In Homer, when a free man has been killed, the State takes no share whatever in the pursuit and punishment of the murderer. It is the duty of the nearest relatives or the friends of the murdered man[141\5] to carry on the blood-feud against the assailant. As a rule the latter puts himself out of reach of reprisals by flight. He withdraws to a foreign country which is unconcerned in his action. We hear nothing of any distinction between premeditated murder and unintentional or even justifiable homicide;[142\5] and it seems probable that at that time, when no regular inquiry was made into the nature of the individual case, the relatives of the murdered man took no account of the different varieties of killing. If the guilty man can escape by flight from those whose duty it is to avenge his deed, they on their part may forgo the full toll of vengeance, which would have required the death of the murderer, and may be satisfied with the payment of compensation, after which the doer of the deed is allowed to remain in his own country undisturbed.[143\5] The requirements of vengeance are thus in essence fulfilled, but the retaliatory murder of the murderer can be bought off. This decided relaxing of the ancient notion of vengeance can only be accounted for by an equally decided weakening of the belief in the continued consciousness, power, and rights of the murdered man, upon which the requirement of vengeance was founded. The soul of the dead is powerless; its claims can be easily satisfied by the payment of "weregild" to the living. In such a satisfaction as this, the departed soul is in reality not concerned at all; it remains a simple business transaction between living people.[144\5] In the midst of the general declension of the beliefs about the dead--amounting almost to complete extinction--which is found throughout the Homeric poems, this weakening of belief in one particular point is not very surprising. But {176} in this case, as in the general study of Homeric beliefs about the dead, it is clear that the conception of the soul as powerless, shadowlike, and feeble is not the primitive or original one; it has foisted itself gradually in the course of years upon a more ancient mode of conception in which the dead had undiminished sensibility and could influence the condition of the living. Of this older conception we have emphatic witness in the duty--not forgotten even in Homeric Greece--of prosecuting the blood-feud.