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The Homeric world is an unstable and disorderly system, and Homeric society is also unstable and disorderly. A society is fairly stable in so far as it maintains some agreed rules and practices, and the members of that society observe them. But in Homer the prevailing moral outlook provokes competition, conflict, and aggression.

Homer is not indifferent to law and justice. Odysseus contrasts justice with savagery; and the Cyclopes who lack justice lack the basic institutions of social and political life. For Hesiod justice and law are the distinctively human institutions that prevent us from preying on each other like beasts; they give human beings their best hope of preservation. In Homer and Hesiod, however, the prospects for justice are insecure and precarious. The naturalists agree in looking for order in the world as a whole; and some of them probably also share a distinctive ethical outlook that especially values law and justice.

The direction of naturalist criticism is easiest to see in a particular example. Xenophanes attacks the general admiration for strength and athletic prowess, because it expresses the Homeric outlook; athletics, war, and political activity are different ways of displaying and advancing power, honour, and status. Pindar wrote poems in honour of the winners in athletic contests, and his extravagant praise of the winner in a chariot race, for not disgracing the hereditary virtue of his ancestors, illustrates the widespread esteem of the athletic virtues. Solon saw their danger and tried to limit the scale of prizes and honours for athletes. Xenophanes sees that respect for law and justice will always be weak where admiration for the Homeric virtues is strong.

Xenophanes' attacks on Homeric competitions are one aspect of a wider struggle against the Homeric outlook at the social and political level; and at this level the influence of naturalism is important. In sixth-century Athens, as in Victorian Britain, social and political reform would have been inconceivable without some belief in social laws and regularities. Conscious institutional reform requires the belief that certain changes can be relied on to produce regular effects. We can see from Homer that such a belief does not seem self-evidently true to everyone. The political reformers who hold it show that they stand with the naturalists and with Herodotus against Homer and Hesiod.

Athenian political institutions were largely the work of two innovative legislators, Solon and Cleisthenes, who reformed the constitution with the clear aim of changing the nature of the governing class and of political life. Solon was a poet and politician, later remembered as the founder of the Athenian democracy, and the first 'champion of the common people'. He believed that the cause of civil conflict was unrestricted and unchecked power in the hands of a hereditary upper class. He formed a new deliberative Council to assume some of the traditional powers of the hereditary Council of the Areopagus. He formed jury courts with jurors probably chosen by lot, and so allowed the common people a crucial role in the supervision of the government. Solon's reforms were intended to prevent the Homeric virtues from destroying the community.

Solon's convictions about the effectiveness of deliberate action rest on his views about the operations of justice and injustice on a social level. In explaining why justice should be pursued and injustice avoided Solon does not appeal to divine rewards or punishments, but strictly to the effects--injustice is an 'inescapable plague' producing civil conflict and civil war. 'My spirit', he says, 'urges me to teach the Athenians these things, how bad laws produce the most evils for a city.' Bad laws produce these results unavoidably, according to general principles with uniform and predictable results.

A Homeric outlook encourages me to advance my interests, or those of my family or my supporters, at the expense of the rest of the community. Solon's successor Cleisthenes saw that these narrow loyalties threatened the Solonian constitution. Herodotus suggests that Cleisthenes won the struggle for power against other aristocratic factions by 'co-opting the people into his faction'; and his complicated institutional reforms were designed to make it harder to exploit the traditional loyalties supporting the aristocratic factions. To undermine them he introduced democratic local government in Attica (the whole area, urban and rural, governed from the city of Athens), with newly created district assemblies controlling admission to citizenship--an important function previously confined to aristocratic bodies.

But institutional reforms alone may still fail in their aim if they conflict with unchallenged Homeric assumptions and aspirations; as long as some people try to excel in Homeric virtues, the demands of justice and of the community will threaten to conflict with the overriding aims and values of individuals. Moreover, naturalist ethical assumptions are themselves not always clear or beyond criticism; views about law and justice will indicate some of the difficulties.

Heracleitus agrees with Solon that the people should defend and maintain law, and he urges the repression of the wanton aggression that Solon held responsible for lawlessness and disorder. The city's law is the rational order in the city, just as natural law is the rational order in the universe. Indeed, for Heracleitus, the relation is closer than mere analogy, since all human laws are nourished by the single divine law of the universe. In some way that he does not explain, the city conforms best to natural law when it observes its own laws.

In this very general defence of law, Heracleitus seems not to distinguish law from justice; and sometimes, admittedly, the distinction may not be clear. If powerful people can violate law and custom when it suits them, stricter observance of law may secure more justice; people will not be cheated of the benefits due to them by law. Initially it is important to urge the acceptance of some system of law--universally accepted and impartially interpreted rules. But it soon becomes clear that not every law is equally just, and that some are capable of improvement in the interest of the people affected by them.

Once we see a difference between positive law (the law currently in force in a particular state) and the principles that might require changes in positive law, Heracleitus' position seems unhelpfully simple. Solon's defence of law is a defence of the common interest against the greed of the few. But a defence of law might also defend the status quo against questions and reforms. When Heracleitus claims that all human laws are nourished by the one divine law, he assumes that the divine law is just. But it is hard to agree that all positive law is just, and so hard to agree with Heracleitus' uncritical support of law. He might distinguish (as others have) positive from natural law, identifying natural law with divine justice; but then it becomes harder to claim that every positive law accords with natural law, or that all positive laws should be accepted. . . 

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