Audio recording of a lecture given by Jill Leovy on December 2, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The Iliad supplies a detailed and recognizable description of what the Italian mafia scholar Maurizio Catino has dubbed “horizontal” governance -- that is, lateral rule by peers rather than top-down rule by a centralized authority. The same style of order is found the world over -- in feud societies, bandit cultures, and the various small-scale and “stateless” societies studied by anthropologists. It’s also the surprisingly uniform ordering principle of street gangs, criminal groups and paramilitaries in contemporary urban societies. What can we learn about horizontal orders by reading Homer? To what extent can his descriptions shed light on this seminal form of social organization, also known as the protection racket? By the same token, how can an understanding of urban street violence illuminate The Iliad?"

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