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ECSA ECONOMIC IDEAS

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# OIKOS, POLIS, NOMOS (2006)
## Akseli Virtanen

**Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill**

**[An Excerpt from *Arbitrary Power. Towards a Critique of Biopolitical Economy* (Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2006.]**

What is the relationship between governance and the economy?

What form of government and organizing does *oikonomia* actually mean? The heroes of *The Iliad* and *The Odyssey* did not know of it. Neither do we find the term in Hesiod’s *Works and Days*, despite the fact that it is constructed around the existence of human need and the solution of this problem. (59) Neither Protagoras nor anybody else in 5th century BC Greece seems to be using the term either. Yet it must have been generally known in 399 BC, because this is the year Socrates died, and even though he did not hesitate to challenge his judges, he was all too lucid a Greek to have complicated his position by using new terminology when he addressed the Athenian crowd. (60)

Furthermore, there is no ambiguity whatsoever as to what the term *oikonomia* meant in Greek writings in the 300s BC. Both Plato and Xenofon had inherited Socrates’ passion of pondering the meaning of everyday words, and in this case, their definitions coincide: oikonomia means the management of persons and property belonging to the *oikos*, the house.

The typical case during the classical era seems to have been the rational and systematic management of the economy of the Athenian family under the rule of the master of the house. Perhaps the best example of this was Perikles, who managed his oikos in a way that its wealth never decreased, nor was it wasted due to carelessness. Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle did indeed all attach moral characteristics such as circumspection, planning, caution and thriftiness to oikonomia. The duty of Pericles’ *oikonomos* – his name was Evangelus – was to rule the microcosm of the house and thus free his master to pursue political activities. (61)

Furthermore Plato’s version of Socrates’ second speech includes *oikonomia*, along with *khrematismos* (the art of money-making), but also military activity, public debates, and various public offices, in the matters that most men care about. In Plato’s late dialogue *The Statesman* the guest wonders if *politikos* (statesman), *oikonomos* (manager of the house), and *despotes* (master of the house) are not the same thing. The younger Socrates answers without hesitation: *“they certainly are”*. (62)

# Oikos

Yet *oikos*, the other root of *oikonomia*, and its relation to governing dates much further back. It originates from a time before *oikonomia* and *politics*; or the idea of the city state *(polis)* as a community governed by laws and formed by villages comprising of several households; that is, from a time before the separation of the governing of the community *(politics)* and the governing of the household *(oikonomia)*, from a time before the separation of the law governing the city state and the master *(despotes)* governing the household and its internal relations, from *a time before the separation of the political bond and the blood bond*. To understand this universe of the master of *oikos* and its difference from the politicized community, we must momentarily return to the walls of Troy.

Firstly, the master of the house uses his authority in the *oikos*, which means the house as family, kin and habitation, rather than as building. Therefore, for example Achilles’ “shelter”, situated alongside the walls of Troy is the *oikos* where his tribe dwells. (63) Similarly, the original meaning of *despotes* is not only ‘master of the house’, but ‘master’ in general, to the extent that *The New Testament* considered it necessary to coin a new word, *oikosdespotes*, for “master of the house”. (64) The task of the master of the *oikos* was not so much to give orders on the circumspect organization of the fields and lands, but to possess a power, which grants him the authority over family and kin as a whole with which he identifies. (65) Mastership was a personal identity as the head of a house or an extended family, and as the clan personified in the master.

Jussi Vähämaki has illuminated this dynamics of mastery and its position as the backdrop of the problematic of Greek political thinking in the following way (66): Firstly, mastery was limitless by nature, because no external force or factor could subjugate it. The master was subordinate to no one and nothing; no one or nothing could control him. He was absolutely independent and uncontrollable.

Secondly, the master faced only one limit. This limit he needed, not to understand his limitedness, but only to acknowledge his limitlessness: this limit was another master in whom unlimited power recognized itself and by whom it was acknowledged. Mastership was created in the relations between masters, in the respect *(aidos)* of his kind and of his community which constituted its only foundation. Mastership was thus a relation between powers or simply a “social bond” without any foundation separate from or external to mastery itself. Honor and respect were the only “institutional” forms of the master’s authority.

Thirdly, the position of the Greek hero depended on the respect and esteem he enjoyed from his equals and his subjects. It was due only to his immediate power, to his ability for power, that he was able. The master’s virtue (arête) was to defend his own honor, that is, the honor of the oikos that identified with him. Arete, the virtue and excellence of the master, was not a moral virtue; it referred particularly to a successful warrior, or might, physical strength, endurance or “manpower”. It formed the face of the hero visible to the others; loosing this face would have meant loosing everything.

It was precisely because of this, because of offense and defense of honor, that the Achaean heroes had also surrounded the walls of Troy. Menelaus had won his Helen only after Ulysses had solved the problem posed by Helen’s father, king Tyndareus of Sparta: how to choose Helen’s bridegroom without offending the other hero-suitors who had all arrived bearing fine gifts. As a favor for return for Tyndareus’ support in his pursuit of Penelope Ulysses proposed that before the groom was chosen, all the suitors should swear an oath to defend the honor of the chosen one who won Helen against anyone offending it. After Paris abducts Helen to Troy with the help of Aphrodite, Menelaus, the chosen suitor, demands the fulfillment of these oaths and the Trojan War commences.

During the tenth year of the war, at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, there have been triumphs and losses, yet the situation has not changed much. The Greeks have taken Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo on the Trojan side, as a prisoner. Chryseis’ father has come to Agamemnon to ask for the return of his daughter in exchange for a large ransom, but Agamemnon impudently chases him away. Apollo is angered when the daughter of the priest is not released, and shoots plague-contaminated arrows to the Greek camp. “Corpse-fires burn on, night and day”, when “nine days the arrows of god swept through the army” (1:61). On the tenth day, Achilles calls the people together to find out the origin of the plague and promises to protect the seer Calkhas if he reveals the reason for the plague. Agamemnon takes offense of this challenging of his actions. He promises to return the priest’s daughter, but wants something as excellent in exchange for his lost prize, and threatens to send men to Ulysses’, Ajax’s and Achilles’ camps to claim their plunder for him.

*“Shameless – armored in shamelessness – always shrewd with greed!”* retorts Achilles, *“my arms bear the brunt of the raw, savage fighting, / true, but when it comes to dividing up the plunder / the lion’s share is yours, and I go back to my ships”*, and threatens to sail home rather than to stay, offended, to gather wealth for the shameless Agamemnon. Agamemnon wishes Achilles farewell – *“Desert, by all means – if the spirit drives you home! / I will never beg you to stay, not on my account”* – and sends for the radiant maiden Briseis, a prize that Achilles is very fond of, in order to teach him a lesson. This is too much for Achilles who begins to draw his sword, when Pallas Athena interferes, managing to persuade Achilles to leave the sword in the sheath. Achilles settles for showering Agamemnon with insults, calling him a dog, coward, and unworthy as a ruler: *“Staggering drunk, with your dog’s eyes, your fawn’s heart! [...] King who devours his people”.* Nestor attempts to cool the situation down, but as this is a matter of honor, the insult cannot remain unanswered. Achilles throws his insignia, his scepter *“studded bright with gold nails”*, to the ground and refuses to participate in the war any more. He retreats into his tent and prays to his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, to bring Zeus’ revenge on the Greeks unless they grant Achilles the honor he deserves, and Agamemnon understands not to offend the best of the Achaeans.

Thus, the excellence and the virtue (arete) of the master did not reside in his judgment or in refraining from battle and violence; on the contrary, his position and his honor rather required immediate force, reaction, and “recklessness”. It was this that made the master “good” or mighty, noble, and rich, as Nietzsche emphasizes in the Genealogy of Morals: the goodness of the master was not moral goodness, but an ability to possess reality, to be actual, to be true; to realize one’s selfhood immediately and without thinking, spontaneously and independently. (67) It included no lapse of time (in which thought could linger between intention and action), consideration, hesitation or “cunning”; they would have attested of the inability of the master to defend the honor of the oikos. The goodness and the force of the master were “drive, will, action” and their manifestations as such, as total certainty of unconscious instincts, and even as a certain “lack of cleverness, something like brave recklessness, whether in the face of danger or of an enemy, or wildly enthusiastic, sudden fits of anger, love, reverence, thankfulness, and vengefulness, by which in all ages noble souls have recognized each other”. (68)

The respect (aidos) of the master’s community depended on this ability to defend the honor of the oikos, and there was no “being” for the master beyond the defense of this honor, that is, beyond doing, acting, influencing and creation of a reputation. It was as if the life and deeds of the hero were shattered into a multitude of immediate sensations that were impossible to coordinate into one unitary self (subject) behind the actions. In other words, it was difficult to differentiate in the master the doer from the deed that on its own justified its doing and its doer. The mastership of the master or his “subjectivity” as a master and a hero had shattered into continuous honorable feats or never-ending realization of mastership, and no distinct subject or moral principle standing behind the deeds could be detached from it. (69) The meaning and the goal of the action was in itself, that is, in heroism. Heroes were to live in a constant state of self-realization.

This resulted in a problem: first of all, because no external or institutional reason or foundation guaranteed honor or justified mastership and its continuation or transmission to for example future generations, being a master required the master’s constant and immediate presence in the relationship with his oikos and with other masters. Without this constant presence, the master would soon have become a former master. This is why, for example, soon after Ulysses set out on his wanderings, his economy drifted onto the mercy of Penelope’s suitors, the Ithacans and the noblemen of the neighboring islands. Upon Athena’s advice, Telemachus summons the men of Ithaca and attempts to step into Ulysses’ place by arriving at the meeting carrying a shining spear of his father and accompanied by his two dogs, but the suitors mockingly silence him and continue their celebration. (70)

Similarly, Achilles’ absence threatens to destroy the entire Greek host, because he is unique and irreplaceable, and therefore no one can represent him in his stead. (71) Being a hero cannot be delegated; this is equally proven by the swift death of Patroclus, who lead the tribe of Myrmidons into battle instead of Achilles, who stayed sulking and brooding in his tent. (72)

Respect and esteem were, however, also ways for the master to adapt to community life. Being a hero requires the ability to receive the others’ acknowledgement; it requires public exposure or the constant existence and presence of the others. The entire existence of the hero depended on this acknowledgement by others.

At the same time, the total insubordination of a hero could not recognize or acknowledge any kind of equality or limit. This necessity of the fulfillment of complete and limitless insubordination constituted the virtue of the master. It was not a personal choice but a necessity that was structurally part of mastership. The master’s virtue to be a master, to see to the honor of his oikos and to avoid shame was the condition for maintaining his mastership and position.

This was the condition for survival and survival meant simply preservation of honor. This virtue of the hero and his necessity to resort to this virtue meant that the hero was always in the end forced to clash with another hero, to offend him, to dispossess him of his honor and thus destroy the principle of his existence. (73)

Although the respect of equals was a necessary condition for the master’s existence, his virtue required breaking this mutual respect; in one word, it required hubris. Without hubris or excess of being able and of the personal, which was a proof of the ability of a master, the master was not able to acquire his honor. Without hubris, a master could not be a master. This is why, as Vähämäki also notes, in the world of the heroes hubris is not yet the condemnable evil which it must become in the political community. The dynamic contradiction between respect (aidos, the human and collective side of heroism) and virtue or power (arete, the godlike and self-sufficient side of the hero), the necessity and the unavoidable breech of mutual recognition, the necessity of respect and the inevitability of defamation, the necessity and impossibility of community life made the army of heroes into an “impossible community”. (75)

# Polis

By placing this “impossible community” on stage, The Iliad was already anticipating the end of the world of heroes and the transition into city-state. (76) The “community” of heroes is permanently unstable and under a constant threat of collapsing. The masters of oikos are incapable of collaboration; due to the logic of mastership, they are not capable of uniting their oikoses. They live a perfectly actual and public life, yet they do so without public or common space; they form a community without a common cause. As Vähämäki states, it is like the heroes’ situation is “crying out loud” for politics to solve the problem. (77)

A common cause would, however, require a focal point that would be external to the heroes and their “community”, some principle, common value or truth that would connect and secure the unanimity of the heroes battling against each other. Yet no hero can submit to anything like that, for he is a hero only because he does not submit to anyone or anything. The only common virtue of the heroes lies in this personal and unsubmissible force which characterizes the ruling of oikos. Outside the heroes’ universe, there exists no value or truth separate from them that they could share or that could function as a reference point for their co-operation. Moral good or the law, death or escaping it, community or its falling apart cannot function as such reasons for a hero. He is half god, half lion, and since gods and beasts are self-sufficient, they do not need others. (78) Because of this, there is no place for the hero in Aristotle’s polis, which is defined precisely by the difference between the divine and the bestial: “the one who is outside of the polis because of his nature and not by accident, is either a worthless human or more powerful than a human... the one who is not capable of forming a community (koinoinein), or the one who does not need to do so because of his self-sufficiency, is not part of the city-state (polis), but like a beast or a god”. (79)

Protagoras tells us that when Epimetheus distributed on Zeus’ order the gifts of nature, the human race was left without proper means for survival. (80) It did not receive proper teeth or claws for hunting, thick fur for warmth, a carapace for defense or speed for fleeing. When all other living beings were harmoniously equipped, only man was left naked and barefoot, uncovered and weaponless. Epimetheus had asked Prometheus to inspect the distribution, and Prometheus improved his brother’s work by stealing the *“mechanical arts of Hephaestus and Athena, and fire with them”*, which he then gave to man. Yet, even though the dispersed humans started to manage in their daily life thanks to weapons, dwellings, and various tools, they still did not prevail in the war against the animals. Men were still lacking political wisdom, politike sofia, of which also the art of war was part. Although men gathered together to build cities in order to protect themselves, they only wronged and destroyed each other and were not capable of uniting to form a city-state. They dispersed again instead of uniting. At this point Zeus himself had to get involved. He finally decided to give men a moral foundation that would enable the political bond: he gave men respect (aidos) and sense of justice (dike). Hermes, acting as Zeus’ messenger, asked Zeus if political virtue should be distributed to everybody or in the way of the arts which were distributed, so that “one skilled individual having enough medicine or of any other art for many unskilled ones?”. Zeus answers this with emphasis: political virtue should be given to everybody or else the city-states (poleis) cannot be created.

Political virtue (politike areis), which includes justice (dikaisyne), is now distributed to all humans; it makes permanent human community possible in the form of the city-state. Zeus’ gift attempts to solve the problem posed by the Iliad by bringing in something that is shared by every one, the moral ground that does not depend on “individuals”, their personas or presence as the principle of the organization of the human community: political virtue is independent from “individuals” and their personas; it is shared by every one but does not belong to any one. It is common for everyone and consequently does not belong to some individual oikos and its master.

Replacing the autocratic bond by a political bond, that is, the politization of the problem of morals – making it collective and public – was an attempt to govern the impossibility of the community of heroes: actions were now brought into the common, public space and they, along with their consequences, were subjected to collective evaluation, to “us”. It was an attempt to separate the governing of oikos and the governing of polis, the personal governing of the house and the political governing of the community.

The difference between the internal use of power of the oikos and the law governing the polis, or the difference between private and public, starts to come into view. The transition into the city-state is a transition from independent rule – covering both territory and kin – to collective rule, or from the power of the person to the community organized through public laws. This community or “we” replaces, restrains, and organizes the affective and hubris-filled “selves” warring at the walls of Troy. (81) What is essential to the community or “we” are above all the public laws and rules which directed the life of the community and which were separate from the presence, persona and ceaseless self-realization of the master: “In the polis, the highest master (kyrios holos) is the law and not man, because the law (nomos) is without passion whereas the human soul is always subject of passions”. (82) Respect of the law becomes a precondition for justice, virtue becomes submission to law, and hubris and koros, megalomania and excess, human passions and ardent aspirations, any personal immoderation, extreme pursuit of wealth or power, excessive detachment from the community, its opinions, and shared values transformed into a threat to collective justice.

Hesiode, too, considered the collective justice (dike) received from Zeus as that which separates men from animals: fish, beasts and birds devour each other because they do not know justice, whereas Chronos prescribed this law (nomos) for men so that they would relent from thinking of violence – man’s nomos is to follow dike (man’s law is to follow justice). He who offends this is guilty of hubris, exceeding the part due to one according to justice. Therefore Hesiode advises his brother: “You, Perses, must listen to justice (dike), not arrogance (hubris). (83) Perses, who prefers following debates and frivolous court cases to work, is planning to take Hesiode to court in order to win a larger portion of the family estate. In spite of his view that acting according to justice is good (because the gods reward it) and that acting out of hubris is bad (because it offends the gods and results in their revenge) Hesiode fears nonetheless that, due to the bribes his brother has been paying, the local nobility is going to rule on the case wrongly in the brother’s favor. Polis is already becoming dikaipolis, a “city of law suits”. (84)

By the beginning of 6th century BC the city-state had hijacked the law from the gods. Justice was now determined by the city-state, by the human community itself. Law had become secular; it operated entirely in the polis, without any connection with the worlds of the gods. The law was no longer issued by the gods; what mattered was no longer divine justice, but the law of the alike, the law of the polis.

The statesman-poet Solon (circa 630-560), who acted as the Archon eponymous of Athens from 594 to 593, can be considered the first actual lawmaker of the polis, the one who laid its foundation and set it in stone. He created a polity (politeia) for Athens and brought its law into a written and public form. (85) Solon still considered justifying the divine justice his responsibility; he compared Zeus’ justice to spring breeze that chases the clouds and reveals the blue sky. Yet Solon also undertook immediate action in order to create a just society, for Athens was in crisis, according to Aristotle no less than on the brink of a violent civil war as the people revolted against the few men of power. The latter possessed all the land; the landless poor lived at the mercy of the wealthy. If the poor did not pay their dues for the plot of land they farmed, they, their spouses and their children could end up as slaves. “And there was no lack of other reasons for discontentment, as they were shut out of practically everything”. (86)

Solon’s solution was to attempt to break the bond to blood vengeance, mythical and mimetic violence and its divine justification (the nobility descended from gods or heroes), and start to treat all citizens justly, regardless of their origin and wealth. Solon freed the poor from serfdom by nullifying their debts (in which the guarantee was either the person’s freedom or his land), but land was not redistributed to the poor, which resulted in a new, large group of landless, poor citizens. Isonomy, the equality of law, means equality before the law regardless of one’s origin and wealth. The opposing parties, both the “good” and the “evil” would now be equal before a shared and public law: “The laws – for the good as well as the evil – and direct was the justice I applied to both – it was I who wrote them”.

It did, however, soon turn out that the solution was far from non-problematic. On the one hand, the law was not sufficient: people only pretended to obey it (the idea of educating people to want their share by upbringing and theater was born); on the other, it was impossible to prevent the law from repeatedly becoming a tool for a some interest group for achieving their goals. Or, as Solon writes: “My legislation was not of much use for the Athenians... serving the gods and legislating themselves cannot help cities; only the ones who win the masses on their side, are able to do that, whatever they might be planning... Peisistratos [Solon’s friend who seized power circa 560 and became a tyrant] convinced the Athenians by flattery, whereas I simply told the truth”. (87)

And how could have superficial law been enough, when “they meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in a court of law, or a theatre, or a camp, or in any other popular resort, and there is a great uproar, and they praise some things which are being said or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating both, shouting and clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and the place in which they are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise or blame – at such a time will not a young man's heart, as they say, leap within him? Will any training enable him to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? Or will he be carried away by the stream? Will he not have the notions of good and evil which the public in general have – he will do as they do, and as they are, such will he be?” (88).

Primitive politics has come to the end of its path at the latest in 399 BC when Socrates is sentenced to death by a majority vote as a person unfit to inhabit the polis. Politics has revealed itself as bare violence. The space of politics as plain space of action has revealed itself as nothing but a violent illusion. (89) Laws have become written by the strong to protect their interests, and justice has transformed into the opinion and the interest of the majority, or an imitation of and submission to the opinion of the majority and of the strongest. Polis was an illusion, justice nothing but a charade. The letter of the law proved to be empty and the law mere control and convention that man, in the eyes of the others, pretends to obey. It provided no protection from arbitrary power. The fact that the law was public meant on the contrary that it had transformed into a power maintaining the normal order, into the public opinion, which “echoes from the stone walls of the place with a twofold strength”. (90)

The exercise of the law according to public opinion and majority decision was like the behavior of “a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him – he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at what times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, he is soothed or infuriated [...] and although he has no real notion of what he means by the principles or passions of which he is speaking, but calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute”. (91)

# Nomos

It is here in the nihilism of the polis and the crisis of its law, that forms the context of Plato’s philosophy, where also another kind of solution for the problem of the impossible community of heroes arises. It receives its expression in the critique of the polis and the demonstration of its limits, for example in sophism and Plato. It has more of a religious foundation and it emphasizes the private rather than the public. What is at stake here is not so much how to transform a war host into a city-state, but rather how to transform man into “I” – how to interiorize morals instead of making them public. (92)

The sophists attempted to resolve the crisis of the polis by challenging the power of the polis with a critique of “common sense”. They exposed the problem of meaningful language at the center of politics and the word as something that can be used for lying. The relationship between the sign and the truth is paradoxical, because a sign is not a sign if it cannot be used for lying. The function of language is not transmission of meaning, for as such it could never be free, but to be an instrument for touching that can open the way beyond the difference between private and public, to what is beyond “common sense”. In the same way, Plato thinks that justice should be founded on a stronger foundation than the opinion of the majority or majority decision; it should be possible to separate it from land titles and other divisions of the visible. Instead of concentrating only on the polis – on dividing the visible – it is necessary to build a path back to what is outside of the visible, to the invisible, to the soul. It is a place that cannot be reduced to the visible – which thus proves the limitedness of the polis, i.e. of human deeds and community life – and always conveys the possibility of doing otherwise. It is a place that cannot be reached on the level of meaningful speech and the visible, but only through “inner vision”.

In tracing the origin of biopower and its human technologies, Michel Foucault ties it to this attachment on to the inner being of man and the evolution of this attachment through Christianity. Foucault calls this “government of souls” (gouvernement des ames) permanently attached to man’s inner being “pastoral power” (pouvoir pastoral; from Latin pastor, shepherd).

Reconstructing the decisive transitions of the problematic of government, Foucault draws attention to the fact that Greek political thinking did not in fact contain an idea of a god or a ruler as a shepherd tending to his flock. (93) The polis had place neither for the hero, nor for the shepherd, nomeus, whose place was outside the city. Power outside the law was herdsman’s power, pastoral power. (94) Despite the fact that pastoral power was originally external to Greek politics, the city-state and its law, Foucault attempts to establish how political power in the modern world ultimately absorbs it, and “tending souls” turns into “government of man”.

## A. Pastoral Power
In Plato’s dialogue The Statesman the younger Socrates and the stranger are reflecting on whether a statesman could be defined as a kind of herdsman. The dialogue begins by distinguishing the government of living beings from that of the lifeless, then the ruling of individual animals from that of herds, and finally governing a flock of animals from that of a flock of humans. However, distinguishing man from other animals proves to be problematic, and the distinction must start again from the beginning: wild animals must be distinguished from the tame, land animals from the ones that live in water, horned from the hornless, fast from the slow, the quadruped from the biped, the ones that are able to breed with other species from the ones that are not, and so and so forth, ad aeternum. Plato shows that the problem cannot be solved by means of division, by determining which animals live in a herd and which do not, because “this mistake has already brought upon us the misfortune of which the proverb speaks [...] the misfortune of too much haste, which is too little speed” (264b). (95) To clear the matter, we must first determine what a herdsman does.

According to Plato, the herdsman alone rears his herd. Secondly, he provides it with nourishment. Thirdly, he “is allowed on all hands to be the sole and only feeder and physician of his herd; he is also their match-maker and accoucheur; no one else knows that department of science. And he is their merry-maker and musician, as far as their nature is susceptible of such influences, and no one can console and soothe his own herd better than he can” (268a).

What about the statesman-politician, then? Like the shepherd is the ruler of the flock, he is the ruler of the city-state, but does he feed the people? No, that is the business of the farmer and the baker. Does he tend to people when they are sick? No, it is the physician who sees to that. Who directs people with music and song? The gymnastics master does that. Consequently each one of them could claim to be the “shepherd of men” who sees to their rearing. It is because this that we must be able to distinguish the statesman from these “merchants, husbandmen, providers of food, and also training-masters and physicians, will all contend with the herdsmen of humanity, whom we call Statesmen, declaring that they themselves have the care of rearing or managing mankind”. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate in what sense the statesman is not a herdsman, and in what sense governing a city-state differs from shepherding.

The stranger now begins to narrate to Socrates the myth of the reversal of the rotation of the universe, in which “the sun and the stars reversed their motion” (269a-273e). In the first cycle of the world, all animal species were part of the herd tended by a divine shepherd. The divine shepherd fulfilled all the needs of its flock (271d): men needed to do nothing to acquire what they needed; the trees and other plants provided more than enough fruit without the help of agriculture. They did not need clothes or beds, because the climate had been adjusted to be perfect for them. There was no “devouring one another, or war, or quarrel”, and most essentially, there was no need for politics or political constitution (politeia) with the deity acting as the pastor (nemein) (271a).

Then the world turned to the opposite direction. The gods no longer tended to people; men lost the protection and care of the gods. Men were now compelled to start taking care of themselves and to direct their own lives. The animals, beastly by nature, got even wilder and men, deprived of care, help and practical skills were in dire trouble. Would the statesman-politician now turn into their shepherd? No, because politics did not mean feeding, tending and raising offspring, but bonding and uniting, bringing different virtues and mentalities together through shared and public opinions. The one and only goal of the statesman’s weaving skill is to weave, with the help of common ideas and conceptions, the different people and their different natures – the courageous and the gentle – into an even, fine fabric. Government of a state consists of weaving the people together like the warp and the weft, of connecting their lives under the sign of unanimity and friendship. In this way, “the noblest and best of all the webs which political life admits, and enfolding therein all other inhabitants of cities, whether slaves or freemen” (311c) would be woven, the statesman binding the people in one fabric.

The statesman-weaver was then not a shepherd, as Plato notes (295a-e) – how could he have had the time to sit next to everyone, feed everyone, follow everyone’s development and care for them when they were sick. Only the god-shepherd was able to do this in the golden age. Statesmen could not be herdsmen, because their task was not to tend to the flock, but to assure the unity of the city-state: “The political problem concerned the relation of one and many in the city-state – citizen configuration. The pastoral problem concerns the life of individuals.” (96)

If the idea of the ruler as a shepherd did not belong to the Greek polis – already anticipated in the scene where Ulysses, upon his return to Ithaca, disguises himself precisely as a shepherd, so that he would not be recognized as a ruler – it was, according to Foucault, nonetheless a central theme in the East – in Egypt, Assyria and Judea. Foucault brings forth the following aspects of its organization and its idea. (97) Firstly, whereas the Greek gods ruled the earth and the people living on it through it, in the East the shepherd used his power on the flock rather than on the earth. The relationship with the flock was primary; only after that did God promise the land to his flock.

Secondly, similarly to the Greek heroes, only the immediate presence and action of the shepherd constitutes the flock. The shepherd gathers together scattered individuals, who, without their shepherd, would remain scattered. When the statesman-law giver solves a problem, he leaves behind him a strong city that will survive even without him because of his laws. Eunomia, the right order of matters and good government, does not depend on the person. Therefore for example Solon, who attached polis tightly to law (and, doing that, transformed the principle of good order into the principle of good law), leaves for a ten-year voyage after his term of archon so that the Athenians can learn how to live with their laws and according to them. (98) The shepherd, conversely, does not only protect his flock during the night when wolfs and other dangers threaten it, but his care is continuous, individual and endless. The shepherd sees to that every member of the flock is saved, that even the lost individuals are found and fed.

Thirdly, the shepherd strives to “do good” to his flock, and this goodness means dedicating himself to the flock. Everything he does revolves around the wellbeing of his flock. When the members of the flock are sleeping, the shepherd keeps watch over them. The shepherd risks his own self for those he cares for, nurtures and brings up. The shepherd pays attention to each and everyone, because he needs to be familiar with not only the good pastures and the laws of the seasons, but also with each individual member of his flock and its needs. Yahweh chose Moses as the shepherd of his flock, because Moses had gone searching for a lost lamb and sent his lambs to eat one by one: first the youngest so that they could eat the softest grass, and the older ones after that, because they were able to chew on coarser grass.

Early Christianity was the next to develop the pastoral theme. (99) First of all, the connection between responsibility and the moral bond became more complex. The shepherd was no longer only responsible for each and every member of the flock, but also for all their deeds, all the good and bad they were responsible for, and everything that happened to them.

A sin committed by a member of the flock was a sin committed by the shepherd, and he was responsible for it at the last judgment. Conversely, through helping the members of the flock find theirs, the shepherd could find his own salvation. Yet, by saving his lost lamb he risks loosing his own way, like Moses when he went searching for his lost lamb. If the shepherd wants to save himself, he must run the risk of sacrificing himself for his flock; but if he truly looses his way, it is his flock that runs the greatest risk. Yet in any case there is no question of the flock sacrificing itself for the shepherd.

Secondly, obedience changed its nature. According to the Jewish conception, when the flock follows the God-shepherd, it obeys his will, his law. In the Christian conception the relationship between the lamb and the shepherd becomes one of individual and absolute submission, an idea even farther removed from the Greek world. A Greek would obey because it was the law or the will of the city (like for example in Socrates’ case); if he happened to obey the will of an individual, such as a physician, this individual must first rationally convince him to do so. Furthermore, this could happen only in view of certain goal, such as getting well or acquiring a skill. In Christianity the bond with the shepherd becomes one of individual and personal submission. The will of the shepherd is carried out, not because it is the law or because it follows the law, but because it is his will (no matter how absurd). Obedience becomes a virtue. It is an end in itself, not a means to an end as it was for the Greek. It is no longer an exception, but a permanent state. The will of the members of the flock is no longer to live according to their will, but according to the will of the shepherd. Christianity named this state of obedience apatheia. Whereas in Greek philosophy apatheia means controlling one’s passions (pathos) through intellect, in Christian thinking pathos signifies willpower directed towards the self from which apatheia frees us.

Thirdly, it is not enough for the shepherd to be aware of the general state of his flock; he must be familiar with each and everyone’s individual needs. The shepherd must be aware of what is happening, of the doings and the public sins of each individual. However, the shepherd must also be aware of what takes place in each and everyone’s soul, that is, what are the individual sins of the members of the flock. To access this personal knowledge, Christianity adapted and bound together two important Greek instruments to its purposes: self-examination and self-awareness. The direction of conscience now formed a permanent bond: the member of flock did not allow himself to be directed only in a particularly difficult moment, but being directed became a permanent state. The meaning of self-examination changed as well: it changed from directing the consciousness on itself to opening the soul to the shepherd in its depth. This was the origin of something unknown to Greek thinking: an organization of absolute obedience, knowledge of the self and confessing it.

Finally, all these techniques of examination, confession, guidance and obedience shared the same goal: to make the individuals work towards their own “mortification” in this world. This did not mean actual death; it meant renouncing the self and the world, or a sort of a daily, everyday death. It was death or renouncing the self that would guarantee life in another world.

General householding expands the Christian governance of souls precisely in this sense. (100) Shepherding is invested with a different reason. Its function changes, just like the function of a tool changes in its function and consequently in its nature when it is moved from one social environment to another. It is no longer the saving of souls in the world to come that is at stake in shepherding, but its securing in this world: now, saving begins to mean health, wellbeing, safety, protection from accidents and risks. Earthly goals replace the original, religious aims of pastoral power. Secondly – and simultaneously – the bureaucracy of the pastoral power grows, when “general householding” takes the place of “church” as the field of practices of government. The practice of pastoral power spreads from religious institutions, to which it has been tied over millennia, to the entire society, the general economy of the state, public institutions, private enterprises, the work of benefactors and philanthropists, and the ancient institutions such as family, that originate from antiquity, are mobilized to serve this purpose. Thirdly, the multiplication of the agents and the aims of pastoral power directs the knowledge on man towards two poles: general economy is parallel and continuous with life; it is essentially connected with truth and its production, with truth on the individual himself as well as the processes of the life of the population. (101)

With general economy, the problem of government unfolds according to the interests of the state imparting a secular order, and the eschatological horizon is replaced by the idea of increasing the interior forces of the state issued from political marginalism. General economy shifts the emphasis from the government of souls in relation to a salvation in the hereafter to the governability of the processes of the population in the name of earthly salvation. The government of the spirit now becomes earthly government; shepherding souls turns into governing the earthly life of men. It is both individualizing and totalizing as it strives to fall upon each and everyone, to direct the moving multitude in its singularity and its entirety.

## B. The War Machine
Foucault attempted to illustrate with the charting of the origin of biopower how the two historical evolutions of political power – one towards a continuously more centralized political constitution, the other towards a form of power permanently and ceaselessly directed towards the individual; in other words, the city-state/citizen and the shepherd/flock games – came together demonically in the vital economy of the modern state.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have also taken notice of this relationship between nomadic grazing and the organization of a state. (102) They agree with Foucault that nomadic organization never originally belongs to the state; the state always has to seize it. The difference of their analysis reveals nonetheless a feature that distinguishes their work in a more general way. Whereas for Foucault the strategisation of society (sheepherding’s transformation into a technique of political power) is essential, what is the most essential to

Deleuze and Guattari is the continuous flight of the society, which creates its rhizome (nomads as a moving war machine). (103)

There is a distinct difference between the political bond and the “rule-less” or “lawless” organization of nomads according to Deleuze and Guattari. Nomads, no more than heroes, had no place in the polis. They were neither despots nor lawmakers; they were always coming from “somewhere else”. They refused the bonds and contracts of sedentary life, they did not “comprehend” the polis; rather, they constituted a form of pure exteriority for it. Polis itself is always in a relation with its exteriority and cannot be understood independently from this relation. This exteriority cannot be reduced to “foreign policy”, that is, to the relations between states. The organization of the nomads means, to Deleuze and Guattari, a form of exteriority not reducible to the state or relations between states, but which exists solely in its own metamorphosis. As long as these nomadic groups are evolutionarily thought to be a primitive or a less organized social formation, their organization cannot be understood. The nomads were not at all less organized than the polis.

In short, nomads were not originally a “Greek” problem (they were, however, a problem for the Greeks). The Greeks were not nomads. Neither were the Trojans. Yet, the Scythes, and their descendants between the Greeks and the Trojans – the Amazons – were: “They raze everything on their way”. (104) The Scythes were nomads who built no cities and who therefore could not be “citizens”. They lived mounted on their horses, consequently lacking all wisdom, theoretical merit and humanity in the Greek sense. Without a city they were in constant movement. There was, however, other kind of wisdom in movement than in the city-state or politics. (105) Herodotus indeed praises the Scythes as the wisest of all in “matters between men”, because they cannot be conquered: “I do not praise the Scythians in all respects, but in this, the most important: that they have contrived that no one who attacks them can escape, and no one can catch them if they do not want to be found. For when men have no established cities or forts, but are all nomads and mounted archers, not living by tilling the soil but by raising cattle and carrying their dwellings on wagons, how can they not be invincible and unapproachable?” (106)

Nomos, the second root of oikonomia, is a phonetic abbreviation of nomeus, shepherd. The connection between nomos and nomadic life comes forth most clearly in the Greek words nomeus (shepherd), nomeou (put on pasture), nomós (pasture, grazing, dwelling place), and in the verb nemein (to distribute, to give), which appears regularly in Homer. (107) The other meaning of the verb nemein refers directly to the shepherds’ life (to stay at pasture, to herd, to drive the flock to the pasture, to feed them, etc.) and it seems that connotation “to drift” “to disperse”, “to spread out” originated from this field.

In the Homeric “society”, there were no fences and no ownership in the pasture ground. The pasturing was thus not a question of dividing the land to the animals but on the contrary of the distribution and of the division of the animals to the open pasture grounds. In their commentary on the etymological roots of nomos, Deleuze and Guattari state that nomos signifies exactly this specific dividing: dividing that does not divide anything into parts, dividing in a space with no boundaries or enclosures. (108) The root nem of nomos signifies above all the distribution of the herd onto the pasture, which does not include any splitting or parceling of the land, or division in the sense of allocation (expressed rather by the Greek words temnein and diairein). In the pastoral sense, the division of animals takes place in an unlimited space and does not suppose division of the land: during the Homeric period it had nothing to do with land titles or parceling of land; when the question of ownership of land was raised during Solon’s time, a whole new terminology was used to discuss it. It was only during Solon’s time that nomos started to mean the principle behind law and justice (thesmos and dike), and then to identify with the laws themselves (nomos as a separate and limited space of law). (109) Prior to this, the place of nomos was the intermediary space, the space in-between, the plain, the steppe and the desert between the wild forest and the polis, governed by laws.

This idea of division and distribution is key to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between nomos and polis. Polis, the city state ruled by laws, is characterized by dividing according to logos. Deleuze defines it as dividing that divides the divided according to customary and permanent definitions, directed by the “public opinion” and “common sense”. (110) Nomadic distribution stands against this. It is not about the division of the divided, visible wealth; it means rather “division among those who distribute themselves in an open space – a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits.” (111) There nothing belongs to anybody or is his own, but everybody gathers and regroups only in order to spread out and fill the largest possible space. Dividing in space, spreading out and filling the space, dispersing into the space, are something completely different from dividing the space. (112) It means straying from the narrow path, or even “delirious” division, demonic rather than divine organization, because it is “a peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between gods’ fields of action”. (113)

While the gods have their established characteristics, tasks, spaces and codes and deal with limits and land titles, the demons saunter over fences and enclosures, from one in- between to another, and in this way destroy limits between spaces and properties. (114)

Open or indeterminate space and nomadic dispersion belong therefore together. The nomad holds a territory precisely in the sense of this in-between or intermediary space. He follows customary, established routes; he moves from place to place and is certainly not indifferent to them (watering place, resting place, meeting place, hiding place, etc.). Yet, in contrast to those who live sedentary lives, although the places determine the routes, they remain subordinate to the routes they determine. One will come to the watering place or the hiding place only to leave it behind once more. Even dwelling is connected with route rather than place, and the route keeps it in constant movement. Each place is only a connection in the same way a connecting flight exists only as a connection. The routes run between places, but what is primary is being in between or the delay of the interspace, which possesses its own autonomy and direction. The nomad life is this existence in-between devoid of visible landmarks or certain, formal principles by which to orient oneself.

Although the nomads’ movement may follow paths and habitual routes, it does not fill the function occupied by the road in sedentary life. It does not divide or sector a limited space for people; it does not allot a share to each, or regulate communication between the parts. Rather, it acts the opposite way: it disperses people and animals in an open space that is indeterminate and undefined and does not communicate. Nomos means this particular way of distribution, distribution without being divided into parts or proportions, in a space without limits or enclosures. It is the consistency of this indeterminate, formless, intermediate existence without state (without form, without polis). In this sense of a hinterland, backcountry, intermediate state or openness of a mountainside it contradicts polis organized by the law.

There was a significant difference between the space of being-in-between and the divided space of the polis and the organizations that were characteristic to them: the space of politics and oikonomia, of sedentary life, is a fabric striated and lined by fences, yards, roads and walls. The statesman-politician is a weaver; he is the planner and the weaver of this fabric. The art of planning and weaving constitutes the “royal science”, that is, the paradigm of the governing of people and the functioning of the state. (115) The nomadic space of being-in-between is a seamless, smooth felt, marked only by the “traces” erased and displaced by the nomadic movement. A fabric is always formed of two elements, the warp and the weft (one horizontal, the other vertical), which create the order of the limited and measured space. The gates of the city, its taxes and duties are channels, fences, filters for channeling the movement, for forcing it into a shape. The fabric of the polis is a model of channeling the movement and the uncertainty that binds them to the conduits between established and recognizable places and identities. Nomads do not “comprehend” it, their spiraling organization will always collide with an obstacle. Felt is “anti-fabric”, a micro-level cluster of fibers achieved by felting, which does not include separation of threads, weaving or intertwining of separate elements. It has neither top nor bottom or centre; it is limitless and open to every direction. (116) It is even and smooth, yet in no way homogenous. Its smoothness or undividness characterizes rather the indeterminacy, formlessness, or constant transformation of its space-time that emphasizes touching and prodding, trajectories, forces moving to certain directions with certain velocity, instead of planning and the forms of elements.

Nomads distribute themselves in this smooth intermediate space; they spread themselves, they live and dwell this space; it is their territorial and organizational principle. That is why Deleuze and Guattari note that nomads are in fact not defined by movement (in the geographical sense). (117) Rather, the nomad is the one who does not move. Contrary to the migrant, who travels from one place to another, leaving behind a region that has become hostile and arriving at another, perhaps undefined and unpredictable, the nomad never leaves. (118) He moves, holding onto his open space. He is not fleeing from the steppe; instead, he makes his homelessness his home. Nomadic organization is a response to this challenge. Nomads are simply those who live in nomos; whose home is nomos. In a sense, nomads could be defined by the term apolis, meaning an outlaw, a person without home and city. Yet, nomads have a home: nomos is their home. We cannot understand nomads by defining them negatively in relation to polis, as if they were lacking something, but positively as a band, whose home is nomos. (119)

Division according to logos and dispersion according to nomos are characterized by the use of opposite methods of numbering and geometry. In the polis, a number serves as a means for census, taxation and elections: a number serves as a tool for government and identity, as a way of organizing and controlling the resources, land, artifacts, fluctuations and movements of human material that are its objects – in other words, as a way of subjecting them to the law. The nomadic number is not a tool for calculating the space, but a way of moving and organizing detached from space, caused by the concrete character of open range: it can be covered without having been counted, measured or defined. This is the contrary of geometry, which divides the very space. Numbered animals, numbers as variables, can move through nomos while geometrically divided pieces of land stay put.

Geometry is the science of the polis, the “royal science”, which matters only to the army of the state and to the fortifications of sedentary life, not to those living the nomos. (120) According to Herodotus, geometry was born in Egypt: The king [Seostris] divided the country among all the Egyptians by giving each an equal parcel of land, and made this his source of revenue, assessing the payment of a yearly tax. And any man who was robbed by the river of part of his land could come to Sesostris and declare what had happened; then the king would send men to look into it and calculate the part by which the land was diminished, so that thereafter it should pay in proportion to the tax originally imposed. From this, in my opinion, the Greeks learned the art of measuring land”. (121)

While the Scythes spread onto the steppe, following and adapting to the contours of the land and looking for the next pasture and the proportions of the next division, Egypt’s juridical model replicated the same social structures between land and individuals after the floods of the Nile year after year according to unchanged proportions. (122) State-form has a tendency to replicate itself and to remain identical in its changes. In order to yield power over land, the state must take advantage of the geometrical ability to draw borders and create enclosures and interiors to be ruled. This always means an external reference point, stable and permanent point of view, external to what is being reproduced. It is “watching the flow from the bank”. (123) The model of the law, the search for laws, is constituted by the formation of these constants. Despite the fact that these constants may only be relations between variables, they are always a fixed relation between the variables. Following, adapting, mutation, metamorphosis are instead necessary when new pastures, new divisions and singularities of materials rather than permanent forms are being sought.

What is essential in the division and metamorphosis of nomos are the flocks and packs whose origin is not found in the state (polis) or family and kin (oikos), but instead in animals and the “becoming animal” of man (the war machine). Therefore, it is not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari say that “becoming pack” is an invention of animal-raising nomads. Raising and training animals should not be confused with primitive hunting, or taming and domesticating characteristic to sedentary life, because it is a “system of projection”. (124) While the hunter’s goal is simply to end the animal motion by systematic slaughtering, a rider uses and conserves kinetic energy, that is, the speed of the horse, not its proteins (its motor, not its flesh).

The animal breeder aims at the continuation of motion and the rider joins this motion, directing it, causing it to accelerate, decelerate, etc.: “Riding is the first extension of the nomad, his first system of arms”. The nomad borrows from the animal the idea of a motor rather than the model of hunting. He does not generalize the model of hunting by adapting it to his enemy; instead, he abstracts the idea of a motor and adapts it to himself. Becoming animal does therefore not mean animal “features”, pretending to be an animal, or imitating an animal, “any more than Mozart’s music imitates birds” (125). Rather, it means a transformation that confuses the order of model and copy, or a multitude, conjunction and alliance of distinct without a reason or end exterior to them.

Banding is simply a matter of distribution, probing, following and pushing forward according to the immanent necessity of finding the next pasture and transforming by dividing. Its functioning is not directed by origin or blood bond (power of a person), political bond (power of the community), or the bond of constant obedience and submission (pastoral power), but the bond of heterogeneity and continuous transformation (dividing of the singular together). When multitude or several specific beings bring about one effect, it can be considered one being. (126) As such, it will never drain the power of which it consists, because the many singular will always participate by only one of their aspects in the combination. Something extra, something else, that flees and is able to participate in other relationships and combinations, remains always in them.

Unlike polis, the nomad pack does not have a coordinating law that would be separate from the pack and would rule and direct it. And unlike oikos, multitude does not have a “lineage” or a “descend”. It does not have a common ancestor. Becoming a pack is not characterized by a descendance from the father, but rather by contamination, the birth and proliferation through contamination, not through bloodline. Unlike proliferation through descend and the simple dualistic difference between the sexes included there, contamination always concern heterogeneous elements: “people, animals, bacteria, viruses, molecules, micro-organisms...”. (127)

According to Aristotle, the place of human being is in the polis in so far as he fulfills his own nature as a “political animal”. A human being who is outside the state because of his nature is, for Aristotle, like the brotherless, lawless and homeless lover of war and discord, condemned by Homer. (128) According to Aristotle a human being can actualise his own nature only as a part of polis since “the city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually, for the whole must necessarily be prior to the part” and the part exists only when filling its appropriate task as a part of the whole. For Deleuze and Guattari instead, a human being or an animal outside the polis is not “an isolated piece at draughts” as for Aristotle, but always gregarious, always a multitude and therefore a war machine. (130) By this Deleuze and Guattari mean that polis has no monopoly of acting together. The condition of cooperation does not lie in the weaving together of several different, it does not lie in law, in moral, in tolerance or in agreement, it does not lie in “us” or in “I”. It is not about the dialectics of the individual and the collective or about seeking a “good” totality. The herds of animals or men find their common substance rather in the mere movement and mutation. There the relations are not organized by a common cause, but by laws of closeness, attraction, rejection and contamination. There “good” are the relations that increase power, that spread and combine themselves, and “bad” are the ones that suffocate and pull apart. (131) When the herd meets something fit for it, it merges to it, devours it and the power of the herd expands. What the herd was before transforms, together with that encountered, into a part of a bigger and larger subjectivity. This subjectivity has nothing to do with making the morals public or interiorizing them.

In this way nomos rises against logos, against the law (“Thou shalt”) whose actual meaning is command and always “smells like morals”, either public or interiorized. (132)

## REFERENCES

59. Works and Days was most likely written just a little after The Odyssey and The Iliad, in the of 8th century or at the beginning of the 7th century BC. Homeric epics are thought to depict events that took place from circa 600 to 400 years before (although some estimate only 200 years before). See for example Edvin Linkomies’ introduction to his translation of The Iliad. The timing is not, however, a very interesting question. On Homer as a concept and as an “aesthetic judgement”, see Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture “Homer und die klassische Philologie” (1869).
60. Plato, Apologia, 36b-c.
61. Plutarch, Life of Pericles, XVI, 5.
62. Plato, The Statesman, 258c-259c.
63. The Iliad, 24:471; 572.
64. This resulted from the fact that the root of despotes, dem, was no longer understood. See Benveniste (1973), Indo-European Language and Society, p. 249.
65. Benveniste (1973), Indo-European Language and Society, p. 74.
66. Vähämäki, Antiikin poliittinen filosofia (manuscript); Dodds (1951), The Greeks and the Irrational; Vegetti (1989), L’etica degli antichi; Vernant (1990), Myth and Society in Ancient Greece.
67. Nietzsche (1989), On the Genealogy of Morality, First Treatise. London: Vintage.
68. Ibid., § 10.
69. Vähämäki (1997), ”Ennen politiikkaa [Before politics]”, p. 10.
70. The Odyssei, 2.1-259.
71. Vähämäki, op. cit., p. 10.
72. The Iliad, chapters 16 and 17.
73. Precisely in this sense heroes were in between the divine and human world: in their sovereignty and self-sufficiency they had godlike or wild beast features, but on the other hand they simply could not withdraw from the recognition of mortals, their subjects and peers, that is, from their bond to the human world. They were half goats, half gods, half men, half heroes. See Vegetti (1989), L’etica degli antichi, p.25.
74. Vähämäki, op.cit., p. 7. In The Odyssey (Od. XI:405-426), which is considered to be later than The Iliad, Aigisthos, the lover of Agamemnon’s wife, who together with Klytaimnestra killed Agamemnon after his return, was guilty of hubris, because he did not listen to gods’ advice. The result is doom. Agamemnon’s wife Klytaimnestra was Helen’s sister.
75. Vegetti (1989), op. cit., p.13-34.
76. In The Odyssey the transition is already more explicit, and Hesiod questions the values of heroes more clearly than Homer. See Hirvonen (2000) Oikeuden käynti, p. 53-58. Yet heroes don’t die anywhere, but continue their self-sufficient lives especially in the conceptions of eligible and good life in Greek philosophy.
77. Vähämäki (1997), op. cit., p. 7.
78. That is why in the world of heroes a gift must be understood as a gift, and not as some kind of exchange. A hero is self-sufficient and it would be an insult to give him something useful or something that he needs. A hero does not need anything. Thus an assumption that a guest could give to a master something that he needs degrades the host. A hero is so self- sufficient that he needs nothing, and the guest can not bring anything but a gift – by which he demonstrates that the master does not need anything. See Vähämäki, Antiikin poliittinen filosofia (manuscript).
79. Aristotles, Politics, 1253a, 1-5 and 25-30.
80. Plato, Protagoras, 320c-323a.
81. Vähämäki (1997), “Ennen politiikkaa”, p.10.
82. Aristotles, op. cit., 1281a, 35-37.
83. Hesiod, Work and Days, 214-219: 277-280.
84. Dikaipolis was the name of the hero in The Acharnians, a play by Aristophanes in 425 BC. One must bear in mind that the gods of The Iliad had nothing to do with justice. They possessed no moral characteristics and their cohabitation is in a constant state of possibility of conflict and disintegration; they resembled the heroes, like them they were bound to destiny (moira), they were just stronger that the heroes, and immortal. The capricious gods of The Iliad could thus not offer much help to the problem of the heroes; quite the contrary. For example the reason behind the Trojan War was an Olympian dispute between three goddesses. All immortals except one, the goddess of discord Eris, had been invited to Zeus’s banquet. The insulted goddess took her vengeance by throwing a golden apple, upon which it was written: “To the most beautiful”, in the midst of the guests. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite begun to fight over the apple, and in the end they decided that mortals should settle the matter. They descended on the hills of mount Ida, where Paris was tending to his sheep, and, courting him with gifts, begged him to tell which one of them was the most beautiful. Hera promised Paris power over all. Athena promised him all wisdom. But Aphrodite promised the most beautiful maiden in the world for his bride. Paris handed the apple to Aphrodite. And Paris, the son of Priamus, the king of Troy – who had been abandoned at the hills of mount Ida because of a dream foretelling the destruction of Troy and whom a gentle shepherd had taken in and raised – no longer was contented with his sheep and left to search for the promised fortune. It was not for long before he met Helen.
85. Some written laws had been passed prior to Solon as the codification of unwritten rules had started promptly after reinvention of writing. The writing and the public displaying of laws meant the beginning of the significant transition from laws preceding the letter of the law or the unpredictability of common law to certainty and predictability of written law. Written law carves in stone the space common to all and available to all. The first known legislator was Zaleukos Lokroi in Epizefyrioi circa 650. The most important code of law of Athens prior to Solon was the cruel law of Dracon, “written in blood” in the year 621/620, which was replaced by Solon’s law. Aristotle, Athenaion politeia, 7.1; Hirvonen (2000), Oikeuden käynti, s. 58-71.
86. Aristotle, Athenaion politeia, 2.1.
87. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, I: 65–66.
88. Plato, Republic, 492b–d.
89. Nietzsche (1930), Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §474; Nietzsche (1872), Der griechische Staat; also Nietzsche (1872), Homer’s Wettkampf.
90. Rajanti (1999), Kaupunki on ihmisen koti, p. 86–87.
91. Plato, Republic, 493b-c.
92. Vähämäki (1997), ”Ennen politiikkaa”, p. 10
93. Foucault (2004), Sécurité, territoire, population, p. 140-142.
94. Ojakangas (2002), Kenen tahansa politiikka, p. 99.
95. According to Deleuze the purpose of the division method (and the Platonic dialectic in general) is to distinguish genuine from pretenders, fakes and inauthentic, to examine the pretensions and distinguish the true pretender from the false ones. It is the “philosophical Odyssey”. See Deleuze (1990), Logic of sense, s. 254.
96. Foucault (1994), Dits et écrits, vol. IV, p. 144.
97. Foucault (2004), Sécurité, territoire, population, p. 128–138.
98. The results were however not very impressive. Solon friend and colleague Peisistratos seized power and became a tyrant.
99. Foucault (2004), ibid., p. 167–193
100. Foucault (2004), ibid., p. 233–236.
101. Foucault (1982), ”Afterword”, p. 215.
102. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, especially ch. 12 ”1227: Traité de nomadologie – la machine de guerre”.
103. For Deleuze, there is a difficulty of locating in Foucault the ”loose thread” or the line of flight, the movement of deterritorialization that moves and changes societies. For Foucault, the functioning of power in Deleuze and Guattari tends to settle only as a particular component of the dispositive or assemblage, that is, the repressive or reterritorializing component. Yet, for Foucault, what is at stake here is always also a more fundamental “production”, a production of ability and potentiality, a dimension that is born from the relations between power and knowledge but does not reduce to them. The difference is not only in the choice of words. See Deleuze (1994) “Desir et plaisir", Magazine littéraire 325, Octobre 1994: 59-65.
104. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 439. Scythians were bands and tribes, which dominated the steppes of the European and Asian sides of southern Russia. By the 7th century BC the whole of Asia Minor was afraid of them, and by the end of 6th century they formed the most bold and able-bodied armed force in the known world: “with [Scythians] indeed no people in Europe can bear comparison, there not being even in Asia any nation singly a match for them if unanimous, though of course they are not on a level with other races in general intelligence [xunesis] and the arts of civilized life [eubolia].” (Thukydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.97). At the top of their powers (approximately 700s-300s BC), the Scythians made attacks to eastern parts of Zhou-dynasty and forced it to move its capital further east (771 BC). In the west, the Scythians made raids even to France. See ”Scythia” and ”Scythians” in Perseus Encyclopedia.
105. Sellars (1998), ”Nomadic Wisdom”, p. 69; Rosen (1988), The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry, p. 36.
106. Herodotus, Histories, 4.46.1.
107. If the meaning of oikos is unambiguous, this is not the case for the second root of the word oikonomia: nomos. We can give nomos two principal meanings which differ from one another by their accents: in the word nomós the stress is on the second syllable, and in the word nómos on the first syllable. The first means the pasture ground and the steppes (in Homer it can be found only in this form) and the other, which is considered more recent, means the way of life of beings following their own norms (Hesiod) or more simply just the way or norm which stresses determination of behavior, often considered as essential to the word. Out of the latter was developed the third, much more recent meaning of nomos as a law and a codified habit. The meaning of nomos as habit was not, however, so arbitrary at the beginning. It meant rather the way of life that was habitual, a normal way to live, which was almost impossible to separate from the geography of the steppes and the ways of battle and cooking food necessary there. In this sense it is not impossible that the most ancient term for habit could have been born out of a term which was used for the most ordinary, habitual way of life, life in the steppes, where the austere conditions of life required a special form of life in order to survive. See Liddell and Scott (2002), An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford UP, Oxford.
108. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 472.
109. Hirvonen (2000), Oikeuden käynti, p. 65.
110. Deleuze (1968), Différence et répétition, p. 54.
111. Deleuze (1968), Différence et répétition, p. 54.
112. Nomos does not therefore mean the first measuring and dividing of the land, the way in which for example Carl Schmitt seems to think nomos in his creative etymology. The land is occupied, but not in the way presented by Schmitt; there is a concrete order in nomos, but it is not the one outlined by Schmitt. See Carl Schmitt (2003), The Nomos ofthe Earth, I:4; V.
113. Deleuze (1968), Différence et répétition, p. 54. We can regard also Pan, the demon god of “disorder” occupying these intermediary states as a bearer of this kind of a folly. He is the son of the god of thieves, Hermes, whose home is in the meadows and in the mountains between the city-state and the forest. Maybe it was for this reason that the Greek feared the scream of Pan and the “irrational” madness it evoked: Panic (panikon deima; a surprising, sudden feeling of fear, horror, anxiety or insecurity which often takes over flocks of animals or men) raises and becomes infectious when people drift too far away from the divine or political limits and meanings controlling them. “Then Pan, who declares and always moves (aei polon) all, is rightly called goat-herd (aipolos)”, Plato, Kratylos, 408b-d. See James Hillmann (1972), An Essay on Pan.
114. Deleuze (1968), Différence et répétition, p. 54.
115. Plato, Statesman, 311c; Timaios 19a-27d; Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 594.
116. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 594–595.
117. Deleuze (1977), “On the Superiority of Anglo American Literature” (In Dialogues II. Trans. Eliot Ross Albert. New York: Continuum, 1987, 27-56).
118. On the difference between the nomads and the migrants see Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 472–473.
119. In Greek nomads (nomas) are quite simply those who live in nomos, who distribute in it with their flocks with no allusion polis. Klaus Harju has accurately treated the question of home in homelessness by the concept of ”saudade”. See Harju (2005), ”Saudade, to be at home without a home”. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization 2005(X): 687-689.
120. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 485. Also Karl von Clausewitz emphasizes the subsidiary nature of geometry for war tactics and strategy. Clausewitz (1976), On War, especially part III, ch. 15 ”Geometrical element”.
121. Herodotus, Histories, 2.109.1.
122. According to Herodotus (Histories, 2.4) the Egyptians did not only divide the land but were also the first to divide years and made them “consist of twelve divisions of the seasons”. They also kept “memory of the past” which made them “the most skilled in history”. The Scythians were instead “the youngest in the world” (4.5), they “don’t have history, only geography” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, Mille plateaux, p. 490.).
123. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 461.
124. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 493.
125. Deleuze (1977), “On the Superiority of Anglo American Literature”, p.43.
126. “By particular things (res singularis), I mean things which are finite and have a conditioned existence; but if several individual things concur in one action, so as to be all simultaneously the effect of one cause, I consider them all, so far, as one particular thing.” Spinoza (1677), Ethics, II: Def. VII.
127. Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, p. 295.
128. The Iliad 9.63: “For he that foments civil discord (polemos) is a clanless (afretor),
hearthless (anestios) outlaw (athemistos)”
129. Aristotles, Politics, 1253a18.
130. Aristotles, Politics, 1253a5–10; See Deleuze & Guattari (1980), Mille plateaux, Proposition
V: Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of a war machine in space, p. 471.
131. Deleuze (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 22.
132. Nietzsche (1968), The Will to Power, § 630.

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