Strictly speaking, the term ἄψῦχων should be applied only to an inanimate object and not to the brute, which was more correctly called ἄφωνον (dumb); but this distinction was not always observed either in common parlance or in legal phraseology. The law on this point as formulated and expounded by Plato (_De Leg._, IX. 12) was as follows: “If a draught animal or any other beast kill a person, unless it be in a combat authorized and instituted by the state, the kinsmen of the slain shall prosecute the said homicide for murder, and the overseers of the public lands (ἀγρονόμοι), as many as may be commissioned by the said kinsmen, shall adjudicate upon the case and send the offender beyond the boundaries of the country (ἐξορίζειν, exterminate in the literal and original sense of the term). If a lifeless thing shall deprive a person of life, provided it may not be a thunderbolt (κεραυνός) or other missile (βέλος) hurled by a god, but an object which the said person may have run against or by which he may have been struck and slain, then the kinsman immediate to the deceased shall appoint the nearest neighbour as judge in order to purify himself as well as his next of kin from blood-guiltiness, but the culprit (τὸ ὄφλον) shall be put beyond the boundaries, in the same manner as if it were an animal.” In the same section it is enacted that if a person be found dead and the murderer be unknown, then proclamation shall be made by a herald on the market-place forbidding the murderer to enter any sanctuary or the land of the slain, and declaring that, if discovered, he shall be put to death and his body be thrown unburied beyond the boundaries of the country of the person killed. The object of these measures was to appease the Erinnys or avenging spirit of the deceased, and to avert the calamities which would otherwise be brought upon the land, in accordance with the strict law of retribution demanding blood for blood, no matter whether it may have been shed wilfully or accidentally. [Cf. Æschylus, _Cho._, 395, where this law (νόμος) is clearly and strongly affirmed.] The same superstitious feeling leads the hunters of many savage tribes to beg pardon of bears and other wild animals for killing them and to purify themselves by religious rites from the taint incurred by such an act, the μίασμα of murder, as the Greeks called it.