The Classical World Read Free

working onto the shield for Achilles. In one part of it, two contestants are shown disputing over the ‘recompense’ to be made for a dead man. The people cheer them on and have to be held back by heralds. On polished seats of stone the elders sit and join in the process. ‘Two talents of gold lie in the middle for whoever speaks the straightest judgement among them.’ 6
    The details of this scene of justice remain mysterious and are therefore disputed. Are the contestants arguing over whether or not a price has been paid for the killing of a man? They are said to wish to reach a conclusion from a ‘knowledgeable man’, but what, then, are the elders doing in the process? It seems that Homer describes the elders as holding the ‘sceptres of heralds’: is it the elders who then rush forwards and give judgements ‘one after another’? But if so, who is the ‘knowledgeable’ man? The people seem to be cheering on either party: are they, perhaps, the group who will decide by their shouts which elder is the ‘knowledgeable’ one and has given the best judgement? The contestants would then have to accept the opinion of the people’s favoured speaker. He in turn would receive the ‘two talents of gold’ on display in the middle of the meeting.
    There is no single king in this scene and so it reads like Homer’s invention on the model of something seen in his own non-monarchical lifetime. A murder was a spectacular event, of obvious concern to people at large. The people’s presence and noisy participation arecertain here, in the oldest surviving scene of the giving of justice in Greek. Homer’s audience would surely recognize the details, but one achievement of the next three centuries was to be the bringing of this process under written law before juries who would consist of ordinary people. As we shall see, the ‘two talents’ were duly removed from the middle of the proceedings, in Athens and many Greek cities and also, at least in theory, from the judicial process at Rome.

2
    The Greeks’ Settlements
    On these conditions an agreement was sworn by those who stayed (on Thera) and by those who sailed to found the colony (in Libya) and they invoked curses against those who would not abide by it… They made images of wax and burned them, calling down this curse, everyone assembled together, men, women, boys and girls: ‘Whoever does not abide by this oath but transgresses it shall melt away and dissolve like these images, himself, his descendants and his property. But those who abide by the oath, those sailing to Libya and those staying on Thera, shall have good things in abundance, both themselves and their descendants.’
    Oath of the settlers who founded Cyrene,
c.
630 BC (as reinscribed,
c.
350 BC )
    In Homer’s poems, the main social context for the heroes in their Greek homelands is their palaces. In Homer’s lifetime, if we date him after
c.
760 BC , no such palaces were to be found in Greece. The last buildings of such epic splendour had been the palaces of the distant ‘Mycenaean’ age which had come to an abrupt end
c.
1180 BC .
    There are hints, however, of a different social context, especially in the
Odyssey
: what we now call the
polis
or the ‘city-’ or ‘citizen-state’. Exactly how and when the
polis
had arisen remains highly disputed for lack of evidence, except from such archaeology as we so far have. Some modern scholars would see it as the direct heir of the fortified strongholds of the Mycenaean age, round which (on this view) survivors regrouped and formed a new type of community. Others wouldsee it as a later initiative, a part of a wider recovery in levels of population, riches and organization in the ninth century BC . Others would delay it even later, proposing that the very first
poleis
were founded in a new phase of settlement overseas: faced with a new start, these settlers invented a new type of social organization, the ‘city-state’, beginning in Sicily in the 730s