As is the boy, so is the man. As is the seed, so is the plant. The dove neither begets, nor yet grows into the eagle. How came it that the prime philosophers of full-grown Greece gave to the science of Politics the very highest place in the scale of human knowledge? That they, kings in the region of abstract thought, for the first and perhaps the only time in the history of the world, came to think they discerned in the turbid eddies of state affairs the image of the noblest thing for man, the noblest that speculation as well as action could provide for him? Aristotle says that, of all sciences, Πολιτικὴ is ἡ κυριωτάτη καὶ μάλιστα ἀρχιτεκτονική[14]; and that ethical science constitutes but a branch of it, πολιτική τις οὖσα. Whence, I ask, did this Greek idea come? It is not the Greece, but it is the Rome of history, which the judgment and experience of the world has taken as its great teacher in the mere business of law and political organization. For so lofty a theory (a theory without doubt exaggerated) from so practical a person as Aristotle, we must assume a corresponding elevation of source. I cannot help believing that the source is to be found rather in the infancy, than in the maturity, of Greek society. As I read Homer, the real first foundations of political science were laid in the heroic age, with a depth and breadth exceeding in their proportions any fabric, however imposing, that the after-time of Greece was able to rear upon them. That after-time was in truth infected with a spirit of political exaggeration, from which the heroic age was free. [14] Ar. Eth. Nic. i. 2. We shall have to examine the political picture presented by the heroic age with reference to the various classes into which society was distinguished in its normal state of peace: to the organization of the army in war, and its mixture of civil with military relations: to the institutions which embodied the machinery of government, and to the powers by which that machinery was kept in motion. ~_Functions of the King._~ Let us begin with the King; who constituted at once the highest class in society, and the centre of its institutions. The political regimen of Greece, at the period immediately preceding the Trojan war, appears to have been that described by Thucydides, when he says that the tyrannies, which had come in with the increase of wealth, were preceded by hereditary monarchies with limited prerogatives[15]: πρότερον δὲ ἦσαν ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς γέρασι πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι. And again by Aristotle; βασιλεία ... ἡ περὶ τοὺς ἡρωικοὺς χρόνους ... ἦν ἑκόντων μὲν, ἐπὶ τισὶ δὲ ὡρισμένοις· στρατηγὸς γὰρ ἦν καὶ δικαστὴς ὁ βασιλεὺς, καὶ τῶν περὶ τοὺς θεοὺς κύριος. The threefold function of the King was to command the army, to administer justice chiefly, though not exclusively, between man and man, and to conduct the rites of religion[16]. [15] Thuc. i. 13. [16] Ar. Pol. III. xiv. xv. V. x.