tells us[77] that here ‘no one has a fixed portion of land, his own peculiar property, but the magistrates and chiefs allot every year to _tribes and clans_ as much land as, and in whatever place, they think proper, and they oblige them to remove the succeeding year.’ Tacitus, however, says[78] that ‘the lands are occupied by villages, in groups, in allotments proportioned to the number of cultivators, and are presently parcelled out among _individuals_ according to rank and condition: the arable lands are annually changed.’ Such a theory of evolution in landed property within the tribe may, however, be complicated by the coexistence, in the same district, of tribal groups and of a dominant ‘feudal’ caste. Maine points out,[79] in reference to Russian village-communities, that ‘these villages are always in theory the patrimony of some noble proprietor, and the peasants have within historical times been converted into the predial and, to a great extent, into the personal serfs, of the seignior. But the pressure of this superior ownership has never crushed the ancient organisation of the village.’ Now if we adopt the hypothesis of two distinct strata in the Homeric society, namely, of a dominant quasi-feudal Achaean caste, and of a tribal Pelasgian subject-folk, we shall be justified in assuming that some such ‘superior ownership’ coexisted with tribal ownership in the world of the Homeric poems. We shall expect to find a predominance of private ownership on the one hand, and a trace or ‘reminiscence’ of communal ownership on the other, in the verses of a poet who reflected in the main the atmosphere of the Achaean lords, but also, incidentally and fortuitously, that of the subject people. We must, then, consult the text of Homer if we hope to decide whether the Achaeans were quasi-feudal adventurers who ruled over the Pelasgians, without disturbing or destroying their normal tribal life: or whether the Achaeans, themselves a tribal nomadic people, adopted, by a social fusion, the tribal ownership which existed amongst their subjects, the chiefs alone possessing ‘private land,’ the others, common land. As the Homeric references to land-tenure are rare and obscure, it is obvious that the solution of the problem of Homeric land-ownership depends entirely on the answer to this wider and more important question.