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Who's Who in ‘Homeric’ Society?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
Question and quotation marks tend to proliferate in articles which ask whether Homer can provide any historical information about early Greek society. In this article ‘Homeric’ society will refer to the society which is portrayed in the Iliad and the Odyssey. ‘The World of Odysseus’ will refer to the recension of ‘Homeric’ society which appears in M. I. Finley's book of that name. Finley claims that ‘The World of Odysseus’ is a faithful account of ‘Homeric’ society and that the latter is a literary portrait of a real society that existed in Greece some time during the dark ages. As a result of Finley's influential book, ‘The World of Odysseus’, or something very like it, has found its way into most of the history books generally available in the classroom. In this article I wish to reconsider ‘Homeric’ society and to question the propriety of identifying it with either ‘The World of Odysseus’ or any real society.
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References
1 Finley, M. I., The World of Odysseus (first publ. 1954; 2nd ed., Harmondsworth, 1979)Google Scholar.
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25 English translations of Homer on the other hand have a wealth of words. e.g. the folk, peasants, commoners, serfs, the masses, multitude, lower orders, lower classes etc.
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27 Pace Finley, , The World of Odysseus, 60Google Scholar ‘…of the half dozen or so craftsmen who are dignified with a personal name in the poem, not one has a patronymic, let alone a genealogy’,.
28 Peruogetes…
το γνετ' κ πατρς πολ χερονος υἱς μενων
παντοας ρετς, ἠμν πδας ἠδ μχεσθαι,
κα νον ν πρώτοισι Μυκηναων ττυκτο. (Il. 15. 641–3).
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39 The following quotation illustrates to what divergent conclusions reading Homer may lead: ‘In Homer the king was at once the chief priest, the chief judge, and the supreme war-lord of his people’ (Bury, J. B. and Meiggs, Russell, A History of Greece [London, 1975], 52)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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43 The young prince (if that is what he is) on the ‘Warrior Vase’ found in the villa of Hagia Triada and now in the Archaeological Museum at Heraklion seems to be holding a sceptre, but there is no way of telling what it symbolizes.
44 Thucydides 6. 83. 1.
45 See the note on these lines in W. Leaf and M. A. Bayfleld II (London, 1962), 490–1, 494.
46 Egyptians had long believed that their king brought fertility to the land (v. Pritchard, J. B., Ancient Near East Texts relating to the Old Testament, 31–2)Google Scholar. Assyrians shared the belief (v. Luckenbill, , op. cit. II, 60–3 and 292Google Scholar: ‘After Assur…had caused me to take my seat, joyfully, upon the throne of the father who begot me, Adad sent his rains, Ea opened his fountains, the grain grew 5 cubits tall in the stalk…’).
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50 Plutarch, , Pericles 11Google Scholar.
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52 Gernet, Louis, ‘Droit et prédroit en Grèce ancienne’, Anthropologie de la Grèce antique, 175 ff.Google Scholar, describes some of the beliefs and rituals which preceded the rule of law in Greece.
53 Gernet, , op. cit. 243Google Scholar.
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55 cf. Nilsson, , op. cit. 222–3Google Scholar. Nilsson mentions the leadership of Dionysios of Phocaea, who was elected commander-in-chief of the Ionian fleet some time before the battle of Lade, but says that ‘Agamemnon’s power was evidently much more securely founded’ (p. 223).
56 Greenhalgh, P. A. L., Early Greek Warfare (Cambridge, 1973), 2, 170Google Scholar, would call this a piece of ‘archaizing veneer’.
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