despotic.(601) In all places the prytanes inherited from the kings the celebration of public sacrifices, which they generally performed in particular buildings in the market-place, on the common hearth of the state. So the prytanis of Tenedos, to whom Pindar has composed an ode for the sacrifice upon entrance into his office (εἰσιτήριον). In Cos a divination from fire was probably connected with the sacrifices of the prytanis.(602) These sacrifices, the public banquets, together with the reception of foreign ambassadors, belonged at Athens to the fifty prytanes, as was the case at Rhodes and Cos. But the political signification of the name had, under the democratic government of Athens, become entirely different from that which it bore in other more aristocratic constitutions. 4. The striking dissimilarity in the duties of the prytanes in the Athenian and in the early constitutions of Greece, and a conviction that the democracy of Athens, although relatively modern, had so completely brought into oblivion the former institutions, that they can be only recognised in insulated traces and names which had lost their ancient meaning, encourage me to offer some conjectures on the original nature of the office held by the prytanes of Athens. There was at Athens a court of justice in the prytaneum (ἐπὶ πρυτανείῳ), which, in the times of which we have an historical account, only possessed the remnants of a formerly extensive criminal jurisdiction.(603) Now that this had once been the chief court in Athens is proved by the name _prytanea_, which were fees deposited by the parties before each lawsuit, according to the amount of value in question, and which served for the maintenance of the judges.(604) The name proves that these monies had at one time been the pay of the prytanes, in their judicial capacity, like the gifts in Homer and Hesiod. Furthermore we know that the ancient financial office of the colacretæ at one time, as their name testifies, collected their share of the animals sacrificed (which exactly resembles the perquisites of the kings at Sparta), and that they always continued to manage the banquets in the Prytaneum, and at a later time collected the justice-fees, for example, these very prytanea.(605) From the connexion between these functions, which has not been entirely obliterated, it is manifest that the ancient judicial prytanes formed a company or _syssition_, dined in public, were fed at the public expense, and, with regard to their revenues, had stept into the rights of the kings, whose share in the sacrifices and justice-fees had formerly been collected by the colacretæ.