Pollux[114] assures us that, in the time of Dracon, the Ephetae sat in all the five great homicide courts. They therefore sat on the Areopagus at that time, and also in the Prytaneum. In the time of Aristotle[115] the judges at the Prytaneum court were the Tribe-Kings and the King-Archon. The Ephetae continued to sit at the Delphinium, the Palladium, and the Phreatto courts.[116] These facts suggest, _prima facie_, a survival in the democratic era of the judicial power of the old nobility of birth. Pollux[117] states that the Tribe-Kings were Eupatridae, which implies that they were members of the old Attic nobility. The Ephetae, he says,[118] were chosen on grounds of birth: a fact which proves, as Gilbert points out,[119] that they also were Eupatridae. Aristotle[120] says that, before Dracon, the highest magistrates were elected from the ranks of the aristocrats and the oligarchs; and that these magistrates were the final judges of the suits that came before them, not, as in his own time, the preliminary investigators. Is it not obvious therefore that we must interpret the evolution of Attic homicide courts as a gradual encroachment on the part of the new plutocracy and the new democracy upon the domain which at one time was administered exclusively by the sacerdotal aristocracy of birth? According to this view, the Ephetae and the Tribe-Kings, who once sat in all the great Attic courts and who were never suppressed, though they certainly were submerged, in the classical period of Greek history, were the lineal descendants of the tribal Elders of Pelasgian days whom Homer describes[121] as ‘sitting on smooth stones in a sacred circle, with sceptres in their hands.’ According to this hypothesis Dracon did not create the Athenian Ephetae. He did not even establish them in the rôle of homicide judges, for such they had been from time immemorial, in the local judicature of tribal society; and such they must also have been, in the centralised civic judicature, which before Dracon, though perhaps not long before him, had evolved under the twofold influence of political synoekism and the religious doctrine of homicide as a ‘pollution.’ THE EXEGETAE AND THE NUMBER FIFTY-ONE