The position of iron, however, relatively to the other metals, was very different in the heroic age from what it now is: and probably its great rarity was due, like that of silver, to the difficulty of bringing the metal into a state fit for use; which could more readily be effected with copper, with tin, or with κύανος, in whatever sense it is to be interpreted. Iron, however, would appear to have been more valuable than these metals; greatly more valuable, in particular, than copper, which is now worth from fifteen to twenty times as much as iron. A mass of crude iron is produced at the funeral games as a prize; and iron made into axe-heads forms another. No other metal, below the rank of gold and silver, is ever similarly employed in an unmanufactured state.—
Let us now turn to a brief view of the polity and organization of the army.
We perceive the organization of the Greek communities in a double form: both as a community, properly so called, in time of peace, a picture supplied by the Odyssey; and likewise as an army, according to the delineations of the Iliad.
Mode of government of the army.
The differences are worth noting: but they do not seem to touch fundamental principles. Agamemnon governed the army by the ordinary political instruments, not by the rules of military discipline. Aristotle[180] quotes from the Iliad of his own day and place, and as proceeding from the mouth of Agamemnon, the words,
πὰρ γὰρ ἐμοὶ θάνατος·
and Grote founds upon this citation the remark, that ‘the Alexandrian critics effaced many traces of the old manners.’ But was this really a trace of the old manners? Is there a single passage now remaining of the Iliad, a single thought, a single word, which at all corresponds with the idea that Agamemnon had in his own hands, in the shape of a defined prerogative, the power of capital punishment? Aristotle certainly accepts the passage, and contrasts this military power of Agamemnon with the restraints upon him in the peaceful sphere of the ἀγορή; but I am by no means sure that English institutions do not afford us the aid of far more powerful analogies for appreciating the real political spirit of the Homeric poems, than any that even Aristotle could draw in his own day from the orientalizing government of Alexander. I do not, however, so much question the passage, as the construction put upon it. The prerogatives of the Greek kings were founded in general duty and feeling, not in law. When Ulysses belaboured Thersites, it was not in the exercise of a determinate right, but in obedience to the dictates of general prudence, which, upon a high emergency, the general sense approved. Doubtless, if Agamemnon had caught a runaway from the ranks, he might have slain him; but is it supposed that Ulysses might not? What was the meaning of the advice of Nestor, to put the poltroons in the middle of the ranks, but that their comrades about them should spear them if they should try to run? There is no criminal justice, in the proper sense of the term, though there is civil justice, in either of the Homeric poems; the wrongs of man to man are adjusted or requited by the latter form of remedy, but the ideas on which the former rests were unknown: there is no king’s peace, more than there is a king’s highway: the sanctions of force are added upon occasion to the general authority of office by those who bear it, according to the suggestions of their common sense. Had it been otherwise, Ulysses would never have put the wretched women in his household, who could not, like the Suitors their paramours, be politically formidable, to a death, which fully entitled him to say with the Agamemnon of the citation, πὰρ γὰρ ἐμοὶ θάνατος. The general reverence for rank and station, the safeguard of publicity, and the influence of persuasion, are the usual and sufficient instruments for governing the army, even as they governed the civil societies of Greece. In the Assembly of the army, the quarrel with Achilles takes place: in the Assembly arises the tumultuary impulse to return home: in the Assembly, that impulse having been checked, it is deliberately resolved to see what they can do by fighting: in the Assembly it is determined to ask a truce for burials, and to erect the rampart: in the nocturnal Assembly that Council is appointed to sit, which sends the abortive mission to Achilles. Every great measure affecting the whole body is, as we shall find, adopted in the Assembly: and, finally, it is here that Agamemnon explicitly confesses and laments his fault, and that the reconciliation with Achilles is ratified.
We may therefore take the polity, so to speak, of the Greek army into a common view with that of the Ithacan ἀγορή; but first it will be well to sketch its military organization.
Its military composition.