_a._ Nausicaa, Od. vi. 115.
_b._ Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus, Od. xi. 258; but only in the phrase
βασίλεια γυναικῶν, which seems to resemble δῖα γυναικῶν.
_c._ Arete, queen of the Phæacians, Od. xiii. 59.
_d._ Penelope, Od. xvi. 332, 7: and elsewhere.
Now it cannot be said that the use of the word is forborne in the
Iliad from the want of fit persons to bear it; for Hecuba, as the wife
of Priam, and Helen, as the wife of Paris, possibly also Andromache,
(though this is much more doubtful[34],) were all of a rank to have
received it: nor can we account for its absence by their appearing only
as Trojans; for the title of βασιλεὺς is frequently applied to Priam,
and it is likewise assigned to Paris, though to no other member of the
Trojan royal family.
[34] See inf. ‘Ilios.’
We have also two other cases in the Iliad of women who were queens of
some kind. One is that of Hypsipyle, who apparently exercised supreme
power[35] in Lemnos, but we are left to inference as to its character:
the other is the mother of Andromache[36],
[35] Il. vii. 469.
[36] Il. vi. 395-7. 425.
ἣ βασίλευεν ὑπὸ Πλάκῳ ὑληέσσῃ.
She was what we term a Queen consort, for her husband Eetion was alive
at the time. In the Odyssey we are told that Chloris, whom Neleus
married, reigned at Pylos; ἡ δὲ Πύλου βασίλευε, Od. xi. 285. In this
place the word βασιλεύειν may perhaps imply the exercise of sovereign
power. Be this as it may, the introduction of the novel title of Queen
betokens political movement.
There are other signs of advancing change in the character of kingship
discernible from the Odyssey, which will be more conveniently
considered hereafter. In the meantime, the two which are already before
us are, it will be observed, exactly in the direction we might expect
from the nature of the Trojan war, and from the tradition of Strabo. We
have before us an effort of the country amounting to a violent, and
also an unnaturally continued strain; a prolonged absence of its best
heads, its strongest arms, its most venerated authorities: wives and
young children, infants of necessity in many cases, remain at home. It
was usual no doubt for a ruler, on leaving his country, to appoint some
guardian to remain behind him, as we see from the case of Agamemnon,
(Od. iii. 267,) and from the language of Telemachus, (Od. xv. 89);
but no regent, deputy, or adviser, could be of much use in that stage
of society. Again, in every class of every community, there are boys
rapidly passing into manhood; they form unawares a new generation,
and the heat of their young blood, in the absence of vigorous and
established controul, stirs, pushes forward, and innovates. Once more,
as extreme youth, so old age likewise was ordinarily a disqualification
for war. And as we find Laertes and Peleus, and Menœtius, with Admetus,
besides probably other sovereigns whom Homer has not named to us, left
behind on this account, so there must have been many elderly men of the
class of nobles (ἀριστῆες, ἔξοχοι ἄνδρες) who obtained exemption from
actual service in the war. There is too every appearance that, in some
if not all the states of Greece, there had been those who escaped from
service on other grounds; perhaps either from belonging to the elder
race, which was more peculiarly akin to Troy, or from local jealousies,
or from the love of ease. For in Ithaca we find old men, contemporaries
and seniors of Ulysses, who had taken no part in the expedition; and
there are various towns mentioned in different parts of the poems,
which do not appear from the Catalogue to have made any contribution to
the force. Such were possibly the various places bearing the name of
Ephyre, and with higher likelihood the towns offered by Agamemnon to
be made over to Achilles[37].
[37] There is a _nexus_ of ideas attached to these towns that excites
suspicion. It would have been in keeping with the character of
Agamemnon to offer them to Achilles, on account of his having already
found he could not control them himself. No one of them appears in the
Catalogue. Nor do we hear of them in the Nineteenth Book, when the
gifts are accepted. It seems, however, just possible that the promise
by Menelaus of the hand of his daughter Hermione to Neoptolemus may
have been an acquittance of a residue of debt standing over from the
original offer of Agamemnon, out of which the seven towns appear to
have dropped by consent of all parties.
~_Disorganization caused by the War._~
Again, as Cinyres[38] the ruler of Cyprus, and Echepolus[39] the son
of Anchises, obtained exemption by means of gifts to Agamemnon, so
may others, both rulers and private individuals, have done. But the
two main causes, which would probably operate to create perturbation
in connection with the absence of the army, were, without much doubt,
first, the arrival of a new race of youths at a crude and intemperate
manhood; and secondly, the unadjusted relations in some places of the
old Pelasgian and the new Hellenic settlers. Their differences, when
the pressure of the highest established authority had been removed,
would naturally in many places spring up afresh. In conformity with
the first of these causes, the Suitors as a body are called very
commonly νεοὶ ὑπερηνορέοντες[40], ‘the domineering youths.’ And the
circumstances under which Ulysses finds himself, when he has returned
to Ithaca, appear to connect themselves also with the latter of the
above-named causes. But, whatever the reasons, it is plain that his
position had become extremely precarious. Notwithstanding his wealth,
ability, and fame, he did not venture to appeal to the people till he
had utterly destroyed his dangerous enemies; and even then it was only
by his promptitude, strength of hand, and indomitable courage, that he
succeeded in quelling a most formidable sedition.
[38] Il. xi. 20.
[39] Il. xxiii. 296.
[40] Od. ii. 324, 331, _et alibi_. The epithet is, I think, exactly
rendered by another word very difficult to translate into English, the
Italian _prepotenti_.
Nothing, then, could be more natural, than that, in the absence of the
sovereigns, often combined with the infancy of their children, the
mother should become the depositary of an authority, from which, as we
see by other instances, her sex does not appear to have excluded her:
and that if, as is probable, the instances were many and simultaneous,
this systematic character given to female rule should have its formal
result on language in the creation of the word Queen, and its twin
phrase δέσποινα, or Mistress. The extension of the word ἄνασσα from
divinities to mortals might result from a subaltern operation of the
same causes.
In the very same manner, the diminished force of authority at its
centre would increase the relative prominence of such among the nobles
as remained at home. On reaching to manhood, they would in some cases,
as in Ithaca, find themselves practically independent. The natural
result would be, that having, though on a small scale, that is to say,
so far probably as their own properties and neighbourhoods respectively
were concerned, much of the substance of sovereignty actually in
their hands, they should proceed to arrogate its name. Hence come the
βασιλῆες of Ithaca and the islands near it; some of them young men,
who had become adult since the departure of Ulysses, others of them
old, who, remaining behind him, had found their position effectively
changed, if not by the fact of his departure, yet by the prolongation
of his absence.
The relaxed use, then, of the term βασιλεὺς in the Odyssey, and the
appearance of the term βασίλεια and of others in a similar category,
need not qualify the proposition above laid down with respect to the
βασιλεὺς of the Iliad. He, as we shall see from the facts of the poem,
stands in a different position, and presents to us a living picture of
the true heroic age[41].
[41] I need hardly express my dissent from the account given of the
βασιλεὺς and ἄναξ in the note on Grote’s History of Greece, vol. II.
p. 84. There is no race in Troas called βασιλεύτατον. Every
βασιλεὺς was an ἄναξ; but many an ἄναξ was not a βασιλεύς. It is true
that an ἄναξ might be ἄναξ either of freemen or of slaves; but so he
might of houses (Od. i. 397), of fishes (Il. xiii. 28), or of dogs (Od.
xvii. 318).
~_Altered idea of the Kingly office._~
This change in the meaning of the word King was accompanied by
a corresponding change in the idea of the great office which it
betokened. It had descended from a more noble to a less noble type. I
do not mean by this that it had now first submitted to limitations. The
βασιλεὺς of the Greeks was always and essentially limited: and hence
probably it was, that the usurper of sole and indefinite power in the
state was so essentially and deeply odious to the Greeks, because it
was felt that he had plundered the people of a treasure, namely, free
government, which they and their early forefathers had possessed from
time immemorial.
It is in the Odyssey that we are first startled by meeting not only
a wider diffusion and more lax use of the name of king, but together
with this change another one; namely, a lower conception of the kingly
office. The splendour of it in the Iliad is always associated with
duty. In the simile where Homer speaks of corrupt governors, that draw
down the vengeance of heaven on a land by crooked judgments, it is
worthy of remark, that he avoids the use of the word βασιλεύς[42]:
[42] Il. xvi. 386.
ὅτε δή ῥ’ ἄνδρεσσι κοτεσσάμενος χαλεπήνῃ,
οἳ βίῃ εἰν ἀγορῇ σκολίας κρίνωσι θέμιστας.
The worst thing that is even hinted at as within the limits of
possibility, is slackness in the discharge of the office: it never
degenerates into an instrument of oppression to mankind. But in the
Odyssey, which evidently represents with fidelity the political
condition of Greece after the great shock of the Trojan war, we find
that kingship has come to be viewed by some mainly with reference to
the enjoyment of great possessions, which it implied or brought, and as
an object on that account of mere ambition. Not of what we should call
absolutely vicious ambition: it is not an absolute perversion, but it
is a clear declension in the idea, that I here seek to note
ἦ φῂς τοῦτο κάκιστον ἐν ἀνθρώποισι τετύχθαι;
οὐ μὲν γάρ τι κακὸν βασιλευέμεν· αἶψά τέ οἱ δῶ
ἀφνειὸν πέλεται, καὶ τιμηέστερος αὐτός.[43]
[43] Od. i. 391-3.
This general view of the office as one to be held for the personal
enjoyment of the incumbent, is broadly distinguished from such a
case as that in the Iliad, where Agamemnon, offering seven cities
to Achilles[44], strives to tempt him individually by a particular
inducement, drawn from his own undoubtedly rather sordid mind;
[44] Il. ix. 155.
οἵ κέ ἑ δωτίνῃσι θεὸν ὣς τιμήσουσιν.
The moral causes of this change are in a great degree traceable to the
circumstances of the war, and we seem to see how the conception above
expressed was engendered in the mind of Mentor, when he observes[45],
that it is now useless for a king to be wise and benevolent like
Ulysses, who was gentle like a father to his people, in order that,
like Ulysses, he may be forgotten: so that he may just as well be
lawless in character, and oppressive in action. The same ideas are
expressed by Minerva[46] in the very same words, at the second Olympian
meeting in the Odyssey. It would therefore thus appear, that this
particular step downwards in the character of the governments of the
heroic age was owing to the cessation, through prolonged absence,
of the influence of the legitimate sovereigns, and to consequent
encroachment upon their moderate powers.
[45] Od. ii. 230-4.
[46] Od. v. 8-12.
~_Instance of a bad King._~
And it is surely well worthy of remark that we find in this very same
poem the first exemplification of the character of a bad and tyrannical
monarch, in the person of a certain king Echetus; of whom all we know
is, that he lived somewhere upon the coast of Epirus, and that he was
the pest of all mortals that he had to do with. With great propriety,
it is the lawless Suitors who are shown to be in some kind of relation
with him; for in the Eighteenth Odyssey they threaten[47] to send Irus,
who had annoyed them in his capacity of a beggar, to king Echetus, that
he might have his nose and ears cut off, and be otherwise mutilated.
The same threat is repeated in the Twenty-first Book against Ulysses
himself, and the line that conveys it reappears as one of the Homeric
_formulæ_[48];
[47] Od. xviii. 83-6 and 114.
[48] Od. xxi. 308.
εἰς Ἔχετον βασιλῆα, βροτῶν δηλήμονα πάντων.
Probably this Echetus was a purchaser of slaves. It is little likely
that the Suitors would have taken the trouble of sending Irus away,
rather than dispose of him at home, except with the hope of a price; as
they suggest to Telemachus to ship off Theoclymenus and Ulysses (still
disguised) to the Sicels, among whom they will sell well[49].
[49] Od. xx. 382, 3.
~_Kingship in the age of Hesiod._~
The kingship, of which the features were so boldly and fairly defined
in the Homeric age, soon passed away; and was hardly to be found
represented by any thing but its φθορὰ, the τυραννὶς or despotism,
which neither recognised limit nor rested upon reverence or upon usage,
but had force for its foundation, was essentially absolute, and could
not, according to the conditions of our nature, do otherwise than
rapidly and ordinarily degenerate into the positive vices, which have
made the name of tyrant ‘a curse and a hissing’ over the earth. In
Hesiod we find what Homer nowhere furnishes; an odious epithet attached
to the whole class of kings. The θεῖοι βασιλῆες of the heroic age have
disappeared: they are now sometimes the αἰδοῖοι still, but sometimes
the δωρόφαγοι, the gift-greedy, instead. They desire that litigation
should increase, for the sake of the profits that it brings them[50];
[50] Hesiod Ἔργ. i. 39. 258. cf. 262.
μέγα κυδαίνων βασιλῆας
δωροφάγους, οἳ τήνδε δίκην ἐθέλουσι δικάσσαι.
The people has now to expiate the wickedness of these corrupted kings;
ὀφρ’ ἀποτίσῃ
δῆμος ἀτασθαλίας βασιλέων·
A Shield of Achilles, manufactured after the fashion of the Hesiodic
age, would not have given us, for the pattern of a king, one who stood
smiling in his fields behind his reapers as they felled the corn[51].
Yet while Hesiod makes it plain that he had seen kingship degraded
by abuse, he has also shown us, that his age retained the ideas both
that justice was its duty, and that persuasion was the grand basis of
its power. For, as he says in one of his few fine passages[52], at
the birth of a king, the Muses pour dew upon his tongue, that he may
have the gift of gentle speech, and may administer strict justice to
the people. He then, or the ancient writer who has interpolated him,
goes on to describe the work of royal oratory, in thoughts chiefly
borrowed from the poems of Homer. But the increase of wealth, and the
multiplication of its kinds through commerce, mocked the simple state
of the early kings, and tempted them into a rapacity, before which
the barriers of ancient custom gave way: and so, says Thucydides[53],
τὰ πολλὰ τυραννίδες ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι καθίσταντο, τῶν προσόδων μειζόνων
γιγνομένων. The germ of this evil is just discernible in the Agamemnon
of the Iliad: and it is marked by the epithet of Achilles, who,
when angry, still knows how to strike at the weakest point of his
character, by calling him δημόβορος βασιλεὺς[54], a king who eat up,
or impoverished, those under his command. Whether the charge was in
any great degree deserved or not, we can hardly say. Helen certainly
gives to the Achæan king a better character[55]. But however that may
be, the reproach was altogether personal to the man. The reverence due
and paid to the office must have been immense, when Ulysses, alone, and
armed only with the sceptre of Agamemnon, could stem the torrent of
the flying soldiery, and turn them back upon the place of meeting.
[51] Il. xviii. 556.
[52] Hes. Theog. 80-97.
[53] Thuc. i. 13.
[54] Il. i. 231.
[55] Il. iii. 179.
~_Veneration long adhering to the name._~
Even in the Iliad, indeed, we scarcely find the strictly patriarchal
king. The constitution of the state has ceased to be modelled in any
degree on the pattern of the family. The different classes are united
together by relations which, though undefined and only nascent, are
yet purely political. Ulysses, in his character of king, had been
gentle _as_ a father[56]; but the idea which makes the king even
metaphorically the father of his people is nowhere, I think, to
be found in Homer: it was obsolete. Ethnical, local, and dynastic
changes, often brought about by war, had effaced the peculiar traits
of patriarchal kingship, with the exception of the old title of ἄναξ
ἀνδρῶν; and had substituted those heroic monarchies which retained,
in a larger development, so much of what was best in the still older
system. As even these monarchies had begun, before the Trojan war, to
be shaken here and there, and as the Odyssey exhibits to us the state
of things when apparently their final knell had sounded, so, in the age
of Hesiod, that iron age, when Commerce had fairly settled in Greece,
and had brought forth its eldest-born child Competition[57], they had
become a thing of the past. Yet they were still remembered, and still
understood. And it might well be that, long after society had outgrown
the forms of patriarchal life, men might nevertheless cling to its
associations; and so long as those associations were represented by old
hereditary sovereignties, holding either in full continuity, or by ties
and traditions not absolutely broken, much of the spirit of the ancient
system might continue to subsist; political freedom respecting the
tree, under the shadow of which it had itself grown up.
[56] Od. ii. 47.
[57] Hesiod. Ἔργ. 17-24.
It should be easier for the English, than for the nations of most other
countries, to make this picture real to their own minds; for it is the
very picture before our own eyes in our own time and country, where
visible traces of the patriarchal mould still coexist in the national
institutions with political liberties of more recent fashion, because
they retain their hold upon the general affections.
And, indeed, there is a sign, long posterior to the account given
by Hesiod of the heroic age, and distinct also from the apparently
favourable notice by Thucydides of the πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι, which might
lead to the supposition that the old name of king left a good character
behind it. It is the reverence which continued to attend that name,
notwithstanding the evil association, which events could not fail to
establish between it and the usurpations (τυραννίδες). For when the
office of the βασιλεὺς had either wholly disappeared, as in Athens,
or had undergone essential changes, as in Sparta, so that βασιλεία no
longer appears with the philosophical analysts as one of the regular
kinds of government, but μοναρχία is substituted, still the name
remained[58], and bore for long long ages the traces of its pristine
dignity, like many another venerable symbol, with which we are loath
to part, even after we have ceased either to respect the thing it
signifies, or perhaps even to understand its significance.
[58] The title is stated to have been applied in Attica even to the
decennial archons. Tittmann, Griechische Staatsverfassungen, b. ii. p.
70.
Such is a rude outline of the history of the office. Let us now
endeavour to trace the portrait of it which has been drawn in the Iliad
of Homer.
~_Notes of Kingship in the Iliad._~
1. The class of βασιλῆες has the epithet θεῖοι, which is never used by
Homer except to place the subject of it in some special relation with
deity; as for (_a_) kings, (_b_) bards, (_c_) the two protagonists,
Achilles and Ulysses, (_d_) several of the heroes who predeceased the
war, (_e_) the herald in Il. iv. 192; who, like an ambassador in modern
times, personally represents the sovereign, and is therefore Διὸς
ἄγγελος ἠδὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν, Il. i. 334.
2. This class is marked by the exclusive application to it of the
titular epithet Διοτρεφής; which, by the relations with Jupiter which
it expresses, denotes the divine origin of sovereign power. The word
Διογενὴς has a bearing similar to that of Διοτρεφὴς, but apparently
rather less exclusive. Although at first sight this may seem singular,
and we should perhaps expect the order of the two words to be reversed,
it is really in keeping; for the gods had many reputed sons of whom
they took no heed, and to be brought up under the care of Jupiter was
therefore a far higher ascription, than merely to be born or descended
from him.
3. To the βασιλεὺς, and to no one else, is it said that Jupiter has
intrusted the sceptre, the symbol of authority, together with the
prerogatives of justice[59]. The sceptre or staff was the emblem of
regal power as a whole. Hence the account of the origin and successive
deliveries of the sceptre of Agamemnon[60]. Hence Ulysses obtained
the use of it in order to check the Greeks and bring them back to the
assembly, ii. 186. Hence we constantly hear of the sceptre as carried
by kings: hence the epithet σκηπτοῦχοι is applied to them exclusively
in Homer, and the sceptre is carried by no other persons, except by
judges, and by herald-serjeants, as their deputies.
[59] Il. ii. 205.
[60] Il. ii. 101.
4. The βασιλῆες are in many places spoken of as a class or order by
themselves; and in this capacity they form the βουλὴ or council of
the army. Thus when Achilles describes the distribution of prizes by
Agamemnon to the principal persons of the army, he says[61],
[61] Il. ix. 334.
ἄλλα δ’ ἀριστήεσσι δίδου γέρα, καὶ βασιλεῦσιν.
In this place the Poet seems manifestly to distinguish between the
class of kings and that of chiefs.
When he has occasion to speak of the higher order of chiefs who usually
met in council, he calls them the γέροντες[62], or the βασιλῆες[63]:
but when he speaks of the leaders more at large, he calls them by
other names, as at the commencement of the Catalogue, they are ἀρχοὶ,
ἡγεμόνες, or κοίρανοι: and, again, ἀριστῆες[64]. In two places, indeed,
he applies the phrase last-named to the members of that select class
of chiefs who were also kings: but there the expression is ἀριστῆες
Παναχαιῶν[65], a phrase of which the effect is probably much the same
as βασιλῆες Ἀχαιῶν: the meaning seems to be those who were chief over
all orders of the Greeks, that is to say, chiefs even among chiefs.
Thus Agamemnon would have been properly the only βασιλεὺς Παναχαιῶν.
[62] Il. ii. 53 _et alibi_.
[63] Il. xix. 309. ii. 86.
[64] Il. ii. 487, 493. xx. 303.
[65] Il. ii. 404, and vii. 327. On the force of Παναχαιοὶ, see Achæis,
or Ethnology, p. 420.
The same distinction is marked in the proceedings of Ulysses, when he
rallies the dispersed Assembly: for he addressed coaxingly,
ὅντινα μὲν βασιλῆα καὶ ἔξοχον ἄνδρα κιχείη,
whatever king _or_ leading man he chanced to overtake[66].
[66] Il. ii. 188.
5. The rank of the Greek βασιλεῖς is marked in the Catalogue by this
trait; that no other person seems ever to be associated with them on an
equal footing in the command of the force, even where it was such as to
require subaltern commanders. Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, Ulysses, the
two Ajaxes, Achilles, are each named alone. Idomeneus is named alone as
leader in opening the account of the Cretans, ii. 645, though, when he
is named again, Meriones also appears (650, 1), which arrangement seems
to point to him as only at most a quasi-colleague, and ὀπάων. Sthenelus
and Euryalus are named after Diomed (563-6), but it is expressly added,
συμπάντων δ’ ἡγεῖτο βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Διομήδης.
Thus his higher rank is not obscured. Again, we know that, in the case
of Achilles, there were five persons, each commanding ten of his fifty
ships (Il. xvi. 171), of whom no notice is taken in the Catalogue
(681-94), though it begins with a promise to enumerate all those who
were in command of the fleet (493),
ἀρχοὺς αὖ νηῶν ἐρέω νῆάς τε προπάσας;
and in the case of the Elians he names four leaders who had exactly the
same command, each over ten ships (618). It thus appears natural to
refer his silence about the five to the rank held by Achilles as a king.
So much for the notes of this class in the Iliad.
Though we are not bound to suppose, that Homer had so rigid a
definition of the class of kings before his mind as exists in the case
of the more modern forms of title, it is clear in very nearly every
individual case of a Greek chieftain of the Iliad, whether he was a
βασιλεὺς or not.
~_The Nine Greek Kings of the Iliad._~
The class clearly comprehends: