The early Greeks were small and often dispersed peoples, pirates on the sea, unjust on land, ungoverned and lawless. The great feats of Hercules and Thesius manifest the state of this rising people. What more could religion do, other than what it did, to create horror for murder ? It established that a man killed by violence was first angry at the murderer, that he incited anxiety and terror in him, and tried to make him yield to him the places he had frequented1 ; no one could touch the criminal or converse with him without being defiled or unqualified to testify2 ; the city had to be spared the murderer’s presence, and had to expiate him.3