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]:

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.