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The article compares affective economies in the The Iliad and a corpus of drug runner ballads, focusing on the way they organize power through honor and glory, instead of money. I argue that affective economies go beyond the merely pecuniary, demonstrating how heroes in both Mexico and ancient Greece operate within economies built upon the notions of honor and glory. The essay proposes that there are common strategies to resolve similar needs from social constructs that are alike in nature: the organization of bandits ruled by Agamemnon depicted by Homer as an Achaean league and the organization that was allegedly ruled by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as the Sinaloa Car-tel. Both organizations face problems structural problems typical of a political environment where military might is stronger than institutional power or medi-ums of economic exchange. In such an environment, honor is seen as a defensive system, and glory acts as an offensive one, both of them oriented towards the preservation (real or symbolic) of life in the face of open military confrontation. For these purposes, sung ballads and epic poems show how other forms of power can be more useful than money to men whose lives are continuously at risk.
