d’une parenté primitive, en vertu d’une parenté théorique, un droit éminent sur les biens de chacun.’ So Fustel de Coulanges points out that just as each _gens_[43] or clan had its own tribunal and chief, so also the phratry[44] had its own phratriarch, assemblies and tribunals. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘a small society modelled on the family,’ and the tribe[45] had, as chief priest and judge, a tribe-king (φυλοβασιλεύς), and held assemblies whose decrees bound all tribesmen. The nature of such tribal conventions and decrees is further illustrated by a passage in Demosthenes, to which Coulanges refers.[46] In a speech against Theocrines,[47] Demosthenes narrates how the fellow-tribesmen of Theocrines convicted him of the embezzlement of tribal funds and punished him by a fine; and he was forbidden by State law to prefer any indictments against any citizen until he had paid this fine, as in the meantime he was regarded as a State debtor. The decree was moved against him at a tribal meeting by a certain Scironides and the fine proposed was seven minae.[48] From such passages as this Coulanges[49] argues that Plutarch and Thucydides are mistaken when they say that Theseus destroyed the local magistracies after the synoekism of Attica. This Demosthenic passage indicates clearly the survival of courts whose primeval jurisdiction had been largely superseded by that of the State. Apart from those arguments which are based on the survivals of tribalism, it is logically probable that since homicide in Pelasgian society was normally atoned for by the payment of a collective wergeld penalty, which affected the property of at least two clans, and since the judicial machinery of Pelasgian tribes was such that it would ordinarily have been set in motion for adjudication in disputes regarding property, homicide was therefore a fit and proper subject for investigation by such tribunals. THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES AND THE ROYAL JUDGES