Since Homer, then, the poet of the Achaeans, has given us only two incidental references to wergeld, we are not surprised that he has told us nothing about the details of the system. We may indeed infer that the amount payable was very large,[75] but Glotz reveals how little he is himself acquainted with the system when he asserts[76] that the offender only escaped death at the cost of ruin. ‘La ποινή,’ he says, ‘c’est une large, parfois peut-être une totale dépossession de l’offenseur au profit de la partie lésée. A la mort juste on n’échappe que par la ruine.’ It is probable that the payment took the form of ‘women, cattle, or horses.’[77] But in the absence of more definite evidence[78] we must fall back on what we can learn from analogous instances. It is for that reason that we have discussed at so much length the wergeld system in our introductory chapter. We have no doubt that the wergeld revealed by Homer was a genuine wergeld, and not a mere clumsy device for terminating the feuds of savages exhausted by slaughter. We must now search further, in the text of Homer, for anything he may have to tell us of other alternative penalties existing amongst the Pelasgian people. In this matter we cannot trust to the analysis of Glotz, for he knows of no distinction between Achaeans and Pelasgians, and hence his account is misleading. We may say at once that we cannot find any genuine Pelasgian reference to the death penalty as an alternative, in cases of homicide _outside the clan_, though from other analogies and, indirectly, from Homer[79] we may infer that the option was valid.