I am indebted to Sir Moses Finley, S. C. Humphreys, and G. S. Kirk for useful criticisms of earlier drafts.

¹ It follows that the Iliad and Odyssey can be used in evidence even if it is agreed with Snodgrass, A. M., “An Historical Homeric Society?” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 94 (1974), 114–25,CrossRefGoogle Scholar that they cannot possibly reflect the institutions of Greek society as they were at any one period. It is no doubt true for the purposes of an archaeological historian such as Coldstream, J. N., Geometric Greece (London, 1977), 18,CrossRefGoogle Scholar that “Homer we cannot use.” But for the purposes of a sociologist, it is not. From this point of view, the discussion by Finley, M. I. in The World of Odysseus (London, 1956)Google Scholar remains fundamental, irrespective of whether he is right that the Odyssey gives a picture of “the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., distorted here and there by misunderstandings and anachronisms ” (“The World of Odysseus Revisited,” Proceedings of the Classical Association,71 (1974), 23).Google Scholar

² Cohen, Ronald, “Introduction,” in Origins of the State, Cohen, Ronald and Service, Elman R., eds. (Philadelphia, 1978), 12–13.Google Scholar

³ Odyssey IX. 112–15Google Scholar: They have no assembly and no customary law (themistes), but each individual patriarch lays down the law (themisteuei) for his own wives and children regardless of any other. The fact that no such actual society exists in the ethnographic record does not alter its significance as an ideal type with which Homer and his audience contrasted their own societies. But it is a contrast between civilization and the absence of it, not between statehood and stateless-ness.

⁴ Southall, Aidan W., Alur Society (Cambridge, England, 1957), ch. 9.Google Scholar

⁵ Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (London, 1974), 148.Google Scholar

⁶ Ch. Petit-Dutaillis, , The Feudal Monarchy in France and England, Hunt, E. D., trans. (London, 1936), 80.Google Scholar

⁷ See Bray, Warwick, “From Village to City in Mesoamerica,” in The Origins of Civilization, Moorey, P. R. S., ed. (Oxford, 1979), 78–102.Google Scholar

⁸ Cf. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., “The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan,” reprinted in his Essays in Social Anthropology (London, 1962), 73,Google Scholar and Howell, P. P., “Observations on the Shilluk of the Upper Nile. The Laws of Homicide and the Legal Functions of the Reth,” Africa, 22:2 (1952), 106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ I do not, in other words, seek to dissent from the remark of Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), 2,Google Scholar that “the Germania is not only an unsafe guide to future German society, it also affords no solid ground for generalization about Germanic society at large of the historian's own time.”

¹⁰ Tacitus, , Germania 26: “agri pro numero cultivorum ab universis vicis occupantur, quos mox inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur.”Google Scholar

¹¹ It is worth noting how, when Telemachus has to find a crew, he can only do so among those of his contemporaries who are also his friends (Odyssey III.363Google Scholar), and when Antinous asks how he achieved it (IV. 642–44), the only alternative he puts is that of household servants of Telemachus's own.

¹² Maroboduus appears in Germania 42 as a rex of noble genus, but his assumption of a royal title apparently rendered him fatally unpopular (Annals II.xliv: Maroboduum regis nomen invisum apud popularis). Thompson, E. A., The Early Germans (Oxford, 1965), 68,Google Scholar speaks of him as a “permanent autocrat” who had “won despotic power,” but in the event, his power, despotic as it may have been, was temporary only.

¹³ Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 4th ed. (Tubingen, 1956), II, 588:Google Scholar “Bei der patriarchalen Herrschaft ist es die personliche Unterwerfung unter den Herrn. …”

¹⁴ Sahlins, , Stone Age Economics, 139.Google Scholar

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¹⁶ Gluckman, Max. Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford, 1965), 125. For Gluckman, as for some other anthropologists, the Anuak (and indeed the Shilluk) count as a “state,” but on a definition so broad as to include any form of minimal government of what on the definition advanced here is only a “semistate” kind.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Roebuck, Carl, “Urbanization in Corinth,” Hesperia, 41:1 (1972), 127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁹ Cf. Oates, Joan, Babylon (London, 1979), 25Google Scholar, and Hooker, J. T., Mycenaean Greece (London, 1977), 183.Google Scholar

²⁰ See Widens, R. F., Aristocratic Society in Ancient Crete (London, 1955), 105–8.Google Scholar

²¹ Jeffery, L. H., Archaic Greece (London, 1976), 47, 158, 226, 238.Google Scholar

²² Cf. Waley, Daniel, The Italian City-Republics (London, 1969), 231, and the quotation from Machiavelli's Discorsi there cited.Google Scholar

²³ Cf. West, M. L., ed., Works and Days (Oxford, 1978), 151.Google Scholar

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²⁵ Ibid. 6–9.

²⁶ Finley, , World of Odysseus, 70, does at one point speak of “taxes and other dues to lords and kings” in the Homeric world; but he subsequently qualifies this by the observation that “no word immediately denoting compulsion, like ‘taxes’ or even feudal ‘dues,’ is to be found in the poems for payments from people to ruler, apart from the context of the special prerogative in the distribution of booty and the meat of sacrificial animals” (p. 105).Google Scholar

²⁷ Meiggs, and Lewis, , Greek Historical Inscriptions, 2–3.Google Scholar

²⁸ Murakawa, Kentaro, “Dēmiurgos,” Historia, 6:4 (1957), 386.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ibid., 399. Mosley, D. J., “Diplomacy in Classical Greece,” Ancient Society, 3(1972), 14Google Scholar, cites Numelin, R., The Beginnings of Diplomacy (London, 1950), 132Google Scholar, on the heralds of the Fijian Mata-Ki, “whose functions correspond almost exactly with what we know of the Homeric heralds.” Jeffery, L. H., “Demiourgoi in the Archaic Period,” Archeologica Classica, 25–26 (1973–74), 319, comments that “not only heralds and judges, but theoroi, proxenoi, presbeis and the like might all be termed ‘workers’ of this sort; for before the rise of government by democracy all such public duties needed a social background of leisure, wealth and office-holding. …”Google Scholar

³⁰ Whitelock, Dorothy, The Beginnings of English Society, 2d ed. (Harmondsworth, England, 1954), 105.Google Scholar

³¹ See Wilson, Godfrey, “Introduction to Nyakusa Law,” Africa, 10:1 (1937), 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Meiggs, and Lewis, , Greek Historical Inscriptions, 5.Google ScholarWallace, M. B., “Early Greek Proxenia,” Phoenix, 24:3 (1970), 192, suggests that the “political precocity ”‘implied by the Meiggs and Lewis dating is a reason for lowering the date. But the sociological point still stands.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³⁸ Ecclesiastical History III. 14 on King Oswine of NorthumbriaGoogle Scholar; cf. both Thompson, , Early Germans, 58Google Scholar, and Wallace-Hadrill, , Early Germanic Kingship, 85–86.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Bloch, Maurice, “The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagascar,” Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 18:1 (1977), esp. 110–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁴⁵ Cf. Wright, Henry T. and Johnson, Gregory A., “Population, Exchange and Early State Formation in Southwestern Iran,” American Anthropologist, 77:2 (1975), 284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ Cf.Goody, Jack, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (London, 1971), 29.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Cf. Salzman, P. C., “The Proto-State in Iranian Baluchistan,” in Cohen and Service, Origins, 135Google Scholar: “Each baluchi sardar, therefore, led a population of nomadic tribesmen who controlled their own capital resources the major part of which, the herds, was mobile. The sardar had virtually no economic patronage to dispense and had little way of coercing mobile followers with independent resources. Even if a sardar had managed somehow to form a military arm loyal to him alone the other tribesmen could have massed in opposition, or else could have loaded their camels and disappeared.”

⁴⁸ See Harris, Marvin, Cultural Materialism (New York, 1979), 101–2.Google Scholar

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⁵⁵ Forrest, W. G., “Two Chronographic Notes. I. The Tenth Thalassocracy in Eusebius,” Classical Quarterly, 19:1 (1969), 95–106, shows just how uncertain the naval history of the period remains, although he accepts a Corinthian supremacy in the Bacchiad period, which was lost subsequently.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁵⁷ The old Amphictionic oath quoted by Aeschines (III. 110) clearly shows the distinction to be exhaustive, since the only other category of possible offenders is that of individuals: Larsen, J. A. O., “Representation and Democracy in Hellenistic Federalism,” Classical Philology, 40:2 (1945) 78, n.72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cf. also the later inscription from Epidauros cited by Larsen, in Greek Federal States (Oxford, 1968), 4, n.l.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Baechler, Jean, “Les Origines de la democratic grecque,” Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, 21:2 (1980), 226–28, attempts to get round this by preserving an emphasis on the segmentary character of ethnē while classifying Macedon and Epirus separately as “monarchies tribales. ” But this only weakens the value of the distinction still further.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶¹ Cf. Thucydides III. 94ff., on the Aetolians. For a parallel to the allegation by the Messenians that the Eurytanians, the largest segment (meros) of the Aetolian ethnos, ate their meat raw, cf., e.g., the legend of the Nyoro, Toro, and Nkole that the dynasty of kings who introduced the arts of government into the territory of western Uganda likewise found the country inhabited by ōmophagoi cited by Mair, Lucy, Primitive Government (London, 1962), 129.Google Scholar

⁶² The difficulties which his fragment on the constitution of Thessaly has posed for successive commentators are set out in detail by Wade-Gery, H. T., “Jason of Pherae and Aleuas the Red,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 44 (1924), 55–64.MCrossRefGoogle Scholar But Larsen, , Greek Federal States, 17, dismisses attempted emendation as only making matters worse, and prefers the simple explanation that there was a tendency in the fourth century, which Aristotle here follows, to adopt polis as the name for every kind of state.Google Scholar

⁶³ Analogously, the emergence of statehood in pre-Inca Peru took the form both of the building of substantial cities and synoecism of surrounding villages in the south, and of the organization of the population into functionally equivalent dispersed communities focussed on ceremonial centres in the north. Lanning, Edward P., Peru before the Incas (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), 115–20.Google Scholar

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⁶⁵ Cf. Smout, T. C., A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (Glasgow, 1969), 20: “It would be wrong to think of it [the Alban Kingdom] in any sense as a state. …”Google Scholar

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⁶⁹ Coldstream, , Geometric Greece, 57, fig. 13.Google Scholar No doubt it is possible to be over-sceptical of the inferences about roles which can be drawn from archaeological finds. The contents of Childeric's tomb, for example, surely licence the conclusion that “this was no leader of a small war-band, but an established federate king.…” (Wallace-Hadrill, , Early Germanic Kingship, 18Google Scholar; cf. Ament, H., “The Germanic Tribes in Europe,” in The Northern World, Wilson, David M., ed. (London, 1980), 64Google Scholar: “Even if the signet-ring had not been found, one would have to speak of a ‘king's’ rather than a ‘noble's’ tomb.”) But there is no such trace of a Greek Childeric in Dark Age Athens or anywhere else.

⁷⁰ See Jacoby, F., Atthis (Oxford, 1949), 126.Google Scholar

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