Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/88

 72 HISTORY OF GKKECE. same thing, fulfilling the express bidding of Agamemnon, upon whom Odysseus does not offer a single comment. This scene, which excited a sentiment of strong displeasure among the democrats of historical Athens, 1 affords a proof that the feeling of personal dignity, of which philosophic observers in Greece Herodotus, Xenophon, Hippocrates, and Aristotle boasted, as distinguishing the free Greek citizen from the slavish Asiatic, was yet undeveloped in the time of Homer. 2 The ancient epic is commonly so filled with the personal adventures of the chiefs, and the people are so constantly depicted as simple appendages attached to them, that we rarely obtain a glimpse of the treat- ment of (he one apart fom the other, such as this memorable Homeric agora affords. There remains one other point of view in which we are to re- gard the agora of primitive Greece, as the scene in which jus- tice was administered. The king is spoken of as constituted by Zeus the great judge of society : he has received from Zeus the sceptre, and along with it the powers of command and sanction : the people obey these commands and enforce these sanctions, under him, enriching him at the same time with lucrative pres- ents and payments. 3 Sometimes the king separately, sometimes the kings or chiefs or gerontes in the plural number, are named as deciding disputes and awarding satisfaction to complainants ; always, however, in public, in the midst of the assembled agora/ 1 Xenophon, Memorab. i. 2, 9. s Arisfcot. Polit vii. 6, 1 : Hippocrat. DC Acre, Loc. ct Aq. v. 85-86 ; He- >dot. vii. 135. 3 The aur/xTpov, deptarec, or -&e^tg, and u-yopr/, go together, under the pre- siding superintendence of the gods. The goddess Themis both convokes /md dismisses the agora (see Iliad, xi. 806 ; Odyss. ii. 67 ; Iliad, xx. 4). The tftjUfCTef, commandments and sanctions, belong properly to Zens (Odyss. xvi. 403) ; from him they are given in charge to earthly kings along with the sceptre (Iliad, i. 238; ii. 206). The commentators on Homer recognized #f/^f, rather too strictly, as ayapuc Kal /3ov/l^f /U'fjv (see Eustath. ad Odyss. xvi. 403). The presents and the Tinrapal deptOTec (Iliad, ix. 156). 4 Hesiod, Theogon. 85 ; the single person judging seems to be mentioned (Odyss. xii. 439). It deserves to be noticed that, in Sparta, the senate decided accusations of homicide (Aristot. Polit. iii, 1, 7): in historical Athens, the senate of Areiopagus originally did the same, and retained, even when its powers