There is one point which, in conclusion, we wish to emphasise, namely the value and the importance of the Platonic code when considered as a supplement to the laws of Dracon in cases where they do not directly reproduce them. It is easy to assert that Plato is an idealist when his ideas do not correspond with one’s pet hypotheses.[229] But what, we may ask, was the source of Platonic idealism, and was this source of such a kind that it would have affected the historicity of his homicide-laws? The idealism of Plato was, we think, derived from the Orphic-Pythagoreans, and also to some extent from the Eleatic philosophers. His theory of ‘ideas’ originated, as Burnet has shown,[230] with the Pythagoreans. So, Glotz rightly says[231]: ‘l’eschatologie de Platon présente une grande cohésion. Elle vient de l’orphisme.’ Was there, then, in Orphism any special doctrine which could have affected Plato’s attitude to homicide? Could such a doctrine have imported new ideas into Plato’s legislation? It is true that murderers were excluded from the famous Mysteries at Eleusis when those Mysteries came under Orphic domination, from 400 B.C. onwards.[232] Murderers were punished by everlasting fire in the Orphic Tartarus,[233] and parricides and matricides were singled out for the most severe punishment. Aristophanes has a line[234] which has been interpreted as referring[235] to human bloodshed, Ὀρφεὺς μὲν γὰρ τελετὰς θ’ ἡμῖν κατέδειξε φόνων τ’ ἀπέχεσθαι: but the φόνοι which are here mentioned denote the sacrificial slaying of animals, to which the Orphics objected. Horace[236] puts it more clearly when he says: silvestres homines sacer interpresque deorum caedibus et victu foedo deterruit Orpheus.