In the realm of Odysseus one seeks in vain for cogent evidence of tribal conditions. The shameless conduct of the suitors of Penelope, in devouring the substance of the absent Odysseus, and in plotting the assassination of his son and heir,[83] as also the cruel hyper-vengeance which Odysseus with impunity wreaked upon them, seem to us more suggestive of feudalism and autocracy than of genuine tribalism. In tribal communities an immense importance attaches to questions of marriage and inheritance. The voice of the ‘folk-moot,’ of the clan-gathering, can and must be heard. It is true that in the Odyssey[84] the disguised Odysseus, in questioning his son as to why he had not driven the suitors from his house, asks significantly: ‘Do the people hate thee?’ But it is equally true that in the domestic drama of the realm of Odysseus the rank and file of the people are ignored. For our part we feel that we move in that atmosphere of autocratic militarism which, in ancient Thessaly or Macedonia, and in medieval Europe, exalts the dagger of the assassin and the intrigue of the paramour.
In Odyssey xiv. 208 we are told that when a certain rich man, named Castor, died, his sons divided up and cast lots for his property. This procedure would be perfectly normal in modern society if the owner died intestate and the property was not entailed. We hear nothing in this narration of any clan-council having determined the right of succession, as would ordinarily occur in tribal conditions.
In Odyssey xix. 294 it is said that the wealth which Odysseus has amassed would suffice for his posterity even unto the tenth generation. The selection of the number ten in this passage seems to us to indicate a possible reference to tribal life. F. Seebohm, speaking of medieval Welsh tribes, lays stress on the length of time which had to elapse before a ‘stranger’ could become a tribesman, pointing out[85] that even the great-grandson of a stranger could not be a tribesman, though he could be recognised as the founder of an embryonic clan, whereas a semi-servile stranger’s descendants could not attain to the rank of tribesmen until the ninth generation had passed away. Hence the saying that a man’s wealth would suffice for ten generations could easily, in tribal language, have become a proverb. It would simply mean that a man’s posterity would never be in want, for after nine generations any man’s descendants could have formed a tribal organisation and possessed tribal wealth of their own. But must we conclude from this that Odysseus was a tribesman? No conclusion could be less cogent. It is true that the Achaeans, at the time of the Trojan war, were long enough settled in the country to have produced the nucleus of clans and tribes, for they had ruled over Greece for two hundred years. Thus the Achaean Melampus, a contemporary of Nestor and Atreus, founded a family in Argos, the development of which may thus be traced in Homer[86]:
| Melampus—> | { Antiphates— | Oicles——Amphiaraus— | { Alcmaeon |
| { Amphilochus. | |||
| { Mantius— | { Polypheides—Theoclymenus. | ||
| { Cleitus. |
Here we find kinship extending to second and third cousins. Such kinship exists everywhere in the world to-day, but it clearly does not constitute a clan or a tribe. When, therefore, in Homer,[87] Theoclymenus is said to have killed a man who is described as ἔμφυλος in relation to his slayer, we must not suppose that the deceased was a tribesman. The word ἔμφυλος should be translated as kinsman,[88] not tribesman. Several instances may be found in Homer of tribal phrases and expressions applied in non-tribal contexts. Thus the word γένος which ordinarily means ‘clan’ is used in Homer to denote a family in the modern sense,[89] or to mean ‘blood-descent,’ and kinship.[90] Rarely or never does it carry its proper meaning. If the social organisation of the Achaeans had been of a tribal character, surely the Homeric use of the word γένος would have been different from what it actually is. Leaf calls attention[91] to the very rare occasions on which Homer refers to such groups as the clan, the phratry, and the tribe. Nestor says to Achilles that ‘the lover of domestic strife is a man without hearth or law or phratry,’[92] and the same Nestor urges Agamemnon to divide his fighting forces ‘by tribes and phratries,’[93] but these solitary references no more compel us to regard Achilles and Agamemnon as tribal chiefs than the tribal proverb concerning the tenth generation compels us to regard Odysseus as a tribal patriarch. Such references are rather, as Leaf says,[91] ‘reminiscences,’ reflections, whether in the mind of a Minoan or of an Achaean, of conditions which prevailed universally amongst the subject Pelasgian peoples.
We may then confidently conclude that the evidence of the Homeric poems is much more consistent with the theory that the Achaeans were a quasi-feudal military caste than with the theory which conceives them as tribal nobles. We may think of the Achaeans, in their relation to the Pelasgians, very much as we should think of the soldiers of the ancient Roman Empire quartered in a province.[94] When the Burgundians came to France about A.D. 500 they were regarded,[94] by a polite fiction, as guests, and were presented with hospitalitas, consisting of two-thirds of the land and one-third of the slaves! When the Achaeans conquered Greece, they lived, indeed, in garrison-towns and sought to maintain a splendid isolation in their lofty fortresses, but they took unto themselves the richest lands and the fattest cattle and sheep, leaving the Pelasgians to till the soil and to squabble about boundaries. But when after two or three hundred years the Achaeans met a somewhat similar fate to that which they had meted out to Greece and to Troy, the tribal nobility of the primitive Pelasgians once more asserted its ancient privileges.
FOOTNOTES
[3] Numbers xxxv.