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 66 HISTORY OF GREECE. as opportunities for tdvising the king, and media for promulgat- ing his intentions to the people, rather than as restraints upon his authority. Unquestionably, they must have conduced in prac- tice to the latter result as well as to the former ; but this is not the light in which the Homeric poems describe them. The chiefs, kings, princes, or gerontes for the same word in Greek desig- nates both an old man and a man of conspicuous rank and posi- tion compose the council, 1 in which, according to the repre sentations in the Iliad, the resolutions of Agamemnon on the one side, and of Hector on the other, appear uniformly to prevail. The harshness and even contempt with which Hector treats re- spectful opposition from his ancient companion Polydamas, the desponding tone and conscious inferiority of the latter, and the unanimous assent which the former obtains, even when quite in the wrong all this is clearly set forth in the poem:- while in the Grecian camp we see Nestor tendering his advice in the most submissive and delicate manner to Agamemnon, to be adopt- ed or rejected, as " the king of men" might determine. 3 The council is a purely consultative body, assembled, not with any power of peremptorily arresting mischievous resolves of the king, but solely for his information and guidance. He himself is the presiding (boulephorus, or) member* of council ; the rest, col- lectively as well as individually, are his subordinates. We proceed from the council to the agora : according to what seems the received custom, the king, after having talked over his intentions with the former, proceeds to announce them to the people. The heralds make the crowd sit down in order, 5 and 1 B iro/dftif), abv 6e Kparof aiev uigeiv. 4 Iliad, vii. 126, UTJ^EV^ 'Epflr^f.
 * Iliad, xviii. 313.
 * Iliad, ix. 95-101.
 * Considerable strjss seems to be laid on the necessity that the people in