If it be objected that pleas of ‘accidental’ homicide were regularly tried at the Palladium court,[59] we may reply that the proper function of this court was subsidiary or supplemental to that of the Prytaneum. In the Palladium the accused in his plea denied, indeed, any guilt, but he would have found it difficult to prove his innocence unless he could transfer the guilt to another person. In the Prytaneum, as we conceive it, he had often an opportunity of laying the blame upon an inanimate instrument of death. Such a plea of accidental slaying involved no question of human guilt, as the accusation was centred upon an inanimate ‘object.’ Again, whenever the plea of the accused differed from the charge of the accuser, it was the duty of the King-Archon to decide on the probabilities of the case, before he relegated the trial to its appropriate court.[60] If, then, a person accused of murder or manslaughter could advance a plea of accidental homicide by accusing an inanimate object, the Prytaneum court adjoining the official residence of the King and the Prytaneis would have been at the immediate disposal of the defendant. No long period of time, such as ordinarily had to elapse between formal accusations and homicide trials, preceded the trials at the Prytaneum; and we may infer from Plato’s account that the verdict of ‘death by persons unknown’ was normally brought in by the Prytaneum court before any formal proclamation of the unknown murderer was made by the relatives of the slain. INVOLUNTARY HOMICIDE