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 179 78-6064 ISBN 0-674-36220-9 MU. Jag! ell. 1979 K Ing 14- MATRIS IN PIAM MEMORIAM Foreword 04,1 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 I 1 From Homer to Plato: The Contours of the Problem 4 2 The Function of Epic in Preliterate Societies I 5 3 The Psychology of Rhythmic Memorization 38 4 The Society Reported by Homer 55 5 Some Elements of the Homeric Fantasy 88 6 The Method and Manner of Homeric Storage 106 7 The Justice of the Iliad 123 8 The Legalities of the Odyssey 139 9 The Moralities of the Odyssey 150 10 The Justice of the Odyssey 179 11 The Justice of Hesiod: An Essay in Detection 193 12 The Spoken and the Written Word 2/8 13 The Early History of the Verb "to Be" 233 14 The Justice of Solon 249 15 The Justice of the Pre-Socratics 263 16 The justice of Aeschylus 272 17 The Justice of Herodotus 296 18 The Justice of Plato 308 19 A Philosophy of the Written Word 324 Epilogue 335 Notes 343 Works Cited 367 Index 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 2 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. 3 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.