And indeed, even if we could show that Homer had applied the name βασιλεὺς to two brothers in one family, the result would be the same, as far as the main argument is concerned, for there is no such pronounced mark of equality found among brothers in any of the royal families of Greece.
Again; in considering the law of succession among the Greeks, we have found four cases in the Catalogue, where contingents were placed under the command of two leaders seemingly co-ordinate; they are in every instance brothers, and the four dual commands occur in a total of twenty-nine. Or let us state the case in another form, so as to include the cases of Bœotia and Elis. Among sixteen Trojan contingents, there are but six where the chief authority is plainly in a single hand; out of twenty-nine Greek contingents, there are twenty-three, and, of the remaining six, four are the cases of brothers. This fact is material, as tending to show a looser and less effective military organization in the ranks of the Trojans and their allies, than in those of the Greeks; a circumstance which does not prove, but which harmonizes with, the hypothesis that they were wanting also in a defined order of succession to the seat of political power.
There are other reasons, immediately connected with Hector, for supposing that Homer intended to represent Paris as older than his brother[472]. Paris had been in manhood for at least twenty years, according to the letter of the poem, which must at least represent a long period of time. But Hector has one child only, a babe in arms, which is in itself a presumption of his being less advanced in life. Again, we must suppose his age probably to be not very different from that of Andromache. But it is quite plain that she was a young mother; since after the slaughter of Eetion, her father, Achilles shortly took a ransom for her mother, who thereupon went back to the house of her own father, Andromache’s maternal grandfather, and subsequently died there[473]. If then the grandfather of Andromache was alive when Thebe was taken, and Hector’s age was in due proportion to her own, he must in all likelihood have been younger than Paris. Again, it may be noticed that the term ἥβη is nowhere ascribed to Paris, but it is assigned to Hector at his death[474]. Notwithstanding its complimentary use for Ulysses in Od. viii. 135, that word has a certain leaning to early life. But we have a stronger, and indeed I think a conclusive argument in the speech of Andromache after his death[475];
ἆνερ, ἀπ’ αἰῶνος νέος ὤλεο.
Thus he is distinctly called young. And we may consider it almost certain, under these circumstances, that Paris was the first-born son of Priam[476], but that his right of succession oozed away like water from a man’s hand.
The relations of race between the Trojans and the Greeks have already been examined, in connection with the great Homeric title of ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν[477]; under some difficulties, which resolve themselves into this, that Homer, on almost every subject so luminous a guide, is in all likelihood here, as it were, retained on the side of silence; and that we have no information, except such as he accidentally lets fall. But he was under no such preoccupation with regard to the institutions of Troy; so that, while he had no occasion for the same amount of detail as he has given us with reference to the Greeks, or the same minute accuracy as he has there observed, enough appears to supply a tolerably clear and consistent outline.
We have been accustomed too negligently to treat the Homeric term Troy, as if it designated only or properly a single city. But in Homer it much more commonly means a country, with the city sometimes called Troy for its capital, and containing many other cities beside it. The proper name, however, of the city in the poems is Ἴλιος, not Τροίη. Ilios is used above an hundred and twenty times in the Iliad and Odyssey, and always strictly means the city. The word Τροίη is used nearly ninety times, and in the great majority of cases it means the country. Often it has the epithets εὐρεῖα, ἐρίβωλος, ἐριβώλαξ, which speak for themselves. But more commonly it is without an epithet; and then too it very generally means the country. When the Greeks speak, for example, of the voyage Τροίηνδε, this is the natural sense, rather than to suppose it means a city not on the sea shore, and into which, till the end of the siege, they did not find their way at all[478].
Priam and his dynasty in Troas.
According to the genealogical tree in the Twentieth Iliad, Dardanus built Dardania among the mountains: his son Erichthonius became wealthy by possessions in the plain; and Tros, the son of Erichthonius, was the real founder of the Trojan state and name[479].