Abstract
In Western culture, "authority" is a concept closely linked on the one hand to the Roman auctoritas and on the other to the written tradition with its set of "authors" and "canonical texts". It is therefore not surprising that modern scholars have long denied the existence of authority in a predominantly oral culture such as that of ancient Greece or that they have limited themselves to looking in the Greek world for something akin to auctoritas understood as the capacity of an agent or auctor to "increase" (augere), to carry out a certain process. In contrast to this approach, this lecture is aimed at identifying the experiences of the Greeks within the conceptual framework of "their" notion of authority which presents itself as exousía, "faculty, possibility" (from Greek éx-esti "it is possible"), granted to someone by an external source, to act or speak in a compelling form. Having shed some light on the Greek concept of authority, we will then investigate its relationship to the gods. In Homer, the authority of the chief or basileús derives from Zeus, the sovereign deity who gave Agamemnon "sceptre and rules so that he may provide for others"(Il. II 206; IX 99). By borrowing the categories of analysis from the study of oral traditions, we will show that in a world that does not have written laws the sceptre functions as the visible trace of an invisible network of relations binding Zeus to Agamemnon, Agamemnon to the other chiefs, the chiefs to simple soldiers. Finally, we will see how the sceptre acts as a means of relations also in Chaeronea, in Roman age Boeotia, where it is revered as the main deity of the city in the context of a cult probably dedicated to Zeus.
