Early Greece

by Oswyn Murray

  It has been described as a shame culture rather than a guilt culture: the sanctions protecting morality were not internal to a man but external, in the sense of shame (aidōs) that a man must feel at losing status before his peers: so public penalties were in terms of loss of property, for property was one aspect of honour. The gods have little to do with this morality, except in the sense that they largely conform to it. Only Zeus in a general way has some concern with the triumph of right, or at least the preservation of certain basic rules like those of guest-friendship. It is typical of such a culture that internal states of conflict are little recognized, and that admissions of fault or failure are hard to make, for they involve public loss of face: Homeric heroes do not deny responsibility for their actions, but they often also claim that an external divine force was responsible, and see no incompatibility. In fact the whole language of psychic phenomena is reified and externalized: mental states are identical with their physical symptoms, and head, lungs, belly and knees are thought of as the seats of the emotions.

  This aristocratic style of life had its roots in a distant past of nomadic warrior bands, and never wholly disappeared in Greece. Its continuity can be illustrated from the history of the Greek word phratra, which is cognate with the almost universal Indo-European kinship term for brother (German Bruder, Celtic brathir, Latin frater, French frère). In Greek the word is not used of blood relationship; it rather designates a ‘brotherhood’, a social group. It is used twice in Homer: ‘divide your men by tribes (phylai), by phratries, Agamemnon, so that phratry may help phratry and tribes tribes’ (Iliad 2.362f see also 9.63). The tribes were originally military divisions, the phratries presumably also – the old word perhaps for the bands of hetairoi. They seem to have been widespread as a political division smaller than the tribe. The power of the aristocratic genos in many cities down to the Persian Wars was dependent on the continuity of these political and social groupings around the genos; the names of the Bacchiadai and Kypselidai of Corinth or the Philaidai, Alkmeonidai and Peisistratidai of Athens, with their characteristic suffixes, claim descent from an often quite recent ancestor as a genos: but these aristocratic families clearly had far wider traditional support. In Athens for instance at least until Kleisthenes the phratries were a major political force; and each phratry seems to have been dominated by one or two noble families (see below p. 276). And long after they lost their political role the phratries continued as cult groups and social clubs.

  Other less tangible attitudes survived. The moral code was one; the importance of drinking clubs another. The philosophic or literary symposium of Plato and others was one descendant, as were the rowdy hetaireiai or aristocratic clubs; these could be organized to influence court cases and elections and even used to overthrow the government of Athens through Street murders in 411 BC. And the prevalence of cases of drunken assault (hybris) by young aristocrats in the legal literature of the fourth century shows that the suitors were never really taught to behave.

  A third continuity is the place of the gift or benefit in social relationships. The Christian notion of charity, giving without expectation of return (except in heaven) comes through Judaism from the ancient near east, a world of such gross inequalities that giving served merely to emphasize the gap between classes and the merits of the powerful in the eyes of God. In the more equal societies of Greece and Rome giving is for a return, and establishes a social relationship between giver and recipient in which one is temporarily or permanently under an obligation to the other.

  IV

  The End of the Dark Age: the Community

  BEYOND THE aristocratic world of the oikos lay the community as a whole, which in Homer is presupposed or glimpsed occasionally on the outskirts of the main action, but in Hesiod takes the central position. The chief social division is that between aristocracy and the people (dēmos), who are primarily the free peasantry, though there is no sign that the landless thēs was excluded from any rights. In contrast the craftsman or dēmiourgos (‘public worker’) held an ambiguous position. He was often an outsider, travelling from community to community; Eumaeus claims such men are welcome as xenoi, and lists them: the seer, the healer of pains, the worker in wood, the inspired singer (Odyssey 17.382ff). The class also surely includes metal workers; heralds, who seem to have been public officiate, were dēmiourgoi of a rather different sort. The presence of outsiders among the craftsmen is one reason for their ambiguous status; another is the fact that they possessed skills which were highly valued by the aristocracy, without being aristocratic: an artist was in some sense both divinely inspired and less than mortal. This ambivalence is reflected in myth: the gods both give and take away. Blindness is a common motif: insight replaces outsight when Apollo blinds his prophets. Demodocus was ‘the favourite bard whom the Muse loved especially, and gave him both good and evil; she took away his eyes but gave him sweet song’ (Odyssey 8.62ff). Rightly or wrongly Demodocus was seen as Homer.

  The mythic prototypes of human skills are themselves physically marred. The blacksmith is important enough to have a god, but in social terms he is lame like his god, Hephaistos: ‘From the anvil he rose limping, a huge bulk, and his thin legs moved under him … with a sponge he wiped his face and hands, and his sturdy neck and hairy chest’ (Iliad 18.41 off). To the other gods he is a figure of fun: ‘unquenchable laughter fìlled the blessed gods when they saw Hephaistos bustling through the house’ (Iliad 1.599f); even his marriage to Aphrodite is a marriage of opposites, which leads to the delightful folk-tale of Aphrodite and Ares, love and war, caught in adultery by his golden net (Odyssey 8.266ff). In contrast the goddess who presides over the women’s work of weaving, Athene, was normal; for that activity was fully integrated into the home, not a skilled craft. In Hesiod, Prometheus, the embodiment of forethought, stole fire from heaven for man, and so created technology; in retaliation Zeus created woman (Theogony 535ff; Works and Days 42ff). Such attitudes to the craftsman and his skills in myth reflect the early ambivalence of his social status; in the case of manual skills this attitude persisted: Greece was a society which never carne to terms with technology.

  The basic forms of Greek political organization remained the same throughout the history of the city-state, and are already present in Homer; it was the powers apportioned to the different elements and the criteria for membership which varied in different periods. In early Greece an assembly of all adult male members of the community (the agora or gathering) was subordinate to the boulē (council) of the elders, which seems to consist of the heads of the noble families, the basilēes. The existence of an executive or magistracy, whether elective or hereditary, is obscured by the memories of Mycenean kingship in Homer; but slightly later evidence shows many varied forms, principally that of the annual magistrate or board of magistrates, whose powers were effectively limited by the existence of the elders in council, and the fact that the magistrates themselves were young men who only entered the council through holding such offices.

  Debate within the council or before the people was the basis of decision-making, though there was no formal voting procedure. The traditional pair of activities of the basileus is warfare and debate, which are of equal importance. Odysseus is ‘the best in good counsel and mighty in war’ (Iliad 2.273); Achilles claims, ‘I am the best of all the bronze-clad Achaeans in war, even though others are better in assembly’ (Iliad 18.105f); of Hector and his hetairos it is said, ‘one was far better at words, the other with the sword’ (Iliad 18.252). These proverbial distinctions show the enormous importance of the spoken word and persuasion in public debate from the beginning.

  There are several detailed descriptions of political decision-making in Homer; the longest and most revealing is that in book 2 of the Iliad. As a result of a dream, Agamemnon orders ‘the loud voiced heralds to summon the long haired Achaeans to the Gathering … but first he called a council of the great hearted elders’. The council is seated except for the speaker; he reveals a plan to test the troops by propo
sing withdrawal from Troy; the other elders must oppose this in assembly. Nestor speaks in favour, and the councillors proceed to the assembly, which is controlled by nine heralds. After the people are seated, Agamemnon takes his skēptron or staff of office and addresses them standing. His proposal is so popular that it starts a rush for the ships, and the meeting looks like breaking up in chaos. But Odysseus takes the skēptron as a badge of authority and intercepts the flight, using persuasion on the nobles and ordering the troops. When the assembly has returned and settled down, there is one recalcitrant man of the people, Thersites, lovingly described as the archetypal agitator, ‘the ugliest man who came to Troy, bandy legged and lame in one foot, his two shoulders rounded over a hollow chest; his head above was misshapen and sprouted a scanty stubble’. He proceeds to abuse Agamemnon, until Odysseus threatens him, and hits him with the skēptron; whereupon the people mutter their approval of the best thing that Odysseus has ever done. Athene disguised as a herald secures silence, and Odysseus and Nestor in turn persuade the army to stay and fight; Agamemnon ostensibly gives way, and dismisses the Achaeans to prepare for battle.

  From this and other accounts the essentials of procedure are clear. Business was normally first discussed in the council of elders and then presented to the Gathering of the people: on both occasions there was debate, and disagreement was possible. But only elders were expected to speak: the assembly’s role was as much to hear the decision of the council as to ratify it. On the other hand the assembly had to be held for major decisions; and the importance and power of public opinion was recognized. It is the dēmos who gives geras to the nobles (Odyssey 7.150); in Odysseus’ Cretan story it was the dēmos who forced him to sail to Troy (Odyssey 14.239); and even though Telemachus hoped in vain to appeal to the people of Ithaca against his fellow aristocrats the suitors, he did at least force them to justify their position in open assembly (Odyssey 2). There was a regular place of assembly even in the Achaean camp before Troy, ‘where the meeting and law (themis) was, and the altars of the gods were set up’ (Iliad 11.807f); the rituals and procedures essential for the orderly conduct of mass meetings were well established, and show remarkable similarities with the highly complex rituals surrounding the only later assemblies whose workings are known in detail, those of democratic Athens. Continuity and development are both present in the growth of the machinery of government from the primitive warrior assemblies of Homer to the classical city-state.

  Outside the political and military spheres, the most important function of the basilēes was the regulation of disputes between individuals, in ways which are especially important, because they were the basis of the subsequent development of Greek law and legal procedure. Beyond a group of primitive tabus and customs, there was no conception of crime or system of justice in the modern sense, with laws written or unwritten of divine or human origin, and punishments inflicted by the community. The essential characteristic of Greek law is that it was originally a human system of public arbitration to settle the compensation due for injury.

  In Homer the vocabulary is concrete, and refers to individual cases and specific rules: the actual decisions (dikai) are ‘straight’ or ‘crooked’ according to the extent to which they conform to the customs (themistes), the unwritten rules and precedents which justify decisions. The singular dikē is used in its later abstract sense of justice only twice in Homer, the singular themis only in the rather doubtful case quoted above (Iliad 11.807). The relation of these specifìc decisions and customs to the general order of the universe is expressed by the claim that the official staff (skēptron) and the themistes are a gift from Zeus: ‘the men who give dikai carry the skēptron in their hands, those who guard the themistes for Zeus’ (Iliad 1.238f); Zeus has given the basileus the skēptron and the themistes that he may take counsel for the people (Iliad 2.205f; 9.98f.), and ‘he is angry with men who in assembly judge with crooked themistes and drive out justice, not caring for the eye of the gods’ (Iliad 16.386ff: this is the only case in the Iliad of dikē in an abstract sense; the other example is Odyssey 14.84).

  Two forms of procedure are known. The first is a primitive oath-taking test: Menelaus formally takes the skēptron in a dispute and demands that Antilochus swear a public oath by Poseidon that he did not cheat him in the chariot race; Antilochus refuses the challenge and offers compensation (Iliad 23.565ff). More complex is the procedure described as a scene on the shield of Achilles:

  But the people were gathered in assembly. There a dispute had arisen and two men were quarrelling over the price of a dead man. One claimed to pay the full amount, addressing the people, the other refused to accept anything. Both were eager to accept a solution from an expert; the people were cheering both, supporting each side, and the heralds were restraining the people. But the elders sat on polished stones in a sacred circle, and held the sceptres in their hands. Then they rose before them, and in turn gave judgement. And in the middle lay two talents of gold to give to him who among them spoke judgement most straightly.

  (Iliad 18.497ff)

  This describes a formal arbitration. The proceedings are public, with all the ceremonies appropriate to a full assembly. The elders act as individual mediators not as judges; no decision can be enforced: rather the solution must be acceptable to both sides, and the elder whose opinion is accepted receives the mediation fee offered by one or both parties in the arbitration. The only sanction available to produce a solution is the pressure of public opinion, which at present is equally divided.

  There are also a number of unusual features. Murder or homicide must always impose a strain on systems of arbitration, since the alternative to settlement is the commencement of a blood feud detrimental to the community. Public opinion will therefore be in favour of a settlement, but the blood price demanded may be too high for the murderer to pay, or the relatives may refuse compensation altogether; in either case the murderer must go into exile. The main reason given in Homer for being an exile is that one has killed a man, an action that carries no moral blame, and can indeed serve as an introduction to the best circles. Ajax, in trying to persuade Achilles to accept the compensation offered by Agamemnon, argues, ‘a man has accepted recompense from the murderer of his brother or his son; and the murderer may remain at home among the people, having paid a great price; while the heart and noble anger of the other is appeased by the recompense he has received’ (Iliad 9.632ff); the implication is that a man may also refuse compensation or stand out for more than the other possesses. The case on the shield of Achilles has a further twist: the amount of blood price is not in dispute, but the aggrieved relative wishes to refuse it and so force the murderer into exile; the case has actually been brought by the murderer in order to put public pressure on the other to accept a blood price. The issue is therefore a complex one, for it is almost exactly on the borderline in the development of a system of arbitration towards a code of law involving public sanctions.

  The basileus has a duty to mediate in disputes, but they are also a source of profìt: the mediator whose verdict is accepted receives the mediation fee; so Agamemnon tempts Achilles by offering him seven citadels inhabited by wealthy men ‘who will honour him like a god with gifts and perform fat themistes under his skēptron’ (Iliad 9.156ff); in other words he is likely to gain considerable profìt from mediation fees.

  It was this system which galled Hesiod: as he warned his brother, the only people likely to derive profìt from their dispute were the ‘gift-eating basilēes’. Hesiod was clearly not referring to bribery: these gifts are the right of a mediator, and it is not suggested that they will make any direct difference to the verdict; on the other hand there was considerable doubt in Hesiod’s mind whether the verdict, the dikē, would be straight. In Boeotia the system seems to have developed far enough to have legal force.

  So Hesiod took the decisive step in political thought of warning the rulers that there is such a thing as Justice.

  She is the virgin Dikē born of Zeus, glorious and h
onoured by the gods who dwell on mount Olympus; and whenever anyone harms her by casting crooked blame, straightway sitting by her father Zeus, son of Kronos, she tells him of the minds of unjust men, until the people pays for the arrogance of its nobles who, plotting evil, bend judgements astray and speak crookedly. Take thought of this, you gift-eating nobles, straighten your words, utterly forget crooked judgements.

  (Works and Days 256ff)

  For Hesiod dikē (justice) has replaced timē (honour) as the central virtue for the community and its leaders: he speaks as a prophet warning the nobles that their misdeeds will destroy society: the whole city suffers from the vengeance of Zeus on them; he causes plague and famine, barrenness in women, and poverty; he destroys their army and their walls and their ships at sea (Works and Days 24off).

  Hesiod’s concern with social justice led him to create a political vocabulary. His thought is not normally expressed in truly abstract concepts; instead he speaks through the manipulation of myth: the eastern myth of the ages of man is retold to reveal the flight of justice from earth in the fifth and worst age, the age of iron (p. 91); the traditional form of the animal fable is given a new political dimension in the story of the hawk and the nightingale, which Hesiod himself probably invented. And the structure of political argument, the relationships between concepts, are expressed through a mode of thought which is specifically Greek, and which has had a deep effect on the cultural tradition of the western world – personification. Ideas derived from concrete institutions become abstract by acquiring the status of a divinity; the connections between these abstractions are expressed in terms of family relationships. The random examples in Homer (mostly concerned with physical states like Fear and Death and Sleep) have become in Hesiod a complex and meaningful system. Individual dikai (judgements) are parts of the goddess Dikē, who is hurt when they are perverted; she is the daughter of Zeus. Zeus indeed becomes the protector of human society: