by the slaying of a citizen as by kindred murder: the State would feel the supernatural peril of the act and would take cognisance. The reasons for supposing that this was the actual order in the Hellenic evolution of the homicide law may appear to rest on mere legends, but legends are often direct and firsthand evidence of early thought, and the stories about the slayers of kindred who were driven out of the communities and who were the first applicants for the ritual of purification, such as Ixion, Orestes, Theseus, accord well with the early belief that the Erinyes were the ghostly avengers of kindred slaughter. Then we find that in the Aithiopis, the poem of Arctinos of Miletus, Achilles has to leave the army and retire to Lesbos for {147} purification, although Thersites, whom he has slain, is no real kinsman of his: whence we may draw the conclusion that the State of Miletus, in the eighth century, had come to take cognisance of the slaying of any citizen. And the Argives, in the fifth or fourth century, offer atonement to Zeus Meilichios for a civic massacre, the god who has a legendary association with purification for the shedding of kindred blood. By the fifth century in Athens the religious feeling concerning the sacredness of all life within the city had so deepened that even the slaying of a slave caused a miasma and was a State offence.[147.1] Now when we examine certain details of Attic law, together with certain expressions of sentiment concerning homicide in the classical writers of Attica, we see the clear imprint of its origin. Accidental homicide was as gravely regarded by the Athens of the fourth century as by the old Hebrew code: such homicides must fly over the border, but if they went by {148} a certain road, the State refused to allow the avenger of blood to follow them: they must remain in exile until they have won the forgiveness of one of the kinsmen of the dead.[148.1] We may suppose that the kinsmen are regarded as taking up the feud of the ghost, who is likely to be vindictive, even when the slaying was accidental. Finally, when the pardoned homicide returns he must go through elaborate purifications. These latter were to wipe off the miasma, not to ease what we might call the burden of conscience. And the community were obliged to expel temporarily even a perfectly innocent man, because of their fear of the wrath of the dead. This dread of the ghost is appealed to by an Attic orator as a motive that should influence the judges to condemn the prisoner.[148.2] The first legal preliminary in a case of murder, which reveals clearly the religious origin of the State law, was the solemn proclamation, made by one of the relatives holding {149} a spear at the funeral, that the murderer should keep aloof from all the holy and public places of the community.[149.1] And Antiphon strongly expresses the popular sentiment that the unpunished murderer pollutes