The Actors by Max Beckmann, 1942
Homeric Society: The Actor and the Action
Written by Michael Heller
I continue to explore the nature of three original group societies before rulership. I am using the recorded evidence provided in verse fiction by Homer, and histories of the Greek Dark Age, to propose an ancient ‘proxy’ for prehistoric society. I highlight how features of the first (individualistic) society continue to shape evolutions of governance in the second (communalistic) and third (coordinated) societies. Homeric Society, I conclude, is transitioning to coordination. A group-over-person society is on the way to becoming a person-over-group society. The feature I focus on in this section is a person-in-plurality, the ‘basileus’, with a bold tint of singleness. A group of elite settlement leaders (all ‘absolute rulers’ of households) carefully come to terms with evolutionary pressures for collegial hierarchy and single-person leadership.
We certainly need to know first of all what kind of action is functionally important for ‘survival’ … together with its importance for a deliberate development of a type of social action. Only then can we pose the question: How does this action come about? What motives define it? One first has to know what a king, an official, a businessman, a pimp, or a magician does—the action that alone stamps them as of this category; hence, before we can move to any analysis, it is important to know with what typical ‘action’ we are dealing … Only this analytical perspective is capable, and should be capable, of the sociological understanding of individual human beings differentiated by type. (Max Weber, Economy and Society)
No administration, no king
The difference between one type of society and another is the form of governance. There is no evidence of administration in the Homeric Society. Therefore I say with certainty, there were no kings and palaces in the Homeric Society. What stamps kingship as a category is the office of an absolute-constant personal ruler and personal household at the apex of a pyramid of formal authority with layers of administered and thus lawfully legitimated central governance over all households and settlements within an extensive and defined territory. Nothing more, nothing less. Birthright, pomp and ceremony, court culture, and the obligatory claims to have been selected and endorsed by gods are but the usual accoutrements. We understand ancient kingship as an artificial authority relationship between principal and dependent settlements.
In the European middle ages the language of kingship encompassed monarchy (rule by one), princes, lords, and descending ranks of ‘rule’. Despite ongoing protestations to the contrary (see the very recent Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox) there was no kingship-equivalent rulership in Homeric Society. Once ‘governing’ is exaggerated to ‘rulership’ it is hard to put the genie of terminological equivalence back in the bottle. There were, for example, no “princes” or “ambassadors” in Homeric Society.
Instead there were two forms of leadership which likely often overlapped among men who were young enough to go into battle or travel between householder settlements as envoys bearing placatory gifts for exchange and for bordering-bonding purposes:
non-political commanders within bands of warriors, and
principal householders who met on special occasions for the necessary political purpose of guiding and cajoling processes of decision making in small political units, within and between settlements.
Contextualised studies of Homer reveal individualistic differentiations of eldership, physical prowess, charisma personality, and intelligent rationality in both categories.
Recap and reintroduction
A fact to emphasise and keep in mind: in the same territories here roamed and to a limited extent controlled by Homeric heroes there had generations earlier existed true kings. Post-collapse Homeric society was we should say ‘primitive’ by comparison with the known kingdoms of the nearby late 2nd millennium BCE Near East and pre-collapse Greece itself. Homer embroidered his heroes of 900-700 BCE with threads of myth and glorification of the Minoan and Mycenaean age of only a few hundred years before. In reality, Homer’s society, insofar as it existed, was refashioning primeval elements of small-scale social ordering, decision making, and material subsistence predating writing and administration by several millennia. This is why, as a more or less believable history, Homer usefully introduces us to the small-scale and still fairly individualistic society with household-settlement characteristics becoming structured as a communalistic and then coordinated society over the course of several centuries to 650 BCE, before Greece’s T5 participatory society that leapfrogs T4 administration.
In functional governance terms there are similarities with the isolated forager and chieftain societies which survive to the present day. The Homeric Society could be a better ‘proxy’ for prehistoric forager societies. The fiction of Homeric Society assists in the conceptualisation of original prehistoric transitions — from very small roaming band societies, to mobile or settled medium-sized communalistic societies, and to solid settlements of (potentially) larger-sized coordinated societies. Homer’s stories are often used historiographically to present the birth of Western civilisation. My approach reverses this by viewing them backwards in history. For me the valuable elements of Homer’s stories are those that seem genuinely to offer a) un-ennobled logical insights of rationally experimental processes of decision making, and b) insight of socio-cognitive processes whereby individualistic priorities such as ‘honour’ are reconciled with necessities of leadership, arbitration, and adjudication, and c) insight of socio-psychological utilitarian pressure to control instincts and emotions.
From a revisionist perspective what is most surprising in Homer’s poems—justified only by the absence of literacy or recorded history and the professional storyteller’s marketable obligation to find valour and virtue even in the barbarisms of his auditors’ world—is the apparent ignorance of the evolutionary achievements of their recent predecessors. It is not just a matter of losing logistical and technical skills. It is also a loss or distortion of memory. How else can one explain the absence of Homeric verses referring to the Mycenaean or Minoan ranks of literate palace officials in charge of careful accounting and complex oversight of stupendous administrative projects?
Greek examples are amply attested in archeology — general taxation and compulsory labour dues, the building of massive elite edifices and community assembly halls, canal construction, palatial seagoing enterprises, large-scale organisation combining labour and materials for husbandry of many thousands of animals and the cultivation of enormous agricultural estates, specialised industry for manufacture of goods, and central storage units. Homer’s words for ‘built’ describe only small-scale settlement or encampment fortifications, simple gates and walls, or boatbuilding for sea trade and raiding, or small burial mounds, and the ‘build’ of human bodies. Even leaving aside differences in military capacity, the contrast between two worlds could not be sharper.
The point is that in Homer there is verse treating ‘gods’, ‘kings’ and ‘palaces’ and nostalgic verse about 2nd-millennium organised warfare without mention of 2nd-millennium administrative praxis. In translation Homer speaks only in vague terms of “administering” households and orchards, or “administering” a band of fighting men. While Homer’s heroes self-consciously (and almost doctrinally) emulate the glorified individualistic heroic traits of the warriors-of-old, their practical objective processes of household administration were not remotely emulative of the administrators-of-old. Rather, on Homer’s evidence, in social, political and economic terms, Homeric society began again the sui generis evolution from household to polity. It is on the basis of this premise that I seek to interpret the actors and their actions.
The Actor
The heroes form an elite … who maintain close relations among each other. They are called basileis.. (Kurt A. Raaflaub 1997)
The leading political and judicial actor in Homeric Society is the basileus. The term basileus (plural, basileis) is much debated because it evolved linguistically into Greek from the older Mycenaean term wanax—meaning palace king or warrior king—and would eventually also mean ‘king’ in Greek. It may be that the first basileus were in fact officials of the royal household, servants of kings responsible for administering a territorial subunit. The ‘tyrants’ who emerged from the late 7th century BCE as brutal ‘aristocratic’ owners of large dynamic estates and who were emblematic in provoking the classical participatory counter-movement in the 5th-4th centuries, were called (or styled themselves) as basileis. The many translations of Homer tend not to use the term basileus. The word is usually rendered as ‘king’. Explanatory or glossary notes sometimes emphasise that Homer did not consider these positions to be hereditary.
Of course, neither is kingship necessarily inherited. Furthermore, to be a basileus was never a full time occupation. There was work to be done—or work to be supervised—on the ‘farms’. Do true kings build their own houses and bedrooms? Or was Odysseus a master carpenter who dreamed of being a king? He had the skills for both.
There was a branching olive tree inside our court, grown to its full prime, the bole like a column, thickset. Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged. Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive, clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up, planing it round with a bronze smoothing adze — I had the skill — I shaped it plumb to the line to make my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger. Working from there I built my bed, start to finish, I gave it ivory inlays, gold and silver fittings, wove the straps across it, oxhide gleaming red. There's our secret sign, I tell you, our life story! Does the bed, my lady, still stand planted firm? — I don't know — or has someone chopped away that olive-trunk and hauled our bedstead off? (Homer, The Odyssey, Book 23)
My approach simplifies matters by rejecting the validity of the term ‘king’ during this period of Greek history for the reasons given above. With respect to the debates about Homeric Society I follow Kurt A. Raaflaub’s dogma — “basileis are not kings”. As he also shows, Homer did not depict heritable ‘noble’ lineage among the settlement elite. Raauflaub does nevertheless refer to basileis as an “emerging aristocracy”. Yet such terms seem unnecessary efforts to understand histories in terms of future or nearby polities. My emphasis is instead on understanding the origins of forms of governance.
It is likely that Homer had knowledge of politically advanced city-based societies in the larger region. Moreover as the plots unfold, and the raiding and trading expand territorially, Odysseus and other principal basileis saw advanced polities with their own eyes. What they returned to remained, in the meantime, and for generations to come, a home-unchanged — the traditional householder settlement. From a political science perspective the conclusion to draw from Homer’s evidence is that though the heroes had the knowledge they made no attempt to emulate or join existing polities.
The notion of ‘aristocracy’ distorts the picture of Greek evolution. Aristocracy has a specific meaning in Aristotle of ‘rule by the best’ which is at odds with the modern meaning applicable to Type 7 medieval governance, which equates aristocracy with land-based wealth, inheritance, and appointments to monarchial services. Homeric societies did not even have clearly demarcated chieftains. As I have said, they were transitioning from household to coordination. Chieftains emerged slowly by somehow throwing off the constraints of communalism. They would not resemble a larger scale landowning power elite until the 6th century, but then only in a primitive form that quickly proved to be an evolutionary dead-end. By then elite communalism was deeply rooted instinctually and ideologically. The original path to aristocracy was agriculture and administration. It led experimentally in Rome’s case to a participative rejection of kingship. Greece leapfrogged administration directly into participation. And in both cases the model of participatory society proved to be intermediary and unsustainable.
Rather, basileis of Homeric Society were emergent leaders of a type that is typical of coordinated but still-a-bit communalistic and fiercely independent societies fumbling insofar as ‘home capacity’ allows toward political solutions that better suited the time and the place. Their governance actions are described to us by a poet who uses literary license to misname them as kings and misrepresent them as ‘the chosen’ political candidates of sponsoring gods. More usefully, Homer’s depictions of dialogue among decision makers in the coordinating assemblies of very rustic settlements of the Dark Age suggest that ‘leadership’ only meant degrees of ‘influence’ contingent on the type of ‘decision’ and the age, experience, expertise, esteem, or wealth of a basileus rather than their bloodline. In other words, the basileus ‘ruled’ his own household with total authority but shared leadership in the settlement communally with other basileis.
Distributed or collegial leadership was unlikely to arise among warriors going into war with an ethos more akin to hunter gatherers who choose a group leader to make the rapid decisions required when tracking and killing volatile and dangerous prey. In peace time Odysseus engages deferentially with peers in communalistic-coordinative assemblies of basileis. But in battle Homer has Odysseus crying out for one-man rule:
When he caught some common soldier shouting out, he'd beat him with the sceptre, dress him down: ‘You fool—sit still! Obey the commands of others, your superiors … How can all be masters here on the battlefield? Too many basileis can ruin an army—mob rule! Let there be one commander, one master only, endowed by [the gods] with a basileus’s sceptre and rights of custom: whatever one man needs to lead his people well.’ So he ranged the ranks, commanding men to order, and back again they surged from ships and shelters, back to the meeting grounds with a deep pounding din, thundering out as battle lines of breakers crash and drag along some endless beach, and the rough sea roars. (Iliad, Book 2, 230-240)
‘Commanders’ were not tolerated on the ‘battlefields’ of village politics. Yet leadership differentiation of a sort was evident in regular settlement assemblies. A single principal basileus could emerge as the most influential man by becoming the arbiter of decisions in cases where the opinions of basileis are revealed to be evenly divided. A parallel exists in less formal individualistic and forager societies’ ‘campfire democracy’ where there is no ‘chief’ but nevertheless an elder or an especially clever, charismatic, or physically imposing younger person tends to dominate the talk. The term ‘democracy’ is valid only insofar as the group is small enough for every person (men, women, children) to be ‘represented’ hands-up in attendance at the gathering.
Homer’s hot-head heroes often appear to ‘dominate’ dialogue in the assembly settings, as do the elder basileis. Yet it would not be surprising if relative individual influence had routinely varied according to the topic of discussion simply by virtue of the men’s different life experiences or expertise. For the peak Homeric period—i.e. roughly 300 years midway between the true kings (wanax) and the upstart tyrants who wished to be kings (basileus)—we can gain a composite picture of basileis by mining the richest (and plentiful enough) modern scholarship on governance in the Homeric Society.
A basileus was a principal householder and leader of a settlement. But a single settlement would have several or—in Homer—as many as a dozen such men. Leadership influence was always to an extent distributed. It gave ‘power’ to elicit ‘obedience’ only in the heat of battle. ‘Power’ in the assembly was distributed among the basileis. It is best to think of basileis as an elite group within a group society who cooperate in order to coordinate. The elders (gerontes) with long-consolidated large wealthy households were most likely to have the rank of basileus. The second most likely candidates were younger men who had distinguished themselves through brave and clever leadership in battle, and they would often have been sons of a basileus.
Even should an exceptional basileus acquire influence over other basileis it is analytically most significant that he would not in this phase of evolution acquire any special title. By universal designation he remained just a basileus, equal in rank to others. No terminology existed to identify dominance or authority. Suppositional interpretive adjectives commonly employed by contemporary scholars of Homeric Society (such as ‘paramount’ or chief basileus), as well as other-worldly supernatural suppositions (typically an inference of political endorsement from the god Zeus) provide no typology for distinguishing one basileus from another in terms of the phenomena of ‘power’ or ‘authority’. To repeat: power presupposes capacity to elicit obedience, and authority presupposes capacity to compel. These powers existed only within the household, or on the battlefield.
Nevertheless, the evidence as presented by Homer encourages one to assume that in most cases one basileus is recognised by other basileis as—to use the term favoured in Homeric scholarship—paramount leader. Bernard Knox wrote that Agamemnon in Homer’s Iliad was the “shepherd of the people”. We can view this ‘type’ as the chief coordinator of the coordinated group society. Combining such evidence with simple interpretative logic we should say with reasonable confidence that in the Greek Dark Age one basileus will have been distinguished initially from other basileis by the size of his household and thenceforth in combination with his individual characteristics—personality, intelligence, or physique giving rise to certain skills—which, by the same token, help to explain how one becomes a large and wealthy householder in the first place—a competitive entrepreneurial individual spirit, knowhow, and motivation.
With variations in environmental conditions, good luck (good soil and water) could contribute to wealth differentiation. But the principal factors were the competitive motivations for accumulation. In Homeric Society competition between leading householders within settlements was intense. It could take jovial or sporting forms, but was nevertheless the internal developmental process by which one settlement became more prosperous than another. The more serious competition was between settlements, and could lead to war or preemptive pacification with diplomacy, trade, and the exchange of gifts (guest friendship). But there is no doubt that among clusters of settlements in Greece’s fragmented territories competitive rivalry and emulation by trial and error increasingly drove social, economic and even political experimentation.
This competitive materialist aspect of Greek society in the Dark Age comes across in the opening verses of Hesiod’s Works and Days contrast between praiseworthy strife that is conducive to wealth creation and the de-incentivising or time-wasting strife of political life in the settlement’s central place for decision making assemblies (agora):
She [good strife] rouses even the shiftless to accomplishment. For when a man who is not working sees another who has grown rich, who is eager to plow and to plant and to place his house in order, this neighbour works to rival his neighbour who hastens to wealth. This Strife is good for mortals. So the ceramicist is angered by the ceramicist, and the carpenter by the carpenter, and the beggar envies the beggar; and the singer, the singer. … [Lay] these things up in your heart, so that the evil Strife does not hold your heart back from labor as you gawk and obsess with quarrels in the agora. For he has little concern with quarrels and things that take place in the agora, he who holds in his house the abundant and ripe sustenance of the things that the earth bears … When you have plenty of that, you can engage in quarrels and conflict.. (Hesiod, Works and Days, 20-34)
Passages like these suggesting a positive attitude toward economic competition and a negative attitude toward political competition should not be misunderstood to mean that political life was passive. It was in fact very quarrelsome and competitive among those in the peer group of Homeric leaders. The difference is that while thriving on materialistic differentiation they did not wish to compete over ranking differentiations of leadership. The basileus hoped for parity with his elite companions by having input to discussion and decision making and in the division of the spoils of war—all these were the proper signs of justice. Individually this participation justified their self-made economic success through hard labour and good household management. Life was better in settlement environment when one worked hard and argued boisterously as individuals, but avoided overt displays of power and authority as communities.
Furthermore the political responsibilities of the basileus were often rewarded by the settlement with the allocation of a slice of communal farming land to be held by him as private property (temenos). Allocations of booty from the raiding of neighbouring settlements were divided among basileis. We may conclude from all this that political participation paid dividends and incentivised predatory economic behaviour while at the same time enabling concentrations of wealth and settlement enlargement which over time could encourage the political and economic emulation of distant polities.
Another cog in the political-economy ratchet effect of wealth accumulation lay in incentives for a basileus to expand his household dependents, enslaved and free, who became political followers and enhanced his influence. These could include refugees from the very same settlements they were raiding. Leading basileis were careful to keep their followers on side. For them to remain loyal in competitive conditions of householder recruitments and constant inter-settlement warfare a household’s followers must be treated respectfully, as if they (the people) may be heroes too.
If the basileus position is inherited it is only in the sense that accumulated property was passed on in the male line. It is obvious enough that initially the basileus is a basileus by virtue of property and wealth. The fact that it is the paramount leader’s responsibility to provide the wine and food for the banquet served on the occasion of an assembly and council supports the supposition that the primary distinguishing mark of being ‘paramount’ is wealth. From that point on the influence is competitive and the more competitive person stands out on basis of his ‘individual’ qualities.
The Place of Action
Assemblies and councils feature prominently in Homer. Homer’s descriptions of group action in assemblies are really the main source of evidence for how Homeric Society functioned. The late Kurt A. Raaflaub was the principal author on assemblies in the best handbooks of ancient Greece published in the past three decades. In The Homer Encyclopedia (2011), his summaries of Homeric assemblies and councils are definitional. They cut the fairest most concise middle path through the debates.
Assembly
The word agore (agora) designates the assembly, hence also the meeting place and public discourse. Assemblies feature 22 times in the epics, often described in detail. Assemblies are common wherever a decision needs to be made: in communities, in the field, or en route. They are somewhat formalised and regulated by common norms. Upon orders by a leader, heralds announce them to the entire community. The agore may be paved, with polished stones in a circle as seats for the leaders and benches for the rest. It forms the “middle”, the communal centre … The convener announces the “agenda” and presents his opinion. Subsequent speakers hold the leader's staff (sceptre) as sign of communal authority, and step in the middle. The discussion is more competitive than rational [pace Finley]: politics is performed. Upon reaching consensus, or if this proves impossible, the assembly is dissolved. … Speakers are usually the elite leaders, not the commoners … The assembly deals with public matters affecting the community [war or abuses that cause harm], and it witnesses and legitimises public acts (distribution of booty, ending a feud, or a trial). The assembly lacks independent authority, initiative, free speech, and vote; it expresses approval or disapproval by shouting or even leaving. Yet it is not, therefore, insignificant; its communal importance is demonstrated by the traits mentioned above, its centrality in the poet's conceptualisation of civilised society, the importance attributed to persuasive speech, the negative consequences if the leader ignores good advice or the assembly's expressed opinion and fails, and, the demos’ [settlement community’s] ultimate authority in many communal matters. (Kurt A. Raaflaub 2011)
Council
The word boule [pl. boulai] designates the council; boule (to consult, deliberate) is its main function. … [In] the ideal society … the paramount leader spends much time with his fellow basileis in council and feasting, drinking the councillors wine. Addressing the leaders and councillors, he explains: “Twelve are marked out as basileis in our demos and hold power as leaders and I myself am the thirteenth”… The] council meets frequently, both separately and immediately before or after an assembly, often in connection with a banquet set out by the paramount leader. A hierarchy of speaking is based on status and other markers (age and experience); exceptions are explained carefully. The other basileis challenge the paramount leader, who is expected to follow the best advice or the shared opinion of the rest. The councillors are described variously as: protoi, the first ones; aristoi, the best ones; arkhoi, the chiefs; hegetores, the leaders; medontes, the guardians; or gerontes, the elders. They are the paramount leader's peers, yielding to him only because of his greater resources and authority, and serve as his advisors, discussing anything that matters to the community, including relations with other communities. They exert considerable influence … [They] must be the heads of the most powerful households (oikoi), while in the military context they are the leaders of individual contingents defined by region or as follower groups. … [The] boule is a firmly established institution; its meetings are mentioned twenty times. Contrary to Finley's doubts, it plays an important role in offering a forum with clearly established norms that permits open discussion and challenges to the leader, and enables compromise, agreement, and common action. … [Only] a small developmental step is needed to produce the boulai of archaic poleis well attested by the late 7th and 6th centuries, which are formalised, regulated (by age, number, or function) and (directly or indirectly) elected. (Kurt A. Raaflaub 2011)
Discussion
Clearly assemblies were the public sphere of Homeric Society. They had the same function as the campfire assemblies of the forager society and reflected the very same imperatives for discussion of means to ends, and then for reasoning, persuasion, and approval. Although Homeric discussion was frank, lively, challenging, critical and discursive its structural purpose was quite evidently to achieve consensus among highly competitive individuals rather than a ‘victory’ over opposing ideas and parties. The assembly was a representation of communal obligation and bonds of friendship among elite equals, tempered by individualistic desires “always to be the best and to excel among the others” (Homer, Iliad Book 6). It was conditioned ultimately by their differentiations of household wealth and influence, and individual characteristics.
Hector, always you rebuke me in assemblies, although my counsel is good—since it is not in the least seemly for one of the people to speak beside the mark, neither in council nor in war, but always to increase your power. But now once again I will speak out as seems to me to be best. (Polydamas to Hector, in Homer, Iliad Book 12.211-215)
Like the forager assembly the Homeric assembly could also be the mechanism for sharing common goods (equal distributions of best cuts of meat or booty respectively). Also, in both cases the sociation of the assembly is symbolised by the circle of people seated around a ‘centre’ (the campfire or the middle spectre and stone respectively).
But the Homeric assembly was demonstrably more formal in procedure and ceremony. It could arise spontaneously and informally according to exigencies and opportunities of the moment (like forager campfire assemblies) but once underway it was structured by a formulated and consistent organisational procedure with reference to traditional ceremony and a preexisting hierarchy. In order to avoid community divisions the rules of assembly precluded rights to speak and also precluded majoritarianism. Rights to speak depended on informal leadership rankings. Ingrained customary expectations of honourable compliance were strongly felt and ensured that if a promise was made in assembly to achieve a certain goal the promise must be kept on pain of penalties.
Any householder who had been a fighter in the communal army had the right to sit in assembly to witness the process, demonstrate approval, and thereby legitimise and share in responsibility for decisions made on behalf of the settlement. It is likely that the agenda of an assembly meeting will have been agreed beforehand in the council meeting. The basileis set the agenda. In effect the separation of council from assembly is like a separation between the executive and representative branches. Governance is therefore unabashedly hierarchical and organised coordination despite the absence of rulership. But by default governance remains communalistic in the sense that basileis are a governing elite and the processes ensures a distribution of power with collegial decision making. On the other hand, this form of governance is not continuous. It is recreated with every assembly, and the assembly is called only when an issue arises that requires a coordinated decision. If a decision is not reached through assembly the decision is left to leading basileis acting together. In council and in banquet with wine they display traditional deference to the current paramount basileus who nonetheless is unable to ignore the expressed opinions of his peers. To ignore the will of the peer group would be to invite disorder and the collapse of governance. The routine is ad hoc intra-settlement communalistic elite governance among the larger households.
In the final part of Homeric Society I look for what can be learned from Homeric decisional processes and behavioural patterns at the level of individual impacts on sociopolitical learning. Firstly there is the application of intelligent rationality to reasoning. The making of rules is fundamental for bordering, bonding and binding, and Homeric scholarship tells us much about pre-legal evolutions in judgements for justice and ‘just’ sociation. These themes lead into questions about personality. To what extent are the elements of ‘heroic code’ a reflection of innate personality traits predetermining the impulse to be motivated to create the circumstances that enable leadership (such as charisma), or are they more like learned rules of agency that arise from interaction which must be utilitarian for leadership? Finally, there is a recurring theme of emotion. Some of the best known studies of transition from ape to hominin society emphasise learning of special emotions that enable sociation. Could it be the other way around? What can the Homeric fictions tell us about governance success and failure in terms of learned or evolved ability to control the primate emotions?
For source material I am referring to the following authors:
Alexander Mazarakis Ainian, Pierre Carlier, Paul Cartledge*, Jan Paul Crielaard, Marcel Detienne, Vincent Farenga*, Moses Finley, Robin Lane Fox*, Michael Gagarin*, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, Dean Hammer, Mogens Herman Hansen*, Peter Jones, Bernard Knox, Geoffrey Lloyd, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Dimitri Nakassis, Josiah Ober*, Robin Osborne*, Kurt Raaflaub, Peter Rhodes, Malcolm Schofield, Rosalind Thomas, Robert W. Wallace, Hans van Wees* — scholars with an * after their name are current subscribers to Social Science Files.