(1) _The Areopagus._[54] ‘There are many institutions amongst us of a character not elsewhere found, but the most characteristic and venerable of all is the court of the Areopagus ... in ancient times, as tradition tells us, the gods deigned in this court alone to demand and to render justice for murder and to sit and judge mutual disputes: Poseidon sued Ares for having slain his son Halirrhothius,[55] and the twelve gods judge the suit of the Erinnyes and of Orestes: this tribunal neither tyrant nor oligarchy nor democracy has ventured to deprive of its jurisdiction in murder cases: everyone knows that any process of popular invention would be less efficacious than that of the Areopagus ... of this court only is it true that no convicted criminal or defeated plaintiff has ever assailed the propriety of its verdict. For all know that in the Areopagus where the law permits and commands proceedings for homicide to be taken, the person who charges another with such a crime will take an oath with imprecations on his family and his house: it is no ordinary oath that he has to swear ... he must stand upon the entrails of a boar and a ram and a bull: these animals must have been sacrificed by the proper persons and on the appointed days so that both in regard to time and to officiating persons every due solemnity may have been observed. Even then the person who has sworn such an oath is not yet believed, but if he is convicted of falsehood, he will carry away the curse of perjury upon his children and his posterity.’ The solemn procedure here described is also referred to by Antiphon[56]: and Lysias[57] assures us that ‘the plaintiff swears that the defendant was the slayer, the defendant swears that he did not slay.’ Pollux[58] states that both plaintiff and defendant were required to confine themselves to the point at issue and to abstain from any attempt to excite sympathy or compassion. What a contrast this picture presents to the procedure in a democratic Heliastic court composed of five hundred or seven hundred Athenian citizens, sitting together at the _Crush_, at the _Triangle_, at the _Froggy_ or at the _Scarlet_![59] When Demosthenes says that the Areopagus was never deprived of its jurisdiction on homicide, not even by the democracy, we feel that he is acutely conscious of the contrast in the procedure of the Areopagus and of the Heliastic courts, as Antiphon certainly is[60]: we may also infer that some such democratic invasion had occurred in the case of the four other homicide courts in which the Ephetae at one time had exclusive jurisdiction.