We have pointed out that in Homeric Greece there were, so to speak, two different religions, which reflected, in their main features, the social caste-differences of the Achaeans and the Pelasgians. It has been rightly said that primitive man creates his gods in his own likeness, and in the absence of any definite Homeric references to the religious aspect of homicide we must assume that the two religions of Homeric Greece adopted, towards homicide, the attitudes of the two corresponding social strata. Amongst the Achaeans, we have seen, homicide was a deed which concerned only the slayer and the nearest blood-relations of the victim; there was no co-operation of large groups, no trial, no civic interest in the execution of vengeance: it was entirely a matter for ‘private settlement’ between the relatives of the slain and the individual slayer. And this ‘settlement’ was not a payment in money or in kind: it was a payment in blood, and in blood alone. The Achaeans, as a caste, had no interest in such ‘crimes’: on the whole, they regarded bloodshed as a local misfortune, which should not be aggravated by an extension of the dispute to wider areas, and therefore they frequently adopted and protected murder-exiles. We are not then surprised to find that in Homer the Olympian gods of the Achaean caste manifest no anger against a murderer. In the Pelasgian tribal religion we may assume that the position of the homicide was somewhat different. It required the payment of wergeld to purchase back the friendship of tribal gods. But we have seen[75] that for slaying within the kindred no payment of wergeld could be offered or accepted; and we have said[76] that the penalty of slavery or bondage was probably inapplicable and that therefore exile was the normal punishment for bloodshed within the clan. It follows that the murdered man whose body was interred in the family tomb would never have come in contact, through worship, with his kinsman who had slain him. And in this sense we may accept the dictum of Coulanges[77] that ‘the hand stained with blood could not touch sacred objects: the shedder of blood could not sacrifice.’ Hence it is perhaps significant that, in Homer, Tlepolemus who, when he had slain his maternal uncle, went into exile to Rhodes, is said to have been ‘loved by Zeus,’[78] for by exile he had atoned for his offence. In ordinary cases of homicide, however, between members of different clans, we must suppose that the gods of the phratry, of the tribe, and of the city became reconciled to the slayer if the relatives of the slain received the customary wergeld. If then Miss Harrison says[79] that ‘so long as primitive man retains the custom of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead kinsmen with passions like his own,’ she is compelled, by her own reasoning, to admit that the ‘ghosts’ of murdered men, in the tribal wergeld system, did not revolt at the presence of a murderer, unless he were a kinsman.[80]