Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/83

 AGORA IN ITHAKA. 57 enforce silence: any one of the chiefs or councillors but as il seems, no one ^Ise 1 is allowed to address them : the king first promulgates his intentions, which are then open to be comment- ed upon by others. But in the Homeric agora, no division of affirmative or negative voices ever takes place, nor is any formaa resolution ever adopted. The nullity of positive function strikes us even more in the agora than in the council. It is an assem- bly for talk, communication, and discussion, to a certain extent, by the chiefs, in presence of the people as listeners and sympath- izers, often for eloquence, and sometimes for quarrel, but here its ostensible purposes end. The agora in Ithaka, in the second book of the Odyssey, is convened by the youthful Telemachus, at the instigation of Athene, not for the purpose of submitting any proposition, but in order to give formal and public notice to the suitors to desist from their iniquitous intrusion and pillage of his substance, and to absolve himself farther, before gods^and men, from all obligations towards them, if they refuse to comply. For the slaughter of the suitors, in all the security of the festive hall and banquet (which forms the catastrophe of the Odyssey), was a proceeding involving much that was shocking to Grecian feeling, 2 and therefore re- quired to be preceded by such ample formalities, as would leave both the delinquents themselves without the shadow of excuse, and their surviving relatives without any claim to the customary satisfaction. For this special purpose, Telemachus directs the heralds to summon an agora : but what seems most of all sur- the agora should sit down (Iliad, ii. 96) : a standing agora is a symptom of tumult or terror (Iliad, xviii, 24G); an evening agora, to which men como elevated by wine, is also the forerunner of mischief (Odyss. iii. 138). Such evidences of regular formalities observed in the agora are not with- out interest. 1 Iliad, ii. 100. ' U.VTTJG 6e dioTpeQe Nitzsch (ad Odyss ii. 14) controverts this restriction of individual manifes- tation to the chiefs : the view of O. Mailer (Hist. Dorians, b. iii. c. 3) appears to me more correct : such was also the opinion of Aristotle fojai -nivvv ' ApiaTOT&jjc OTL o /iev dfjfiof (JLOVOV TOV uKovaat Kvpioe T/V, oi 6e q-ys/j.6vef kal rovirpal-ai (Schol. Iliad, ix. 17): compare the same statement in his Nike- machean Ethics, iii. 5. 2 See Iliad, ix. 635 ; Odysr . xi. 4*9.