Though primarily and perhaps originally related to the interests of the aristocracy, the way in which these warrior bands might benefit the community is clear. Odysseus spins a long story about his imaginary life in Crete, which shows this. After the account of his upbringing mentioned above (p. 38), he describes how, in spite of his dubious birth and poverty, he had married a wife from a landed family because of his prowess. Nine times he led a fleet against foreigners, and became rich and respected; so that when the expedition set off to Troy, public opinion forced him to be one of the leaders. The expedition it seems was a public venture. When he returned he went back to sea-raiding on his own account: he found it easy enough to fill nine ships. The companions feasted for six days and then set off for Egypt. There the expedition carne to grief as a result of delay, and the troubles of its imaginary leader began (Odyssey 14.199ff).
There are other indications that the poet envisaged the expedition to Troy as a public one: a public fine is mentioned for those who refused to go (Iliad 13.669ff), and the feasting was at public not private expense: ‘dear leaders and captains of the Argives, who drink at public cost with the sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, and each command your bands’ (Iliad 17.248ff; compare 4.3428ff). Institutionalized warfare was an area where the community had an interest in the maintenance of its aristocracy and their fìghting bands; the warrior might even be given a special grant of land by the people, a temenos (the word survives from Myceanean Greek, though its meaning may have changed): ‘Glaucus, why are we two especially honoured, with seats of honour and meat and full cups, in Lycia, and everyone looks on us as gods, and we possess a great temenos by the banks of the Xanthus, fair orchards and wheat-bearing fìelds? Now we must stand with the first of the Lycians and face fiery battle, so that the Lycians in their thick breastplates may say “Our nobles that rule in Lycia are great men, they eat fat sheep and drink the best honey-sweet wine. But they are powerful men, for they fìght with the first of the Lycians”’ (Iliad 12.310ff).
Homeric descriptions of fìghting are confused; but, combining them with the archaeological evidence from grave goods, it seems that warfare in the late Dark Age was heavily dependent on the individual champion and his companions, who constituted almost a warrior class. Only they had the resources to acquire the metal for their equipment: the rest of the community seems to have been lightly armed with primitive weapons, and to have done little more than watch the duels of the nobility. They were armed with bronze cuirass, greaves and helmet, and shields in a variety of shapes, held from a central grip and made from leather or bronze plates. The primary offensive weapons were iron swords and two or more spears, which could be thrown and used for thrusting. If it is right to interpret the anachronistic chariots as horses, it would seem that the warriors rode to battle with a mounted squire, but fought on foot: the development of a true cavalry is later.
Oral epic created a heroic past for a particular group in society and glorified its values; since the Homeric poems established themselves as the bible of the Greeks, the ethic they portray had a permanent influence on Greek morality. It is essentially a competitive ethic, expressed in the words of Glaucus, ‘always to be best and pre-eminent over others, and not to shame the seed of my fathers’ (Iliad 6.208f). The moral vocabulary concerns principally success or skill: a good man is good at something, at fighting or counsel; the word aretē is closer to ‘excellence’ than ‘virtue’. It is a public attribute measured by the amount of honour (timē) given by others to a man; and timē itself had a physical expression in the geras or share of booty due to him. It was also an individualistic ethic: a man’s timē was his own concern, even the gods cared little for any timē but their own; the chief exception to this self-regarding ethic was the duty to help a friend.
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.
The End of the Dark Age: the Community