[181] P. 191.
[182] Il. xviii. 336, xxiii. 181.
[184] Orestes, 500.
CHAPTER III
THE ACHAEAN SYSTEM
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.
‘The Achaians,’ says Leaf,[1] ‘shew no signs in Homer of anything corresponding to the minor classifications, so important in later Greece, which is recalled to us by the Attic names of γένος and φρατρία. They appear as a single unit divided only locally. The whole primitive family system, with its rites and taboos, has disappeared and the only kinship recognised as carrying a moral obligation is the natural obligation of close blood relationship ... this is only what we should expect in a people of military adventurers.... Homicide is a local and family affair.’
We have indicated the confusion of ideas which characterises the traditional views regarding Homeric homicide,[2] a confusion which is to be attributed to the failure of writers to discriminate between the Achaeans and the Pelasgians, between the individualistic quasi-feudal militarism of a dominant caste and the complex tribal organisations of a settled agricultural subject-people. We have suggested, as the most probable hypothesis, that the Pelasgian penalty for homicide was normally and essentially wergeld, except in cases of kin-slaying, for which the penalty was exile: we have argued that, within the Pelasgian tribe, or phratry, or village community, exile from his clan or phratry or State was accepted for the slayer as a complete or partial substitute for his wergeld debt: and that if the murderer in default of wergeld remained in his native place beyond a certain time, he could be killed with impunity, having been previously warned or threatened; we have said that bondage or servitude might be accepted in case of failure to pay the prescribed wergeld quota—whether on the part of the murderer himself or on the part of delinquent relatives—a bondage which was not necessarily perpetual, but was rather a temporary punishment proportioned to the ‘debt.’ The Achaean system, we have suggested,[3] was fundamentally different: it was a restricted ‘small family’ vendetta, in which blood for blood was the normal retribution, wergeld was unknown, and exile was merely a flight from death.