The first communities to reach this stage of progress were the Greek colonies in the West. The Epizephyrian Locrians, near the extreme south of Italy, received the earliest written code from Zaleucus (663 B.C.), whose strict and severe legislation put an end to a period of strife and confusion, though we know little of his laws, except that they attached definite penalties to each offence, and that they strictly protected the rights of property. Two centuries later, his code was adopted even by the Athenian colony of Thurii in south Italy (443 B.C.). Charondas, the "disciple" of Zaleucus, became the lawgiver, not only of his native town of Catana on the east coast of Sicily, but also of other Chalcidian colonies in Sicily and Italy. The laws of Charondas were marked by a singular precision, but there was nothing (says Aristotle) that he could claim as his own except the special procedure against false witnesses (_Politics_, ii. 12. 11). In the case of judges who neglected to serve in the law courts, he inflicted a large fine on the rich and a small fine on the poor (_ib._ vi. (iv.) 13. 2). Androdamas of Rhegium gave laws on homicide and on heiresses to the Chalcidians of Thrace, while Philolaus of Corinth provided the Thebans with "laws of adoption" with a view to preventing any change in the number of the allotments of land (_ib._ ii. 12. 8-14). The laws of Gortyn. Local legislation in Crete is represented by the laws of the important city of Gortyn, which lies to the south of Ida in a plain watered by the Lethaeus. Part of that stream forms a sluice for a water-mill, and at or near this mill some fragmentary inscriptions were found by French archaeologists in 1857 and 1879. The great inscription, to which most of our knowledge of the laws is due, was not discovered until 1884. It had been preserved on a wall 27 ft. long and 5 ft. high, the larger part of which was buried in the ground, while its farthest extremity passed obliquely athwart the bed of the mill-stream. It was necessary to divert the water before the last four columns could be transcribed by the Italian scholar, Federico Halbherr, whose work was completed in the same year by the excavation and transcription of the first eight columns by the German scholar, E. Fabricius. In the following year Halbherr discovered more than eighty small fragments on the neighbouring site of a former temple of the Pythian Apollo.