First of all, we have already protested against the opinion which represents the early Greeks as cannibals living in a state of barbarism. In our view, the only period of Greek history to which such a conception may, with any justice, be applied is the period of the Dark Ages which succeeded the Trojan war, when continual migrations and the breakdown of tribal solidarity gave a temporary reality to the picture which is drawn for us by Hesiod. The Pelasgian, Minoan, and Achaean periods, however, present to our minds societies enjoying a civilisation which was regular and orderly, and a culture which was real and distinctive, even though it was also primitive. Again, the arguments which Leaf bases on the linguistic interpretation of one or two verbs in this passage are not only inconclusive for his hypothesis, as Glotz rightly holds,[46] but suggest, we think, the opposite deduction. In 1883 Leaf translated the words ὀ μὲν εὔχετο πάντ’ ἀποδοῦναι ... ὁ δ’ ἀναίνετο μηδὲν ἑλέσθαι as ‘the one avowed that he had paid all ... the other denied that he had received aught’: but in his latest edition of the _Iliad_ (1902) he translates them (to suit his changed hypothesis) thus: ‘the one offered to pay all ... the other refused to accept aught.’ He admits, of course, that the verbs can have the meaning which he gave to them in 1883. But he omits to note the solitary word πάντα which we consider a decisive factor. If a man is said to ‘pay all’ surely that ‘all’ must have been a sum fixed by a traditional arrangement. We can find no parallel, in wergeld-paying communities, for a judicial decision on the part of the tribe which compels a relative of the victim to accept the wergeld which the tribe of which he is a member has traditionally recognised as the complete payment of the debt. It is only if payment is in default or dispute that the tribe would assert itself to prevent a feud of blood. When Homer adds, after the clause ὁ δ’ ἀναίνετο μηδὲν ἑλέσθαι, the words δήμῳ πιφαύσκων, surely this means ‘declaring it to the people’ rather than ‘manifesting it to the people,’ for it is absurd to suppose that the actual wergeld was included in the scene, since such a payment, as we have shown, usually consisted of cattle and sheep.