The word Troes, it is right to add, is sometimes confined strictly to the inhabitants of the city: but the occasions are rare, and perhaps always with contextual indications that such is the sense.
Another sign that Priam exercised a direct sovereignty over the territory which yielded the five contingents may perhaps be found in the fact, that we do not find any of his nephews in command of them. They were led by their local officers, while the brothers of Priam constituted a part of the community of Troy, and chiefly influenced the Assembly: and their sons, though apparently more considerable persons than most of those local officers in general, simply appear as acting under Hector without special command. The brothers of Priam are Lampus, Clytius, and Hiketaon. His nephews and other relatives are Dolops the son of Lampus; Melanippus the son of Hiketaon; Polydamas, Hyperenor, and Euphorbus, the sons of Panthous and his wife Phrontis.
Had the senior members of the family held local sovereignties, we should have found their sons in local commands. But we find only two sons of Antenor in command, as either colleagues or lieutenants of Æneas, over the Dardans, whom we have no reason to suppose they had any share in ruling.
Strabo, indeed, contends, that there are nine separate δυναστεῖαι immediately connected with Troy[493], besides the ἐπίκουροι. Of these states one he thinks was Lelegian, and was ruled over by Altes, father of Laothoe, one of Priam’s wives. Another by Munes, husband of Briseis. Another, Thebe, by Eetion, father of Andromache. Others he considers to be represented by Anchises and Pandarus: but this does not well agree with the structure of the Catalogue. He refers also to Lyrnessus and Pedasus; which are nowhere mentioned by Homer as furnishing contingents, but they had apparently been destroyed, as well as taken, by Achilles. He places several of the dynasties in cities thus destroyed: and they all, according to him, lay beyond the limits marked out in the Twenty-fourth Iliad.
This assemblage of facts appears to point to a very great diversity of relations subsisting between Priam, with his capital, and the states, cities, and races, of which we hear as arrayed on his side in the war. There are first the cities of Troas, or Troja proper, furnishing the five, or if we except Dardania four out of the five, first contingents of the Catalogue. Over these Priam was sovereign.
There are next the cities, so far as they can be traced, under the δυναστεῖαι mentioned by Strabo, such as Thebe, and the cities of Altes and Munes. These were probably in the same sort of relation to the sceptre of Priam, as the Greek states in general to that of Agamemnon.
Thirdly, there are the independent nations. Of these eleven named in the Catalogue; others are added as newly arrived in the Tenth Book[494], and further additions were subsequently made, such as the force under Memnon, and the Keteians under Eurypylus[495]. Nothing perhaps tends so much, as the powerful assistance lent to Priam by numerous and distant allies, to show how justly in substance Horace has described the Trojan war as the conflict between the Eastern and the Western world. The two confederacies, which then came into collision, between them absorbed the whole known world of Homer; and foreshadowed the great conflicts of later epochs.
Political institutions of Troy.
We may now proceed to consider the political institutions of the kingdom of Priam, which has thus loosely been defined.
The Βασιλεὺς of the Trojans is less clearly marked, than he is among the Greeks: for (as we shall find) they had no Βουλὴ, and therefore we have not the same opportunities of seeing the members of the highest class collected for separate action in the conduct of the war. Still, however, the name is distinctly given to the following persons on the Trojan side, and to no others.