homer's Nestor draw upon his experience as the ground for
choice between alternative procedures. In fact, throughout the Iliad he made but
one suggestion that could in any proper sense be called a significant and reasoned one,
his proposal that the Achaeans build a great defensive wall before their camp on the
beach. With that single exception, Nestor's talk was invariably emotional and
psychological, aimed at bol-

114

stering morale or at soothing overheated tempers, not at selecting the course of
action. For the former,'his yean of experience were very important, but in the unique
sense of giving him the greatest store of incidents upon which to draw for models of
heroic behaviour, for reminders by example of the way to honour and glory. Odysseus, on
the other hand, was the man of many devices, and his superior skill in that respect took
the form of deception and mendacity. 'Deceit and artful tales', Athena told him, not in
criticism, 'are dear to you from the bottom of your heart' (13.295) Odysseus lied all the
time, on the assumption that it could do no harm and might turn out useful in the end; and
he lied cleverly. This may have been purposeful deception in a general sense, but it was
not controlled rational behaviour. It was surely not wisdom.

The modern reader may be misled by the numerous formulas which, in one or another
variant, speak of a man of counsel. For us counsel is deliberation; wise counsel,
deliberation based on knowledge, experience, rational analysis, judgement. But counsel for
Homer pointed less to the reasons than to the decision itself, and hence to the power of
authority. Only in that sense could Nestor have called Agamemnon and Achilles 'first of
the Danaans both in counsel and in battle' (I 258). Neither was preeminent in the giving
of advice -Achilles particularly not -but by status and power they outranked the others in
the right of decision. There was much talk about a king's seeking counsel; and there was
scarcely any offered that was more than encouragement or admonition. After all, the basic
values of the society were given, predetermined, and so were a man's place in the society
and the privileges and duties that followed from his status. They were not subject to
analysis or debate, and other issues left only the narrowest margin for the exercise of
what we should call judgement (as distinct from work skills, including knowledge of the
tactics of armed combat).

There were situations in which one could legitimately disagree whether or not the
counsel of prudence was also the voice of cowardice. Then it was not a question of mere
tactics, nor the illegitimate one of challenging or defending the code of honour, but a
matter of properly classifying and evaluating a specific

115

choice of procedures. In the Iliad prudence was personified in the Trojan
Polydamas (not in Nestor), and his interchanges with Hector underscored the true quality
of the hero. Polydamas urged caution: Do not attack the Achaeans lest Achilles be roused
and return to the fight and destroy us all. This was the prudent road to success, and
Hector was utterly impatient with it, for it was not the road of honour. Polydamas was
right, of course, and thanks to Hector's imprudent heroism the poem soon reached the final
stage of preparation before the decisive single combat between Hector and Achilles.

Prudence made one last attempt, this time in the persons of Priam and Hecuba, who
begged their son not to fight Achilles, for the outcome was certain: Hector would be slain
and Troy destroyed. Hector knew they were right in their prediction, as Polydamas had been
earlier, and he said as much, but in a long soliloquy he rejected their plea and
re-asserted the paramount claim of honour. 'I am ashamed before the Trojan men and the
women of trailing robes, lest one worse than I should say: "Hector by trusting in his
own might has destroyed the people." , What if I were to offer surrender and promise
to return Helen and all her possessions and to pay in amends half the wealth of Troy?
Achilles 'would kill me, unarmed, as if but a woman' (XXII 105- 25).

Rather than that, Hector chose honourable death by combat, and the end of his city and
his people. Once when Polydamas pointed to an ill omen as ground for caution, Hector
brushed him off with 'One omen is best, to fight back for one's fatherland' (XII 243). But
his whole course of behaviour gave the lie to that retort. *.The fact is that such a
notion of social obligation is fundamentally non-heroic. It reflects the new element, the
community, at the one point at which it was permitted to override everything else, the
point of defence against an invader. In the following generations, when the community
began to move from the wings to the centre of the Greek stage, the hero quickly died out,
for the honour of the hero was purely individual, something

* The constituent elements of 'fatherland' soon turn out to be, again in Hector's words
(xv 496-9). wife, children, oikos, and landed estate.

116

he lived and fought for only for its sake and his own sake. (Family attachment was
permissible, but that was because one's kin were indistinguishable from oneself) .The
honour of a community was a totally different quality, requiring another order of skills
and virtues: in fact, the community could grow only by taming the hero and blunting the
free exercise of his prowess, and a domesticated hero was a contradiction in terms.

Achilles, as a leader of the invading army, was not enmeshed in the extraneous strands
of obligation. Writing long after Homer, Aeschylus would invent a scene (in a play now
lost) in which the Myrmidons rebelled against Achilles for his refusal to fight. The
Athenian playwright thus injected the notion of duty into the tale, but not once did Homer
or Agamemnon or Odysseus charge Achilles with anything so anachronistic as public
responsibility. Achilles was honour-bound to bring his incomparable prowess into the
battle. But when Agamemnon took the girl Briseis from him his honour was openly shamed,
and once 'honour is destroyed the moral existence of the loser collapses'. * The dilemma
became at once unbearable: honour pulled in two opposing directions, and though one way
pointed to victory in a great war and the other to a trifle, one captive woman out of
thousands, the tremendous conflict lay precisely in the fact that honour was not measured
like goods in a market, that the insult was worth as much as the war. Briseis was a
trifle, but Briseis seized from Achilles was worth 'seven tripods that have never been on
the fire and, ten talents of gold and twenty glittering cauldrons' and twelve
prize-winning race-horses and twenty Trojan captives and seven cities and a few other odds
and ends (IX 121-56).

I t was when Achilles refused this proper, and under all normal circumstances
satisfactory, gift of amends that the real tragedy of the Iliad began. 'Sing,
goddess, of the wrath of Peleus's son Achilles.' The hero's mistake was not made at the
beginning; it came at the refusal of the penal gift, for that marked him as a man of
unacceptable excesses, shameless in breaching the heroic code. 'Why,' said Ajax in
indignation, 'a man even accepts

* Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, translated by T. G. Rosenmeyer
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 160.

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amends from the murderer of his brother or for his dead son, and the killer remains in
his own country, having paid much. ... But for you, the gods have put an implacable and
evil emotion in your breast on account of a single girl' (IX 632-8). Homer could not close
the tale with the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles, for that would have left us
with Achilles the too angry man, not with Achilles the redeemed hero. Achilles had still
to expunge his wrath. This he did by abandoning his idea of throwing Hector's body to the
dogs -a new excess, stemming from his grief over the death of Patroclus -and by returning
the body to Priam for the proper rites. Now the slate was clean. Achilles had vindicated
his honour on all sides, and had done so both honourably and with the fullest display of
his prowess.

It is in the nature of honour that it must be exclusive, or at least hierarchic. When
everyone attains equal honour, then there is no honour for anyone. Of necessity,
therefore, the world of Odysseus was fiercely competitive, as each hero strove to outdo
the others. And because the heroes were warriors, competition was fiercest where the
highest honour was to be won, in individual combat on the field of battle. There a hero's
ultimate worth, the meaning of his life, received its final test in three parts: whom he
fought, how he fought, and how he fared. Hence, as Thorstein Veblen phrased it, under
'this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the taking of life ...is
honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of slaughter, as an expression of
the slayer's prepotence, casts a glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all
the tools and accessories of the act.'* The Iliad in particular is saturated in
blood, a fact which cannot be hidden or argued away, twist the evidence as one may in a
vain attempt to fit archaic Greek values to a more gentle code of ethics. The poet and his
audience lingered lovingly over every act of slaughter: 'Hippolochus darted away, and him
too he [Agamemnon] smote to the ground; slicing off his hands with the sword and cutting
off his neck, he sent him rolling like a round log through the battle-throng' (XI 145-7).

* The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library. 1934; London:
Allen & Unwin, 1924). p. 18.

118

To Nietzsche the constant repetition of such scenes and their popularity throughout the
Greek world for centuries to come demonstrated that 'the Greeks, the most humane men of
ancient times, have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate'. * But what must be
stressed about Homeric cruelty is its heroic quality, not its specifically Greek
character. In the final analysis, how can prepotence be determined except by repeated
demonstrations of success? And the one indisputable measure of success is a trophy. While
a battle is raging only the poet can observe Agamemnon's feat of converting Hippolochus
into a rolling log. The other heroes are too busy pursuing glory for themselves. But a
trophy is lasting evidence, to be displayed at all appropriate occasions. Among more
primitive peoples the victim's head served that honorific purpose; in Homer's Greece
armour replaced heads. That is why time after time, even at great personal peril, the
heroes paused from their fighting in order to strip a slain opponent of his armour. In
terms of the battle itself such a procedure was worse than absurd, it might jeopardize the
whole expedition. It is a mistake in our judgement, however, to see the end of the battle
as the goal, for victory without honour was unacceptable; there could be no honour
without public proclamation, and there could be no publicity without the evidence of a
trophy.

In different ways this pattern of honour-contest-trophy reappeared in every activity.
Achilles could find no more fitting way to mourn his dead comrade than to set up a
competitive situation in which the Achaean nobles might display their athletic prowess.
The moment Diomedes brought his chariot to the finishing line in first place he leaped to
the ground and 'he lost no time; ... eagerly he took the prize and gave his high-spirited
companions the woman to lead away and the tripod with handles to carry; and he unyoked the
horses' (XXIII 510-13). This unselfconscious delight in the prizes, demonstrated before
the excited assemblage, had little to do with their intrinsic worth; Diomedes, like
Achilles,

* "Homer's Contest", in The Portable Nietzsche, translated and
edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954; London: Chatto & Windus, 1971).
p.32.

119

had slave women and tripods enough in his hut. His impetuosity -he did not even stop to
attend to his horses-was an emotional response, open and unabashed, honour triumphant. We
might call it a boyish gesture; for Diomedes it was pride in his manliness.

The contest was to playa tremendous part in Greek public life in later centuries.
Nothing defines the quality of Greek culture more neatly than the way in which the idea of
competition was extended from physical prowess to the realm of the intellect, to feats of
poetry and dramatic composition. For that step the world of Odysseus was of course
unprepared. It was also unprepared to socialize the contest, so to speak. Diomedes sought
victory in the chariot race, as on the battlefield, for himself alone, for the honour of
his name and in a measure for the glory of his kin and companions. Later, when the
community principle gained mastery, the polis shared in the glory, and in turn it arranged
for Victory songs and even public statues to commemorate the honour it, the city, had
gained through one of its athletic sons. And with \he dilution of the almost pure egoism
of heroic honour with civic pride went still another change for which the Homeric world
was unprepared: the olive wreath and the laurel took the place of gold and copper and
captive women as the victor's prize. *

Prestige symbols have a complex history. Among many primitive peoples they may be
objects of little or no intrinsic worth, cowrie shells or wampum or cheap blankets. The
world of Odysseus was not a primitive world, and in their higher sphere the Greeks of that
time insisted on treasure. Their goal was honour, and the signs of honour are always
conventional; but they would have nothing to do with conventional signs like cowrie. A
beautiful young captive was a more honorific trophy than an old woman, and that was all
there was to it. Even when the use of treasure was in display, in its prestige function,
only its intrinsic worth gave it proper value.

Gift-giving too was part of the network of competitive, hono-

* Not many centuries were to pass, it must be added, before the post- Homeric Greeks
were compelled to supplement the victor’s' wreaths with cash bonuses (awarded by the
native cities, not by the management of the Olympic or Pythian Games).

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rific activity. And in both directions: it was as honourable to give as to receive. One
measure of a man's true worth was how much he could give away in treasure. Heroes boasted
of the gifts they had received and of those they had given as signs of their prowess. That
is why gift-objects had genealogies. When Telemachus refused Menelaus's offer of horses,
the Spartan king countered with the following proposal: 'Of the gifts, such as are
treasures lying in my house. I will give you the one which is finest and most valuable. I
will give you a skilfully wrought bowl; it is all of silver, finished with gold on the
rim, the work of Hephaestus. The hero Phaedimus, king of the Sidonians, gave it to me.'* A
trophy with such a history obviously shed greater glory on both donor and recipient than
just any silver bowl, as the armour of Hector was a far greater prize to his conqueror
than the arms of one of the lesser Trojans. Status was the chief determinant of values,
and status was transmitted from the person to his possessions, adding still more worth to
their intrinsic value as gold or silver or fine woven cloth.

It was this honorific quality that distinguished the wealth of the heroes, and their
almost overpowering accumulative instinct, from the materialistic drives of other classes
and other ages. Wealth meant power and direct material satisfaction to Odysseus and his
fellow-nobles, to be sure, and that equation was never absent from their calculations.
When Odysseus awakened on Ithaca, where the Phaeacians had landed him while he slept, he
failed to recognize the island because Athena had covered it with a mist. His first
reaction was one of anger that Alcinous and his men had broken faith and conducted him to
some strange place. And almost in the same breath he began worry about the gifts they had
given him, lesbr /t they be stolen. Athena then appeared, quickly straightened him out, and
personally helped him hide the treasure in a cave. Later, in his first meeting with
Penelope, Odysseus in disguise deliberately misled her with an elaborate tale which ended
with the story that he had but recently met the long-lost hero in Thesprotia, from which
country 'he is bringing much good treasure as he begs up and down the land'.

* 1.374-5, repeated 2.239-40.

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He would have returned sooner, 'but it seemed to his heart more advantageous to collect
much goods as he went over the earth' (19.272-84).

The tale was false, but as the poet said, it was 'in the likeness of truth' (19.203).
Odysseus actually used the verb 'to beg' (aitizo), the very word employed by
Eumaeus when he advised his disguised master to go into town and beg for food. But what
Odysseus meant and what Eumaeus meant were altogether different. A king 'begged' for gifts
of treasure as part of the normal course of his travels and his relations abroad, with kin
and guest- friends, old and new, as a way of adding new links to the endless chain of gift
and counter-gift. When King Alcinous asked him to remain overnight so that the proper
parting gifts could be assembled, Odysseus replied: I would wait a year if necessary, 'for
more advantageous would it be to come to my dear fatherland with a fuller hand, and so
should I be more reverenced and loved among men, whosoever should see me after I returned
to Ithaca , (11.358-6r). This he said in the same court in which he had reacted so
violently to the suggestion that he might be a trader seeking 'coveted gains'.

There were delicate distinctions here, between honourable acquisition and a trader's
gain. The heroes had a streak of the peasant in them, and with it went a peasant's love of
possessions; a calculating, almost niggardly hoarding and measuring and counting. Wealth
was an unequivocal good; the more wealth, the greater the good, a subject for boasting,
not for concealment. But the heroes were more than peasants, and they could give as
proudly as they took, and they could set honour above all material goods. The same
Achilles who reminded Agamemnon that 'it was not on account of the Trojan warriors that I
came here to fight, for they have committed no offence against me; they have not robbed me
of my cattle or my horses' (1 152-4), could reject with contempt Agamemnon's compensatory
gifts, fabulous as they were: 'For cattle and fine sheep can be rustled, and tripods and
chestnut horses can be acquired' (IX 406-7). The circulation of treasure was as essential
a part of heroic life as its acquisition; and it was this movement, the fact of its
existence

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and the orbits it followed, that set that life apart from any other life of
accumulation.

What tends to confuse us is the fact that the heroic world was unable to visualize any
achievement or relationship except in concrete terms. The gods were anthropomorphized, the
emotions and feelings were located in specific organs of the body, even the soul was
materialized. Every quality or state had to be translated into some specific symbol,
honour into a trophy, friendship into treasure, marriage into gifts of cattle. In the
furious quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles reached such a point of wrath that he drew his
sword. Athena promptly appeared beside him, unseen to anyone else, and checked him with a
command curiously put in the language of a plea, and ending with these words: 'For thus do
I declare, and it shall come to pass: hereafter shall splendid gifts come to you in
threefold measure, because of this [ Agamemnon's] insolence; but restrain yourself and
hearken to us' (1212- 4). This was the only intelligible language of pleading, and by
gifts the goddess meant material goods, not blessings of the spirit.

Because the concrete expressions of honour and friendship were always articles of
intrinsic value, not cowrie shells, the prestige element was concealed under an overlay of
treasure. In fact, both counted greatly, the wealth on the one hand, and the wealth as
symbol on the other. That is why the giving and receiving were ceremonial acts, an added
touch that would have been needless were possession sufficient unto itself. King Alcinous
personally stowed the Phaeacian gifts aboard Odysseus's ship, as the head of a modem state
personally signs a treaty before assembled dignitaries. In a significant- sense the gifts
of guest-friendship were the archaic forerunners of articles of agreement. What other firm
proof could there have been, in that unlettered world, that a relationship had been
established, creating obligations and responsibilities? .

At no point was the bond between ceremonialism and the satisfaction of material wants
more tightly knit than in the endless feasting. 'For I say that there is nothing more
gracious than when one has good cheer among the whole population, and the sharers in the
feast in all the homes, seated in order, listen to the

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minstrel, and the tables alongside them are laden with bread and meat, and the
cupbearer draws wine from the mixing-bowl and serves it around and pours it into the
goblets' (9.5-10). Odysseus was weary. After ten years of war and another ten years of the
most incredible and taxing adventures he had come to the Phaeacian Utopia, and his mind
was reaching out to his own home, to the approaching end of his wanderings-. He began to
relax, and he made this pretty little speech.

But there was more than good cheer and Gemütlichkeit to Homeric feasting. 'Idomeneus,'
said Agamemnon, 'I honour you above all the Danaans of the fleet horses, whether in war or
in some other work or in the feast, when the Argive nobles mix the sparkling wine of the
elders in the bowl' (IV 257-70). This formulation of the hierarchy of aristocratic
activities, setting the banquet alongside the battle and 'other work', was precise, for it
was feasting that occupied the heroes when they were not immediately engaged in the
pursuits of combat, and it was heroic feasting, not only in its magnitude but also in its
ethics. What was blameworthy about the suitors, for example, was not the total idleness
and luxury of their daily banqueting in the halls of Odysseus. That was proper
aristocratic behaviour, but it was most improper to carry on the feasting at one man's
expense, all the more so when it was done in his absence. 'Sharers in the feast' was the
phrase (one word in the Greek) Odysseus used in Phaeacia, and by it he meant those who
shared the cost as well as the pleasures. 'Leave my palace,' Telemachus demanded of the
suitors in all earnestness, with no trace of mockery, 'and hold your feasts elsewhere,
eating your own substance, going from house to house in turn.'*

Just as there could be no ceremonial occasion without gifts of treasure, so there could
be none without a feast. The Iliad closes with the Trojan mourning for Hector. For
nine days they mourned, and on the tenth they cremated his body, placed the bones in a
golden urn, and buried them in the presence of the assembled Trojan army. ' And having
heaped the burial mound, they went back; then they gathered and feasted well in a glorious

* 1.374-5, repeated 2.139-40.

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feast in the house of Priam, the king nourished by Zeus. Thus they performed the
funeral rites for Hector, tamer of horses' (XXIV 801-4-). Or, to take a different example,
there is Nestor's advice to Agamemnon: 'Give a feast for the elders, that is proper for
you and not unseemly' (IX 70). On such occasions, of course, there was no sharing of cost;
Priam gave the feast that closed the funeral rites, and Agamemnon feasted his council of
elders before they deliberated.

The meaning of this ceremonial eating together becomes clearest in still another
context. Without exception, whenever a visitor arrived, whether kin or guest;-friend,
emissary or stranger, the first order of business was the sharing of a meal. This was a
rule on all levels, when Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix came to Achilles with Agamemnon's
proposal of a gift of amends, or when the then unidentified beggar appeared at the hut of
Eumaeus the slave and swineherd. Only after the meal was it proper for the host to inquire
who his guest was and what his mission. 'But come along,' said Eumaeus, 'let us go into
the hut, old man, so that after you have satisfied yourself with bread and wine to your
heart's content, you may tell whence you are and how many troubles you have suffered'
(14-.4-5-7).

This was a ritual that could not be refused, akin to the taboo- purging rituals of the
primitive world. Hence the meal was shared not merely by host and guest and their
retainers, but also by the gods. 'Then the swineherd stood up and carved. ..and he divided
and distributed the whole into seven portions. The first he set aside for the nymphs and
for Hermes son of Maia, having prayed, and the others he distributed to each. ..and he
made burnt offering to the everlasting gods' (14-432-6). The descriptions of the
sacrifices vary, and so do the names of the participating gods, but the essential notion
was always the same. Through the sharing of food-in substantial quantities, it should be
noted, not just symbolically -- a bond was instituted, or renewed, in ceremonial fashion,
tying men and gods, the living and the dead, into an ordered universe of existence. It was
as if the constant repetition of the feast were somehow necessary for the preservation of
the group, whether on the oikos level or on the larger scale of the class,

125

and also for the establishment of peaceful relations across lines, with strangers and
guest-friends.

Conversely, exclusion from the feast was a mark of the social outcast. Upon learning of
the death of Hector, Andromache in her great grief lamented the fate in store for the boy
Astyanax: , And in his need the child turns to his father's companions, pulling one by the
cloak, another by the tunic; and of those who take pity one gives him a sip, and he
moistens his lips, but his palate he does not moisten. And some unorphaned child drives
him from the feast with blows of the hand, reviling him with abuse: " Away, you! Your
father does not share the feast with us"' (XXII 492-8).

Andromache could not protect her child, not even in her imagination, for women had no
place at the feast. Not only was this a man's world, it was one in which the inferior
status of women was neither concealed nor idealized, which knew neither chivalry nor
romantic attachments. 'Do they then alone of mortal men love their wives, these sons of
Atreus?' Achilles is quoted as asking, according to the usual translations.*.The Greek,
however, does not say 'wives', it says 'bed-mates' ; Achilles was speaking of a woman he
had 'won with the spear. Earlier Agamemnon had said of Chryseis, the priest's captive
daughter, 'Yes, I prefer her to Clytaemnestra, my wedded bed-mate' (I 113-4). In fact,
from Homer to the end of Greek literature there were no ordinary words with the specific
meanings 'husband' and 'wife'. A man was a man, a father, a warrior, a nobleman, a
chieftain, a king, a hero; linguistically he was almost never a husband.

And then there is the word 'to love'. That is how we render philein, but the
question remains open as to what emotional quality, what overtones, the Greek verb really
possessed. It was used in every context in which there were positive ties between people.
When he visited Aeolus, keeper of the winds, Odysseus reported, 'he treated me hospitably
for a full month' (10.14), and Philein was the word by which hospitable treatment was
expressed. But where in the many references to Odysseus's sad longing for his home and his
wife is there a passage in which sentiments and passions that the modern world calls
'love' shine through? More

* IX 340-1, in the translation by A. T. Murray in the Loeb Classical Library.

126

often than not Penelope was omitted from the image of home, for the standard formula
was the one used by Nausicaa: 'Then there is hope that you will see your friends, and come
to your home good to dwell in, and to your native land.'*

Odysseus was fond of Penelope, beyond a doubt, and he found her sexually desirable. She
was part of what he meant by 'home', the mother of his dear son and the mistress of his
oikos., Monogamous marriage was the rule.# There are no confirmed bachelors in the poems
and no spinsters, and the sole reference to divorce is the somewhat dubious one in which
Hephaestus threatened to return his adulterous wife, Aphrodite, to her father (a threat
that was not carried out) (8.317-20). The meaning of monogamy must not be misconstrued,
however. It neither imposed monogamous sexuality on the male nor did it place the small
family at the centre of a man's emotional life. The language had no word for the small
family, in the sense in which one might say, '1 want to go back to live with my family.'

Neither in the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope nor in any other relationship
between man and mate in the Homeric poems was there the depth and intensity, the quality
of feeling -on the part of the male -that marked the attachment between father and son on
the one hand, and between male and male companion on the other. The poems are rich in such
images as this: 'as a father greets his dear son who has come from a distant land in the
tenth year' (16.17-18); but there are no similes drawn from a husband's joy in his wife.
In the narrative itself one need only recall the key role of the love of Achilles for
Patroclus, and the massive grief of Achilles at the death of his comrade.

There is an ancient dispute, still unresolved, whether overt eroticism was part of the
relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. The text of the poems offers no directly
affirmative evidence at any point; even the two references to the elevation of

.6.314-5; repeated by Athena 7-76-7, and used earlier by Zeus, 541-2, and by Hermes,
5.114-5.

# The sole 'exception', Priam with his several wives, fifty sons, twelve daughters and
uncounted grandchildren, is as mysterious to us as it may have been to the poet. No other
man is polygamous, not even in Troy, nor is any god.

127

Ganymede to Olympus speak only of his becoming cupbearer to Zeus. Pederasty was a
widely accepted practice in the Greek world at a very early date, and it remained an
integral part of Greek culture for many centuries, as the literature from Theognis to
Plato eloquently testifies. What was involved, furthermore, was not homosexuality in the
sense o[the direction of erotic impulses and activity exclusively to members of one's own
sex, but a full bisexuality. Neither Greek practice nor Greek ethics, therefore, would
have seen anything inconsistent or unlikely in the coexistence of an erotic relationship
between heroes and their vaunted prowess with the opposite sex. If historical proof is
needed it is enough to point to the warrior elite of Thebes. And so, to explain the
striking intensity of Achilles' passion and to fit the world of Odysseus into the
mainstream of Hellenic culture, it has been argued that on this matter we are faced with
an instance of 'expurgation' in the poems, that 'Homer has swept this whole business, root
and branch, out of his conception of life'. *

Be that as it may, there is no mistaking the fact that Homer fully reveals what
remained true for the whole of antiquity, that women were held to be naturally inferior
and therefore limited in their function to the production of offspring and the performance
of household duties, and that the meaningful social relationships and the strong personal
attachments were sought and found among men. The classic exposition may be read in the
eighth book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, on philia, which we render
with the pale word 'friendship'. When there is philia of a lower kind, says Aristotle,
between unequal partners, as between a man and a woman, 'each of the two differs in virtue
and function, in the ground for friendship, and therefore also in affection and
friendship. Accordingly, the affection should be proportionate to the respective worths of
each: 'the better [of the two], for example, should receive more affection than he gives'.
And that is precisely what we find in Homer. While Odysseus was absent the loss to
Penelope, emotionally, psychologically,

* Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (3rd edn., Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1924), p. 125. Other examples of possible 'expurgation' will be noticed below.

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affectively, was incomparably greater than the loss to her husband. The grief of
Achilles was nearly matched by the sorrow of Hecuba and Andromache at the death of Hector,
son to one and husband to the other.

Some caution must be exercised here. What we nave is a skilfully shaped portrayal of
the second sex; in which a bard who shared the conviction of the natural inferiority of
women defined their feelings to their lords and superiors. The image which emerges is a
complicated one, and in some respects an enigmatic one. The two characters in the poems
who are not fully resolved are both women, Arete, queen of the Phaeacians, with her
strange unwomanly claims to power and authority, and Hellen, who is a very peculiar
figure. Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, was Aphrodite's favourite, and thanks to the
gifts of the goddess she succeeded in embroiling Greeks and Trojans in a gigantic struggle
that cost both sides dearly. Helen was no innocent victim in all this, no unwilling
captive of Paris-Alexander, but an adulteress in the most complete sense. For Paris there
was no atonement. 'Lord Zeus,' prayed Menelaus, 'grant that I be avenged on him who first
did me wrong, illustrious Alexander, and subdue him at my hands, so that any man born
hereafter may shrink from wronging a host who has shown him friendship' (III 351-4). But
Helen received no punishment, and scarcely any reproach. She ended her days back in
Sparta, administering magical drugs obtained in Egypt, interpreting omens, and
participating in the life of the palace much like Arete and not like a proper Greek woman.

Not even Penelope was altogether free of suspicion and the element of enigma. When
Athena bade Telemachus return immediately from his visit to Menelaus, lest Penelope, who
was weakening under pressure from her father and brothers, not o1lly accept one of the
suitors but strip the palace of treasure to boot, the goddess concluded with a sweeping
generalization: 'For you know what is the emotion in the breast of a woman, that she
wishes to increase the household of him who weds her, and of her former children and of
her dear husband she neither remembers once he is dead nor inquires' (15.20-3).

This was a strange way indeed to talk about Penelope, and

129

it came from a very interesting source. On Olympus the gods were altogether superior to
the goddesses, considered collectively -superior not only in their power but also in their
appeal, in the feelings they inspired among men. The chief exception to the rule was
Athena, and the significant quality of Athena as a goddess was her manliness. She was the
virgin goddess in a world that knew no original sin, no sinfulness of sex, no Vestal
Virgins. She was not even born of woman, having sprung from the head of Zeus-an insult to
the whole race of women for which Hera never forgave her husband, Hera Who was the
complete female and whom the Greeks feared a little and did not like at all, from the days
of Odysseus to the twilight of the gods.

Neither Athena nor the poet went further in explaining Penelope's behaviour. The
responsibility for Helen, however, was explicitly Aphrodite's. Early in the Iliad,
Paris engaged Menelaus in single combat and was within an inch of losing his life when ,
Aphrodite snatched him up most easily, being a god, and covered him with a heavy mist and
set him down in his fragrant, incense- smelling chamber. And she herself went to summon
Helen' from the battlements. ' "Come here. Alexander summons you to go home. He is
there in his chamber and inlaid bed." , Helen demurred. 'Then angrily divine
Aphrodite addressed her: "Do not provoke me, wretch, lest in my wrath I abandon you,
and in this , wise hate you as now I love you beyond measure" , (Ill 380-415). And
Helen was afraid, and she took herself to the fragrant chamber and the inlaid bed.

The reason for Helen's reluctance had been given some verses before. In the guise of
Laodice, Priam's fairest daughter, the divine messenger Iris had talked with her and had
'placed in her heart sweet yearning for her former husband and her city and parents' (Ill
139-40). This impasse in which Helen was placed was nothing unusual, for in the Homeric
psychology every human action and every idea could be the direct consequence of divine
intervention. In ordinary affairs one could never be sure (and a man could anyway fail to
grasp or to follow the divine guide-line). Thus, in reply to Penelope's request for an
explanation of Telemachus's risky journey to Pylos and Sparta in search

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of news of his father, the herald Medon said (4.712-3): 'I do not know whether some god
urged him on, or whether his own heart (thymos) stirred him to go to Pylos.'

However, when the action was witless or otherwise astonishing, there was no doubt that
the gods had intervened. When Eurycleia informed Penelope that Odysseus had returned and
destroyed the suitors, the queen replied in utter disbelief: 'Good mother, the gods have
made you mad, they who are able to make witless even those with the best wit, and they
bring the weakminded to prudence. They have distracted you, who were formerly right-
minded' (23.11-14). The examples can be multiplied from every page and every conceivable
situation.

Nowhere is the historian faced with a more subtle problem. Was all this literal belief
or poetic metaphor? When the heroes are called dios (divine), isotheos
(god-equal), diotrephes (nourished by Zeus), precisely what significance shall we
attach to the epithets? What did they mean to the poet and his audience? When Menelaus
began to drag Paris in the dust and Aphrodite tore off the latter's helmet-strap just
before it strangled him, was that a fancy poetic figure for chance, for a lucky accident
that broke the strap in time, or did Homer believe literally what he sang? What we believe
in these matters is irrelevant and misleading. Modern critics who call Homer's gods
'symbolic predicates', the activity on Olympus the poet's 'scenario', not only inject
modern theology and modern science into the world of Odysseus, they destroy the poems. The
narrative itself collapses without the interventions of the gods, and so do the psychology
and the behaviour of the heroes.

A fair test is provided by the genealogies, which gave most aristocratic families, and
even whole tribes, divine ancestry. Poseidon was angered beyond measure by the Phaeacians
because they not only rescued Odysseus but returned him to Ithaca laden with treasure,
and his anger was compounded by the fact that the Phaeacians 'come from my own stock'
(13.130). In Odysseus's account of his journey to Hades there is one lengthy

* Following an accepted convention, I have translated dios as 'illustrious' throughout.

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section which parades various women proud to have borne mortal sons to Zeus or
Poseidon. The converse was exceedingly rare -Calypso even protested: 'You are merciless,
you gods, and jealous beyond compare, who begrudge goddesses that they have intercourse
with men openly, if one makes one her dear bedfellow' (5.118-20). From one such union came
Achilles, son or Peleus and of Thetis the sea-nymph; from another, Aeneas, son of Anchises
and Aphrodite.

It is inconceivable that this passion for divine genealogy was mere poetic fancy. Here
was sanction for aristocratic privilege, for rule by might, and an ideology that no one
believes is an absurdity. Xenophanes, in the sixth century, was not tilting at windmills
when he raised his voice in the sharpest possible protest against the Homeric view of the
gods. If 'theft, adultery and deceit' were commonly accepted as divine practices, then
surely divine ancestry of mortals and divine intervention in battle were scarcely less
credible. The irrelevance of so many of the interventions, which contribute nothing to the
development of the narrative, is a further argument. Presumably there is much here that
was part of the inherited bardic formulas, repeated and perpetuated after much of
primitive belief had degenerated into mere clichés of speech and story-telling. The
essential difficulty is to find the proper line between a thought-world that was gone and
a rationality that was yet to come.

One element which deserves particular notice is the complete anthropomorphism. God was
created in man's image with a skill and a genius that must be ranked with man's greatest
intellectual feats. The whole of heroic society was reproduced on Olympus in its
complexities and its shadings. The world of the gods was a social world in every respect,
with a past and a present, with a history, so to speak. There was no Genesis, no creation
out of nothing. The gods came to power on Olympus as men came to power in Ithaca or Sparta
or Troy, through struggle or family inheritance. Here is the account in Poseidon's words
(xv 187-93) of what followed the forcible overthrow of the Titans: 'For we are three
brothers, sons of Cronus, whom Rhea bore, Zeus and I, and Hades is the third, who rules
the underworld. And in three

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lots we divided everything, and each drew his share of honour [i.e. his domain]: I drew
the white sea to inhabit forever. when we cast lots, and Hades drew the murky darkness,
and Zeus drew the wide heaven, in air and clouds; but the earth and high Olympus are
common to all' (xv 187-93).

These sentences were part of a very angry speech. Poseidon had entered the battle on
the Greek side, and the Trojans were in rout. Zeus sent Iris to him with an order that he
withdraw from the fight. 'Highly indignant, the renowned earth-shaker answered her:
"Oh no, for strong as he is, he has spoken insolently if he will master me by force,
against my will, I who am his equal in honour"' (xv 184-6). Poseidon gave in, of
course, but in the colloquy the parallel between gods and heroes was perfectly drawn. Like
any hero, Poseidon was concerned solely with honour and prowess. He bowed to the authority
of Zeus, but only because the elder brother was prepotent. Earlier, when Hera first
proposed that together they could outmanoeuvre Zeus and save the Achaeans from the
slaughter that was planned for them, Poseidon would have none of it. 'Hera reckless in
speech, what manner of talk have you spoken! I would not see us all at war with Zeus
Cronion, for he is far greater' (VIII 209-11 ).

With respect to power, the divine world was as differentiated as the human, and the
range was very wide. Not only were there great differences in the quantity possessed by
the individual gods, there were also significant distinctions in the spheres in which
power could be applied. Aphrodite, for example, was invincible in matters of erotic
desire. But when she tried to take part in the actual fighting, Diomedes attacked her,
'knowing that she was a feeble god' (v 331), and he wounded her in the hand. Aphrodite
went weeping to Zeus, only to receive a gentle rebuke: 'Not to you, my child, are given
the works of war, but do you pursue the loving works of wedlock and all these will be
looked to by fleet Ares and Athena' (v 428-30).

Only Zeus occupied a position without earthly parallel. Although he was not perfect,
neither omnipotent nor omniscient - that must be underscored -his power was overwhelming,
beyond the dreams of even the greatest king. And Zeus maintained a dis-

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tance between himself and the mortal world that was also unique. He alone of the
Olympians never intervened directly in speech or act, but through a verbal message carried
by Iris, Dream, Rumour, or one of the other gods, or through the still less direct form of
an omen, such as thunder or the flight of an eagle. Even on Olympus there was distance:
when Zeus entered his palace, 'all the gods rose at once from their seats in the presence
of their father' (1533-4). It would be a mistake, however, to imagine Zeus as some kind of
Eastern super-potentate. For all his uniqueness, he had much of the Greek basileus
in him (though Homer never gave him the title), a special sort of first among equals. The Odyssey
opens with an appeal by Athena that he put an end to the travail of Odysseus. In reply
Zeus first denied responsibility for what was happening. 'It is Poseidon the earth-mover
who has stubbornly remained angry, because of the Cyclops whom he [Odysseus] blinded in
the eye.' Then Zeus proposed a course of action: 'But come, let us all here consider his
homecoming, that he might return. Poseidon will give up his anger, for he will be
powerless against all the immortals, striving alone against the will of the gods'
(1.68-79).

This mixture of might and counsel bespoke the archaic world. Even Poseidon admitted the
power of Zeus to compel obedience, and yet the poet was reluctant to reduce the decision
to force alone. He was not always able to achieve full consistency in the heavenly
picture. The case of Zeus is outstanding, but there are others, such as the two
cbr /ponceptions of fate, one that it was thbr /br /e work of the gods and the other that it bound all,
mortals and immortals alike (including Zeus because his knowledge fell short of
omniscience) ; or the notion of Hades as neutral, as a place where the shades of men live
on in utter dullness and emptiness, but where, nevertheless, a few like Tantalus are
doomed to everlasting torment. The inconsistencies merely point up how tremendous was
the effort to re-create the heroic world on another plane, and how very successful it was.
The evidence can be drawn from every sphere, from wealth and labour, gift-giving and
feasting, honour and shame.

A measure of failure was inevitable. That the gods were

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immortal was one source of difficulty, but perhaps not the chief one. Because they
could not die, the gods could not be true heroes. They might fail to attain a specific
goal, but they could try again .and again, and there was never any risk of death in the
attempt. Still, it was possible to overlook that one flaw and to have the gods behave
otherwise exactly as heroes would behave. It was possible, too, to take care of minor
technicalities of immortality: blood was the physiological key to mortality, and therefore
it had to be replaced by another substance, called ichor. What was not possible was
to define power in purely human terms, even on the most heroic scale. Divine power was
supernatural in the precise sense. It was superior to human power in its quality, in its
magic. Diomedes could defeat Aphrodite in direct combat, but only so long as the feeble
goddess failed to avail herself of the supernatural powers that even she commanded. She
could have covered him with a heavy mist and snatched him up and away, for instance.
Against such arts Achilles himself would have been outmatched. Only the gods, further, had
the power to take a man's wits from him, or to teach bards and seers to know things that
had been and things that were to be.

The humanization of the gods was a step of astonishing boldness. To picture
supernatural beings not as vague, formless spirits, or as monstrous shapes, half bird,
half animal, for instance, but as men and women, with human organs and human passions,
demanded the greatest audacity and pride in one's own humanity. Then, having so created
his gods, Homeric man called himself godlike. The words 'man' and 'godlike' must be
stressed sharply. On the one hand, Homer never confused 'godlike' with 'divine' ; he never
crossed the line between the mortal and the immortal. Hesiod spoke of 'a godlike race of
hero-men who are called demi-gods', but there were no demi-gods in the Iliad or Odyssey.
Kings were honoured like gods, but never worshipped. Heroes were men, not cult objects.
Though they had divin ancestors, blood ran in their veins none the less, not ichor.
On the other hand, there were no local, regional or national dividing- lines of genuine
consequence among men. Neither in matters of cult nor in any other fundamental aspect of
human life did

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the poet distinguish or classify invidiously. Individuals-and classes varied in worth
and capacity, but not peoples, neither between Achaeans and others nor among the Achaeans
themselves. This universality of Homer's humanity was as bold and remarkable as the
humanity of his gods.

That we are faced here with a new creation, a revolution in religion, can scarcely be
doubted. We do not know who accomplished it, but we can be sure that a sudden
transformation had occurred, not just a slow, gradual shift in beliefs. Never in the
history of the known religions, Eastern or Western, was a new religion introduced
otherwise than at one stroke. New ideas may have been germinating for a long time, old
ideas may have been undergoing constant and slow change, still other notions may have been
imported from abroad. But the actual step of transformation, the creation of a new
conceptual scheme, has always been sharp, swift, abrupt.

It is no underestimation of the magnitude of the revolution to add that it was far from
complete. More precisely, it was not universal: the history of Greek religion in
subsequent centuries shows great variation on this score, according to social class,
education, individual temperament, circumstance. Xenophanes did not speak for the
illiterate mountaineers of Arcadia or the semi- literate peasants of his native Colophon
or his adopted Sicily. Age-old magical practices and cults, such as those associated with
hot springs, continued to flourish. The pre-Olympian cosmological myths had ,a long life
ahead. All the more remarkable, therefore, that the traces in the Homeric poems ( in
contrast to Hesiod ) are so few as to warrant another reference to Homeric 'expurgations'.
The old nature gods, for instance, were either debased or ignored. Helius, the sun, was so
impotent that when Odysseus's starving men committed the terrible offence of killing some
of his cattle he could do no better than rush to Zeus and ask the latter to take vengeance
for him. Selene, the moon, was of no consequence whatsoever.

Most notable of all is the indifference to Demeter, goddess of fertility, for unlike
Helius and Selene, Demeter remained a major figure in Greek religion for many centuries
after Homer. Her

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rites celebrated the procession of the seasons, the mystery of the plants and the
fruits in their annual cycle of coming to be and passing away. Demeter-worship was carried
on outside the formal Olympian religion, for its founders had place neither for her nor
for mystery rites altogether. Homer knew all about Demeter (she is mentioned six times in
the Iliad and Odyssey) ; and that is just the point. He deliberately turned
his back on her and everything she represented.

'Honour him like a god with gifts' is a recurrent phrase about kings; the converse is
that the gods are to be honoured like kings with gifts. In practice that meant gifts of
food, of feasting, through burnt offerings, and gifts of treasure, through dedications of
arms and cauldrons and tripods arrayed in the temples. The temples and their priests,
incidentally, were themselves part of the new religion. The forces of nature had been
worshipped where they were; the gods conceived as men were housed, like men, in
appropriate palaces. Mystery rites (literally 'orgies', a word which does not appear in
either poem) and blood rites and human sacrifice and everything else that dehumanized the
gods were ruthlessly discarded. Thus the important story of the sacrifice of Agamemnon's
daughter Iphigenia was omitted, and the many gross atrocities in the prehistory of the
gods were toned down radically. Achilles, it is true, sacrificed 'twelve brave sons of
great-hearted Trojans' on the funeral pyre of Patroclus, but the poet promptly labelled
that act of primitive horror for what it was: 'such evil deeds did he contrive in his
heart' (XXIII 175-6).

In a famous passage in his autobiography, John Stuart Mill wrote of his father: 'I have
a hundred times heard him say that all ages and nations have represented their gods as
wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait
after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human
mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.' For
Homeric religion, at least, this is not a pertinent judgement, not because Homer's gods
were incapable of wickedness, but because they were essentially devoid of any ethical
quality whatsoever. The ethics of the world of Odysseus were man-made and man-

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sanctioned. Man turned to the gods for help in his manifold activities, for the gifts
it was in their power to offer or to withhold. He could not turn to them for moral
guidance; that was not in their power. The Olympian gods had not created the world, and
they were therefore not responsible for it.

When Odysseus awoke on Ithaca, Athena appeared to him in the guise of a shepherd and
was greeted by one of Odysseus's characteristic inventions, how he came from Crete, fought
at Troy, slew the son of Idomeneus, fled to the Phoenicians, and so forth. Athena smiled,
resumed her female shape, and offered the following comment: 'Crafty must he be and shifty
who would outstrip you in all kinds of cunning, even though it be a god that encountered
you. Headstrong man, full of wiles, of cunning insatiate, are you not to cease, even in
your own land, from deceit and artful tales, so dear to you from the bottom of your heart?
But come, let us speak no more of these things, being both practised in craft; for you are
far the best of all mortals in counsel and speech, and I am: celebrated among all the gods
in craft and cunning' (13.291-9).

This is what the line of philosophers from Xenophanes to Plato protested, the
indifference of the Homeric gods in moral matters. Just before the close of the Iliad
(XX:IV 527-33), Achilles stated the doctrine explicitly: 'For two jars stand on Zeus's
threshold whence he gives of his evil gifts, and another of the good; and to whom Zeus who
delights in thunder gives a mixed portion, to him befalls now evil, now good; but to whom
he gives of the baneful, him he scorns, and evil misery chases him over the noble earth, a
wanderer honoured neither by gods nor by mortals.'

Chance, not merit, determined how the gifts fell to a man. And since it was not in his
power to influence the choice, man could neither sin nor atone. He could offend a god
mightily, but only by dishonouring him, by shaming him -through a false oath, for example,
or disobedience of the direct command of an oracle or failure to make a sacrificial
gift-and then it was incumbent upon the offender to make amends precisely as he made
amends to any man he might have dishonoured. But this was not penance;

138

it was the re-establishment of the proper status relationship. Without sin there could
be no idea of conscience, no feelings of moral guilt. The evils of which Achilles spoke
were mishaps, not the evils of the Decalogue.

And there was no reverential fear of the gods. 'Homer's princes bestride their world
boldly; they fear the gods only as they fear their human overlords.'* No word for
'god-fearing' is ever used in the Iliad. Nor, it scarcely need be added, was
there-a word for 'love of god' : philotheos makes its first known appearance in the
language with Aristotle. For moral support the men of the Iliad relied not on the
gods but on their fellow-men, on the institutions and the customs by which they lived; so
complete was the intellectual revolution that had occurred. Having lifted the incubus of
unintelligible and all-powerful natural forces, man retained a consciousness .that there
were powers in the universe which he could not control and could not really understand,
but he introduced a great self-consciousness, a pride and a confidence in himself, in man
and his ways in society.

But what of the men whose life gave no warrant for pride and self-confidence? For it is
self-evident that the gods of the Iliad were the gods of heroes, or, plainly
spoken, of the princes and the heads of the great households. What of the others, those
for whom the iron age had come, when 'men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and
from perishing by night'?# They had reason enough to fear the gods, but they had no reason
to be god-fearing if the gods were truly as the poet described them. For them there was
little question of choice of gifts; there was always the certainty that the gifts would
come from the wrong jar: 'Evil misery chases him over the noble earth, a wanderer honoured
neither by gods nor by mortals.' The poet of the Iliad could turn away from Demeter
in contempt, but to the iron race of men she gave promise of a harvest, as the god
Dionysus, whom Homer also ignored, meant wine and joy and forgetfulness of sorrow. 'Apollo
moved only in the best society, from the days

* E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (University of California Press,
1951), p. 29.

# Hesiod, Works and Days, 176-8.

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when he was Hector's patron to the days when he canonized aristocratic athletes; but
Dionysus was at all periods demotikos, a god of the people.'*

The Olympian religion could not stand stilt and yet survive. The intellectual
revolution reflected in the Iliad required still another revolution, a moral one,
in which Zeus was transformed from the king of a heroic society to the principle of cosmic
justice. There are elements of this new conception in the Odyssey, for the suitor
theme is in some fashion a tale of villainy and retribution. 'Father Zeus,' said old
Laertes when Odysseus revealed himself and told him of the slaughter of the suitors,
'indeed you gods still exist on high Olympus, if truly the wooers have paid for their evil
insolence' ( 24.35 I -2) .The contrast with the Iliad is striking. There the
destruction of Troy was, if anything, an act of divine injustice. Paris had insulted
Menelaus, and both sides, Achaeans and Trojans alike, were prepared at one point to rest
the decision on single combat between the two heroes. Menelaus was the victor, and the war
should have ended then, with the return of Helen and the payment of amends, but Hera and
Athena would not be content until Ilion was sacked and all its men killed. The interest of
the two goddesses was strictly heroic, an insistence on full retribution for the shame
they once had suffered at the hands of Paris when he judged Aphrodite more beautiful. This
and nothing else brought about the fall of Troy.

Zeus bowed to Hera's demand, even though, in his own words, 'of all the cities under
the sun and the starry heave in which dwell earthly men, most honoured of my heart was
holy Ilion, and Priam and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear'. Hera responded in
kind: 'Indeed there are three cities most dear of all to me, Argos and Sparta and
widewayed Mycenae. May these waste whenever they become hateful to your heart; for them I
shall neither stand up nor hold a grudge' (IV 44-54). For the decision to be put into
effect, it should be added, Athena was called upon to trap the Trojans, by the most
malicious deception, into violating the oaths they and the Achaeans had taken when
Menelaus and Paris met in single combat.

* Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 76.

14O

From such a view of divine motives to the punishment of the suitors was a long step,
and the poet of the Odyssey took it hesitantly and incompletely. Its implications
were extensive and complex, and he did not always see them by any means. When he did, the
effect was startling. No sooner had Eurycleia returned to the great chamber of the palace
and seen the carnage among the suitors than 'she was about to cry out in exultation,
beholding so great a deed. But Odysseus restrained her. ..."Rejoice in your heart,
old woman, and restrain yourself and do not cry aloud. It is an unholy thing to glory over
slain men. These men the destiny of the gods had overpowered, and their (own) merciless
deeds"' (22-4:08-13). Not only was this sentiment unheroic, for heroes commonly
exercised their prerogative to exult publicly over their victims, but in a sense it
remained un-Hellenic, as Nietzsche's dictum suggests. It was as if, groping to understand
a new vision of man and his fate, the poet saw something so profound, and yet so far
beyond the horizon of his world, that he gave it expression in a few brief verses, only to
draw back from it at once.

Interestingly enough, the Odyssey also has a considerable revival of the
elements of belief that had been so rigorously 'expurgated' from the Iliad. The
eleventh book, the scene in Hades, is filled with ghosts and dark blood and eerie noises,
like a canvas of Hieronymus Bosch, not at all heroic in its texture. In the end, it
remained for a poet who stood outside the heroic world to take the great next step. In the
case of Hesiod we are certain, as we cannot be for the poet of the Iliad: it was he
who organized the individual gods into a systematic theogony and made justice into the
central problem of existence, human as well as divine. From Hesiod a straight line leads
to Aeschylus and the other great tragedians.

In those succeeding centuries the miracle that was Greece unfolded. Homer having made
the gods into men, man learned to know himself.

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