When, therefore, we find in the twelfth century an archbishop of Juvavia interdicting his countrymen from ratifying their treaties with an oath taken by the dog, we gain some insight into the portent of the canine oath of Thebes and Athens. The superstition and mysticism attaching to this animal are brought still closer home by a passage from De Joinville, which mentions the sacrificing of a living dog as a Byzantine method of confirming an obligation. Moreover, on the coins of Syracuse the dog as the emblem of constancy is represented in company with the goddess Diana. That a sacrificial ceremony, barbarous at once and ineffectual, should have received any countenance among a people of culture, is only in accordance with the view expressed at an earlier part of these pages, that the progress of true civilisation may be clearly traced by comparing the relative values of the veracity. The cities of Greece were full of straw-shoes, men who distinguished their calling by a straw at their feet, and who were ready at the bid of a suitor to give the lightest evidence for the heaviest fee. Confidence had little place among a nation far too volatile and specious to be able to rely upon any system of reciprocal good faith. From this circumstance it was that the Greeks earned for themselves the repute of being the least trustworthy of all the untruthful nations of antiquity. In such a community the fragile safeguard of an oath is, from sheer helplessness, the more rigorously demanded. The Hellenic people may be said to have been eminently a swearing people. The character had so persistently clung to them, and was descended from so remote an antiquity, that Juvenal, in the Sixth Satire, can only refer their immunity from swearing to the period when innocence was said to have prevailed upon earth and before Jupiter had begun to let his beard grow.