An Economic Approach to Homer's Odyssey: Part I
A n economic approach to Homer’s Odyssey1 is most definitely not about “what Homer really meant.” Instead, the economic approach views Homer through a lens that Homer himself probably never entertained, namely a series of relatively simple models about preferences and constraints. The economic approach is thus a distortion, but perhaps a useful or interesting distortion. It is taking the richness of ideas, presentation, and narrative in Homer and remixing it. For all the complexity lost, this process induces us to engage in a certain kind of reductive prioritization as to how Homer wrote about human nature and politics, and thus it will bring out some elements of the story more than others.
In this series, I will use an economic approach to better understand the implicit politics and economics in The Odyssey. As a “naïve” reader with no training in ancient history, I find the comparative treatment of political regimes as one of the most striking features of the narrative, namely that Odysseus visits a considerable number of distinct polities, and experiences each in a different way. How does each regime operate, and how does it differ from the other regimes presented in the book? Economics forces us to boil down those descriptions and comparisons to a relatively small number of variables. Trying to model the polities in Homer’s Odyssey forces us to decide which are their essential, as opposed to accidental features, and what they might have in common, or which are the most important points of contrast.
You don’t have to hold any special loyalty to the economic approach to think this method might be worthwhile. There is an adage that it is better to trade in a liquid market than an illiquid market. Economics is, in intellectual terms, a liquid market. There are a great number of economists, and many people are familiar with the basic modes of economic thought. So, bringing a new approach to Homer is putting an idea out into a relatively active discussion group, analogous to trading in a liquid market. This seems worth trying for Homer, since The Odyssey has received almost zero attention from economists to date.
