The Greeks, or Achaians, that Homer writes about in the Iliad were not people of a unified nation. Instead, areas of the Balkan Peninsula, now known as Greece, were made up of many small kingdoms, populated by ethnically-related peoples, from 1400–800 B.C., and even later, to the time of Alexander the Great (c. 200 B.C.). Scholarship generally dates the composition of the Iliad at about 800 B.C. At that time, Homer would have been writing about the Mycenaeans, a people who lived in Greece four to five hundred years earlier, although the picture he paints in the epic shows aspects of society from all of the periods between 1400 and 800 B.C.
The Mycenaeans, also called Hellenes, had taken control of the Balkan Peninsula around 1500 B.C. They formed what were essentially small farming communities organized around a predominant family. In the Iliad, each of the great warrior heroes is the head, and therefore the king of each of these communities. According to legend, and evidenced by some archaeological finds, the most powerful of these communities was Mycenae, ruled by Agamemnon. These rulers were known as basileis, and they acted as kings, generals, and judges. The noble families in each kingdom were the aristoi, who advised the basileis through a council called the boule. Ordinary soldiers were known as the laos, but they too had a voice and could vote in the agora, or public forum, on decisions that involved them.
