You may...

You may, of course, certainly point this out; but if your performance failed to satisfy the appropriate criteria, then you simply cannot prevent the withdrawal of the ascription of kingliness, courage, and cleverness or cunning. And this is to say that Homeric moral predicates are not applied, as moral predicates have been applied in our society, only where the agent could have done other than he did. Excuses, praise, and blame must all play different parts.

We cannot even inquire whether (in the Kantian sense) ought implies can for Homer, for in Homer we cannot find ought (in the Kantian sense).

So Odysseus blames the suitors, when he returns to Ithaca, for having had a false belief: “Dogs, you did not think that I would return home from Troy; for you have consumed my possessions, lain with my maidservants by force, and wooed my wife while I was yet alive, fearing neither the gods who inhabit the broad heaven, nor yet that there would be any retaliation from men hereafter; but now the doom of death in upon you all.”4 The suitors are blamed precisely for having a false belief; but this is what in a modern sense we would feel we could not blame people for.

For to believe is not to perform an avoidable action. And it is not that Homer thinks that beliefs are voluntary; he is engaged in an assessment to which what the agent could or could not have done otherwise is irrelevant. It will be useful now to look at a cognate of ἀγαθός in Homer, the noun ἀρετή, usually and perhaps misleadingly translated virtue. A man who performs his socially allotted function possesses ἀρετή. The ἀρετή of one function or role is quite different from that of another.

The ἀρετή of a king lies in ability to command, of a warrior in courage, of a wife in fidelity, and so on. A man is ἀγαθός if he has the ἀρετή of his particular and specific function. And this brings out the divorce of ἀγαθός in the Homeric poems from later uses of good (including later uses of ἀγαθός).

When Agamemnon intends to steal the slave girl Briseis from Achilles, Nestor says to him, “Do not, ἀγαθός though you be, take the girl from him.”5 It is not that, being ἀγαθός, Agamemnon can be expected not to take the girl, nor that he will cease to be ἀγαθός if he does take her. He will be ἀγαθός whether he takes her or not. The way in which “ἀγαθός” is tied so completely to fulfillment of function is also brought out in its links with other concepts.