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 honoured 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:
He married second rich Themis (Custom), who bore the Hōrai (Norms), Eunomiē (Social Order), Dikē (Justice) and blessed Eirēnē (Peace).
(Theogony 901ff)
Or in modern terms, the relationship between divine order and human order produces the norms which establish good rule, justice and peace. A whole social ethic is expressed in terms of myth and personification, an ethic in Which justice and social order have replaced the self-regarding virtues of the Homeric nobility.
The characteristic form of political organization of the Greeks was that of the polis or city-state, the small independent community, self-governing and usually confined to one city and its immediate countryside; Aristotle described man as ‘by nature an animal of the polis’ (Politics 1.1253a); the central theme of Greek history is the development of the city-state to become the dominant form of government in the Greek-speaking world for roughly a thousand years, enabling city dwellers to control directly all or much of their own government, and to feel a local loyalty to an extent which no modern society has achieved. It is a natural question to ask, when and how did the polis arise? Some features of the Homeric poems point to an earlier state; but as far as social and political organization are concerned, despite the importance of the genos and the oikos, Homer and Hesiod show that the polis already existed in all essential aspects by the end of the Dark Age. Homer takes the same view of human nature as Aristotle: the Cyclopes are utterly uncivilized, not only because they ignore the rules of guest-friendship; ‘they possess neither counsel-taking assemblies nor themistes, but dwell on the tops of high hills in hollow caves, and each one utters judgements for his children and wives, and they take no heed of one another’ (Odyssey 9.112ff). But though Homer recognized the existence of the polis, it was Hesiod who gave it the language of self-awareness. He stands at the beginning of Greek thought about politics, as about science and theology.
The origins of the polis are one of the great themes of early Greek history, whose various aspects form the main subject of this book. The problem is best explored from two points of view. The first concerns the origins and development of Greek political institutions, the continuing process of change and reform towards a form of political rationality which seems unique in world history. A society with little