Bury, who rightly attributes the origin of purgation rites for homicide to post-Homeric times, nevertheless connects those rites with the worship of the Erinnyes and of the Chthonian deities. ‘Gradually,’ he says,[94] ‘as the worship of the souls of the dead and of the deities of the underworld developed, the belief gained ground that he who shed blood was impure and needed cleansing. Accordingly, when a murderer satisfied the kinsfolk of the murdered man by paying a fine, he had also to submit to a process of purification and to satisfy the Chthonian gods and the Erinnyes or Furies who were, in the original conception, the souls of the dead clamouring for vengeance.’ The validity of this conception of the origin of the Erinnyes will be examined presently. We hope also to show, at a later stage, that wergeld and ‘pollution’ were mutually destructive. O. Müller holds[95] that the religious rites of expiation and purification were derived from the remotest times of Grecian antiquity and were designed to reinstate the slayer in community of worship with his people. Confronted with the difficulty that such rites are not mentioned in our Homeric text, Müller argues,[96] firstly, that the reading ἁγνιτέω (= purifier) instead of ἀφνειοῦ (= rich man) in a passage in the _Iliad_[97] was the reading of the original text of Homer. He quotes a scholiast’s opinion to the effect that there is an anachronism in the verse. Secondly, he holds that the absence of Homeric references to purgation for homicide is not surprising, because the poet’s hearers would have taken it for granted as a matter of course! We must leave our readers to weigh for themselves the value of this argument. The opinion of the scholiast, if it proves anything, proves that there was an obviously false reading interpolated in the text. Müller conceives[98] purgation (καθαρμός) as a form of expiation (ἱλασμός) which is closely related to the worship of the dead and the Erinnyes, and believes that it originated in the idea that the life of the manslayer (and sometimes the lives of all his clansmen) must be sacrificed in atonement for homicide. Such a sacrifice, he thinks, came to be obviated in course of time, either (1) by the substitution of a surrogate victim, or (2) by the degradation of the murderer to a state of servitude, or (3) by wergeld, which was originally suggested by the new religious custom of accepting the sacrifice of an animal in lieu of the death of the slayer.[99] Regarding the Erinnyes as Chthonian deities to whom this expiation is offered, he is surprised to find that, in the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, the purgation of Orestes does not lay to rest the wrath of the Erinnyes. To obviate this difficulty he falls back on the obviously absurd assumption that Aeschylus, for dramatic purposes, presents Orestes as not completely purified.[100] The text of Aeschylus and the text of Homer furnish the best refutations of such hypotheses.