Mapping Utopia: Homer's Politics and the Birth of the Polis

College Literature, Spring 2007 by Giesecke, Annette Lucia

As the pride of Greece and Troy fought and died beneath the walls of windy Ilion, Hephaistos, lord of the forge and volcanic fire, fashioned new armor for great Achilles. The pièce de résistance was the wondrous, ornate shield embellished with a host of earthly images, vignettes drawn from nearly every facet of human life on Earth (XVIII.478-607) [see Figure 1]. At its center, presumably on its boss, Hephaistos wrought the four elements: earth, air, sea, and heavenly fire. Here too he wrought two cities, one at peace and one at war, together with their vineyards, fields, and pasturelands. There appeared as well the rituals of sacrifice and marriage, proceedings in a court of law, and the joyous dance of youths and maidens. On the shield s rim, and encompassing the entire composition, ran the tides of the River Ocean. None of Achilles' men, so Homer says, had the courage to look upon this armor (XIX. 14-15). Only Achilles looked, and appropriately so, for armor embodies, constitutes the essence of, the heroic persona; "as he looked, all the more did the anger came upon him / and his eyes glittered terribly beneath the lids, like blazing fire" (XIX.16-17).1 Achilles' receipt of the armor is a pivotal moment in the Iliad, for it marks his re-entry into battle and the reversal of the ill fortunes of the Greeks. It signals also the transformation of Achilles into godlike beast, a condition that he must transcend in order to achieve the standard of true heroism. The lengthy, extraordinarily vivid description of the shield has been viewed as something "like an immense simile ... that halts the action of the poem while the audience visualize the scene and feels its relationship to the ongoing story" (Edwards 1991, 200). Viewed, as it commonly is, as the master simile of the Iliad, inextricably linked to the larger narrative by a myriad of references including the resolution of a quarrel, which resonates with the quarrel of Achilles with Agamemnon, and a wedding, which surely alludes to the ill-fated union between Peleus and Thetis that was the underlying cause of the Trojan War itself, the shield does not receive its due. Indeed, it can be shown that shield is vastly more than a master simile, for within it resides the answer to a question fundamental to the understanding of the Odyssey, a question ultimately fundamental too to determining the meaning of the Iliad: why, as he commences his song, does Homer place such emphasis on the fact that Odysseus had come to know many cities and the sensibilities of many peoples as he struggled to survive his ten-year journey home over the threatening, wine-dark sea? In both Achilles' shield and Odysseus's wanderings exists a coherent political vision, a utopian paradigm for social betterment.2 Both are illustrative of the postMycenaean Greek faith in urbanism, in the institutions and "form" of the nascent polis "city-state," as the best vehicle by which to negotiate a place for humanity in Nature and, consequently, the optimum vehicle of human advancement, spiritual, ethical, intellectual, and technological alike. As Aristotle would famously state, the person who forms no part of the polis must be either a beast or a god, a creature well below or well above the human level (1957, 1253a1-4).

Critical to grasping the political, and specifically Utopian, thrust of the Homeric poems is the date of their crystallization or relative stabilization after centuries of oral transmission. Once believed either to be essentially Bronze/Heroic Age (3000-1150 BCE) creations having accumulated a mass of anachronisms in the course of a long period of oral transmission or to be retrospective creations of the Dark Age (roughly 1150-800 BCE), the Homeric poems are now viewed as having taken substantial shape in the course of the eighth century BCE.3 Artifacts such as the tower shield, boar's tusk helmet, and silver-riveted sword, all Bronze Age items unlikely to have been used in the Dark Age or thereafter, are in reality devices employed to lend the Homeric poems, "set" in Bronze Age Greece, a convincingly antiquated cast.4 The poems needed to be "modern enough to be understandable, but archaic enough to be believable" (Raaflaub 1997,628). Meanwhile, the sheer numbers and relative impotence of kings, as well as the importance of assemblies of the people, reflect the world of the poems' substantial generation; further, the elaborate, hierarchical Bronze Age palace bureaucracies with their strict control over all aspects over regional politics and economies are conspicuous in their absence.

This, the eighth century, was both a time of recovery from unsettled Dark Age conditions and the time in which the characteristic social organization of the Greeks, the polis, began to take shape.5 In its Classical form, the polis may be defined as an urban form minimally comprising "a community of persons, of place or territory, of cults, customs and laws, and capable of (full or partial) self-administration (which presupposes institutions and meeting places)" (Raaflaub 1997, 630). The Greeks themselves offered various definitions of the polis. Pausanias, for instance, envisioned the ideal polis as an urban entity possessing gymnasia, theaters, a marketplace, and a spring to supply the city with fresh water (1907, X.iv.1), while Aristotle stressed the importance of walls, easily defensible territory, good access to a port, healthful air and water, a restricted population, and the purposeful placement of civic buildings and areas, including both temples and adorai "places of meeting" (1957, 1325b34-l33Ib24). Whatever "definition" of the polis one adopts, it is clear that it was conceived of not only as a center of defense, but also, and critically, as a center of habitation, "political" institutions, cults, industry, trade, education, and entertainment.6 Its role as a center of habitation in which the agora has assumed the "central" location once occupied by the acropolis and palace of the king is what most vividly distinguishes the polis from Bronze Age citadels.7