The condition of the island shows us what its polity had been, rather than what it was. But for all ordinary occasions it had sufficed. For Assemblies met only when they had something to do; and rarely indeed would such junctures arrive. Infractions of social order and social rights, which now more commonly take place by fraud, were then due almost wholly to violence. And violence, from its nature, could hardly be the subject of appeal to the Assembly: as a general rule, it required to be repaid on the instant, and in the same coin. Judicial questions would not often be of such commanding interest, as to divide a people into two opinions; nor the parties to them wealthy enough to pay two talents to the successful judge. Great controversies, affecting allegiance and the succession, must of necessity in all ages be rare; and of a disputed succession in Greece the poems can hardly be said to offer us an instance. We find, however, in the last Book of the Odyssey, that, according to the ideas of that period, when a question as to the sovereignty did arise, the people needed no instructor as to the first measure they were to take. They repaired, as if by a common and instinctive impulse, to the Agorè; in which lay deposited their civil rights and their old traditions, like the gems of the wealth of Greece in the shrine of the Archer Apollo[279]. [278] Tittmann Griech. Staatsv. b. ii. p. 56. [279] Il. ix. 404. II. ILIOS. THE TROJANS COMPARED AND CONTRASTED WITH THE GREEKS. We have perhaps been accustomed to contemplate the Trojans too exclusively, either as enemies of the Greeks, or else as constituting, together with them, one homogeneous chapter of antiquity, which we might be content to examine as a whole, without taking notice of specific differences. Let us now endeavour to inquire what were the relations, other than those of mere antagonism in the war, between the two nations; what points they embraced, and what affinities or discords they disclose. The direct signs of kindred between Troy and Greece have already been considered; but the examination into points of contrast and resemblance as respects religion, polity, and character, will assist us in judging how far a key to those affinities and discords is to be found in the different interfusion and proportion, in the two cases, of ethnical elements which they possessed in common.