Thus no system of contracts, patent and copyright laws, bills of sale, and specie-backed currency, can ensure an orderly and just disposal of such goods if they are conceived of as material commodities. The only thing that cannot be copied in Homer's story is the power and immediacy of his own performance of it, his personal presence, that which cannot be measured as a commodityhis gift, as we say. To take Troy, Agamemnon must first have given his own daughter Iphigenia. Beware of the Greeks when they come bearing gifts, especially Trojan Horses.
Life is the performance, and thus the death, of the hero.
Where the analogy between the future and Homer's universe breaks down is of course in those aspects of ancient Greece that really have been set behind us by the ratchet of historical memory. It was a martial universe, one in which a violent rabble of young male heroes confronted a violent and uneasy patriarchy, contending over, and divided radically from, that third mysterious indoors world of the matriarchy, of white arms and weaving and procreativeness and terrifying protected personal subtlety. The point of the analogy is that a hard, real-feeling, complex world does exist in Homer in which nobody buys anything from, or sells anything to, anyone else. As such it is an imaginable human world based on gifts, on performance, on the exchange of informational goods. And such a world may now be approaching.