Chapter 5

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 commonlyνεοὶ 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, whateverthe 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.

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 phraseδέσποινα, or Mistress. The extension of the wordἄνασσαfrom 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 theβασιλῆεςof 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 theirposition effectively changed, if not by the fact of his departure, yet by the prolongation of his absence.

The relaxed use, then, of the termβασιλεὺςin the Odyssey, and the appearance of the termβασίλειαand of others in a similar category, need not qualify the proposition above laid down with respect to theβασιλεὺςof 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].

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. Theβασιλεὺςof 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 ofcorrupt 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 wordβασιλεύς[42]:

ὅτε δή ῥ’ ἄνδρεσσι κοτεσσάμενος χαλεπήνῃ,οἳ βίῃ εἰν ἀγορῇ σκολίας κρίνωσι θέμιστας.

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 δῶἀφνειὸν πέλεται, καὶ τιμηέστερος αὐτός.[43]

ἦ φῂς τοῦτο κάκιστον ἐν ἀνθρώποισι τετύχθαι;

οὐ μὲν γάρ τι κακὸν βασιλευέμεν· αἶψά τέ οἱ δῶ

ἀφνειὸν πέλεται, καὶ τιμηέστερος αὐτός.[43]

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;

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 weseem 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.

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 Homericformulæ[48];

εἰς Ἔχετον βασιλῆα, βροτῶν δηλήμονα πάντων.

Probably this Echetus was a purchaser of slaves. Itis 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].

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 itsφθορὰ, theτυραννὶςor 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. Theθεῖοι βασιλῆεςof the heroic age have disappeared: they are now sometimes theαἰδοῖοιstill, but sometimes theδωρόφαγοι, the gift-greedy, instead. They desire that litigation should increase, for the sake of the profits that it brings them[50];

μέγα κυδαίνων βασιλῆαςδωροφάγους, οἳ τήνδε δίκην ἐθέλουσι δικάσσαι.

μέγα κυδαίνων βασιλῆας

δωροφάγους, οἳ τήνδε δίκην ἐθέλουσι δικάσσαι.

The people has now to expiate the wickedness of these corrupted kings;

ὀφρ’ ἀποτίσῃδῆμος ἀτασθαλίας βασιλέων·

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 fieldsbehind 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 himδημόβορος 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 ofthe flying soldiery, and turn them back upon the place of meeting.

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 gentleasa 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 ofἄναξ 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.

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 theπατρικαὶ 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 theβασιλεὺςhad either wholly disappeared, as in Athens, or had undergone essential changes, as in Sparta, so thatβασιλείαno longer appears with the philosophical analysts as one of the regular kinds of government, butμοναρχίαis 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.

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 ofβασιλῆεςhas the epithetθεῖοι, 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 thereforeΔιὸς ἄγγελος ἠδὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν, Il. i. 334.

2. This class is marked by the exclusive application to it of the titular epithetΔιοτρεφής; which, by the relations with Jupiter which it expresses, denotes the divine origin of sovereign power. The wordΔιογενὴςhas a bearing similar to that ofΔιοτρεφὴς, 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 theβασιλεὺς, 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 epithetσκηπτοῦχοιis applied to themexclusively in Homer, and the sceptre is carried by no other persons, except by judges, and by herald-serjeants, as their deputies.

4. Theβασιλῆεςare in many places spoken of as a class or order by themselves; and in this capacity they form theβουλὴor council of the army. Thus when Achilles describes the distribution of prizes by Agamemnon to the principal persons of the army, he says[61],

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 theγέροντες[62], or theβασιλῆες[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 areἀρχοὶ,ἡγεμόνες, orκοίρανοι: 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 isἀριστῆες Παναχαιῶν[65], a phrase of which the effect is probably much the same asβασιλῆες 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 onlyβασιλεὺς Παναχαιῶν.

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 kingorleading man he chanced to overtake[66].

5. The rank of the Greekβασιλεῖςis 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, andὀπάων. 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 aβασιλεὺςor not.

The Nine Greek Kings of the Iliad.

The class clearly comprehends:

1. Agamemnon, Il. i. 9, and in many places.

2. Menelausfrom Il. xix. 310, 311, where they remain with Achilles, while the otherβασιλῆες, ver. 309, are sent away. Also for Ulysses, see xiv. 379; and various places in the Odyssey.3. Nestor4. Ulysses5. Idomeneus

6. Achilles, Il. i. 331. xvi. 211.7. Diomed, Il. xiv. 27, compared with 29 and 379.8. Ajax Telamonius, Il. vii. 321 connected with 344.9. Ajax, son of Oileus.

Among the indications, by which the last-named chief is shown to have been aβασιλεὺς, are those which follow. He is summoned by Agamemnon (Il. ii. 404-6) among theγέροντες ἀριστῆες Παναχαιῶν: where all the abovenamed persons appear (except Achilles), and no others. Now theγέροντεςor elders are summoned before in ver. 53 of the same book, and are called in ver. 86 theσκηπτοῦχοι βασιλῆες. Another proof of the rank of Oilean Ajax is the familiar manner in which his name is associated on terms of equality, throughout the poem, with that of Ajax Telamonius.

But the part of the poem, which supplies the most pointed testimony as a whole with respect to the composition of the class of kings, is the Tenth Book.

Here we begin with the meeting of Agamemnon and Menelaus (ver. 34). Next, Menelaus goes to call the greater Ajax and Idomeneus (53), and Agamemnon to call Nestor (54, 74). Nestor awakens Ulysses (137); and then Diomed (157), whom he sends to call Oilean Ajax, together with Meges (175). They then conjointly visit theφύλακεςor watch, commanded by Thrasymedes, Meriones, and others (ix. 80. x. 57-9). Nestor gives the watch an exhortation to be on the alert, andthen reenters within the trench, followed by the Argeian kings (194, 5);

τοὶ δ’ ἅμ’ ἕποντοἈργείων βασιλῆες, ὅσοι κεκλήατο βουλήν.

τοὶ δ’ ἅμ’ ἕποντο

Ἀργείων βασιλῆες, ὅσοι κεκλήατο βουλήν.

The force of the termβασιλῆες, as marking off a certain class, is enhanced by the lines which follow, and which tell us that with them, the kingsτοῖς δ’ ἅμα, went Meriones and Thrasymedes by special invitation (196, 7);

αὐτοὶ γὰρ κάλεον συμμητιάασθαι.

Now in this narrative it is not stated that each of the persons, who had been called, joined the company which visited the watch: but all who did join it are evidentlyβασιλῆες. But we are certain that Oilean Ajax was among them, because he is mentioned in ver. 228 as one of those in the Council, who were anxious to accompany Diomed on his enterprise.

Ajax Oileus therefore makes the ninth King on the Greek side in the Iliad.

These nine King-Chiefs, of course with the exception of Achilles, appear in every Council, and appear either absolutely or almost alone.

The line between them, and all the other chiefs, is on the whole preserved with great precision. There are, however, a very few persons, with regard to whom the question may possibly be raised whether they passed it.

Certain doubtful cases.

1. Meges, son of Phyleus, and commander of the Dulichian Epeans, was not in the first rank of warriors; for he was not one of the ten who, including Menelaus, were ready to accept Hector’s challenge[67]. Neither was he a member of the ordinary Council; but on one occasion, that of the Night-council, he is summoned. Those who attended on this occasion are also, as we haveseen, called kings[68]. And we have seen that the term has no appearance of having been loosely used: since, after saying that the kings followed Nestor to the council, it adds, that with them went Meriones and Antilochus[69].

But when Diomed proceeds to ask for a companion on his expedition, six persons are mentioned (227-32) as having been desirous to attend him. They are the two Ajaxes, Meriones, Thrasymedes, Menelaus, and Ulysses. Idomeneus and Nestor are of course excepted on account of age. It seems plain, however, that Homer’s intention was to include the whole company, with those exceptions only. He could not mean that one and one only of the able-bodied warriors present hung back. Yet Meges is not mentioned; the only one of the persons summoned, who is not accounted for. I therefore infer that Homer did not mean to represent him as having attended; and consequently he is in all likelihood not included among theβασιλῆεςby v. 195.

2. Phœnix, the tutor and friend of Achilles, is caressingly called by himΔιοτρεφὴς[70]in the Ninth Book; but the petting and familiar character of the speech, and of the whole relation between them, would make it hazardous to build any thing upon this evidence.

In the Ninth Book it may appear probable that he was among the elders who took counsel with Agamemnon about the mission to Achilles, but it is not positively stated; and, even if it were, his relation to that great chieftain would account for his having appeared there on this occasion only (Il. ix. 168). It is remarkable that, at this single juncture, Homer tells us that Agamemnon collected not simply theγέροντες, but theγέροντες ἀολλέες, as if there were persons present, who did not belong to the ordinary Council (Il. ix. 89).

Again, in the Nineteenth Book, we are told (v. 303) that theγέροντες Ἀχαιῶνassembled in the encampment of Achilles, that they might urge him to eat. He refused; and he sent away the ‘other kings;’ but there remained behind the two Atreidæ, Ulysses, Nestor, and Idomeneus, ‘and the old chariot-driving Phœnix.’ The others are mentioned without epithet, probably because they had just been described as kings; and Phœnix is in all likelihood described by these epithets, for the reason that the termβασιλῆεςwould not include him (xix. 303-12).

On the whole then, and taking into our view that Phœnix was as a lord, orἄναξ, subordinate to Peleus, and that he was a sub-commander in the contingent of Achilles, we may be pretty sure that he was not aβασιλεύς; if that word had, as has I think been sufficiently shown, a determinate meaning.

3. Though Patroclus was in the first rank of warriors he is nowhere calledβασιλεὺςorΔιοτρεφής; but onlyΔιογενὴς, which is a word apparently used with rather more latitude. The subordinate position of Menœtius, the father of Patroclus, makes it improbable that he should stand as a king in the Iliad. He appears to have been lieutenant to Achilles over the whole body of Myrmidons.

4. Eurypylus son of Euæmon[71], commander of a contingent of forty ships, and one of the ten acceptors of the challenge, is in one place addressed asΔιοτρεφής. It is doubtful whether he was meant to be exhibited as aβασιλεὺς, or whether this is a lax use of the epithet; if it is so, it forms the only exception (apart fromix. 607) to the rule established by above thirty passages of the Iliad.

Upon the whole, then the evidence of the Iliad clearly tends to show that the titleβασιλεὺςwas a definite one in the Greek army, and that it was confined to nine persons; perhaps with some slight indistinctness on the question, whether there was or was not a claim to that rank on the part of one or two persons more.

Conditions of Kingship in the Iliad.

Upon viewing the composition of the class of kings, whether we include in it or not such cases as those of Meges or Eurypylus, it seems to rest upon the combined basis of

1. Real political sovereignty, as distinguished from subaltern chiefship;2. Marked personal vigour; and3.Either,a.Considerable territorial possessions, as in the case of Idomeneus and Oilean Ajax;b.Extraordinary abilities though with small dominions, as in the case of Ulysses; or, at the least,c.Preeminent personal strength and valour, accepted in like manner as a compensation for defective political weight, as in the case of Telamonian Ajax.

1. Real political sovereignty, as distinguished from subaltern chiefship;

2. Marked personal vigour; and

3.Either,a.Considerable territorial possessions, as in the case of Idomeneus and Oilean Ajax;

b.Extraordinary abilities though with small dominions, as in the case of Ulysses; or, at the least,c.Preeminent personal strength and valour, accepted in like manner as a compensation for defective political weight, as in the case of Telamonian Ajax.

b.Extraordinary abilities though with small dominions, as in the case of Ulysses; or, at the least,

c.Preeminent personal strength and valour, accepted in like manner as a compensation for defective political weight, as in the case of Telamonian Ajax.

Although the condition of commanding considerable forces is, as we see, by no means absolute, yet, on the other hand, every commander of as large a force as fifty ships is aβασιλεὺς, except Menestheus only, an exception which probably has a meaning. Agapenor indeed has sixty ships; but then he is immediately dependent on Agamemnon. The Bœotians too have fifty; but they are divided among five leaders.

Among the bodily qualities of Homeric princes, we may first note beauty. This attribute is not, I think, pointedly ascribed in the poems to any person, except those of princely rank. It is needless to collect all the instances in which it is thus assigned. Of some of them, where the description is marked, and the persons insignificant, like Euphorbus and Nireus[72], we may be the more persuaded, that Homer was following an extant tradition. Of the Trojan royal family it is the eminent and peculiar characteristic; and it remains to an observable degree even in the case of the aged Priam[73]. Homer is careful[74]to assert it of his prime heroes; Achilles surpasses even Nireus; Ulysses possesses it abundantly, though in a less marked degree; it is expressly asserted of Agamemnon; and of Ajax, who, in the Odyssey, is almost brought into competition with Nireus for the second honours; the terms of description are, however, distinguishable one from the other.

Again, with respect to personal vigour as a condition of sovereignty, it is observed by Grote[75]that ‘an old chief, such as Peleus and Laertes, cannot retain his position.’ There appears to have been some diversity of practice. Nestor, in very advanced age, and when unable to fight, still occupies his throne. The passage quoted by Grote to uphold his assertion with respect to Peleus falls short of the mark: for it is simply an inquiry by the spirit of Achilles, whether his father is still on the throne, or has been set aside on account of age, and the question itself shows that, during the whole time of the life of Achilles, Peleus, though old, had not been known to have resigned the administration of the government. Indeed his retention of it appears to be presumed in the beautiful speech of Priam to Achilles (Il. xxiv. 486-92).

Custom of resignation in old age.

At the same time, there is sufficient evidence supplied by Homer to show, that it was the more usual custom for the sovereign, as he grew old, either to associate his son with him in his cares, or to retire. The practice of Troy, where we see Hector mainly exercising the active duties of the government—for he feeds the troops[76], as well as commands them—appears to have corresponded with that of Greece. Achilles, in the Ninth Iliad, plainly implies that he himself was not, as a general, the mere delegate of his father; since he invites Phœnix to come and share his kingdom with him.

But the duties of counsel continued after those of action had been devolved: for Priam presides in the Trojanἀγορὴ, and appears upon the walls, surrounded by theδημογέροντες, who were, apparently, still its principal speakers and its guides. And Achilles[77], when in command before Troy, still looked to Peleus to provide him with a wife.

I find a clear proof of the general custom of retirement, probably a gradual one, in the application to sovereigns of the termαἴζηοι. This word is commonly construed in Homer as meaning youths: but the real meaning of it is that which in humble life we convey by the term able-bodied; that is to say, those who are neither in boyhood nor old age, but in the entire vigour of manhood. The mistake as to the sense of the term has created difficulties about its origin, and has led Döderlein to derive it fromαἴθω, with reference, I suppose, to the heat of youth, instead of the more obvious derivation formαandζάω, expressingthe height of vital power. A single passage will, I think, suffice to show that the wordαἴζηοςhas this meaning: which is also represented in two places by the paraphrastic expressionαἰζήιος ἀνήρ[78]. In the Sixteenth Iliad, Apollo appears to Hector under the form of Asius (716):

ἀνέρι εἰσάμενος αἰζηῷ τε κρατερῷ τε.

Now the Asius in question was full brother to Hecuba, the mother of Hector and eighteen other children; and he cannot, therefore, be supposed to have been a youth. The meaning of the Poet appears clearly to be to prevent the supposition, which would otherwise have been a natural one in regard to Hector’s uncle, that this Asius, in whose likeness Apollo the unshorn appeared, was past the age of vigour and manly beauty, which is designated by the wordαἴζηος.

Force of the termαἴζηος.

There is not a single passage, where this word is used with any indication of meaning youths as contra-distinguished from mature men. But there is a particular passage which precisely illustrates the meaning that has now been given toαἴζηος. In the Catalogue we are told that Hercules carried off Astyoche[79]:

πέρσας ἄστεα πολλὰ Διοτρεφέων αἰζηῶν.

Pope renders this in words which, whatever be their intrinsic merit, are, as a translation, at once diffuse and defective:

‘Where mighty towns in ruins spread the plain,And saw their blooming warriors early slain.’

‘Where mighty towns in ruins spread the plain,

And saw their blooming warriors early slain.’

Cowper wholly omits the last half of the line, and says,

‘After full many a city laid in dust’....

Chapman, right as to the epithet, gives the erroneous meaning to the substantive:

‘Where many towns of princely youths he levelled with the ground.’

Voss, accurate as usual, appears to carry the full meaning:

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