Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/614

602 primal man—the virtues of the Golden Age—we gather in some degree from his saying that men lived like the gods, but we gain it more distinctly by reading into his wail for the lost time Homer's conception of the virtues which made men illustrious and woman the ornament and crown of man's life. As surely as every writer of a work of imagination holds the mirror for his own age to glass herself in, as surely as Dante crystallized his enemies in immortal scorn, or that the vast gallery of Shakespeare was taken from every phase of life that met in London; whether they were adventurers returned from buccaneering beyond the line where there was no peace, or soldiers of fortune from the continent, squires of parts or squires with homely wits, courtiers who climbed the dizzy ladder with bold hearts and watchful eyes, great nobles of stainless lives, such as are still to be found in England, they were all types of those whom he met or of whom he had been told by those who had met them:—as surely as this is true for those, so surely can the same be said for Homer's men and women. Such evidence for the cast and character of any period is as much to be relied upon as the testimony of a living witness about the men, the movements, the looks, the bustle of Wall street or the Stock Exchange.

But first, is the king a petty tyrant in the Homeric state, something like a Rhenish graf four centuries ago, or a Scotch noble up to the Revolution? Instead he is the guardian of the precedents or customs on which the rights of his subjects rest, he is the vicegerent of the gods and must answer to them for an unjust judgment. In the stern controversy between him and Achilles, Agamemnon calls kings the shepherds of their people in proof that he should be careful of the lives of the host. The king has a council of ancients something like the Aula Regia of the Norman kings, and the people are entitled to meet in public assembly like the meetings that heard Demosthenes when the herald called upon him on that supreme occasion when no other dared to "fulmine over Greece to Macedon."