Homer (ca. 8th century BCE)
Homer has long been considered a fountainhead of “western” civilization, though it is only more recently that the epic poems attributed to him, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have been evaluated as important works of political theory. These epics depict the events surrounding the Trojan War between the Greeks and Trojans, a war caused by the abduction of Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus. Homer's importance for political thought can be seen in three primary fields. (1) As the pedagogical source for classical (fifth-century bce) Greece, Homeric texts are considered exemplary of the warrior ethos and as educators of Pericles’ democratic, imperial Athens. (2) Homeric texts are also, and as such, treated as the key antagonists against whom Plato's political philosophy pivots, leading, indeed, to the “quarrel between poetry and philosophy.” (3) Finally, Homer is seen as one of the founding figures in “agonistic” and “tragic” democratic political theory, particularly as this has been articulated by Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Simone Weil. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
Athens; 
civic virtue; 
democratic theory; 
Greece; 
tragedy