We admit, with Glotz, that in cases of adultery and seduction slaying was unjustifiable in Homer which would have been justifiable in historical Greece. Glotz[164] points out that the system of compensation for adultery and seduction which is found in the laws of Gortyn recalls, in a certain manner, the custom applied by Hephaestus to Ares in the _Odyssey_.[165] He says of this system: ‘Nous y retrouvons aussi, exprimées avec précision, quelques-unes des règles que les coutumes ont transmises aux législations[166].... Entre la ποινή de Gortyne et celle de la fin des temps Homériques la ressemblance est frappante.’[167] This is as much as to say that ‘towards the close of the Homeric epoch’ custom (or, as we should say, tribal unwritten law) compelled the husband of an adulterous wife to accept, in certain cases, compensation from the paramour, and to arrest, but not to slay him. In the _Odyssey_,[168] Hephaestus, having surprised Ares in the arms of his wife, decides to imprison them, saying ‘the snare and the bond will hold them till her sire give back to me the gifts of wooing.’ The other gods, among whom ‘laughter unquenchable arose,’ say that ‘Ares owes the adulterer’s fine’ (μοιχάγρι’ ὀφέλλει). In the _Iliad_[169] the wife of Proetus falsely accused Bellerophon of attempted adultery,[170] and begged her husband to slay the offender. But Homer tells us that Proetus feared to slay him, and sent him forth to Lycia with the famous σήματα λυγρά—a written injunction to the King of Lycia to put Bellerophon to death—an act which suggests that the death penalty for adultery was not customary in Greece.[171] And surely the existence of a prescribed μοιχάγρια suggests that even amongst the Achaeans the slaying of an adulterer was unjustifiable. We may further infer that amongst the Pelasgians there existed some authority, whether tribal tradition, or clan-custom, which discriminated between the cases in which death could and those in which it could not be inflicted with impunity. The collective execution of death in case of refusal to obey clan-laws regarding the payment of wergeld, or μοιχάγρια, is a clear manifestation of that social justice which claims the right to decide between justifiable and unjustifiable slaying.