before the formation of the city-state and ethnos-state, what kinds of script and what kinds of self enabled Greek communities to perform justice? Did these scripts and selves undergo changes when the state and its citizens emerged in the early eighth century? My goals in this chapter are to recover a likely version of the earliest pre-citizen script, including its cognitive dimensions (especially the sort of reasoning) and its communicative dimensions (especially key speech acts, speech genres, and performative attitudes), and to identify a kind of performer we can consider a prototype for the earliest citizens, including his or her degrees of social and moral autonomy. Given the nature of the evidence at our disposal, my argument must remain hypothetical. I claim that, first, Early Iron Age communities created a heroic self when they used funerary ritual, especially lamentation, to render justice to deceased warrior chiefs (basileis); and, second, that around the time of state formation this heroic self achieves a degree of autonomy when performances of the Iliad enable Homer's Achilles to manipulate scripts of lament and deliberation, effecting a self-transformation into a prototype for the citizen.

I divide my inquiry into three unequal parts. The first, “Doing Justice to the Dead in Early Iron Age Communities,” outlines key social features of typical communities in Early Iron Age Greece (ca. 1100–700), particularly in the state's “Formative Era,” the Early to Middle Geometric periods (ca. 900–760).