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 proposing 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