Part I. ch. 2, p. 15.)

“Charlevoix observes, (says Dr. Ferguson, Essay on Civil Society, Part II. § 2, p. 145,) that the nations among whom he travelled in North America never mentioned acts of generosity or kindness under the notion of duty. They acted from affection, as they acted from appetite, without regard to its consequences. When they had done a kindness, they had gratified a desire: the business was finished, and it passed from the memory. The spirit with which they give or receive presents is the same as that which Tacitus remarks among the ancient Germans: ‘Gaudent muneribus, sed nec data imputant, nec acceptis obligantur.’ Such gifts are of little consequence, except when employed as the seal of a bargain or a treaty.”

Respecting the Morlacchi (Illyrian Sclavonians), the Abbé Fortis says (Travels in Dalmatia, pp. 55-58):—

“The hospitality of the Morlachs is equally conspicuous among the poor as among the opulent. The rich prepares a roasted lamb or sheep, and the poor, with equal cordiality, gives his turkey, milk, honey,—whatever he has. Nor is their generosity confined to strangers, but generally extends to all who are in want.... Friendship is lasting among the Morlacchi. They have even made it a kind of religious point, and tie the sacred bond at the foot of the altar. The Sclavonian ritual contains a particular benediction, for the solemn union of two male or two female friends, in presence of the whole congregation. The male friends thus united are called Pobratimi, and the females Posestreme, which means half-brothers and half-sisters. The duties of the Pobratimi are, to assist each other in every case of need and danger, to revenge mutual wrongs, etc.: their enthusiasm is often carried so far as to risk, and even lose their life.... But as the friendships of the Morlacchi are strong and sacred, so their quarrels are commonly unextinguishable. They pass from father to son, and the mothers fail not to put their children in mind of their duty to revenge their father, if he has had the misfortune to be killed, and to show them often the bloody shirt of the deceased.... A Morlach is implacable, if injured or insulted. With him, revenge and justice have exactly the same meaning, and truly it is the primitive idea, and I have been told that in Albania the effects of revenge are still more atrocious and more lasting. There, a man of the mildest character is capable of the most barbarous revenge, believing it to be his positive duty.... A Morlach who has killed another of a powerful family is commonly obliged to save himself by flight, and keep out of the way for several years. If during that time he has been fortunate enough to escape the search of his pursuers, and has got a small sum of money, he endeavors to obtain pardon and peace.... It is the custom in some places for the offended party to threaten the criminal, holding all sorts of arms to his throat, and at last to consent to accept his ransom.”

Concerning the influence of these two distinct tendencies—devoted personal friendship and implacable animosities—among the Illyrico-Sclavonian population, see Cyprien Robert, Les Slaves de la Turquie, ch. vii. pp. 42-46, and Dr. Joseph Müller, Albanien, Rumelien, und die Œsterreichisch-Montenegrenische Gränze, Prag. 1844, pp. 24-25.

“It is for the virtue of hospitality (observes Goguet, Origin of Laws, etc. vol. i. book vi. ch. iv.), that the primitive times are chiefly famed. But, in my opinion, hospitality was then exercised, not so much from generosity and greatness of soul, as from necessity. Common interest probably gave rise to that custom. In remote antiquity, there were few or no public inns: they entertained strangers, in order that they might render them the same service, if they happened to travel into their country. Hospitality was reciprocal. When they received strangers into their houses, they acquired a right of being received into theirs again. This right was regarded by the ancients as sacred and inviolable, and extended not only to those who had acquired it, but to their children and posterity. Besides, hospitality in these times could not be attended with much expense: men travelled but little. In a word, the modern Arabians prove that hospitality may consist with the greatest vices, and that this species of generosity is no decisive evidence of goodness of heart, or rectitude of manners.”

The book of Genesis, amidst many other features of resemblance to the Homeric manners, presents that of ready and exuberant hospitality to the stranger.

They are the instinctive manifestations of human sociality, standing at first alone, and for that reason appearing to possess a greater tutelary force than really belongs to them,—beneficent, indeed, in a high degree, with reference to their own appropriate period, but serving as a very imperfect compensation for the impotence of the magistrate, and for the absence of any all-pervading sympathy or sense of obligation between man and man. We best appreciate their importance when we compare the Homeric society with that of barbarians like the Thracians, who tattooed their bodies, as the mark of a generous lineage,—sold their children for export as slaves,—considered robbery, not merely as one admissible occupation among others, but as the only honorable mode of life; agriculture being held contemptible,—and above all, delighted in the shedding of blood as a luxury. Such were the Thracians in the days of Herodotus and Thucydidês: and the Homeric society forms a mean term between that which these two historians yet saw in Thrace, and that which they witnessed among their own civilized countrymen.[145]

[145] Respecting the Thracians, compare Herodot. v. 11; Thucydid. vii. 29-30. The expression of the latter historian is remarkable,—τὸ δὲ γένος τῶν Θρᾳκῶν, ὁμοῖα τοῖς μάλιστα τοῦ βαρβαρικοῦ, ~ἐν ᾧ ἂν θαρσήσῃ, φονικώτατόν ἐστι~.

Compare Herodot. viii. 116; the cruelty of the Thracian king of the Bisaltæ towards his own sons.

The story of Odysseus to Eumæus in the Odyssey (xiv. 210-226) furnishes a valuable comparison for this predatory disposition among the Thracians. Odysseus there treats the love of living by war and plunder as his own peculiar taste: he did not happen to like regular labor, but the latter is not treated in any way mean or unbecoming a freeman:—

ἔργον δέ μοι οὐ φίλον ἦεν Οὐδ᾽ οἰκωφελίη, ἥ τε τρέφει ἀγλαὰ τέκνα, etc.

When, however, among the Homeric men we pass beyond the influence of the private ties above enumerated, we find scarcely any other moralizing forces in operation. The acts and adventures commemorated imply a community wherein neither the protection nor the restraints of law are practically felt, and wherein ferocity, rapine, and the aggressive propensities generally, seem restrained by no internal counterbalancing scruples. Homicide, especially, is of frequent occurrence, sometimes by open violence, sometimes by fraud: expatriation for homicide is among the most constantly recurring acts of the Homeric poems: and savage brutalities are often ascribed, even to admired heroes, with apparent indifference. Achilles sacrifices twelve Trojan prisoners on the tomb of Patroklus, while his son Neoptolemus not only slaughters the aged Priam, but also seizes by the leg the child Astyanax (son of the slain Hector) and hurls him from one of the lofty towers of Troy.[146] Moreover, the celebrity of Autolykus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, in the career of wholesale robbery and perjury, and the wealth which it enabled him to acquire, are described with the same unaffected admiration as the wisdom of Nestôr or the strength of Ajax.[147] Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus, pillage in person, wherever they can find an opportunity, employing both force and stratagem to surmount resistance.[148] The vocation of a pirate is recognized and honorable, so that a host, when he asks his guest what is the purpose of his voyage, enumerates enrichment by indiscriminate maritime plunder as among those projects which may naturally enter into his contemplation.[149] Abduction of cattle, and expeditions for unprovoked ravage as well as for retaliation, between neighboring tribes, appear ordinary phenomena;[150] and the established inviolability of heralds seems the only evidence of any settled feeling of obligation between one community and another. While the house and property of Odysseus, during his long absence, enjoys no public protection,[151] those unprincipled chiefs, who consume his substance, find sympathy rather than disapprobation among the people of Ithaka. As a general rule, he who cannot protect himself finds no protection from society: his own kinsmen and immediate companions are the only parties to whom he can look with confidence for support. And in this respect, the representation given by Hesiod makes the picture even worse. In his emphatic denunciation of the fifth age, that poet deplores not only the absence of all social justice and sense of obligation among his contemporaries, but also the relaxation of the ties of family and hospitality.[152] There are marks of querulous exaggeration in the poem of the Works and Days; yet the author professes to describe the real state of things around him, and the features of his picture, soften them as we may, will still appear dark and calamitous. It is, however, to be remarked, that he contemplates a state of peace,—thus forming a contrast with the Homeric poems. His copious catalogue of social evils scarcely mentions liability to plunder by a foreign enemy, nor does he compute the chances of predatory aggression as a source of profit.

[146] Ilias Minor, Fragm. 7, p. 18, ed. Düntzer; Iliad, xxiii. 175. Odysseus is mentioned once as obtaining poison for his arrows (Odyss. i. 160), but no poisoned arrows are ever employed in either of the two poems.

The anecdotes recounted by the Scythian Toxaris in Lucian’s work so entitled (vol. ii. c. 36, p. 544, _seqq._ ed. Hemst.) afford a vivid picture of this combination of intense and devoted friendship between individuals, with the most revolting cruelty of manners. “You Greeks live in peace and tranquillity,” observes the Scythian,—παρ᾽ ἡμῖν δὲ συνεχεῖς οἱ πόλεμοι, καὶ ἢ ἐπελαύνομεν ἄλλοις, ἢ ὑποχωροῦμεν ἐπιόντας, ἢ συμπεσόντες ὑπὲρ νομῆς ἢ λείας μαχόμεθα· ~ἔνθα μάλιστα δεῖ φίλων ἀγαθῶν~, etc.

[147] Odyss. xxi. 397; Pherekydês, Fragm. 63, ed. Didot; Autolykus, πλεῖστα κλέπτων ἐθησαύριζεν. The Homeric Hymn to Hermês (the great patron-god of Autolykus) is a farther specimen of the admiration which might be made to attach to clever thieving.

The ἡμερόκοιτος ἀνὴρ, likely to rob the farm, is one great enemy against whom Hesiod advises precaution to be taken,—a sharp-toothed dog, well-fed, to serve as guard (Opp. Di. 604).

[148] Iliad, xi. 624; xx. 189. Odyss. iv. 81-90; ix. 40; xiv. 230; and the indirect revelation (Odyss. xix. 284), coupled with a compliment to the dexterity of Odysseus.

[149] Even in the century prior to Thucydidês, undistinguishing plunder at sea, committed by Greek ships against ships not Greek, seems not to have been held discreditable. The Phokæan Dionysius, after the ill-success of the Ionic revolt, goes with his three ships of war to Sicily, and from thence plunders Tyrrhenians and Carthaginians (Herod. vi. 17).—ληϊστὴς κατεστήκεε, Ἑλλήνων μὲν οὐδενὸς, Καρχηδονίων δὲ καὶ Τυρσηνῶν. Compare the conduct of the Phokæan settlers at Alalia in Corsica, after the conquest of Ionia by Harpagus (Herodot. i. 166).

In the treaty between the Romans and Carthaginians, made at some period subsequent to 509 B. C., it is stipulated,—Τοῦ Καλοῦ Ἀκρωτηρίου, Μαστίας, Ταρσηΐου, μὴ ληΐζεσθαι ἐπέκεινα Ῥωμαίους μηδ᾽ ἐμπορεύεσθαι, μηδὲ πόλιν κτίζειν (Polyb. iii. 24, 4). Plunder, commerce, and colonization, are here assumed as the three objects which the Roman ships would pursue, unless they were under special obligation to abstain, in reference to foreigners. This morality approaches nearer to that of the Homeric age, than to the state of sentiment which Thucydides indicates as current in his day among the Greeks.

[150] See the interesting boastfulness of Nestôr, Iliad, xi. 670-700; also Odyss. xxi. 18; Odyss. iii. 71; Thucyd. i. 5.

[151] Odyss. iv. 165, among many other passages. Telemachus laments the misfortune of his race, in respect that himself, Odysseus, and Laërtês were all only sons of their fathers: there were no brothers to serve as mutual auxiliaries (Odyss. xvi. 118).

[152] Opp. Di. 182-199:—

Οὐδὲ πατὴρ παίδεσσιν ὁμοιΐος, οὐδέ τι παῖδες, Οὐδὲ ξεῖνος ξεινοδόκῳ, καὶ ἑταῖρος ἑταίρῳ, Οὐδὲ κασίγνητος φίλος ἔσσεται, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ, Αἶψα δὲ γηράσκοντας ἀτιμήσουσι τοκῆας, etc.

There are two special veins of estimable sentiment, on which it may be interesting to contrast heroic and historical Greece, and which exhibit the latter as an improvement on the former, not less in the affections than in the intellect.

The law of Athens was peculiarly watchful and provident with respect both to the persons and the property of orphan minors; but the description given in the Iliad of the utter and hopeless destitution of the orphan boy, despoiled of his paternal inheritance, and abandoned by all the friends of his father, whom he urgently supplicates, and who all harshly cast him off, is one of the most pathetic morsels in the whole poem.[153] In reference again to the treatment of the dead body of an enemy we find all the Greek chiefs who come near (not to mention the conduct of Achilles himself) piercing with their spears the corpse of the slain Hectôr, while some of them even pass disgusting taunts upon it. We may add, from the lost epics, the mutilation of the dead bodies of Paris and Deiphobus by the hand of Menelaus.[154] But at the time of the Persian invasion, it was regarded as unworthy of a right-minded Greek to maltreat in any way the dead body of an enemy, even where such a deed might seem to be justified on the plea of retaliation. After the battle of Platæa, a proposition was made to the Spartan king Pausanias, to retaliate upon the dead body of Mardonius the indignities which Xerxês had heaped upon that of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. He indignantly spurned the suggestion, not without a severe rebuke, or rather a half-suppressed menace, towards the proposer: and the feeling of Herodotus himself goes heartily along with him.[155]

[153] Iliad, xxii. 487-500. Hesiod dwells upon injury to orphan children, however, as a heinous offence (Opp. Di. 330).

[154] Iliad, xxii. 371. οὐδ᾽ ἄρα οἵ τις ἀνούτητί γε παρέστη. Argument of Iliad. Minor. ap. Düntzer, Epp. Fragm. p. 17; Virgil, Æneid, vi. 520.

Both Agamemnôn and the Oiliad Ajax cut off the heads of slain warriors, and send them rolling like a ball or like a mortar among the crowd of warriors (Iliad, xi. 147; xiii. 102).

The ethical maxim preached by Odysseus in the Odyssey, not to utter boastful shouts over a slain enemy (Οὐκ ὁσίη, κταμένοισιν ἐπ᾽ ἀνδράσιν εὐχετάασθαι, xxii. 412), is abundantly violated in the Iliad.

[155] Herodot. ix. 78-79. Contrast this strong expression from Pausanias, with the conduct of the Carthaginians towards the end of the Peloponnesian war, after their capture of Selinus in Sicily, where, after having put to death 16,000 persons, they mutilated the dead bodies,—κατὰ τὸ πάτριον ἔθος (Diodôr. xiii. 57-86).

The different manner of dealing with homicide presents a third test, perhaps more striking yet, of the change in Grecian feelings and manners during the three centuries preceding the Persian invasion. That which the murderer in the Homeric times had to dread, was, not public prosecution and punishment, but the personal vengeance of the kinsmen and friends of the deceased, who were stimulated by the keenest impulses of honor and obligation to avenge the deed, and were considered by the public as specially privileged to do so.[156] To escape from this danger, he is obliged to flee the country, unless he can prevail upon the incensed kinsmen to accept of a valuable payment (we must not speak of coined money, in the days of Homer) as satisfaction for their slain comrade. They may, if they please, decline the offer, and persist in their right of revenge; but if they accept, they are bound to leave the offender unmolested, and he accordingly remains at home without farther consequences. The chiefs in agora do not seem to interfere, except to insure payment of the stipulated sum.

[156] The Mosaic law recognizes this habit and duty on the part of the relatives of the murdered man, and provides cities of refuge for the purpose of sheltering the offender in certain cases (Deuteron. xxxv. 13-14; Bauer, Handbuch der Hebraïschen Alterthümer, sect. 51-52).

The relative who inherited the property of a murdered man was specially obliged to avenge his death (H. Leo, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte des Jüdischen Staats.—Vorl. iii. p. 35).

Here we recognize once more the characteristic attribute of the Grecian heroic age,—the omnipotence of private force, tempered and guided by family sympathies, and the practical nullity of that collective sovereign afterwards called _The City_,—who in historical Greece becomes the central and paramount source of obligation, but who appears yet only in the background, as a germ of promise for the future. And the manner in which, in the case of homicide, that germ was developed into a powerful reality, presents an interesting field of comparison with other nations.

For the practice, here designated, of leaving the party guilty of homicide to compromise by valuable payment with the relatives of the deceased, and also of allowing to the latter a free choice whether they would accept such compromise or enforce their right of personal revenge,—has been remarked in many rude communities, but is particularly memorable among the early German tribes.[157] Among the many separate Teutonic establishments which rose upon the ruins of the Western Empire of Rome, the right as well as duty of private revenge, for personal injury or insult offered to any member of a family,—and the endeavor to avert its effects by means of a pecuniary composition levied upon the offender, chiefly as satisfaction to the party injured, but partly also as perquisite to the king,—was adopted as the basis of their legislation. This fundamental idea was worked out in elaborate detail as to the valuation of the injury inflicted, wherein one main circumstance was the rank, condition, and power of the sufferer. The object of the legislator was to preserve the society from standing feuds, but at the same time to accord such full satisfaction as would induce the injured person to waive his acknowledged right of personal revenge,—the full luxury of which, as it presented itself to the mind of an Homeric Greek, may be read in more than one passage of the Iliad.[158] The German codes begin by trying to bring about the acceptance of a fixed pecuniary composition as a constant voluntary custom, and proceed ultimately to enforce it as a peremptory necessity: the idea of society is at first altogether subordinate, and its influence passes only by slow degrees from amicable arbitration into imperative control.

[157] “Suscipere tam inimicitias, seu patris, seu propinqui, quam amicitias, necesse est. Nec implacabiles durant: luitur enim etiam homicidium certo pecorum armentorumque numero, recipitque satisfactionem universa domus.” (Tacit. German. 21.) Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, p. 32.

“An Indian feast (says Loskiel, Mission of the United Brethren in North America,) is seldom concluded without bloodshed. For the murder of a man one hundred yards of wampum, and for that of a woman two hundred yards, must be paid by the murderer. If he is too poor, which is commonly the case, and his friends cannot or will not assist him, he must fly from the resentment of the relations.”

Rogge (Gerichtswesen der Germanen, capp. 1, 2, 3), Grimm (Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer, book v. cap. 1-2), and Eichhorn (Deutsches Privat-Recht. sect. 48) have expounded this idea, and the consequences deduced from it among the ancient Germans.

Aristotle alludes, as an illustration of the extreme silliness of ancient Greek practices (εὐήθη πάμπαν), to a custom which he states to have still continued at the Æolic Kymê, in cases of murder. If the accuser produced in support of his charge a certain number of witnesses from his own kindred, the person was held peremptorily guilty,—οἷον ἐν Κύμῃ περὶ τὰ φονικὰ νόμος ἔστιν, ἂν πλῆθός τι παράσχηται μαρτύρων ὁ διώκων τὸν φόνον τῶν αὑτοῦ συγγενῶν, ἔνοχον εἶναι τῷ φόνῳ τὸν φεύγοντα (Polit. ii. 5, 12). This presents a curious parallel with the old German institution of the Eideshelfern, or conjurators, who, though most frequently required and produced in support of the party accused, were yet also brought by the party accusing. See Rogge, sect. 36, p. 186; Grimm, p. 862.

[158] The word ποινὴ indicates this _satisfaction by valuable payment_ for wrong done, especially for homicide: that the Latin word _pœna_ originally meant the same thing, may be inferred from the old phrases _dare pœnas, pendere pœnas_. The most illustrative passage in the Iliad is that in which Ajax, in the embassy undertaken to conciliate Achilles, censures by comparison the inexorable obstinacy of the latter in setting at naught the proffered presents of Agamemnôn (Il. ix. 627):—

Νηλής· καὶ μὲν τίς τε κασιγνήτοιο φόνοι Ποινὴν, ἢ οὗ παιδὸς ἐδέξατο τεθνειῶτος· Καί ῥ᾽ ὁ μὲν ἐν δήμῳ μένει αὐτοῦ, πολλ᾽ ἀποτίσας· Τοῦ δέ τ᾽ ἐρητύεται κραδίη καὶ θύμος ἀγήνωρ, Ποινὴν δεξαμένου....

The ποινὴ is, in its primitive sense, a genuine payment in valuable commodities serving as compensation (Iliad, iii. 290; v. 266; xiii. 659): but it comes by a natural metaphor to signify the death of one or more Trojans, as a satisfaction for that of a Greek warrior who had just fallen (or _vice versâ_, Iliad, xiv. 483; xvi. 398); sometimes even the notion of compensation generally (xvii. 207). In the representation on the shield of Achilles, the genuine proceeding about ποινὴ clearly appears: the question there tried is, whether the payment stipulated as satisfaction for a person slain, has really been made or not,—δύο δ᾽ ἄνδρες ἐνείκεον εἵνεκα ποινῆς Ἀνδρὸς ἀποφθιμένου, etc. (xviii. 498.)

The danger of an act of homicide is proportioned to the number and power of the surviving relatives of the slain; but even a small number is sufficient to necessitate flight (Odyss. xxiii. 120): on the other hand, a large body of relatives was the grand source of encouragement to an insolent criminal (Odyss. xviii. 141).

An old law of Tralles in Lydia, enjoining a nominal ποινὴ of a medimnus of beans to the relatives of a murdered person belonging to a contemptible class of citizens, is noticed by Plutarch, Quæst. Græc. c. 46, p. 302. Even in the century preceding Herodotus, too, the Delphians gave a ποινὴ as satisfaction for the murder of the fabulist Æsop; which ποινὴ was claimed and received by the grandson of Æsop’s master (Herodot. ii. 134. Plutarch. Ser. Num. Vind. p. 556).

The Homeric society, in regard to this capital point in human progression, is on a level with that of the German tribes as described by Tacitus. But the subsequent course of Grecian legislation takes a direction completely different from that of the German codes: the primitive and acknowledged right of private revenge (unless where bought off by pecuniary payment), instead of being developed into practical working, is superseded by more comprehensive views of a public wrong requiring public intervention, or by religious fears respecting the posthumous wrath of the murdered person. In historical Athens, this right of private revenge was discountenanced and put out of sight, even so early as the Drakonian legislation,[159] and at last restricted to a few extreme and special cases; while the murderer came to be considered, first as having sinned against the gods, next as having deeply injured the society, and thus at once as requiring absolution and deserving punishment. On the first of these two grounds, he is interdicted from the agora and from all holy places, as well as from public functions, even while yet untried and simply a suspected person; for if this were not done, the wrath of the gods would manifest itself in bad crops and other national calamities. On the second ground, he is tried before the council of Areiopagus, and if found guilty, is condemned to death, or perhaps to disfranchisement and banishment.[160] The idea of a propitiatory payment to the relatives of the deceased has ceased altogether to be admitted: it is the protection of society which dictates, and the force of society which inflicts, a measure of punishment calculated to deter for the future.

[159] See Lysias, De Cæde Eratosthen. Orat. i. p. 94; Plutarch. Solon, c. 23; Demosthen. cont. Aristokrat. pp. 632-637.

Plato (De Legg. ix. pp. 871-874), in his copious penal suggestions to deal with homicide, both intentional and accidental, concurs in general with the old Attic law (see Matthiæ, Miscellanea Philologica, vol. i. p. 151): and as he states with sufficient distinctness the grounds of his propositions, we see how completely the idea of a right to private or family revenge is absent from his mind. In one particular case, he confers upon kinsmen the privilege of avenging their murdered relative (p. 871); but generally, he rather seeks to enforce upon them strictly the duty of bringing the suspected murderer to trial before the court. By the Attic law, it was only the kinsmen of the deceased who had the right of prosecuting for murder,—or the master, if the deceased was an οἰκέτης (Demosthen. cont. Euerg. et Mnesibul. c. 18); they might by forgiveness shorten the term of banishment for the unintentional murderer (Demosth. cont. Makart. p. 1069). They seem to have been regarded, generally speaking, as religiously obliged, but not legally compellable, to undertake this duty; compare Plato, Euthyphro, capp. 4 and 5.

[160] Lysias, cont. Agorat. Or. xiii. p. 137. Antiphon. Tetralog. i. 1, p. 629. Ἀσύμφορον δ᾽ ὑμῖν ἐστὶ τόνδε, μιαρὸν καὶ ἄναγνον ὄντα, εἰς τὰ τεμένη τῶν θεῶν εἰσιόντα μιαίνειν τὴν ἅγνειαν αὐτῶν, ἐπὶ δὲ τὰς αὐτὰς τραπέζας ἰόντα συγκαταπιμπλάναι τοὺς ἀναιτίους· ἐκ γὰρ τούτωον αἵ τε ἀφορίαι γίνονται, δυστυχεῖς θ᾽ αἱ πράξεις καθίστανται.

The three Tetralogies of Antipho are all very instructive respecting the legal procedure in cases of alleged homicide: as also the Oration De Cæde Herodis (see capp. 1 and 2)—τοῦ νόμου κειμένου, τὸν ἀποκτείναντα ἀνταποθανεῖν, etc.

The case of the Spartan Drakontius, one of the Ten Thousand Greeks who served with Cyrus the younger, and permanently exiled from his country in consequence of an involuntary murder committed during his boyhood, presents a pretty exact parallel to the fatal quarrel of Patroklus at dice, when a boy, with the son of Amphidamas, in consequence of which he was forced to seek shelter under the roof of Pêleus (compare Iliad, xxiii. 85, with Xenoph. Anabas. iv. 8, 25).

3. The society of legendary Greece includes, besides the chiefs, the general mass of freemen (λαοί), among whom stand out by special names certain professional men, such as the carpenter, the smith, the leather-dresser, the leech, the prophet, the bard, and the fisherman.[161] We have no means of appreciating their condition. Though lots of arable land were assigned in special property to individuals, with boundaries both carefully marked and jealously watched,[162] yet the larger proportion of surface was devoted to pasture. Cattle formed both the chief item in the substance of a wealthy man, the chief means of making payments, and the common ground of quarrels,—bread and meat, in large quantities, being the constant food of every one.[163] The estates of the owners were tilled, and their cattle tended, mostly by bought slaves, but to a certain degree also by poor freemen called Thêtes, working for hire and for stated periods. The principal slaves, who were intrusted with the care of large herds of oxen, swine, or goats, were of necessity men worthy of confidence, their duties placing them away from their master’s immediate eye.[164] They had other slaves subordinate to them, and appear to have been well-treated: the deep and unshaken attachment of Eumæus the swineherd and Philœtius the neatherd to the family and affairs of the absent Odysseus, is among the most interesting points in the ancient epic. Slavery was a calamity, which in that period of insecurity might befall any one: the chief who conducted a freebooting expedition, if he succeeded, brought back with him a numerous troop of slaves, as many as he could seize,[165]—if he failed, became very likely a slave himself: so that the slave was often by birth of equal dignity with his master: Eumæus was himself the son of a chief, conveyed away when a child by his nurse, and sold by Phœnician kidnappers to Laërtês. A slave of this character, if he conducted himself well, might often expect to be enfranchised by his master and placed in an independent holding.[166]

[161] Odyss. xvii. 384; xix. 135. Iliad, iv. 187; vii. 221. I know nothing which better illustrates the idea of the Homeric δημιοεργοί,—the herald, the prophet, the carpenter, the leech, the bard, etc.,—than the following description of the structure of an East Indian village (Mill’s History of British India, b. ii. c. 5, p. 266): “A village, politically considered, resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of _officers and servants_ consists of the following descriptions: the potail, or head inhabitant, who settles disputes and collects the revenue, etc.; the curnum, who keeps the accounts of cultivation, etc.; the tallier; the boundary-man; the superintendent of tanks and water-courses; the Brahman, who performs the village worship; the schoolmaster; the calendar Brahman, or astrologer, who proclaims the lucky or unpropitious periods for sowing or thrashing; the smith and carpenter; the potter; the washerman; the barber; the cowkeeper; the doctor; the dancing-girl, who attends at rejoicings; the musician, and the poet.”

Each of these officers and servants (δημιοεργοί) is remunerated by a definite perquisite—so much landed produce—out of the general crop of the village (p. 264).

[162] Iliad, xii. 421; xxi. 405.

[163] Iliad, i. 155; ix. 154; xiv. 122.

[164] Odysseus and other chiefs of Ithaka had oxen, sheep, mules, etc., on the continent and in Peloponnêsus, under the care of herdsmen (Odyss. iv. 636; xiv. 100).

Leukanor, king of Bosporus, asks the Scythian Arsakomas—Πόσα δὲ βοσκήματα, ἢ πόσας ἁμάξας ἔχεις, ταῦτα γὰρ ὑμεῖς πλουτεῖτε; (Lucian, Toxaris, c. 45.) The enumeration of the property of Odysseus would have placed the βοσκήματα in the front line.

[165] Δμωαὶ δ᾽ ἃς Ἀχιλεὺς ~ληΐσσατο~ (Iliad, xviii. 28: compare also Odyss. i. 397; xxiii. 357; particularly xvii. 441).

[166] Odyss. xiv. 64; xv. 412; see also xix. 78: Eurykleia was also of dignified birth (i. 429). The questions put by Odysseus to Eumæus, to which the speech above referred to is an answer, indicate the proximate causes of slavery: “Was the city of your father sacked? or were you seized by pirates when alone with your sheep and oxen?” (Odyss. xv. 385.)

Eumæus had purchased a slave for himself (Odyss. xiv. 448).

On the whole, the slavery of legendary Greece does not present itself as existing under a peculiarly harsh form, especially if we consider that all the classes of society were then very much upon a level in point of taste, sentiment, and instruction.[167] In the absence of legal security or an effective social sanction, it is probable that the condition of a slave under an average master, may have been as good as that of the free Thête. The class of slaves whose lot appears to have been the most pitiable were the females,—more numerous than the males, and performing the principal work in the interior of the house. Not only do they seem to have been more harshly treated than the males, but they were charged with the hardest and most exhausting labor which the establishment of a Greek chief required: they brought in water from the spring, and turned by hand the house-mills, which ground the large quantity of flour consumed in his family.[168] This oppressive task was performed generally by female slaves, in historical as well as legendary Greece.[169] Spinning and weaving was the constant occupation of women, whether free or slave, of every rank and station: all the garments worn both by men and women were fashioned at home, and Helen as well as Penelopê is expert and assiduous at the occupation.[170] The daughters of Keleos at Eleusis go to the well with their basins for water, and Nausikaa, daughter of Alkinous,[171] joins her female slaves in the business of washing her garments in the river. If we are obliged to point out the fierceness and insecurity of an early society, we may at the same time note with pleasure its characteristic simplicity of manners: Rebecca, Rachel, and the daughters of Jethro, in the early Mosaic narrative, as well as the wife of the native Macedonian chief (with whom the Temenid Perdiccas, ancestor of Philip and Alexander, first took service on retiring from Argos), baking her own cakes on the hearth,[172] exhibit a parallel in this respect to the Homeric pictures.

[167] Tacitus, Mor. Germ. 21. “Dominum ac servum nullis educationis deliciis dignoscas: inter eadem pecora, in eâdem humo, degunt,” etc. (Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 167.)

[168] Odyss. vii. 104; xx. 116; Iliad vi. 457; compare the Book of Genesis, ch. xi. 5. The expression of Telemachus, when he is proceeding to hang up the female slaves who had misbehaved, is bitterly contemptuous:—

Μὴ μὲν δὴ ~καθαρῷ θανάτῳ~ ἀπὸ θυμὸν ἑλοίμην Τάων, etc. (Odyss. xxii. 464.)

The humble establishment of Hesiod’s farmer does not possess a mill; he has nothing better than a wooden pestle and mortar for grinding or bruising the corn; both are constructed, and the wood cut from the trees, by his own hand (Opp. Di. 423), though it seems that a professional carpenter (“the servant of Athênê,”) is required to put together the plough (v. 430). The Virgilian poem _Moretum_, (v. 24,) assigns a hand-mill even to the humblest rural establishment. The instructive article “Corn Mills,” in Beckmann’s Hist. of Inventions (vol. i. p. 227, Eng. transl.), collects all the information available about this subject.

[169] See Lysias, Or. 1, p. 93 (De Cæde Eratosthenis). Plutarch (Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum, c. 21, p. 1101),—~Παχυσκελὴς~ ἀλετρὶς πρὸς μύλην κινουμένη,—and Kallimachus, (Hymn. ad Delum, 242,)—μηδ᾽ ὅθι δειλαὶ Δυστοκέες μογέουσιν ἀλετρίδες,—notice the overworked condition of these women.

The “grinding slaves” (ἀλετρίδες) are expressly named in one of the Laws of Ethelbert, king of Kent, and constitute the second class in point of value among the female slaves (Law xi. Thorpe’s Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, vol. i. p. 7).

[170] Odyss. iv. 131; xix. 235.

[171] Odyss. vi. 96; Hymn, ad Dêmêtr. 105.

[172] Herodot. viii. 137.

We obtain no particulars respecting either the common freemen generally, or the particular class of them called Thêtes. These latter, engaged for special jobs, or at the harvest and other busy seasons of field labor, seem to have given their labor in exchange for board and clothing: they are mentioned in the same line with the slaves,[173] and were (as has been just observed) probably on the whole little better off. The condition of a poor freeman in those days, without a lot of land of his own, going about from one temporary job to another, and having no powerful family and no social authority to look up to for protection, must have been sufficiently miserable. When Eumæus indulged his expectation of being manumitted by his masters, he thought at the same time that they would give him a wife, a house, and a lot of land near to themselves;[174] without which collateral advantages, simple manumission might perhaps have been no improvement in his condition. To be Thête in the service of a very poor farmer is selected by Achilles as the maximum of human hardship: such a person could not give to his Thête the same ample food, and good shoes and clothing, as the wealthy chief Eurymachus, while he would exact more severe labor.[175] It was probably among such smaller occupants, who could not advance the price necessary to purchase slaves, and were glad to save the cost of keep when they did not need service, that the Thêtes found employment: though we may conclude that the brave and strong amongst these poor freemen found it preferable to accompany some freebooting chief and to live by the plunder acquired.[176] The exact Hesiod advises his farmer, whose work is chiefly performed by slaves, to employ and maintain the Thête during summer-time, but to dismiss him as soon as the harvest is completely got in, and then to take into his house for the winter a woman “without any child;” who would of course be more useful than the Thête for the indoor occupations of that season.[177]

[173] Odyss. iv. 643.

[174] Odyss. xiv. 64.

[175] Compare Odyss. xi. 490, with xviii. 358. Klytæmnêstra, in the _Agamemnôn_ of Æschylus, preaches a something similar doctrine to Kassandra,—how much kinder the ἀρχαιόπλουτοι δεσποταὶ were towards their slaves, than masters who had risen by unexpected prosperity (Agamemn. 1042).

[176] Thucydid. i. 5, ἐτράποντο πρὸς λῄστειαν, ἡγουμένων ἀνδρῶν οὐ τῶν ἀδυνατωτάτων, κέρδους τοῦ σφετέρου αὐτῶν ἕνεκα, καὶ τοῖς ἀσθενέσι τροφῆς.

[177] Hesiod, Opp. Di. 459—ἐφορμηθῆναι, ὁμῶς δμῶές τε καὶ αὐτὸς—and 603:—

... Αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δὴ Πάντα βίον κατάθηαι ἐπήρμενον ἔνδοθι οἴκου, Θῆτά τ᾽ ἄοικον ποιεῖσθαι, καὶ ἄτεκνον ἔριθον Δίζεσθαι κέλομαι· χαλεπὴ δ᾽ ὑπόπορτις ἔριθος.

The two words ~ἄοικον ποιεῖσθαι~ seem here to be taken together in the sense of “dismiss the Thête,” or “make him houseless;” for when put out of his employer’s house, he had no residence of his own. Göttling (_ad loc._), Nitzsch (ad Odyss. iv. 643), and Lehrs (Quæst. Epic. p. 205) all construe ἄοικον with θῆτα, and represent Hesiod as advising that the houseless Thête should be at that moment _taken on_, just at the time when the summer’s work was finished. Lehrs (and seemingly Göttling also), sensible that this can never have been the real meaning of the poet, would throw out the two lines as spurious. I may remark farther that the translation of θὴς given by Göttling—_villicus_—is inappropriate: it includes the idea of superintendence over other laborers, which does not seem to have belonged to the Thête in any case.

There were a class of poor free women who made their living by taking in wool to spin and perhaps to weave: the exactness of their dealing, as well as the poor profit which they made, are attested by a touching Homeric simile (Iliad, xiii. 434). See Iliad, vi. 289; xxiii. 742. Odyss. xv. 414.

In a state of society such as that which we have been describing, Grecian commerce was necessarily trifling and restricted. The Homeric poems mark either total ignorance or great vagueness of apprehension respecting all that lies beyond the coasts of Greece and Asia Minor, and the islands between or adjoining them. Libya and Egypt are supposed so distant as to be known only by name and hearsay: indeed, when the city of Kyrene was founded, a century and a half after the first Olympiad, it was difficult to find anywhere a Greek navigator who had ever visited the coast of Libya, or was fit to serve as guide to the colonists.[178] The mention of the Sikels in the Odyssey,[179] leads us to conclude that Korkyra, Italy, and Sicily were not wholly unknown to the poet: among seafaring Greeks, the knowledge of the latter implied the knowledge of the two former,—since the habitual track, even of a well-equipped Athenian trireme during the Peloponnesian war, from Peloponnêsus to Sicily, was by Korkyra and the Gulf of Tarentum. The Phokæans, long afterwards, were the first Greeks who explored either the Adriatic or Tyrrhenian sea.[180] Of the Euxine sea no knowledge is manifested in Homer, who, as a general rule, presents to us the names of distant regions only in connection with romantic or monstrous accompaniments. The Kretans, and still more the Taphians (who are supposed to have occupied the western islands off the coast of Acarnania), are mentioned as skilful mariners, and the Taphian Mentês professes to be conveying iron to Temesa to be there exchanged for copper;[181] but both Taphians and Kretans are more corsairs than traders.[182] The strong sense of the dangers of the sea, expressed by the poet Hesiod, and the imperfect structure of the early Grecian ship, attested by Thucydidês (who points out the more recent date of that improved ship-building which prevailed in his time), concur to demonstrate the then narrow range of nautical enterprise.[183]

[178] Herodot. iv. 151. Compare Ukert, Geographie der Griechen und Römer, part i. pp. 16-19.

[179] Odyss. xx. 383; xxiv. 210. The identity of the Homeric Scheria with Korkyra, and that of the Homeric Thrinakia with Sicily, appear to me not at all made out. Both Welcker and Klausen treat the Phæakians as purely mythical persons (see W. C. Müller, De Corcyræorum Republicâ, Götting. 1835, p. 9).

[180] Herodot. i. 163.

[181] Nitzsch. ad Odyss. i. 181; Strabo, i. p. 6. The situation of Temesa, whether it is to be placed in Italy or in Cyprus, has been a disputed point among critics, both ancient and modern.

[182] Odyss. xv. 426. Τάφιοι, ληΐστορες ἄνδρες; and xvi. 426. Hymn to Dêmêtêr, v. 123.

[183] Hesiod. Opp. Di. 615-684; Thucyd. i. 13.

Such was the state of the Greeks, as traders, at a time when Babylon combined a crowded and industrious population with extensive commerce, and when the Phœnician merchant-ships visited in one direction the southern coast of Arabia, perhaps even the island of Ceylon,—in another direction, the British islands.

The Phœnician, the kinsman of the ancient Jew, exhibits the type of character belonging to the latter,—with greater enterprise and ingenuity, and less of religious exclusiveness, yet still different from, and even antipathetic to, the character of the Greeks. In the Homeric poems, he appears somewhat like the Jew of the Middle Ages, a crafty trader, turning to profit the violence and rapacity of others,—bringing them ornaments, decorations, the finest and brightest products of the loom, gold, silver, electrum, ivory, tin, etc., in exchange for which he received landed produce, skins, wool, and slaves, the only commodities which even a wealthy Greek chief of those early times had to offer,—prepared at the same time for dishonest gain, in any manner which chance might throw in his way.[184] He is, however, really a trader, not undertaking expeditions with the deliberate purpose of surprise and plunder, and standing distinguished in this respect from the Tyrrhenian, Kretan, or Taphian pirate. Tin, ivory, and electrum, all of which are acknowledged in the Homeric poems, were the fruit of Phœnician trade with the West as well as with the East.[185]

[184] Odyss. xiv. 290; xv. 416.—

Φοίνιξ ἦλθεν ἀνὴρ, ἀπατήλια εἰδώς, Τρώκτης, ὃς δὴ πολλὰ κάκ᾽ ἀνθρώποισιν ἐώργει.

The interesting narrative given by Eumæus, of the manner in which he fell into slavery, is a vivid picture of Phœnician dealing (compare Herodot. i. 2-4. Iliad, vi. 290; xxiii. 743). Paris is reported to have visited Sidon, and brought from thence women eminent for skill at the loom. The Cyprian Verses (see the Argument. ap. Düntzer, p. 17) affirmed that Paris had landed at Sidon, and attacked and captured the city. Taphian corsairs kidnapped slaves at Sidon (Odyss. xv. 424).

The ornaments or trinkets (ἀθύρματα) which the Phœnician merchant carries with him, seem to be the same as the δαίδαλα πολλὰ, Πόρπας τε γναμπτάς θ᾽ ἕλικας, etc. which Hêphæstus was employed in fabricating (Iliad, xviii. 400) under the protection of Thetis.

“Fallacissimum esse genus Phœnicum omnia monumenta vetustatis atque omnes historiæ nobis prodiderunt.” (Cicero, Orat. Trium. partes ineditæ, ed. Maii, 1815, p. 13.)

[185] Ivory is frequently mentioned in Homer, who uses the word ἐλέφας exclusively to mean that substance, not to signify the animal.

The art of dyeing, especially with the various shades of purple, was in after-ages one of the special excellences of the Phœnicians: yet Homer, where he alludes in a simile to dyeing or staining, introduces a Mæonian or Karian woman as the performer of the process, not a Phœnician (Iliad, iv. 141).

What the _electrum_ named in the Homeric poems really is cannot be positively determined. The word in antiquity meant two different things: 1, amber; 2, an impure gold, containing as much as one-fifth or more of silver (Pliny, H. N. xxxiii. 4). The passages in which we read the word in the Odyssey do not positively exclude either of these meanings; but they present to us electrum so much in juxtaposition with gold and silver each separately, that perhaps the second meaning is more probable than the first. Herodotus understands it to mean _amber_ (iii. 115): Sophoklês, on the contrary, employs it to designate a metal akin to gold (Antigone, 1033).

See the dissertation of Buttmann, appended to his collection of essays called _Mythologus_, vol. ii. p. 337; also, Beckmann, History of Inventions, vol. iv. p. 12, Engl. Transl. “The ancients (observes the latter) used as a peculiar metal a mixture of gold and silver, because they were not acquainted with the art of separating them, and gave it the name of _electrum_.” Dr. Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, vol. i. p. 241) thinks that the Homeric _electrum_ is amber; on the contrary, Hüllmann thinks that it was a metallic substance (Handels, Geschichte der Griechen, pp. 63-81).

Beckmann doubts whether the oldest κασσίτερος of the Greeks was really _tin_: he rather thinks that it was “the _stannum_ of the Romans, the _werk_ of our smelting-houses,—that is, a mixture of lead, silver, and other accidental metals.” (_Ibid._ p. 20). The Greeks of Massalia procured tin from Britain, through Gaul, by the Seine, the Saone, and the Rhone (Diodôr. v. 22).

Thucydidês tells us that the Phœnicians and Karians, in very early periods, occupied many of the islands of the Ægean, and we know, from the striking remnant of their mining works which Herodotus himself saw in Thasus, off the coast of Thrace, that they had once extracted gold from the mountains of that island,—at a period indeed very far back, since their occupation must have been abandoned prior to the settlement of the poet Archilochus.[186] Yet few of the islands in the Ægean were rich in such valuable products, nor was it in the usual course of Phœnician proceeding to occupy islands, except where there was an adjoining mainland with which trade could be carried on. The traffic of these active mariners required no permanent settlement, but as occasional visitors they were convenient, in enabling a Greek chief to turn his captives to account,—to get rid of slaves or friendless Thêtes who were troublesome,—and to supply himself with the metals, precious as well as useful.[187] The halls of Alkinous and Menelaus glitter with gold, copper, and electrum; while large stocks of yet unemployed metal—gold, copper, and iron—are stored up in the treasure-chamber of Odysseus and other chiefs.[188] Coined money is unknown to the Homeric age,—the trade carried on being one of barter. In reference also to the metals, it deserves to be remarked that the Homeric descriptions universally suppose copper, and not iron, to be employed for arms, both offensive and defensive. By what process the copper was tempered and hardened, so as to serve the purposes of the warrior, we do not know;[189] but the use of iron for these objects belongs to a later age, though the Works and Days of Hesiod suppose this change to have been already introduced.[190]

[186] Herodot. ii. 44; vi. 47. Archiloch. Fragm. 21-22, ed. Gaisf. Œnomaus ap. Euseb. Præp. Ev. vi. 7. Thucyd. i. 12.

The Greeks connected this Phœnician settlement in Thasus with the legend of Kadmus and his sister Eurôpa: Thasus, the eponymus of the island, was brother of Kadmus. (Herod. _ib._)

[187] The angry Laomedôn threatens when Poseidôn and Apollo ask from him (at the expiration of their term of servitude) the stipulated wages of their labor, to cut off their ears and send them off to some distant islands (Iliad, xxi. 454). Compare xxiv. 752. Odyss. xx. 383: xviii. 83.

[188] Odyss. iv. 73; vii. 85; xxi. 61. Iliad, ii. 226; vi. 47.

[189] See Millin, Minéralogie Homerique, p. 74. That there are, however, modes of tempering copper, so as to impart to it the hardness of steel, has been proved by the experiments of the Comte de Caylus.

The Massagetæ employed only copper—no iron—for their weapons (Herodot. i. 215).

[190] Hesiod, Opp. Di. 150-420. The examination of the various matters of antiquity discoverable throughout the north of Europe, as published by the Antiquarian Society of Copenhagen, recognizes a distinction of three successive ages: 1. Implements and arms of stone, bone, wood, etc.: little or no use of metals at all; clothing made of skins. 2. Implements and arms of copper and gold, or rather bronze and gold; little or no silver or iron. Articles of gold and electrum are found belonging to this age, but none of silver, nor any evidences of writing. 3. The age which follows this has belonging to it arms of iron, articles of silver, and some Runic inscriptions: it is the last age of northern paganism, immediately preceding the introduction of Christianity (Leitfaden zur Nördischen Alterthumskunde, pp. 31, 57, 63, Copenhagen, 1837).

The Homeric age coincides with the second of these two periods. Silver is comparatively little mentioned in Homer, while both bronze and gold are familiar metals. Iron also is rare, and seems employed only for agricultural purposes—Χρυσόν τε, χαλκόν τε ἅλις, ἐσθῆτα θ᾽ ὑφαντήν (Iliad, vi. 48; Odyss. ii. 338; xiii. 136). The χρυσοχόος and the χαλκεὺς are both mentioned in Homer, but workers in silver and iron are not known by any special name (Odyss. iii. 425-436).

“The hatchet, wimble, plane, and level, are the tools mentioned by Homer, who appears to have been unacquainted with the saw, the square, and the compass.” (Gillies, Hist. of Greece, chap. ii. p. 61.)

The Gauls, known to Polybius, seemingly the Cisalpine Gauls only, possessed all their property in cattle and gold,—θρέμματα καὶ χρυσὸς,—on account of the easy transportability of both (Polyb. ii. 17).

The mode of fighting among the Homeric heroes is not less different from the historical times, than the material of which their arms were composed. The Hoplites, or heavy-armed infantry of historical Greece, maintained a close order and well-dressed line, charging the enemy with their spears protended at even distance, and coming thus to close conflict without breaking their rank: there were special troops, bowmen, slingers, etc. armed with missiles, but the hoplite had no weapon to employ in this manner. The heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey, on the contrary, habitually employ the spear as a missile, which they launch with tremendous force: each of them is mounted in his war-chariot, drawn by two horses, and calculated to contain the warrior and his charioteer; in which latter capacity a friend or comrade will sometimes consent to serve. Advancing in his chariot at full speed, in front of his own soldiers, he hurls his spear against the enemy: sometimes, indeed, he will fight on foot, and hand to hand, but the chariot is usually near to receive him if he chooses, or to insure his retreat. The mass of the Greeks and Trojans, coming forward to the charge, without any regular step or evenly-maintained line, make their attack in the same way by hurling their spears. Each chief wears habitually a long sword and a short dagger, besides his two spears to be launched forward,—the spear being also used, if occasion serves, as a weapon for thrust. Every man is protected by shield, helmet, breastplate, and greaves: but the armor of the chiefs is greatly superior to that of the common men, while they themselves are both stronger and more expert in the use of their weapons. There are a few bowmen, as rare exceptions, but the general equipment and proceeding is as here described.

Such loose array, immortalized as it is in the Iliad, is familiar to every one; and the contrast which it presents, with those inflexible ranks, and that irresistible simultaneous charge which bore down the Persian throng at Platæa and Kunaxa,[191] is such as to illustrate forcibly the general difference between heroic and historical Greece. While in the former, a few splendid figures stand forward, in prominent relief, the remainder being a mere unorganized and ineffective mass,—in the latter, these units have been combined into a system, in which every man, officer and soldier, has his assigned place and duty, and the victory, when gained, is the joint work of all. Preëminent individual prowess is indeed materially abridged, if not wholly excluded,—no man can do more than maintain his station in the line:[192] but on the other hand, the grand purposes, aggressive or defensive, for which alone arms are taken up, become more assured and easy, and long-sighted combinations of the general are rendered for the first time practicable, when he has a disciplined body of men to obey him. In tracing the picture of civil society, we have to remark a similar transition—we pass from Hêraklês, Thêseus, Jasôn, Achilles, to Solon, Pythagoras, and Periklês—from “the shepherd of his people,” (to use the phrase in which Homer depicts the good side of the heroic king,) to the legislator who introduces, and the statesman who maintains, a preconcerted system by which willing citizens consent to bind themselves. If commanding individual talent is not always to be found, the whole community is so trained as to be able to maintain its course under inferior leaders; the rights as well as the duties of each citizen being predetermined in the social order, according to principles more or less wisely laid down. The contrast is similar, and the transition equally remarkable, in the civil as in the military picture. In fact, the military organization of the Grecian republics is an element of the greatest importance in respect to the conspicuous part which they have played in human affairs,—their superiority over other contemporary nations in this respect being hardly less striking than it is in many others, as we shall have occasion to see in a subsequent stage of this history.

[191] Tyrtæus, in his military expressions, seems to conceive the Homeric mode of hurling the spear as still prevalent,—δόρυ δ᾽ εὐτόλμως ~βάλλοντες~ (Fragm. ix. Gaisford). Either he had his mind prepossessed with the Homeric array, or else the close order and conjunct spears of the hoplites had not yet been introduced during the second Messenian war.

Thiersch and Schneidewin would substitute πάλλοντες in place of βάλλοντες. Euripidês (Androm. 695) has a similar expression, yet it does not apply well to hoplites; for one of the virtues of the hoplite consisted in carrying his spear steadily: δοράτων κίνησις betokens a disorderly march, and the want of steady courage and self-possession. See the remarks of Brasidas upon the ranks of the Athenians under Kleon at Amphipolis (Thucyd. v. 6).

[192] Euripid. Andromach. 696.

Even at the most advanced point of their tactics, the Greeks could effect little against a walled city, whilst the heroic weapons and array were still less available for such an undertaking as a siege. Fortifications are a feature of the age deserving considerable notice. There was a time, we are told, in which the primitive Greek towns or villages derived a precarious security, not from their walls, but merely from sites lofty and difficult of access. They were not built immediately upon the shore, or close upon any convenient landing-place, but at some distance inland, on a rock or elevation which could not be approached without notice or scaled without difficulty. It was thought sufficient at that time to guard against piratical or marauding surprise: but as the state of society became assured,—as the chance of sudden assault comparatively diminished and industry increased,—these uninviting abodes were exchanged for more convenient sites on the plain or declivity beneath; or a portion of the latter was inclosed within larger boundaries and joined on to the original foundation, which thus became the Acropolis of the new town. Thêbes, Athens, Argos, etc., belonged to the latter class of cities; but there were in many parts of Greece deserted sites on hilltops, still retaining, even in historical times, the traces of former habitation, and some of them still bearing the name of the old towns. Among the mountainous parts of Krête, in Ægina and Rhodes, in portions of Mount Ida and Parnassus, similar remnants might be perceived.[193]

[193] Ἡ παλαιὰ πόλις in Ægina (Herodot. vi. 88); Ἀστυπάλαια in Samus (Polyæn. i. 23. 2; Etymol. Magn. v. Ἀστυπάλαια): it became seemingly the acropolis of the subsequent city.

About the deserted sites in the lofty regions of Krête, see Theophrastus, De Ventis, v. 13, ed. Schneider, p. 762.

The site of Παλαίσκηψις in Mount Ida,—ἐπάνω Κέβρηνος κατὰ τὸ μετεωρότατον τῆς Ἴδης (Strabo, xiii. p. 607); ὕστερον δὲ κατωτέρω σταδίοις ἑξήκοντα εἰς τὴν νῦν Σκῆψιν μετῳκίσθησαν. Paphos in Cyprus was the same distance below the ancient Palæ-Paphos (Strabo, xiv. p. 683).

Near Mantineia in Arcadia was situated ὄρος ἐν τῷ πεδίῳ, τὰ ἐρείπια ἔτι Μαντινείας ἔχον τῆς ἀρχαίας· καλεῖται δὲ τὸ χωρίον ἐφ᾽ ἡμῶν Πτόλις (Pausan. viii. 12, 4). See a similar statement about the lofty sites of the ancient town of Orchomenus (in Arcadia) (Paus. viii. 13, 2), of Nonakris (viii. 17, 5,) of Lusi (viii. 18, 3), Lykoreia on Parnassus (Paus. x. 6, 2; Strabo, ix. p. 418).

Compare also Plato, Legg. iii. 2, pp. 678-679, who traces these lofty and craggy dwellings, general among the earliest Grecian townships, to the commencement of human society after an extensive deluge, which had covered all the lower grounds and left only a few survivors.

Probably, in such primitive hill villages, a continuous circle of wall would hardly be required as an additional means of defence, and would often be rendered very difficult by the rugged nature of the ground. But Thucydidês represents the earliest Greeks—those whom he conceives anterior to the Trojan war—as living thus universally in unfortified villages, chiefly on account of their poverty, rudeness, and thorough carelessness for the morrow. Oppressed, and held apart from each other by perpetual fear, they had not yet contracted the sentiment of fixed abodes: they were unwilling even to plant fruit-trees because of the uncertainty of gathering the produce,—and were always ready to dislodge, because there was nothing to gain by staying, and a bare subsistence might be had any where. He compares them to the mountaineers of Ætolia and of the Ozolian Lokris in his own time, who dwelt in their unfortified hill villages with little or no intercommunication, always armed and fighting, and subsisting on the produce of their cattle and their woods,[194]—clothed in undressed hides, and eating raw meat.

[194] Thucyd. i. 2. Φαίνεται γὰρ ἡ νῦν Ἑλλὰς καλουμένη, οὐ πάλαι βεβαίως οἰκουμένη, ἀλλὰ μεταναστάσεις τε οὖσαι τὰ πρότερα, καὶ ῥᾳδίως ἕκαστοι τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀπολείποντες, βιαζόμενοι ὑπὸ τινῶν ἀεὶ πλειόνων· τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμιγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις, οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης, νεμόμενοι δὲ τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῇν, καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες, ἄδηλον ὂν ὅποτέ τις ἐπελθὼν, καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων, ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν, οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον, οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

About the distant and unfortified villages and rude habits of the Ætolians and Lokrians, see Thucyd. iii. 94; Pausan. x. 38, 3: also of the Cisalpine Gauls, Polyb. ii. 17.

Both Thucydidês and Aristotle seem to have conceived the Homeric period as mainly analogous to the βάρβαροι of their own day—Λύει δ᾽ Ἀριστοτέλης λέγων, ὅτι τοιαῦτα ἀεὶ ποιεῖ Ὅμηρος οἷα ἦν τότε· ἦν δὲ τοιαῦτα τὰ παλαιὰ οἷάπερ καὶ νῦν ἐν τοῖς βαρβάροις (Schol. Iliad. x. 151).

The picture given by Thucydidês, of these very early and unrecorded times, can only be taken as conjectural,—the conjectures, indeed, of a statesman and a philosopher,—generalized too, in part, from the many particular instances of contention and expulsion of chiefs which he found in the old legendary poems. The Homeric poems, however, present to us a different picture. They recognize walled towns, fixed abodes, strong local attachments, hereditary individual property in land, vineyards planted and carefully cultivated, established temples of the gods, and splendid palaces of the chiefs.[195] The description of Thucydidês belongs to a lower form of society, and bears more analogy to that which the poet himself conceives as antiquated and barbarous,—to the savage Cyclopes, who dwell on the tops of mountains, in hollow caves, without the plough, without vine or fruit culture, without arts or instruments,—or to the primitive settlement of Dardanus son of Zeus, on the higher ground of Ida, while it was reserved for his descendants and successors to found the holy Ilium on the plain.[196] Ilium or Troy represents the perfection of Homeric society. It is a consecrated spot, containing temples of the gods as well as the palace of Priam, and surrounded by walls which are the fabric of the gods; while the antecedent form of ruder society, which the poet briefly glances at, is the parallel of that which the theory of Thucydidês ascribes to his own early semi-barbarous ancestors.

[195] Odyss. vi. 10; respecting Nausithous, past king of the Phæakians:

Ἀμφὶ δὲ τεῖχος ἔλασσε πόλει, καὶ ἐδείματο οἴκους, Καὶ νηοὺς ποίησε θεῶν, καὶ ἐδάσσατ᾽ ἀρούρας.

The vineyard, olive-ground, and garden of Laërtes, is a model of careful cultivation (Odyss. xxiv. 245); see also the shield of Achilles (Iliad, xvii. 541-580), and the Kalydônian plain (Iliad, ix. 575).

[196] Odyss. x. 106-115; Iliad, xx. 216.

Walled towns serve thus as one of the evidences, that a large part of the population of Greece had, even in the Homeric times, reached a level higher than that of the Ætolians and Lokrians of the days of Thucydidês. The remains of Mykênæ and Tiryns demonstrate the massy and Cyclopian style of architecture employed in those early days: but we may remark that, while modern observers seem inclined to treat the remains of the former as very imposing, and significant of a great princely family, Thucydidês, on the contrary, speaks of it as a small place, and labors to elude the inference, which might be deduced from its insignificant size, in disproof of the grandeur of Agamemnôn.[197] Such fortifications supplied a means of defence incomparably superior to those of attack. Indeed, even in historical Greece, and after the invention of battering engines, no city could be taken except by surprise or blockade, or by ruining the country around, and thus depriving the inhabitants of their means of subsistence. And in the two great sieges of the legendary time, Troy and Thêbes, the former is captured by the stratagem of the wooden horse, while the latter is evacuated by its citizens, under the warning of the gods, after their defeat in the field.

[197] Thucyd. i. 10. Καὶ ὅτι μὲν Μυκῆναι μικρὸν ἦν, ἢ εἴ τι τῶν τότε πόλισμα νῦν μὴ ἀξιόχρεων δοκεῖ εἶναι, etc.

This decided superiority of the means of defence over those of attack, in rude ages, has been one of the grand promotive causes both of the growth of civic life and of the general march of human improvement. It has enabled the progressive portions of mankind not only to maintain their acquisitions against the predatory instincts of the ruder and poorer, and to surmount the difficulties of incipient organization,—but ultimately, when their organization has been matured, both to acquire predominance, and to uphold it until their own disciplined habits have in part passed to their enemies. The important truth here stated is illustrated not less by the history of ancient Greece, than by that of modern Europe during the Middle Ages. The Homeric chief, combining superior rank with superior force, and ready to rob at every convenient opportunity, greatly resembles the feudal baron of the Middle Ages, but circumstances absorb him more easily into a city life, and convert the independent potentate into the member of a governing aristocracy.[198] Traffic by sea continued to be beset with danger from pirates, long after it had become tolerably assured by land: the “wet ways” have always been the last resort of lawlessness and violence, and the Ægean, in particular, has in all times suffered more than other waters under this calamity.

[198] Nägelsbach, Homerische Theologie, Abschn. v. sect. 54. Hesiod strongly condemns robbery,—Δὼς ἀγαθὴ, ἅρπαξ δὲ κακὴ, θανάτοιο δότειρα (Opp. Di. 356, comp. 320); but the sentiment of the Grecian heroic poetry seems not to go against it,—it is looked upon as a natural employment of superior force,—Αὐτόματοι δ᾽ ἀγαθοὶ δειλῶν ἐπὶ δαῖτας ἴασιν (Athenæ. v. p. 178; comp. Pindar, Fragm. 48, ed. Dissen.): the long spear, sword, and breastplate, of the Kretan Hybreas, constitute his wealth (Skolion 27, p. 877; Poet. Lyric. ed. Bergk), wherewith he ploughs and reaps,—while the unwarlike, who dare not or cannot wield these weapons, fall at his feet, and call him The Great King. The feeling is different in the later age of Demêtrius Poliorkêtês (about 310 B. C.): in the Ithyphallic Ode, addressed to him at his entrance into Athens, robbery is treated as worthy only of Ætolians:—

Αἰτωλικὸν γὰγ ἁρπάσαι τὰ τῶν πέλας, Νυνὶ δὲ, καὶ τὰ πόῤῥω.—

(Poet. Lyr. xxv. p. 453, ed. Schneid.)

The robberies of powerful men, and even highway robbery generally found considerable approving sentiment in the Middle Ages. “All Europe (observes Mr. Hallam, Hist. Mid. Ag. ch. viii. part 3, p. 247) was a scene of intestine anarchy during the Middle Ages: and though England was far less exposed to the scourge of private war than most nations on the continent, we should find, could we recover the local annals of every country, such an accumulation of petty rapine and tumult, as would almost alienate us from the liberty which served to engender it.... Highway robbery was from the earliest times a sort of national crime.... We know how long the outlaws of Sherwood lived in tradition; men who, like some of their betters, have been permitted to redeem, by a few acts of generosity, the just ignominy of extensive crimes. These, indeed, were the heroes of vulgar applause; but when such a judge as Sir John Fortescue could exult, that more Englishmen were hanged for robbery in one year than French in seven,—and that, _if an Englishman be poor, and see another having riches, which may be taken from him by might, he will not spare to do so_,—it may be perceived how thoroughly these sentiments had pervaded the public mind.”

The robberies habitually committed by the noblesse of France and Germany during the Middle Ages, so much worse than anything in England,—and those of the highland chiefs even in later times,—are too well known to need any references: as to France, an ample catalogue is set forth in Dulaure’s Histoire de la Noblesse (Paris, 1792). The confederations of the German cities chiefly originated in the necessity of keeping the roads and rivers open for the transit of men and goods against the nobles who infested the high roads. Scaliger might have found a parallel to the λῃσταὶ of the heroic ages in the noblesse of la Rouergue, as it stood even in the 16th century, which he thus describes: “In Comitatu Rodez pessimi sunt; nobilitas ibi latrocinatur: nec possunt reprimi.” (ap. Dulaure, c. 9.)

Aggressions of the sort here described were of course most numerous in those earliest times when the Ægean was not yet an Hellenic sea, and when many of the Cyclades were occupied, not by Greeks, but by Karians,—perhaps by Phœnicians: the number of Karian sepulchres discovered in the sacred island of Delus seems to attest such occupation as an historical fact.[199] According to the legendary account, espoused both by Herodotus and by Thucydidês, it was the Kretan Minôs who subdued these islands and established his sons as rulers in them; either expelling the Karians, or reducing them to servitude and tribute.[200] Thucydidês presumes that he must of course have put down piracy, in order to enable his tribute to be remitted in safety, like the Athenians during the time of their hegemony.[201] Upon the legendary thalassocraty of Minôs, I have already remarked in another place:[202] it is sufficient here to repeat, that, in the Homeric poems (long subsequent to Minôs in the current chronology), we find piracy both frequent and held in honorable estimation, as Thucydidês himself emphatically tells us,—remarking, moreover, that the vessels of those early days were only half-decked, built and equipped after the piratical fashion,[203] in a manner upon which the nautical men of his time looked back with disdain. Improved and enlarged ship-building, and the trireme, or ship with three banks of oars, common for warlike purposes during the Persian invasion, began only with the growing skill, activity, and importance of the Corinthians, three quarters of a century after the first Olympiad.[204] Corinth, even in the Homeric poems, is distinguished by the epithet of wealthy, which it acquired principally from its remarkable situation on the Isthmus, and from its two harbors of Lechæum and Kenchreæ, the one on the Corinthian, the other on the Sarônic gulf. It thus supplied a convenient connection between Epirus and Italy on the one side, and the Ægean sea on the other, without imposing upon the unskilful and timid navigator of those days the necessity of circumnavigating Peloponnêsus.

[199] Thucyd. i. 4-8. τῆς νῦν Ἑλληνικῆς θαλάσσης.

[200] Herodot. i. 171; Thucyd. i. 4-8. Isokratês (Panathenaic. p. 241) takes credit to Athens for having finally expelled the Karians out of these islands at the time of the Ionic emigration.

[201] Thucyd. i. 4. τό τε λῃστικὸν, ~ὡς εἰκὸς~, καθῄρει ἐκ τῆς θαλάσσης ἐφ᾽ ὅσον ἠδύνατο, τοῦ τὰς προσόδους μᾶλλον ἰέναι αὐτῷ.

[202] See the preceding volume of this History, Chap. xii. p. 227.

[203] Thucyd. i. 10. τῷ παλαιῷ τρόπῳ λῃστικώτερον παρεσκευασμένα.

[204] Thucyd. i. 13.

The extension of Grecian traffic and shipping is manifested by a comparison of the Homeric with the Hesiodic poems; in respect to knowledge of places and countries,—the latter being probably referable to dates between B. C. 740 and B. C. 640. In Homer, acquaintance is shown (the accuracy of such acquaintance, however, being exaggerated by Strabo and other friendly critics) with continental Greece and its neighboring islands, with Krête and the principal islands of the Ægean, and with Thrace, the Troad, the Hellespont, and Asia Minor between Paphlagonia northward and Lykia southward. The Sikels are mentioned in the Odyssey, and Sikania in the last book of that poem, but nothing is said to evince a knowledge of Italy or the realities of the western world. Libya, Egypt, and Phœnike, are known by name and by vague hearsay, but the Nile is only mentioned as “the river Egypt:” while the Euxine sea is not mentioned at all.[205] In the Hesiodic poems, on the other hand, the Nile, the Ister, the Phasis, and the Eridanus, are all specified by name;[206] Mount Ætna, and the island of Ortygia near to Syracuse, the Tyrrhenians and Ligurians in the west, and the Scythians in the north, were also noticed.[207] Indeed, within forty years after the first Olympiad, the cities of Korkyra and Syracuse were founded from Corinth,—the first of a numerous and powerful series of colonies, destined to impart a new character both to the south of Italy and to Sicily.

[205] See Voelcker, Homerische Geographie, ch. iii. sect. 55-63. He has brought to bear much learning and ingenuity to identify the places visited by Odysseus with real lands, but the attempt is not successful. Compare also Ukert, Hom. Geog. vol. i. p. 14, and the valuable treatises of J. H. Voss, _Alte Weltkunde_, annexed to the second volume of his Kritische Blätter (Stuttgart, 1828), pp. 245-413. Voss is the father of just views respecting Homeric geography.

[206] Hesiod. Theog. 338-340.

[207] Hesiod. Theogon. 1016; Hesiod. Fragm. 190-194, ed. Göttling; Strabo, i. p. 16; vii. p. 300. Compare Ukert, Geographie der Griechen und Römer, i. p. 37.

In reference to the astronomy and physics of the Homeric Greek, it has already been remarked that he connected together the sensible phenomena which form the subject matter of these sciences by threads of religious and personifying fancy, to which the real analogies among them were made subordinate; and that these analogies did not begin to be studied by themselves, apart from the religious element by which they had been at first overlaid, until the age of Thales,—coinciding as that period did with the increased opportunities for visiting Egypt and the interior of Asia. The Greeks obtained access in both of these countries to an enlarged stock of astronomical observations, to the use of the gnomon, or sundial,[208] and to a more exact determination of the length of the solar year,[209] than that which served as the basis of their various lunar periods. It is pretended that Thales was the first who predicted an eclipse of the sun,—not, indeed, accurately, but with large limits of error as to the time of its occurrence,—and that he also possessed so profound an acquaintance with meteorological phenomena and probabilities, as to be able to foretell an abundant crop of olives for the coming year, and to realize a large sum of money by an olive speculation.[210]

[208] The Greeks learned from the Babylonians, πόλον μὲν γὰρ καὶ γνώμονα καὶ τὰ δυωκαίδεκα μέρεα τῆς ἡμέρης (Herodot. ii. 109). In my first edition, I had interpreted the word πόλον in Herodotus erroneously. I now believe it to mean the same as _horologium_, the circular plate upon which the vertical gnomon projected its shadow, marked so as to indicate the hour of the day,—twelve hours between sunrise and sunset: see Ideler, Handbuch der Chronologie, vol. i. p. 233. Respecting the opinions of Thales, see the same work, part ii. pp. 18-57; Plutarch. de Placit. Philosophor. ii. c. 12; Aristot. de Cœlo, ii. 13. Costard, Rise and Progress of Astronomy among the Ancients, p. 99.

[209] We have very little information respecting the early Grecian mode of computing time, and we know that though all the different states computed by lunar periods, yet most, if not all, of them had different names of months as well as different days of beginning and ending their months. All their immediate computations, however, were made by months: the lunar period was their immediate standard of reference for determining their festivals, and for other purposes, the solar period being resorted to only as a corrective, to bring the same months constantly into the same seasons of the year. Their original month had thirty days, and was divided into three decades, as it continued to be during the times of historical Athens (Hesiod. Opp. Di. 766). In order to bring this lunar period more nearly into harmony with the sun, they intercalated every year an additional month: so that their years included alternately twelve months and thirteen months, each month of thirty days. This period was called a Dieteris,—sometimes a Trieteris. Solon is said to have first introduced the fashion of months differing in length, varying alternately from thirty to twenty-nine days. It appears, however, that Herodotus had present to his mind the Dieteric cycle, or years alternating between thirteen months and twelve months (each month of thirty days), and no other (Herodot. i. 32; compare ii. 104). As astronomical knowledge improved, longer and more elaborate periods were calculated, exhibiting a nearer correspondence between an integral number of lunations and an integral number of solar years. First, we find a period of four years; next, the Octaëteris, or period of eight years, or seventy-nine lunar months; lastly, the Metonic period of nineteen years, or 235 lunar months. How far any of these larger periods were ever legally authorized, or brought into civil usage, even at Athens, is matter of much doubt. See Ideler, Uber die Astronomischen Beobachtungen der Alten, pp. 175-195; Macrobius, Saturnal. i. 13.

[210] Herodot. i. 74; Aristot. Polit. i. 4, 5.

From Thales downward we trace a succession of astronomical and physical theories, more or less successful, into which I do not intend here to enter: it is sufficient at present to contrast the father of the Ionic philosophy with the times preceding him, and to mark the first commencement of scientific prediction among the Greeks, however imperfect at the outset, as distinguished from the inspired dicta of prophets or oracles, and from those special signs of the purposes of the gods, which formed the habitual reliance of the Homeric man.[211] We shall see these two modes of anticipating the future,—one based upon the philosophical, the other upon the religious appreciation of nature,—running simultaneously on throughout Grecian history, and sharing between them in unequal portions the empire of the Greek mind; the former acquiring both greater predominance and wider application among the intellectual men, and partially restricting, but never abolishing, the spontaneous employment of the latter among the vulgar.

[211] Odyss. iii. 173.—

Ἠτέομεν δὲ θεὸν φαίνειν τέρας· αὐτὰρ ὅγ᾽ ἡμῖν Δεῖξε, καὶ ἠνώγει πέλαγος μέσον εἰς Εὔβοιαν Τέμνειν, etc.

Compare Odyss. xx. 100; Iliad, i. 62; Eurip. Suppl. 216-230.

Neither coined money, nor the art of writing,[212] nor painting, nor sculpture, nor imaginative architecture, belong to the Homeric and Hesiodic times. Such rudiments of arts, destined ultimately to acquire so great a development in Greece, as may have existed in these early days, served only as a sort of nucleus to the fancy of the poet, to shape out for himself the fabulous creations ascribed to Hephæstus or Dædalus. No statues of the gods, not even of wood, are mentioned in the Homeric poems. All the many varieties, in Grecian music, poetry, and dancing,—the former chiefly borrowed from Lydia and Phrygia,—date from a period considerably later than the first Olympiad: Terpander, the earliest musician whose date is assigned, and the inventor of the harp with seven strings instead of that with four strings, does not come until the 26th Olympiad, or 676 B. C.: the poet Archilochus is nearly of the same date. The iambic and elegiac metres—the first deviations from the primitive epic strain and subject—do not reach up to the year 700 B. C.

[212] The σήματα λυγρὰ mentioned in the Iliad, vi. 168, if they prove anything, are rather an evidence against, than for, the existence of alphabetical writing at the times when the Iliad was composed.

It is this epic poetry which forms at once both the undoubted prerogative and the solitary jewel of the earliest era of Greece. Of the many epic poems which existed in Greece during the eight century before the Christian era, none have been preserved except the Iliad and Odyssey: the Æthiopis of Arktinus, the Ilias Minor of Lesches, the Cyprian Verses, the Capture of Œchalia, the Returns of the Heroes from Troy, the Thêbaïs and the Epigoni,—several of them passing in antiquity under the name of Homer,—have all been lost. But the two which remain are quite sufficient to demonstrate in the primitive Greeks, a mental organization unparalleled in any other people, and powers of invention and expression which prepared, as well as foreboded, the future eminence of the nation in all the various departments to which thought and language can be applied. Great as the power of thought afterwards became among the Greeks, their power of expression was still greater: in the former, other nations have built upon their foundations and surpassed them,—in the latter, they still remained unrivalled. It is not too much to say that this flexible, emphatic, and transparent character of the language as an instrument of communication,—its perfect aptitude for narrative and discussion, as well as for stirring all the veins of human emotion without ever forfeiting that character of simplicity which adapts it to all men and all times,—may be traced mainly to the existence and the wide-spread influence of the Iliad and Odyssey. To us, these compositions are interesting as beautiful poems, depicting life and manners, and unfolding certain types of character with the utmost vivacity and artlessness: to their original hearer, they possessed all these sources of attraction, together with others more powerful still, to which we are now strangers. Upon him, they bore with the full weight and solemnity of history and religion combined, while the charm of the poetry was only secondary and instrumental. The poet was then the teacher and preacher of the community, not simply the amuser of their leisure hours: they looked to him for revelations of the unknown past and for expositions of the attributes and dispensations of the gods, just as they consulted the prophet for his privileged insight into the future. The ancient epic comprised many different poets and poetical compositions, which fulfilled this purpose with more or less completeness: but it is the exclusive prerogative of the Iliad and Odyssey, that, after the minds of men had ceased to be in full harmony with their original design, they yet retained their empire by the mere force of secondary excellences: while the remaining epics—though serving as food for the curious, and as storehouses for logographers, tragedians, and artists—never seem to have acquired very wide popularity even among intellectual Greeks.

I shall, in the succeeding chapter, give some account of the epic cycle, of its relation to the Homeric poems, and of the general evidences respecting the latter, both as to antiquity and authorship.