Crime & Punishment in Homer

                                              Crime & Punishment in Homer

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, crime and punishment are not administered through a modern legal system of police forces and courts, but rather they are expressions and manifestations of a very strict honour-based social code and the will of the gods. The actions that are expected of a hero in battle and the demands of xenia are good examples of such honour-based social systems. Crime is seen as a disruption to the natural order of things and punishment is viewed as a method of re-establishing the balance that has been lost, either to the character of the hero or the divine order.

In my opinion, Crime and Punishment, published by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1866, is the second greatest novel of all time. Similar to what we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Dostoevsky’s novel focuses on the mental anguish and the moral dilemmas facing his main character Raskolnikov. We see this same theme playing out in Homer’s epic works, and it comes as no surprise to find out that Homer greatly influenced the Russian novelist. Homer was one of the classic authors that Dostoevsky read from a young age and he held him in high regard. Homer’s elements provided a significant foundation to his writings and they influenced his style and his themes. As an aside, and again in my humble opinion, the greatest novel of all time was Lost Horizon, written in 1933 by James Hilton and telling the story of Shangri-La. I imagine that a lost horizon was a condition often experienced by Odysseus on his 10 year journey home. As I think about it, we should probably stop referring to Odysseus’s 10 year trip. In fact he spent only 2 years at sea and the other 8 years he spent canoodling around in the beds of the two floozies, Calypso and Circe. But I digress…

The Trojan War itself was rooted in crime, long before it ever began. The Judgement of Paris was an incident of blatant bribery, and the abduction of Helen was either kidnapping and robbery at its finest, or else adultery and theft committed by an unfaithful wife. Then we have the sacrificial killing of Iphigenia at Aulis, when Agamemnon committed paternal filicide. The Iliad depicts numerous actions committed within the context of war, including indiscriminate killings, the targeting of civilians, torture, mutilation, brutality, sexual assault, desecration of the dead and enslavement, all of which would be considered war crimes or crimes against humanity by today’s standards, but were just an acceptable part of warfare and commonplace in ancient Greek conflicts.

At the very start of the Iliad, Homer presents to us King Agamemnon of Mycenae, the leader of the Achaeans and a criminal by every stretch of the imagination. Ten years after the killing of his daughter, he was still doing evil things. In the first place, he kidnapped Chryseis, the daughter of the priest of Apollo and he had her installed in his tent as his personal sex-toy. He then contravened the honor-based social code by refusing the ransom offered to the girl, and then heaped abuse on her father and threatened him. This in turn angered the god Apollo, and he consented to the priest’s request to lower his wrath on the Achaeans. The god responded by inflicting the scourge of a terrible plague on the Greeks and the stench of death rose from their encampment. It is interesting to note that while Agamemnon’s personal crimes were many, the punishment for them was not directed at the king himself, but rather at his troops. He did get his comeuppance when he got home however.

Most of what we would deem as misdeeds or possible crimes in the Iliad all take place within the context of war and are therefore seen as admissible by ancient standards. One exception could include the stripping of the armour from the body of Patroclus by Hector, a clear violation of the heroic code and a terrible disrespect shown to the corpse of a fallen warrior. The wrath that Achilles showed at the death of his comrade and his subsequent violation of Hector’s corpse, as an outlet for his rage and a punishment for the Trojan’s crime, are clearly linked to Hector’s own actions. An unspeakable crime in the mind of Achilles can only be followed by a likewise unspeakable punishment. There are those who hold that the death of Patroclus himself can be seen as a punishment inflicted by Zeus on Achilles for his refusal of the embassy that was sent to him to reconsider fighting and for his pride or hubris.

The warrior Diomedes attacked and wounded the immortals Aphrodite and Ares, a violation of the natural order of things and an action that incurred the wrath of the other gods, but there was no punishment levied on the hero that we are aware of in the Iliad. Diomedes was struck on the foot and pinned to the ground by an arrow shot by Paris and he had to withdraw early from the battle. His death is not recorded in the Iliad and in fact, tradition holds that he survived the war and returned to his kingdom. One tradition holds that as a punishment and in revenge for wounding her, Aphrodite caused the wife of Diomedes to be unfaithful to him, and he discovered this when he returned to Argos. But unlike Agamemnon, his wife didn’t kill him in his bathtub on his first day back home.

In the Odyssey, the entire story of the Cyclops Polyphemus is a continuous loop or cycle of crime leading to punishment, leading to further crime, leading to additional punishment. The monster started it off by refusing to offer xenia or guest-friend hospitality to the visiting Odysseus and his crew and going even further in this violation by killing and eating a number of those present. Odysseus and his men inflicted punishment on the Cyclops by blinding him. That action was seen as a crime by the god Poseidon, and he in turn sent his wrath in the form of violent punishing storms against the wanderer and his crew. In the end, Odysseus arrived back in Ithaca totally alone, having lost all his men along the way through divine retribution.

Polyphemus was punished by mortals because he inflicted harm on humans and Odysseus and his men were punished because they offended a god. The message was clear that all hell would be paid if mortals offended the immortals. In fact, Poseidon was not the only god who sought to punish Odysseus and his men for their crimes. For eating his sacred cattle, the sun god Helios punished the crew by destroying their ship with a thunderbolt, killing everyone on board except Odysseus who had ordered his men not to eat the cattle. Once more we see divine retribution in action.

The actions of the suitors and their ultimate demise are another example of crime and punishment in action. The suitors had violated the honour code of xenia by dishonouring the home of Odysseus by consuming his wealth and by pressing his wife Penelope to marry one of them. In addition, they committed the ultimate outrage against xenia by plotting to kill Telemachus, a severe violation of the sacred laws of hospitality. Odysseus and his son dispatched the suitors without mercy, an act seen as justified payback for their violation of the social order. One questions however, the actions taken against the 12 disloyal handmaidens. Their only crime appears to have been that they allowed themselves to be seduced by the arrogant suitors, and yet they were hung for their misdeeds. It’s like the son of Lord Ponsonby seduced the milkmaid and the downstairs char girl, and had his actions dismissed as just sowing his wild oats or ‘boys will be boys’, and in the meantime, the unfortunate girls were severely dismissed without a reference and forced to wear Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. Their punishment did not seem fair for the supposed crime that they had committed.

The two epics show us a world where justice is a personalized and emotional act of revenge, with not much distinction shown between mortal and divine motivations. Crime and injustice are seen as violations or transgressions of the social order or the divine cosmos and for which balance must be restored. The severity of the crime determines the severity of the response and in every case both the crime and the punishment serve the bard’s purpose of exploring the themes of pride, vengeance, justice and the consequences of human actions, whether they have been leveled at other humans or against the gods themselves. Justice and retribution are administered through heroic revenge, divine intervention or social sanctions, and in each instance the message is clear – if you do the crime, you do the time.