Early Greece. Oswyn Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ Hesiod’s vision is that of the lower orders, unable to envisage change but obsessed with the petty injustices of the social system and the realities of peasant farming. It is for this reason that I have not distinguished sharply the evidence of Homer and Hesiod, but have used them to create a composite picture of society at the end of the Dark Age. Given the different characteristics of the two types of epic it is however obvious that inferences drawn from Hesiod are more certain than inferences from heroic epic.

      The subject matter of Homeric epic is the activities of the great, and it is their social environment which is portrayed most clearly. The word basileus, which is the normal title of the Homeric hero, in later Greek came to mean king; but in the Linear B tablets the king himself is called by a title which survives in certain passages of Homer, wanax: somewhere much lower in the hierarchy at loca1 level is a group of people called by a name which is clearly the later Greek basileus; presumably when the palace economy disappeared, it was these men who were left as the leaders in their communities. In Homer and Hesiod the word basileus is in fact often used in a way which is much closer to the idea of a nobility, a class of aristocrats, one of whom may of course hold an ill-defined and perhaps uneasy position of supremacy within the community. Agamemnon at Troy is the highest basileus among a group of equals whose powers and attributes are not essentially different from his. When Odysseus visits the ideal land of Phaeacia he meets many basilēes feasting in the house of Alcinous and Alcinous himself says, ‘twelve honoured basilēes rule as leaders over the people, and I am the thirteenth’ (Odyssey 8. 390–1 ). The basilēes to whom Hesiod appeals for justice are a group of nobles. Monarchy probably ceased to be a widespread phenomenon in Greece at the beginning of the Dark Age: once again Homer’s ambivalence is due to the combination of Mycenean reminiscence with later society.

      The basilēes of early Greece are a group of hereditary nobles largely independent of each other and separated from the rest of the community by their style of life as much as by their wealth, prerogatives or power. Each stands at the head of a group which can be viewed in two different ways: in terms of hereditary descent, as his genos or family, and in terms of its economic counterpart, the oikos (household or estate).

      The Homeric family is not a particularly extended group. It comprises essentially the head of the house, his wife and his adult sons with their wives and offspring, together with other members of the immediate family. On his death the property is divided equally by lot among his sons, who then set up separate households; male children by slave women mostly have some status, though a lower one than sons of the wife: at one point Odysseus claims to be a bastard from Crete; his father treated him the same as his other children, but when he died the estate was shared among these, while he received only a house and little else (Odyssey 14.202ff). The basic Greek word for a man’s land is klēros, what he has inherited by lot; his dearest possessions which he will not leave and for which he will fight are his family, his oikos and his klēros (Iliad 15.498; Odyssey 14.64). It is the details of the division by lot of their father’s estate which Hesiod and his brother are quarrelling about (Works and Days 37), and Hesiod proclaims, work hard ‘that you may buy the klēros of others, not another yours’ (341). Beyond the immediate kin, the genos seems to have little significance; genealogies are not important and seldom go back beyond the third generation. Names for more distant kin are few, though kinship by marriage has a special term, as do certain members of the mother’s family. A man may expect help from his father-in-law or son-in-law as from his friends (Odyssey 8.58iff; Hesiod, Works and Days 345). But in general it is the immediate family which counts: blood-money for killing a man is described as due to his brother or father (Iliad 9.632f), not to any wider group; and when Odysseus kills the suitors, the father of one takes up the blood-feud with the words ‘it brings great shame for future men to hear if we do not take vengeance for the deaths of our sons and brothers’ (Odyssey 24.433ff). Curiously it is only killing within the family which involves a wider group of relatives or supporters (Iliad 2.66iff; Odyssey 15.272ff). It is somewhat misleading therefore to translate genos as clan rather than family.

      The patriarchal nature of the family is shown not only by the rules of inheritance. Marriages are arranged by the heads of the genos, often for reasons of political friendship; the bride comes from the same social class, but is not necessarily related or even from the same area. Achilles says that if he returns from Troy, his father Peleus will himself seek a wife for him; ‘for there are many Achaean women in Hellas and Phthia, daughters of nobles who defend their citadels, one of whom I shall make my beloved bride if I wish’ (Iliad 9.394ff). The arranging of the marriage seems to involve both the giving of bridegifts (for which there is a special word, hedna) by the family of the bridegroom to that of the bride, and the provision of a dowry for the bride by her relatives. It has been suggested that these practices are incompatible, and represent two different historical layers in Homer; but they are in fact found together in other societies. The purpose of the dowry is to endow the future household; the bridegift has a different aim, which is neither to purchase the bride nor to initiate a gift-exchange involving the bride: it is rather to impress the bride’s family with the wealth and status of the bridegroom’s family. This is shown by the competition for a particularly desirable bride: Penelope complains to her suitors, ‘this has not been established in the past as the right way for suitors to behave, who wish to woo a noble lady and the daughter of a rich man, and compete with one another; but they themselves bring oxen and fat sheep as a feast for the friends of the bride, and they give splendid gifts: they do not eat another’s livelihood without repayment’ (Odyssey 18.275ff). The gifts of such suitors are not conditional on winning the bride’s hand: the losers lose all, so that there is here no exchange agreed, merely a contest in giving. The bride joins the bridegroom’s genos: when Telemachus arrives at Menelaus’ palace, a double wedding feast is in progress: his (bastard) son is bringing home a bride; and his daughter, long ago promised by Menelaus to Achilles’ (bastard) son, is leaving home (Odyssey 4. 1ff). The submergence of the wife in the new family of her father-in-law is shown by the survival in the Iliad of a kinship term found also in other Indo-European languages, e(i)nater, for the relationship between the wives of brothers, who would normally have lived together in the same household. The greatest tragedy is the premature death of the head, leaving his sons too young to assert their rights; this is what Andromache fears for her son in Troy, now Hector is dead (Iliad 22.484ff), and it is this struggle which Telemachus faces on Ithaca as his father’s prolonged absence makes it more and more likely that he has died.

      Lower down the social scale marriage was a more practical affair, closely related to inheritance. Hesiod regards women as a curse sent by Zeus, ‘a great pain for mortals, living with men, sharing not in dread poverty but in prosperity’, like drones in the hive, but necessary in order to avoid the worse fate of others sharing the inheritance (Theogony 590–612). A man will marry at thirty a virgin in her fifth year from puberty (Works and Days 695fr; rather old: 14–16 was later the common age of marriage for girls), and he will have only one son if possible; though if one lives long enough there are compensations in more (376ff). Despite the strength of certain incest tabus shown in myth, endogamy, marriage within a relatively restricted cycle of relations, was the rule in Greece, and served to preserve existing patterns of ownership: in classical Athens an heiress could legally be claimed in marriage by her father’s closest male relative, beginning with her uncle; the procedure involved a herald publicly inviting claimants to come forward.

      Many of these differences between the aristocracy and the ordinary citizen survived. Throughout the archaic period marriage outside the community was common between aristocrats, and contributed considerably to their political power and to the development of relations between cities; when in the mid fifth century Athens passed a law that citizens must in future be of Athenian parentage on both sides, this was a popular, anti-aristocratic move; the proposer, Perikles, like other Athenian aristocrats, would have found many earlier members of his family debarred from citizenship by such a rule.

      A similar tension between aristocracy and peasantry perhaps explains the development in СКАЧАТЬ