extent that Ares was almost eclipsed and the Athenians found it difficult to decide whose trial came first! Demosthenes[9] wisely refrains from deciding. ‘In ancient times,’ he says, ‘as we are informed by tradition, the gods on this tribunal alone deigned to demand and render justice for murder.... Poseidon claimed justice against Ares because of the murder of his son Halirrhothius, and the Twelve Gods sat in judgment between the Erinnyes and Orestes. Such are its ancient glories.’ Aeschylus is naturally led by dramatic considerations to regard the trial of Orestes as the first[10] Athenian murder-trial: and therefore, out of courtesy to Ares, he is led to reject the legend that Ares was a murderer, in favour of what we believe to have been an older story, namely that Ares was a war god to whom, on that hill, the Amazons sacrificed when they were overthrown by Theseus.[11] Euripides[12] accepts as a fact the trial of Ares on the Areopagus, but he places it prior to the trial of Orestes. It is quite impossible to base any historical reasoning upon such legends. The mention of the Areopagus in a law of Dracon—or rather, as we think, in a Solonian modification of it—is the only genuine evidence for the antiquity of the Court. Similarly, in regard to the Delphinium, Pausanias implies that it was believed to be as old as Theseus: but we have not the least doubt that its exclusive association with pleas of justifiable homicide was a product of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Pausanias says[13]: ‘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 ... and before the acquittal of Theseus every manslayer had to flee for his life.’ Such statements belong to the region of aetiological legend, but not to that of historical fact. Theseus slew Pallas and his sons in war[14]; hence his act was not homicide in the ordinary sense. We have seen that in Homer[15] Pelasgian manslayers had not to flee, for they could pay their share of the wergeld and remain in the home of their fathers. It is strange that Orestes was not more definitely connected with the Delphinium court, for his plea in most legends was justifiable homicide. Demosthenes suggests that Orestes’ acquittal by the Areopagus was the cause of the establishment of the Delphinium.[16] But Orestes was bound to the Areopagus by ‘hooks of steel’ and he could not be divorced from it! We have little doubt that the Delphinium was a temple of Apollo at Athens long before it became associated with homicide-trials. Legends which explain it as the court of Apollo the Delphian justifier of Orestes, or of Apollo the justifiable slayer of the Δελφίνη, or Python,[17] do not prove that the distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable homicide originated in or had any essential connexion with this temple.