Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3. Gladstone William Ewart

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scale, that is to say, so far probably as their own properties and neighbourhoods respectively were concerned, much of the substance of sovereignty actually in their hands, they should proceed to arrogate its name. Hence come the βασιλῆες of Ithaca and the islands near it; some of them young men, who had become adult since the departure of Ulysses, others of them old, who, remaining behind him, had found their position effectively changed, if not by the fact of his departure, yet by the prolongation of his absence.

      The relaxed use, then, of the term βασιλεὺς in the Odyssey, and the appearance of the term βασίλεια and of others in a similar category, need not qualify the proposition above laid down with respect to the βασιλεὺς of the Iliad. He, as we shall see from the facts of the poem, stands in a different position, and presents to us a living picture of the true heroic age41.

      Altered idea of the Kingly office.

      This change in the meaning of the word King was accompanied by a corresponding change in the idea of the great office which it betokened. It had descended from a more noble to a less noble type. I do not mean by this that it had now first submitted to limitations. The βασιλεὺς of the Greeks was always and essentially limited: and hence probably it was, that the usurper of sole and indefinite power in the state was so essentially and deeply odious to the Greeks, because it was felt that he had plundered the people of a treasure, namely, free government, which they and their early forefathers had possessed from time immemorial.

      It is in the Odyssey that we are first startled by meeting not only a wider diffusion and more lax use of the name of king, but together with this change another one; namely, a lower conception of the kingly office. The splendour of it in the Iliad is always associated with duty. In the simile where Homer speaks of corrupt governors, that draw down the vengeance of heaven on a land by crooked judgments, it is worthy of remark, that he avoids the use of the word βασιλεύς42:

      ὅτε δή ῥ’ ἄνδρεσσι κοτεσσάμενος χαλεπήνῃ,

      οἳ βίῃ εἰν ἀγορῇ σκολίας κρίνωσι θέμιστας.

      The worst thing that is even hinted at as within the limits of possibility, is slackness in the discharge of the office: it never degenerates into an instrument of oppression to mankind. But in the Odyssey, which evidently represents with fidelity the political condition of Greece after the great shock of the Trojan war, we find that kingship has come to be viewed by some mainly with reference to the enjoyment of great possessions, which it implied or brought, and as an object on that account of mere ambition. Not of what we should call absolutely vicious ambition: it is not an absolute perversion, but it is a clear declension in the idea, that I here seek to note

      ἦ φῂς τοῦτο κάκιστον ἐν ἀνθρώποισι τετύχθαι;

      οὐ μὲν γάρ τι κακὸν βασιλευέμεν· αἶψά τέ οἱ δῶ

      ἀφνειὸν πέλεται, καὶ τιμηέστερος αὐτός.43

      This general view of the office as one to be held for the personal enjoyment of the incumbent, is broadly distinguished from such a case as that in the Iliad, where Agamemnon, offering seven cities to Achilles44, strives to tempt him individually by a particular inducement, drawn from his own undoubtedly rather sordid mind;

      οἵ κέ ἑ δωτίνῃσι θεὸν ὣς τιμήσουσιν.

      The moral causes of this change are in a great degree traceable to the circumstances of the war, and we seem to see how the conception above expressed was engendered in the mind of Mentor, when he observes45, that it is now useless for a king to be wise and benevolent like Ulysses, who was gentle like a father to his people, in order that, like Ulysses, he may be forgotten: so that he may just as well be lawless in character, and oppressive in action. The same ideas are expressed by Minerva46 in the very same words, at the second Olympian meeting in the Odyssey. It would therefore thus appear, that this particular step downwards in the character of the governments of the heroic age was owing to the cessation, through prolonged absence, of the influence of the legitimate sovereigns, and to consequent encroachment upon their moderate powers.

      Instance of a bad King.

      And it is surely well worthy of remark that we find in this very same poem the first exemplification of the character of a bad and tyrannical monarch, in the person of a certain king Echetus; of whom all we know is, that he lived somewhere upon the coast of Epirus, and that he was the pest of all mortals that he had to do with. With great propriety, it is the lawless Suitors who are shown to be in some kind of relation with him; for in the Eighteenth Odyssey they threaten47 to send Irus, who had annoyed them in his capacity of a beggar, to king Echetus, that he might have his nose and ears cut off, and be otherwise mutilated. The same threat is repeated in the Twenty-first Book against Ulysses himself, and the line that conveys it reappears as one of the Homeric formulæ48;

      εἰς Ἔχετον βασιλῆα, βροτῶν δηλήμονα πάντων.

      Probably this Echetus was a purchaser of slaves. It is little likely that the Suitors would have taken the trouble of sending Irus away, rather than dispose of him at home, except with the hope of a price; as they suggest to Telemachus to ship off Theoclymenus and Ulysses (still disguised) to the Sicels, among whom they will sell well49.

      Kingship in the age of Hesiod.

      The kingship, of which the features were so boldly and fairly defined in the Homeric age, soon passed away; and was hardly to be found represented by any thing but its φθορὰ, the τυραννὶς or despotism, which neither recognised limit nor rested upon reverence or upon usage, but had force for its foundation, was essentially absolute, and could not, according to the conditions of our nature, do otherwise than rapidly and ordinarily degenerate into the positive vices, which have made the name of tyrant ‘a curse and a hissing’ over the earth. In Hesiod we find what Homer nowhere furnishes; an odious epithet attached to the whole class of kings. The θεῖοι βασιλῆες of the heroic age have disappeared: they are now sometimes the αἰδοῖοι still, but sometimes the δωρόφαγοι, the gift-greedy, instead. They desire that litigation should increase, for the sake of the profits that it brings them50;

      μέγα κυδαίνων βασιλῆας

      δωροφάγους, οἳ τήνδε δίκην ἐθέλουσι δικάσσαι.

      The people has now to expiate the wickedness of these corrupted kings;

      ὀφρ’ ἀποτίσῃ

      δῆμος ἀτασθαλίας βασιλέων·

      A Shield of Achilles, manufactured after the fashion of the Hesiodic age, would not have given us, for the pattern of a king, one who stood smiling in his fields behind his reapers as they felled the corn

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