3. The children of concubines, or of chance attachments, who were,
νόθοι, bastards.
The name νόθος with Homer, at least among the Greeks, ordinarily marks
inferiority of condition. The mothers of the four νόθοι are never
named. This may, however, be due to accident. At any rate Lycaon
appears to have the full rank of a prince: he was once ransomed with
the value of a hundred oxen, and, when again taken, he promises thrice
as much; again, in describing himself as the half-brother of Hector,
he avows nothing like spurious birth. The reference to him by Priam
explains his position more clearly, and places it beyond doubt that
Laothoe was recognised as a wife, for she brought Priam a large
dowry[445]; and if her sons be dead, says the aged king, ‘it will be
an affliction to me and to their mother.’ The language used in another
passage about Polydorus is also conclusive[446]. He is described as the
youngest and dearest of the sons of Priam, which evidently implies his
being in the fullest sense a member of the family. Again, in the palace
of Priam there were separate apartments, not for the nineteen only, but
for the fifty. Thus they seem to have included all the three classes.
So that it is probable enough that the state of illegitimacy did not
draw the same clear line as to rank in Troy, which it drew in Greece.
[445] Il. xxii. 51, 3.
[446] Il. xx. 407. xxi. 79, 95.
Laothoe, mother of Lycaon and Polydorus, was a woman of princely rank:
and when Lycaon says that Priam had many more besides her[447],
[447] Il. xxi. 88.
τοῦ δ’ ἔχε θυγατέρα Πρίαμος, πολλὰς δὲ καὶ ἄλλας,
he probably means many more of the same condition, wives and other
well-born women, who formed part of his family.
So that Homer, in all likelihood, means to describe to us the threefold
order,