a basis for very wide generalisations as to Homeric land-tenure. No Achaean uses the words: they are the poet’s own: hence they can easily be applied to conditions of tenure with which the poet was himself acquainted, but which were not necessarily adopted by the Achaeans during their domination in Greece. In regard to the wergeld passage, Glotz suggests that, while the verses themselves would lead one to suppose that a certain ‘superior force’ constrained the kinsman of the victim to forgo blood-vengeance by accepting a blood-price, still they do not prove that there was any ‘social justice’ to intervene and impose a settlement or to indicate the amount of the wergeld.[32] This view we cannot accept. There is no explicit[33] reference, of course, to any ‘social justice,’ but the temperament which forgoes blood-vengeance and accepts wergeld is the product of a social system which restricts and controls the human passion for revenge. The Achaeans were above and outside such a system: the Pelasgians, we think, were born and bred in it,—perhaps for centuries. Allegiance to his tribal or civic unit and its laws alone could restrain primitive man—especially in Southern climes where passion dies very hard—from following the promptings of his natural blood-thirst. In course of time individual members of a settled agricultural tribe would inevitably develop a restrained temperament, through their fear of violating those unwritten laws of which Antigone said[34] that they ‘are not of to-day or yesterday, but no man knows the time which gave them birth.’ The Achaeans, who lived in every-day contact with such types of men, must have observed even though they did not imitate their self-restraint, and all the more because it was a quality which the Achaean caste-atmosphere could not produce.