Harris 2020 Homeric Economy in Cambridge Guide to Homer

The Classical Bulletin 80.1 (2004): 43-5.

Oral Tradition, 2003

2007

New Directions in Oral Theory (Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005) 43-89

In the very fertile field of Homeric Studies there were published in this, the last year of the 20th century, more than a dozen new dissertations, two dozen new scholarly books and monographs, and over 250 new articles and reviews in scholarly journals-a total of almost 10,000 pages of text (and that does not include reprints, translations, popular literature, conference talks, or the ever-growing corpus of electronic text on the World Wide Web). 1 From the last decade of the 20th century I have personally collected more than 2,200 titles of new books, monographs, and journal articles-a total of over 60,000 pages of text (and I must be missing at least a few!). I estimate that in the last century around a half-million new pages of scholarly text were printed; this adds up to 460 pages of commentary for each page of Homeric text, including the "Homeric" Hymns! And this has gone on year after year for at least the last two centuries, and, though sometimes with somewhat less enthusiasm and prolificacy, for twenty-four centuries before that. There is a very present danger that we as Homeric scholars will fail to keep up with all the new discoveries and insights in our field as a whole. This is inevitable, and we recognize it. We do well if we can manage the bibliographical searching tools for the material published during the 20th century, if we have a grasp of the general flow of scholarship during the 19th, and if we can access and comprehend the commentaries on Homer that have survived from earlier centuries (from the Alexandrian hypomnemata whose vestiges are embedded in the Homeric scholia, to Eustathius' magna opera on both epics, to Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum). Some new and even important discoveries in the field will pass many of us by. But there is another danger, I think, more sinister than this one: that the ever rising inundation of new material will cause us to drift away from those moorings established by the toilsome research of our predecessors. I propose to offer here not something entirely new and imaginative, not something more to add to the mass of material to be mastered, but simply a reminder of some of those moorings from which we seem to have lost our grasp.

2006

This article argues that Akhilleus' reference to the wealth of Orkhomenos and (Egyptian) Thebes (Iliad 9.381–4) reflects the political and social conditions of the Mycenaean period, which thus helps to explain the onomastic equation between Egyptian and Boiotian Thebes.

Colby Quarterly, 2002

2012

Homer clearly expressed the economic problem of choosing the best option among several alternatives given a certain set of restrictions. In the Odyssey he specifically wrote about the minimum cost choice. This kind of problem, as is well known, is at the heart of the neoclassical economics. We can therefore consider Homer a forerunner of this school of thought. This hypothesis contrasts with those of Trever (1916), Schumpeter (1954) and Schefold (1997).

The script has been presented with an expanded or reduced text according to the requirements of the particular setting. The current text was performed on March 14th, 2020 at Melbourne's Lyceum Club. Staging was minimal but projected images provided an atmospheric backdrop to the actors and registered the phases of the story.

The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households and City-States, edited by E.M. Harris, D.M. Lewis & M. Woolmer, CUP, 2015

International Journal of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, 2024

• Purpose of the study: In this study, I explore the Iliad for evidence of early Greek economic behavior and institutions, including markets, overseas trade, money, and exchange of commodities. In so doing, I test the hypothesis that epic poetry is capable of offering insights into the economic activity and strategic thinking of actors across the socio-political spectrum more broadly. • Methodology: This project is informed by the approach of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) emphasizing the role of institutions in stabilizing expectations through the establishment of rules governing transactional behavior. I emphasize the effect of institutions in stabilizing expectations, allowing for culturally fluent actors to develop diverse strategies within the context of the prevailing institutional matrix. • Main Findings: Through a close examination of the text, it is possible to discern evidence for aristocratic economic practices that prioritize and reify elite relationships and status, and nonelite activity in which the relationship between trading partners is secondary to the material conditions of exchange, suggesting a diversity of strategies and the potential for transactions to serve multiple functions simultaneously. • Applications of this study: The focus on economic activity in relation to customs, status, and political power in the early Greek world engages with numerous fields of study. For example, placing transactional behavior in the context of cultural mores involves economic anthropology, the consideration of ancient Greek political economy is significant to ancient history, and the role of institutions directly relates to neo-institutional economics. • Novelty/Originality of this study: This study directly challenges the traditional reductive view that economic behavior during this period was subordinated entirely to cultural and social considerations. Instead, relying (in part) on neo-institutional economic theory, I argue for a much more nuanced view that allows for a fuller consideration of diverse motives and strategies on the part of cultural fluent actors.

Introductory remarks for a course that employs Homer’s Odyssey as the jumping-off point for an examination of a tradition that extends through Euripides’ Hippolytus, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, Vergil’s Aeneid, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesian Tale, and Petronius’ Satyricon, and that leads to the development of the modern picaresque novel.

The Classical Review, 2020