The Voice of the People in Homer

Abstract

Abstract The informality of the Homeric assembly is often emphasised to distinguish it from the democratic bodies of the classical polis, and to show that the people in the Homeric society had no means to qualify the power of their aristocratic leaders. This article argues, to the contrary, that the lack of a formal system of command and control in the Homeric society conditioned the dependence of the leaders on a political model of persuasion. Since this was necessarily directed at the mass population of the society, they people were integrated in the system of government. This was maintained through three general mechanisms: first, the voice of the people was institutionalised, in the form of a popular assembly, the agorē; second, the people had a standardised, effective means by which to express consent and a limited amount of dissent to their leaders in the assembly; third, the people participated in a juridical function which was communal in purpose and form. This model seeks to show that, in these ways, the voice of the people held an important position in the structure of power, one which depended on the informality of that structure rather than being reduced by it.