Note 138.3 — Chapter VII · The Deities as Social-Powers.

In considering a religion under its social or legal aspects, the laws concerning homicide will often yield telling evidence. There is a whole aeon of development dividing the code of Hammurabi and the Homeric and pre-Homeric theory in this matter. The Babylonian had arrived, as we have seen,138.3 in some indefinitely early period at the conception of murder as a crime against the whole State, at what we may call the advanced secular point of view. In Greece that conception is post-Homeric: the Homeric and pre-Homeric societies were still in the stage of law in which homicide is treated as a private affair of the kinsmen, a matter to be settled by the blood-feud or weregild. Only in certain cases it was a sin, namely, when the slain person was a suppliant or a kinsman. The religious feeling in respect of the first partly arises from the old Aryan Hearth-worship;139.1 in respect of the second, it is associated with a primitive tribal horror of shedding kindred blood: and, though the feeling of the religious sanctity of the guest, the suppliant, and the kinsman was strong in Semitic communities, I cannot find any special Babylonian cult that is analogous to that of Zeus Μειλίχιος, or Ἱκέσιος, or Ξένιος. I have traced elsewhere the development in the ninth and eighth centuries of the more civilised legislation concerning homicide in Greece, and I have tried to indicate the precise part played by religion in aiding the evolution:139.2 to get to the facts one must specially study the worship of Athena and Apollo. I have connected it with a growing sense of the impurity of bloodshed, which might express itself in a definite religious way, as fear of the ghost or of the offended deity. It is open to us to explain this increased sensitiveness concerning purity as a mark of Oriental influence, which was reaching Greece in the first millennium B.C. But at least we ought not to derive it from Mesopotamia until we find evidence of purifications from bloodshed as a common ritual in Babylonian religion, and the impurity of bloodshed an underlying principle of the Babylonian law of murder. But, as we have seen, we discern here only the secular result: the religious force that may have worked towards it is too far removed in the background of the past. Summarily, we must conclude that the political application of Hellenic religion seems wholly a native and independent product of the Hellenic spirit, and reflected the characteristically Hellenic forms of civic life.