And not far off is the temple of the Goddesses whom the Athenians call _The Venerable Ones_, but Hesiod in his Theogony calls them the Erinnyes. And Æschylus first represented them with snakes twined in their hair: but in the statues here, either of these or of any other infernal gods, there is nothing horrible. Here are statues of Pluto and Hermes and Earth. Here all that have been acquitted before the Areopagus offer their sacrifices, besides foreigners and citizens occasionally. Within the precincts is also the tomb of Œdipus. After many enquiries I found that his bones had been brought there from Thebes: for I could not credit Sophocles’ account about the death of Œdipus, since Homer records that Mecisteus went to Thebes after the death of Œdipus and was a competitor in the funeral games held in his honour there.[5] The Athenians have other Courts of Law, but not so famous as the Areopagus. One they call Parabystum and another Trigonum, [that is _Crush_ and _Triangle_,] the former being in a low part of the city and crowds of litigants in very trumpery cases frequenting it, the other gets its name from its shape. And the Courts called _Froggy_ and _Scarlet_ preserve their names to this day from their colours. But the largest Court, which has also the greatest number of litigants, is called Heliæa. Murder-cases are taken in the Court they call the Palladium, where are also tried cases of manslaughter. And that Demophon was the first person tried here no one disputes: but why he was tried is debated. They say that Diomede, sailing home after the capture of Ilium, put into Phalerum one dark night, and the Argives landed as on hostile soil, not knowing in the dark that it was Attica. Thereupon they say Demophon rushed up, being ignorant that the men in the ships were Argives, and slew several of them, and went off with the Palladium which he took from them, and an Athenian not recognized in the melée was knocked down and trodden underfoot by Demophon’s horse. For this affair Demophon had to stand his trial, prosecuted some say by the relations of this Athenian, others say by the Argives generally. And the Delphinium is the Court for those who plead that they have committed justifiable homicide, which was the plea of Theseus when he was acquitted for killing Pallas and his sons who rose up against him. And before the acquittal of Theseus every manslayer had to flee for his life, or if he stayed to suffer the same death as he had inflicted. And in the Court called the Prytaneum they try iron and other inanimate things. I imagine the custom originated when Erechtheus was king of Athens, for then first did Ox-killer kill an ox at the temple of Zeus Guardian of the City: and he left the axe there and fled the country, and the axe was forthwith acquitted after trial, and is tried annually even nowadays. Other inanimate things are said to have spontaneously committed justifiable homicide: the best and most famous illustration