For this reason, therefore, the story has been deemed untrue; yet for all this, the real facts may have been quite different. Every one has often in his life done things after long consideration which have never attained their object: the same may happen to a state. The embassy falls just within the time of Pericles, between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, the period when Athens was most flourishing, and the fame of that most powerful and enlightened city was certainly spread far and wide. That the senate at a much later age, in the days of Cassander, when wishing to set up a bust of the wisest Greek, did not make choice of Socrates but Pythagoras, was quite in the spirit of the Italian nation; yet that they selected Alcibiades as the bravest, proves how familiar Athens was to the minds of the Romans. They may therefore indeed have sent this embassy not wholly without purpose, as they seem to have derived advantage from it for their political constitution. There is yet this other tradition concerning this legislation, that a wise Ephesian named Hermodorus, who was staying at Rome, had been consulted about it by the decemvirs. He is said to have been a friend of the great Heraclitus, and to have been banished from Ephesus because he was too wise (ἡμέων μηδεὶς ὀνήϊστος ἔστω). Down to a late period, there was shown at Rome a _statua palliata_ which was referred to him. The tradition is old, and Hermodorus was not so renowned that the Romans should have called him their teacher without good reasons. He could play the part of adviser, as the object of the legislation was laid down, which was to do away with the difference between the two orders, and so far to modify the constitution, that both of these might as much as possible constitute one whole; then also to effect a limitation of the _imperium_ of the consuls. For all this the civil code has no Greek sources whatever. There are points in the Roman law, of which we know for certain that Solon had already abolished them; and in the criminal code there are still greater discrepancies.