[Odysseus and Calypso by Max Beckman 1943]
“The authoritarian household, the oikos, was the centre around which life was organized, from which flowed not only the satisfaction of material needs, including security, but ethical norms and values, duties, obligations and responsibilities, and relations with the gods. The oikos was not merely the family, it was all the people of the household together with its land and its goods.” [Moses I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, 1979]
Homeric Society: the household
Written by Michael Heller
Building on previous sections I here attempt to explain how the individualistic differentiations which determine elements of governance in the first society reappear in somewhat modified forms in the household-based Greek societies which were reconstituted after the collapse of the late second millennium Mycenaean administered society. The ‘Homeric Society’ encompasses the period during which Greece emerged from the Dark Age. The terms ‘Greek Dark Age’ and ‘Homeric Society’ refer in what follows to this emergence and consolidation as it applies to household units and in comparison with Neolithic Mesopotamian households.
Of special interest are changes in three of the five differentiations: heroic charisma, intelligent rationality, and eldership. These individual-level developments were most in evidence during the Dark Age fusion of coordinated and communalistic societal governance. The two other individualistic differentiations (sex, strength) did not evolve to such an extent.
Before contemplating the individualisms it is necessary to understand the domestic units through which pre-political individual behaviour was channeled. The familiar concept here is the household, oikos in Greek. The ancient household was a social and economic unit, but potentially a political one too. The household was patriarchal, meaning that it was ruled by the patriarch, the head of household. Within the household the family and any servants and slaves obey the father. The master of the household has full powers of command and control in the organisation of all of the household’s activities of subsistence and self-sufficiency. He must also bear the responsibility for protecting and sustaining its members all of whom by tradition live only on the basis of their dependence on the householder. The household may in some conditions be an expansive profit making enterprise but is usually principally oriented to domestic production with some trade in-kind with surrounding households. The possibility of household specialisation exists wherever there are nearby households.
Several clarifications are in order. The first is that a ‘household’ cannot itself constitute a ‘society’. The household is a unit of property rather than of sociation. There is not much logic in concepts such as ‘patriarchal society’ or ‘household society’ unless these refer to a defined group of households which together make a self-governed settlement.
In the transition to administered society in Neolithic Mesopotamia we find the latter type of settlement society. I prefer, however, to incorporate these societies within the categories of ‘communalistic’ and ‘coordinated’ which provide more scope for global equivalence and comparison through history. I prefer also to emphasise the economic character of the household, as a unit of property and production. We will see that when and where large (grain-growing) agricultural estates emerged a contrast can be detected between the Neolithic Mesopotamian households that cooperated to form the communalistic estates which were incubators of regulated administered societies and, on the other hand, the Greek agricultural estates (ca. 700-600) which were giant single households with amassed lands and slaves that were pillaged by oftentimes ‘tyrannical’ descendants of the (smaller) Homeric ‘plundering’ householders.
Hans van Wees argues:
“… for much of the archaic period Greeks pursued maximum gains from their land and other assets without … institutional security. Indeed, they actively contributed to economic insecurity by resorting to violent means of enriching themselves. … As a result of territorial expansion, more intense exploitation of local and imported labour, and the probable concentration of elites in fewer but larger settlements, the period 750–600 saw the development of estates able to produce large surpluses.”
Such changes and comparisons can be conceptualised using my distinctions between three group societies, whereas a concept of patriarchal society would blur the picture. The point is a simple one but not so obvious that it can escape discussion — to repeat, households are not societies. In pre-rulership pre-legal conditions, the household was a relationship of private property based on family units traditionally governed by a patriarch, the head of household. Households were units of communalistic cultivator societies much in the same way that individuals were units of cave-dwelling and hunter-gatherer societies. Over time communalistic societies developed leadership coordination. We will see how this was achieved through intelligent use of assemblies.
Heads of households operated communally but also competitively in relations with other heads of households. Within the secure framework of community-settlement governance based on custom and convention it was possible—anachronistically—for householders to sustain internal forms of governance that were not by any stretch of the imagination communalistic. Their methods would not have been tolerated as a general form of governance in any pre-agricultural hominin society. This was only possible because a householder—simply by virtue of the fact that he constructed and owned the buildings and gardens within a boundary of land—held socially recognised defensible property rights signifying that between his own walls he as patriarch could enjoy non-negotiable freedoms to fully control decision making, innovation, and task allocation.
Let us see how we can square these assumptions with what is thought to be known about Greece in the Dark Age. Archeological and literary evidence supports the view that destruction of the extra-palatial organs of administration of Mycenaean royal households resulted in economic disruption, depopulation and general disorder (ca. 1100-900 BCE) which caused people to revert to or continue with household subsistence strategies without the protection or imposition of a polity.
It is possible that some existing householder economies may have benefited materially from being freed of burdens of forced tribute, taxation, or labour and other forms of centralised economic planning despite the severe disruptions to trade and the more limited access to raw materials and technologies. This latter scarcity acquires added importance given that upheavals in exchange relations during the Dark Age coincided with the socio-technical transition already underway from ‘bronze age’ to ‘iron age’.
All that can be supposed with archeological certainty is that house-holding subsistence units were scattered around lawless empty landscapes. Internal divisions of labour were the new material condition of life in Greece characterised by kin group self-sufficiency in production, provisioning, storage, and consumption, supplemented with dependent slave and contract labour. New material skills had to be learned or relearned in order to survive in the changed environment. Societies of small settlements of households were regenerated or renegotiated in fluid, rivalrous, competitive conditions of scarcity and commonplace predatory behaviour.
From our perspective, which is the formation of societies, it is therefore important to emphasise the settlement structure. Homer himself appears to have understood the sociation that characterises the world inhabited by his ‘heroic’ householders—who cooperate politically and economically in settlements—when he contrasted it with the fictitious barbaric lifestyle of one-eyed giant Cyclopes who are cave dwelling families.
“From there, grieving still at heart, we … reached the country of the lawless outrageous Cyclopes who … neither plow with their hands nor plant anything but all grows for them without seed planting, without cultivation … These people have no institutions, no meetings for counsels; rather they make their habitations in caverns hollowed among the peaks of the high mountains, and each one is the law for his own wives and children, and cares nothing about the others.” The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore
The image makes no sense because the very existence of ‘Cyclopes’ suggests group structures. Primate history and evolutionary psychology and biology show that harem-based or monogamous families based indispensably on male-female tolerance were a late byproduct of societies. Nor does the Cyclopes fiction bear on the mobile hunter gatherers who moved from cave to cave while preserving their essential border-bond-bind structural cohesion which allows us to classify them as ‘societies’. But Homer’s verse at least does reveal a recognition that ‘society’ requires not the permanence of household or individualistic units based on the isolation and closedness of family and property but rather an interaction of units which has no necessary relation to kinship.
In fact, if Homer’s many depictions of households are to be believed then the conditions of relative autonomy and ‘property’ gave the master-patriarch unlimited powers over his house, land and compounds, powers which, as already noted, were sharply at variance with the—by degrees—communalistic and coordinated nature of Homeric society. The householder owns his wife, children and slaves. If he so wishes he can kill any of them with impunity. He is free to punish, reward or copulate with his servants. But within the settlement he has no choice but to act according to settlement-based social custom and convention. In other words, outside his house the master was accountable to a community that was larger than the house.
The successful wealthy households featured in Homer’s stories could grow to a relatively large size. If their patriarchs were Homeric warrior ‘heroes’ who regularly participated in raiding expeditions for plunder in the surrounding territories they would have killed or ransomed the defeated men and returned home with booty and women. But the successful head of household also recruited free men as dependant servants whose own families would then be incorporated within the household and be subject to his customary authority. Joining a powerful household was a desirable form of upward social mobility for families seeking material advances and socio-psychological security in the Dark Age. As Ian Morris argues in relation to Aegean early Iron Age oikoi economies — “In a dangerous, under-populated world with limited markets, contractual relations with the poor providing labor for the rich make a great deal of sense”. By expanding its labour force a single household might then over time grow and be restructured, hierarchically and administratively.
In a slow process that in some ways mirrors the pattern found in the ancient core-periphery settlements of late Neolithic Mesopotamia (on their prototypical Urukean-Schumpeterian journeys to regulated administered agricultural societies) from a single household there might evolve an internally diverse polity ruled by descendants of a founding family which absorbed a whole settlement hierarchy environment. This again draws attention to the possibility of two potentially convergent pre-rulership paths to estate and polity — one communalistic, the other coordinated.
Now if we return to the economic conditions we see that a combination of a) complete individual control over the unit of production with b) customary limitations on the exercise of power over other householders within the settlement, and c) liberty and incentives for one community or gang of householders to pillage, colonise, recruit, or befriend ‘outsider’ households and ‘alien’ communities, undoubtedly allowed for wealth creation and concentration in the short term and, potentially, for a shift toward the creation and concentration of rulership polities in the longer term.
Material indicators available to historians do not suggest long run economic stagnation in the Dark Age. Rather, the autonomy of units appears to have facilitated resilience and adaptation to new conditions. Recent economic debate about the Greek Dark Age has therefore had to reconcile the ‘collapse’ with clear signs of competition and survival.
In his classic The World of Odysseus (1954) Moses Finley wrote:
“Wherever the wealth of the household is so decisive, unless there is mobility in wealth, unless the opportunity exists to create new fortunes, the structure becomes caste-like in its rigidity.”
He was right. But what were the opportunities? Finley pointed out a constraint:
“The base of the oikos was its land, and there was little possibility, under normal, peaceful conditions, to acquire new land in the settled regions. Hypothetically one might push beyond the frontier and take up vacant land, but few men actually did anything so absurd and foolhardy, except under the most violent compulsions. It was not out of mere sentiment for the fatherland that banishment was deemed the bitterest of fates. The exile was stripped of all ties that meant life itself; it made no difference in this regard whether one had been compelled to flee or had gone from home in the search for land by free choice.”
The people of Dark Age Greece were never hunter gatherers like those who first settled in the alluvial plain of Mesopotamia on the eve of the invention of agriculture and agricultural estates. The initial mode of production in the Homeric Society was agropastoralism. This included planting crops on the small scale of a household orchard (fruit, vines, olives). The principal economic activity of households was stock breeding and herding (sheep, cattle, and the beloved horses so indispensable to the adventuresome lives of Homer’s warrior heroes). The literary sources claim that all the householders were themselves skilled herders. Even when the richer among them had servants, slaves and regular political-judicial responsibilities they might still be seen getting their hands dirty in paddocks, stables, butcheries and building sites. Typically households also manufactured their own pots and cut stone for construction. There is little if any archeological evidence of centralised storage in Dark Age settlements. Households must themselves have stored the products of their farm and workshops.
However, during these formative periods even the richest households could not process all their own metals for tools and weapons. The metal ‘treasure’ which ‘heroic’ robbers obtained in raiding expeditions did not satisfy local demand. Finley wrote:
“Wars and raids for booty, indistinguishable in the eyes of Odysseus’s world, were organised affairs, often involving a combination of families, occasionally even of communities. Invariably there was a captain, one of whose functions was to act as the head and distribute the booty, all of which was first brought to a central storage point. Division was by lot, much like the division of an inheritance when there were several heirs.”
Metal was the main reason why householders engaged in local and long-distance trade, especially with the Phoenician seafaring merchants described in Homer as ‘scoundrels’ and ‘swindlers’. Yet even among Greek Dark Age settlements there evolved stable networks of exchange in two basic forms — dynamic local markets which were self-generating wherever ‘surplus’ met with ‘demand’, and a constrained ritualised ‘gift’ form of exchange that served principally to cement political ties and relative socioeconomic ranks among the upper elite of householders. Finley wrote:
“The word ‘gift’ is not to be misconstrued. It may be stated as a flat rule of both primitive and archaic society that no one ever gave anything, whether goods or services or honours, without proper recompense, real or wishful, immediate or years away, to himself or to his kin. The act of giving was, therefore, in an essential sense always the first half of a reciprocal action, the other half of which was a counter-gift. … More precisely, the word ‘gift’ was a cover-all for a great variety of actions and transactions which later became differentiated and acquired their own appellations. There were payments for services rendered, desired or anticipated; what we would call fees, rewards, prizes, and sometimes bribes. … None of this is to say that no one ever deliberately profited from an exchange. But the exceptional instance is far less noteworthy than the essential point that, in a strict sense, the ethics of the world of Odysseus prohibited the practice of trade as a vocation. The test of what was and what was not acceptable did not lie in the act of trading, but in the status of the trader and in his approach to the transaction. So crucial was the need for metal …”
Finley was not a theorist. As we will see in a later section some of his concepts lacked consistency and precision, and he was prone to indulgently compare Greek Dark Age politics with early modern aristocracies, kings and parliaments. I quote his economy summaries at length because he wrote so elegantly and these joined-up holistic and logical sociological insights surpass what appears in later scholarship. Finley wrote:
“The need for metal, or any similar need, was an oikos affair, not an individual matter. Its acquisition, whether by trade or by raid, was therefore a household enterprise, managed by the head. Or it could be larger in scale, involving many households acting cooperatively. Internally, the situation was altogether different. Trade within the household was impossible by definition: the oikos was a single, indivisible unit. Because a large sector of the population was enmeshed in the great households, they too were withdrawn from any possibility of trade, external or internal.”
The observation that “the oikos was a single, indivisible unit” pretty much sums up the argument I advance in this section on ‘households'. I take it further in conceptual terms by saying that this base element was the foundation of the third society in the same way that the individual was the base element of the first society. And it seems clear to me that material developments in the dusk of the Greek Dark age can be understood only in relation to the household as the incubator and the restraint.
Evidently much of this reorganisation of economic life depended on flexible political adaptation to conditions of extreme insecurity. It was an indispensable fact of life that authoritarian households had to cooperate in ways that were clearly non-authoritarian by contrast with the true or mythologised forms of ‘rulership’ that preceded the Dark Age. Insights into this political process can only be found in modern interpretations of poetic narratives dating from ca. 800-700 BCE, examined in a following section.
My sources include publications by:
*Alain Bresson, Walter Donlan, Moses I. Finley, *Robin Lane Fox, Irene S. Lemos, *Ian Morris, Barry B. Powell, Kurt A. Raaflaub, *Hans van Wees — authors with an * are current subscribers to Social Science Files.