[10] _R. G. E._ p. 151. [11] No society is less affluent than that of the Australian tribes. But this does not provoke preferential female infanticide. See Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 51, 52, 264; _Northern Tribes_, p. 608; Howitt, _Native Tribes of South East Australia_, pp. 749, 750. [12] See Appendix, "The supposed Expurgation of Homer." [13] Odyssey, xxiii. 183-204. [14] _Odyssey_, xvii. 266. [15] _R. G. E._ p. 153. [16] _Iliad_, v. 69-71. [17] viii. 281-284. [18] xxiv. 247. [19] Mr. Murray refers me, for female infanticide among Greeks, to a letter in _Pap. Oxyz_., 744: "Keep a male. Cast out a female child." These may have been the manners of late Egyptianised Greeks, but I am not dealing with them. See p. 40 _supra_ under note 2. CHAPTER VI THE HOMERIC WORLD IN WAR On the fringe of the horizon, in Homer's day as in our own, always hung the cloud of war. In war, men were as cruel as they have usually been. A successful siege of a city involved the slaying of its defenders, and the carrying away of the women, "to make another's bed, and draw water from another's well." Hector, when the broken oaths of the duel[1] make it certain that Troy must perish, looks for no better fortune to befall Andromache; may the earth be mounded above him before that day! Though a truce is granted for the cremation and burial, with one common cairn, of the men who fall in a great battle,[2] it is not Achilles alone who would fain refuse burial, and rest in the House of Hades, to an enemy. Hector intends to give the body of Patroclus to the dogs of Troy, and to fix his head on the palisade above the wall.[3] The fury of Achilles, when he learns from Iris the intentions of Hector, has thus more excuse than is usually supposed. Homer himself found such deeds in the tradition; and though he regards them with horror, he cannot expurgate them. The insults lavished by Achilles on the dead Hector are ἀεικέα ἔργα, deeds of shame.[4] But the deeds of Hector would have been as shameful. The treatment of Hector was not sensational enough for the refined taste of the Athenian tragedians. Sophocles and Euripides make Achilles drag the wounded but living Hector.[5]