The second passage which we shall cite is from the _Iliad_,[155] a passage in which the ghost of Patroclus tells Achilles how his father Menoitius brought him away from home to the realm of Peleus on the day when he slew the son of Amphidamas, though he was but a boy and did not intend it, and was angry over dice.[156] As this is the only passage in Homer which contains an explicit reference to involuntary homicide, and as the slayer is compelled to flee for ever precisely as if the act had been wilful murder, this passage has been quoted[157] as a proof that in early Greece there was no distinction made between murder and manslaughter. If, however, we are right in our discrimination between the Pelasgian and the Achaean attitudes to homicide, it would almost seem as if the passage could be regarded, not indeed as a proof, but perhaps as an indication, of the existence of this distinction in Homeric Greece. May we not suppose that the words of Patroclus are not an expression of subjective innocence by a member of a caste which regarded only objective facts, but a ‘reminiscence’ of a higher ethical code which obtained in the tribal villages around the fortress, and which had enshrined itself in the language which the Achaeans learned from the Pelasgians? In the words of Patroclus we think we can find an echo of a distinction which, in later times, is made the basis of grades of penalties in certain laws of homicide. Plato, whose penal code is probably modelled on the unwritten laws of tribal institutions, points out that a person who slays another in a passion but with intent to kill shall be exiled for a period of three years, while a person who slays in a passion without intent to kill is punished by exile for two years. He adds that ‘it is difficult to give laws on such matters with accuracy.... Of all these matters, therefore, let the guardians of the laws have cognisance ... and let the exiles acquiesce in the decisions of such magistrates.’ We cannot, of course, ignore the main fact given by Homer that Patroclus was compelled to flee from death because of involuntary or quasi-involuntary homicide. But Patroclus was an Achaean and we do not associate with the Achaeans any tendency to discriminate between degrees of guilt. The Achaean system of military control within a small dominant caste was merely capable of preventing indefinite retaliations. It was not interested in homicide as an offence against the stability of social organisations. It had no homicide tribunals, no elaborate code of penalties. We could not expect it to manifest any subtle power of delicate discrimination. It is possible that the military system of historical Sparta was equally crude in its conceptions of homicide-guilt as it was, apparently, equally severe in its punishment.[158]