Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/383

 CHANGES AT ATHENS UNDER PKRIKLES. 859 homicide was a part of old Attic religion not less than of judica- ture. Though put in the background for a time, after the expul- sion of the Peisistratids, it had gradually recovered itself when recruited by the new archons under the Kleisthenean constitution ; and during the calamitous sufferings of the Persian invasion, its forwardness and patriotism had been so highly appreciated as to procure for it an increased sphere of ascendency. Trials for homicide were only a small part of its attributions : it exercised judicial competence in many other cases besides, and what was of still greater moment, it maintained a sort of censorial police over the lives and habits of the citizens, — it professed to enforce a tutelary and paternal discipline, beyond that which the strict letter of the law could mark out, over the indolent, the prodigal, the undutiful, and the deserters from old rite and custom. To crown all, the senate of Areopagus also exercised a supervision over the public assembly, taking care that none of the proceed- ings of those meetings should be such as to infringe the estab- lished laws of the country. These were powers immense as well as undefined, not derived from any formal grant of the people, but having their source in immemorial antiquity, and sustained by general awe and reverence : when we read the serious expres- sions of this sentiment in the mouths of the later orators, — Demosthenes, -lEschines, or Deinarchus, — we shall comprehend how strong it must have been a century and a half before them, at the period of the Persian invasion. Isokrates, in his Discourse usually called Areopagiticus, written a century and a quarter after that invasion, draws a picture of what the senate of Are- opagus had been while its competeijce was yet undiminished, and ascribes to it a power of interference little short of paternal des- potism, which he asserts to have been most salutary and improv- ing in its effect. That the picture of this rhetor is inaccurate, cont. Aristokrat. c. 65, p. 641). Plutarch, Solon, c. 19. tijv avu (iovTJiv kmoKOKOv TtavTuv Kal (^v7MKa tuv vofiuv, etc. 'E(5«'/cafov ovv ol 'ApemraycTai, Trepi nuvTuv axe^ov rCiv c<pakfidruv Kal irapavofiiuv, Wf unavTa <j)r](nv 'Kvdporiuv ev npuTy Kal ^iXoxopo^ ev Sevrepq, Kal rpiry tuv 'kr^iduv (Philochorus, Fr. 17-58, ed. Didot, p. 19, ed. Siebelis). See about the Areopagus, Schomann, Antiq. Jur. Att. sect. Ixvi, K. F. Hermann. Griech. Staatsalterthiimer, sect. 109.