ABSTRACT
In his penetrating study of Homeric society The World of Odysseus, M.I.Finley argues that in dark age Greece no war could have been on the scale of Homer’s Trojan war. War, he held, was more like raiding for booty; and in support of this he quotes translated extracts from Nestor’s account of a raid on Elis (Iliad, 11. 670-84):
This, Finley writes (1977, 46), was ‘a typical “war” as narrated by Nestor, a raid for booty. Even if repeated year after year, these wars remained single raids.’ A little later he says, ‘Wars and raids for booty, indistinguishable in the eyes of Odysseus’ world, were organized affairs, often involving a combination of families, occasionally even of communities’ (1977, 63). His view of dark age and later Greek warfare remains similar in his Ancient History: Evidence and Models (1985, 76):
This chapter is not concerned with the historicity of the Trojan war (which cannot yet be proved or disproved), but with the causes and character of war in the society Homer reflects (taken, as by Finley, to be largely the Greek dark age, as argued below).1
No one would doubt that in that society, as on occasions later, there sometimes occurred warfare in which the main aim was profit and hostilities took the form of plundering rather than of battle-though it must remain impossible to be sure of this in the case of wars that receive little or no attention in the sources. But it is argued here that, to judge from the Homeric poems and some relevant archaeological evidence, since Homeric warfare and heroic values do not always concern profit and plunder, warfare in dark age Greece (and over the 400 years from the fall of the Mycenaean palaces to the opening of the eighth century, there must have been some) was probably (more often than not) clearly distinguishable from raids for booty.
