Again, we may mention what we consider a very serious weakness in Leaf’s later position. He has to assume that the scene in question is not a single scene, but two scenes. He thus describes the affair in his _Companion to the Iliad_[47] (1892). ‘A man has been slain: the homicide has offered a money payment in commutation of the death, but the next of kin refuses to accept it. Both parties come into the public place attended by their friends and dispute. This scene ends here. The next scene shows us the dispute referred to the Elders, the King’s Council, who are to decide what course is to be taken. The importance of this double scene lies in the fact that it shows us criminal law in its very birth. No criminal law can be said to exist when it is a matter for private arrangement between the homicide and the next of kin to settle the offence, if they like, by a money payment, instead of by the normal blood revenge, which means the exile of the homicide if he is not killed. But criminal law begins when the people claim to have a voice in the question and to say that the money shall be accepted.’ We will merely say, by way of comment, that this two-scene theory not only is artistically improbable but finds no support whatever in the text of Homer. A period of thirteen years separated the date of the _Companion_ from that of the publication of _Homer and History_. Though in this latter work he does not mention the Shield of Achilles, still we feel that if Leaf had applied his later theory of the distinction between Achaeans and Pelasgians to the solution of his earlier problem, he could have thrown considerable light on the question. In 1883 it was the absence of a king in the trial that troubled him. But is it not now clear that the ‘Kings’ of Greece from 1300 B.C. to 1100 B.C. were Achaeans, bellicose war-lords, who held in their hands the ‘sceptres’ and dealt out dooms to the people, but who took little interest in local disputes, who did not understand, perhaps, and probably did not adopt, many of the Pelasgian ‘dooms’?[48] Hence, if we suppose that the Elders in this scene are not Achaeans but Pelasgian chiefs of clans and tribes, we can quite easily understand the absence of the Achaean king or over-lord.