As is the boy, so is the man. As is the seed, so is the plant. The dove neither begets, nor yet grows into the eagle. How came it that the prime philosophers of full-grown Greece gave to the science of Politics the very highest place in the scale of human knowledge? That they, kings in the region of abstract thought, for the first and perhaps the only time in the history of the world, came to think they discerned in the turbid eddies of state affairs the image of the noblest thing for man, the noblest that speculation as well as action could provide for him? Aristotle says that, of all sciences, Πολιτικὴ is ἡ κυριωτάτη καὶ μάλιστα ἀρχιτεκτονική[14]; and that ethical science constitutes but a branch of it, πολιτική τις οὖσα. Whence, I ask, did this Greek idea come? It is not the Greece, but it is the Rome of history, which the judgment and experience of the world has taken as its great teacher in the mere business of law and political organization. For so lofty a theory (a theory without doubt exaggerated) from so practical a person as Aristotle, we must assume a corresponding elevation of source. I cannot help believing that the source is to be found rather in the infancy, than in the maturity, of Greek society. As I read Homer, the real first foundations of political science were laid in the heroic age, with a depth and breadth exceeding in their proportions any fabric, however imposing, that the after-time of Greece was able to rear upon them. That after-time was in truth infected with a spirit of political exaggeration, from which the heroic age was free.
We shall have to examine the political picture presented by the heroic age with reference to the various classes into which society was distinguished in its normal state of peace: to the organization of the army in war, and its mixture of civil with military relations: to the institutions which embodied the machinery of government, and to the powers by which that machinery was kept in motion.
Functions of the King.
Let us begin with the King; who constituted at once the highest class in society, and the centre of its institutions.
The political regimen of Greece, at the period immediately preceding the Trojan war, appears to have been that described by Thucydides, when he says that the tyrannies, which had come in with the increase of wealth, were preceded by hereditary monarchies with limited prerogatives[15]: πρότερον δὲ ἦσαν ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς γέρασι πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι. And again by Aristotle; βασιλεία ... ἡ περὶ τοὺς ἡρωικοὺς χρόνους ... ἦν ἑκόντων μὲν, ἐπὶ τισὶ δὲ ὡρισμένοις· στρατηγὸς γὰρ ἦν καὶ δικαστὴς ὁ βασιλεὺς, καὶ τῶν περὶ τοὺς θεοὺς κύριος. The threefold function of the King was to command the army, to administer justice chiefly, though not exclusively, between man and man, and to conduct the rites of religion[16].
Independently of sovereignties purely local, we find in Homer traces of a maritime Cretan empire, which had recently passed away: and we find a subsisting Pelopid empire, which appears to have been the first of its kind, at least on the Greek mainland. For the Pelopid sceptre was not one taken over from the Perseids: it was obtained through Mercury, that is, probably through contrivance, from Jupiter: and the difference probably consisted in one or both of these two particulars. It comprehended the whole range of continental Greece, πᾶν Ἄργος, to which are added, either at once or in its progressive extension, the πολλαὶ νῆσοι (Il. ii. 108) of the Minoan empire. Besides this, it consisted of a double sovereignty: one, a suzerainty or supremacy over a number of chiefs, each of whom conducted the ordinary government of his own dominions; the other, a direct, though perhaps not always an effective control, not only over an hereditary territory, but over the unclaimed residue of minor settlements and principalities in the country. This inference may, I think, be gathered from the fact that we find the force of Agamemnon before Troy drawn exclusively from his Mycenian dominions, while he had claims of tribute from towns in the south-west of Peloponnesus, which lay at some distance from his centre of power, and which apparently furnished no aid in the war of Troy.
The Pheræ of Diocles lay on the way from Pylos to Sparta: and Pheræ is one of the towns which Agamemnon promised to Achilles. It should, however, be borne in mind that, as the family of names to which Pheræ belonged was one so largely dispersed, we must not positively assume the identity of the two towns.
Degrees in Kingship and in Lordship.
Kingship in Homer is susceptible of degree; it is one thing for the local sovereignties, such as those of Nestor or Ulysses, and another for the great supremacy of Agamemnon, which overrode them. Still the Greek βασιλῆες in the Iliad constitute a class by themselves; a class that comprises the greater leaders and warriors, who immediately surround Agamemnon, the head of the army.
Of by much the greater part even of chiefs and leaders of contingents, it is plain from the poem that though they were lords (ἄνακτες) of a certain tribe or territory, they were not βασιλῆες or kings.