I wrote this paper several years ago when preparing for my CWT with Emily Wilson. It is now being published by Liberty Fund, in parts. Here is part I. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
In this series, I will use an economic approach to better understand the implicit politics and economics in The Odyssey. As a “naïve” reader with no training in ancient history, I find the comparative treatment of political regimes as one of the most striking features of the narrative, namely that Odysseus visits a considerable number of distinct polities, and experiences each in a different way. How does each regime operate, and how does it differ from the other regimes presented in the book? Economics forces us to boil down those descriptions and comparisons to a relatively small number of variables. Trying to model the polities in Homer’s Odyssey forces us to decide which are their essential, as opposed to accidental features, and what they might have in common, or which are the most important points of contrast.
And this:
In the world(s) of Homer’s Odyssey, in contrast [to standard economics], the assumptions about human behavior are different. In general terms I think of the core assumptions as looking more like the following:
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- 1. Humans pursue quests rather than consumption as traditionally defined.
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- 2. Humans are continually deceiving others and indeed often themselves. Gains from economic trade are scant, but the risk of death or imprisonment is high.
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- 3. Humans seek out states of intoxication.
Under the economic approach I am proposing, you can think of Homer’s Odyssey as what happens when you inject assumptions along the above lines (with some qualifiers) into a variety of settings.
The piece has numerous points of interest, and I will be covering later installments as they appear.
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