In the introduction of these devices, however, he shows some skill. The speech on the murder of Herodes is quite subtle in places. Compliments are paid to the jury, but the flattery is not too open. It is sometimes achieved rather by suggestion than by statement. ‘Not that I wished to avoid a trial by your democracy,’ says the defendant; and again, ‘Of course I could trust you quite without considering the oath you have taken’; or once more, in parenthesis, ‘On the supposition that I had no objection to quitting this land for ever, I might have left the country.’ Here, and in other cases, there is little more than a hint which an intelligent juror may grasp. The most prominent of all the topics used by Antiphon is the appeal to the divine law by which guile meets with punishment; the murdered man, if unavenged by human justice, will find divine champions who will not only bring the homicide to book, but will punish the guilty city which has become polluted by harbouring him. So much stress is laid upon this conception of divine justice that some writers have believed that Antiphon held firm religious views which he thus expressed. This opinion may reasonably be held, but it must not be pressed. We know from external sources that Antiphon was not in sympathy with the existing government, yet the speakers of his orations express or imply admiration for the democracy; the speech-writer, in fact, wrote what he thought would be acceptable to the judges rather than what he himself believed. Arguing, in Antiphon’s own way, from probabilities, we may say it is more likely that a highly educated contemporary of Anaxagoras and Pericles should in private life profess a moderate scepticism than an unquestioning belief in the sort of curse that destroyed the house of Atreus, even though Antiphon may be Aeschylean in style. The argument of the defendant in the _Herodes_, ‘Those who have sailed with me have made excellent voyages, and sacrifices at which I have assisted have been most favourably performed, and this is a strong argument for my innocence,’ does not appeal to us, who do not believe in the accidental blood-guiltiness of the community which unknowingly harbours a guilty individual. It may or may not have had some weight with Antiphon himself, but it certainly would have some influence on the common people of Athens, who believed that the whole city was polluted by the sacrilege of the mutilation of the Hermae. The fact that it must impress the jury was a good reason for inserting it, whether Antiphon had any religious feeling or not.[62] § 6 It remains to consider Antiphon’s manner in the treatment of his subjects.