The Classical World (4 page)

Nowadays, scholars’ dates for Homer himself vary between
c.
800
BC
and
c.
670
BC
. Most of them, myself included, would opt for
c.
750–730
BC
, and certainly before the poet Hesiod (
fl.
710–700
BC
): at least we are almost certain that the
Odyssey
was later than the
Iliad
, whose plot it presupposes. But was there one Homer or two, one for each poem? What we now read has probably been tidied up and added to in places, but at least there was a monumental poet at work. The main plot of each epic is much too coherent for them to have evolved as a sort of ‘people’s Homer’, like a snowball over the centuries. Professional reciters, or rhapsodes, did continue to perform the poems in archaic Greece, but they certainly did not create the bulk of them. Unlike Homer, in my view, these reciters had memorized what they performed: they had learned from a text which went back to the main poet’s lifetime. I do not believe that Homer himself wrote out his epic: he was, I think, a true oral poet, the heir to other illiterate poets before him. However, he was the first real ‘epic’ poet, the one who concentrated his very long songs on a single guiding theme. His predecessors, like his lesser followers, would have sung of one episode after another without Homer’s gift for large-scale unity. We may even have the plot of one such oral poem before Homer which gives a central role to the hero Memnon from dusky Ethiopia. If he was originally in it, the earliest known Greek heroic song would be about a hero who is black.

During the eighth century the new invention, the alphabet, began to spread in the Greek world. It was not invented in order to write down Homer’s great poems, but it was used (possibly by his heirs, and during his lifetime) to preserve them. They were so good that there was a future profit in a text of them. If so, much of what survives is probably the dictated version of the poet himself. The poems are very long (15,689 lines for the
Iliad
, 12,110 for the
Odyssey
), but they are unlikely to have attained this length only during his hours of
dictation, undertaken to preserve them. They were also too long to be composed for performance at a banquet, as they require two or three days’ listening. Arguably, they were first composed for a festival (later Greek festivals are known to have set aside several days for poetic contests, even in Hadrian’s day
²
). As they survive, they do not address any one family of patrons or any one city-state. A big festival would fit this general ‘Panhellenic’ aspect very well: perhaps a Homer who was known to be a prize-winner was given a free run at one such festival, without rival competitors.

The two epics, the first big Greek poems, do touch already on luxury, freedom and justice. Homer does not use the later Greek word for ‘luxury’ (
truph
ē
), nor any word which disapproves of it. Rather, he enhances his grand epic world with descriptions of luxury palaces of gold, silver and bronze. He tells of wonderful silverwork from the Levant, slave-women skilled in working ivory, necklaces of amber beads, textiles and dozens of fine robes, a precious store of value. The treasures of the nobles’ clothes chests have perished, but otherwise we can fit some of these luxuries (but not the fantasy palaces) to our increasing archaeological record, especially to items found in contexts of the ninth and eighth centuries
BC
. Homer’s heroes and kings are not ‘corrupted’ by luxury: they fight unforgettably in mortal combat for honour, and like Odysseus they are capable of practical, everyday work with their hands. The luxuries around them are individual items of wonder. It seems that Homer and his hearers are not living in the lap of luxury ‘nowadays’ and taking it for granted in an effete royal world.

Individual luxuries are very attractive to the women portrayed in the poems: the amber necklaces are particularly tempting. When sold as captives, the women can be luxuries too, costing as much as twenty oxen. But in general, the poems represent women with a courtesy which is quite different from the small farmers’ grudging view of women in the near-contemporary poetry of Hesiod. In the
Odyssey
, Penelope and Odysseus really do express their love as a reunited married couple; the great sorrow of Laertes, Odysseus’ father, is the previous death of his wife. It is quite untrue, then, that Greeks never imagined that a man might love his wife or that ‘romantic love’ in the Greek world is always the love of one man for another. Homeric epic
is a touching tribute to good marriage. Hesiod, too, does recognize the value of a good wife, rare though she is, but it is he, not Homer, who describes the first-created woman, Pandora, the inadvertent cause of hardship and sickness for all mortal men ever since.

Freedom is also a crucial value for the participants. Once, in a supreme moment, Hector looks forward to the time when freedom will be celebrated, the ‘mixing bowl of freedom’, no doubt filled with wine, will be set up and Troy will be ‘free’, with its enemies defeated. By contrast, there is the ‘day of slavery’ which takes away most of a man’s powers.
³
‘Freedom’, therefore, is a ‘freedom from…’: from enemies who will kill and enslave a community, and from ‘slavery’, the condition of absolute subjection in which men are bought and sold like objects. In Hesiod’s poetry, too, slaves are assumed to be a part of the Greek farmer’s way of life and a wide range of Greek words describes them. We cannot point back to a time before the classical age, when slavery, the ownership of other human beings, did not yet exist among the Greeks.

The heroes, often kings themselves, may complain about a king or leader, but they do not long to be ‘free’ from monarchy. They take for granted their own freedom to do much as they please before their own people. Nobles might be enslaved and sold by an enemy, but they are not worried about being ‘enslaved’ to another noble’s will in their own community. Nor are they concerned to uphold free speech for everyone in that community or to grant an equal freedom to people outside their class. No public assembly casts votes in the epic world; no meetings occur by right, whether or not a king or noble wants to summon one. In the
Iliad
, when Odysseus rallies the Greek army he speaks gently and respectfully to the kings and ‘people of eminence’. When he finds a man of the people, who is typically ‘shouting’, he pushes him with his staff and tells him firmly to sit down and attend to his betters. When insolent Thersites dares to insult and criticize King Agamemnon, Odysseus thumps him with his sceptre and brings out a bruise on this ugly, misshapen and unheroic free-speaker. The audience of soldiers bursts into ‘sweet laughter’ at the sight, although they are also ‘vexed’: what they are ‘vexed’ at is the ugly man’s outspokenness and all the trouble, not at the way in which the hero has hit him.
⁴
The epics present the unchallengeable dominance of a
heroic aristocracy. They were not composed as a reaction to a real world in which this dominance was being contested.

Nonetheless, justice is a value in its world too, exemplified by the distant ‘Abioi’, a ‘just’ people to the north of Troy to whom the god Zeus looks away for respite from the Trojan War. Paris’ theft of fair Helen, Menelaus’ wife, is an unjust affront to hospitality and eventually the gods will punish it. In the
Odyssey
, the gods explicitly prefer justice to human wrongdoing; in the
Iliad
, Zeus is said to send down violent autumn storms to punish ‘men who use violence and give crooked rulings in the public meeting places, and drive out justice’.
⁵
Once only, we see a human process of justice in action, and, however we understand its action, it points to possibilities other than a hero’s autocratic will. In the eighteenth book of the
Iliad
, Homer is imagining for us the wonderful scenes which the craftsman-god Hephaestus is working onto the shield for Achilles. In one part of it, two contestants are shown disputing over the ‘recompense’ to be made for a dead man. The people cheer them on and have to be held back by heralds. On polished seats of stone the elders sit and join in the process. ‘Two talents of gold lie in the middle for whoever speaks the straightest judgement among them.’
⁶

The details of this scene of justice remain mysterious and are therefore disputed. Are the contestants arguing over whether or not a price has been paid for the killing of a man? They are said to wish to reach a conclusion from a ‘knowledgeable man’, but what, then, are the elders doing in the process? It seems that Homer describes the elders as holding the ‘sceptres of heralds’: is it the elders who then rush forwards and give judgements ‘one after another’? But if so, who is the ‘knowledgeable’ man? The people seem to be cheering on either party: are they, perhaps, the group who will decide by their shouts which elder is the ‘knowledgeable’ one and has given the best judgement? The contestants would then have to accept the opinion of the people’s favoured speaker. He in turn would receive the ‘two talents of gold’ on display in the middle of the meeting.

There is no single king in this scene and so it reads like Homer’s invention on the model of something seen in his own non-monarchical lifetime. A murder was a spectacular event, of obvious concern to people at large. The people’s presence and noisy participation are
certain here, in the oldest surviving scene of the giving of justice in Greek. Homer’s audience would surely recognize the details, but one achievement of the next three centuries was to be the bringing of this process under written law before juries who would consist of ordinary people. As we shall see, the ‘two talents’ were duly removed from the middle of the proceedings, in Athens and many Greek cities and also, at least in theory, from the judicial process at Rome.

The Greeks’ Settlements

On these conditions an agreement was sworn by those who stayed (on Thera) and by those who sailed to found the colony (in Libya) and they invoked curses against those who would not abide by it… They made images of wax and burned them, calling down this curse, everyone assembled together, men, women, boys and girls: ‘Whoever does not abide by this oath but transgresses it shall melt away and dissolve like these images, himself, his descendants and his property. But those who abide by the oath, those sailing to Libya and those staying on Thera, shall have good things in abundance, both themselves and their descendants.’

Oath of the settlers who founded Cyrene,
c.
630
BC
(as reinscribed,
c.
350
BC
)

In Homer’s poems, the main social context for the heroes in their Greek homelands is their palaces. In Homer’s lifetime, if we date him after
c.
760
BC
, no such palaces were to be found in Greece. The last buildings of such epic splendour had been the palaces of the distant ‘Mycenaean’ age which had come to an abrupt end
c.
1180
BC
.

There are hints, however, of a different social context, especially in the
Odyssey
: what we now call the
polis
or the ‘city-’ or ‘citizen-state’. Exactly how and when the
polis
had arisen remains highly disputed for lack of evidence, except from such archaeology as we so far have. Some modern scholars would see it as the direct heir of the fortified strongholds of the Mycenaean age, round which (on this view) survivors regrouped and formed a new type of community. Others would
see it as a later initiative, a part of a wider recovery in levels of population, riches and organization in the ninth century
BC
. Others would delay it even later, proposing that the very first
poleis
were founded in a new phase of settlement overseas: faced with a new start, these settlers invented a new type of social organization, the ‘city-state’, beginning in Sicily in the 730s
BC
.

Its definition is also rather fluid, varying between a ‘settlement’ or a ‘community’, usages which are both well attested in Greek. The distinctive sense of
polis
is, in my view, a ‘citizen-state’. The leader of the most recent research group to have specialized in it defines it as ‘a small, highly institutionalized and self-governing community of citizens, living with their wives and children in an urban centre and its hinterland, together with two other types of people: free foreigners (often called “metics”) and slaves…’
¹
Correctly, this definition reminds us that a
polis
was not a ‘city’ (it could be very small) and that it was not simply a town: its population was distributed over a rural territory which might include many villages (the Athenians’ territory had about a hundred and forty such villages by
c.
500
BC
). It also emphasizes people, the ‘citizens’, rather than their territory. Impressively, a
polis
could persist in this sense while outside its original territory: for some forty years in the fourth century
BC
, the men of Samos were exiled from their home island, but they still represented themselves as ‘the Samians’. Or so the men did: women lived in
poleis
, and their descent from citizen-families was often important, but they were not full citizens with political rights.

If we stress the sense of the word
polis
as a community, we can follow the changing political rights of its male population: a ‘citizen’ in the ninth century
BC
certainly did not have the same rights as many enjoyed in the classical fifth century
BC
. The themes of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ play an important part in these changes. Essentially, the
polis
was a community of warriors, males who would necessarily fight for it. Again, there were changes in who fought most, and in what style: ‘
polis
-males’ were not only warriors, nor often very war-like, but most of them did have to face the probability of a battle or two for their
polis
’s sake. In their changing styles of fighting, ‘luxury’ at times played a role.