Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/98

74 The strength of the earliest monarchies then, so far as we can gather from Homer, lay in no clearly defined powers or prerogatives, for definition implies limitation, and the Homeric monarchy knows no such thing, either as securing the king's power or confining it within certain bounds. It lay rather in the belief that the good relation of men and gods could be successfully cared for by those only with whose families the knowledge of divine things was deposited; in the belief that men of noble birth, and therefore as a rule of bodily beauty and prowess, could be the only leaders in war; and in the belief that obedience was owing to these in all questions between man and man in time of peace, because it was only through their judgments that the will of Zeus could be known. These three aspects of a single deeply-rooted conception lie at the base of all ancient aristocratic government; and this earliest monarchy, as we said just now, was but the outward expression of a truly aristocratic society. If we now turn for a moment to the earliest Roman constitution of which we have any knowledge, we shall find a marked change in the direction of definition and solidity.

II. Of the kings of Rome we have no direct contemporary evidence; we know them only from tradition, and from the traces they left behind them in the Republican constitution which followed. But the "method of survivals" has here been applied by a master-hand; and we can be fairly sure, not only of the fact that monarchy actually existed at Rome, but even of some at least of its leading characteristics.