criteria of the individual.
When Homer wished to describe the Cyclopes as living in a state of barbarism, he says, not that they have no kings, or no towns, or no armies, or no country, but that they have no Assemblies, and no administration of justice, which, as we have seen, was the primary function of the Assemblies. And yet all, or nearly all the States had Kings. The lesson to be learned is, that in heroic Greece the King, venerable as was his title, was not the fountainhead of the common life, but only its exponent. The source lay in the community, and the community met in the Agorè. So deeply imbedded is this sentiment in the mind of the Poet, that it seems as if he could not conceive an assemblage of persons having any kind of common function, without their having, so to speak, a common soul too in respect of it.
The common Soul or Τὶς in Homer.
Of this common soul the organ in Homer is the Τὶς or ‘Somebody;’ by no means one of the least remarkable, though he has been one of the least regarded, personages of the poems. The Τὶς of Homer is, I apprehend, what in England we now call public opinion. We constantly find occasions, when the Poet wants to tell us what was the prevailing sentiment among the Greeks of the army. He might have done this didactically, and described at length the importance of popular opinion, and its bearings in each case. He has adopted a method more poetical and less obtrusive. He proceeds dramatically, through the medium of a person, and of a formula:
ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν, ἰδὼν ἐς πλήσιον ἄλλον.
It may, however, not seem worthy of remark, considering the amount of common interest among the Greeks, that he should find an organ for it in his Τίς. But when he brings the Greeks and Trojans together in the Pact, though it is only for the purpose of a momentary action, still he makes an integer pro hâc vice of the two nations, and provides them with a common Τὶς (Il. iii. 319):
ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν Ἀχαιῶν τε Τρώων τε.
We find another remarkable exemplification in the case of the Suitors in the Odyssey. Dissolute and selfish youths as they are, and competitors with one another for a prize which one only can enjoy, they are nevertheless for the moment banded together in a common interest. They too, therefore, have a collective sentiment, and a ready organ for it in a Τὶς of the Odyssey (Od. ii. 324), who speaks for the body of Suitors:
ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκε νέων ὑπερηνορεόντων.
All these are, in my view, most striking proofs of the tenacious hold, which the principle of a public or corporate life for all aggregations of men had taken upon the mind of Homer, and upon Greece in the heroic age. Nor can I help forming the opinion, that in all probability we may discern in the Homeric Τὶς the primary ancestor of the famous Greek Chorus. It is the function of the Chorus to give utterance to the public sentiment, but in a sense apt, virtuous, and pious. Now this is what the Homeric Τὶς usually does; but of course he does on behalf of the community, what the Chorus does as belonging to the body of actors.
It is then surely a great error, after all we have seen, to conclude that, because the political ideas and practices of those times did not wear the costumes now in fashion, they were without their own real vitality, and powerful moral influence upon the minds and characters of men.
Imperfect organization of the Heroic Polities.
But, on the other hand, in repelling these unsound and injurious notions, we must beware of assuming too much of external resemblance between the heroic age and the centuries either of modern Christendom or even of historic Greece and Rome. All the determinate forms of public right are the growth of long time, of dearbought experience, and of proved necessity. Right and force are supplements to one another; but the proportions, in which they are to be mingled, are subject to no fixed rule. If the existence of rights, both popular and regal, in the heroic age is certain, their indeterminateness is glaring and conspicuous. But the shape they bore, notwithstanding the looseness of its outline, was quite adequate to the needs of the time. We must not, in connection with the heroic age, think of public life as a profession, of a standing mass of public affairs, of legislation eternally in arrear, of a complex machinery of government. There were no regular regencies in Greece during the Trojan war. There was no Assembly in Ithaca during the long absence of Ulysses278, before the one called by Telemachus, and reported in the Second Book of the Odyssey. We have seen, however, in what way this lack of machinery told upon the state of Greece by encouraging faction, and engendering revolution. The strain of the Trojan expedition was too great for a system so artless and inorganic. The state of Ithaca in the Odyssey is politically a state almost of anarchy; though the symptoms of that disease were milder by far then, than they could now be. The condition of the island shows us what its polity had been, rather than what it was. But for all ordinary occasions it had sufficed. For Assemblies met only when they had something to do; and rarely indeed would such junctures arrive. Infractions of social order and social rights, which now more commonly take place by fraud, were then due almost wholly to violence. And violence, from its nature, could hardly be the subject of appeal to the Assembly: as a general rule, it required to be repaid on the instant, and in the same coin. Judicial questions would not often be of such commanding interest, as to divide a people into two opinions; nor the parties to them wealthy enough to pay two talents to the successful judge. Great controversies, affecting allegiance and the succession, must of necessity in all ages be rare; and of a disputed succession in Greece the poems can hardly be said to offer us an instance. We find, however, in the last Book of the Odyssey, that, according to the ideas of that period, when a question as to the sovereignty did arise, the people needed no instructor as to the first measure they were to take. They repaired, as if by a common and instinctive impulse, to the Agorè; in which lay deposited their civil rights and their old traditions, like the gems of the wealth of Greece in the shrine of the Archer Apollo279.
II. ILIOS.
THE TROJANS COMPARED AND CONTRASTED WITH THE GREEKS
We have perhaps been accustomed to contemplate the Trojans too exclusively, either as enemies of the Greeks, or else as constituting, together with them, one homogeneous chapter of antiquity, which we might be content to examine as a whole, without taking notice of specific differences. Let us now endeavour to inquire what were the relations, other than those of mere antagonism in the war, between the two nations; what points they embraced, and what affinities or discords they disclose. The direct signs of kindred between Troy and Greece have already been considered; but the examination into points of contrast and resemblance as respects religion, polity, and character, will assist us in judging how far a key to those affinities and discords is to be found in the different interfusion and proportion, in the two cases, of ethnical elements which they possessed in common.
We have seen in another place280 that the Greeks, or Achæans, and the Trojans, were akin by the Hellic element, which appears to establish a connection chiefly as regarded the royal house, and other ruling houses, of Troy. On the other hand it has seemed clear, from many sources, that the main affinity between the bulk of the two nations was Pelasgian. As respects the ethnological question, the supposition most consonant to the evidence as a whole appears to me to be, that in Troas we find Hellic families, possessed of dominion over a Pelasgian people: in Greece we find Hellic tribes, placed in dominant juxtaposition with Pelasgic tribes, of prior occupancy; constituting, as is probable, whole classes of the community, and mingling with and powerfully modifying the aggregate composition so as to produce a mixed result; while in Troy, though the ruling houses are probably a different order, and there may be found here and there the tokens of this influence, yet the general face of society, and the substance of manners and institutions, are Pelasgian.
Tittmann Griech. Staatsv. b. ii. p. 56.
Il. ix. 404.
Achæis, or Ethnology, sect. ix. p. 496.
