Proportion and Apportionment: A Study in Homeric Values

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to elucidate Homeric aesthetical, ethical, and political values; the relation between these values and those of the polis; and what this relation tells us about the place of Homeric society in our account of the development of the polis. I argue that the system of value that we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey is predicated on the ideas of portion, proportion, and proper distribution. These ideas, I contend, animate the Homeric conception of justice and of appropriateness. Further, I argue that this system shares much ground with the middling ideology of the polis, but is different from this ideology in respect of the discourse of sōphrosunē and of being mesos/metrios. From this, I maintain that the Homeric worldview reflects the social and material conditions of a world that shares the basic values of the polis but is not as sociologically complex as the polis.