The portion of the Homeric story of Phoenix which is generally regarded as spurious[40] happens to be the passage in which parricide is referred to in a casual and frivolous manner. Plutarch states that such a reference was considered unsuitable to the character of Phoenix. We will go further and say that it is unsuitable to the ancient Greek conception of parricide, whether among the Achaeans, or, _a fortiori_, among the clans. This latter point will become more evident when we discuss the laws of Plato and the legends of the Attic tragedians. Our theory of the Achaean penalty for homicide must now seek further confirmation from a discussion of other Homeric passages. In the _Iliad_[41] Phoenix tells Achilles the story of Meleager, son of Oeneus, King of Calydon, pointing out how he refused to fight for his people during a war between the Calydonians and the Curetes. The cause of his refusal was his indignation at the curse which his mother, Althaea, had launched against him because he had slain her brother, a prince of the Curetes, in the war. Homer, of course, does not mention the story which later legends contain, of the fateful brand, and the death of Meleager when the brand was burned by his mother.[42] But from the entreaties of his father, Oeneus, of his sisters, and even of his mother,[43] and from the presents which were offered to him by the priests and the elders of the Aetolians,[44] in the hope that he would lay aside his anger and continue to fight for the Calydonians, we may infer that he was not regarded in Homeric times as a kin-slayer of certain guilt. His own anger, too, indicates what the Homeric facts would seem to imply, that the slaying of his mother’s brother was in his own opinion justifiable as an act of war.[45] When, in later times, the Roman poet Ovid makes Althaea say, as the Achaean avenger of a brother’s death would naturally say, _mors morte pianda est_, he implies, what the Homeric story of the ‘curse’ compels us to assume, that Althaea regarded her brother’s death as culpable kin-slaying, which required atonement. The curse of Althaea indicates her conviction that the death of Thestius was a crime and also her inability to avenge it at the time. But, in the general opinion, there was a doubt about the guilt of Meleager, and Meleager was sufficiently important to get the benefit of the doubt. There are, then, two conclusions which may be indirectly derived from this passage: (_a_) that kin-slaying, within the Achaean caste, was regarded as a crime which merited serious punishment, such as death; and (_b_) that the distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable slaying was in certain circumstances admitted and upheld by the Achaeans.[46]