Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

We may now proceed to consider the political institutions of the kingdom of Priam, which has thus loosely been defined.

The Βασιλεὺς of the Trojans is less clearly marked, than he is among the Greeks: for (as we shall find) they had no Βουλὴ, and therefore we have not the same opportunities of seeing the members of the highest class collected for separate action in the conduct of the war. Still, however, the name is distinctly given to the following persons on the Trojan side, and to no others.

1. Priam, Il. v. 464, xxiv. 630.

2. Paris, iv. 96.

3. Rhesus, x. 435.

4. Sarpedon, xii. 319. xvi. 660.

5. Glaucus, xii. 319.

Among the Trojans, as among the Greeks, it was the custom for the kings, as they descended into the vale of years, to devolve the more active duties of kingship on their children, and to retain, perhaps only for a time, those of a sedentary character. Hence Hector at least shares with Priam the management of Assemblies, as it is he[496 - Il. ii. 808. viii. 489.] who dissolves that of the Second Book, and calls the military one of the Eighth. Hence, too, he speaks of himself as the person responsible for the burdens entailed by the war upon the Trojans. ‘I did not,’ he says to the allies, ‘bring you from your cities to multiply our numbers, but that you might defend for me the wives and children of Trojans; with this object in view, I exhaust the people for your pay and provisions[497 - Il. xvii. 223-6.].’ Hence we have Æneas leading the Dardanians, while his father Anchises nowhere appears, and, as it must be presumed, remains in his capital. Hence, while ten or twelve sons of Antenor bear arms for Troy, and two of them are the colleagues of Æneas in the command of the Dardanian contingent, their father appears among the δημογέροντες, who were chief speakers in the Assembly within the city. We do not know that Antenor was a king; more probably he held a lordship subordinate to Priam, in a relation somewhat more strict than that between Agamemnon and the Greek chieftains, and rather resembling that between Peleus and Menœtius; but the same custom of partial retirement seems to have prevailed in the case of subaltern rulers, as indeed it would be dictated by the same reasons of prudence and necessity.

The βασιλήϊς τιμὴ of Troy was not, any more than those of Greece, an absolute despotism. In Troy, as in Greece, the public affairs were discussed and settled in the Assemblies, though with differences, which will be noticed, from the Greek manner of procedure. It was in the Assembly that Iris, disguised as Polites, addressed Priam and Hector to advise a review of the army[498 - Il. ii. 795.]. And it was again in an Assembly that Antenor proposed, and that Paris refused, to give up Helen: whereupon Priam proposed the mission of Idæus to ask for a truce with a view to the burial of the dead, and the people assented to the proposal[499 - Il. vii. 379.];

οἱ δ’ ἄρα τοῦ μάλα μὲν κλύον ἠδ’ ἐπίθοντο.

It was in the Assembly, too, that those earlier proposals had been made, of which the same personage procured the defeat by corruption.

Lastly, in the Eighth Book, Hector[500 - Il. viii. 489, 542.], as we have seen, holds a military ἀγορὴ of the army by the banks of the Scamander. At this he invites them to bivouac outside the Greek rampart, and they accept his proposal by acclamation. This Assembly on the field of battle is an argument a fortiori to show, that ordinary affairs were referred among the Trojans to such meetings. We have, indeed, no detail of any Trojan Assembly except these three. But we have references to them, which give a similar view of their nature and functions. Idæus, on his return, announces to the Assembly that the truce is granted[501 - Il. vii. 414-7.]. It is plain that the restoration of Helen was debated before, as well as during the war, in the Assembly of the people; because Agamemnon slays the two sons of Antimachus on the special ground that the father had there proposed that Menelaus, if not Ulysses, should be murdered[502 - Il. xi. 138.], when they came as Envoys to Troy, for the purpose of demanding her restoration. This Antimachus was bribed by Paris, as the Poet tells us, to oppose the measure[503 - Ibid. 123.]. Again, Polydamas, in one of his speeches, charges Hector with having used him roughly, when he had ventured to differ from him in the Assemblies, upon the ground that he ought not, as a stranger to the Trojan δῆμος, to promote dissension among them[504 - Il. xii. 211-14.].

Trojan institutions do not, then, present to our view a greater elevation of the royal office. On the contrary, it is remarkable, that the title of δημογέρων, which Homer applies to the chief speakers of the Trojan Assembly, not being kings, is also used by him to describe Ilus the founder of the city[505 - Il. xi. 37.]. It is, however, possible, perhaps even likely, that this title may be applied to Ilus as a younger son, if his brother Assaracus was the eldest and the heir[506 - Il. xx. 232.].

But although it thus appears that monarchy was limited in Troy, as it was in Greece, and that public affairs were conducted in the assemblies of the people, the method and organization of these Assemblies was different in the two cases.

1. The guiding element in the Trojan government seems to have been age combined with rank; while among the Greeks, wisdom and valour were qualifications, not less available than age and rank.

2. The Greeks had the institution of a βουλὴ, which preceded and prepared matter for their Assemblies. The Trojans had not.

3. The Greeks, as we have seen, employed oratory as a main instrument of government; the Trojans did not.

4. The aged members of the Trojan royal family rendered their aid to the state, not as counsellors of Priam in private meetings, but only in the Assembly of the people.

A few words on each of these heads.

The greater weight of Age in Troy.

1. The old men who appear on the wall with Priam, in the Third Book, are really old, and not merely titular or official γέροντες; they are[507 - Il. iii. 150.],

γήραϊ δὴ πολέμοιο πεπαυμένοι.

There are no less than seven of them, besides Priam. Three are his brothers, Lampus, Clytius, Hiketaon; the others probably relatives, we know not in what precise degree: Panthous, Thymœtes, Ucalegon, Antenor. They are called collectively the Τρώων ἡγήτορες, as well as the ἀγορηταὶ ἐσθλοί; and they were manifestly habitual speakers in the Assembly.

There is nothing in the Greek life of the Homeric poems that comes near this aggregation of aged men. Now we have no evidence, that their being thus collected was in any degree owing to the war. Theano, wife of Antenor, was priestess of Minerva in Troy; which makes it most probable that he resided there habitually, and not only on account of the war.

The only group at all approaching this is, where we see Menœtius and Phœnix at the Court of Peleus; but we cannot say whether this was a permanent arrangement. Phœnix, as we know, was lord of the Dolopians, and if so, could not have been a standing assistant at the court of Peleus; we do not know that the Trojan elders held any such local position apart from Troy, even in any single case; and on the other hand, we have no knowledge whether Phœnix and Menœtius, even when at the court of Peleus, took any share in the government of his immediate dominions. The name γέροντες, as usually employed among the Greeks to describe a class, had no necessary relation to age whatever.

Of the respect paid to age in Greece, we have abundant evidence; but we find nothing like this gathering together of a body of old men to be the ordinary guides of popular deliberation in the Assemblies.

It is true that we hear by implication of both Hector and Polydamas, who were not old, as taking part in affairs: but all the indications in the Iliad go to show that Hector’s share in the government of Troy, though not limited to the mere conduct of the forces in the field, yet arose out of his military office, and probably touched only such matters as were connected with the management of the war. Polydamas evidently was treated as more or less an interloper.

But even if it were otherwise, and if the middle-aged men of high station and ability took a prominent part in affairs, the existence of this grey-headed company, with apparently the principal statesmanship of Troy in their hands, forms a marked difference from Greek manners. For in Greece at peace we have nothing akin to it; while in Greece at war upon the plain of Troy, we see the young Diomed as well as the old Nestor, and the rather young Achilles and Ajax, as well as the elderly Idomeneus, associated with the middle-aged men in the government of the army and its operations.

The absence of a Βουλὴ in Troy.

First then, I think it plain that the Trojans had no βουλὴ, for the following reasons:

1. That although we often hear of deliberations and decisions taken on the part of the Trojans, and we have instances enough of their holding assemblies of the people, yet we never find mention of a βουλὴ, or Council, in connection with them.

2. In the Second Book, Homer describes the Trojan ἀγορὴ thus (Il. ii. 788, 9):

οἱ δ’ ἀγορὰς ἀγόρευον ἐπὶ Πριάμοιο θύρῃσιν
πάντες ὁμηγερέες, ἠμὲν νέοι ἠδὲ γέροντες.

This latter line is only to be accounted for by the supposition, that Homer meant to describe a difference between the usages of the Trojans, and those of the Greeks; whose γέροντες were recognised as members of the βουλὴ, even when in the Assemblies.

Of the separate place of the Greek γέροντες in the Assemblies, we have conclusive proof from the Shield of Achilles (xviii. 497, 503):

λαοὶ δ’ εἰν ἀγορῇ ἔσαν ἄθροοι·

and afterwards,

οἱ δὲ γέροντες
εἵατ’ ἐπὶ ξεστοῖσι λίθοις, ἱερῷ ἐνὶ κύκλῳ.

And again, where the Ithacan γέροντες make way for Telemachus, as he passes to the chair of his father.

But in Troy the γέροντες (such is probably the meaning of Il. ii. 789.) have no separate function: the young and the old meet together: while in Greece, besides distinct places in the Assembly, the γέροντες had an exclusive function in the βουλὴ, at which they met separately from the young.

3. It would appear that the ἀγορὴ was with the Trojans not occasional, as with the Greeks, for great questions, but habitual. And this agrees with the description in Il. ii. 788. For when Jupiter sends Iris to Troy, she finds the people in Assembly, but apparently for no special purpose, as she immediately, in the likeness of Polites, begins to address Priam, and we do not hear of any other business. So, when Idæus came back from the Greeks, he found the Trojan Assembly still sitting. All this looks as if the entire business of administering the government rested with that body only.

I draw a similar inference from the remarkable expression in Il. ii. 788, ἀγορὰς ἀγόρευον. This seems to express that there was a standing, probably a daily, assembly of the Trojans, not formally summoned, and open to all comers, which acted as the governing body for the state. The line would then mean, not simply ‘the Trojans were holding an assembly,’ but ‘the Trojans were holding their assembly as usual.’

The names βουλευτὴς and ἀγορητὴς appear to have been merely descriptive, and not titular. Both are applied to the Trojan elders.

And so βουλαὶ, βουλεύειν, βουληφόροι, are constantly used without any, so to speak, official meaning. In Il. x. 147, the expression βουλὰς βουλεύειν can hardly mean ‘to attend the βουλὴ,’ for the singular number would be the proper term for the βουλὴ specially convoked: and I interpret it as meaning, to attend at or to hold the usual council. This is among the Greeks. Among the Trojans, in Il. x. 415-17, Dolon says,

Ἕκτωρ μὲν μετὰ τοῖσιν, ὅσοι βουληφόροι εἰσὶν,
βουλὰς βουλεύει θείου παρὰ σήματι Ἴλου,
νόσφιν ἀπὸ φλοίσβου.

Now the word βουληφόρος is applied, Il. xii. 414, to Sarpedon, as well as in xiii. 463 and elsewhere to Æneas. Neither were among the γέροντες βουλευταί. But further, it is applied, Od. ix. 112, to the ἀγορὴ itself:

τοῖσιν δ’ οὔτ’ ἀγοραὶ βουληφόροι, οὔτε θέμιστες

And therefore the word, though it means councillor in a general sense, does not mean officially member of a βουλὴ, as opposed to an ἀγορὴ or Assembly.