This hypothesis is very ingenious. We have little doubt that there is a large substratum of correctness in its underlying principle—namely the association of the old nobility with ‘purgation’ rites. But surely the court of Phreatto was not based on the probability that purgation would have followed the trial. Again, the Palladium frequently tried cases of wilful murder between metics and between foreigners. These murderers could never have been purged at Athens, since the deed was committed there. Moreover, all these Ephetae courts, except the Prytaneum, could, in all probability, have brought in a verdict of wilful murder, just as the Areopagus could have acquitted the defendant and admitted him therefore to some kind of ‘purgation’ at the shrine of the Semnai Theai. Furthermore, Müller is not quite consistent with himself in associating purgation exclusively with judges as in this quotation, and in maintaining elsewhere[147] that the three Exegetae who supervised those rites were not judges[148] at all. By his own reasoning, therefore, he would be compelled to admit that the Exegetae could have cleansed the accused after acquittal in any court. Again, he holds[149] that in early Attica there was no discrimination between murder and manslaughter, and that the same courts originally tried all these different pleas; but yet he maintains that a certain distribution of functions which was based on this discrimination had already taken place in the time of Solon. We believe that a discrimination between different degrees of homicide guilt was recognised in early tribal Attica, and that in the seventh century B.C., when a compromise took place between what we may call Apollinism and tribalism, the Apolline religion was compelled by tribal aristocracy to define the kinds of homicide to which purgation could be applied. Moreover, the detailed formulae and ritual of purgation were confided as a secret and sacred trust to this aristocracy. But even within an exclusive nobility there must eventually arise a division of labour. The same nobles who judged a suit might also be appealed to for purgation, and hence they probably found it more convenient to delegate the latter duty to one particular family or clan. Most especially would the Ephetae of the Areopagus, who in those days held in their hands the reins of civic government, have found it difficult to discharge at once the various duties of a Council of State, of homicide judges, and of purgation priests. Hence, therefore, we may assume that the Ephetae-Areopagus limited its activities as a homicide-court and confined itself to charges of wilful murder, of plots to kill, and perhaps also of arson, between the citizens (who were, originally, the nobles), not merely because of the necessity for a division of labour, but also because the Areopagus court was the supreme Council of the State. To the other courts, therefore, fell the duty of trying minor