The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato

388 Pages·1978·13.04 MB·English

by  Eric Havelock

The Greek Concept of Justice
From Its Shadow in Homer
to Its
Substance in Plato
ta
Eric A. Havelock
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
1978
Copyright © 1978 by Eric A. Havelock
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Loeb Publication
Fund of the Department of the Classics, Harvard University.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Havelock, Eric Alfred.
The Greek concept of justice.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Justice. I. Title.
JC75.J8H38 (cid:9) 179 (cid:9) 78-6064
ISBN 0-674-36220-9
MU. Jag! ell.
1979 K Ing
14-
MATRIS
IN PIAM MEMORIAM
Foreword
,1
04
Scholars of my generation will recognize in my text and notes many
evidences of the guidance they have given me, even where the direction
of my own journey may seem to have been solitary. It would have been
even more so but for the welcome extended to my investigations by
Bruno Gentili, a welcome inspired by the force of certain conceptions
which have been pursued in parallel to my own. More remotely, but
still powerfully, the reader may perceive at work the influences of
Bruno Snell and E. R. Dodds. I would also acknowledge the company
and criticism that have been afforded me by some scholars of a younger
generation who have had the patience in recent years to listen, to
comment, and to correct many things that I have said and written and
which in their amended form are implicit in this book. To Tom Cole,
David Claus, Kevin Robb, Christopher Gill, Michael Gagarin, Jack-
son Hershbell, Bennett Simon, Joseph Russo, and Alexander Mourelatos
I am specially indebted for assistance rendered in this manner, through
personal communication and by their published writings. Adam Parry
was a companion in much of my endeavor, and my manuscript has
lacked the unfailing judgment he would have given it had he lived. A
valued association with two other colleagues of Yale University days,
Geoffrey Kirk and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, did much by friendly dispute to
vii
Foreword
sharpen wit and clarify vision. More recently, I have profited from the
prompting and sympathetic encouragement of Donald Kagan. To the
reader for the Harvard University Press I owe thanks for vigorous
criticism of an earlier draft of the book, which produced much im-
provement in the final version.
Prolonged writing of any kind, creative or scholarly, is a lonely
occupation, alleviated in my case by the constant support and informed
intelligence of my wife, Christine.
The award of a Senior Fellowship by the National Endowment for
the Humanities in 1969-70 afforded me some of the leisure needed
to complete this book and is here gratefully acknowledged.
yiii
Contents
gi
Prologue (cid:9) I
1 From Homer to Plato: The Contours of the Problem (cid:9) 4
2 The Function of Epic in Preliterate Societies (cid:9) I 5
3 The Psychology of Rhythmic Memorization (cid:9) 38
4 The Society Reported by Homer (cid:9) 55
5 Some Elements of the Homeric Fantasy (cid:9) 88
6 The Method and Manner of Homeric Storage (cid:9) 106
7 The Justice of the Iliad (cid:9) 123
8 The Legalities of the Odyssey (cid:9) 139
9 The Moralities of the Odyssey (cid:9) 150
10 The Justice of the Odyssey (cid:9) 179
11 The Justice of Hesiod: An Essay in Detection (cid:9) 193
12 The Spoken and the Written Word (cid:9) 2/8
13 The Early History of the Verb "to Be" (cid:9) 233
14 The Justice of Solon (cid:9) 249
15 The Justice of the Pre-Socratics (cid:9) 263
16 The justice of Aeschylus (cid:9) 272
17 The Justice of Herodotus (cid:9) 296
18 The Justice of Plato (cid:9) 308
19 A Philosophy of the Written Word (cid:9) 324
Epilogue (cid:9) 335
Notes (cid:9) 343
Works Cited (cid:9) 367
Index (cid:9) 375
ix
Prologue
gl
The present volume resumes that exploration of the growth of the
Greek mind which was first undertaken in my Preface to Plato (1963).
In that work a problem in Platonism—namely, Plato's proposed exclu-
sion of the Greek poets from the curriculum of the Academy—was
offered as a point of departure from which to reconsider the cultural role
of the Greek poets themselves, in particular Homer and Hesiod. The
view presented was that their compositions prior to Plato had constituted
an exclusively oral education, in a Greece which had placed minimum
reliance upon the written word. It was this oral—that is, poetic—educa-
tion which Plato proposed to supplant by his own philosophical pro-
gram. The treatise in which he rejected the poets, namely, the Republic,
was built round an attempt to conceptualize "justice," usually accepted
as the leading Greek "virtue." It is a fair inference that Plato saw the
cultivation of justice as lying at the heart of any educational system.
This brings up the question : What of justice in the context of an
instruction purely oral and poetic? The present work, starting with
Homer, addresses itself to this problem directly.
Given this purpose, one is forced to analyze with greater thorough-
ness the moral function of the poets in archaic Greek culture. But the
method proposed does not proceed a priori by looking for moral guid-
1
The Greek Concept of Justice
ance in their works. Accepting the premise that in general the means of
communication tends to condition the content of what is communicated,
the investigator finds himself forced to look at things that Homer,
Hesiod, or Aeschylus say about justice as in the first instance things said
orally and remembered, not written down and read. At this point one
touches rather immediately upon questions of cultural history and be-
havior in a more general and theoretic context. The justice of a Homer
or a Hesiod may be considered a purely Greek problem. But once placed
in the context of a major transition from the oral to the written word, it
becomes a problem in oralism, on the one hand, and in social anthro-
pology, on the other. The oralist school in contemporary AMerica, asso-
ciated especially with the names of McLuhan and Ong, has drawn a
distinction between a linear-literate consciousness and its oral counter-
part, on the whole to the disadvantage of the former, and has seen in
contemporary culture a revival of oralism, encouraged by many modern
technologies of communication. Does the Greek experience have any
relevance to such a view? Does it shed any light upon it or support it?
As for social (or cultural) anthropology, those familiar with investiga-
tions in this field extending over the last century, from Max Mueller
and Durkheim through Malinowski to Levi-Strauss, will realize that I
have undertaken to treat the archaic culture of Greece as itself bearing
many analogies to societies usually classified as "savage" or "primitive,"
though the analogy for me lies not in any supposed primitiveness, but in
the technology employed for communication. May it be that my account
of Homer's function and content (described in Preface to Plato as a
"tribal encyclopedia") corresponds in important particulars to the func-
tion and content of the tribal myth, particularly as interpreted by
Malinowski? And if so, what qualifications should be added to distin-
guish my view of what the Greek "myth" does and how it functions?
In sharp contrast, my story as it moves on out of Homer into Plato,
leaving behind a justice orally mailaged in order to consider a justice
formulated in writing, enters a realm usually reserved for philosophers,
whether of language, or logic, or ethics. In this latter context, what is
likely to be the professional fate of a thesis, here offered, which would
regard the achievement of a conceptual syntax, and even of abstract
thought, as the fruit of a change of communication, from the ear to the
eye, from listening to viewing, from remembering to reading? What is
to be made of an argument which seems to be in danger of concluding
that ethics was something invented by Plato?
The answers to questions like these might indicate both how far
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Prologue
such disciplines are relevant to what I say, and also how far is my
distance from them. The answers might, I assume, be controversial. To
anticipate what they might be in advance of my text, when it is only in
a reading of the text that they are likely to arise, would be premature.
The reader who is impatient to know where in the company of anthro-
pologists and philosophers I seem to myself to stand is referred to some
tentative comparisons which I have stated in a brief epilogue.
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1
From Homer to Plato
ll
The Contours of the Problem
Although we now gain acquaintance with the Homeric poems as they
are read between the covers of printed books, there is agreement that
they belong to that class of composition commonly described as oral
poetry. An examination of their diction, and in particular of verbal
formulas out of which the verse is put together, originally suggested this
conclusion, which was reinforced by comparison with techniques em-
ployed by singers of oral poetry where such can still be found and
observed today, particularly in the Balkans.
Homer as Artist
The purpose of epic poetry, ancient or modem, is on the face of it
to tell a story, and answers that have been attempted to the Homeric
Question have turned very largely on the critic's evaluation of the way
the story is told. Such matters as coherence of plot and its relation to
incident, consistency or its absence in the delineation of character, and
the presence of thematic motifs or imagery where recurrence may be
significant have engaged critical attention. The poems are judged in the
first instance as works of literary art, successful or not. The focus of
interest in them has been aesthetic. As the oral mode of their composi-
tion came to be appreciated, this too was evaluated within the same
4