We shall see, later,[159] when we analyse the laws of Plato’s homicide-code and of the ancient Hebrew code that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary slaying was much more likely to have arisen in the tribal customs of village-communities accustomed to the most minute differentiations in their wergeld system than in systems emanating from centralised political or religious authority. The Homeric poems give us, it is true, no reliable evidence which would help us to arrive at a definite decision on the existence of such a distinction in early Greece, but from the passages we have cited we may at least extract a suggestion that the distinction was really appreciated, and we have suggested a source from which that sentiment may very easily have sprung. JUSTIFIABLE AND UNJUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE We come now to a kindred problem, namely, the question whether the Pelasgians[160] were aware of a difference between justifiable and non-justifiable slaying? Most writers will admit that there was no vengeance set in motion by death on the field of battle. It was a recognised challenge of strength, an ἄγων, the issue of which was accepted as the will of the gods. But in local blood-vengeance, arising, let us suppose, out of failure to pay wergeld, or when the murderer’s clan defended him at home or did not expel him and feud followed, was there no distinction between murder and just revenge? Glotz, as we should expect, holds that there was no distinction between murder and revenge.[161] ‘Coupable ou non coupable, il est responsable. Qui a versé du sang doit du sang.’ It is thus, certainly, with modern Montenegrins, Albanians and others. But are the creators of Mycenaean civilisation to be compared with these? Glotz conceives the blood-vengeance of early Greece to be what we have called unrestricted vendetta, but this mode of vengeance is not usually associated with settled tribal communities who are otherwise known to accept wergeld, and we maintain that the Pelasgians had reached this stage at the dawn of Greek history. Glotz bases his view for the most part[162] on those numerous ‘flights’ of murderers which Homer records. Now, these references concern murderers, not avengers of murder; and there is no instance, in Homer, of an avenger of blood becoming in turn the object of vengeance. The non-Homeric instances cited by Glotz,[163] such as the trial of Ares for the murder of Halirrhothius, who had dishonoured his daughter; the flight of Hyettos from Argos to Orchomenus, after slaying Molouros, who was caught in adultery with his wife, are derived from Pausanias, Apollodorus, or Euripides, and are therefore irrelevant for the interpretation of the Homeric age.