ABOUT THE late eighth century, with Homer and Hesiod, literary evidence becomes available to supplement the fìndings of archaeology. But whereas Hesiod describes a real world contemporary with himself, it is obvious from the character of the Greek oral epic tradition that there are difficulties in using the Homeric poems for history. In some respects Homeric society is clearly an artificial literary creation. It is a natural tendency of all heroic epic to exaggerate the social status and behaviour of everyone involved, so that characters appear generally to belong to the highest social class and to possess great wealth and extraordinary abilities, in implicit contrast with the inequalities and squalor of the present age. Equally it is agreed that there are some minor elements in the Homeric poems from almost every period; the presence or absence of isolated phenomena cannot therefore be held to count for or against any particular date. This rule can be given a general negative extension, for the oral epic tradition consciously or unconsciously excludes whole areas of experience as irrelevant, or as known to be later than the heroic age: thus all signs of the coming of the Dorians and the Ionian migration are absent, as are many aspects of the poet’s own period. In general, omissions, however large, carry little weight for the argument.
Nevertheless I would argue that there is a historical basis to the society described in Homer, in the poet’s retrojection of the institutions of his own day. Archaeological evidence suggests this. Though the poems show a number of Mycenean survivals, the Linear B tablets have revealed a society wholly different from that portrayed in Homer; equally the scanty evidence from the early Dark Age is incompatible with the material culture of the Homeric poems. Only in the later Dark Age do the archaeological and literary evidence begin to coincide over a wide range of phenomena. To take examples which have been used in the controversy, the emphasis on Phoenicians as traders points most probably to a period between 900 and 700, as does the typical display of wealth through the Storage and giving away of bronze cauldrons and tripods. The architecture of the Homeric house fìnds its closest parallels in the same period. Homeric burials are by cremation which points away from the Mycenean inhumation to the later Dark Age and onwards, though the actual funerary rites owe much to poetic invention, which in turn affected contemporary practices. The earliest and most striking instances have been found at Salamis in Cyprus, whose rulers, in close contact with Euboea and possessed of great wealth as vassals of Assyria, were practising complicated ‘Homeric’ funeral rites from the second half of the eighth century. On the mainland offerings of almost the same date found inserted into Mycenean tombs suggest that epic had created a new interest in the heroic past which itself influenced the development of hero cult.
Admittedly some central aspects of Homeric society have been thought to show a basic confusion. In descriptions of fìghting, for instance, the chariot, which disappeared as a weapon of war at the end of the Mycenean period, is still an essential item of the aristocrat’s equipment; but the epic tradition no longer under stood its military use. Instead it has become a transport vehicle taking the heroes from place to place on the battlefield, and standing idly by as they dismount and fìght on foot: occasionally it even takes on the attributes of a horse and performs feats such as jumping ditches. This seems to be a combination of a Mycenean weapon with the tactics of the aristocratic mounted infantry of the late Dark Age. Again the Homeric warrior fights with a jumble of weapons from different periods: he can even start off to battle with a pair of throwing spears and end up fìghting with a single thrusting one. The metal used for weapons is almost invariably bronze, but for agricultural and industrial tools it is iron – a combination unknown in the real world, where the replacement of bronze by iron came first in the military sphere. Such examples do not however prove the artificiality of Homeric society. The elements all seem to belong to real societies: it is only their combination which is artifìcial; and when the different elements can be dated, they show a tendency to fall into two categories, dim reflections of Mycenean practices and a clearer portrayal of the late Dark Age world.
More general considerations reinforce this conclusion. The process of continual re-creation which is implied by an oral epic tradition means that the factual basis of epic is little different from that implied in any oral tradition: the focus is sharpest on contemporary phenomena, but the existence of fixed linguistic rhythms and conventional descriptions leads back into the past; and since the poet is consciously re-creating the past, he will discard the obviously contemporary and preserve what he knows to be older elements. The reality of the resulting society must be tested by using comparative evidence from other cultures to show how compatible the different institutions described by Homer are, and whether the overall nature of the society resembles that of other known primitive societies. Finally there is a clear line of development from the institutions described in Homer to those which existed in later Greece.
The differences in the way Homer and Hesiod portray society are not then to be explained chronologically: Homer’s society is of course idealized, and reaches back in time through the generations of his predecessors; Hesiod’s is fully contemporary. And the towns of Ionia which produced Homer were in many respects more sophisticated, more secure and more conservative than the social tensions of the peasant communities in Boeotia. But also Homer describes society from above, from the aristocratic point of view, whereas Hesiod’s vision is that of the lower orders, unable to envisage change but obsessed with the petty injustices of the social system and the realities of peasant farming. It is for this reason that I have not distinguished sharply the evidence of Homer and Hesiod, but have used them to create a composite picture of society at the end of the Dark Age. Given the different characteristics of the two types of epic it is however obvious that inferences drawn from Hesiod are more certain than inferences from heroic epic.
The subject matter of Homeric epic is the activities of the great, and it is their social environment which is portrayed most clearly. The word basileus, which is the normal title of the Homeric hero, in later Greek came to mean king; but in the Linear B tablets the king himself is called by a title which survives in certain passages of Homer, wanax: somewhere much lower in the hierarchy at loca1 level is a group of people called by a name which is clearly the later Greek basileus; presumably when the palace economy disappeared, it was these men who were left as the leaders in their communities. In Homer and Hesiod the word basileus is in fact often used in a way which is much closer to the idea of a nobility, a class of aristocrats, one of whom may of course hold an ill-defined and perhaps uneasy position of supremacy within the community. Agamemnon at Troy is the highest basileus among a group of equals whose powers and attributes are not essentially different from his. When Odysseus visits the ideal land of Phaeacia he meets many basilēes feasting in the house of Alcinous and Alcinous himself says, ‘twelve honoured basilēes rule as leaders over the people, and I am the thirteenth’ (Odyssey 8. 390–1 ). The basilēes to whom Hesiod appeals for justice are a group of nobles. Monarchy probably ceased to be a widespread phenomenon in Greece at the beginning of the Dark Age: once again Homer’s ambivalence is due to the combination of Mycenean reminiscence with later society.
The basilēes of early Greece are a group of hereditary nobles largely independent of each other and separated from the rest of the community by their style of life as much as by their wealth, prerogatives or power. Each stands at the head of a group which can be viewed in two different ways: in terms of hereditary descent, as his genos or family, and in terms of its economic counterpart, the oikos (household or estate).
The Homeric family is not a particularly extended group. It comprises essentially the head of the house, his wife and his adult sons with their wives and offspring, together with other members of the immediate family. On his death the property is divided equally by lot among his sons, who then set up separate households; male children by slave women mostly have some status, though a lower one than sons of the wife: at one point Odysseus claims to be a bastard from Crete; his father treated him the same as his other children, but when he died the estate was shared among these, while he received only a house and little else (Odyssey 14.202ff). The basic Greek word for a man’s land is klēros, what he has inherited by lot; his dearest possessions which he will not leave and for which he will fight are his family, his oikos and his klēros (Iliad 15.498; Odyssey 14.64). It is the details of the division by lot of their father’s estate which Hesiod and his brother are quarrelling about (Works