was proved to have shed the blood of another, could not be acquitted, or condemned to less than the full penalty (of death or perpetual exile, with confiscation of property) by the judges on the hill of Arês, whatever excuse he might have to offer: but the judges at the palladium and delphinium might hear him, and even admit his plea, without contracting the taint of irreligion. Drako did not directly meddle with, nor indeed ever mention, the judges sitting in areopagus. [132] Dêmosthen. cont. Euerg. et Mnêsib. p. 1161. [133] Dêmosthen. cont. Aristokrat. p. 647. τοσούτοις δικαστηρίοις, ἃ θεοὶ κατέδειξαν, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα ἄνθρωποι χρῶνται πάντα τὸν χρόνον, p. 643.—οἱ ταῦτ᾽ ἐξαρχῆς τὰ νόμισμα διαθέντες, οἵτινές ποθ᾽ ἦσαν, εἴθ᾽ ἥρωες, εἴτε θεοί. See also the Oration cont. Makartat. p. 1069; Æschin. cont. Ktesiphon. p. 636; Antiph. De Cæde Herodis, c. 14. The popular dikastery, in the age of Isokratês and Dêmosthenês, held sittings ἐπὶ Παλλαδίῳ for the trial of charges of unintentional homicide,—a striking evidence of the special holiness of the place for that purpose (see Isokrat. cont. Kallimachum, Or. xviii, p. 381; Dêmosth. cont. Neær. p. 1348). The statement of Pollux (viii, 125), that the ephetæ became despised, is not confirmed by the language of Dêmosthenês. [134] Plutarch, Solon, c. 19; Aristot. Polit. ii, 9, 2. [135] Read on this subject the maxims laid down by Plato (Legg. xii, p. 941). Nevertheless, Plato copies, to a great degree, the arrangements of the ephetic tribunals in his provisions for homicide (Legg. ix. pp. 865-873). [136] I know no place in which the special aptitude of particular localities consecrated each to its own purpose, is so powerfully set forth, as in the speech of Camillus against the transfer of Rome to Veii (Livy, v, 52). In respect to homicide, then, the Drakonian ordinances were partly a reform of the narrowness, partly a mitigation of the rigor, of the old procedure; and these are all that have come down to us, having been preserved unchanged from the religious respect of the Athenians for antiquity on this peculiar matter. The rest of his ordinances are said to have been repealed by Solon, on account of their intolerable severity. So they doubtless appeared, to the Athenians of a later day, who had come to measure offences by a different scale; and even to Solon, who had to calm the wrath of a suffering people in actual mutiny. That under this eupatrid oligarchy and severe legislation the people of Attica were sufficiently miserable, we shall presently see, when I recount the proceedings of Solon: but the age of democracy had not yet begun, and the government received its first shock from the hands of an ambitious eupatrid who aspired to the despotism. Such was the phase, as has been remarked in the preceding chapter, through which, during the century now under consideration, a large proportion of the Grecian governments passed.