Search for a command to run...
Dr Long's interest in my work ( JHS xc [1970] 121–39; hereafter referred to as ‘Long’) is naturally very welcome; but it seems to me to require further comment in its turn. In order to advance the discussion, I shall be compelled to refer on a number of occasions to what I have written elsewhere in articles, and indeed on other pages of Merit and Responsibility . I shall begin with some very general points, some concerned with philosophy, some with interpretation. First, can ‘an historical reference for Homeric society’ be found ‘in the individual oikos , such that Homeric values can be seen to derive consistently from its needs’? The ‘facts of Homeric life’ to which I endeavour to relate my analysis of Homeric values are those contained in Professor M. I. Finley's admirable The World of Odysseus . My very occasional disagreements are concerned with interpretations within an agreed framework: Professor Finley's framework. I shall turn to the historicity of the society in a moment; but there seems in any case to be no prima facie absurdity in employing the tools of the social anthropologist on an overtly fictional society, say More's Utopia , with the intention, perhaps, of displaying incongruities and discrepancies: however fictional it might be, there would still be a society and values to discuss.