In the first passage (_Iliad_ ix. 632-7) the scene is the tent of Achilles before Troy. Owing to the secession of Achilles from the Greek fighting-line the Trojans had been rapidly gaining the upper hand and the Greeks were only saved from destruction by the sudden approach of night.[27] An embassy is sent from Agamemnon to Achilles to induce him to waive his wounded pride in the interest of the Achaeans, and promising not only the restoration of his concubine Briseis but also a grant of seven cities in the Peloponnese and many splendid gifts. Achilles rejects every possible ‘satisfaction’[28] and implies that the insult offered to him was so great that nothing short of the destruction of Agamemnon and his army would assuage his wrath. Odysseus and Phoenix having failed to bend his haughty spirit, the third member of the embassy, Ajax, son of Telamon, who was certainly an Achaean, reproached him with his indifference to the fate of his Achaean comrades, who loved him, and reminded him of the self-control possessed by other men in directing their passion for revenge, even when afflicted by a much graver injury—that of murder. ‘Yet,’ he says, ‘doth a man accept payment (ποινή) from the murderer of his brother or for the slaying of his son: and the manslayer abideth in his home-land when he hath paid a goodly price, and the man’s heat and proud spirit is restrained when he hath accepted the payment—but for thee the gods have put within thy breast an evil and implacable spirit.’ When Ajax delivered this speech, he had already despaired of the success of the embassy[29]: and he mentioned the act of the receiver of wergeld, not as the act of a normal Achaean hero—the Achaeans of the Homeric age are of a very different type—but as an act which was characteristic of a well-known kind of temperament, an act which, he thought, might serve to emphasise the extreme abnormality of Achilles’ desire for vengeance. If Achilles had had a son or a brother who was murdered, and if he were on the point of crushing a whole village in revenge, the argument of Ajax would have been more relevant to the case, but even then it could not be taken to imply that either Ajax or Achilles was a member of a society in which wergeld was a recognised penalty. It is significant also that Achilles, in his reply, makes no reference whatsoever to this argument. Viewing Homer as a whole, it seems more than probable that this almost solitary instance of wergeld was introduced by the poet, who[30] was aware of the existence of the wergeld system, but was not concerned with its details. We need not call attention to the non-factual nature of recorded speeches even in Greek prose writers, and _a fortiori_ in the epic poets who reconstructed speeches more or less as a historical novelist would at the present day. It is in a similarly casual way that Homer gives us his one solitary reference to a common tillage field[31]—a reference which Ridgeway makes