We find a reference to the exile penalty _for kin-slaying_ in Homer.[107] We are told that Tlepolemus, son of Hercules by Astyocheia, came to Troy from Rhodes, whither he had fled, because when grown to manhood he had slain his father’s maternal uncle, an old man, Likymnius, of the stock of Ares. ‘Then with speed he built ships and gathered much folk together and went fleeing across the deep, because the other sons and grandsons of the mighty Hercules threatened him.’ So he came to Rhodes, a wanderer, and his folk settled by kinship in three tribes and were loved by Zeus.’ Leaf would probably regard this passage as non-Homeric, since it happens to occur in the ‘Catalogue’: but this will not vitiate our argument, as the predominant atmosphere of post-Homeric Greece was, in Leaf’s view, that of the ‘group-system’ and there was no break in the custom of tribal wergeld. We may assume[108] that the family of Hercules was Pelasgian. Homer does not mention the place where the slaying took place, but it was, possibly, Mycenae, of which Electryon, father of Likymnius, was at one time king. Likymnius was a half-brother of Alcmene, the mother of Hercules, whose birth, according to Homer,[109] took place at Thebes. Likymnius was, therefore, a maternal uncle of Hercules and grand-uncle of Tlepolemus. In a normal clan the avengers of Likymnius must have included the brothers of Tlepolemus, since the homicide affected the whole kindred-group. The case is remarkably similar to that described in _Beowulf_, and referred to by F. Seebohm,[110] but Beowulf took no part in the quarrel between his maternal and paternal kindreds and the quarrel was in violation of tribal usage. This is precisely the kind of event which would have tested to the utmost the solidarity of the kindred; for there was a clan law that all the members who were akin either paternally or maternally had to act together in the avenging of a kinsman. The murder of Likymnius—who was not a kinsman of Amphitryon, grandfather of Tlepolemus, but who was akin to Hercules, to Tlepolemus and the brothers of Tlepolemus—was a crucial test, as it involved a conflict between loyalty to clan law and loyalty to one’s nearer relatives. When Homer speaks of the avengers of Likymnius as the ‘sons and grandsons of the mighty Hercules,’ it does not follow that the family of Hercules were the sole avengers, but that, as the nearest relatives of Tlepolemus, their action was the most important, seeing that they were the kinsmen whose obedience to clan law was most difficult and, therefore, most appreciated.