Rule by one: the politics of Homer, c. 750 BCE

Abstract

The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is that it is intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other. (Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution , 1867) Monarchy runs like a red thread through Greek political history and thought (see also chapter 8). It was never normal or normative, though. Herodotus indeed (2.147) throws scorn on the Egyptians for their seemingly congenital incapacity to live without kings. There again, though, the same might be said of the – wholly Greek – Spartans, whose odd double kingship reminded Herodotus precisely of non-Greek royalty (Egyptian, Persian, Scythian) (see further chapter 10). The fact that there were always two Spartan kings, however, reigning jointly, from two different royal houses is, in a way, exactly the exception that proves the rule. The concentration of power that full-blooded monarchy represented was always at bottom felt to be incompatible with the fundamental polis principles of freedom and equality. If the wanax of Mycenaean times is put on one side, the continuous story of Greek kingship begins in Homer; but the Homeric epics are as slippery as a historical source as they are outstandingly brilliant as literature. Was there a single ‘Homeric society’, locatable in a specific time and place, and, if so, when and where? If there was, what were its politics? Where, to put it more bluntly, is the polis in Homer? Alternatively, and perhaps more accurately, how was the political dimension expressed therein?