In another passage of the _Iliad_[15] we are told that Medon, son of Oileus and brother of Ajax, ‘dwelt in Phylace, far from his own country, for that he had slain a man, the brother of his stepmother Eriopis.’ The murder probably took place in Opus, a Locrian town, where also was perpetrated the death of the son of Amphidamas at the hands of Patroclus.[16] Like Patroclus, Medon came to Phthia, not to Peleus the king of the realm, but only, as Leaf would maintain,[17] to Protesilaus, a ‘baron’ of Achilles who ruled the town of Phylace. The typically Achaean method of procedure is maintained. Again, we are told[18] that Lycophron, son of Mastor, of Cythera, slew a man in Cythera and came and dwelt with Ajax who made him his ‘squire’ or a member of his bodyguard. He, too, was slain in Troy, and when he falls Ajax says to his brother Teucer, ‘Our faithful comrade has fallen ... whom we honoured like our parents.’ Leaf[19] quotes this passage as an instance of the immunity of Achaeans from any real punishment for bloodshed. So far as tribal customs were concerned such men were entirely above the law. In the _Odyssey_,[20] Eumaeus, swineherd of Odysseus, tells how a beggar appealed to him for help on the ground that he had slain a man, and that he knew Odysseus (which was a falsehood). From the poverty of the beggar it is not necessary to infer that he was a Pelasgian who had ‘wandered over a vast tract of land.’ Again, Odysseus,[21] inventing a fiction about his past, pretends that he is a murder-refugee from Crete (an Achaean dominion), having killed the son of Idomeneus. ‘I smote him,’ he says, ‘with a bronze-shod spear as he came home from the field, lying in ambush for him by the wayside, with one of my companions.’ He adds, very significantly, as we think: ‘and now I have come hither with these my goods; and I left as much again to my children.’ There is no trace here of that solidarity in the control of property, and of that ‘passive collectivity’ or distribution of punishment, which is so characteristic of clan wergeld. No tribal murderer could have taken any property away with him: his property, and therefore probably[22] that of his children, was distributed among the wider kindred who either retained it or used it to defray their share of the wergeld.[23] Odysseus, however, departs with half his property, and the relatives of the slain Orsilochus left the children in tranquil enjoyment of the rest! Of course, Odysseus did not really live through such an experience, but a ‘tribesman’ would have told a very different story.