4. Banishment was probably never a regular punishment in Sparta, for the law could hardly have compelled a person to do that which, if he had done it voluntarily, would have been punished with death.(1050) Murderers, particularly if their crime was unpremeditated, were sometimes forced to fly the country;(1051) but this cannot be considered as a case in point, for the flight only took place for the purpose of avoiding the revenge of relations. On the other hand, banishment exempted a person from the most severe punishments,(1052) and, according to the principles of the Greeks, preserved him from every persecution; so that even a person who was declared an outlaw by the Amphictyons was thought secure when out of the country.(1053) There is no instance in the history of Sparta of any individual being banished for political reasons, so long as the ancient constitution continued. The punishment of death was inflicted either by strangulation in a room of the public prison called Δεξὰς,(1054) or by throwing the criminal into the Cæadas, a ceremony which was always performed by night.(1055) It was also in ancient times the law of Athens, that no execution should take place in the day-time.(1056) So also the senate of the Æolic Cume (whose antiquated institutions have been already mentioned) decided criminal cases during the night, and voted with covered balls,(1057) nearly in the same manner as the kings of the people of Atlantis, in the Critias of Plato.(1058) These must not be considered as oligarchical contrivances for the undisturbed execution of severe sentences, but are to be attributed to the dread of pronouncing and putting into execution the sentence of death, and to an unwillingness to bring the terrors of that penalty before the eye of day. A similar repugnance is expressed in the practice of the Spartan Gerusia, which never passed sentence of death without several days’ deliberation, nor ever without the most conclusive testimony; the person who was acquitted could however be always subjected to a fresh examination.(1059) Notwithstanding this horror of shedding blood, the punishments in the early Greek states were more severe than under the Athenian republic. The orator Lycurgus(1060) ascribes to the ancient legislators in general the principle of the laws of Draco, to punish _all_ actions with the same severity, whether the evil which they caused was great or small. This severity partly owed its origin to a supposition that the public rights were injured, and not the property or the peace of an individual. Thus the ancient law of Tenedos (which, together with the worship of Apollo there established, appears to have been derived from Crete) punished adulterers by decapitation with an axe;(1061) the same offence was punished, according to the code of Zaleucus, by the loss of an eye,(1062) and in Sparta it was guarded against by laws of extreme severity.(1063)