An historical Homeric society?

Abstract

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.