Blood and Friendship in Homer's World
How the oaths of antiquity kept the peace (but also started horrible wars).
As we all round our 2024, we’re headed towards immense change. We held elections in 60 countries, representing more than half of the world’s population. Incumbent governments, mostly adherents of neoliberal globalism, did not fare well. France’s prime minister was ousted in a no confidence vote. Donald Trump returns to the presidency in the United States. Election results in Romania are under dubious dispute. Then there are places like Syria, where elections haven’t mattered in a long time. Former dictator Bashar al-Assad now lives in Russia.
The January 2025 World Economic Forum will take up the issue of global cooperation in an era where a lot of people, living under all forms of government, are telling (and sometimes warning) their leaders to prioritize local concerns and well-being even as global technologies like gene editing, artificial intelligence and quantum computing have global implications.
Last time Trump was in office, the U.S. left The Paris Agreement, a legally binding treaty about climate change that went into effect just as his presidency started. Joe Biden rejoined the treaty. Once again, Trump plans to pull out. But this isn’t just a Trump thing. By democratic vote, the United Kingdom left the European Union in 2016, in a process still unravelling. Voters in France are acting out against President Emmanuel Macron’s cuts to pensions and labor reforms. Farmers in the Netherlands are protesting regulations handed down from the EU.
Within the western democracies or the Global North, voters feel like they’re being asked to make do with less while the rest of the world asks for more. At the COP29 climate talks this year, leaders from developing countries argue that they are climate change victims, being asked to decarbonize their economies at their own cost, both in terms of direct expenditures and missed opportunities. They argue that wealthier countries polluted their way to prosperity and should pay for the carbon transition, a bill they propose would be $1.3 trillion a year, which is a lost of money but just 60% of what these countries spend each year on weapons. The West’s answer was that it would come up with less than a third of that, and mostly as loans, not grants.
There are real questions to be asked now about how deeply an elected government can oblige its people to treaties and promises, given that the people change their minds and that the demographics of populations change as well. In contemporary Greece, birth rates have fallen, young people have left, the remaining population has aged out of the work force and ghost towns proliferate in once vibrant communities like Pelopponnese.
Well, the contemporary world will be upon us soon enough. So let’s look backward to the simpler and more brutal times of antiquity, when the civilizations around the Mediterranean were organized into tribal city-states, at constant risk of war with one another. In those days, sporting events like what we now memorialize as the Olympic Games and art events like the Festivals of Dionysus served as breaks from conflict, where civilizations in conflict could try to find some common goals or at least respite from their divergent interests.
Otherwise, Greek life in antiquity involved either war or the threat of war and the bulwark of peace were honor-based promises dramatized in Homer’s epic tales of The Trojan War and its aftermath. The story of the Trojan War starts with Helen, a woman so sorcerously beautiful that every unmarried king in the ancient world sought her partnership. The kings compete for her hand and, after much rigamarole, she marries Menelaus, King of Sparta. Helen’s older sister Clytemnestra married Agamemnon, King of Argos and commander of the largest army in the region. Odysseus, King of Ithaca, married Helen’s cousin Penelope. All of these women can trace their lineage to the gods, so all the major kings here left with an immortally blessed bride. But, they all knew Helen’s divinity made her particularly irresistible to men and so Odysseus had all of the suitors swear an oath to protect the couple. If any king stole Helen from Menelaus, all of the suitors pledged to go to war against the kidnapper and his country.
It was an early example of keeping the peace through the threat of mutually assured destruction. Odysseus created the oath not only to keep the suitors from attacking each other, but to give all of them an interest in Sparta’s security. Any intrusion on the Menelaus/Helen union would bring costly war onto all of their shores, after all.
Now, Homer gives us an event that even clever Odysseus could not foresee. Up in Olympus, the goddesses Hera, Aphrodite and Athena were manipulated by chaos into a dispute about a golden apple inscribed “for the prettiest one.” They chose Paris, son of Priam and a prince of Troy, to adjudicate their dispute. Hera offered him power, Athena offered martial prowess and Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman on Earth. Paris sided with Aphrodite, stole Helen away under the cover of love’s mist, and forced the pledged suitors into a calamitous action that would result in the ten year siege of Troy — a world war by the standards of the time.
At any point, the kings of the Greek nation states might have refused to take this action. They might have argued that the agreement was to keep the peace among themselves and that nobody could have foreseen unearthly forces fighting over an apple would trigger these costly and dangerous obligations. But such pedantry would have ripped their society apart. An oath was an oath and if kings tried to lawyer their ways out of them, then nobody could be trusted ever. Refusing to fight for Menelaus, as promised, might have invalidated every other agreement between the kings, fracturing the city states into squabbles and wars.
A cynic might say that the oath also provided the kings a convenient excuse to invade a wealthy, outside territory and maybe there is something to the notion that having an other created the conditions for unity (but certainly not unanimity) among the Greek kings. But it’s also the case that only somebody from the House of Priam, which was not party to the oath, would have taken Helen from Menelaus. Those who had sworn knew the consequences of oath-breaking all too well.
Undermining the idea that this is all just a pretense to invade a foreign country is the tone of The Illiad, which describes the Trojan side with deep respect, gives them full character, celebrates their heroism and even their victories and asks the listener or reader to sympathize with their struggles. This is the opposite of Old Testament xenophobia where the warriors of god slaughter outsiders like they’re Hollywood extras.
Alongside these honor bound promises, the nation-states also adhered to strict hospitality and etiquette codes. Visitors, even from “enemy” tribes were to be treated respectfully, to be fed, to be given gifts and aid on their journeys. I was taught that the code was to treat every traveler as if they might be a god in mortal guise. But it’s not punishment from the heavens that motivated these traditions so much as a desire to keep peace among people. While a host might be expected to treat a traveler as if they were a god, the traveler also had to show appreciation, to accept what was given but to know not to demand and not to overstay.
We see this at play long after the Trojan war, at the end of Odysseus’ ten-year journey home (which means he has been gone from his kingdom for 20 years). With Odysseus presumed long dead, a gaggle of suitors, certainly dozens and maybe more than an hundred, have gathered at his home, demanding to marry Penelope. The suitors are so greedy that they impoverish Ithaca, devouring its cattle, grains, and wine while taking its treasures. Each of the suitors wants to marry Penelope and to become king. While they wait, they drain the country.
The Odyssey ends with one slaughter and then a slaughter averted. Homer describes violence that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. Odysseus, his son Telemachus and Laertes, his most faithful subject lock the unarmed suitors into the great hall of the palace and then execute them, mostly using a bow and arrow of unbelievable power. The suitors have numbers on their side but they die like animals in an abattoir. Then the trio hang all of the maidens of Ithaca who helped the suitors. They only let one bard escape, to make sure the tale is told throughout the islands.
The theme here isn’t revenge, though. The suitors aren’t being killed because they tried to marry Penelope. They aren’t dying for the mistake of thinking Odysseus was dead. If anybody had gone to Ithaca to ask for Penelope’s hand and taken no for an answer, they would have stayed a few days, had a few meals and left with gifts. Odysseus would not have later hunted them down. Odysseus killed the suitors for being bad guests. Because if travelers acted like that, nobody would ever take them in and back then, anybody who traveled beyond their city walls had to rely on the kindness of strangers to survive. Remember that in the Greek myths, the open road was full of horrors including monsters who attacked from the night and hotel owners who would lop your limbs off to make you fit the bed. There could be no exploration, trade or diplomacy without hospitality and bad guests make hospitality scarce.
Odysseus’ actions almost spark a new war when the father of a slain suitor raises an army for revenge, but Athena intervenes to prevent it. The gods see the enforcement of hospitality as just and necessary.
Myths are always simpler than reality and sometimes tell us more about the way things ought to be than how they are. I have no doubt that the complexities of ancient societies would rival those of today. Nuance has been and is a driving force in world and personal affairs. We have broadened the voices of stakeholders, though and the promises of one leader to another have less relevance for the rest of us than perhaps they once did. In a world with no global honor code and no real international law that can claim to derive from the consent of the people it says it governs, force and whim dominate world affairs.
That’s why we’re coming up on such an interesting 2025.