The work of Parliament was divided between the ecclesia and the heliæa; for legislation in the strict sense of the term could be enacted only by the joint action of the two bodies.[24] Administrative decrees, moreover, by means of which the ecclesia disposed of all important public business, and which might differ from laws only in a formal way, could be suspended at the initiative of individuals and were incontestable only when passed on, as to constitutionality or public expediency, by the heliæa. The men who sat in the heliæa were but common citizens like those who voted in the ecclesia; but they came to sit in judgment on both laws and decrees by the accident of the lot and not because of any particular interest in the questions concerned. In other words, the courts could not be packed with partisans as the meetings of the ecclesia commonly were. This fact, together with the delay which necessarily occurred, protected the state against the verdict of a chance majority, which was in fact usually a minority of all the citizens. There was no such thing in Athens as the final settlement of controversial matters by a single popular vote. The heliæa acted as sovereign in one further particular. Upon it devolved the duty of determining whether the magistrates and councilors observed the laws and conducted themselves honestly during their years of office. It was to the sworn assembly of the Athenians, accordingly, that all those engaged in civil administration were responsible. The ecclesia, on the other hand, had the right to impeach and dismiss those officials who, being given discretionary powers, abused them. The main work of the heliæa was of course to settle domestic and imperial litigation. As we shall see, the judicial power of the heliæa gave it a large measure of political control over all the subject cities of Athens. The heliæa was the brake on the democratic machine: the ecclesia was the dynamo. The intent of the Athenians was that all political decisions of importance should be reached, after full debate, by the ecclesia. It was, however, obvious that an assembly of from five to fifty thousand men would proceed with disastrous slowness if all matters, great and small, were laid before it, or even if it considered only significant affairs, but considered them without previous examination and formulation. Perversion of modern democracies results most notably from the usurpation of power on the part of those who sift proposals for popular reference. Athens had to guard against a similar danger. Hence the harbinger of democracy, Clisthenes, created for it one of the most peculiar _probuleutic_, or deliberative, bodies which ever had the handling of large affairs. This was the council of the Five Hundred.