Justice does not require laws
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“O wrapped in shamelessness, with your mind forever on profit, how shall any one of the Achaians ready obey you either to go on a journey or to fight strongly in battle? I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing..but for your sake, O great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favor, you with the dog’s eye, to win your honor…You forget all this or else you care nothing,..now my prize you threaten in person to strip from me,.”
Although the world which Homer depicts in the Iliad is filled with bronze weapons and savage fighting, as expressed in the above passage spoken by Achilleus, it’s also extends into the realms of thought and behavior. It’s a world where justice is based on ideas of custom, habit, honor, and decency. It’s a world where society runs on unwritten traditions of proper order and the working of nature. It’s a world where when humans go beyond the boundaries of natural justice by refusing to give others their rightful due, or by trying to take somebody else’s goods, they disturb the order of things. The ancient Greeks had a word for this disturbance of the natural order of things. They called it HUBRIS.