The noun apoina 'payment' occurs as the object of the verb dekhesthai 'receive, accept' in various forms six times in the Iliad (Iliad 1.20, 1.23, 1.111, 1.377, 6.46, 11.131) and once in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (l. 140); the same is true of the noun poinē 'payment, blood money' (Iliad 9.633, 9.636, 17.207-208), which is derived from the same root as apoina. Another verb is used once to denote not 'accepting' a poinē in the legal dispute described on Achilles' shield at Iliad 18.501, namely helesthai 'take for oneself'. There is a demonstrably living analogy between poinē and apoina, as one can see from the context of Iliad 9.632-637, which draws an explicit parallel between the two, so the use of a different verb, helesthai, in the instance of a negated poinē, reinforces the normality of the syntactic formula is apoina + forms of dekhesthai 'to accept'.
Payments designated as apoina in Homeric epic are customarily accepted. We can say that the traditional diction is equipped for that, and in archaic exchange systems as described by Mauss, there are symmetrical obligations: there is an obligation to accept an offer to exchange just as there is an obligation to reciprocate appropriately once one accepts an exchange. There are exceptions to those obligations, but they are fraught with danger and power for all concerned. One such exception is this one, the first scene in the Iliad, in which Agamemnon rejects the apoina of Chryses. For another example, we can point to Achilles fighting in the river Xanthos at the beginning of Iliad 21, when he comes upon the Trojan Lycaon, a son of Priam whom he had not long before captured and 'sold' — the difference between 'selling' and giving apoina for a person is not to be pressed (see peperēmenos 'having been sold' 21.58, 21.78 vs. 21.99 apoina for the same transaction as well as the extremely archaic expression ōnon edōke 'paid a price' at 21.41 for another transaction of the same type). Lycaon grabs Achilles by the knees in the posture of a suppliant, in other words, a person urgently requesting a customarily obligatory "favor". Yet Achilles tells him that his (Achilles') days of accepting payment for captives, which he did often before (21.100-102), have ended with the death of Patroklos, especially, he says, when it comes to the sons of Priam. Then, by way of consolation for both himself and Lycaon, Achilles goes on to describe the coming day of his own death, at dawn or midday or in the afternoon, by a spear or an arrow from a bowstring (21.106-113). Then he kills Lycaon, brutally, confronting us, too, with the moment of death for a person who has just come to life for us in the narrative. For a third example, there is Achilles' refusal of Agamemnon's apoina for him in Iliad 9, but as we shall see, there are significant anomalies in that failed transaction that are not present in this instance or in Achilles' refusal of Lycaon. A better parallel to the present moment is the legal dispute on Achilles' shield, which turns on the question, in what circumstances the refusal of a poinē could be proper — with the implication that there may or may not be such circumstances.