or prose forms now awaits us; it is this: What stock of ideas did the Athenians at the beginnings of their literary production as a people possess? It is here that survivals from the clan age and the village community come thickly upon us.
§ 49. In the first place, the Athenians inherited from the days of their village communities the idea of inherited guilt, which, strange to say, never seems to have received among them the angry repudiation we find in the Hebrew Ezekiel. Nay, what is still more remarkable, the idea comes upon us in Athenian literature with almost fresher vitality than in the Homeric poems. In the most striking Homeric reference to the Wehrgeld, a passage from the Iliad already quoted, the old communal liability has been cut down into the banishment of the individual criminal from his δῆμος, or village community, until the Wehrgeld is accepted by the kindred of the murdered man; unlike the system of the Arab Thâr, no one can now suffer in the murderer's stead, but he is personally exiled for a time to avoid any pollution attaching to his group. This personal liability in the Homeric age ought to be contrasted with the dramatic prominence of inherited guilt at Athens probably three centuries later; for the contrast shows that, whatever social and intellectual progress had taken place in other parts of Greece and under different political or physical conditions, the clan spirit of the old Athenian dêmes retained sufficient strength even in the days of Sophocles to make itself felt in spectacles the pivot ethical conception of which is communal responsibility. While individualism elsewhere in Greece had been developed under the rule of kings or tyrants, the Athenian townsmen had retained enough of the primitive communal spirit to make it the life of their drama. Moreover, in this late survival of
