The kingdom of Makedonia lay on the northern fringe of the Aegean, set against a hinterland of non-Greek peoples – Illyrians, Paionians and Thrakians. Were the Makedonians themselves Greeks? By the yardsticks which the Greeks themselves recognised (encapsulated in Hdt. VIII. 144.2) the answer is, and was, ambiguous; and so was the role of Makedonia in the Greek world before the second quarter of the fourth century, with kings such as Alexandros I (c.498–c.454) playing a part in the Persian War (114) and Perdikkas II (c.454–c.413) in the Peloponnesian (177, 192) but with no consistent impact upon Greek affairs. A sketchy picture of developments can be pieced together (321), but they were slow. In 359, however, came the accession to the throne of king Philippos II, father of Alexander (III) the Great, and his reign (359–336) marks a watershed, not simply in Makedonian history but in Greek history as a whole. (For the spectacular archaeological finds at Vergina in 1977, including a royal tomb which may well be that of Philippos II, see N. G. L. Hammond, ‘“Philip's tomb” in historical context’, GRBS 19 (1978), 331–50.) His dealings with the Greeks, whom by 338 he had conquered, form the subject of Ch.34; here, first, the texts and documents have been chosen to illustrate the Makedonian domestic background and the influence of Philippos upon it.

Perikles held that all Athens had to do was to retain the empire and to avoid any defeat. (Note the remarks of the Mytilenians on the dependence of the Athenians on their empire, Thuc. III. 13.5–7.) It was not as easy as he supposed, however, to retain control of the empire and simultaneously to fight even a limited war against Sparta, and it is reasonable to surmise that among the Athenians there were those who held that as long as Sparta remained potentially hostile Athens and her empire were necessarily insecure. Did the Athenians, if they made peace after achieving stalemate, have to fear another war in the future when their reserves of men and money were still depleted? Did they have to defeat Sparta before making peace? Certainly attempts were made to tip the balance decisively against Sparta; the recovery of Megara would have achieved this, as well as rendering Attika immune to invasion; and as early as 426, a raid on Tanagra in Boiotia was mounted (Thuc. III. 91.3–6). This was the prelude to a full-scale attempt in 424 to recover Boiotia, which ended in defeat at Delion (Thuc. IV. 76–101.2).

With none of these moves is Kleon associated; his strategy is that of Perikles; his interest in the occupation of Pylos and the capture of Sphakteria (190) and in the recovery of the poleis in Thrake detached by Brasidas (193) is wholly Periklean.

Perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly – because of the different sorts of evidence available – the best-documented, aspect of the archaic period is the process whereby Greeks settled throughout the length and breadth of the Mediterranean Sea, from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to North Africa. The very earliest settlements were unlike the vast majority of later ones and were trading-posts, emporia, at Al Mina in Syria, at Pithekoussai (on Ischia in the Bay of Naples), perhaps at Sinope and Trapezous on the Black Sea, at Naukratis in Egypt. Al Mina was settled by Greeks before 800, Pithekoussai about 775, some Black Sea sites (and some in the Troad and on the Sea of Marmara) perhaps soon afterwards, Naukratis in the late seventh century. This last emporion was itself unlike the other emporia, as far as we know, since it was a venture in which a number of Greek poleis shared and was established under the control of the kingdom of Egypt. (It is also worth noting in passing that large numbers of Greeks settled in Egypt as soldiers of Pharaoh (see 94).)

Greek apoikiai proper, on the other hand, were self-supporting, self-governing agricultural communities. The literary sources always assume that they were organised ventures of established communities (see 16), but it is an open (and important) question how far the need to send out an apoikia was not itself sometimes a factor in the process of self-definition of a polis.

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.