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:

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: