The Historians' History of the World 03

The different manner of dealing with homicide presents a third test, perhaps more striking yet, of the change in Grecian feelings and manners during the three centuries preceding the Persian invasion. That which the murderer in the Homeric times had to dread, was, not public prosecution and punishment, but the personal vengeance of the kinsmen and friends of the deceased, who were stimulated by the keenest impulses of honour and obligation to avenge the deed, and were considered by the public as specially privileged to do so. To escape from this danger, he is obliged to flee the country, unless he can prevail upon the incensed kinsmen to accept of a valuable payment (we must not speak of coined money, in the days of Homer) as satisfaction for their slain comrade. They may, if they please, decline the offer, and persist in their right of revenge; but if they accept, they are bound to leave the offender unmolested, and he accordingly remains at home without further consequences. The chiefs in agora do not seem to interfere, except to insure payment of the stipulated sum.

In historical Athens, this right of private revenge was discountenanced and put out of sight, even so early as the Draconian legislation, and at last restricted to a few extreme and special cases; while the murderer came to be considered, first as having sinned against the gods, next as having deeply injured the society, and thus at once as requiring absolution and deserving punishment. On the first of these two grounds, he is interdicted from the agora and from all holy places, as well as from public functions, even while yet untried and simply a suspected person; for if this were not done, the wrath of the gods would manifest itself in bad crops and other national calamities. On the second ground, he is tried before the council of Areopagus, and if found guilty, is condemned to death, or perhaps to disfranchisement and banishment. The idea of a propitiatory payment to the relatives of the deceased has ceased altogether to be admitted: it is the protection of society which dictates, and the force of society which inflicts, a measure of punishment calculated to deter for the future.

The society of legendary Greece includes, besides the chiefs, the general mass of freemen (λαοὶ), among whom stand out by special names certain professional men, such as the carpenter, the smith, the leather-dresser, the leech, the prophet, the bard, and the fisherman. We have no means of appreciating their condition. Though lots of arable land were assigned in special property to individuals, with boundaries both carefully marked and jealously watched, yet the larger proportion of surface was devoted to pasture. Cattle formed both the chief item in the substance of a wealthy man, the chief means of making payments, and the common ground of quarrels—bread and meat, in large quantities, being the constant food of every one. The estates of the owners were tilled, and their cattle tended, mostly by bought slaves, but to a certain degree also by poor freemen called thetes, working for hire and for stated periods. The principal slaves, who were entrusted with the care of large herds of oxen, swine, or goats, were of necessity men worthy of confidence, their duties placing them away from their master’s immediate eye. They had other slaves subordinate to them, and appear to have been well-treated: the deep and unshaken attachment of Eumæus the swineherd and Philœtius the neatherd to the family and affairs of the absent Ulysses, is among the most interesting points in the ancient epic. Slavery was a calamity, which in that period of insecurity might befall any one: the chief who conducted a freebooting expedition, if he succeeded, brought back with him a numerous troop of slaves, as many as he could seize—if he failed, became very likely a slave himself: so that the slave was often by birth of equal dignity with his master—Eumæus was himself the son of a chief, conveyed away when a child by his nurse, and sold by Phœnician kidnappers to Laertes. A slave of this character, if he conducted himself well, might often expect to be enfranchised by his master and placed in an independent holding.