Our next quotation has reference to Tydeus, the brother of Meleager. Homer[47] tells us that Tydeus left his native Calydon, and ‘roaming thence settled at Argos, (for thus did Zeus and other gods decree,) and married there a daughter of Adrastus.’ In this connexion Leaf[48] points out that ‘Homer does not tell of any actual homicide, yet the picture he gives of the family feuds in Tydeus’ time is such as to make family bloodshed far from improbable.’ From later legends[49] we learn what Homer has not mentioned, namely, that Tydeus was a kin-slayer. We know that Tydeus was an Achaean, and his action in fleeing from Calydon and settling at Argos was a typical Achaean procedure. His ‘exile’ was really a flight from death, and such a flight suggests that even in the case of kin-slaying the Achaeans, unlike the Pelasgians, did not accept ‘exile’ as a penalty for bloodshed. This has already been demonstrated in connexion with the flight of Theoclymenus.[50] The alliance of Tydeus, by marriage, with Adrastus, King of Argos, helped to preclude the possibility of blood-vengeance at the hands of Calydonian avengers. A clear and cogent illustration of the Achaean system of avenging bloodshed is to be found in the punishment inflicted by Orestes on his mother and her paramour in revenge for the slaying of Agamemnon. It is not of course a matter of absolute certainty that Orestes slew his mother or that she slew her husband, in the Homeric story, but it can, we think, be inferred with the greatest probability. Homer says[51] that, after the Trojan war, Menelaus wandered about with his ships ‘amongst men of strange speech’ for seven years: that meanwhile ‘Aegisthus planned baneful deeds at home: and for seven years ruled over rich Mycenae, having wrought the death of the son of Atreus, and subdued unto himself the people: but in the eighth year goodly Orestes came back from Athens as a retribution and slew the man guilty of his father’s blood (πατροφονῆα), Aegisthus of crafty counsel, who had wrought his father’s death. Now when he had slain him, he held a funeral feast with the Argives for his hateful mother and for Aegisthus powerless in defence (ἀνάλκιδος).’ In this rendering of the text, we have deliberately avoided translating κτείνειν as ‘to slay,’ since it can also mean ‘to seek to slay’[52] or, which is almost equivalent, ‘to plot the death of.’ From the point of view of homicide-guilt and retribution, the plotter and the perpetrator were probably equally culpable whether in the Homeric epoch or in historical times.[53] Hence it is that in other passages Homer presents Clytaemnestra as the plotter and Aegisthus as the executor. In both cases, of course, the guilt of bloodshed is aggravated by the additional stigma of adultery. In the _Odyssey_[54] Zeus tells how he warned Aegisthus not to kill Agamemnon or to woo his wife, for Agamemnon would be avenged by Orestes. Again,[55] we are told