Legendary poems of Greece valuable pictures of real manners, though giving no historical facts.—They are memorials of the first state of Grecian society—the starting-point of Grecian history.—Comparison of legendary with historical Greece—government of the latter—of the former.—The king—in legendary Greece.—His overruling personal ascendency.—Difficulty which Aristotle found in explaining to himself the voluntary obedience paid to the early kings.—The boulê—the agora: their limited intervention and subordination to the king.—The agora—a medium for promulgation of the intentions of the king.—Agora summoned by Telemachus in Ithaka.—Agora in the second book of the Iliad—picture of submission which it presents.—Conduct of Odysseus to the people and the chiefs.—Justice administered in the agora by the king or chiefs.—Complaints made by Hesiod of unjust judgment in his own case.—The king among men is analogous to Zeus among gods.—The Council and Assembly, originally media through which the king acted, become, in historical Greece, the paramount depositaries of power.—Spartan kings an exception to the general rule—their limited powers.—Employment of public speaking as an engine of government—coeval with the earliest times.—Its effects in stimulating intellectual development.—Moral and social feeling in legendary Greece.—Omnipotence of personal feeling towards the gods, the king, or individuals.—Effect of special ceremonies.—Contrast with the feelings in historical Athens.—Force of the family tie.—Marriage—respect paid to the wife.—Brothers, and kinsmen.—Hospitality.—Reception of the stranger and the suppliant.—Personal sympathies the earliest form of sociality.—Ferocious and aggressive passions unrestrained.—Picture given by Hesiod still darker.—Contrast between heroic and historical Greece.—Orphans.—Mutilation of dead bodies.—Mode of dealing with homicide.—Appeased by valuable compensation (ποινὴ) to the kinsman of the murdered man.—Punished in historical Greece as a crime against society.—Condition, occupations, and professions of the Homeric Greeks.—Slaves.—Thêtes.—Limited commerce and navigation of the Homeric Greeks.—Kretans, Taphians, Phœnicians.—Nature of Phœnician trade as indicated by Homer.—Weapons and mode of fighting of the Homeric Greeks.—Contrast with the military array of historical Greece.—Analogous change—in military array and in civil society.—Fortification of towns.—Earliest residences of the Greeks—hill-villages lofty and difficult of access.—Homeric society recognizes walled towns, individual property, and strong local attachments.—Means of defence superior to those of attack.—Habitual piracy.—Extended geographical knowledge in the Hesiodic poems, as compared with Homer.—Astronomy and physics.—Coined money, writing, arts.—Epic poetry.—Its great and permanent influence on the Greek mind. 57-118 CHAPTER XXI.