Plato says[132] that the Interpreters, in his ideal State, should be elected annually _one_ from each tribe. It is therefore better, we think, to abandon the hypothesis that the Exegetae were at all times three in number. Suidas is a very late authority for this number, and he may be referring merely to the chief members of a group. But how, then, do we explain the fact that the number of the Ephetae was invariably fifty-one? It is, we think, very possible to suppose that in early times the three most important ‘archons’ were Ephetae, who acted in conjunction with the other Ephetae, who were therefore forty-eight in number, and that the number forty-eight was made up of the four Tribe-Kings and of forty-four nobles elected by the four Ionian Attic tribes, eleven from each tribe. Aristotle[133] assures us that the three ‘archons’ in the seventh century were nobles and that they were ‘final judges,’ not mere investigators. It is not necessary to assume that in later times the Ephetae always sat together as a body of fifty-one judges. Sometimes they may have adjudicated as a single group, but more frequently they were divided into sections which sat in different courts. The presence of the King Archon and the Tribe-Kings at the Prytaneum[134] suggests perhaps a previous condition of things in which these officials sat with the entire Ephetae body in the more important homicide courts. We prefer therefore to suppose that the Ephetae and the Exegetae were for a long time[135] identical. They were both members of a sacerdotal nobility of birth which preserved the oral traditions of tribal law, and expounded these traditions. As these nobles normally supervised the ritual of public sacrifices, they naturally also, after the advent of the pollution doctrine, acquired control of the ceremonial of homicide purgation. Thus, Müller says[136]: ‘The purification of the bloodshedder came under the sacred law of Athens which remained in the hands of the old nobility even after they had lost their political authority.’ The number _three_ applied, apparently, in Müller’s view,[137] to the three chief purifiers or supervisors of the rite of purgation, though Müller is not quite explicit on this matter. But we cannot suppose that this figure limited the number of purifiers at any time. SOLON AND THE AREOPAGUS