Private Revenge and Public Justice

Abstract

This article intends to show that the study of the Homeric epics may be useful for understanding the historical roots of our modern institutions of Criminal Justice. The Iliad and the Odyssey (both the product of an oral tradition that lasted several centuries) were written down around the middle of the 8th century BC and describe the moral values and the social life of the Greek world of that period. The social organization that they describe was not yet a polis, and the law did not exist (at least in the modern sense of the word). Nevertheless, a set of social rules existed and was basically respected. The fundamental rule was an obligation to react to any offensive behaviour by taking revenge on the offender. The sanction for not taking revenge was `losing face'. But revenge was not a free exercise of violence. It was regulated by detailed rules, some of them considered so important that if a dispute arose concerning their violation, the Council of Elders settled the dispute, acting as the first documented body of jurors in western history. The Homeric epics, therefore, show the instruments and the effectiveness of social control in situations where a state does not exist, as well as the way - or one of the ways - in which a legal system may come into existence.