The Voice of the People in Homer
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Kyriaco Nikias
Kyriaco Nikias is a Research Associate and Associate Teacher of the Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide.
Abstract
The informality of the Homeric assembly is often emphasised to distinguish it from the democratic bodies of the classical polis, and to show that the people in the Homeric society had no means to qualify the power of their aristocratic leaders. This article argues, to the contrary, that the lack of a formal system of command and control in the Homeric society conditioned the dependence of the leaders on a political model of persuasion. Since this was necessarily directed at the mass population of the society, they people were integrated in the system of government. This was maintained through three general mechanisms: first, the voice of the people was institutionalised, in the form of a popular assembly, the agorē; second, the people had a standardised, effective means by which to express consent and a limited amount of dissent to their leaders in the assembly; third, the people participated in a juridical function which was communal in purpose and form. This model seeks to show that, in these ways, the voice of the people held an important position in the structure of power, one which depended on the informality of that structure rather than being reduced by it.
About the author
Kyriaco Nikias is a Research Associate and Associate Teacher of the Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide.
Acknowledgements
All translations from Homer and foreign secondary sources are my own unless a translation is cited. I thank Professor Paul Babie for his scholarly guidance, and Professor Ngaire Naffine for her advice in the early stages of this article.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus: Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
- Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
- Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
- The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
- Late-Victorian Experiences with Italian Legislation: Stories of Sex, Madness and Social Commitment
- “Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”
- Research
- Robotics and Work: Between Fiction and Reality
- Praising the World “by Geometrical Terms”: Legal Metrics, Science and Indicators in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa
- The Voice of the People in Homer
- Elizabeth the Rhetorician. An Analysis of the Greatest Speeches by the Virgin Queen
- Book Review
- Pier Giuseppe Monateri: Dominus Mundi. Political Sublime and the World Order
