them
than because of any moral obligation. 'We will sack a town for you,'
says Menelaus to Telemachus, as an inducement to him to settle in
Laconia.

Along with this primitive rudeness goes, on the other hand, a strongly
aristocratic constitution of society. The great leaders and chiefs,
the long-haired Achaeans, are absolutely separated from the common
people, not in rank only, but to all appearance in race. They are
a superior caste, and of a different breed. Even to their King
their subjection is not much more than nominal, and he has to be
very careful of offending their susceptibilities or wounding their
sense of their own importance, while their treatment of the commons
beneath them is sufficiently disdainful. Though the commons are
summoned sometimes to the Council, their function there is merely a
passive one; they are called to hear what has been determined, and
to approve of it, if they so desire, but in no case have they any
alternative to accepting it, even should they disapprove. Altogether
the superiority of the Achaean nobles, and the haughtiness with
which they bear themselves, is such as to suggest that they hold
the position, not of tribal chieftains ruling over clansmen of the
same stock as themselves, but of a separate and conquering race
holding dominion over, and using the services of, the vanquished,
much after the manner of the Norman lordship in Sicily.

All this is sufficiently different from the state of things during
the historic period. It is not an undeveloped condition of the
same society that is in contemplation; it is a totally distinct
social organization. With regard to the position of woman, the
facts are even more remarkable, for if the Homeric picture be a
true one, historic Hellas, instead of representing an advance upon
the prehistoric age, presents a distinct retrogression. In the
Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but
even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern
life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as
in later Hellenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with
the other sex in private and in public, and is uniformly depicted
as exercising a very strong, and generally beneficent, influence.
The very names of Andromache, Penelope, Nausicaa, stand as types
of all that is purest and sweetest in womanhood. The fact that a
wife is purchased by bride-gifts does not militate against the
respect in which s