(1) In regard to the Pelasgian Erinnyes, we have suggested that they were divinities of different degrees of rank in the Chthonian religion. They did not visit their wrath on a murderer if he paid the tribal penalty, or even on the slayer of a kinsman, unless he remained in contact with the domestic worship of his dead relative.[130] There was no ‘purgation’ for homicide: because homicide was not yet an offence against _the greater gods of the State_. The exile or death of a murderer or the payment of wergeld appeased, of itself, the Erinnys of the slain: to refuse to accept wergeld was impossible, in the organisation of the tribe. (2) The Achaean Erinnys was an eclectic product. It was not Homer who personified[131] the Erinnys because it was already personified, though in that vague collective nameless manner in which alone a cultus-epithet can be deified. The Achaeans conceived the Erinnyes as gods. For them there are only gods and men: there are no ghosts or abstractions in the galaxy of supernatural beings. The Achaean Erinnys has lost its connexion with ghost-terror, though it retains sufficient traces of its Chthonian importance to be treated with considerable respect. It is merely a subordinate deity which executes the decrees of Olympian gods, but its association with Zeus and the Moirae suggests the greater dignity which it enjoyed in Chthonian religion. The connexion of the Erinnys with curses is essentially Chthonian. All castes in Homer use the ritual of swearing, but we cannot say how far the Achaeans understood the ideas underlying the rite. The curse of a father or a mother was particularly terrible in the Pelasgian domestic religion. But we cannot suppose that the Achaean respect for parents, or their dread of curses, was as great or as profound as that of the Pelasgians. The Achaean Zeus himself hurled to Tartarus his aged father Kronos.[132] Hence the Homeric references to parents’ curses, such as are found in the stories of the Achaean Phoenix and the Achaean Meleager, indicate probably an assimilation of Pelasgian ideas.[133] But the literary heirloom which the poet of the Achaeans bequeathed to Greece helped to beget a false conception of the Achaean Erinnys in the minds of later poets. The Achaean mode of blood-vengeance and their desire of blood for blood caused later legend-makers to attribute a veritable blood-thirst to the Erinnyes of murdered Achaeans.