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Cattle and Honour in Homer and Hesiod

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Apostolos N. Athanassakis*
Affiliation:
University of California at Santa Barbara
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Extract

The concept of Homeric or simply Greek honour is not as easy to comprehend as is commonly assumed. Basically it is a system of values stemming from the belief that no harm done to self, kinsman, friend or property should remain uncompensated or unavenged. In a way, what is subsumed under the term honour is an awareness that the higher one bids the higher one is. In the present article the English word ‘honour’ is only a code word for the various fundamentals of life that belong to the semantic compass of Homeric timē. The word ‘cattle’ is also a code word for livestock, especially bovine animals as well as sheep and goats. Honour is not much talked about these days, and many educated people are familiar with some of its aspects mostly through the works of cultural anthropologists who, it seems, have to go to the far corners of the earth to study it. Yet, both honour and the price for honour are ubiquitous in our modern world. The difference is that the state is the keeper of every citizen's honour and as such it regulates punishment for offence to collective or individual honour and, through its courts, decides the material price that must be paid in compensation for real or even intended harm.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1992

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References

1. Adkins, A.W.H., Moral Values and Political Behaviour in Ancient Greece (New York 1972)Google Scholar, chapters 2 and 3, esp. pp.15–34; From the Many to the One (London 1970), 13–48Google ScholarPubMed; Merit and Responsibility (London 1960), 61–85Google ScholarPubMed. Of special interest is Adkin, ’s article ‘Honour and Punishment in the Homeric Poems’, BICS 7(1960), 23–32Google Scholar.

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4. Walcot, P. has written of shame and honour in Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern (New York 1970), 56–76Google Scholar. It is remarkable, to me at least, that the ideals of levendia, pallikaria, and timē are left entirely out of consideration.

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6. For the history and social structure of Mani see Mexis, Dimos N., I Mani kai i Maniates (Athens 1977)Google Scholar. Pages 17–19 refer specifically to questions raised in this study. On honour and blood feud in Mani see Alexakis, Eleuth. P., Ta Yeni kai i Ikoyenia stin Paradosiaki Kinonia tis Manis (Athens 1980), 100–15Google Scholar. The beautifully written Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (London 1958)Google Scholar by Patrick Leigh Fermor is a sine qua non for the educated reader with an interest in Mani.

7. For some details on this as well as the beginning of a rare folk song referring to athanato nero see my note on Theogony 775–806 in Hesiod, , Theogony, Works and Days, Shield, tr. Athanassakis, Apostolos N. (Baltimore and London 1983), 53Google Scholar. All translations of Hesiod in this article are from this work.

8. The first three lines of this rare folk song are given in my notes on Theogony 507–615 (Athanassakis [n.7 above], 49).

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11. Ibid. 19.

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13. For a simple case of valuation based on heads of cattle in Homer, consider duōdekaboios, ‘worth twelve oxen’, in reference to a golden tripod (Il. 23.703), and tessaraboios, ‘worth four oxen’, in reference to a slave woman (Il. 23.705); cf. also Il. 6.236. For more details see Athanassakis, A., ‘An Inquiry into the Etymology and Meaning of iphthimos in the Early Epic’, Glotta 49 (1971), 1–21Google Scholar.

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17. The information presented here on Sphakia—and by extension on such parts of Crete as the great region dominated by Mt Psiloritis (ancient Mt Ida) I owe to the kind auspices of the Guggenheim Foundation and to such research as I was able to conduct in these areas especially during the academic year 1987–88, when I worked in Crete as a Guggenheim Fellow. Essentially, I owe it all to those Cretans who received me as a guest and chose to speak to me as such. Also, Dr. Robert Petty, my field assistant in several of my travels is hereby thanked for his labours. There are few books that touch on the subject of honour in Crete, let alone in Sphakia in particular. Herzfeld, Michael’s The Poetics of Manhood (Princeton 1985)Google Scholar offers much useful information on a great range of sociological aspects on the village of Zoniania, to which he refers by the fictitious name of Glendi. Regrettably, he writes little on honour (233f.). Perhaps Patrick Leigh Fermor in his rich volume Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London 1966), 125–44Google Scholar, especially 132–34, still is the best introduction to the sort of spirit that produces honour and levendia.

18. Athanassakis (n.7 above), 60.

19. On the obscure epithets mentioned here and Hermes’ precocious feat of cattle theft see Athanassakis, , ‘From the Phallic Cairn to Shepherd God and Divine Herald’, Eranos 87 (1989), 33–49Google Scholar.

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21. On this famous fraternal feud see Van Groningen, B.A., Hésiode et Persès (Amsterdam 1957), 153–56 and esp. 164–66Google Scholar.

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25. On the view of this cooperative effort, which clearly involved children, see Detienne (n.23 above), 22–24.

26. On slave labour in Hesiod see Finley (n.20 above), 106.

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28. Ralph M. Rosen has advanced the interesting view that Hesiod’s Nautilia, that portion of the Works and Days that refers to sailing, is to be understood in terms of an extended and elaborate poetic metaphor: Poetry and Sailing in Hesiod’s Works and Days’, ClAnt 9 (1990), 99–113Google Scholar.

29. See Fontenrose, Joseph, ‘Work, Justice, and Hesiod’s Five Ages’, CPh 69 (1974), 1–16, esp. 7 and 11fGoogle Scholar. on hubris in the myth of the five ages. Note that it may be oversimplifying the argument to state with Matthew W. Dickie that in W&D 224–47, ‘What is meant by dikē in this passage is chiefly determined by the sense of the term hubris, to which it is opposed’ (Diké as a Moral Term in Homer and Hesiod’, CPh 73 [1978], 91–101 at 99Google Scholar). A broader and more diachronic discussion of hubris in Hesiod is to be found in Knox, Bernard M.W., Essays: Ancient and Modern (Baltimore 1989), 7–22Google Scholar. For hubris in classical times see MacDowell, Douglas M., ‘Hybris in Athens’, G&R 23 (1976), 14ff.Google Scholar; Fisher, N.R.E., ‘Hybris and Dishonour: I’, G&R 23 (1976), 177–91Google Scholar, esp. 176f. These two articles should be read in conjunction.

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33. The view that Hesiod is primarily a poet who speaks in various personae and who selects and rearranges details from his own life to suit the demands of his Muse is not one for which I can claim any credit. A well-developed argument on this has been presented by Griffith, Mark, ‘Personality in Hesiod’, ClAnt 2 (1983), 37–65Google Scholar. An entirely opposite view had been presented by Walcot, P., Hesiod and the Near East (Cardiff 1966)Google Scholar; note especially his statement, ‘The Works and Days is an intensely personal poem. Acknowledge this and you will be compelled to admit the truth of what Hesiod has to say about himself, his brother, and his father’ (106).

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38. Lloyd-Jones, H., ‘Ehre und Schande in der Griechischen Kultur’, A&A 38 (1987), 1–28Google Scholar.

39. See Campbell (n.9 above).

40. T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton 1–3.

41. 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