Note 73.1 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

In the most primitive period of Hellas, the shedding of kinsman’s blood was already a heinous sin; but the slaying of one outside the kindred circle was neither a sin against God nor a social crime. But as the public mind of Greece became penetrated with the feeling that all the citizens of the Polis were in some sense akin, the slaying of a citizen became a criminal act of which the State, and no longer merely the clan of the slain man, would take cognisance. And this expanded concept of law is reflected in the expansion of an ancient and most significant cult, the cult of Zeus Meilichios.73.1 This was the underworld God, who was angered and must be appeased when kindred blood was shed; as the idea of kinship was enlarged, any civic massacre might arouse his wrath and rites of atonement might be offered to him. This keener sensitiveness concerning the sanctity of human life was accompanied by a feeling that bloodshed might imprint a stain on the slayer that rendered him ritualistically unclean, that is, temporarily unfit to approach the Gods or men; it was also fortified by the growing fear of the ghost-world, which seems to have lain more heavily on the post-Homeric society than on Homer’s men. It is hard to give the dates for this section of the mental history of Hellas. The first record of the thought, which is nowhere explicit in Homer, that homicide in certain circumstances demands purification is derived from the Aithiopis of Arktinos, the epic poet of Miletos in the eighth century.73.2 Achilles, having slain the worthless Thersites, must retire from the army for a while to be purified in Lesbos by Apollo and Artemis; we mark here that the slain man was no kinsman of the slayer in any true sense of the word, but was a member of the same Achæan community, and therefore his slaying brought a religious impurity upon the hero; and we may believe that the narrative reveals the early religious law of Miletos. But we must, in passing, recognise the possibility that these apparently new manifestations may be only a revival of immemorial thought and feeling, common in the older non-Hellenic societies, and only for a time suspended.74.1