Society and Personhood: Homer in (several) Iron Ages
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 16/04/2019

Homer remains an oddly popular figure well outside the narrow field of the Aegean or Mediterranean in the Iron Age. Various social models derived from Epic poetry (chiefly but not exclusively Homer) have been used to understand a variety of social forms in various parts of transalpine Europe in the last millennium BC (notably by Kristian Kristiansen). These models seem to derive from Moses Finley’s work. The readiness to use ‘Homeric’ models in this part of the world contrasts oddly with the archaeological consensus in the Aegean world. Though the notion of ‘Homeric Society’ has long been used as a convenient shorthand to describe the social order of the Early Iron Age in the Aegean (pre 700 BC) its use even within a purely Aegean context is much more popular with ancient historians than with archaeologists. The notion of a socially homogeneous, Aegean-wide ‘society’ sits uncomfortably with the extreme material and regional diversity of the Aegean world from the tenth to eighth centuries BC. Prehistorians working in transalpine Europe have been oddly unconcerned with the problems raised by Aegean Iron Age specialists. This paper argues that we cannot talk usefully about ‘Homeric society’ either in the Aegean or anywhere else. But we can usefully talk about Homeric notions of the self and of personhood, and these may indeed be applicable more widely to the European as well as the Aegean world. 

James Whitley (Cardiff University)