But we cease to wonder at the submissive character of the agora, when we read the proceedings of Odysseus towards the people themselves;—his fine words and flattery addressed to the chiefs, and his contemptuous reproof and manual violence towards the common men, at a moment when both were doing exactly the same thing,—fulfilling the express bidding of Agamemnôn, upon whom Odysseus does not offer a single comment. This scene, which excited a sentiment of strong displeasure among the democrats of historical Athens,[110] affords a proof that the feeling of personal dignity, of which philosophic observers in Greece—Herodotus, Xenophôn, Hippocratês, and Aristotle—boasted, as distinguishing the free Greek citizen from the slavish Asiatic, was yet undeveloped in the time of Homer.[111] The ancient epic is commonly so filled with the personal adventures of the chiefs, and the people are so constantly depicted as simple appendages attached to them, that we rarely obtain a glimpse of the treatment of the one apart from the other, such as this memorable Homeric agora affords.
There remains one other point of view in which we are to regard the agora of primitive Greece,—as the scene in which justice was administered. The king is spoken of as constituted by Zeus the great judge of society: he has received from Zeus the sceptre, and along with it the powers of command and sanction: the people obey these commands and enforce these sanctions, under him, enriching him at the same time with lucrative presents and payments.[112] Sometimes the king separately, sometimes the kings or chiefs or gerontes in the plural number, are named as deciding disputes and awarding satisfaction to complainants; always, however, in public, in the midst of the assembled agora.[113] In one of the compartments of the shield of Achilles, the details of a judicial scene are described. While the agora is full of an eager and excited crowd, two men are disputing about the fine of satisfaction for the death of a murdered man,—one averring, the other denying, that the fine had already been paid, and both demanding an inquest. The gerontes are ranged on stone seats,[114] in the holy circle, with two talents of gold lying before them, to be awarded to such of the litigants as shall make out his case to their satisfaction. The heralds with their sceptres, repressing the warm sympathies of the crowd in favor of one or other of the parties, secure an alternate hearing to both.[115] This interesting picture completely harmonizes with the brief allusion of Hesiod to the judicial trial—doubtless a real trial—between himself and his brother Persês. The two brothers disputed about their paternal inheritance, and the cause was carried to be tried by the chiefs in agora; but Persês bribed them, and obtained an unjust verdict for the whole.[116] So at least Hesiod affirms, in the bitterness of his heart; earnestly exhorting his brother not to waste a precious time, required for necessary labors, in the unprofitable occupation of witnessing and abetting litigants in the agora,—for which (he adds) no man has proper leisure, unless his subsistence for the year beforehand be safely treasured up in his garners.[117] He repeats, more than once, his complaints of the crooked and corrupt judgments of which the kings were habitually guilty; dwelling upon abuse of justice as the crying evil of his day, and predicting as well as invoking the vengeance of Zeus to repress it. And Homer ascribes the tremendous violence of the autumnal storms to the wrath of Zeus against those judges who disgrace the agora with their wicked verdicts.[118]
Though it is certain that, in every state of society, the feelings of men when assembled in multitude will command a certain measure of attention, yet we thus find the agora, in judicial matters still more than in political, serving merely the purpose of publicity. It is the king who is the grand personal mover of Grecian heroic society.[119] He is on earth, the equivalent of Zeus in the agora of the gods: the supreme god of Olympus is in the habit of carrying on his government with frequent publicity, of hearing some dissentient opinions, and of allowing himself occasionally to be wheedled by Aphroditê, or worried into compliance by Hêrê: but his determination is at last conclusive, subject only to the overruling interference of the Mœræ, or Fates.[120] Both the society of gods, and the various societies of men, are, according to the conceptions of Grecian legend, carried on by the personal rule of a legitimate sovereign, who does not derive his title from the special appointment of his subjects, though he governs with their full consent. In fact, Grecian legend presents to us hardly anything else, except these great individual personalities. The race, or nation, is as it were absorbed into the prince: eponymous persons, especially, are not merely princes, but fathers and representative unities, each the equivalent of that greater or less aggregate to which he gives name.
But though, in the primitive Grecian government, the king is the legitimate as well as the real sovereign, he is always conceived as acting through the council and agora. Both the one and the other are established and essential media through which his ascendency is brought to bear upon the society: the absence of such assemblies is the test and mark of savage men, as in the case of the Cyclôpes.[121] Accordingly, he must possess qualities fit to act with effect upon these two assemblies: wise reason for the council, unctuous eloquence for the agora.[122] Such is the idéal of the heroic government: a king, not merely full of valor and resource as a soldier, but also sufficiently superior to those around him to insure both the deliberate concurrence of the chiefs, and the hearty adhesion of the masses.[123] That this picture is not, in all individual cases, realized, is unquestionable; but the endowments so often predicated of good kings show it to have been the type present to the mind of the describer.[124] Xenophôn, in his Cyropædia, depicts Cyrus as an improved edition of the Homeric Agamemnôn,—“a good king and a powerful soldier,” thus idealizing the perfection of personal government.
It is important to point out these fundamental conceptions of government, discernible even before the dawn of Grecian history, and identified with the social life of the people. It shows us that the Greeks, in their subsequent revolutions, and in the political experiments which their countless autonomous communities presented, worked upon preëxisting materials,—developing and exalting elements which had been at first subordinate, and suppressing, or remodelling on a totally new principle, that which had been originally predominant. When we approach historical Greece, we find that (with the exception of Sparta) the primitive hereditary, unresponsible monarch, uniting in himself all the functions of government, has ceased to reign,—while the feeling of legitimacy, which originally induced his people to obey him willingly, has been exchanged for one of aversion towards the character and title generally. The multifarious functions which he once exercised, have been parcelled out among temporary nominees. On the other hand, the council, or senate, and the agora, originally simple media through which the king acted, are elevated into standing and independent sources of authority, controlling and holding in responsibility the various special officers to whom executive duties of one kind or another are confided. The general principle here indicated is common both to the oligarchies and the democracies which grew up in historical Greece: much as these two governments differed from each other, and many as were the varieties even between one oligarchy or democracy and another, they all stood in equal contrast with the principle of the heroic government. Even in Sparta, where the hereditary kingship lasted, it was preserved with lustre and influence exceedingly diminished,[125] and such timely diminution of its power seems to have been one of the essential conditions of its preservation.[126] Though the Spartan kings had the hereditary command of the military forces, yet, even in all foreign expeditions, they habitually acted in obedience to orders from home; while in affairs of the interior, the superior power of the ephors sensibly overshadowed them. So that, unless possessed of more than ordinary force of character, they seem to have exercised their chief influence as presiding members of the senate.
There is yet another point of view in which it behoves us to take notice of the council and the agora as integral portions of the legendary government of the Grecian communities. We are thus enabled to trace the employment of public speaking, as the standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obedience, to the social infancy of the nation. The power of speech in the direction of public affairs becomes more and more obvious, developed, and irresistible, as we advance towards the culminating period of Grecian history, the century preceding the battle of Chæroneia. That its development was greatest among the most enlightened sections of the Grecian name, and smallest among the more obtuse and stationary, is matter of notorious fact; nor is it less true, that the prevalence of this habit was one of the chief causes of the intellectual eminence of the nation generally. At a time when all the countries around were plunged comparatively in mental torpor, there was no motive sufficiently present and powerful to multiply so wonderfully the productive minds of Greece, except such as arose from the rewards of public speaking. The susceptibility of the multitude to this sort of guidance, their habit of requiring and enjoying the stimulus which it supplied, and the open discussion, combining regular forms with free opposition, of practical matters, political as well as judicial,—are the creative causes which formed such conspicuous adepts in the art of persuasion. Nor was it only professed orators who were thus produced; didactic aptitude was formed in the background, and the speculative tendencies were supplied with interesting phenomena for observation and combination, at a time when the truths of physical science were almost inaccessible. If the primary effect was to quicken the powers of expression, the secondary, but not less certain result, was to develop the habits of scientific thought. Not only the oratory of Demosthenês and Periklês, and the colloquial magic of Socratês, but also the philosophical speculations of Plato, and the systematic politics, rhetoric, and logic of Aristotle, are traceable to the same general tendencies in the minds of the Grecian people: and we find the germ of these expansive forces in the senate and agora of their legendary government. The poets, first epic and then lyric, were the precursors of the orators, in their power of moving the feelings of an assembled crowd; whilst the Homeric poems—the general training-book of educated Greeks—constituted a treasury of direct and animated expression, full of concrete forms, and rare in the use of abstractions, and thence better suited to the workings of oratory. The subsequent critics had no difficulty in selecting from the Iliad and Odyssey, samples of eloquence in all its phases and varieties.
On the whole, then, the society depicted in the old Greek poems is loose and unsettled, presenting very little of legal restraint, and still less of legal protection,—but concentrating such political power as does exist in the hands of a legitimate hereditary king, whose ascendency over the other chiefs is more or less complete according to his personal force and character. Whether that ascendency be greater or less, however, the mass of the people is in either case politically passive and of little account. Though the Grecian freeman of the heroic age is above the degraded level of the Gallic plebs, as described by Cæsar,[127] he is far from rivalling the fierce independence and sense of dignity, combined with individual force, which characterize the Germanic tribes before their establishment in the Roman empire. Still less does his condition, or the society in which he moves, correspond to those pleasing dreams of spontaneous rectitude and innocence, in which Tacitus and Seneca indulge with regard to primitive man.[128]
2. The state of moral and social feeling, prevalent in legendary Greece, exhibits a scene in harmony with the rudimentary political fabrics just described. Throughout the long stream of legendary narrative on which the Greeks looked back as their past history, the larger social motives hardly ever come into play: either individual valor and cruelty, or the personal attachments and quarrels of relatives and war-companions, or the feuds of private enemies, are ever before us. There is no sense of obligation then existing, between man and man as such,—and very little between each man and the entire community of which he is a member; such sentiments are neither operative in the real world, nor present to the imaginations of the poets. Personal feelings, either towards the gods, the king, or some near and known individual, fill the whole of a man’s bosom: out of them arise all the motives to beneficence, and all the internal restraints upon violence, antipathy, or rapacity: and special communion, as well as special solemnities, are essential to their existence. The ceremony of an oath, so imposing, so paramount, and so indispensable in those days, illustrates strikingly this principle. And even in the case of the stranger suppliant,—in which an apparently spontaneous sympathy manifests itself,—the succor and kindness shown to him arise mainly from his having gone through the consecrated formalities of supplication, such as that of sitting down in the ashes by the sacred hearth, thus obtaining a sort of privilege of sanctuary.[129] That ceremony exalts him into something more than a mere suffering man,—it places him in express fellowship with the master of the house, under the tutelary sanctions of Zeus Hiketêsios. There is great difference between one form of supplication and another; the suppliant, however, in any form, becomes more or less the object of a particular sympathy.
The sense of obligation towards the gods manifests itself separately in habitual acts of worship, sacrifice, and libations, or by votive presents, such as that of the hair of Achilles, which he has pledged to the river-god Spercheius,[130] and such as the constant dedicated offerings which men who stand in urgent need of the divine aid first promise and afterwards fulfil. But the feeling towards the gods also appears, and that not less frequently, as mingling itself with and enforcing obligations towards some particular human person. The tie which binds a man to his father, his kinsman, his guest, or any special promisee towards whom he has taken the engagement of an oath, is conceived in conjunction with the idea of Zeus, as witness and guarantee; and the intimacy of the association is attested by some surname or special appellation of the god.[131] Such personal feelings composed all the moral influences of which a Greek of that day was susceptible,—a state of mind which we can best appreciate by contrasting it with that of the subsequent citizen of historical Athens. In the view of the latter, the great impersonal authority, called “The Laws,” stood out separately, both as guide and sanction, distinct from religious duty or private sympathies: but of this discriminated conception of positive law and positive morality,[132] the germ only can be detected in the Homeric poems. The appropriate Greek word for human laws never occurs. Amidst a very wavering phraseology,[133] we can detect a gradual transition from the primitive idea of a personal goddess Themis, attached to Zeus, first to his sentences or orders called Themistes, and next by a still farther remove to various established customs, which those sentences were believed to sanctify,—the authority of religion and that of custom coalescing into one indivisible obligation.
The family relations, as we might expect, are set forth in our pictures of the legendary world as the grand sources of lasting union and devoted attachment. The paternal authority is highly reverenced: the son who lives to years of maturity, repays by affection to his parents the charge of his maintenance in infancy, which the language notes by a special word; whilst on the other hand, the Erinnys, whose avenging hand is put in motion by the curse of a father or mother, is an object of deep dread.[134]