Among other causes, which might tend to promote the establishment of the Greek βουλὴ or Council, we may perhaps reckon with propriety the inability of the old to discharge the full duties of sovereignty in the heroic age. Bodily force usually undergoes a certain amount of decay, before the mind has passed out of its ripeness; and both kings and subordinate lords, who had ceased to possess the strength that was requisite for bearing the principal burdens of government, might still make their experience available for the public good in the Council; even as we find that in Troas the brothers of Priam, with others advanced in life, were the principal advisers of the Assembly[195]. [195] Il. iii. 146-53. ~_The βουλὴ in time of peace._~ I admit that we have no example to give of the use of the βουλὴ by the Greeks during peace, so precise as those which the Iliad supplies for time of war. But even in war we do not find it except before Assemblies, which had deliberative business to transact. Now the only deliberative Greek ἀγορὴ which we meet with in time of peace is that of the Twenty-fourth Odyssey. The absence of a sovereign and a government in Ithaca at that time, and the utter discord of the principal persons, made a Council quite impossible, and left no measure open except a direct appeal to the people. It appears however clear, that the action of the βουλὴ was not confined to war. For we not only find the γέροντες on the Shield[196], who sit in the ἀγορὴ, exercising exclusively the office of judges, but they are also distinctly noticed as a class or order[197] in the Ithacan Assembly, who had a place in it set apart for themselves. Nor are we without a proof which, though conveyed in few words, is complete, of the conjunction of the Council with the sovereign in acts of government. For when Ulysses in his youth undertook the mission to Messene, in the matter of the sheep that had been carried off from Ithaca, he did it under the orders of Laertes, together with his council[198]: [196] Il. xviii. 506. [197] Od. ii. 14. [198] Od. xxi. 21. πρὸ γὰρ ἧκε πατὴρ ἄλλοι τε γέροντες. And Nausicaa meets her father Alcinous, on his way to the βουλὴ of the Phæacians. Upon the whole, the βουλὴ seems to have been a most important auxiliary instrument of government; sometimes as preparing materials for the more public deliberations of the Assembly, sometimes intrusted, as a kind of executive committee, with its confidence; always as supplying the Assemblies with an intellectual and authoritative element, in a concentrated form, which might give steadiness to its tone, and advise its course with a weight adequate to so important a function. ~_Opposition in the βουλή._~