The Political Institutions of the Ancient Greeks

by Basil Edward Hammond

In time of war the king had supreme and exclusive command over his tribe. Thus when Achilles king of the Phthiotians was angry with Agamemnon, he was able without consultation with any one to withdraw the whole Phthiotian contingent from aiding in the war against the Trojans: and, when he began to relent, nothing was needed but a word from him to place his forces in the field again under the orders of his friend Patroclus[32]. Agamemnon on the other hand, being the commander of a host composed of contingents from many tribes, found it necessary, before issuing any orders to the whole army, to consult the kings who were taking part with him in his enterprise[33].

Our conclusions about the political system which prevailed in the Greek tribes of the heroic age can be shortly summed up. In time of peace all public business was conducted in assemblies: in these assemblies the king and the elders alone had the right of speaking, and the king was expected to act according to the advice of the elders. In time of war the king was commander-in-chief, and could act without control from any one.

Besides the political institutions of the ancient Greeks, some of the general conditions of their life may be noticed. They depended for their subsistence partly on their cattle and partly on the produce of the ground, and most of the poorer free men, not possessing slaves, lived in the country to tend their herds and till their lands. Some, who had no herds and no lands of their own, worked as labourers for hire[34]. The estates and the cattle of the kings and rich men were committed to the charge of slaves captured in war or in freebooting expeditions[35]. The kings and rich men themselves lived, not scattered over the open country after the fashion of the Germans described by Tacitus[36], but collected in cities. Thus at Ithaca the house of the king and the houses of the wooers of Penelope were all close together: for at the end of the first day in the story of the Odyssey the wooers "went each to his house to sleep[37]" and on the morrow at the dawn of day at the summons of the heralds they "came very quickly to the assembly[38]": Pylos, where Nestor lived, is called the gathering place and the abodes of the Pylians[39]: and, not to multiply instances, words denoting cities are regularly applied in the Homeric poems to the dwelling-places of the heroes.

The cities of the heroic age had, for their defence, in all cases a fortress or strong place of refuge close at hand, and some of them at least were entirely encircled with a wall. Argos lay at the foot of the steep isolated mountain of the Larissa which rose about a thousand feet above it: Corinth was under the still loftier Acrocorinthus; Mycenæ and Athens had each its Acropolis, a strong fortress built on a rock rising abruptly but to no great height above the town. That in some cases the lower city, as distinct from the Acropolis, had also its own outer wall is proved by the whole story of the siege of Troy, which shows that cities entirely enclosed in fortifications were well known to Homer[40].

There are numberless passages in the Iliad and Odyssey which prove that the houses of the heroes were well stored with wealth. The suitors who intruded as guests at the house of Telemachus always found plenty of cattle, bread, wine and oil ready at hand for their riotous feasts, and yet Telemachus was but a poor man among the Greek princes. When Telemachus paid a visit to Menelaus and Helen at Sparta he was astonished to find that their palace glittered with gold and silver, with electrum (a mixture of two metals) and with ivory[41]. The chamber of Odysseus at Ithaca contained abundance of gold and bronze, and clothing in chests and sweet smelling oil and wine in jars against his return[42]. The metal used for weapons was brass or bronze: agricultural implements were chiefly made of iron: of the precious metals gold was more commonly used than silver[43]. We do not hear that any of these metals were obtained in the heroic age from the soil of Greece itself, and may fairly conjecture that they were brought to the Greeks by the Phœnicians who in that age were more active in trade than any other people[44].

The population of a city must have consisted of the wealthy families who had slaves to till their lands and tend their flocks and of those few artificers or professional men whose business brought them to live near the houses of the rich. Among the handicraftsmen were the carpenter, the copper-smith, the leather-dresser, the worker in gold: the professions were those of the leech, the prophet and the bard[45]. Thus it may be that in an assembly the people outside the sacred circle did not greatly surpass in number the elders who sat within it: for there were no classes to constitute a people except the younger members of the families of the elders and the few men who were induced to live in the city to find employment for their knowledge or skill.

2. The Dorians and the Ionians in the heroic age.

Before the beginning of Greek History, properly so called, the Achæan peoples, so important in the eyes of Homer, had sunk into comparative insignificance, and the first places in the Hellenic world had been filled by Dorians and Ionians. The original abode of the Dorians was a small mountainous country called Doris not far from Thermopylæ[46]. From hence bands of adventurers had gone forth and, invading Peloponnesus, had expelled the Achæans from Sparta, Messenia, Argos and Corinth, had occupied their territories and had copied their institutions. The Ionians in Attica had grown in prosperity and power, and, like the Dorian tribes, had adopted that form of government which I have called heroic monarchy.

Of the Dorian kingly government at Corinth we know nothing but its existence[47]: of the Messenian kings we have many stories told by Myron of Priene, but, on reading them side by side with the stories told by Geoffrey of Monmouth about King Arthur, I thought that for complete untrustworthiness there was nothing to choose between the two authors[48]: concerning the early kings of Argos Athens and Sparta, a few facts are established on good authority, and these I shall now proceed to state.

Argos, with its two neighbours Mycenæ and Tiryns, was in some respects unlike the other Greek communities. Elsewhere in Greece during the heroic age each community occupied the whole of a natural division of the country, and had its territory fenced round with natural barriers. In the Argolic plain three Achæan communities had found room to settle, exactly as in Italy many communities found room to settle in and around the plain of Latium: and thus the Argolic communities rather resembled the Latin cities than the Greek tribes. Their city walls were of exceptional strength, as the remains of them testify: their kings were richer and were exalted to a greater eminence above their subjects than the other Greek kings, for the palace of the king at Tiryns occupies nearly the whole of the upper citadel and is such as to demand a most prodigal expenditure of labour for its construction[49], and Agamemnon king of Mycenæ is represented by the poet of the Iliad as a powerful monarch. It cannot be doubted that the three cities had the same reasons for making their walls strong and their kings powerful as the Romans had in the days of Servius Tullius: they feared that they might be conquered by their neighbours, and hoped that they might themselves be the conquerors.