The last decade of the sixth century was a momentous one in Athenian history. In 510 two generations of Peisistratid rule came to an end, hastened by the intervention of the Spartans (74). In its place, interfactional politics returned, of a type familiar enough in the first half of the century (68–69) but almost forgotten, inevitably, during the period of the tyranny. One of the protagonists, Isagoras, secured a temporary advantage over his rival, the Alkmaionid Kleisthenes, by invoking once again Spartan force majeure (75). But Kleisthenes' riposte – to widen, unprecedentedly, the entire basis of the political argument – was on a different level altogether; and whether or not he himself realised in full the implications and potential of what he then went on to do (76–80), its effect was to mark out these years, for Athens and Attika, as the real pivot between the archaic and the classical periods. The reforms of Kleisthenes, like those of Solon, had their application on several levels, of which the narrowly political, the preoccupation of the ancients themselves (80), is perhaps not the most important. True, the partnership in government between his new boulē (77) and the ekklēsia was to be at the very centre of the evolution of radical Athenian democracy in the fifth and fourth centuries, but it is that extraordinary process itself (charted in Chs.11, 21 and 31) which calls for a more fundamental explanation than the development of constitutional machinery – which is not so much cause as effect.

Thucydides has left us a long account of the immediate antecedents of the Peloponnesian War from 435 onwards, which presumably represents material collected soon after the events; in its finished form, however, his text presents a further complex of factors for consideration, and distinguishes between ‘each side's openly expressed complaints’ and the ‘truest cause, albeit the one least publicised’ (see 165). A further problem is posed by the fact that the speeches which Thucydides attributes to the various actors in the drama are redolent of this allegedly least publicised truest cause (see, e.g., 176); these speeches raise, in fact, in its acutest form the problem of the speeches in Thucydides (see p. 11). It is also necessary to observe that the jokes made about the outbreak of war by Aristophanes and others have hopelessly contaminated the later historical tradition (see, for instance, 180).

In looking at the contrast between the ‘truest cause, albeit the one least publicised’ and ‘each side's openly expressed complaints’, there are likely to be as many different views as there are scholars; one may remark, however, that it is not possible to fuse the two Thucydidean accounts by arguing that the Spartans and their allies were always disposed to go to war with the Athenians and saw an occasion in the complaints made at the meeting of 432. For in 440, the Corinthians had blocked a Spartan proposal to help Samos (see 176) and (apparently subsequently) the Spartans had refused to help Lesbos when it wished to revolt (Thuc. III.2.1); they had also attempted to prevent the split between Corinth and Kerkyra.

This commentary has two main purposes. First, to give some at least of the help which unpractised readers might want in tackling Iliad 24. Second, to show in detail, over a continuous stretch of his poem, something of Homer's skill and greatness. I have not ignored ‘analytic’ and ‘formulaic’ criticism; and I believe I have learned something from them. But I do not share their assumption that the Iliad is not a designed and significant whole, or not the work of a deeply thoughtful poet who repays close study as much as Sophocles or Dante or Shakespeare. Ruth Finnegan's Oral poetry (Cambridge 1977), and her Penguin Anthology, have made it clear both how diverse and how subtle or reflective oral poetry can be. I have attempted a commentary because that seemed the best way to bring out how variously Homer's art is manifested and how firmly it is sustained; questions of style and expression, as well as of overall structure, have therefore claimed a good deal of attention. I have also introduced more parallels than might be expected from later authors, in order to show how Homer's language, artistry and thought are comparable to theirs. The greatest poet of ancient Greece is too often treated as if he were not a part of Greek civilization.

A word on (1) the arrangement and (2) the limits of this book.

Historicism

In this chapter, I will discuss a number of twentieth-century movements in linguistics which have shaped current attitudes and assumptions. The first of these, to which I will give the label historicism, is usually thought of as being characteristic of an earlier period of linguistic thought. It is of importance in the present connection in that it prepared the way for structuralism.

Writing in 1922, the great Danish linguist, Otto Jespersen, began one of the most interesting and controversial of his general books on language with the following sentence: “The distinctive feature of the science of language as conceived nowadays is its historical character.” Jespersen was here expressing the same point of view as Hermann Paul had done in his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Principles of Language History), first published in 1880 and commonly described as the bible of Neogrammarian orthodoxy: the view that (to quote from the fifth edition of Paul's book, which appeared in 1920) “as soon as one goes beyond the mere statement of individual facts, as soon as one tried to grasp their interconnection [den Zusammenhang], to understand the phenomena [die Erscheinungen], one enters upon the domain of history, albeit perhaps unconsciously”. Both Jespersen's book and the fifth edition of Paul's Prinzipien, it will be noted, were published several years after Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique générale, which inaugurated the movement now known as structuralism, and only a few years before the foundation of the Prague Linguistic Circle, in which structuralism was combined with functionalism and some of the ideas of present-day generativism had their origin.

What is language?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. At first sight this definition – which is one that will be found in most textbooks and general treatments of the subject – is straightforward enough. But what exactly is meant by ‘language’ and ‘scientific’? And can linguistics, as it is currently practised, be rightly described as a science?

The question “What is language?” is comparable with – and, some would say, hardly less profound than – “What is life?”, the presuppositions of which circumscribe and unify the biological sciences. Of course, “What is life?” is not the kind of question that the biologist has constantly before his mind in his everyday work. It has more of a philosophical ring to it. And the biologist, like other scientists, is usually too deeply immersed in the details of some specific problem to be pondering the implications of such general questions. Nevertheless, the presumed meaningfulness of the question “What is life?” – the presupposition that all living things share some property or set of properties which distinguishes them from non-living things – establishes the limits of the biologist's concerns and justifies the autonomy, or partial autonomy, of his discipline. Although the question “What is life?” can be said, in this sense, to provide biology with its very reason for existence, it is not so much the question itself as the particular interpretation that the biologist puts upon it and the unravelling of its more detailed implications within some currently accepted theoretical framework that nourish the biologist's day-to-day speculations and research.

Universal grammar and its relevance

From the earliest times there has been a close connection between the philosophy of language and such traditionally recognized branches of philosophy as logic (the study of reasoning) and epistemology (the theory of knowledge). As far as logic is concerned, the very name of what has now become a highly technical and more or less independent discipline proclaims the connection: the Greek word ‘logos’ is related to the verb meaning “to speak” or “to say” and can be translated, according to context, as either “reasoning” or “discourse”. That there should be this kind of historical connection is hardly surprising. Common sense and introspection support the view that thought is a kind of inner speech; and various more sophisticated versions of this view have been put forward, over the centuries, by philosophers. In fact, throughout most of the 2000 years or so during which Western traditional grammar held sway in the various centres of scholarship, no clear distinction was drawn, at the theoretical level, between grammar and logic. In particular periods – most notably in the thirteenth century and again in the eighteenth – systems of what came to be called universal grammar were developed, in which the connection between logic and grammar was made explicit and given some kind of philosophical justification. In all such cases it was grammar that was subordinated to logic, since the principles of logic were held to be of universal validity.