It is complained, and perhaps not without foundation, that the study of
the ancient historians does not supply the youth of England with good
political models: that, if we adjust our sympathies and antipathies
according to the division of parties and classes offered to our view
in Rome, Athens, or Sparta, they will not be cast in an English mould,
but will come out in the cruder forms of oligarchic or democratic
prejudice. Now I do not wait to inquire how far these defects may
be supplied by the political philosophers, and in particular by the
admirable treatise of Aristotle. And it certainly is true, that in
general they present to us a state of political ideas and morals
greatly deranged: the choice lies between evil on this side in one
form, and on that side in another form: the characters, who can be
recommended as examples, are commonly in a minority or in exile. Nor
do I ask how far we ought to be content, having an admirable range,
so to speak, of anatomical models in our hands, to lay aside the idea
of attaching our sympathies to what we see. I would rather incite the
objector to examine and judge whether we may not find an admirable
school of polity, and see its fundamental ideas exhibited under the
truest and largest forms, in a quarter where perhaps it would be the
least expected, namely, in the writings of Homer.
As respects religion, arts, and manners, the Greeks of the heroic age
may be compared with other societies in the infancy of man. But as
respects political science in its essential rudiments, and as respects
the application of those principles by way of art to the government of
mankind, we may say with almost literal truth that they are the fathers
of it; and Homer invites those who study him to come and view it in its
cradle, where the infant carries every lineament in miniature, that we
can reasonably desire to see developed in manhood.
~_Strong development of political ideas._~
I cannot but deprecate the association established, perhaps
unintentionally, by Grote, where, throwing Homer as he does into
hotch-pot, so to speak, with the ‘legendary age,’ he expresses
himself in his Preface[1], as follows. ‘It must be confessed that
the sentimental attributes of the Greek mind--its religious and
poetical vein--here appear in disproportionate relief, as compared
with its more vigorous and masculine capacities--with those powers of
acting, organizing, judging, and speculating, which will be revealed
in the forthcoming volumes.’ If the sentimental attribute is to be
contra-distinguished from the powers, I will not say of speculating,
but of acting, organizing, and judging, then I know of nothing less
sentimental in the after-history of Greece than the characters of
Achilles and Ulysses, than the relations of the Greek chiefs to one
another and to their people, than the strength and simplicity which
laid in those early times the foundation-stones of the Greek national
character and institutions, and made them in the social order the
just counterparts of the material structures that are now ascribed
to the Pelasgians; simple indeed in their elements, but so durable
and massive in their combination, as to be the marvel of all time.
The influences derived from these sources were of such vitality and
depth, that they secured to an insignificant country a predominating
power for centuries, made one little point of the West an effective
bulwark against the East, and caused Greece to throw out, to the right
and left, so many branches each greater than the trunk. Even when the
sun of her glory had set, there was yet left behind an immortal spark
of the ancient vitality, which, enduring through all vicissitudes,
kindled into a blaze after two thousand years; and we of this day
have seen a Greek nation, founded anew by its own energies, become
a centre of desire and hope at least to Eastern Christendom. The
English are not ashamed to own their political forefathers in the
forests of the Northward European Continent; and the later statesmen
with the lawgivers of Greece were in their day glad, and with reason
glad, to trace the bold outline and solid rudiments of their own and
their country’s greatness in the poems of Homer. Nothing in those
poems offers itself, to me at least, as more remarkable, than the
deep carving of the political characters; and what is still more, the
intense political spirit which pervades them. I will venture one step
farther, and say that, of all the countries of the civilized world,
there is no one of which the inhabitants ought to find that spirit so
intelligible and accessible as the English: because it is a spirit,
that still largely lives and breathes in our own institutions, and, if
I mistake not, even in the peculiarities of those institutions. There
we find the great cardinal ideas, which lie at the very foundation of
all enlightened government: and then we find, too, the men formed under
the influence of such ideas; as one among ourselves, who has drunk into
their spirit, tells us;
[1] Page xvii.
Sagacious, men of iron, watchful, firm,
Against surprise and sudden panic proof.
And again,
The sombre aspect of majestic care,
Of solitary thought, unshared resolve[2].
[2] Merope; by Matthew Arnold, pp. 94, 135.
It was surely a healthful sign of the working of freedom, that in
that early age, despite the prevalence of piracy, even that idea of
political justice and public right, which is the germ of the law of
nations, was not unknown to the Greeks. It would appear that war could
not be made without an appropriate cause, and that the offer of redress
made it the duty of the injured to come to terms. Hence the offer of
Paris in the Third Iliad is at once readily accepted: and hence, even
after the breach of the Pact, arises Agamemnon’s fear, at the moment
when he anticipates the death of Menelaus, that by that event the claim
to the restoration of Helen will be practically disposed of, and the
Greeks will have to return home without reparation for a wrong, of
which the _corpus_, as it were, will have disappeared[3].
[3] Il. iv. 160-82.
Before proceeding to sketch the Greek institutions as they are
exhibited in Homer, I will give a sketch of the interesting account of
them which is supplied by Grote. I cite it more for contrast than for
concurrence; but it will assist materially in bringing out into clear
relief the points which are of the greatest moment.
~_Grote’s account of the Heroic Polities._~
The Greek States of the historic ages, says Grote, always present
to us something in the nature of a constitution, as the condition
of popular respect towards the government, and of the sense of an
obligation to obey it[4]. The man who broke down this constitution,
however wisely he might exercise his ill gotten power, was branded by
the name of τύραννος, or despot, “as an object of mingled fear and
dislike.” But in the heroic age there is no system, still less any
responsibility[5]: obedience depends on personal reverence towards the
king or chief. Into those ‘great individual personalities, the race
or nation is absorbed[6].’ Publicity indeed, through the means of the
council and assembly, essentially pervades the whole system[7]; but it
is a publicity without consequences; for the people, when they have
heard, simply obey the orders of the king[8]. Either resistance or
criticism is generally exhibited as odious, and is never heard of at
all except from those who are at the least subaltern chiefs: though
the council and assembly would in practice come to be restraints
upon the king, they are not so exhibited in Homer[9], but are simple
_media_ for supplying him with information, and for promulgating his
resolves[10]. The people may listen and sympathize, but no more. In the
assembly of the Second Iliad, a ‘repulsive picture’ is presented to us
of ‘the degradation of the mass of the people before the chiefs[11].’
For because the common soldiery, in conformity with the ‘unaccountable
fancy’ which Agamemnon had propounded, made ready to go home, Ulysses
belabours them with blows and covers them with scornful reproofs[12];
and the unpopularity of a presumptuous critic, even when he is in
substance right, is shown, partly by the strokes that Ulysses inflicts
upon Thersites, but still more by the hideous deformities with which
Homer has loaded him.
[4] Grote’s Hist. Greece, vol. ii. p. 83.
[5] Ibid. p. 84.
[6] Ibid. p. 102.
[7] Ibid. p. 101.
[8] Ibid. p. 86.
[9] Ibid. pp. 90, 102.
[10] Ibid. p. 92.
[11] Ibid. p. 95.
[12] Grote’s Hist. Greece, vol. ii. pp. 94, 96.
It is, I think, in happy inconsistency with these representations,
that the historian proceeds to say, that by means of the Βουλὴ and
Ἀγορὴ we are enabled to trace the employment of public speaking, as the
standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obedience,
‘up to the social infancy of the nation[13].’ But if, in order to make
this sentence harmonize with what precedes and follows it, we are to
understand that the Homeric poems present to us no more than the dry
fact that public speaking was in use, and are to infer that it did not
acquire its practical meaning and power until a later date, then I must
include it in the general protest which I beg leave to record against
the greater part of the foregoing propositions, in their letter and in
their spirit, as being neither warranted in the way of inference from
Homer, nor in any manner consistent with the undeniable facts of the
poems.
[13] Ibid. p. 105.
~_Their use of Publicity and Persuasion._~
Personal reverence from the people to the sovereign, associated with
the duties he discharges, with the high attributes he does or should
possess, and with the divine favour, or with a reputed relationship to
the gods, attaching to him, constitutes the primitive form in which
the relation of the prince and the subject is very commonly cast in
the early stages of society elsewhere than among the Greeks. What is
sentimental, romantic, archaic, or patriarchal in the Homeric polities
is common to them with many other patriarchal or highland governments.
But that which is beyond every thing distinctive not of Greece only,
but of Homeric Greece, is, that along with an outline of sovereignty
and public institutions highly patriarchal, we find the full, constant,
and effective use, of two great instruments of government, since and
still so extensively in abeyance among mankind; namely, publicity
and persuasion. I name these two great features of the politics and
institutions of the heroic age, in order to concentrate upon them
the marked attention which I think they deserve. And I venture to
give to this paper the name of the Ἀγορὴ, because it was the Greek
Assembly of those days, which mainly imparted to the existing polities
their specific spirit as well as features. Amid undeveloped ideas,
rude methods, imperfect organization, and liability to the frequent
intrusion of the strong hand, there lies in them the essence of a
popular principle of government, which cannot, I believe, plead on its
behalf any other precedent so ancient and so venerable.
As is the boy, so is the man. As is the seed, so is the plant. The dove
neither begets, nor yet grows into the eagle. How came it that the
prime philosophers of full-grown Greece gave to the science of Politics
the very highest place in the scale of human knowledge? That they,
kings in the region of abstract thought, for the first and perhaps the
only time in the history of the world, came to think they discerned in
the turbid eddies of state affairs the image of the noblest thing for
man, the noblest that speculation as well as action could provide for
him? Aristotle says that, of all sciences, Πολιτικὴ is ἡ κυριωτάτη καὶ
μάλιστα ἀρχιτεκτονική[14]; and that ethical science constitutes but
a branch of it, πολιτική τις οὖσα. Whence, I ask, did this Greek idea
come? It is not the Greece, but it is the Rome of history, which the
judgment and experience of the world has taken as its great teacher in
the mere business of law and political organization. For so lofty a
theory (a theory without doubt exaggerated) from so practical a person
as Aristotle, we must assume a corresponding elevation of source. I
cannot help believing that the source is to be found rather in the
infancy, than in the maturity, of Greek society. As I read Homer, the
real first foundations of political science were laid in the heroic
age, with a depth and breadth exceeding in their proportions any
fabric, however imposing, that the after-time of Greece was able to
rear upon them. That after-time was in truth infected with a spirit of
political exaggeration, from which the heroic age was free.
[14] Ar. Eth. Nic. i. 2.
We shall have to examine the political picture presented by the heroic
age with reference to the various classes into which society was
distinguished in its normal state of peace: to the organization of the
army in war, and its mixture of civil with military relations: to the
institutions which embodied the machinery of government, and to the
powers by which that machinery was kept in motion.
~_Functions of the King._~
Let us begin with the King; who constituted at once the highest class
in society, and the centre of its institutions.
The political regimen of Greece, at the period immediately preceding
the Trojan war, appears to have been that described by Thucydides,
when he says that the tyrannies, which had come in with the increase
of wealth, were preceded by hereditary monarchies with limited
prerogatives[15]: πρότερον δὲ ἦσαν ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς γέρασι πατρικαὶ
βασιλεῖαι. And again by Aristotle; βασιλεία ... ἡ περὶ τοὺς ἡρωικοὺς
χρόνους ... ἦν ἑκόντων μὲν, ἐπὶ τισὶ δὲ ὡρισμένοις· στρατηγὸς γὰρ ἦν
καὶ δικαστὴς ὁ βασιλεὺς, καὶ τῶν περὶ τοὺς θεοὺς κύριος. The threefold
function of the King was to command the army, to administer justice
chiefly, though not exclusively, between man and man, and to conduct
the rites of religion[16].
[15] Thuc. i. 13.
[16] Ar. Pol. III. xiv. xv. V. x.
Independently of sovereignties purely local, we find in Homer traces
of a maritime Cretan empire, which had recently passed away: and we
find a subsisting Pelopid empire, which appears to have been the first
of its kind, at least on the Greek mainland. For the Pelopid sceptre
was not one taken over from the Perseids: it was obtained through
Mercury, that is, probably through contrivance, from Jupiter: and the
difference probably consisted in one or both of these two particulars.
It comprehended the whole range of continental Greece, πᾶν Ἄργος, to
which are added, either at once or in its progressive extension, the
πολλαὶ νῆσοι (Il. ii. 108) of the Minoan empire. Besides this, it
consisted of a double sovereignty: one, a suzerainty or supremacy over
a number of chiefs, each of whom conducted the ordinary government of
his own dominions; the other, a direct, though perhaps not always an
effective control, not only over an hereditary territory, but over
the unclaimed residue of minor settlements and principalities in the
country. This inference may, I think, be gathered from the fact that
we find the force of Agamemnon before Troy drawn exclusively from his
Mycenian dominions, while he had claims of tribute from towns in the
south-west of Peloponnesus, which lay at some distance from his centre
of power, and which apparently furnished no aid in the war of Troy.
The Pheræ of Diocles lay on the way from Pylos to Sparta: and Pheræ
is one of the towns which Agamemnon promised to Achilles. It should,
however, be borne in mind that, as the family of names to which Pheræ
belonged was one so largely dispersed, we must not positively assume
the identity of the two towns.
~_Degrees in Kingship and in Lordship._~
Kingship in Homer is susceptible of degree; it is one thing for the
local sovereignties, such as those of Nestor or Ulysses, and another
for the great supremacy of Agamemnon, which overrode them. Still the
Greek βασιλῆες in the Iliad constitute a class by themselves; a class
that comprises the greater leaders and warriors, who immediately
surround Agamemnon, the head of the army.
Of by much the greater part even of chiefs and leaders of contingents,
it is plain from the poem that though they were lords (ἄνακτες) of a
certain tribe or territory, they were not βασιλῆες or kings.
These chiefs and lords again divide themselves into two classes: one
is composed of those who had immediate local heads, such as Phœnix,
lord of the Dolopes, under Peleus at Phthia, probably Sthenelus under
Diomed, and perhaps also Meriones under Idomeneus: the other is the
class of chieftains, to which order the great majority belong, owning
no subordination to any prince except to Agamemnon. Among these, again,
there is probably a distinction between those sub-chiefs who owned him
as a local sovereign, and those who were only subject to him as the
head of the great Greek confederation.
It is probable that the subordination of the sub-chief to his local
sovereign was a closer tie than that of the local sovereign to the head
of Greece. For, according to the evidence supplied by the promises of
Agamemnon to Achilles[17], tribute was payable by the lords of towns
to their immediate political superior: not a tribute in coined money,
which did not exist, nor one fixed in quantity; but a benevolence
(δωτίνη), which must have consisted in commodities. Metals, including
the precious metals, would, however, very commonly be the medium of
acquittance. Again, we find these sub-chiefs invested with dominion by
the local sovereign, residing at his court, holding a subaltern command
in his army. All these points are combined in the case of Phœnix. On
the other hand, as to positive duty or service, we know of none that
a sovereign like Nestor owed to Agamemnon, except it were to take a
part in enterprises of national concern under his guidance. But the
distinction of rank between them is clear. Evidently on account of
his relation to Agamemnon, Menelaus is βασιλεύτερος, higher in mere
kingship, or more a king, than the other chiefs: Agamemnon boasts[18]
that he is greatly the superior of Achilles, or of any one else in the
army; and in the Ninth Book Achilles seems to refer with stinging, nay,
rather with slaying irony, to this claim of greater kingliness for
the Pelopids, when he rejects the offer of the hand of any one among
Agamemnon’s daughters; No! let him choose another son-in-law, who may
be worthy of him, and who is more a king than I[19];
[17] Il. ix. 297.
[18] Il. i. 186.
[19] Il. ix. 392.
ὅστις οἷ τ’ ἐπέοικε, καὶ ὃς βασιλεύτερός ἐστιν.
But although one βασιλεὺς might thus be higher than another, the rank
of the whole body of Βασιλῆες is, on the whole, well and clearly marked
off, by the consistent language of the Iliad, from all inferior ranks:
and this combination may remind us in some degree of the British
peerage, which has its own internal distinctions of grade, but which
is founded essentially upon parity, and is sharply severed from all
the other orders of the community. We shall presently see how this
proposition is made good.
It thus far appears, that we find substantially, though not very
determinately, distinguished, the following forms of larger and lesser
Greek sovereignty: