The epithets in Homer are often worn very thin, but here, once the point is noted[861], it is manifest that ἀμύμων, ‘the Blameless One,’ is a title perfectly appropriate to Aigisthos _as a dead hero_. Whatever his life on the upper earth, he has joined the company of the κρείττονες, ‘the Stronger and Better Ones.’ The epithet ἀμύμων in Homer is applied to individual heroes, to a hero’s tomb[862], to magical, half-mythical peoples like the Phaeacians and Aethiopians[863] who to the popular imagination are half canonized, to the magic island[864] of the god Helios, to the imaginary, half-magical Good Old King[865]. It is used also of the ‘convoy[866]’ sent by the gods, which of course is magical in character; it is never, I believe, an epithet of the Olympians themselves. There is about the word a touch of what is dead and demonic rather than actually divine. Homer himself is ignorant of, or at least avoids all mention of, the dark superstitions of a primitive race; he knows nothing at least ostensibly of the worship of the dead, nothing of the cult at his tomb, nothing of his snake-shape; but Homer’s epithets came to him already crystallized and came from the underlying stratum of religion which was based on the worship of the dead. And here comes in a curious complication. To Homer, though he calls him mechanically, or if we like ‘euphemistically,’ the ‘Blameless One,’ Aigisthos is really bad, though not perhaps so black as Aeschylus painted him. But was he bad in the eyes of those who first made the epithet? The story of Aigisthos is told _by the mouth of the conquerors_. Aigisthos is of the old order, of the primitive population, there before the coming of the family of Agamemnon. Thyestes, father of Aigisthos, had been banished[867] from his home; Aigisthos is reared as an alien and returns to claim his own. Clytaemnestra too was of the old order, a princess of the primitive dwellers in the land, regnant in her own right. Agamemnon leaves her, leaves her significantly in the charge of a bard[868], one of those bards pledged to sing the glory of the conquering Achaeans, and the end is inevitable: she reverts to the prince of the old stock, Aigisthos, to whom we may even imagine she was plighted before her marriage to Agamemnon. Menelaos in like fashion marries a princess of the land and his too are the sorrows of the king-consort. The tomb of Aigisthos was shown to Pausanias[869]. We hear of no cult; possibly under the force of hostile epic tradition it dwindled and died, but in old days we may be sure ‘the Blameless One’ had his meed of service at Argos, and the epithet itself remains as eternal witness. Salmoneus to the Achaean mind was scarcely more ‘Blameless’ than Aigisthos and yet he too bears the epithet. In the Nekuia[870] Odysseus says: ‘Then of the throng of women-folk first Tyro I did see, Child of Salmoneus, Blameless One, a noble sire he.’