No light is thrown on the social system by the passages which mention the payment of wergelds; for we are not informed whether these were fixed by custom or whether they formed the subject of bargaining in each individual case. In Il. XXI 79 f. Lycaon says that Achilles had sold him into Lemnos for a hundred oxen and that he had been ransomed from thence for three hundred. Even the smaller of these sums is of course much too great for an ordinary slave's price. In the light of Teutonic custom it is possible that both represent standard wergelds, regarded as man-values in general; but one can hardly say that it is more than a possibility. The silence of the poems upon this subject is nothing surprising, for the Teutonic poems yield us no more information.
We may now briefly summarise the results of this discussion. The salient characteristic of the Heroic Age, both in Greece and in northern Europe, appears to be the disintegration of the bonds of kinship, a process which shows itself chiefly in the prevalence of strife between relatives, and which in both cases is probably connected with a change in the organisation of the kindred—agnatic relationship having come gradually to take the place of cognatic. How far this process affected society as a whole we cannot tell, since our evidence is generally limited to the royal families. The binding force formerly possessed by kinship was now largely transferred to the relationship between 'lord' and 'man' (dryhten—þegn, ἄναξ—θεράπων), between whom no bond of blood-relationship was necessary. The comitatus was probably not developed in Greece to the same extent as it was in northern Europe; indeed in regard to social development generally the conditions in Greece seem to have been more primitive. Yet in individual cases the bond between lord and man was apparently the strongest force of which we know.
FOOTNOTES:
[513] Cf. The Origin of the English Nation, p. 327 ff.
[514] ξυγγενῆ γὰρ αὐτῷ τὸν φονέα εἶναι οὐ θέμις. Cf. Greg. Tur., II 40, where Clovis says: nec enim possum sanguinem parentum meorum effundere, quod fieri nefas est. But this is represented as mere hypocrisy; cf. II 41, ad fin.
[515] In some cases the deed was certainly done by the relative's own hand. Such was the case with Lothair and the sons of Chlodomer (Greg. Tur., III 18).
[516] Beow. 2618 f.:
no ymb ða faehðe spraec,
þeah ðe he his broðor bearn abredwade.
Many scholars here understand ða faehðe to mean not the encounter between Eanmund and Weohstan, but the hostility (vendetta) which devolved upon Onela as Eanmund's kinsman; but I think the idea is rather that of 'bloodguiltiness' (towards Onela) incurred by Weohstan. Eanmund was the son of Ohthere, Onela's brother.