Euripides[184] makes Tyndareus utter a sentiment regarding the legitimate modes of homicide-vengeance which seems to us to be very applicable to early Greek societies. Tyndareus objects to the infliction of death as a penalty for the slaying of Agamemnon, on the ground that such penalties, in the absence of State-control, would inevitably lead to an indefinite series of retaliations. ‘Right well,’ he says, ‘did our ancestors in olden times enact these ordinances ... they punished (the murderer) with exile, but they suffered no one to slay him in return, for (in that eventuality) each successive avenger would be liable for bloodshed.... I will support the law, and try to check this brutal murderous practice destructive alike of individual States and of the world.’ We shall see later[185] that Euripides is either consciously archaising in this passage or that the view of Tyndareus was somehow preserved in the legend which the dramatist follows. In either case, it seems to us to contain a valuable principle regarding the fear of unrestricted vendetta, of collective and hereditary punishment, which is found in civilised tribal societies in a condition of private vengeance. Such societies have either to abandon civilisation, and to fall back into a chronic state of chaotic barbarism, or to adopt a system of ‘social justice’ which, by definite rules and regulations, expressive of tribal authority, by public opinion and religious sanctions, prevents, as far as possible, the innocent from suffering with the guilty. The penalty of wergeld was, in a certain sense, collective because it was diffused throughout the kindred. But this penalty is clearly far removed from the collective punishment of a barbarous hypervengeance. It arises, we have said, from the simple fact that property, in early society, was to a great extent collective or common; and also from the fact that the individual of tribal life was not the isolated personality which feudal and modern civilisations have evolved, but was rather a branch of one great wide-spreading tree in which he lived and moved and had his being. Finally, in regard to the Homeric society, we must remember that the Achaeans stood on quite a separate plane. Amongst them there is little or no suggestion of collective punishment. Achaean military discipline prevented it. Such traces of this punishment as are found in many later legends must be attributed, as we shall see, to post-Homeric influences. FOOTNOTES [1] See _Blutrache bei den Griechen_, chapter i. [2] See _History of Greece_ (second edition), p. 172. [3] _History of Greece_, vol. ii. p. 32. [4] See _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, p. 407. [5] P. 408. [6] _La Solidarité de la Famille_, Book I. (_passim_). [7] See _s.v._ φόνος, p. 439. [8] See _supra_, p. 11. [9] _Loc. cit._ p. 440.