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An historical Homeric society?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

A. M. Snodgrass
A. M. Snodgrass
Affiliation:
University of Ediburgh
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Extract

I begin with two modern texts, both as it happens printed on the first page of earlier issues of this journal, and each, I think, expressive of a strong body of opinion in Homeric scholarship, at least in the English-speaking countries, at the time of their writing. First, Miss Dorothea Gray in 1954: ‘Belief in an historical Homeric society dies hard’. Secondly, Professor Adkins in 1971: ‘I find it impossible to believe … that the bards of the oral tradition invented out of their own imaginations a society with institutions, values, beliefs and attitudes all so coherent and mutually appropriate as I believe myself to discern in the Homeric poems. This aspect of the poems is based upon some society's experience’. Miss Gray's prophecy, whether or not one shares the misgivings that it embodied, was thus soundly-based: the seventeen years between these two quotations have indeed witnessed a powerful revival of the belief that the social system portrayed in the Homeric poems, and with it such attendant features as the ethical code and the political structure, are in large measure both unitary and historical. One good reason for the vitality of this belief is the simple fact that it has been alive since Classical times. Another is that it has received support from several influential recent works: if pride of place should be given to M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus, on whose conclusions Professor Adkins expressely says that he takes his stand, a number of others should be acknowledged also. Whereas Finley located the social system of the Odyssey most probably in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., A. Andrewes in his book The Greeks extends this type of inference when he argues for an historical origin in the ‘migration period’ of the twelfth and eleventh centuries for the Homeric political system. As influences on the other side, one may mention T. B. L. Webster's work in isolating Mycenaean practices and features, whose divisive effect on the social pattern is apparent; while G. S. Kirk has a significantly entitled chapter in his The Songs of Homer, ‘The cultural and linguistic amalgam’ (my italics). Most recently, the early chapters in the German Archaeologia Homerica have shown a certain tendency to discern a consistent and historical pattern in the allied area of the material and technological practices of the poems. It is true that in one chapter the author is led to conclude that the metallurgical picture of the Iliad is substantially earlier than that of the Odyssey, and that the date of composition of the former poem must accordingly be very much earlier. But this is only because he is pressing the arguments for the ‘historical’ case one step further: the historical consistency of the metallurgical pictures in each of the two poems is, for him, so apparent and so precise that each can and must be given an historical setting, even if the two are separated by a long period.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 94 , November 1974 , pp. 114 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1974

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References

1 JHS 74 (1954). 1.

2 JHS 91 (1971), 1.

3 Ibid., 2.

4 The Greeks (1967), 45.

5 See e.g. From Mycenae to Homer (1958), chapter 4; and in A Companion to Homer (ed. Wace, A. J. B. and Stubbings, F. H., 1963), 452–62.Google Scholar

6 The Songs of Homer (1962), chapter 9.

7 Archaeologia Homerica (ed. Matz, F. and Buchholz, H.-G.), Göttingen, 1967–.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., Kapitel C, Bielefeld, E., Schmuck (1968), 65Google Scholar; cf. more fully Gnomon 42 (1970), 157–9.

9 The Homeric Odyssey (1955), 157.

10 By ‘historical’, throughout this paper, I mean ‘derived from one single period of history’; a conflation of features from a diversity of historical periods I prefer to call ‘composite’.

11 MacIntyre, Alasdair, A short history of Ethics (1968), 8.Google Scholar

12 JHS 90 (1970), 137. n. 58.

13 Ibid., 122.

14 Finley, M. I. in Revue Internationale des Droits de l'Antiquité (3° ser.), 2 (1955), 167–94Google Scholar, followed in this important respect by Lacey, W. K., JHS 86 (1966), 55–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Calhoun, G. M. in A Companion to Homer (above, n. 5). 452.Google Scholar

16 I give a bald list of those passages which seem to me to illustrate this: Λ 243, Ν 365 (where the ‘price’ is a feat rather than a payment), Π 178, 190, Χ 472, θ 318, λ 281, ο 16, 231, 367, π 391, τ 529, φ 161.

17 Again, while several instances are ambiguous, this practice seems exemplified by Ζ 191, 251, 394, Ι147 = 269, Χ 51, α 277 = β 196, β 54, 132, δ 736, η 311, υ 341, ψ 227, ω 294.

18 Hermes 47 (1912), 414–21. The interpretation of ἓδνα as meaning ‘indirect dowry’ in certain passages receives notable support from the scholiasts, ibid., 419.

19 Cf. Finley, op. cit. (above, n. 14).

20 See e.g. Yalman, Nur, Under the Bo Tree (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), esp. chapter 8 and pp. 303–4.Google Scholar

21 There is a further case where both practices appear to be associated with a hypothetical future occasion, the re-marriage of Penelope: contrast ο 16 etc. (apparent bride-price) with α 277 etc. (dowry). But the case is weaker because the identity of the bridegroom is undecided, and in any case I would apply here the same explanation (mutatis mutandis) as in the case of Hektor and Andromache. The marital fortunes of Penelope are indeed a constant embarrassment to those who believe in a consistent social pattern in Homer, since the ultimate responsibility is distributed between herself, her father and her son, and the political control of Ithaka is also implicated. Even Finley describes the case as an ‘often self-contradictory amalgam of strands’ [op. cit. (above, n. 14), 172, n. 19]. W. K. Lacey (above, n. 14, 61–6) has bravely striven to discern consistent principles behind the various situations envisaged for Penelope; but his explanation seems to me to posit an improbable and indeed almost legalistic fidelity on the poet's part.

22 See Goody, J. R., ‘Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia’, especially Appendix II, in Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology), ed. Goody, J. R. and Tambiah, S. J., forthcoming.Google Scholar

23 I think especially of the hilarious negotiations between Baron Ochs and the Marschallin's notary in the first act of Der Rosenkavalier.

24 Contrast Neleus and Chloris (λ 281, see above) with Odysseus and Nausikaa (hypothetical, η 314) for marriages abroad; Polymela and Echekles (Π 190) with Laothoe and Priam (Χ 51) for more local marriages.

25 ‘Inheritance, Property and Marriage in Africa and Eurasia’, Sociology 3 (1969), 55–76.

26 ‘Inheritance, Property and Marriage in Africa and Eurasia', Sociology, 3 (1969), 56.

27 Ibid., 57.

28 E.g. The World of Odysseus (1956), 66 f.

29 E.g. Merit and Responsibility (1960), 35 f.

30 Op. cit. (above, n. 28), 72.

31 I am indebted to Mrs S. C. Le M. Humphreys for this and several other valuable observations.

32 Goody, op. cit. (above, n. 25), 62–3 with Table V.

33 CQ 41 (1947), 109–21, esp. 120–1.

34 E.g. Adkins, , JHS 91 (1971) 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finley, , The World of Odysseus, 55.Google Scholar

35 The Oldest Irish Tradition (1964), 28.

36 Cf., on methods of composition, Kirk, , The Songs of Homer, 95.Google Scholar

37 Some of these points are discussed in my book The Dark Age of Greece (1971), 388–94.

38 The Songs of Homer, 182.

39 Finley, M. I., Early Greece: the Bronze and Archaic Ages (1970), 84Google Scholar; Kurtz, D. and Boardman, J., Greek Burial Customs (1971), 186.Google Scholar

40 I refrain from introducing chariots into this question, since the widespread assumption that Homer's chariotry is a half-understood memory of the true Bronze Age practice has been questioned by Anderson, J. K. (AJA 69 (1965), 349–52)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But it remains true that, for chariots as well, the tenth and nindi (and indeed the eleventh) centuries in Greece have little or no evidence to offer.

41 Cf. The Dark Age of Greece, 408–12, 422–3.

42 Historia 6 (1957), 147, n. 1.

43 Cf. The Dark Age of Greece, 379–80 and n. 20.

44 As was kindly pointed out to me by Mr V. R. d'A. Desborough.

45 An earlier version of the paper was delivered to the Oxford Philological Society on May 12, 1972. It would be invidious to single out any of the numerous members from whose contributions to the subsequent discussion I benefited. But on the anthropological side I gratefully acknowledge my debt to Dr Jack Goody and my colleague, Professor James Littlejohn, much as I fear I have oversimplified their views on complex subjects; while among Classical colleagues I owe a special debt to Mr D. B. Robinson.