Kin-Groups in the Homeric Epics

Nineteenth-century theories about the progression of primitive societies (including the Greeks) from a "social organization" made up of small kinship units (clans) and tribes to the "political organization" of the city-state were fundamentally disproved by the demonstration, in the 1970s, that the historical subdivisions of the polis were not derived from clans, phratries, and tribes, as anthropologists defined them, but were new groups that served new purposes. Walter Donlan's paper reexamines the reasons why evidence of supra-familial groups is negligible in the Homeric epics, although at the poet's time they must have existed, and what use the epic poet makes of concepts such as genos/geneē and phrētrē.