The sanctuary of the Semnae was, in the narrower sense of the word ‘sanctuary,’ a refuge for suppliants. This is, of course, a trait that it has in common with many other precincts. Thucydides[624] tells how in the conspiracy of Kylon some of the conspirators sat down at the altars of the Venerable Goddesses, and were put to death at the entrance. A monument, the Kyloneion, was put up close to the Nine Gates to expiate the pollution. Plutarch[625], in his account of this same conspiracy, adds a curious primitive touch: the conspirators connected themselves with the image of ‘the goddess’ by a thread, believing thereby they would remain immune; the thread broke of its own accord when they reached the Semnae; this was taken as an omen of rejection and they were put to death. Aristophanes twice alludes to the precinct of the Semnae as a place of sanctuary. In the Knights[626], he makes the outraged triremes say ‘If this is what the Athenians like, we must needs set sail forthwith And sit us down in the Theseion or in the Semnae’s shrine.’ In the _Thesmophoriazusae_[627], when Mnesilochus is about to make off in a fright, Euripides asks ‘You villain, where are you off to?’ and the answer is ‘To the shrine of the Semnae.’ It is noticeable that in both these cases the name given to the goddesses of sanctuary is Semnae, not Erinyes or Eumenides. The confusion of the three was never local, only literary, and by the time of Aristophanes it has not yet begun. Euripides[628] is our solitary authority for the fact that the sanctuary was also oracular. At the close of the _Electra_ he makes the Dioscuri, in a speech not untinged by irony, prophesy that Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, will come to Athens and be acquitted by the equal vote, and that in consequence the baffled Erinyes will descend in dudgeon into a subterranean cleft hard by the Areopagos: ‘A mantic shrine, Sacred, adored of mortals.’ Oracular functions were ascribed to most, if not all, underworld divinities, so that it is quite probable that the description of the Dioscuri is correct. * * * * * The sanctuary of the Semnae was open to suppliants and to those who sought oracular counsel, but to one unfortunate class of the community, happily a small one, it was rigidly closed. These were the people known as ‘second-fated’ or ‘later-doomed.’ Hesychius[629], in explaining the term ‘second-fated’ (δευτερόποτμος), says ‘he is called by some “later-doomed.” So a man is termed when the accustomed rites have been performed as though he were dead, and later on he reappears alive; and Polemon says that to such it was forbidden to enter the sanctuary of the Venerable Goddesses. The term is also used of a man who is reported to have died abroad and then comes home, and again of a man who passes a second time through the folds of a woman’s garment, as was the custom among the Athenians in a case of second birth.’