“Without the people
I cannot do this thing.”
Æschylus makes the monarch of the heroic ages speak here with a strong tincture of the democracy of the latter times of Greece, no doubt securing to himself thereby immense billows of applause from his Athenian auditors, as the tragedians were fond of doing, by giving utterance to liberal sentiments like that of Æmon in Sophocles—“πόλις γὰρ ὀυκ ἒσθ ἣτις ἀνδρός ἐσθ᾽ ἑνός.” But how little the people had to say in the government of the heroic ages appears strikingly in that most dramatic scene described in the second book of the Iliad, which Grote (II. 94) has, with admirable judgment, brought prominently forward in his remarks on the power of the ἀγορά, or popular assembly, in the heroic ages. Ulysses holds forth the orthodox doctrine in these terms—
“Sit thee down, and cease thy murmurings: sit, and hear thy betters speak,
Thou unwarlike, not in battle known, in council all unheard!
Soothly all who are Achæans are not kings, and cannot be;
Evil is the sway of many; only one may bear the rule,
One be king, to whom the deep-designing Kronos’ mighty son
Gave the sceptre and the right.”—Il. II. 200.