ABSTRACT
The Homeric poems are some of the earliest creations of Greek literature, and were enormously influential on the way in which the Greeks of the archaic and classical periods understood the world in which they lived.1 It is usually suggested that ‘Homeric society’ owes most to the ‘dark ages’ of the ninth century BC, and also contains elements from the Mycenaean period (see e.g. Snodgrass 1974); the polis-oriented world that begins to develop during the eighth century is reckoned to be distinct from the ‘heroic’ or ‘aristocratic’ world of Homer (e.g. Murray 1980, 3840). It seems to me difficult to reconcile the centrality of the Homeric poems in the classical polis with the idea that the society they describe was so different. In this paper I argue that the Iliad was in fact the product of a polis-based society, and that its subject-matter-heroes and warfare-had a clear message for all those who lived in the polis.2
