Ideology in the Iliad : Polis, Basileus, Theoi *

In the following text I wish to question, first, the use which a number of scholars ² have made of the concept of ideology in analyzing the relationship of the Iliad to the rise of the polis, in particular the claim that the poem reflects a relatively straightforward conflict between the values of the polis and the values of the aristocratic oikoi. I will then offer a brief excursus on the study of ideology before turning to an exploration of what can be claimed about the rise of the polis in eighth-century B.C. Greece. Finally, I will look briefly at the evidence for ideology in the poem itself.

In his 1986 article, Ian Morris posits two layers of values in the Iliad: one layer, which he argues is more accurately reflective of the eighth-century polis and therefore of “cooperative” values in Adkins’ terms (Adkins 1960.40 and passim), and a second layer, more “oikos-oriented,” stressing the competitive “heroic” ethic. The difference is explained by invoking the notion of ideology: the Iliad is a class-based poem in which the ideas and agendas of the aristocracy are self-evident (Morris 1986.123–27). In Morris’ book of the following year, Burial and Ancient Society, subtitled “The Rise of the Greek City-State” (Morris 1987), he elaborates his case with a very detailed analysis of Greek—mostly Athenian—burial data from 1100–500.

In Stephen Scully’s Homer and the Sacred City (1990), the foundation of the argument is an exhaustive analysis of epithets for cities in Homer. Like Morris, he is primarily concerned to stress the eighth-century, polis-oriented values associated with Troy and Hector while sharply distinguishing them from the heroic ethic of Achilles and all the Achaean attackers. While Scully, too, addresses oikos versus polis in terms of the class nature of the audience (1990.100f.), his fundamental categories seem to me to be structuralist (i.e., Lévi-Strauss via Redfield 1975), moral, and religious: the sacredness of the wall is a function of its separation of nature from culture. The values of the city, concentrated in the protection of women and children, are presented by Scully as self-evidently superior to those of the Greeks and Achilles who want to destroy it. Finally, he argues the wall is “sacred,” “holy,” because it marks off nature from culture. ³ While Scully nods in passing to the notion of an ideological dimension in the contrast in values between attackers and defenders (Scully 1990.110–13), nowhere in his treatment of what is called “Homeric Religion,” the evidence and use of religion in the poem, is there a hint that it too might have an ideological aspect worth analyzing from a contemporary perspective, the perspective of an era and a society which—whatever its own religious commitments—does not accept as literally true the claims about reality made by characters in a poem from the eighth century B.C. ⁴ Indeed, there often seems to be no distinction marked at all between what appears to be exposition of ideas in the poem and the author’s own analytical categories. Marxists are often accused of imposing inappropriate modern categories on historical periods which operated on fundamentally different bases from our own society. But however sympathetically one attempts to read the remains of another culture and another period, it is inadequate, as Marx rightly argued, simply to “share the illusion of that epoch” (Marx-Engels 1975.5.55). ⁵ The very act of analysis implies posing questions about that society that it did not pose for itself—some sort of contemporary analytic categories are inescapable. The question is whether they are explicit or unacknowledged by the analyst.

More recently, in an ambitious attempt to synthesize the social origins of both epic and tragedy, Richard Seaford (1994) offers his own version of a fundamental opposition between aristocratic oikos and emergent polis. Burial, hero-cults, and religious observances for the divine protector of the polis also figure prominently in his argument. Ideology, though formally his first point of inquiry...