Legend is equally powerless to explain the birth of the Palladium court. Pollux is content to give a legend which explains only the origin of the temple, and even this story is probably fictitious.[18] Pausanias[19] tells us a similar tale about the Argives and the wooden image of Pallas, but in order to account for the origin of the court as distinct from the temple, he relates that Demophon, son of Theseus, was tried here for having slain, in an attack upon the Argives, an Athenian citizen whom in the confusion he had not recognised as such. But we have seen[20] that such slaying, in Attic law, was justifiably accidental homicide, not manslaughter. Yet Pausanias fancies that he is explaining the origin of a manslaughter court! No wonder that he feels that ‘the reason why he was tried is a matter of dispute.’[21] In his account of the Prytaneum court which tried inanimate objects or animals guilty of bloodshed and which also brought in verdicts against unknown murderers, Pausanias[22] refers to the ceremony of slaying an ox at the Bouphonia. ‘They call one of the priests,’ he says, ‘Ox-Killer, and he, after throwing the axe, runs away, for that is the usage: and, as if they did not know who had done the deed, they bring the axe into court as defendant.’ The first instance of such a trial occurred, he thinks,[23] in the time of Erechtheus: ‘Then first did Ox-Killer kill an ox, and left the axe and fled the country, and the axe was forthwith acquitted after trial and is tried annually even nowadays.’ Pausanias is probably correct in attributing to the Prytaneum an ancient origin. But the Bouphonia belongs to a different strand of development from that in which originated the trial of inanimate objects. There is a stage in the evolution of ancient religion in which the slaying of an animal was a religious offence and needed expiation.[24] This stage is quite independent of that in which the shedding of human blood became sinful. (We speak, of course, only of ordinary homicide, for in the earliest days[25] the slaying of a kinsman was a sin against the family ghosts and the gods of the hearth.) Now, the tabu against animal sacrifice had probably disappeared, in Greece, long before the seventh century B.C. when the tabu against human bloodshed had set in. But ritual is conservative, and the original rite of the Bouphonia continued to be carried out at a time when its meaning was lost and its origin forgotten. A new meaning—but a wrong meaning—was grafted upon this rite, a meaning which is derived from the trial of guilty animals and inanimate objects in the central Prytaneum court. Now this central trial was forced upon the State by the doctrine of pollution in the seventh century. The trial of animals at the Prytaneum cannot therefore be explained by the Bouphonic rite. The account of Pausanias is therefore misleading. We do not assert that the trial of animals and of inanimate objects in local courts was not as old as the Bouphonic rite.