CHAPTER II

POINE

A STUDY IN ANCIENT

GREEK BLOOD-VENGEANCE

By

HUBERT J. TRESTON, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT CLASSICS IN

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE,

CORK

_Rien de ce qu’ont pensé les Hellènes n’est indifférent

à l’histoire de la civilisation._—GLOTZ

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4

NEW YORK, TORONTO

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS

1923

_Made in Great Britain_

PREFACE

It has not been my purpose in writing this book to occupy myself in

expanding or discussing some articles written on Greek criminal law

in a learned dictionary of antiquities. While it is true that ancient

law, however crude and obscure its expression, is not so repulsive, so

inhumanly technical as medieval or modern law, and while it is also

true that a writer on Greek blood-vengeance cannot avoid an occasional

reference to legal formulae and technique, nevertheless I feel that a

merely legal treatise would not advance the prospects of Greek education

or our knowledge of Greek civilisation, for the simple reason that no one

but a professed student of ancient law could be induced to read it!

This work is intended rather as a supplement to the study of Greek

literature, history, and archaeology. The first part contains an analysis

of important elements of Homeric civilisation, an account of the

different strata in the Homeric society and of the religious beliefs and

practices of the Homeric Greeks. This section owes much to the pioneer

work of Ridgeway and of Leaf; it carries, so to speak, into remote

corners and crevices the light which their genius has thrown on the

general nature and structure of early Greek society.

The second part is concerned with the Middle Age of Hellenism (1000

B.C.-600 B.C.): it is an attempt to explain the social and religious

evolution of the Hellenes and to interpret the homicide laws of the

historical period in the light of that evolution. This section is

inevitably the most ‘legal’ portion of the work, but an effort is made,

even at the cost of what might appear excessive repetition, to avoid an

unduly technical exposition, and the literary aspect of the subject is

constantly emphasised.

The third part is an enquiry into the origin and development of the

legends which are found in Attic tragedy. These legends are permeated

with references to homicide, and I have attempted to render less obscure

and difficult the problems of blood-vengeance which they contain. As such

an attempt would be utterly impossible without a previous discussion

of the homicide laws of Greece, the account of these laws which I have

given in the second part of the work should be regarded as a necessary

preliminary to the subsequent analysis of these legends.

The extent of my indebtedness to modern writers on this and kindred

subjects is sufficiently indicated in the footnotes and the second

section of the Index. I must, however, express, in addition, my

obligations to Professor Goligher, of Trinity College, Dublin, for his

kind encouragement, assistance, and advice.

My best thanks are due to my friend and colleague, Mr. W. H. Porter, for

his generous co-operation in reading and correcting the proofs of this

work and for his valuable criticisms and suggestions. In particular, I

owe to him the alteration which I have adopted, on p. 195, in connection

with the restored Draconian inscription.

I should like also to record my appreciation of the accuracy and

efficiency of Messrs. Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co.’s Reader.

H. J. T.

CORK, _June 1923_.

CONTENTS

PAGES

BOOK I

POINE IN HOMER

CHAPTER I

SECTION I: The general principles of blood-vengeance, analysed

and illustrated: modes of vengeance of modern races in the

Balkans, in the Mediterranean area, and in South America:

modes of the ancient Germans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Welsh:

Burgundian, Norman, Israelite systems 1-11

SECTION II: Nature of the Homeric Society: Views of Leaf and

Ridgeway: feudal militarism and tribalism 12-22

CHAPTER II

The Pelasgian system of blood-vengeance: current views

explained and criticised: author’s view: proofs from the

text of Homer: question of a distinction between murder and

manslaughter, and between justifiable and unjustifiable

homicide: collectivity in vengeance 23-63

CHAPTER III

The Achaean system explained according to author’s theory:

proofs from Homeric text: question of discrimination, amongst

Achaeans, between murder and manslaughter, and between

justifiable and unjustifiable homicide: no collectivity or

solidarity in vengeance 64-77

CHAPTER IV

Judicial aspect of homicide in early Greece: current views

criticised: author’s theory based on distinction between

Achaean and Pelasgian societies: arguments from survivals in

historical times: meaning of δικασπόλοι βασιλῆες: the Trial

Scene in the Homeric Shield of Achilles: origin of trials for

homicide 78-94

CHAPTER V

Religious aspect of homicide in early Greece: current views:

digression on evolution of Greek religion: ancestor-worship:

nature-worship: animal sacra: image-magic: anthropomorphism:

Achaean and Pelasgian contributions to Homeric religion:

fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian dogma and ritual: religious

aspect of kin-slaying amongst Pelasgians and Achaeans: origin

and evolution of the Erinnyes: origin of homicide-purgation:

comparison of Pelasgian with Achaean Erinnys, and of Homeric

Erinnys with post-Homeric and ‘tragic’ Erinnys 95-126

BOOK II

POINE FROM HOMER TO DRACON

CHAPTER I

SECTION I: Social transitions: fall of Achaean Empire and its

causes: Achaean survivals: political changes in post-Homeric

times: post-Homeric migrations: Sparta and Boeotia: the

Hesiodic age of chaos: tribal stability and decay: evolution

of the Attic State; aristocracy and democracy 127-137

SECTION II: Religious and legal transitions in post-Homeric

times: Asiatic-Greek intercourse: compromise between Asiatic

and Greek ideas adopted in regard to homicide: origin of

Apolline purgation system: Apollo and pollution: rise of

Apolline influence: organisation of theocratic nobles:

origin of the laws of Dracon: proofs of author’s theory from

Greek legends, from Plato and Demosthenes: extradition:

pollution-doctrine and wergeld: question of legality of

‘private settlement’ for homicide in historical Athens 138-190

CHAPTER II

The Draconian Code: restored inscription of 409/8 B.C. and

author’s explanation: other Draconian homicide-laws derived

from Demosthenes: Plato’s code confirms and supplements these

data: classification of Attic homicide-laws as follows: (_a_)

those relating to accidental homicide, to death caused by

animals or inanimate objects, and to homicide by persons

unknown: (_b_) those relating to justifiable and to justifiably

accidental homicide: (_c_) those relating to manslaughter:

(_d_) those relating to wilful murder: some problems suggested

by these laws: origin of confiscation of property: evolution

of State-execution: parricide and kin-slaying: historicity of

Plato’s legislation regarding homicide 191-242

CHAPTER III

The Attic Homicide Courts: Attic legends concerning origin of

courts for homicide: the accounts of Pollux, of Aristotle, of

Demosthenes: question of γραφὴ φόνου: Plato’s _Euthyphro_:

author’s theory of the origin of Attic courts for homicide:

Dracon and the Ephetae: Solon and the Areopagus: the Exegetae 243-275

BOOK III

POINE IN ATTIC TRAGEDY

CHAPTER I

Aeschylus: _Agamemnon_, _Choephoroe_, _Eumenides_, _Suppliants_

and _Seven against Thebes_ 276-302

CHAPTER II

Sophocles: _Electra_, _King Oedipus_, _Oedipus at Colonus_,

_Antigone_, _Ajax_ and _Trachinian Maidens_ 303-331

CHAPTER III

Euripides: _Electra_, _Orestes_, _Iphigenia at Aulis_ and

_Iphigenia in Tauris_, _Phoenician Maidens_ and _Suppliants_,

_Mad Hercules_, _Heracleidae_, _Medea_, _Hippolytus_, _Ion_,

_Andromache_, _Hecuba_, _Bacchae_, _Alcestis_, _Troades_ and

_Helen_ 332-422

CONCLUSION 422-424

INDEX 425-427

POINE

BOOK I

POINE IN HOMER

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

SECTION I.: The general principles of blood-vengeance, analysed

and illustrated: customs of modern races in the Balkans, in

the Mediterranean area, and in South America: customs of the

ancient Germans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Welsh: Burgundian,

Norman, Israelite systems.

SECTION II.: Homeric Society; Views of Loaf and Ridgeway:

feudal militarism and tribalism.

SECTION I

If we examine the various methods of blood-vengeance which have been

adopted by different peoples throughout the ages, we shall find that

they may be divided broadly into four groups or categories. Amongst

rude and savage races there exists or has existed a system of vengeance

which we may describe as a barbarous and unrestricted vendetta. In the

absence of any social machinery for the determination of blood-guilt,

or for the estimation of its varying degrees, a single deed of blood

provokes an endless series of retaliations: a hideous orgy of revenge

rages through the land, an orgy which no one may escape; for old men and

women and children perish, whether one by one, or in a general massacre.

The vengeance is at once collective and hereditary. It strikes at the

neighbours and at the most distant relatives of the murderer: it strikes,

too, at the children that are born when the murderer has been gathered

to his fathers. It ends only when there is hardly anyone left to kill,

or when a paltry sum of money is offered to placate a glutted thirst for

blood. It is a strange fact that such a system should have survived up to

comparatively recent times[1] in the Balkan States. It is generally but,

as we hope to show, erroneously maintained that such a system prevailed

amongst the earliest inhabitants of Greece about whom we have any certain

knowledge.

A second mode of vengeance we may describe as a personal restricted

vendetta. It is distinguished from the mode which we have just mentioned

by the absence of collective or hereditary punishment. It refuses to

visit the sins of the father upon his children or upon his neighbours.

The right to avenge remains with the relatives of the slain. They may lie

in wait for the slayer or, if he flees, they may dog his footsteps over

land and sea. But they dare not strike the innocent for the guilty. There

is some power, whether of military autocracy, or of public opinion, which

prescribes the bounds of their avenging. The system does not generally

include a regular tribunal for the trial of homicide, whether because

there is little difficulty, in certain social groups, in determining the

identity of the murderer: or because some primitive method of evidence,

such as the ordeal of medieval Europe, takes precedence of human

witnesses: or because a recourse to arbitration, in the private domain of

a king or of a squire, is too insignificant a procedure to have found its

way into any historical records. It is such a system that seems to have

prevailed in Serbia up to very recent times. It is such a system that, we

hope to show, existed amongst the Achaean caste in Homeric Greece.

A third, and for our present purpose the most important, mode of

vengeance is that which we may describe as the ‘tribal wergeld’ mode.

It consists essentially of a compensation, in the form of goods or

valuables, which is paid by the relatives of the slayer to the relatives

of the slain. It differs from our first-mentioned mode of vengeance in

the fact that satisfaction is paid in ‘money,’ not in blood, and in the

fact that payment is fixed by custom or law and is not of an indefinite

duration. It differs from the second mode in this, that the ideal penalty

is not death, but compensation or exile, and that the punishment is

collective rather than personal. The system is found only in tribal

communities, where the life of the individual is subordinated to that

of the group, and where property is frequently possessed and enjoyed in

common. It is, of course, true that all tribal societies do not adopt

this system, whether because temperament and environment foster a

blood-lust that money cannot appease, or because a religious law has been

superimposed upon the clans, or because a feudal or highly centralised

government has become strong enough to resist the demands of the clansmen

for compensation. But, apart from these special circumstances, tribal

communities tend to adopt the ‘wergeld’ system of vengeance. We have the

most ample evidence[2] of its operation in pre-medieval Germany, and

Wales, and Ireland and Scotland, amongst the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks,

the Wisigoths and the Vikings. We can see in ancient Israel an instance

of a land which has evolved beyond the wergeld stage. There came a

time when a theocratic legislator was sufficiently powerful to attack

the privileges of the clans, and to cry out, as with a divine voice,

‘Ye shall not take satisfaction for the life of a man that is guilty

of blood.’[3] We hope to make it clear that it was this system which

prevailed amongst the earliest inhabitants of Greek lands, who may, for

convenience, be described as Pelasgians. Owing to the great number of the

individuals who were liable to make or to receive compensation, and also

because of the social organisation of the tribes, we are not surprised

to find that a regular tribunal was frequently appealed to, and that a

trial, concerned more often with the question of payment than with the

question of guilt, was one of the most common events of interest in the

life of Pelasgian tribesmen. No wonder is it then that the poet Homer

gives a description of such a scene[4] and tells us that Hephaestus

had engraved it on the famous Shield of Achilles. This is the earliest

reference to a trial of any kind in all European literature.

Our fourth category of the modes of blood-vengeance is intended to

comprise all the methods of punishing homicide which are characteristic

of fully developed social organisms, whether in ancient or in modern

times. Homicide, which was originally conceived as an outrage affecting

only a family or clan, may come to be regarded as a crime against the

body politic, as an insult to the majesty of the State, its laws, its

gods, or its governors. Indeed, this latter conception usually becomes

so vigorous that it obscures and ultimately extinguishes the former,

at least in so far as that former conception concerns the claims of the

relatives of the victim. In early English law the word _murdrum_[5]

denoted a fine payable to the king if the murderer was not produced.

In feudalism, the lord claimed a _portion_ of the payment made by the

relatives of the slayer. This was the _honour-price_, an atonement for

the insult caused by a ‘breach of the peace.’ In historical[6] Athens

wergeld was forbidden, but the property of a convicted murderer who went

into perpetual exile was confiscated to the State. In ancient Israel

wergeld was abolished when murder was conceived as a ‘sin’ against the

God of the State, when it was believed that blood polluted the land.[7]

In Greece, too, we hope to show that wergeld was abolished in the first

instance by the religion of Apollo, and that the evolution of the

State, if it did not assist in its abolition, at least ensured that the

abolition should be permanent. Once murder becomes a sin against the

gods, or a crime against the State, the day of private vengeance has

passed: that of State trial, State imprisonment, State execution takes

its place. The relatives may still assist, they may even be compelled to

assist, in the punishment of homicide, but they have lost the right to

material compensation.

We will now give a few illustrations of the actual operation of these

modes of blood-vengeance. As the fourth or last-mentioned mode is

found in all modern States, we need not here illustrate its operation,

especially as we shall have to describe, at a later stage, the treatment

of homicide in historical Athens.

As an example of the practice of unrestricted vendetta, we may cite

the case of the Montenegrins.[8] This little people, up to quite

recent years, practised a collective and hereditary vendetta, which

continued from generation to generation, until the number of victims

on both sides was equal, or until a blood-price of ten sequins was

accepted by the feud-weary relatives of the original victim. Again, in

Sardinia,[9] until the close of the eighteenth century, a collective

hereditary feud followed a single act of murder, and hundreds of

lives were lost in a single year. In Corsica,[10] in the eighteenth

century, the vendetta-system caused the loss of a thousand lives

each year: whole villages were depopulated: houses became fortresses

where armed men lay in wait, hungry for vengeance, while the women

tilled the fields. A similar barbarous blood-thirst was prevalent in

Sicily,[11] in Calabria,[11] and in Albania,[12] up to quite recent

times. The establishment of an improved system of government and the

operation of disciplinary penalties have fortunately checked and must

ultimately abolish so hideous a mode of vengeance. These peoples of

the Mediterranean area are probably, as Ridgeway holds,[13] the racial

descendants of the old Pelagasian race. For this, and for other reasons,

there is a tendency to assume that the Pelasgians followed this system of

blood-vendetta. But we hope to show that this view is probably incorrect,

and that it is much more applicable to the Greece of post-Achaean days,

that is, from 1000 B.C. to 750 B.C. than to the Greece of Achaean and

pre-Achaean times.

As an illustration of the second mode of vengeance, we may perhaps

cite the Serbians of recent times who adopted a restricted form of

vendetta and who often allowed murder to remain unpunished.[14] The

restricted system seems to have existed amongst the Araucanians[15] of

South America, and amongst the Jivaros Indians,[16] but only when the

identity of the murderer could be established. In this latter case we

find the alternative operation of a more civilised with a more barbarous

form of vengeance. But we must not assume that these forms coexist as

alternatives everywhere. A French authority holds[17] that the essential

motive of collective punishment was the production or identification of

the murderer. ‘So long,’ he says,[17] ‘as the murderer is unknown, so

long is the responsibility collective and diffused.’ We cannot accept

this statement as an explanation of the origin of unrestricted vendetta.

We admit that collective penalties of a minor kind would form a strong

inducement for the discovery of the criminal. It was for this reason

perhaps that an Anglo-Saxon law[18] levied a fine on the whole ‘hundred’

if the murderer was not produced. But it is one thing to bring pressure

to bear on a district, whether by a fine, as in this case, or by an oath,

as in the instance mentioned in Deuteronomy[19]; it is quite another

thing to destroy a whole town or village if the murderer was unknown. We

shall see[20] that the Homeric Achaeans often waited long for vengeance,

and often allowed the homicide to go unpunished, rather than visit with

unjust punishment the innocent relatives of the slayer. In this system

there is no trace of collectivity. The relatives have not even to pay

a sum of money. The flight of the slayer is not indeed accepted as a

substitute for the normal penalty, which is death, but it postpones

indefinitely, if not for ever, a vengeance which the slayer alone can

suffer.

To illustrate the operation of the ‘tribal wergeld’ system, we naturally

turn, in the first place, to the Germans of pre-Christian days.

Tacitus says[21] of them: ‘It is an indispensable duty to adopt the

private enmities of a father or a relative ... these, however, are not

irreconcilable and perpetual. Even homicide is atoned for by a fixed

number of cattle and sheep and the whole House accepts the satisfaction,

to the benefit of the civic group.’ Tacitus is obviously astonished at

this system of compensation for homicide. The Romans, like the Germans,

were familiar with the organisation of the clan, and of the tribe, but

Roman law, as far back as we can trace it, did not permit wergeld. In

Rome,[22] from 450 B.C. onwards, the expiation of the insult which the

homicide offered to the State and its gods had driven from view, and had

therefore probably abolished, the material compensation of the clan.

The chief detail of interest which Tacitus gives us is the collective

acceptance of satisfaction by a whole House or Family. From other

sources, which we shall presently discuss, we may infer that the House

in this instance was a very large unit, including not merely the closer

kindred which traced descent to a common living (or lately deceased)

ancestor, but that wider group of kinsmen which is called the clan.

We note also, in Tacitus’ account, a reference to a fixed number of

cattle and sheep. Who was it that fixed the number? Who was it that paid?

To answer these questions we shall cite some details of Welsh wergeld

payments which have been admirably collected and explained by Mr. F.

Seebohm.[23]

In the Cymric codes, the normal wergeld was a payment of one hundred and

twenty cows, but the number varied according to the rank of the slain.

For the death of a chieftain the amount was one hundred and eighty cows:

for the death of a stranger, from thirty to sixty cows.[24] Over and

above the wergeld or _galanas_, there was payable an insult-price or

_saraad_, consisting of six cows. This amount was always paid first,

from the murderer’s own cattle. Within fourteen days of the murder, a

meeting of the slayer’s clan or wider kindred was convened, at which the

proportion of wergeld due from each family was determined. Usually the

murderer’s family paid forty cows, or one-third of the total wergeld.

Of this amount the murderer himself paid one-third, or about fourteen

cows; his father and mother paid one-third, and his brothers and

sisters one-third, the brothers paying twice as much as the sisters.

The remaining portion of the wergeld, namely, eighty cows, was paid

by the wider kindred. Relatives on the paternal side paid two-thirds,

those on the maternal side, one-third. As the clan comprised very often

a large number of people, the actual contribution of individual cousins

of the murderer would have been rather small. The murderer himself paid,

in _saraad_ and _galanas_, a total forfeit of twenty cows. But if the

murderer was poor, there was paid ‘spear-penny,’ which was one-ninth of

the wergeld, but was collected from male kinsmen on the paternal side.

It was not necessary that these payments should all be made at the

same time, or immediately. They were frequently made in fortnightly

instalments. The system of receiving wergeld seems to have been parallel.

It is probable that the cows paid by the murderer’s family went to the

family of the victim: those paid by first cousins went to first cousins:

those paid by paternal kindred went to paternal kindred: all being

distributed in the last resort to individuals, if the clans involved

had developed the principle of individual ownership at that particular

period of time. It is clear from the Cymric codes that individual

ownership was assumed as universally prevalent. But it is certain that

such a condition is not a characteristic of all tribal communities. In

the Salic law, which operated amongst the Germans from about A.D. 500

onwards, a distinction was made between the inheritance of ‘wergeld’

and that of the ‘allod’ or family-domain.[25] While the latter could

only be inherited by a family group which did not extend beyond second

cousins, a group which in Wales was called a ‘gwely,’ the wergeld was

inherited by all persons who could trace any kind of direct descent,

however remote, from a common ancestor of the original receivers of the

wergeld. This law seems to us to reflect an ancient system of communistic

ownership in movable property amongst the Germans. Indeed we may infer

the existence of such a system from the account which Caesar[26] gives of

the pre-Christian Germans. Even in the time of Tacitus the arable land of

the Germans had not yet become private property.[27]

It is in this common control, or common ownership, of wergeld that we

may find the explanation of the absence of wergeld-payments for homicide

within the clan. Seebohm, speaking of the Welsh system, says[28]: ‘A

murder within this wider kindred was regarded as a family matter....

There was no blood-fine or _galanas_ within the kindred.’ We shall find

at least one illustration of this important principle in the _Iliad_

of Homer.[29] It is not a complete explanation of the principle to

assert, as Fustel de Coulanges would assert,[30] that the kin-slayer had

offended his domestic gods and that no payment could permit the continued

presence of the murderer at the ancestral hearth fire in which the life

of a kinsman had been violently submerged. In the phratry different

clans had a common worship, and the murderer who paid wergeld joined in

that worship. We agree with Coulanges that the attitude of the domestic

gods towards kin-slaying differed from that of the phratry-gods towards

ordinary homicide. But why? Because primitive man creates gods in his own

image and endows them with his own emotions. It is with man, not with

gods, that the ultimate explanation lies. The real explanation of the

principle is to be found, we think, in a tradition ultimately resting on

the common ownership of property.

Accepting this principle, we can understand more easily the punishment

of kin-murder in tribal society. There are only three alternative

penalties to wergeld: exile, bondage (or servitude) and death. It is

natural to assume, and it has been rightly maintained,[31] that death

was a loathsome penalty in days when relatives alone could avenge. It

was therefore rarely, if ever, exacted. Bondage or servitude also,

though sometimes found as a punishment for homicide,[32] would naturally

be avoided as a sequel to kin-murder. There remains only the option

of exile. Like Cain, the slayer of his brother, the kin-murderer must

wander over the wide earth.[33] Expelled from his clan, his home, his

property and his gods, he goes forth to slavery or to death in other

lands. As a French writer puts it, ‘Alone, he has arrayed against him the

universe.’[34]

When homicide occurred between members of different clans, death was

never inflicted on the slayer, except in the last resort. It was,

perhaps, in order to avoid this fate, that the slayer sometimes fled

into exile. But it is doubtful if his flight cancelled any part of the

wergeld except his own individual share, or the ‘spear-penny’ which he

was expected to collect, if he was poor. It is certain however that the

life of the slayer was never exposed to danger from the relatives of the

victim so long as he remained in exile. That there were variations in the

matter of accepting exile as part-payment of wergeld will be obvious from

the following facts which we cite also as illustrations of the survival

of wergeld in a modified form under feudal or ecclesiastical rule.

In the _Canones Wallici_, a code of laws which operated in Wales in the

seventh century A.D., we find[35] that the slayer pays half the total

wergeld, and his relatives pay half. The wergeld at this time consisted

of three male slaves and three female slaves: if the slayer went into

exile his half was cancelled, but his relatives had still to pay their

half, or to follow him into exile. In the Burgundian homicide-laws of

the fifth century A.D. we find[36] that the penalty for the murder of a

freeman was death. The older wergeld penalty, which was now abolished

for murder, was however retained in a certain form for minor degrees of

guilt. Thus, for manslaughter, we have a list of blood-ransoms arranged

according to the rank of the victim: for the unintentional slaying of a

noble, the penalty was a payment of 300 solidi: for that of an ordinary

man, 200 solidi, and so on. For slaying a person in self-defence, the

penalty was reduced to one-half in each case. Amongst the laws of the

early Norman Kings of England we find[37] the following, attributed

to Henry I, in which a group of neighbours known as guild-brethren

(_congildones_) are compelled to supplement the payments of the kindred.

‘If anyone commit homicide of this kind, let his relatives pay as

much wergeld as they would have received if he (the slayer) had been

killed: if the slayer have relatives on the father’s side and not on

the mother’s, they pay as much as they would have received, that is,

two-thirds the wergeld: if the slayer has only maternal relatives, they

pay one-third the wergeld, the _congildones_ one-third, and himself

one-third: if he has no maternal relatives, the _congildones_ pay half,

and himself half.’ The manner in which feudalism gradually substituted

the conception of murder as an insult to a king or to a lord for the

older conception of it as an injury to the clan is clearly seen in the

following law[38] attributed to King Henry I: ‘If the slain man has no

kindred ... half shall be paid to the king, and half to the _congildones_

(of the victim).’ In one portion of the Salic law we read[39] that if

anyone slays a kinsman and goes into exile, his goods are confiscated to

the royal treasury. Feudalism has thus exacted a new penalty which the

clan-regime did not exact.

On the other hand we find a diminution in the collective punishment which

tribal wergeld carried with it, in the law of King Edmund (A.D. 940-946)

which may thus be rendered in modern English[40]: ‘If anyone henceforth

slay any man, (I will) that he himself bear the feud unless with the aid

of his friends he compensate it with full wergeld within twelve months.

But if they will not pay, I will that all the kindred be free from the

feud except the murderer, provided they do not afterwards give him food

and protection.’ In such laws as these we catch a glimpse of a system of

blood-vengeance which once prevailed amongst tribal peoples, but which

soon became a mere echo, a phantom shadow of its former self, in the

march of mightier movements, in the onward course of civilisation.

We have wandered far afield in the search for definite details of

the wergeld system, as we shall look in vain for such details in the

ancient literature of Greece, though we can have no doubt that the

system prevailed in Greece for many centuries. It is true that in the

laws of Gortyn we find[41] a classification of money-payments which

were exacted for adultery and seduction at a period which no authority

regards as earlier than the seventh century B.C., and which is generally

believed[42] to be the sixth or fourth century B.C. These payments

varied according to the rank of the offender and of the injured party:

and also according to the particular circumstances of the offence.[43]

But at the time of the Gortyn laws, Crete had passed out of the stage

in which murder was materially compensated. Hence these laws contain no

reference to the wergeld system. We must therefore be content to apply

to the earliest societies of Greek lands the general principles of the

payment of wergeld which we find operative in other tribal countries. We

have in the text of Homer unmistakable evidence[44] for the payment of

some form of wergeld. The only question that arises is: was this payment

a mere sordid termination of a sanguinary feud, such as characterised

the Montenegrins up to recent years, or was it a genuine tribal wergeld?

Before attempting to answer this question, it will be necessary to

examine briefly the nature of the societies which existed in Homeric

Greece.

SECTION II

Fortunately, as a result of recent archaeological exploration we are now

entitled to assume, what the ancient Greeks so naturally believed, that

the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the pioneer epics of European literature,

are valuable historical documents for the period which preceded and

followed the Trojan war. For our present purpose it does not very much

matter whether the poems were composed by one great poet or by a number

of rhapsodists, whether they were composed in Greece or in Asia Minor.

The important thing is that they refer to actual places and events, to

men and women who really lived and died. Just as Seebohm accepts the

poem _Beowulf_ as sole evidence for early Scandinavian tribal custom,

even though he describes[45] the poem as an ‘Anglian or Northumbrian

recension of a story founded on Scandinavian tradition and designed for

recital at some eighth-century royal court,’ so we see in the _Iliad_ and

the _Odyssey_ a genuine historical picture of Greece under the Achaean

domination, even though these poems were not the work of contemporary

hands, and contain certain passages and verses[46] which are clearly of

later origin than that of the poems as a whole. It is only necessary

for us here to refer to two recent works[47] of Dr. Leaf which furnish

a cogent justification for this assumption. Professor Ridgeway, too,

who has done so much to remove the veil of obscurity which has hung for

so long over early Greece, has never wavered in his belief[48] in the

historicity of Homer. We should indeed prefer to be wrong with Leaf and

Ridgeway rather than to be right with such critics as Gilbert Murray[49]

and Miss Harrison,[50] who see in the Homeric poems the culmination of

centuries of literary work, which took final form and shape in the Athens

of Solon and Peisistratus, in the atmosphere of the Persian rather than

the Trojan war.

The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, however, if they are to be correctly

interpreted, must be studied in the light of sociological analogy

and archaeological research. Everyone is now familiar with the

differentiation which the learning and genius of Ridgeway first defined

in the population of early Greece, and with the distinction which he has

indicated between the _Achaeans_ and the _Pelasgians_.[51] In Homer,

the peoples of Greece are called _Achaeans_: but Ridgeway holds that

the Achaeans were not Greeks: that they were not even members of any

Mediterranean race; that they were Celts[52] from Central Europe who

descended slowly into Greece, who conquered the inhabitants by virtue of

superiority in the arts and weapons of war, who settled and intermarried

with native royal families, and who, in the course of two hundred years,

had become assimilated to the natives in language and culture, until

they lost all consciousness of difference.[53] Homer, the poet of the

Achaeans, called the Greek-Achaean host, the mixed army of Pelasgians

and Achaeans, by a name which belonged only to the Celtic kings in

whose courts he sang his songs of praise. The Celtic Achaeans have lost

their language but retained their name. The Pelasgians, according to

Ridgeway,[54] spoke in the time of Homer an Aryan tongue so well that

even their conquerors came to speak it and forgot their own. Yet they

were not, in origin, an Aryan race! On this point we find it difficult

to agree with Ridgeway, though we admire the scientific reasoning and

the profound learning which support his theory. The precise nature of

the social organisations of early Greece, Ridgeway does not attempt

to decide—at least in his ‘Early Age of Greece’: but we infer from an

article which he has written on Homeric land-tenure[55] that he believed,

as does Mr. H. Seebohm,[56] that both Achaeans and Pelasgians were tribal

peoples.

Some of the difficulties presented by Ridgeway’s reasoning are removed,

in our opinion, by the more recent theories of Dr. Leaf. Before the

advent of the Achaeans to Greece about 1400 B.C.,[57] there already

existed in Greece, according to Leaf, two social and racial strata:

(1) a dominant non-Aryan[58] caste who came originally from Crete, and

who may be called Minoans: (2) a primitive neolithic agricultural

Aryan people who spoke Greek,[59] who were, in fact, the nucleus of

the Greek race, and who had imposed their speech upon their non-Aryan

masters. The Achaeans, in Leaf’s view, came as a wave or series of waves

in the perpetual tide of invasion from the north.[60] Settling first

in Epirus,[61] they pressed gradually southwards, subdued the Minyans

(or Minoans) of Iolcos,[62] and the Pelasgians of central Greece,[63]

crossed later to the Peloponnese, and having conquered Elis, Laconia

and Argolis, established themselves in all the strategic positions of

the peninsula.[64] They were not necessarily, in Leaf’s opinion, of

different racial origin from the Pelasgians[65]: they may, in fact, have

been remotely related to them. But the Achaean outlook and temperament

were very different from those of the Pelasgian folk. The former were

military freebooters; piratical adventurers,[66] bound together by that

rigid obedience to a single commander which was an essential condition

of their survival and success. The latter were tillers of the soil,

accustomed to political serfdom,[67] paying such dues as their masters

exacted, following them, on occasion, to battle and to death. One point

of difference which Leaf mentions must be here especially emphasised,

as it is of vital importance for our theory of Homeric blood-vengeance.

The Achaeans, Leaf holds,[68] had no tribal or ‘kindred’ organisations,

and were merely soldiers of a common army. The Pelasgians,[69] however,

were for the most part organised on the model of tribal communities.

Speaking of the Achaeans, he says[70]: ‘All the rites and taboos of the

primitive Family-system have disappeared and obligation only attaches

to the natural kinship of close blood-relationship.... This is what we

should expect in a race of military adventurers. Family rites do not

tend to military efficiency: the efficient soldier must break away from

local ties. In so doing he takes a long step away from the foundations

of primitive society and religion.’ Thus Leaf conceives the society of

Homeric Greece as composed of two elements: (1) a military autocracy,

ruling like the Spartans in Laconia, a small exclusive caste held

together by the consciousness of a common origin and a common purpose and

also by the danger of hostility from without: (2) a tribal agricultural

subject-folk who lived their primitive lives in rural areas, in villages,

in unimportant towns, and even in cities within view of the Achaean

garrison. Now this conception differs fundamentally from the traditional

ideas of Homeric society, and in particular from the conception of the

Achaeans as a tribal people, which we have associated with Ridgeway

and H. Seebohm. We believe that an attempt to decide this question is

necessary for the elucidation of many Homeric problems, such as that of

blood-vengeance or of land-tenure. We shall adduce evidence, in our study

of Homeric blood-vengeance, which will serve as a confirmation of Leaf’s

hypothesis. At present we will confine ourselves to some more general

arguments which can be regarded as supplementary to the evidence which

Leaf himself puts forward.

Ridgeway, in discussing[71] the mode of land-tenure in Homeric Greece,

seeks to prove that the Homeric poems reveal an evolution in the

private ownership of land, beginning with a stage in which, as in the

_Iliad_, land is held in common by all tribesmen except the king or

chief whose _temenos_ is private and personal and probably hereditary,

and progressing to a stage in which, as in the _Odyssey_, ‘allotments’

among tribesmen tend to accumulate and to become more and more a

family inheritance within the tribe, without attaining to the stage of

absolutely private ownership which we find in the time of Hesiod. Such

an evolution is, of course, a characteristic feature of settled tribal

existence. Sir Henry Maine, in his interesting analysis[72] of the

origin of private property in land, distinguishes three stages of its

growth. In the first stage, there is communal ownership, both of land and

harvest, such as is still found among some Highland clans of Scotland:

the food-supplies of individuals are doled out, sometimes daily, by the

chiefs of the clans.[73] The periodical distribution of the ‘harvest,’

such as was made by the elders of tribal Slavonic subjects in the once

mighty Austrian and Turkish Empires, marks a slight modification of

this system, which does not, however, affect the tenure of land.[74]

‘In the Russian villages, however,’ says Maine,[75] ‘the substance of

the property ceases to be looked upon as indivisible, and separate

proprietary claims are allowed freely to grow up.... After the expiration

of a given, but not in all cases of the same, period, separate ownerships

are extinguished, the land of the village is thrown into a mass: and

then it is redistributed among the families composing the community,

according to their number.’ The third stage finds an illustration in

India, where, as Maine says,[76] ‘not only is there no indivisibility

of the common fund, but separate proprietorship in parts of it may be

indefinitely prolonged and may branch out into any number of derivative

ownerships, the _de facto_ partition of the stock being, however, checked

by inveterate usage and by the rule against the admission of strangers

without the consent of the brotherhood.’ Though neither Maine nor

Ridgeway mentions the analogy, we think we can trace some such evolution

in the old German tribes as described by Caesar and by Tacitus. Caesar

tells us[77] that here ‘no one has a fixed portion of land, his own

peculiar property, but the magistrates and chiefs allot every year to

_tribes and clans_ as much land as, and in whatever place, they think

proper, and they oblige them to remove the succeeding year.’ Tacitus,

however, says[78] that ‘the lands are occupied by villages, in groups, in

allotments proportioned to the number of cultivators, and are presently

parcelled out among _individuals_ according to rank and condition: the

arable lands are annually changed.’

Such a theory of evolution in landed property within the tribe may,

however, be complicated by the coexistence, in the same district, of

tribal groups and of a dominant ‘feudal’ caste. Maine points out,[79]

in reference to Russian village-communities, that ‘these villages are

always in theory the patrimony of some noble proprietor, and the peasants

have within historical times been converted into the predial and, to a

great extent, into the personal serfs, of the seignior. But the pressure

of this superior ownership has never crushed the ancient organisation

of the village.’ Now if we adopt the hypothesis of two distinct strata

in the Homeric society, namely, of a dominant quasi-feudal Achaean

caste, and of a tribal Pelasgian subject-folk, we shall be justified

in assuming that some such ‘superior ownership’ coexisted with tribal

ownership in the world of the Homeric poems. We shall expect to find

a predominance of private ownership on the one hand, and a trace or

‘reminiscence’ of communal ownership on the other, in the verses of a

poet who reflected in the main the atmosphere of the Achaean lords, but

also, incidentally and fortuitously, that of the subject people. We

must, then, consult the text of Homer if we hope to decide whether the

Achaeans were quasi-feudal adventurers who ruled over the Pelasgians,

without disturbing or destroying their normal tribal life: or whether

the Achaeans, themselves a tribal nomadic people, adopted, by a social

fusion, the tribal ownership which existed amongst their subjects, the

chiefs alone possessing ‘private land,’ the others, common land. As the

Homeric references to land-tenure are rare and obscure, it is obvious

that the solution of the problem of Homeric land-ownership depends

entirely on the answer to this wider and more important question.

In _Iliad_ xii. 422-426 Homer makes use of a simile derived from

a current mode of tenure of arable land, in order to describe the

fierceness of the conflict between the Argives and the Lycians. ‘As, in

a common field, two men make quarrel over boundaries, with measures in

their hands, and strive for equal rights, even inch by inch, so, too,

were they (the Argives and the Lycians) by (the brief space of) the

battlements divided.’ This passage proves beyond question that the poet

and his hearers were familiar with a certain degree of communism in

the use of arable land. Whether the reference is to a social condition

in which, as in the German tribes at the time of Tacitus, the arable

land was redistributed annually to individuals, or whether the land

was redistributed after long intervals of undisturbed enjoyment, as

was the custom in certain Russian villages, it is impossible, as it is

unnecessary, to decide. The really important point which we wish to

emphasise is that there is no evidence that the quarrelsome tillers of

the soil were Achaeans. This passage does not prove that the Achaeans

lived in clans and tribes and possessed their lands in communal fashion.

It merely proves that they were familiar with the existence of such a

mode of possession. Incidentally, also, it proves how strong and how

passionate, even in tribal rustic folk, the instinct begotten of even

temporary private ownership may be. Yet this is the principal text of

Homer upon which has been based the theory of the tribal nature of

Homeric society!

In _Odyssey_ vi. 6-10 we are told how Nausithous, the Phaeacian, brought

his people to Scheria, ‘and drew a wall around the town and builded

houses, and made temples for the gods, and meted out the fields.’ Here

we may observe that elaborate ceremonial which, as Fustel de Coulanges

points out,[80] was characteristic of the foundation of cities or of

settlements in Ancient Greece and Rome. The distribution of land was

an essential condition of agricultural existence for tribes which had

already developed a certain degree of private ownership. But this

passage merely proves that groups of people were known to change their

habitations.

In _Iliad_ vi. 190-195 we learn that a king of Lycia gave to Bellerophon,

as a dowry for his wife, half his valuables (τιμή), and the Lycians

gave him a domain (τέμενος) superior to that of others. Ridgeway and H.

Seebohm maintain that the only land which is held in private ownership,

in the _Iliad_, is the domain of kings and princes. In this passage we

admit the probable operation of tribal ownership, but we must point out

that the Lycians were not Achaeans. A more relevant citation is _Iliad_

ix. 574-84, a passage in which we are told that the Elders and Priests

of the Aetolians offered a choice of their richest lands as a ‘domain’

to Meleager. H. Seebohm holds[81] that it is improbable that the richest

lands were at the time unoccupied and that such an offer therefore proves

the existence of a communal land-tenure which would admit of such a

rapid partition and consequent readjustment. Again, we admit that tribal

ownership may be inferred from this passage, but we deny that the donors

of the domain were necessarily members of the Achaean caste. It is true

that the Achaeans ruled over Aetolia, but there still survived many

rich Pelasgian tribes. Even if we knew that the donors were Achaeans,

it would not be necessary to conclude that the Achaeans lived in tribal

groups, for the partition and readjustment might have been equally simple

for rich quasi-feudal owners acting in unison.

In _Iliad_ ix. 147-155 Agamemnon, the Achaean war-chief, says that he

will give to Achilles, as a dowry with his daughter, ‘seven cities,

around Pylos, having men abounding in flocks who will worship him with

gifts as a god and obey him.’ Those who conceive the Achaean heroes as

tribal chieftains will find it very difficult to explain how a chief can

thus wantonly confiscate the territory of his allies. Pylos was in the

‘kingdom’ of Nestor, a Minoan ally of the Achaeans. No confederation of

tribal chiefs engaged in a common war could survive such a confiscation.

But the offer of Agamemnon becomes intelligible enough if we regard him

as the leader of a dominant military power, or as the feudal over-lord

who possessed by right of office a ‘superior ownership’ of all the lands

of Greece.

In _Odyssey_ iv. 171-177 Menelaus says that he would have given to

Odysseus, had he been there on his return from Troy, a whole ‘city to

dwell in,’ and that he would have built for him a house, and brought him

from Ithaca, together with all his wealth, his son and all his people,

‘making one city desolate, of those that lay around, in his domain.’ H.

Seebohm finds it difficult to understand this passage in the light of his

tribal theory of the Achaeans. It is, he says,[82] unusual, and merely

shows the despotism to which a tribal chief frequently attained. But we

prefer to see in Menelaus the typical Achaean over-lord, who by virtue

of his kinship with Agamemnon, and of his own feudal and military power,

tramples with impunity upon a whole city and moves a whole people from

place to place, not as a chief would lead his tribe, but as a medieval

baron might move his _villeins_ from one part of his territory to another.

In the realm of Odysseus one seeks in vain for cogent evidence of

tribal conditions. The shameless conduct of the suitors of Penelope,

in devouring the substance of the absent Odysseus, and in plotting

the assassination of his son and heir,[83] as also the cruel

hyper-vengeance which Odysseus with impunity wreaked upon them, seem

to us more suggestive of feudalism and autocracy than of genuine

tribalism. In tribal communities an immense importance attaches to

questions of marriage and inheritance. The voice of the ‘folk-moot,’

of the clan-gathering, can and must be heard. It is true that in the

_Odyssey_[84] the disguised Odysseus, in questioning his son as to why he

had not driven the suitors from his house, asks significantly: ‘Do the

people hate thee?’ But it is equally true that in the domestic drama of

the realm of Odysseus the rank and file of the people are ignored. For

our part we feel that we move in that atmosphere of autocratic militarism

which, in ancient Thessaly or Macedonia, and in medieval Europe, exalts

the dagger of the assassin and the intrigue of the paramour.

In _Odyssey_ xiv. 208 we are told that when a certain rich man, named

Castor, died, his sons divided up and cast lots for his property. This

procedure would be perfectly normal in modern society if the owner died

intestate and the property was not entailed. We hear nothing in this

narration of any clan-council having determined the right of succession,

as would ordinarily occur in tribal conditions.

In _Odyssey_ xix. 294 it is said that the wealth which Odysseus has

amassed would suffice for his posterity even unto the tenth generation.

The selection of the number _ten_ in this passage seems to us to indicate

a possible reference to tribal life. F. Seebohm, speaking of medieval

Welsh tribes, lays stress on the length of time which had to elapse

before a ‘stranger’ could become a tribesman, pointing out[85] that

even the great-grandson of a stranger could not be a tribesman, though

he could be recognised as the founder of an embryonic clan, whereas a

semi-servile stranger’s descendants could not attain to the rank of

tribesmen until the ninth generation had passed away. Hence the saying

that a man’s wealth would suffice for ten generations could easily, in

tribal language, have become a proverb. It would simply mean that a man’s

posterity would never be in want, for after nine generations any man’s

descendants could have formed a tribal organisation and possessed tribal

wealth of their own. But must we conclude from this that Odysseus was

a tribesman? No conclusion could be less cogent. It is true that the

Achaeans, at the time of the Trojan war, were long enough settled in

the country to have produced the nucleus of clans and tribes, for they

had ruled over Greece for two hundred years. Thus the Achaean Melampus,

a contemporary of Nestor and Atreus, founded a family in Argos, the

development of which may thus be traced in Homer[86]:

{ Antiphates— Oicles——Amphiaraus— { Alcmaeon

Melampus—> { { Amphilochus.

{ Mantius — { Polypheides—Theoclymenus.

{ { Cleitus.

Here we find kinship extending to second and third cousins. Such kinship

exists everywhere in the world to-day, but it clearly does not constitute

a clan or a tribe. When, therefore, in Homer,[87] Theoclymenus is said to

have killed a man who is described as ἔμφυλος in relation to his slayer,

we must not suppose that the deceased was a tribesman. The word ἔμφυλος

should be translated as kinsman,[88] not tribesman. Several instances

may be found in Homer of tribal phrases and expressions applied in

non-tribal contexts. Thus the word γένος which ordinarily means ‘clan’

is used in Homer to denote a family in the modern sense,[89] or to mean

‘blood-descent,’ and kinship.[90] Rarely or never does it carry its

proper meaning. If the social organisation of the Achaeans had been of

a tribal character, surely the Homeric use of the word γένος would have

been different from what it actually is. Leaf calls attention[91] to the

very rare occasions on which Homer refers to such groups as the clan,

the phratry, and the tribe. Nestor says to Achilles that ‘the lover of

domestic strife is a man without hearth or law or phratry,’[92] and the

same Nestor urges Agamemnon to divide his fighting forces ‘by tribes

and phratries,’[93] but these solitary references no more compel us to

regard Achilles and Agamemnon as tribal chiefs than the tribal proverb

concerning the tenth generation compels us to regard Odysseus as a tribal

patriarch. Such references are rather, as Leaf says,[91] ‘reminiscences,’

reflections, whether in the mind of a Minoan or of an Achaean, of

conditions which prevailed universally amongst the subject Pelasgian

peoples.

We may then confidently conclude that the evidence of the Homeric

poems is much more consistent with the theory that the Achaeans were a

quasi-feudal military caste than with the theory which conceives them as

tribal nobles. We may think of the Achaeans, in their relation to the

Pelasgians, very much as we should think of the soldiers of the ancient

Roman Empire quartered in a province.[94] When the Burgundians came to

France about A.D. 500 they were regarded,[94] by a polite fiction, as

guests, and were presented with _hospitalitas_, consisting of two-thirds

of the land and one-third of the slaves! When the Achaeans conquered

Greece, they lived, indeed, in garrison-towns and sought to maintain

a splendid isolation in their lofty fortresses, but they took unto

themselves the richest lands and the fattest cattle and sheep, leaving

the Pelasgians to till the soil and to squabble about boundaries. But

when after two or three hundred years the Achaeans met a somewhat similar

fate to that which they had meted out to Greece and to Troy, the tribal

nobility of the primitive Pelasgians once more asserted its ancient

privileges.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Infra_, p. 4 f.

[2] See _infra_, pp. 6-11.

[3] _Numbers_ xxxv.

[4] _Il._ xviii. 500 ff.

[5] See Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 201.

[6] 621 B.C. onwards.

[7] See _Numbers_ xxxv.

[8] See Récluse, _Universal Geography_, vol. i. p. 181 ff.

[9] _Ib._ pp. 346-7.

[10] See Récluse, _op. cit._, vol. i. p. 366.

[11] _Ib._ p. 321 ff.

[12] _Ib._ pp. 121-122.

[13] _Early Age of Greece_, p. 277.

[14] Récluse, _op. cit._ pp. 175-6.

[15] _Ib._ vol. xviii. p. 442.

[16] _Ib._ p. 246.

[17] See Glotz, _La Solidarité de la Famille_, p. 213.

[18] See Glotz, _loc. cit._

[19] _Deut._ xxi. 1-8.

[20] _Infra_, pp. 64-74.

[21] _Germania_, chap. xxi.

[22] See article _s.v._ ‘Homicidium’ in Ramsay’s _Dict. Rom. Ant._ p. 348

ff.

[23] See _Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law_, pp. 30-55.

[24] _Op. cit._ pp. 43 ff.

[25] F. Seebohm, _op. cit._ pp. 150 ff., and Maine, _Ancient Law_, p. 233.

[26] _Bell. Gall._ vi. 21.

[27] _Germania_, chap. xxvi.

[28] _Op. cit._ p. 55.

[29] _Il._ ii. 662 ff.; _infra_, p. 47 ff.

[30] See _Ancient City_ (trans.), p. 125.

[31] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 55; Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 34.

[32] See _infra_, p. 44 ff.

[33] _Genesis_ iv. 11-16.

[34] Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 45.

[35] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 109.

[36] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 123

[37] _Ib._ p. 323.

[38] _Loc. cit._

[39] _Op. cit._ p. 164.

[40] _Ib._ p. 356.

[41] See Dareste-Reinach, _I.J.G._ tome i. pp. 352-493.

[42] See Caillemer, in Daremberg and Saglio’s _Dictionnaire_, p. 1630.

[43] See also Glotz, _op. cit._ pp. 383-5.

[44] See _infra_, p. 31 ff.

[45] _Op. cit._ pp. 56-72.

[46] See Leaf, _Homer and History_, pp. 83-86, 98 ff.

[47] See his _Homer and History_ and _Troy_.

[48] See _Early Age of Greece_, p. 635.

[49] See _Rise of the Greek Epic_, _passim_.

[50] See _Themis_, pp. 335, 445 ff.

[51] _Op. cit._ pp. 90-337.

[52] _Ib._ pp. 339, 355, 370, 406.

[53] _Ib._ p. 95.

[54] _Ib._ pp. 678 ff.

[55] See _J.H.S._ vol. vi. pp. 319 ff.

[56] See _Greek Tribal Society_.

[57] See _Homer and History_, p. 41; also Bury’s article, _Quarterly

Review_, July 1916.

[58] Leaf, _op. cit._ p. 37.

[59] Leaf, _op. cit._ p. 37.

[60] _Ib._ pp. 41, 49.

[61] _Ib._ pp. 49-50.

[62] P. 51.

[63] P. 222.

[64] Pp. 50-52.

[65] Pp. 37, 247.

[66] P. 252.

[67] Pp. 37, 247.

[68] Pp. 251-252.

[69] Pp. 250, 251, 258.

[70] Pp. 251-252.

[71] _J.H.S._ vol. vi. pp. 319 ff.

[72] See _Ancient Law_, pp. 214 ff.

[73] _Op. cit._ p. 223.

[74] _Ancient Law_, p. 223.

[75] _Ib._ p. 221.

[76] _Ib._ p. 223.

[77] _Bell. Gall._ vi. 21.

[78] _Germania_, chap. xxvi. adopting emendation _vicis_.

[79] _Op. cit._ p. 221.

[80] _Ancient City_ (trans.), p. 57.

[81] _Op. cit._ pp. 103, 118.

[82] _Op. cit._ p. 115.

[83] _Od._ xvi. 369-385.

[84] xvi. 95 ff.

[85] _Op. cit._ p. 51.

[86] _Od._ xv.

[87] _Od._ xv. 273 ff.

[88] So Butcher and Lang, trans. _ad loc._

[89] _Od._ viii. 573.

[90] See _Il._ xiii. 354; _Od._ vi. 35, 209, xv. 533.

[91] _Op. cit._ p. 251 n.

[92] _Il._ ix. 63 ff.

[93] _Il._ ii. 362.

[94] F. Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 122.

CHAPTER II

THE PELASGIAN SYSTEM

Current views explained and criticised: author’s view:

proofs from the text of Homer: question of a distinction

between murder and manslaughter, and between justifiable and

unjustifiable homicide: collectivity in vengeance.

The opinions which have hitherto prevailed among scholars in regard to

early Greek blood-vengeance are more or less unanimous. They seem to be

based on an assumption of homogeneity in the society depicted by Homer.

Expressed in terms of the modes of vengeance which we have described

in the preceding chapter, the customs of Homeric Greeks in regard to

homicide have been conceived as a confusion of modes I, II, and III—as

a mixture of restricted and unrestricted vendetta and wergeld. Thus,

Eichhoff[1] holds that in Homer murder is a ‘private’ affair, and that

the slayer must go into exile if the ‘money’ paid to the injured family

is not accepted. Bury[2] says: ‘According to early custom which we find

reflected in Homer, murder and manslaughter were not regarded as crimes

against the State, but concerned exclusively the family of the slain man,

which might either slay the slayer or accept compensation.’ Grote[3]

says: ‘That which the murderer in Homeric times had to dread was not

public prosecution and punishment, but the personal vengeance of the

kinsmen and friends of deceased. To escape from this danger he is obliged

to flee the country, unless he can prevail upon the incensed kinsmen to

accept of a valuable payment as satisfaction for their slain comrade.’

Jevons[4] says: ‘If the family of the murderer were not content to pay

the wergeld, the murderer generally found it expedient to flee into a far

country, for, if he remained he would assuredly be killed in revenge.’ In

a foot-note in Butcher and Lang’s translation of the _Odyssey_,[5] we

are told that ‘as a rule blood called for blood, and the manslayer had

to flee from the kindred who took up the feud.... It is superfluous to

remark that the “price” as an alternative to vengeance is a widespread

custom.’ Glotz[6] speaks of death, exile, wergeld, and slavery as

possible penalties everywhere. He seems to believe that there existed

in Homeric times that collective and hereditary vengeance which is so

characteristic of barbarous peoples, but for this view he has adduced no

evidence apart from post-Homeric legends. In an article in Daremberg and

Saglio’s _Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines_,[7] we are

informed that ‘originally’ homicide is an offence only against the family

of the victim, and all the members of the ‘famille outragée’ have a right

and a duty of vengeance. To escape this vengeance the murderer has no

other resource but exile. His exile will exempt his kinsmen from the

reprisals to which they would otherwise be exposed.[8] As the murderer

will be most often supported and defended by his family, a war of

families will lay desolate a whole country: in course of time, and with

the softening of human character, the offended family will renounce its

vengeance, and enter into a bargain with the murderer and his family. He

will be permitted to return from exile, but, as a rule, only by payment

of ‘compensation.’ His relatives will furnish him with this payment

(ποινή), at once the price of the blood shed and the ransom of the

murderer’s life. The payment is vaguely defined at first, varying with

the importance and the wealth of families. For murder within the family

(γένος), there is no question of wergeld. A compromise is effected by

which the family waive their right to kill the murderer on condition that

he leaves the γένος—‘ils se bornent au bannissement du coupable, rompant

ainsi, par son expulsion, les liens qui le rattachaient au γένος.’[9]

All these critics appear to suggest that the early age of Greece presents

us with a more or less homogeneous but undeveloped and quasi-barbarous

race[10] which slowly and gradually evolves into something like

civilisation in the time of Dracon and Solon. Thus conceived, the

homicide-customs of Homer are very similar to those of the Montenegrins

of modern times, who have long lived in a condition of social chaos and

who accept, in atonement for homicide, a payment of money when there is

hardly anyone left to pay it!

Leaf, who in _Homer and History_[11] (1915) differentiates very clearly

between the Pelasgian and the Achaean elements in the societies of

Homeric Greece, points out that to the Achaeans ‘homicide is a local and

family affair, and brings no disability other than exile from home.’ A

wealthy and generous king can give opportunities of advancement beyond

all the hopes of a narrow family circle. To an ambitious Achaean (as

witness Patroclus,[12] Phoenix[13] and others[14]), exile in such

circumstances is not a real punishment. When Leaf observes, in regard

to the Achaeans, that ‘thus the most sacred of all taboos, the shedding

of kindred blood, loses its final sanction,’ he seems to hint at the

existence, in the Homeric society, of a non-Achaean attitude to homicide.

He does not however explain the precise nature or origin of this attitude.

Moreover, in _Homer and History_, Leaf does not suggest any solution of

an important problem to which he refers in previous works—the problems

presented by the reference to wergeld in the Homeric passage which

describes the Shield of Achilles.[15] In a note of his translation of

the _Iliad_ (1883), he said[16]: ‘The trial scene is one of the most

difficult and puzzling passages in Homer.... The whole passage is clearly

archaic, but the difficulty lies in the fact that no parallel, so far as

we know, is to be found in the procedure of any primitive races which

throws any light upon this passage.’ In his _Companion to the Iliad_

(1892) and in his latest edition of the _Iliad_ (1902), in a note on

the passage in question,[17] he put forward an hypothesis which seems

to suggest that he conceives the Homeric Greeks as quasi-barbarous

peoples. Having indicated the frequency of blood-for-blood retaliation

in the _Iliad_, he interprets the trial-scene as representing a stage in

the evolution of homicide customs from more primitive conditions. ‘It

seems absolutely necessary to assume an intermediate stage in which the

community asserted the right to say in every case whether the next of

kin should, for reasons of public policy, accept compensation, and the

missing link is apparently brought before us here.’

By assuming that the trial-scene represents, not a murder trial (which

few now maintain) nor yet a wergeld debt trial, _i.e._ an inquiry as

to whether wergeld has been paid or not, but a piece of novel homicide

legislation, Leaf thinks that ‘the scene gains enormously in importance.’

Postponing for a time[18] our criticism of this view, published thirteen

years before the date of _Homer and History_, and deferring the solution

which we shall offer of the difficulty, we proceed to state our own

theory of the homicide customs of Homer. This theory is based in the

first place on a distinction between an Achaean dominant caste and a

subject Pelasgian people; secondly, on the hypothesis which Leaf puts

forward as to the different character and mode of life of the Achaeans

and the Pelasgians—the former being conceived as a race of bellicose

military adventurers living in isolated groups; the latter, as an

agricultural subject-people, tillers of the soil, who preserved intact

their tribal organisations; thirdly, on the connexion existing between

the homicide customs of a people or caste and their temperament and

social organisation—a connexion which is established by a general study

of blood-vengeance amongst various peoples; and, finally, on a correct

interpretation of the text of Homer.

Our theory is as follows: there existed in Greece at the period of the

Achaean domination (1300-1100 B.C.) two fundamentally distinct social

strata, each having a distinct characteristic attitude to homicide, and

observing distinct modes of blood-vengeance. The two modes coexisted

side by side without affecting or modifying each other, but their

coexistence produced a slight confusion of thought and an absence of

clear discrimination in language in the Homeric poet (or poets) who were

in contact with the two social strata, and who were familiar with the two

modes of vengeance, but who almost ignored the one and exalted the other,

out of courtesy to the masters whose praises they sang. These two modes

of vengeance, which we will call respectively Achaean and Pelasgian,

may be thus described: (1) Amongst the Achaeans the normal penalty for

homicide is death. Their system is private vendetta, of a restricted

character, such as we have already described in our introductory chapter.

The vengeance is quite personal and individual, that is, the murderer

alone is liable to the blood feud, which is therefore neither collective

nor hereditary. Vengeance is a duty which devolves upon the dead man’s

sons or brothers, but we may include the possibility of support from

a kindred of limited extent[19]: a kindred which may be an embryonic

clan, but whose attitude to homicide is quite different from that which

normally characterises a clan. Wergeld is not accepted, even though it is

known to exist outside the caste: exile is not a recognised appeasement

or atonement, but is merely a flight from death, and the Achaean murderer

frequently takes refuge with a king or a wealthy man. We shall describe

this Achaean system more fully in a later chapter. (2) The Pelasgian mode

will be found to be that which we have described in the Introduction

as the ‘tribal wergeld’ mode, though it may have evolved from a more

barbarous mode before 1300 B.C. In this system there are three or

four recognised alternative penalties: (1) ‘wergeld,’ which is the

normal measure of vengeance or retribution, and which is so frequently

associated with tribalism; (2) exile, which involves a formal and solemn

expulsion from the ‘group,’ a serious penalty for anyone born and bred in

the atmosphere of tribal life and religion; (3) death, which is rarely

inflicted, but is a possible alternative if neither ‘wergeld’ nor exile

is accepted by the murderer or his clan; (4) we may add, with Glotz,[20]

though there is no definite Homeric evidence for its existence, the

option of slavery or servitude. This is not the slavery which is found in

later times in Home and in Greece, when there was a regular slave trade,

nor is it the temporary ‘slavery’ which is involved in being ‘kidnapped’

and held to ransom—a frequent occurrence in Homer; it is, however, akin

to this latter condition, inasmuch as it involves a state of bondage,

from which a murderer can be redeemed, not by the payment of such a price

as his ‘redeemer’ can be induced to pay, but by the payment of such

valuables as have been determined by long tradition—his quota of the

wergeld of the clan.

PROOFS FROM THE TEXT OF HOMER

In our introductory chapter we pointed out the connexion which exists

between the homicide customs of a people or caste and their temperamental

outlook and social organisation; we have quoted Seebohm’s views as to

the essentially tribal character of the wergeld-exile-death system; and,

therefore, anyone who accepts Leaf’s hypothesis as to the nature of

the Achaean and Pelasgian social strata will be prepared to admit that

our hypothesis as to Pelasgian blood-vengeance is logically _a priori_

probable. In a later chapter we shall seek further confirmation of our

theory by explaining the difference in the religious beliefs of the

Achaeans and the Pelasgians, and by indicating their different attitudes

to the judicial aspect of homicide. We now proceed to the crucial test of

our opinions—the evidence of the Homeric poems.

In Homer the word ποινή occurs very frequently. Glotz[21] thinks the

word is connected with the verb τίνειν (to pay). He says: ‘De vrai,

ποινή doit être rapproché de τίνω et des mots apparentés, τίνυμι, τιμάω,

τίσις, τιμή.’ Others[22] however hold that it is connected with the root

_pu_, found in Greek πῦρ, and Latin _purus_, _punire_, _poena_. The word

ἄποινα seems akin in origin to ποινή, but in Homer it is invariably used

of a ransom or gift of valuables.[23] We do not think that Glotz[24] has

quite succeeded in his attempt to prove the evolution of the word ποινή

from an earlier meaning of ‘blood-vengeance’ to a later one of pecuniary

satisfaction, at least within the limits of the Homeric poems. His

reasoning is very similar to that known as ‘squaring one’s premises to

one’s conclusions’: he is not aware of any distinction between Achaeans

and Pelasgians, and he finds the Homeric use of ποινή rather difficult

to explain. He must have been aware of the fact—one which we consider

of great importance—that in Homer the word ποινή nearly always means

‘punishment’ or ‘revenge’ rather than ‘compensation’ or ‘ransom’: he is

certainly aware that, while ποινή can mean a pecuniary satisfaction for

a material wrong or injury, and can mean the ‘ransom’ of a captive or of

a warrior’s dead body, nevertheless there are only two instances in all

Homer in which ποινή can be formally interpreted to mean wergeld. Thus he

says,[25] ‘On songe aux deux passages de l’Iliade où il est formellement

parlé de composition pour homicide. Ce sont le discours d’Ajax à Achille

au chant ix et la scène judiciaire figurée sur le bouclier d’Achille au

chant xviii.’ It is by a close examination of these two passages that

we hope to solve the difficulty connected with the Homeric ποινή. But,

first, let us say that the word ποινή is precisely the kind of word which

may easily possess a general as well as a special significance. The ideas

of ‘payment’ and ‘punishment’ may, in certain circumstances, coalesce:

and it is probably because Homer was subconsciously aware of the fusion

of ideas involved in the use of the word ποινή, that he employs another

word of kindred meaning, ἄποινα, to denote a payment in which the idea of

‘punishment’ is absent or obscured.

In Homer, the word ποινή is used to denote a variety of ideas ranging

from ‘punishment in general,’ such as death inflicted in vengeance, to

‘compensation for injury’: thus in _Iliad_ xvi. 398 Patroclus, having

slain many foemen in battle, is said to have thus exacted vengeance (or

payment) for many Greeks who had fallen:

κτεῖνε μεταΐσσων, πολέων δ’ ἀπετίνυτο ποινήν.

There is no question of ‘payment of goods’ or ‘wergeld’; it is merely the

vengeance which a warrior inflicts upon his enemies. In _Iliad_ xxi. 28

Achilles chooses out twelve Trojan youths whom he afterwards burns on a

funeral pyre. His motive may have been to placate the shade of Patroclus,

by sending him ‘souls’ to be his slaves in Hades, or, less probably,

to gratify the desire of the shade for vengeance. The youths are spoken

of as ποινὴ Πατροκλοῖο: clearly they are not ‘goods or valuables,’ and

are neither ‘paid’ nor ‘received.’ The poet may have been conscious of

an undercurrent of meaning, if he had known of bondage or slavery as a

penalty for murder in the tribes. But the slaying of Patroclus was not

murder! The ποινή of Patroclus is not even ordinary blood-vengeance, it

is merely the retaliation of an indignant warrior.

Again, in _Odyssey_ xxiii. 312 Odysseus tells Penelope how he exacted

from the Cyclops punishment for the slaying of his companions,—ὡς

ἀπετίσατο ποινὴν ἰφθίμων ἑτάρων. The Cyclops was regarded by Homer and

the Achaeans as one of a lawless band of men who, as the poet says, ‘have

no plants or plough, no gatherings for council nor laws—each one giveth

law to his children and wives, and they reck not of one another’: he

was thus the very antithesis of tribal or of civic society. The payment

exacted was not wergeld, but the loss of an eye! In _Iliad_ v. 266 ποινή

denotes merely compensation for injury—there being no question of murder

at all. Zeus, having carried off Ganymede, the son of Tros, gave Tros a

gift of horses as compensation—υἷος ποινήν Γανυμήδεος. It was really a

case of ‘kidnapping,’ but Ganymede was not ‘held to ransom’—a price is

paid for his loss, which is very different from wergeld.

In _Iliad_ xiv. 483 Akamas having slain Promachus tells how ‘Promachus

sleeps, done to death by my sword, lest a brother’s vengeance (ποινή) be

too long unpaid.’ Here we have a formula of blood-vengeance applied to

the collective vengeance of war. Akamas does not seek the life of Ajax,

the slayer of his brother, but is satisfied by slaying any individual of

the enemy as a ‘satisfaction’ for his brother. But there is no question

of wergeld: death is the penalty desired and exacted. Though the phrase

δηρὸν ἄτιτος could be regarded as a reminiscence of the wergeld system,

in which a period of time was normally allowed for payment, it is quite

naturally applicable to blood-for-blood revenge, as δηρὸν can simply

mean ‘a long time,’ and the tendency of such vengeance was to quick

retribution.

In _Iliad_ xiii. 659 we are told of the slaying in battle of Harpalion,

son of Pylaimenes, king of the Paphlagonians. ‘And the Paphlagonians

tended him busily, and set him in a chariot and drove him to Ilios

sorrowing, and with them went his father, shedding tears, and there

was no atonement (ποινή) for his dead son.’ It is obvious that even if

we suppose the Paphlagonians (who were not Achaeans) to have had clans

and tribes and wergeld payments in their normal home life, we cannot

attribute to them any expectation of wergeld for a man killed on the

field of battle. Nor could the absence of such a compensation, to a

king who had much more wealth than he could ever enjoy, be regarded as

a cause of tears. Hence the word ποινή here must mean blood-vengeance,

the satisfaction arising from blood-for-blood retribution: and this

satisfaction was frustrated because the Paphlagonians did not happen to

see the man who slew Harpalion.[26]

There are only two passages in Homer in which ποινή unmistakably refers

to the genuine wergeld penalty. If those passages were missing no one

could speak of wergeld as a penalty for homicide in the society described

by Homer. We shall now examine those passages with a view to showing that

they do not represent the normal system of the dominant Achaean caste,

but are merely what Leaf would call ‘reminiscences,’ traces of a system

with which Homer and the Achaeans were familiar, but which they did not

adopt or practise amongst themselves.

In the first passage (_Iliad_ ix. 632-7) the scene is the tent of

Achilles before Troy. Owing to the secession of Achilles from the Greek

fighting-line the Trojans had been rapidly gaining the upper hand and

the Greeks were only saved from destruction by the sudden approach of

night.[27] An embassy is sent from Agamemnon to Achilles to induce him to

waive his wounded pride in the interest of the Achaeans, and promising

not only the restoration of his concubine Briseis but also a grant

of seven cities in the Peloponnese and many splendid gifts. Achilles

rejects every possible ‘satisfaction’[28] and implies that the insult

offered to him was so great that nothing short of the destruction of

Agamemnon and his army would assuage his wrath. Odysseus and Phoenix

having failed to bend his haughty spirit, the third member of the

embassy, Ajax, son of Telamon, who was certainly an Achaean, reproached

him with his indifference to the fate of his Achaean comrades, who

loved him, and reminded him of the self-control possessed by other men

in directing their passion for revenge, even when afflicted by a much

graver injury—that of murder. ‘Yet,’ he says, ‘doth a man accept payment

(ποινή) from the murderer of his brother or for the slaying of his son:

and the manslayer abideth in his home-land when he hath paid a goodly

price, and the man’s heat and proud spirit is restrained when he hath

accepted the payment—but for thee the gods have put within thy breast

an evil and implacable spirit.’ When Ajax delivered this speech, he had

already despaired of the success of the embassy[29]: and he mentioned

the act of the receiver of wergeld, not as the act of a normal Achaean

hero—the Achaeans of the Homeric age are of a very different type—but as

an act which was characteristic of a well-known kind of temperament, an

act which, he thought, might serve to emphasise the extreme abnormality

of Achilles’ desire for vengeance. If Achilles had had a son or a brother

who was murdered, and if he were on the point of crushing a whole village

in revenge, the argument of Ajax would have been more relevant to the

case, but even then it could not be taken to imply that either Ajax or

Achilles was a member of a society in which wergeld was a recognised

penalty. It is significant also that Achilles, in his reply, makes no

reference whatsoever to this argument. Viewing Homer as a whole, it

seems more than probable that this almost solitary instance of wergeld

was introduced by the poet, who[30] was aware of the existence of the

wergeld system, but was not concerned with its details. We need not call

attention to the non-factual nature of recorded speeches even in Greek

prose writers, and _a fortiori_ in the epic poets who reconstructed

speeches more or less as a historical novelist would at the present day.

It is in a similarly casual way that Homer gives us his one solitary

reference to a common tillage field[31]—a reference which Ridgeway makes

a basis for very wide generalisations as to Homeric land-tenure. No

Achaean uses the words: they are the poet’s own: hence they can easily

be applied to conditions of tenure with which the poet was himself

acquainted, but which were not necessarily adopted by the Achaeans during

their domination in Greece. In regard to the wergeld passage, Glotz

suggests that, while the verses themselves would lead one to suppose that

a certain ‘superior force’ constrained the kinsman of the victim to forgo

blood-vengeance by accepting a blood-price, still they do not prove that

there was any ‘social justice’ to intervene and impose a settlement or

to indicate the amount of the wergeld.[32] This view we cannot accept.

There is no explicit[33] reference, of course, to any ‘social justice,’

but the temperament which forgoes blood-vengeance and accepts wergeld

is the product of a social system which restricts and controls the

human passion for revenge. The Achaeans were above and outside such a

system: the Pelasgians, we think, were born and bred in it,—perhaps for

centuries. Allegiance to his tribal or civic unit and its laws alone

could restrain primitive man—especially in Southern climes where passion

dies very hard—from following the promptings of his natural blood-thirst.

In course of time individual members of a settled agricultural tribe

would inevitably develop a restrained temperament, through their fear

of violating those unwritten laws of which Antigone said[34] that they

‘are not of to-day or yesterday, but no man knows the time which gave

them birth.’ The Achaeans, who lived in every-day contact with such

types of men, must have observed even though they did not imitate their

self-restraint, and all the more because it was a quality which the

Achaean caste-atmosphere could not produce.

The second of the two genuine wergeld passages in Homer is found in

the description of the Shield of Achilles.[35] This passage raises many

problems and causes serious difficulties to Homeric scholars. Ridgeway,

who holds that the Achaean shield was of a round shape, and who assumes

that the Shield of Achilles was therefore round, still finds nothing

in Homer’s description to suggest that the Achaeans manufactured this

particular shield. ‘It is probable,’ he says,[36] ‘that whilst the shape

of the shield and the style or ornament are derived from central Europe,

its technique discloses the native Mycenaean craftsman employing for

his Achaean lords the method seen in Mycenaean daggers.’ Monro[37] also

points out that ‘in choice of subjects and in the manner of treatment

there is a remarkable agreement between the Mycenaean remains and the

Shield of Achilles.’ All the pictures, he observes, are taken from

incidents of every-day life, and the absence of any references to

commerce or seafaring life suggests the antiquity of the picture.[38]

Leaf, in his translation of the _Iliad_ (1883),[39] makes the following

comment: ‘The whole passage is clearly archaic, but the difficulty

lies in the fact that no parallel, so far as we know, is to be found

in the procedure of any primitive races which throws any light upon

this passage. Homer so constantly represents the kings as the keepers

of the “traditions,” and therefore sole judges, that he must have been

consciously moving in some different world when he depicted the Shield: a

world, too, in which there is no mythology and no sacrifice and nothing

distinctly Hellenic.’ In his _Companion to the Iliad_[40] (1892) and in

his latest edition of the _Iliad_ (1902) he has proposed a solution[41]

of the problems raised by this passage. He suggests that the passage does

not refer to a murder-trial, nor yet to an inquiry into the question of

payment of wergeld (as he held in his translation[42] of the _Iliad_),

but that it is an account of the establishment of a new murder-code,

which abolishes private vendetta and substitutes a compulsory ‘wergeld’

system. We will now quote the portion of this famous passage which

relates to homicide—and we will offer a solution of the difficulty.

On the Shield are depicted, amongst other things, two cities, one of

which is in a state of siege, the other in a condition of peace. It

is with the latter city that we are here concerned. In this city two

‘events’ are described: the first is a wedding, concerning which we need

only say that it is an event of common occurrence, which is not in the

least degree novel or abnormal; the second event[43] is a dispute about

the ransom of a slain man, which takes place in the ἀγορά of the city,

in the presence of the Elders, of the sacred heralds, and of a cheering

crowd of people. Leaf’s original translation (1883) (some of which he has

since abandoned, not, as we think, wisely) is as follows: ‘But the folk

were gathered in the assembly-place; for there a strife was arisen, two

men striving about the blood-price of a slain man: the one avowed that

he had paid all ... but the other denied that he had received aught,

manifesting it to the people: and each was fain to obtain consummation

on the word of his witness[44]: and the folk were cheering both, as they

took part on either side. And heralds kept order among the folk, while

the Elders on polished stones were sitting in the sacred circle and

holding in their hands staves from loud-voiced heralds. Then before the

people they rose up and gave judgment each in turn. And in the midst lay

two talents of gold to be given unto him who should plead among them most

righteously.’

This is the traditional view, which regards the scene as an investigation

by the Elders of the city as to whether a recognised wergeld has or has

not been paid. It is followed by Glotz, who proposes however some curious

explanations of details, which we shall presently discuss. It is the view

which we shall adopt when we have explained more precisely the exact

nature of the ‘court.’

There is however a second view, adopted by Leaf in 1887, 1892 and 1902,

first propounded by Müncher (1829), and supported by other scholars,[45]

which regards the scene as describing the first interference on the part

of some higher authority with the chaotic blood-feuds of savages.

Thirdly, there is the view of Lipsius that the trial was a genuine

murder-trial, and that the two talents of gold referred to by the poet

represented a genuine wergeld. This view is now generally rejected and

we shall see presently the objections which militate against it: but our

first duty is to formulate the arguments which will induce us to accept

the first and to reject the second hypothesis.

First of all, we have already protested against the opinion which

represents the early Greeks as cannibals living in a state of barbarism.

In our view, the only period of Greek history to which such a conception

may, with any justice, be applied is the period of the Dark Ages which

succeeded the Trojan war, when continual migrations and the breakdown

of tribal solidarity gave a temporary reality to the picture which is

drawn for us by Hesiod. The Pelasgian, Minoan, and Achaean periods,

however, present to our minds societies enjoying a civilisation which

was regular and orderly, and a culture which was real and distinctive,

even though it was also primitive. Again, the arguments which Leaf bases

on the linguistic interpretation of one or two verbs in this passage are

not only inconclusive for his hypothesis, as Glotz rightly holds,[46]

but suggest, we think, the opposite deduction. In 1883 Leaf translated

the words ὀ μὲν εὔχετο πάντ’ ἀποδοῦναι ... ὁ δ’ ἀναίνετο μηδὲν ἑλέσθαι

as ‘the one avowed that he had paid all ... the other denied that he

had received aught’: but in his latest edition of the _Iliad_ (1902) he

translates them (to suit his changed hypothesis) thus: ‘the one offered

to pay all ... the other refused to accept aught.’ He admits, of course,

that the verbs can have the meaning which he gave to them in 1883. But

he omits to note the solitary word πάντα which we consider a decisive

factor. If a man is said to ‘pay all’ surely that ‘all’ must have been

a sum fixed by a traditional arrangement. We can find no parallel, in

wergeld-paying communities, for a judicial decision on the part of the

tribe which compels a relative of the victim to accept the wergeld which

the tribe of which he is a member has traditionally recognised as the

complete payment of the debt. It is only if payment is in default or

dispute that the tribe would assert itself to prevent a feud of blood.

When Homer adds, after the clause ὁ δ’ ἀναίνετο μηδὲν ἑλέσθαι, the words

δήμῳ πιφαύσκων, surely this means ‘declaring it to the people’ rather

than ‘manifesting it to the people,’ for it is absurd to suppose that the

actual wergeld was included in the scene, since such a payment, as we

have shown, usually consisted of cattle and sheep.

Again, we may mention what we consider a very serious weakness in

Leaf’s later position. He has to assume that the scene in question is

not a single scene, but two scenes. He thus describes the affair in

his _Companion to the Iliad_[47] (1892). ‘A man has been slain: the

homicide has offered a money payment in commutation of the death, but

the next of kin refuses to accept it. Both parties come into the public

place attended by their friends and dispute. This scene ends here. The

next scene shows us the dispute referred to the Elders, the King’s

Council, who are to decide what course is to be taken. The importance

of this double scene lies in the fact that it shows us criminal law

in its very birth. No criminal law can be said to exist when it is a

matter for private arrangement between the homicide and the next of kin

to settle the offence, if they like, by a money payment, instead of by

the normal blood revenge, which means the exile of the homicide if he

is not killed. But criminal law begins when the people claim to have a

voice in the question and to say that the money shall be accepted.’ We

will merely say, by way of comment, that this two-scene theory not only

is artistically improbable but finds no support whatever in the text of

Homer.

A period of thirteen years separated the date of the _Companion_ from

that of the publication of _Homer and History_. Though in this latter

work he does not mention the Shield of Achilles, still we feel that if

Leaf had applied his later theory of the distinction between Achaeans and

Pelasgians to the solution of his earlier problem, he could have thrown

considerable light on the question. In 1883 it was the absence of a king

in the trial that troubled him. But is it not now clear that the ‘Kings’

of Greece from 1300 B.C. to 1100 B.C. were Achaeans, bellicose war-lords,

who held in their hands the ‘sceptres’ and dealt out dooms to the people,

but who took little interest in local disputes, who did not understand,

perhaps, and probably did not adopt, many of the Pelasgian ‘dooms’?[48]

Hence, if we suppose that the Elders in this scene are not Achaeans but

Pelasgian chiefs of clans and tribes, we can quite easily understand the

absence of the Achaean king or over-lord.

Leaf gives us a very clear picture in _Homer and History_[49] which

we may utilise to remove the difficulties which he felt in 1883. ‘All

this time,’ he says, ‘the main population of Greece was going on with

beliefs and customs undisturbed, unaffected by the change of masters[50]

at the Castle. The group society of the Pelasgians—φυλή, γένος,

φρατρία—continued intact, abiding its time. The epic of the Achaeans

takes no notice of it, why should it? The Achaeans knew little and cared

less about the customs of their subjects, unless at times called in

to settle disputes based on silly family usage, unworthy of a lord’s

notice.’ Though Leaf does not say so explicitly, we think that in his

conception of the Homeric wergeld he is now much nearer to the position

he held in 1883 than to the positions he adopted in the intervening

period.

If we combine then the arguments based on the text of this Homeric

passage with the results of Leaf’s latest researches and also with the

general principles outlined in our Introductory Chapter, we may conclude

that this trial-scene presents us with a genuine wergeld dispute, not

within the Achaean caste, but amongst the Pelasgian tribal folk. We

have seen that scholars are unanimous in holding that the Shield is

of an essentially Mycenaean and therefore Pelasgian pattern. We have

quoted Seebohm at length for the connexion between the wergeld-system of

homicide-compensation and tribal organisation and control.[51] We have

quoted Leaf’s recent views as to the probable existence of clans and

tribes among the Pelasgian subject-people. The conclusion we have drawn

is therefore a practically self-evident deduction from assumed premises.

Before we apply this general conclusion to the solution of minor

difficulties presented by this Homeric passage, it may be desirable to

discuss briefly the view of Lipsius which has been already mentioned. He

maintains that the trial in question was a murder-trial—a decision of

homicidal guilt or innocence: he therefore holds that the two talents of

gold were the actual wergeld. He says[52]: ‘Upon him (of the claimants)

who, according to their (_i.e._ the judges’) opinion—at any rate in

the verdict of the majority—has given his opinion best, are bestowed

two talents of gold which have been laid down in front of them. They

(_i.e._ the talents) constitute, therefore, the objects of the dispute,

the amount of the blood-atonement which the accused deposits and is to

get back in case of victory,[53] but otherwise must transfer to the

plaintiff.’ This opinion has been attacked on many grounds, but chiefly

on the ground that the sum of two (Homeric) talents of gold is too

small to constitute a wergeld-payment.[54] But it does not follow that

the Achaean standard of values was necessarily that of their Pelasgian

subjects. Even though it is true that in Homer a goodly price is paid for

a freeman sold as a slave[55]; for a woman[56]; and for the ransom of the

kidnapped son of a king[57]; although a ‘ransom unspeakable’ (ἀπερείσι’

ἄποινα) is offered for a warrior’s life on the field of battle[58]; and

Lycaon, son of Priam, is kidnapped and sold as a slave for 100 oxen and

liberated by a ransom of 300 oxen[59]:—although ten talents of gold is an

insignificant portion of the ‘placation’ offered to Achilles,[60] and two

talents of gold is the reward paid by Aegisthus to his scout,[61] there

is nothing in all this to prove that, amongst the poor tribal tillers

of the soil, the sum of two talents of gold (which, though it was not

real money, was still a valuable commodity) may not have sufficed as

wergeld for a tribal race ruled over by strangers. The really insuperable

objections which we find to the view of Lipsius are the following: In

the first place tribal wergeld, even where it is comparatively small,

as it was in Ireland under the Brehon Laws, is generally a collection

of numerous valuables, whether cows or sheep or slaves. Even when money

is substituted, the coins are small in value but numerous[62] (_e.g._

200 solidi, 400 argentei). The reason for this lies in the diffused

nature of the responsibility for payment, quite a number of families

and individuals of the wider kindred being liable to contribution.

Secondly, there is no parallel, in analogous instances of wergeld, for

the assumption that the total amount was collected and deposited in court

at any time, much less before the validity of the murder-charge had been

established. In this case, the accused asserts (according to Lipsius’

translation) that he had paid the whole sum: but surely ἀποδοῦναι cannot

be taken to mean ‘that the accused had deposited in court the normal

wergeld.’ How could the accused assert that he had paid it, how could

the plaintiff deny that he had received it—if the actual wergeld were

deposited in court before their very eyes? Thirdly, to say that the two

talents would be given to the most convincing pleader is a very strange

way of describing a judgment of guilty or not guilty on a charge of

homicide. Thus the text of Homer refutes the theory of Lipsius. Maine[63]

indicates the real function of the two talents in this court by showing

that they served the same purpose as the _sacramentum_ or court-fee of

Roman law.

Assuming then that the court here described by Homer was a group of

Pelasgian tribal chiefs or elders who could regularly be appealed to in

such disputes, and who would also perform the functions of a murder-court

if any person accused of homicide appealed to them to establish his

innocence, we shall conclude our discussion by clearing up some minor

points of difficulty.

We cannot concur with Glotz[64] in the opinion that the result of

the verdict is a matter of life or death for the murderer. He says

‘Il peut y avoir un jugement de condamnation entraînant l’esclavage

ou la mort.’[64] But quick justice is not a characteristic of the

wergeld-exile-slavery-death system. We have seen how[65] among the Welsh

tribes wergeld was paid in fortnightly instalments: and we may suppose

that failure to pay any one instalment would have been a common subject

for litigation. In the laws of King Edmund of England (A.D. 940-946)

a period of twelve months[66] was allowed for payment of wergeld—‘to

prevent manifold fightings.’ In the laws of Henry I. the period was fixed

by ‘Sapientes.’

Again, in this Homeric passage as it is usually interpreted, both

pleaders cannot have been right. Payment of wergeld was very different

from a modern transfer of cash. It involved a complete readjustment

of the whole property of two clans, so that hundreds of people were

aware of the transaction. If however we suppose that a portion of the

wergeld was unpaid, it will be possible to maintain that both parties

were _bona fide_ in their assertions. We will assume that Homer, whether

he is indulging his imagination or describing something which he had

actually seen on a shield, is giving us an account of a typical wergeld

dispute such as must commonly have taken place in Pelasgian life: we must

especially remember that the accused (whom we assume to be the murderer)

and the plaintiff are isolated members of large groups concerned in the

payment, though the accused would normally have to pay the greatest

individual share, and the plaintiff, if he was the nearest relative of

the slain, would receive a large share of the wergeld. Let us suppose,

then, that some of the wergeld had been paid, and that the part which had

not been paid was due, not from the murderer himself or his immediate

relatives,[67] but from some distant family of cousins who, unknown to

the defendant, had defaulted or were unable to pay. We can, on this

assumption, credit the defendant (that is, the murderer) with _bona

fides_. Or again, assuming still that the defendant is the murderer, if

we suppose that the disputed ‘instalment’ had been received, unknown to

the plaintiff, by a distant family of his wider kindred for whom he is

acting as the leading ‘avenger’ in negotiation—in a word, if we suppose

that both litigants are acting as representatives of large groups, we

can understand the contradiction in their statements which would be

less intelligible if they were speaking for themselves personally.

And have we not here a clue as to the constitution of the crowd which

attended at the trial? Homer distinctly says that the crowd ‘cheered

on both parties’[68]: and he adds: ‘taking part on either side’[69]:

so interested were they in the issue, that the heralds had to maintain

order.[70] This implies that there was a certain danger of rioting

amongst the crowd—of something like the ‘manifold fightings’[71] of the

Anglo-Saxons.

We cannot agree with the general view that this scene must be expected

to contain a picture of intense public interest.[72] The parallel scene,

in the city at peace, is a wedding! The Shield-picture contains also a

reaping scene and a ploughing scene. Surely the artist was not so much at

pains to reveal subjects of public interest as to depict topics of common

occurrence. To us it seems obvious that one of the most frequent scenes

of tribal life was a wergeld dispute: and as this dispute concerned the

property of a large number of people, all such persons would be naturally

interested in the verdict. In all ancient codes prominence is given to

laws relating to theft, to inheritance, to marriage settlements and the

like, rather than to what we should now consider graver matters. The

reason is, that all ancient thought and religion centred around questions

of property. Hence we think it more than probable that the ‘folk’ of

the Homeric trial scene are not the general public but are rather the

wider kinsmen of the plaintiff and the defendant. It would be not only

natural but also right that they should have supported each one his own

side, just as they would do in the event of a clan feud. But the success

with which the heralds checked the passions of the people shows how very

different the ancient Pelasgians were from the barbarous races who only

accept wergeld under duress, and who hail with triumph the slightest

pretext for another feud. Glotz, who thinks of the Pelasgians as he would

of any barbarous primitive people, thinks therefore that in this scene

the crowd came together armed to the teeth! ‘Les hostilités, un instant

suspendues, menacent d’éclater à nouveau. Les deux ennemis qui déjà se

résignaient mal à une transaction, échangent des injures, en attendant

qu’ils se cherchent les armes à la main.’[73]

What now, we may ask, is the meaning of ἴστωρ in this passage? Homer says:

ἄμφω δ’ ἱέσθην ἐπὶ ἴστορι πεῖραρ ἑλέσθαι.

Leaf, in 1883, translated thus: ‘and each one was fain to obtain

consummation on the word of his witness.’ Later (1892 and 1902), when he

conceived that there were really two scenes described in the picture, he

regarded the ἴστωρ as an arbitrator: ‘each one relied on an arbitrator

to win the suit.’ We can only say that while the etymology and use of

the word ἴστωρ permit of both interpretations, the relation of the verse

to its context seems to us immeasurably in favour of the interpretation

‘witness.’ We may presume that the ‘witnesses’ were included in the

‘people’ and were brought forward to prove the actual transference

of property which had or had not taken place. They are, therefore,

similar to the ‘compurgators’ who figure so prominently in medieval

litigation.[74]

Since Homer, then, the poet of the Achaeans, has given us only two

incidental references to wergeld, we are not surprised that he has told

us nothing about the details of the system. We may indeed infer that the

amount payable was very large,[75] but Glotz reveals how little he is

himself acquainted with the system when he asserts[76] that the offender

only escaped death at the cost of ruin. ‘La ποινή,’ he says, ‘c’est

une large, parfois peut-être une totale dépossession de l’offenseur

au profit de la partie lésée. A la mort juste on n’échappe que par la

ruine.’ It is probable that the payment took the form of ‘women, cattle,

or horses.’[77] But in the absence of more definite evidence[78] we must

fall back on what we can learn from analogous instances. It is for that

reason that we have discussed at so much length the wergeld system in our

introductory chapter. We have no doubt that the wergeld revealed by Homer

was a genuine wergeld, and not a mere clumsy device for terminating the

feuds of savages exhausted by slaughter.

We must now search further, in the text of Homer, for anything he may

have to tell us of other alternative penalties existing amongst the

Pelasgian people. In this matter we cannot trust to the analysis of

Glotz, for he knows of no distinction between Achaeans and Pelasgians,

and hence his account is misleading.

We may say at once that we cannot find any genuine Pelasgian reference to

the death penalty as an alternative, in cases of homicide _outside the

clan_, though from other analogies and, indirectly, from Homer[79] we may

infer that the option was valid.

It is also doubtful if we can detect any genuine instances of slavery

as a penalty for homicide. Glotz calls attention[80] to a very curious

custom which is found among some primitive peoples, the custom of

compelling a murderer to have himself ‘adopted’ by the ‘family’ of the

victim. The murderer takes the place of the dead man! Among the Ossetes

‘a mother does not hesitate to recognise as her son the man who has

deprived her of her son’—but this adoption does not give him a right to

succeed to property. Glotz[81] thinks it more than probable that the same

custom prevailed in the Homeric epoch, for he regards wergeld as a kind

of debt, and slavery was a universal solvent of debt down to the time of

Solon, by whom it was still permitted in the case of a daughter who was

guilty of misconduct (_prise en faute_).[82] The offer of a daughter in

marriage by Agamemnon to Achilles, in an age when men bought women as

venal chattels, Glotz regards as a species of wergeld (ποινή).[83] He

quotes[84] Apollodorus[85] for the eight years ‘captivity’ of Cadmus with

Ares whose son (the dragon) he had murdered—after which Ares gave him his

daughter in marriage.[86] For having massacred the Cyclopes,[87] Apollo

became a shepherd in the service of Admetus.[88] Heracles, having slain

Iphitus, serves Omphale for three years.[89] The only Homeric reference

which Glotz mentions is a passage[90] which describes the year’s service

of Apollo and Poseidon with Laomedon for a sum of money, at the command

of Zeus: they built the walls of Troy, but Laomedon refused to pay their

wages. As there is here no question of murder, we may say that there

is nothing relevant about this Homeric passage.[91] Nor can we attach

any weight to legends presented by Apollodorus, for, as we shall see,

the abolition of wergeld in the seventh century B.C. made exile the

inevitable penalty for murder and left the murderer no property to take

away with him, and therefore he had little option but to accept menial

service with a stranger.

If we reflect on the nature of the wergeld system, we shall see how

difficult it would be to apply a penal form of slavery in default

of payment within a tribe or in any definite locality. Wergeld was

essentially a ‘diffused’ penalty, involving a large number of debtors,

any one of whom could, equally with the murderer, be sold as a slave at

the command of tribal authorities. To enslave a distant relative[92]

of the murderer for debt would constitute a severe form of collective

punishment: and it is much more probable that, in default of payment

on the part of any individual family, the deficiency would have been

contributed by the rest of the clan.[93] It is improbable that an entire

family or gwely would have been so poor and needy that they could not by

a series of instalments have discharged the wergeld debt. In a law of

Henry I. it is decreed[94] that ‘Amends being set going (_i.e._ first

deposits being paid) the rest of the wergeld shall be paid during a term

to be fixed by the _Sapientes_.’ And we must not ignore the role of the

_phratores_, or of the _congildones_, who were selected from neighbouring

clans, and who might have to contribute in certain emergencies. Thus, in

another law of Henry I. we read[95]: ‘If the slayer has no maternal (or

paternal) relations the _congildones_ shall pay half, and for half he

shall flee or pay.’ In ancient tribal Ireland an instance of bondage is

related in the _Senchus Mor_,[96] but failure to pay occurs only in the

case of an illegitimate son, who would normally have no real share in

family property. There is here, indeed, a sort of ‘collectivity.’ Six men

of the tribe of Conn of the Hundred Battles, including four brothers and

an illegitimate nephew, had slain a brother who was under the protection

of another tribal chieftain. A compensation was demanded, which is not

so much wergeld as a fine payable to the chief. Five of the six men were

able to pay, but the illegitimate murderer could not pay: so his mother

was handed over to the tribe as a bondwoman in pledge. However, the fact

that the slain man had been adopted by an outside tribe, and that the

money was paid to the chief, forbid the conclusion that money was paid

for murder within the kindred in tribal Ireland or that kin-slaying was

normally atoned for by bondage in the family of the victim.

It may be urged that slavery was accepted as an expiation of

_manslaughter_ within the kindred on the ground that wergeld was

impossible, that death was too dreadful, and that perpetual exile or

outlawry was too severe a punishment. It is obvious, from the very nature

of the case, that wergeld cannot apply to bloodshed within the clan

or the wider kindred. Seebohm has found no instance of such a penalty

amongst the tribes whose customs he has investigated. He points out that

‘if it (_i.e._ _the murder_) was of someone within the kindred, there was

no slaying of the murderer. Under Cymric custom there was no _galanas_

(_i.e._ wergeld), nothing but execration and ignominious exile.’[97]...

‘There is no feud within the kindred when one kinsman slays another.

Accidental homicide does not seem to be followed even by exile. But

murder breaks the tribal tie, and is followed by outlawry.’[98] ‘Tribal

custom everywhere left the worst crime of all—murder of a parent or

kinsman—without redress, ... unavenged.’[99] Glotz, also, holds that

there was no drastic punishment for bloodshed within the clan: ‘Rien

qu’un parent fait contre un parent n’est susceptible de châtiment.’[100]

But the graver crimes against one’s kindred are penalised, he says, by

exile:—‘La peine la plus grave qui soit ordinairement infligée ...

c’est l’expulsion de la famille.’[101] We believe that in all clans

which worshipped ancestors kin-slaying was usually punished by exile,

perpetual or temporary. In a later chapter, when we come to discuss the

survival of primitive clan-customs in historical Attica, the grounds for

this belief will become apparent. At present we will merely say, with

Fustel de Coulanges,[102] that kinsmen would not encourage the presence

of a kin-slayer as a slave in daily intercourse with his clan, nor would

they easily permit him to take part, at least for a time, in the worship

of the family hearth—of the clan ‘fire’ which he by his act had to some

extent extinguished.[103] We prefer to see him, as Glotz[104] describes

it, stripped naked, and escorted to the clan boundaries, beaten and

insulted, declared an outlaw for years or for ever for treason to his

blood. Later, we shall see[105] that when Athenian State-magistrates are

charged with the execution of the sentence of death, the kin-slayer may

no longer escape, and his clan will refuse to have his corpse ‘gathered

to his fathers.’ It was thus that the King of the Wisigoths commanded the

judge to punish with death the kin-slayer who in the system of ‘private

vengeance’ saved his life by becoming an outlaw from his clan.[106]

We find a reference to the exile penalty _for kin-slaying_ in Homer.[107]

We are told that Tlepolemus, son of Hercules by Astyocheia, came to Troy

from Rhodes, whither he had fled, because when grown to manhood he had

slain his father’s maternal uncle, an old man, Likymnius, of the stock of

Ares. ‘Then with speed he built ships and gathered much folk together and

went fleeing across the deep, because the other sons and grandsons of the

mighty Hercules threatened him.’ So he came to Rhodes, a wanderer, and

his folk settled by kinship in three tribes and were loved by Zeus.’ Leaf

would probably regard this passage as non-Homeric, since it happens to

occur in the ‘Catalogue’: but this will not vitiate our argument, as the

predominant atmosphere of post-Homeric Greece was, in Leaf’s view, that

of the ‘group-system’ and there was no break in the custom of tribal

wergeld. We may assume[108] that the family of Hercules was Pelasgian.

Homer does not mention the place where the slaying took place, but it

was, possibly, Mycenae, of which Electryon, father of Likymnius, was at

one time king. Likymnius was a half-brother of Alcmene, the mother of

Hercules, whose birth, according to Homer,[109] took place at Thebes.

Likymnius was, therefore, a maternal uncle of Hercules and grand-uncle

of Tlepolemus. In a normal clan the avengers of Likymnius must have

included the brothers of Tlepolemus, since the homicide affected the

whole kindred-group. The case is remarkably similar to that described in

_Beowulf_, and referred to by F. Seebohm,[110] but Beowulf took no part

in the quarrel between his maternal and paternal kindreds and the quarrel

was in violation of tribal usage. This is precisely the kind of event

which would have tested to the utmost the solidarity of the kindred; for

there was a clan law that all the members who were akin either paternally

or maternally had to act together in the avenging of a kinsman. The

murder of Likymnius—who was not a kinsman of Amphitryon, grandfather of

Tlepolemus, but who was akin to Hercules, to Tlepolemus and the brothers

of Tlepolemus—was a crucial test, as it involved a conflict between

loyalty to clan law and loyalty to one’s nearer relatives. When Homer

speaks of the avengers of Likymnius as the ‘sons and grandsons of the

mighty Hercules,’ it does not follow that the family of Hercules were the

sole avengers, but that, as the nearest relatives of Tlepolemus, their

action was the most important, seeing that they were the kinsmen whose

obedience to clan law was most difficult and, therefore, most appreciated.

Glotz[111] does not seem to us to have rightly interpreted this passage.

He refuses to believe that the duty of vengeance was so strict as to

compel a man to exercise it against a relative of the paternal line,

in the interest of a victim of the maternal line. Moreover, he argues

that the sons of Hercules are not the avengers of Likymnius, for, if

they were, they would not have allowed him to depart. Here, we believe,

Glotz is confusing the exile penalty of Pelasgian tribes with the

Achaean exile, which was a flight from death. They let him go, says

Glotz, because they wish to avoid a feud within the clan—‘Ils veulent

seulement que le meurtrier s’en aille, parce qu’ils entendent ne pas se

brouiller avec des alliés.’[112] We think, on the contrary, that the

case of Tlepolemus furnishes a splendid instance of the solidarity of

the clan. There was no question of wergeld—nor, we think, of slavery. It

was a question of exile or death. The brothers of Tlepolemus appear to

lead the avengers. From this we need not infer that Likymnius, an old

man, had no sons or grandsons or brothers living at the time. We have

said that a clan conflict was averted by the decision of the sons of

Hercules to join in avenging. Rather than tolerate in the clan society,

in the worship of common ancestors, the slayer of a kinsman, the brothers

of Tlepolemus would, if necessary, have killed him. It is with _death_

that they threatened him, if he remained. But his exile was not a flight

from death: he was granted a certain time in which to build himself

ships. Such delay is characteristic of Pelasgian but not of Achaean

vengeance. There would be some difficulty in interpreting the reference

to the people whom he carried with him into exile, were it stated, as

fortunately it is not, that they were his kinsmen. His companions were

hangers-on, lackland men who were content to join a powerful ‘exile’

emigrant. He founded in Rhodes a city, in typical Pelasgian fashion,[113]

dividing the folk by kinship into three tribes. It is perhaps because he

was a son of Hercules that his exile appears to be no excessive penalty

but a mere inconvenience. It is perhaps for the same reason that he was

loved by Zeus, the father of Hercules.[114]

For the Pelasgian penalty of exile as an alternative to wergeld for

homicide _outside the kindred_, the most relevant, though indirect,

Homeric reference is a passage in the _Iliad_[115] which we have

already discussed, in which we hear of a man-slayer who abides among

his people when he has paid a goodly wergeld. We have already argued

that this passage refers to the tribal customs of the Pelasgians, and

that the Achaean Ajax, who uses the words, is borrowing, for rhetorical

purposes, a sentiment which did not characterise the Achaean attitude

to homicide.[116] We may now point out furthermore that the vagueness

of the description of the wergeld payment, both in this passage and in

that which relates to the Shield of Achilles, suggests, if it does not

prove, that the description proceeds from Achaeans who were not familiar

with the details of the system, but had merely become acquainted with

its outstanding principles. When Homer says ‘a man has been known to

accept a blood-price for the death of a brother or a son,’ the statement

is only a vague description, as anyone who is familiar with real wergeld

will admit. We have seen that a large number of people participated

both in the payment and in the satisfaction. Whether Homer can be taken

to mean that exile would have absolved the murderer’s kindred from all

payment, as it did in the laws of King Edmund of England,[117] or whether

it merely acquitted the murderer of his share of the debt,[118] are

questions which, owing to the vagueness of our Homeric references, cannot

here be decided.

These are the only Homeric references to the exile penalty for homicide

which can be definitely associated with Pelasgian customs. There is a

passage in the _Odyssey_[119] in which the penalty is referred to, but

we think it wiser to interpret the passage as an Achaean reference, and

to regard the exile as a flight from death. Odysseus, having slain the

suitors—an action characterised by arbitrary Achaean hypervengeance—urges

his son Telemachus to consult with him and take joint measures to prevent

retaliation from the relatives of the slain. He says to Telemachus: ‘A

man who has slain a single individual amongst the folk (ἐνὶ δήμῳ) goes

into exile and leaves his connexions and his native land, even when the

slain man has not many “helpers” left behind: but we have slain the

mainstay of the city, those who were noblest of the youths in Ithaca, so

I bid thee take thought upon the matter.’ The outlook of the Achaean

over-lord is clearly indicated in this passage, in the importance which

Odysseus seems to attach to the numbers or military strength of the

avenging relatives. For the Achaeans, murder went unavenged if there

were no avengers or if the avengers were not sufficiently powerful to

retaliate. Blood was rarely shed in vengeance, because the murderer

usually fled and took precautions against pursuit. The idea of fleeing

when the fear of ‘reprisals’ was negligible was not very intelligible to

an Achaean, and it is mentioned here as an instance of unusual caution,

in order to emphasise the danger for Telemachus and Odysseus who remain

unprepared at home surrounded by a host of powerful and hostile Ithacans.

Later on, Odysseus suggests that music and dancing should resound in the

house to prevent the rumour of the slaughter being disseminated until he

has time to prepare his plans.[120] When, eventually, the truth became

known, the relatives of the suitors took counsel together,[121] in the

manner of an Achaean council of war, but not as a Pelasgian clan or

tribe assembled to judge of guilt or innocence. Some said that Odysseus

was justified in his act; others prepare for war. The fight ensues, and

many are slain.[122] Athene[123] intervenes to reconcile the feud; she

acts not as the patron of clan law but as the symbol of Achaean military

discipline. Odysseus does not depart into exile: the covenant which the

outraged relatives submissively enter into came from the throne of Zeus,

and pledged them to serve the king for all his days.[124]

Neither can we put forward as evidence for the Pelasgian exile

penalty for homicide the passage in the _Iliad_[125] in which Priam’s

inexplicable appearance before Achilles and his friends evokes in them

an emotion which Homer compares to the amazement (θάμβος) felt when a

man ‘slays one in his country and goes into exile to the house of a rich

man[126] and wonder possesses them that look at him.’ The amazement here

described would be equally natural whether the stranger was an exiled

Pelasgian or, as Leaf suggests,[127] an Achaean fleeing for his life.

Moreover, suspicion has been thrown upon the whole passage by the

reference, in two scholia, to ‘purification,’ which has led Müller[128]

to infer that the scholiasts read, in their texts, ἁγνιτέω instead of

ἀφνειοῦ. We hope to show later[129] the error of Müller’s view that

purification for homicide was a characteristic of the Homeric age, and

hence we maintain that either the whole passage is a later interpolation

or that the reading ἁγνιτέω found its way into some Homeric texts

from a marginal gloss of post-Homeric origin, suggested by a false

interpretation of the word ἄτη in a preceding verse.

Hence, while the poems of Homer indicate beyond reasonable doubt the

existence of a genuine Pelasgian exile penalty, it is significant that

the poet of the Achaeans tends to ignore the exile[130] alternative as he

tends also to ignore the wergeld alternative, in the system of penalties

for homicide adopted by a tribal people outside the Achaean caste.

VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY HOMICIDE

It is generally[131] asserted that primitive societies recognise no

distinction either between wilful murder and manslaughter (which presumes

a certain degree of guilt), or even between wilful murder and accidental

slaying. The reason assigned is that bloodshed, even in comparatively

advanced civilisations, is a ‘civil’ rather than a ‘criminal’ offence—a

matter for damages and compensation rather than for exemplary punishment.

Thus Glotz[132] says: ‘L’intention n’est rien: le fait est tout. Pas de

circonstances atténuantes. Nulle différence entre l’assassinat lâchement

prémédité et l’homicide involontaire.’ To the possible objection that

the distinction is found in Greek legends, as given by Aeschylus,

Apollodorus, Pausanias and others, he replies that these legends are

of late origin—a view which is not quite consistent with his usual

attitude.[133] He thinks that those legends were invented by the

Athenians to restore the history of the Areopagus, the Palladium, and

the Delphinium courts.[134] He attributes the moral distinction, which

these courts are assumed to imply, between voluntary and involuntary

homicide to a period ‘not much anterior to Dracon,’ but he admits that

the idea was being developed before that time in ‘family law’—that is, in

clan justice. He seems to us rather inconsistent in holding that ‘dans

les lois sur l’homicide (de Dracon) apparaît pour la première fois la

distinction du meurtre prémédité et du meurtre involontaire,’ and in

maintaining at the same time that it was a ‘principe lentement élaboré

dans la justice sociale.’[135] The distinction was developed, he thinks,

not from any philanthropic motives but only because private vengeance was

abolished and the newly established power of the State sought thereby to

restrain the taste for blood. Now we may admit, with Glotz,[136] that the

distinction is a late development in most races whose social customs are

known to us—for instance, amongst the Germans, the Slavs, the Celts, the

Scandinavians, and the Ossetes. France does not seem to have recognised

the distinction in its written laws before A.D. 819. In feudal England

it does not make its appearance before the time of Henry VIII.[137] But

Seebohm[138] shows that in the Lex Wisigothorum (about A.D. 650) ‘a

homicide committed unknowingly (_nesciens_) is declared to be ... no

cause of death. “Let the man who has committed it depart secure.”’ The

introduction of Roman law may have caused this innovation, for Roman law

admitted the distinction from the time of the Twelve Tables[139] onwards,

and this code was still operative amongst Gallic peoples when they were

conquered by the Wisigoths.[140] From _Beowulf_, however, Seebohm[141]

infers that in Scandinavia within the clan ‘accidental homicide does not

seem to be followed even by exile.’ The poem says[142]: ‘Hæthcyn by arrow

from hornbow brought him (Herebeald) down, his near kinsman. He missed

the target and shot his brother. One brother killed the other with

bloody dart. That was a wrong past compensation.... Any way and every way

it was inevitable that the Etheling must quit life unavenged.’ In this

case, of course, there could be no question of wergeld.

In the ‘Canones Wallici’[143] (Celtic laws of the period A.D. 700-800),

which are based on the tribal wergeld system as adopted by the Church, we

find this clause: ‘Si quis homicidium ex intentione commiserit, ancillas

III et servos III reddat.’ This implies a different penalty when murder

was not _ex intentione_.

The Brehon laws[144] contain minute distinctions of payment in different

cases of wounding. If a bishop’s blood was shed in certain quantities,

the guilty person had to be hanged or to pay seven _cumhals_ (slaves)—or

their equivalent in silver and gold: if a less quantity of blood was

shed, the aggressor was condemned to lose his hand. If the blood of a

priest was shed in certain quantities, the criminal’s hand was cut off

or seven _ancillae_ paid, if the act was intentional; if it was not

intentional, one _ancilla_ sufficed for compensation. It is clear then

that this distinction is not always absent even in a wergeld system where

the crime of bloodshed is particularly objective. We have seen[145]

that wergeld often carried with it an ‘honour-price,’ an atonement

for the insult, which was caused by homicide. This price, it seems to

us, could easily admit of a modification of the penalty. Moreover, it

is possible that wergeld is not always to be regarded as a measure of

the loss sustained by a clan, but as also to some extent a ransom of

the prisoner’s life. ‘Partout,’ says Glotz,[146] ‘la composition varie

selon le rang de la victime: et selon le rang du coupable: elle est à la

fois la rançon du meurtrier et le prix du sang versé.’ For the Germans,

according to Coulanges,[147] ‘la composition est un rachat, non pas

rachat de la victime mais rachat de la vie du coupable.’[148] Is it not

natural to suppose that a system of compensation for homicide which

contains such minute differentiations would leave the road open for a

discrimination as to degrees of guilt?

It is time to ask whether Homer has anything to say of this distinction.

We will admit that he says nothing which is directly relevant to the

question. But we will examine two passages with a view to showing that

the distinction was known outside the Achaean caste.

The first passage is from the _Odyssey_[149] and is concerned with

King Oedipus the parricide and with his punishment. Odysseus narrates

how, in Hades, he saw Epicaste, and how ‘he that had slain his father

wedded her and straightway the gods made known these things to men. Yet

he abode in pain in pleasant Thebes, ruling the Cadmeans, by reason of

the baneful devices of the gods. She indeed went down to Hades ... but

for him she left behind many a woe, such as the Erinnyes of a mother

bring to pass.’ Of all forms of homicide, that by which a son deprived

a parent of life was regarded as the most horrible. Probably even the

Achaeans, as we shall see presently, felt a certain horror at the thought

of parricide. Homer, then, cannot understand why the gods, who had taken

the trouble of revealing the crimes of Oedipus, nevertheless permitted,

if they did not encourage, his continued rule over the Cadmeans. All

other parricides of whom Homer had ever heard had taken to flight! And

what was the pain which Oedipus endured? Was it remorse of conscience?

Or was it his self-inflicted blindness? Euripides[150] tells how the

sons of Oedipus confined their father under bolts and hid him away that

his sad fate might be forgotten. We shall see, later, when we analyse

the Oedipodean legends as given by the Attic dramatists, how Oedipus is

filled with natural grief, but is free from that sense of moral guilt

which we should expect him to have felt. He constantly pleads that he

did not know that the man whom he slew was Laius, his father. Was this

plea invented in later years, or was it part of the original legend?

Seebohm[151] has told us that in primitive clan societies ‘accidental

homicide within the kindred does not seem to be followed even by exile.’

Was it, then, because of ‘accidental’ or involuntary[152] parricide that

Oedipus continued to rule over the Cadmeans? Oedipus was not an Achaean.

Minoan or Cadmean, which was he? It does not matter, for our purpose, if

he obeyed the ‘dooms’ of private vengeance in tribal society. Homer is

equally vague about the working of the mother’s curse. Why did Epicaste

curse Oedipus? The Attic dramatists do not mention this. Oedipus is

cursed in Homer for one reason, and, as we think, for one reason only.

It is because other slayers of kinsmen who did not suffer punishment

were usually cursed. Thus Meleager, who in a quarrel slew his uncle,

was cursed by his mother Althaea.[153] It is an Homeric maxim that the

Erinnyes command men to honour their parents.[154]

The second passage which we shall cite is from the _Iliad_,[155] a

passage in which the ghost of Patroclus tells Achilles how his father

Menoitius brought him away from home to the realm of Peleus on the day

when he slew the son of Amphidamas, though he was but a boy and did not

intend it, and was angry over dice.[156] As this is the only passage

in Homer which contains an explicit reference to involuntary homicide,

and as the slayer is compelled to flee for ever precisely as if the act

had been wilful murder, this passage has been quoted[157] as a proof

that in early Greece there was no distinction made between murder and

manslaughter. If, however, we are right in our discrimination between the

Pelasgian and the Achaean attitudes to homicide, it would almost seem as

if the passage could be regarded, not indeed as a proof, but perhaps as

an indication, of the existence of this distinction in Homeric Greece.

May we not suppose that the words of Patroclus are not an expression of

subjective innocence by a member of a caste which regarded only objective

facts, but a ‘reminiscence’ of a higher ethical code which obtained in

the tribal villages around the fortress, and which had enshrined itself

in the language which the Achaeans learned from the Pelasgians? In the

words of Patroclus we think we can find an echo of a distinction which,

in later times, is made the basis of grades of penalties in certain

laws of homicide. Plato, whose penal code is probably modelled on the

unwritten laws of tribal institutions, points out that a person who slays

another in a passion but with intent to kill shall be exiled for a period

of three years, while a person who slays in a passion without intent to

kill is punished by exile for two years. He adds that ‘it is difficult

to give laws on such matters with accuracy.... Of all these matters,

therefore, let the guardians of the laws have cognisance ... and let the

exiles acquiesce in the decisions of such magistrates.’ We cannot, of

course, ignore the main fact given by Homer that Patroclus was compelled

to flee from death because of involuntary or quasi-involuntary homicide.

But Patroclus was an Achaean and we do not associate with the Achaeans

any tendency to discriminate between degrees of guilt. The Achaean system

of military control within a small dominant caste was merely capable of

preventing indefinite retaliations. It was not interested in homicide

as an offence against the stability of social organisations. It had

no homicide tribunals, no elaborate code of penalties. We could not

expect it to manifest any subtle power of delicate discrimination. It

is possible that the military system of historical Sparta was equally

crude in its conceptions of homicide-guilt as it was, apparently, equally

severe in its punishment.[158]

We shall see, later,[159] when we analyse the laws of Plato’s

homicide-code and of the ancient Hebrew code that the distinction between

voluntary and involuntary slaying was much more likely to have arisen in

the tribal customs of village-communities accustomed to the most minute

differentiations in their wergeld system than in systems emanating from

centralised political or religious authority. The Homeric poems give

us, it is true, no reliable evidence which would help us to arrive at a

definite decision on the existence of such a distinction in early Greece,

but from the passages we have cited we may at least extract a suggestion

that the distinction was really appreciated, and we have suggested a

source from which that sentiment may very easily have sprung.

JUSTIFIABLE AND UNJUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE

We come now to a kindred problem, namely, the question whether the

Pelasgians[160] were aware of a difference between justifiable and

non-justifiable slaying? Most writers will admit that there was no

vengeance set in motion by death on the field of battle. It was a

recognised challenge of strength, an ἄγων, the issue of which was

accepted as the will of the gods. But in local blood-vengeance, arising,

let us suppose, out of failure to pay wergeld, or when the murderer’s

clan defended him at home or did not expel him and feud followed, was

there no distinction between murder and just revenge? Glotz, as we

should expect, holds that there was no distinction between murder and

revenge.[161] ‘Coupable ou non coupable, il est responsable. Qui a versé

du sang doit du sang.’ It is thus, certainly, with modern Montenegrins,

Albanians and others. But are the creators of Mycenaean civilisation to

be compared with these? Glotz conceives the blood-vengeance of early

Greece to be what we have called unrestricted vendetta, but this mode

of vengeance is not usually associated with settled tribal communities

who are otherwise known to accept wergeld, and we maintain that the

Pelasgians had reached this stage at the dawn of Greek history. Glotz

bases his view for the most part[162] on those numerous ‘flights’ of

murderers which Homer records. Now, these references concern murderers,

not avengers of murder; and there is no instance, in Homer, of an avenger

of blood becoming in turn the object of vengeance. The non-Homeric

instances cited by Glotz,[163] such as the trial of Ares for the murder

of Halirrhothius, who had dishonoured his daughter; the flight of Hyettos

from Argos to Orchomenus, after slaying Molouros, who was caught in

adultery with his wife, are derived from Pausanias, Apollodorus, or

Euripides, and are therefore irrelevant for the interpretation of the

Homeric age.

We admit, with Glotz, that in cases of adultery and seduction slaying was

unjustifiable in Homer which would have been justifiable in historical

Greece. Glotz[164] points out that the system of compensation for

adultery and seduction which is found in the laws of Gortyn recalls,

in a certain manner, the custom applied by Hephaestus to Ares in the

_Odyssey_.[165] He says of this system: ‘Nous y retrouvons aussi,

exprimées avec précision, quelques-unes des règles que les coutumes ont

transmises aux législations[166].... Entre la ποινή de Gortyne et celle

de la fin des temps Homériques la ressemblance est frappante.’[167] This

is as much as to say that ‘towards the close of the Homeric epoch’ custom

(or, as we should say, tribal unwritten law) compelled the husband of

an adulterous wife to accept, in certain cases, compensation from the

paramour, and to arrest, but not to slay him. In the _Odyssey_,[168]

Hephaestus, having surprised Ares in the arms of his wife, decides to

imprison them, saying ‘the snare and the bond will hold them till her

sire give back to me the gifts of wooing.’ The other gods, among whom

‘laughter unquenchable arose,’ say that ‘Ares owes the adulterer’s fine’

(μοιχάγρι’ ὀφέλλει). In the _Iliad_[169] the wife of Proetus falsely

accused Bellerophon of attempted adultery,[170] and begged her husband

to slay the offender. But Homer tells us that Proetus feared to slay

him, and sent him forth to Lycia with the famous σήματα λυγρά—a written

injunction to the King of Lycia to put Bellerophon to death—an act

which suggests that the death penalty for adultery was not customary

in Greece.[171] And surely the existence of a prescribed μοιχάγρια

suggests that even amongst the Achaeans the slaying of an adulterer was

unjustifiable. We may further infer that amongst the Pelasgians there

existed some authority, whether tribal tradition, or clan-custom, which

discriminated between the cases in which death could and those in which

it could not be inflicted with impunity. The collective execution of

death in case of refusal to obey clan-laws regarding the payment of

wergeld, or μοιχάγρια, is a clear manifestation of that social justice

which claims the right to decide between justifiable and unjustifiable

slaying.

We cannot, of course, find any evidence in the Homeric poems for a

tabulation of instances of justifiable homicide such as is found in the

laws of Dracon.[172] But the Homeric poems present us with a picture

which is mainly, if not exclusively, Achaean, and we cannot infer from

the absence of Homeric evidence that the Pelasgian tribes which had

developed, as we think,[173] a capacity for discriminating between

degrees of homicide guilt, had not also evolved a definite conception

of the distinction between just and unjust slaying. We shall see[174]

later that even the Achaeans recognised at least a distinction between

murder and just revenge. Thus, the Achaean Orestes who slew his mother

to avenge his father is said by Homer to have ‘gained renown amongst all

men.’[175] In the _Odyssey_,[176] Amphinomus, one of the suitors, refuses

to join a conspiracy to murder Telemachus without consulting the gods:

‘I for one would not choose to kill Telemachus: it is a fearful thing to

slay one of the stock of kings: nay, first let us seek the counsel of

the gods, and if the oracles (θέμιστες) of great Zeus approve, myself I

will slay him and bid all the rest to aid; but if the gods are disposed

to avert it, I bid you, too, refrain.’ The θέμιστες here attributed to

Zeus must be regarded as a reflex of the public opinion of the Achaean

caste, which, therefore, had evolved a distinction between just and

unjust slaying. In another place[177] Eupeithes, the father of a slain

suitor, says ‘It is a scorn if we avenge not ourselves on the slayers of

our sons and brothers; rather would I die!’ It is obvious that an act

which is a duty prescribed by caste or law or custom cannot be regarded

as a crime. So,[178] when the feud arose between Odysseus, who regarded

himself as justified in slaying the suitors who had insulted his family,

and the suitors, who were contriving what they considered a just revenge,

Homer tells us that Odysseus would have slain them all, had not Athene

intervened and ordered both sides to desist and to enter into a solemn

covenant of reconciliation. This act of Athene[179] signifies that in

her opinion both sides are justified in shedding blood, and hence that

the feud can be cancelled without disturbing the balance of justice. Now

Glotz[180] rightly points out that the ancients attributed to their gods

such opinions as they themselves professed; and if Achaeanised Athene

acted thus, how can we avoid assuming the existence of at least as high

a standard amongst the Pelasgians? In Homer then we may conclude that

there existed some distinction between just and unjust slaying. For

Glotz, this distinction arises only when the State takes justice into its

own hands and legitimatises private vengeance after trial. The date of

this evolution, he thinks, is the age of Dracon. But we maintain that,

long before Dracon, or perhaps even before Homer, there existed, in

Greece, States within States, that is, clans and tribes and phratries,

whose interest it was, at the dawn of civilised society, to create the

distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable bloodshed, which is so

vital to domestic peace.

COLLECTIVITY IN VENGEANCE

Nothing that has been said in this chapter is incompatible with the

view that punishment, in early societies, tends to be collective and

hereditary. Feuds of blood must have occasionally occurred amongst

the early Pelasgian folk, but we cannot ignore the control of tribal

authority, and the Achaean domination which may have acted as a check.

However, it is one thing to declare war on a group which refuses to

fulfil the law of a district or of a tribe; it is quite another thing

to refuse the ‘satisfaction’ prescribed by custom, and to make a single

murder an invariable cause of incessant bloodshed. This is the state

of Homeric society as conceived by Glotz, and by most writers on the

subject of early Greek homicide. We prefer to emphasise the triumph of

reason over passion which is symbolised by a wergeld system of local

vengeance, by the worship of common ancestors, real or fictitious,

by the early political synoekism of many Greek districts, and by

international Amphictyonies of immemorial antiquity. We think that it

was in post-Homeric times, when the Achaean control was removed, and

the Migrations broke up the solidarity of Pelasgian clans, that Greek

societies developed unrestricted vendetta. Glotz[181] has difficulties

about the Homeric age. He has to admit that there is no infallible

system of collective punishment in Homer. ‘Dans l’Iliade et dans

l’Odyssée,’ he says, ‘les querelles strictement personnelles ne lient

plus infailliblement au sort de l’offenseur tous les siens. On n’y voit

point, après un meurtre ἐμφύλιος, les vengeurs du sang poursuivre la

famille du meurtrier.’ The difficulty is obviated by our theory of

Achaean restricted vendetta. The vengeance of Achilles[182] for the death

of Patroclus is no objection to our theory, as it is not revenge for

homicide proper: war is distinct from peace. Achaean kings confiscate

property, transfer and destroy whole cities[183]: this is but the

autocracy of a quasi-feudal militarism; it is not a punishment of moral

guilt.

Euripides[184] makes Tyndareus utter a sentiment regarding the legitimate

modes of homicide-vengeance which seems to us to be very applicable to

early Greek societies. Tyndareus objects to the infliction of death as a

penalty for the slaying of Agamemnon, on the ground that such penalties,

in the absence of State-control, would inevitably lead to an indefinite

series of retaliations. ‘Right well,’ he says, ‘did our ancestors in

olden times enact these ordinances ... they punished (the murderer) with

exile, but they suffered no one to slay him in return, for (in that

eventuality) each successive avenger would be liable for bloodshed....

I will support the law, and try to check this brutal murderous practice

destructive alike of individual States and of the world.’ We shall see

later[185] that Euripides is either consciously archaising in this

passage or that the view of Tyndareus was somehow preserved in the legend

which the dramatist follows. In either case, it seems to us to contain

a valuable principle regarding the fear of unrestricted vendetta, of

collective and hereditary punishment, which is found in civilised tribal

societies in a condition of private vengeance. Such societies have either

to abandon civilisation, and to fall back into a chronic state of chaotic

barbarism, or to adopt a system of ‘social justice’ which, by definite

rules and regulations, expressive of tribal authority, by public opinion

and religious sanctions, prevents, as far as possible, the innocent from

suffering with the guilty.

The penalty of wergeld was, in a certain sense, collective because it was

diffused throughout the kindred. But this penalty is clearly far removed

from the collective punishment of a barbarous hypervengeance. It arises,

we have said, from the simple fact that property, in early society, was

to a great extent collective or common; and also from the fact that the

individual of tribal life was not the isolated personality which feudal

and modern civilisations have evolved, but was rather a branch of one

great wide-spreading tree in which he lived and moved and had his being.

Finally, in regard to the Homeric society, we must remember that the

Achaeans stood on quite a separate plane. Amongst them there is little

or no suggestion of collective punishment. Achaean military discipline

prevented it. Such traces of this punishment as are found in many later

legends must be attributed, as we shall see, to post-Homeric influences.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See _Blutrache bei den Griechen_, chapter i.

[2] See _History of Greece_ (second edition), p. 172.

[3] _History of Greece_, vol. ii. p. 32.

[4] See _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, p. 407.

[5] P. 408.

[6] _La Solidarité de la Famille_, Book I. (_passim_).

[7] See _s.v._ φόνος, p. 439.

[8] See _supra_, p. 11.

[9] _Loc. cit._ p. 440.

[10] See, _e.g._, Glotz, _loc. cit._ pp. 56-7: ‘Les Grecs ont toujours

senti et manifesté avec une vivacité extrême le bonheur de se venger.

Le cannibalisme qu’ils avaient pratiqué à l’époque de la sauvagerie

primitive, resta dans leur langue, s’il disparut de leurs mœurs.’ On p.

57 they are compared to Montenegrins and Arabs.

[11] Pp. 253-5.

[12] _Il._ xxiii. 85.

[13] _Il._ ix. 565.

[14] _Il._ xv. 334; _Il._ xxiv. 480.

[15] _Il._ xviii. 490-508.

[16] P. 516.

[17] See also _J.H.S._ xiii. 123-6 (1887). The view was first suggested

by Müncher (1829); see Glotz, p. 116.

[18] See _infra_, p. 37 ff.

[19] See _supra_, p. 21.

[20] _Op. cit._ p. 162 ff.

[21] _Op. cit._ p. 105.

[22] Pott, Corssen, Curtius, quoted by Glotz, _loc. cit._

[23] _E.g._ _Il._ ix. 131-2, ἀπερείσι’ ἄποινα.

[24] _Op. cit._ p. 110.

[25] _Op. cit._ p. 114.

[26] Compare the weeping of Hrethel, when his eldest son was killed

by his second son—and no vengeance was possible within the ‘family.’

_Beowulf_ (2464), quoted by F. Seebohm, p. 63.

[27] _Il._ viii. 500 ff.

[28] _Il._ ix. 378-386.

[29] _Il._ ix. 625.

[30] See _infra_, p. 43.

[31] See _Iliad_ xii. 422 and _supra_, p. 17.

[32] _Op. cit._ p. 115. ‘Rien ne prouve ici que la justice sociale

intervienne à quelque titre et de quelque manière que ce soit, ni pour

imposer ou conseiller un accommodement, ni pour indiquer le montant de la

composition.’

[33] _Il._ ix. 634 suggests an ‘arrangement’ by which either (_a_) exile

absolved the clan from punishment (_cf._ _Laws of King Edmund_, Seebohm,

p. 356) or (_b_) exile was accepted in lieu of the murderer’s _share_ of

the wergeld (_cf._ Canones Wallici, quoted by Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 109).

[34] See Soph. _Antigone_, 456-7.

[35] _Il._ xviii. 490-508.

[36] _Op. cit._ pp. 473-4.

[37] See his Edition of _Iliad_, vol. ii. pp. 340-1.

[38] See Monro, _loc. cit._

[39] P. 516; _supra_, p. 25.

[40] P. 312.

[41] See also _J.H.S._ xiii. pp. 123-6 (1887), and Glotz, _op. cit._ p.

116.

[42] P. 516.

[43] 490-508.

[44] ἴστωρ, see _infra_, p. 43.

[45] _E.g._ Hofmeister, Leist, Dareste; see Glotz, _loc. cit._

[46] _Op. cit._ p. 116.

[47] P. 312 ff.

[48] For a fine illustration of Achaean ‘arbitration’ in homicide, see

Euripides, _Hecuba_ (1130 ff.).

[49] P. 258.

[50] Minoans or Achaeans.

[51] _Cf._ Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 122. Aussi celui, qui traite au nom d’une

famille lésée, doit avoir pleins pouvoirs d’agir au nom de tous ou en

référer au groupe qu’il représente.

[52] See _Das Attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren_, Einleitung, pp. iv. ff.

[53] That is, if he was proved to be innocent of the crime.

[54] See Leaf’s note in edition of _Iliad_ (1902), p. 611 ff.

[55] _Od._ xv. 388.

[56] _Od._ xv. 429.

[57] _Od._ xv. 452.

[58] _Il._ x. 378.

[59] _Il._ xxi. 41-80.

[60] _Il._ ix. 264.

[61] _Od._ iv. 525.

[62] See _supra_, p. 10; Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 123 ff.

[63] _Ancient Law_, p. 313. See Leaf, edition of _Iliad_ (1902), p. 612.

[64] _Op. cit._ p. 119.

[65] Seebohm, _op. cit._ pp. 43-5.

[66] See _supra_, p. 11; Seebohm, _op. cit._ pp. 328, 356.

[67] See _supra_, p. 7.

[68] λαοὶ δ’ ἀμφοτέροισιν ἐπήπυον.

[69] ἀμφὶς ἀρωγοί.

[70] κήρυκες δ’ ἄρα λαὸν ἐφήτυον.

[71] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 356.

[72] Leaf, edition of _Iliad_ (1902) p. 611; Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 118 ff.

[73] _Op. cit._ p. 118.

[74] Seebohm, _op. cit._ pp. 203-5; 409-11.

[75] _Il._ ix. 634.

[76] _Op. cit._ p. 129.

[77] Glotz, _op. cit._ p. 118.

[78] _Cf._ also _Il._ xxi. 41; _Od._ xv. 388, 452.

[79] _Il._ ii. 666.

[80] _Op. cit._ p. 162.

[81] _Op. cit._ p. 163.

[82] _Op. cit._ p. 29, and Plutarch, _Solon_, 23.

[83] P. 130.

[84] Pp. 164, 173.

[85] iii. 4. 2.

[86] Hesiod, _Theog._ 937.

[87] P. 173.

[88] Apollod. iii. 10. 4. _Cf._ Euripides, _Alcestis_, 1-10.

[89] Apollod. ii. 6. 2.

[90] _Il._ xxi. 442 ff.

[91] The same remark applies to _Od._ xv. 388, 452, where the ‘ransom’

and temporary bondage are connected with kidnapping by pirates.

[92] A murderer’s children are condemned to bondage for two or three

generations in the Salic Law. Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 164.

[93] _Cf._ the Chrenecruda of Salic Law by which poorer members throw the

burden on the richer. Seebohm, p. 141.

[94] Seebohm, p. 328.

[95] Seebohm, p. 323.

[96] Seebohm, pp. 93-4.

[97] P. 42.

[98] P. 71.

[99] P. 129.

[100] P. 19.

[101] P. 22.

[102] _Op. cit._ pp. 125-126.

[103] Coulanges, _loc. cit._

[104] _Op. cit._ p. 24.

[105] See Bk. II. chap. iii.

[106] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 129.

[107] _Il._ ii. 662 ff.

[108] Müller, _Dorians_, i. pp. 411-46.

[109] _Il._ xix. 99 ff.

[110] P. 64.

[111] P. 170.

[112] Glotz, p. 170. See also p. 51.

[113] See Coulanges, _Ancient City_, pp. 169 ff.

[114] For the exile of Amphitryon, father of Hercules, who had slain

Electryon, father of Likymnius, see Euripides, _Her. Fur._ 15 ff. For the

slaying by Hercules of Iphitus, his guest, an act which appears to bring

no punishment save the vengeance of the gods, _cf._ _Od._ xxi. 27.

[115] _Il._ ix. 632 ff.

[116] _Supra_, pp. 32-3.

[117] Seebohm, p. 356.

[118] _Ib._ p. 109; _supra_, p. 9.

[119] _Od._ xxiii. 118-120.

[120] _Od._ xxiii. 133 ff.

[121] _Od._ xxiv. 421 ff.

[122] _Ib._ 526.

[123] _Ib._ 533.

[124] _Ib._ 483.

[125] _Il._ xxiv. 480 ff.

[126] Reading ἀφνειοῦ.

[127] _H. and H._ p. 253.

[128] _Eumenides_, pp. 104-5.

[129] See _infra_, pp. 111 ff., 139 ff.

[130] We should perhaps also add the ‘reminiscence’ in _Il._ ix. 63,

where the lover of domestic strife is said to be a lawless wretch without

home or phratry. It is possible but not necessary to suppose that the

wretch in question was outlawed because of homicidal tendencies which

continued to manifest themselves afterwards. See Leaf, _H. and H._ p.

251. For a possible reference in the phrase ἀτίμηντος μετανάστης (_Il._

ix. 648), see Ridgeway, _J.H.S._ vol. vi.

[131] Caillemer, art. φόνος in Daremberg and Saglio, p. 439; Philippi,

_Areopag und Epheten_, pp. 3-4; Eichhoff, _Blutrache_, chap. i. p. 8.

[132] P. 48.

[133] Glotz, _op. cit._ pp. 164-173.

[134] P. 48.

[135] P. 302.

[136] P. 48.

[137] _Encycl. Laws England_, ed. Renton, vol. ix. p. 32.

[138] P. 128.

[139] _Cf._ the phrase _si telum fugit magis quam iecit_.

[140] Seebohm, p. 126.

[141] P. 71.

[142] Quoted by Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 63.

[143] Seebohm, _op. cit._ pp. 106-8.

[144] Seebohm, _op. cit._ p. 103.

[145] _Supra_, p. 7.

[146] P. 107.

[147] See _La Monarchie franque_, pp. 473-4 (Glotz, p. 107).

[148] For the contrary view of Dareste in regard to Aryan races, see his

_Études d’histoire du droit_, pp. 252-275. Glotz, p. 106.

[149] xi. 271 ff.

[150] _Phoenissae_, 60 ff.

[151] P. 71.

[152] _Infra_, pp. 171, 310 ff.

[153] _Il._ ix. 563-570.

[154] _Cf._ _Il._ xv. 204 οἶσθ’ ὡς πρεσβυτέροισιν Ἐριννύες αἰὲν ἕπονται.

[155] xxiii. 88 ff.

[156] νήπιος, οὐκ ἐθέλων, ἀμφ’ ἀστραγάλοισι χολωθείς.

[157] See, _e.g._, Eichhoff, _Blutrache_, chap. i. p. 8.

[158] See Xenophon, _Anab._ iv. 8. 25.

[159] See _infra_, pp. 140 f., 197.

[160] For Attic legislation, see _infra_, p. 213 ff.

[161] P. 50.

[162] P. 51; see _infra_, ch. iii.

[163] P. 50.

[164] P. 383.

[165] viii. 318, 332.

[166] _Op. cit._ p. 385.

[167] P. 386

[168] viii. 318 ff.

[169] vi. 160 ff.

[170] For an interesting parallel _cf._ Euripides, _Hippolytus_.

[171] The subsequent solitary wandering of Bellerophon in ‘the plain of

wandering,’ and the death of his sons and daughter through the anger

of the gods, is not presented by Homer as a punishment for an act of

adultery of which he was not guilty (200 ff.).

[172] _Infra_, pp. 193, 215 ff.

[173] _Supra_, p. 55 ff.

[174] _Infra_, p. 76.

[175] _Od._ i. 298 ff.

[176] xvi. 400 ff.

[177] _Od._ xxiv. 420.

[178] _Ib._ 530-555.

[179] See also _Od._ i. 290 ff.

[180] P. 565.

[181] P. 191.

[182] _Il._ xviii. 336, xxiii. 181.

[183] _Supra_, p. 19.

[184] _Orestes_, 500.

[185] _Infra_, p. 348 ff.