authority from the war-council of the chieftains, as Menelaus did in the case of Helen[65]; but in Homer Orestes is the natural avenger of a crime which would otherwise have gone unpunished. The slaying of Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra was not murder, but just revenge, so far as that distinction was admitted and sanctioned by the traditions and public opinion of the Achaean caste. If there had been any tendency to revolt at the abhorrent nature of Orestes’ act in slaying two of his kindred—one of them the dearest of kin—this feeling would have perished on the recollection that Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra were not only murderers but adulterers. We find evidence of a strong public opinion against this twofold moral stigma in Homer. In the _Odyssey_,[66] for instance, Athene urges Telemachus to slay the suitors and quotes the act of Orestes as a parallel. The point of the comparison lies in the suggestion of adultery which attaches to the presence of the suitors in the home of Odysseus. ‘Hast thou not heard,’ says Athene, ‘what renown the goodly Orestes gat him among all men in that he slew the slayer of his father?... thou, too, my friend ... be valiant, that even men unborn will praise thee.’ But as we have elsewhere argued[67] that adultery alone would not justify, in private vengeance, the death of the offender, we must conclude that the justification for Orestes’ act consisted essentially in the fact that he avenged the murder of his father. From this episode we may, then, also conclude that the Achaeans, in certain circumstances, admitted the distinction between justified and unjustified homicide.[68] We have now adduced sufficient evidence from the Homeric poems to justify the theory which we have propounded as to the nature of Achaean blood-vengeance, and to illustrate the contrast which it is necessary to make between the attitude to homicide adopted by a temporary dominant caste of a military quasi-feudal type and that of the tribal village communities in which we believe the Pelasgian subject-race to have lived. It remains for us to conclude this chapter by some brief remarks on certain questions which we have already raised and partly answered: _e.g._, whether there existed, in the Achaean caste, (_a_) the distinction between murder and manslaughter, (_b_) the distinction between justified and unjustified slaying, (_c_) the practice of collective and hereditary vendetta.