their investigations until full discovery should be attained. And the sentiment of the people, collectively taken, responded to this stimulus; though individually, every man was so afraid of becoming himself the next victim arrested, that when the herald convoked the senate for the purpose of receiving informations, the crowd in the marketplace straightway dispersed.

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It was amidst such eager thirst for discovery, Informathat a new informer appeared, Diokleidês--who kleidês. professed to communicate some material facts connected with the mutilation of the Hermæ, affirming that the authors of it were three hundred in number. He recounted that on the night on which that incident occurred, he started from Athens to go to the mines of Laureion; wherein he had a slave working on hire, on whose account he was to receive pay. It was full moon, and the night was so bright that he began his journey, mistaking it for day-break'. On reaching the propylæum of the

1 Plutarch (Alkib. c. 20) and Diodorus (xiii. 2) assert that this testimony was glaringly false, since on the night in question it was new moon. I presume, at least, that the remark of Diodorus refers to the deposition of Diokleidês, though he never mentions the name of the latter, and even describes the deposition referred to with many material variations as compared with Andokidês. Plutarch's observation certainly refers to Diokleidês, whose deposition (he says), affirming that he had seen and distinguished the persons in question by the light of the moon, on a night when it was new moon, shocked all sensible men, but produced no effect upon the blind fury of the people. Wachsmuth (Hellenisch. Alterth. vol. ii. ch. viii. p. 194) copies this remark from Plutarch.

I disbelieve altogether the assertion that it was new moon on that night. Andokidês gives in great detail the deposition of Diokleidês, with a strong wish to show that it was false and perfidiously got up. But he nowhere mentions the fact that it was new moon on the night in question-though if we read his report and his comments upon the deposition of Diokleidês, we shall see that he never could have omitted such a means of discrediting the whole tale, if the fact had been so

temple of Dionysus, he saw a body of men about 300 in number descending from the Odeon towards the public theatre. Being alarmed at such an unexpected sight, he concealed himself behind a pillar, from whence he had leisure to contemplate this body of men, who stood for some time conversing together, in groups of fifteen or twenty each, and then dispersed. The moon was so bright that he could discern the faces of most of them. As soon as they had dispersed, he pursued his walk to Laureion, from whence he returned next day and learnt to his surprise that during the night the Hermæ had been mutilated; also that commissioners of inquiry had been named, and the reward of 10,000 drachms proclaimed for information. Impressed at once with the belief, that the nocturnal crowd whom he had seen were authors of the deed, and happening soon afterwards to see one of them, Euphêmus, sitting in the workshop of a brazierhe took him aside to the neighbouring temple of Hephaestus, where he mentioned in confidence that he had seen the party at work and could denounce them, but that he preferred being paid for silence, instead of giving information and incurring private enmities. Euphêmus thanked him for the warning, desiring him to come next day to the house of Leogoras and his son Andokidês, where he would see them as well as the other parties concerned. An(Andokid. de Myster. sect. 37-43). Besides, it requires very good positive evidence to make us believe, that a suborned informer, giving his deposition not long after one of the most memorable nights that ever passed at Athens, would be so clumsy as to make particular reference to the circumstance that it was full moon (eivai dè ñavσéλnvov), if it had really been new moon.

dokidês and the rest offered to him, under solemn covenant, the sum of two talents (or 12,000 drachms, thus overbidding the reward of 10,000 drachms proclaimed by the senate to any truth-telling informer) with admission to a partnership in the benefits of their conspiracy, supposing that it should succeed. Upon his reply that he would consider the proposition, they desired him to meet them at the house of Kallias son of Têleklês, brother-in-law of Andokidês which meeting accordingly took place, and a solemn bargain was concluded in the acropolis. Andokidês and his friends engaged to pay the two talents to Diokleidês at the beginning of the ensuing month, as the price of his silence. But since this engagement was never performed, Diokleidês came with his information to the senate1.

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Such (according to the report of Andokidês) was the story of this informer, which he concluded by designating forty-two individuals, out of the three hundred whom he had seen. The first names whom he specified were those of Mantitheus and Aphepsion, two senators actually sitting among his audi- prisoned. ence. Next came the remaining forty, among whom were Andokidês and many of his nearest relativeshis father Leogoras, his first or second cousins and brother-in-law, Charmidês, Taureas, Nisæus, Kallias son of Alkmæon, Phrynichus, Eukratês (brother of Nikias the commander in Sicily) and Kritias. But as there were a still greater number of names (assuming the total of three hundred to be correct) which Diokleidês was unable to specify, the commissioner Peisander proposed that Mantitheus and 1 Andokid. de Myster. sect. 37-42.

VOL. VII.

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Aphepsion should be at once seized and tortured, in order to force them to disclose their accomplices; the Psephism passed in the archonship of Skamandrius, whereby it was unlawful to apply the torture to any free Athenian, being first abrogated. Illegal, not less than cruel, as this proposition was, the senate at first received it with favour. But Mantitheus and Aphepsion, casting themselves as suppliants upon the altar in the senate-house, pleaded so strenuously for their rights as citizens, to be allowed to put in bail and stand trial before the Dikastery, that this was at last granted'. No sooner

1 Considering the extreme alarm which then pervaded the Athenian mind, and their conviction that there were traitors among themselves whom yet they could not identify-it is to be noted as remarkable that they resisted the proposition of their commissioners for applying torture. We must recollect that the Athenians admitted the principle of the torture, as a good mode of eliciting truth as well as of testing depositions for they applied it often to the testimony of slaves-sometimes apparently to that of metics. Their attachment to the established law, which forbade the application of it to citizens, must have been very great, to enable them to resist the great, special and immediate temptation to apply it in this case to Mantitheus and Aphepsion, if only by way of exception.

The application of torture to witnesses and suspected persons, handed down from the Roman law, was in like manner recognised, and pervaded nearly all the criminal jurisprudence of Europe until the last century. I could wish to induce the reader, after having gone through the painful narrative of the proceedings of the Athenians concerning the mutilation of the Hermæ, to peruse by way of comparison the Storia della Colonna Infame by the eminent Alexander Manzoni, author of 'I Promessi Sposi.' This little volume, including a republication of Verri's 'Osservazioni sulla Tortura,' is full both of interest and instruction. It lays open the judicial enormities committed at Milan in 1630, while the terrible pestilence was raging there, by the examining judges and the senate, in order to get evidence against certain suspected persons called Untori; that is, men who were firmly believed by the whole population (with very few exceptions) to be causing and propagating the pestilence by means of certain ointment which they applied to the doors and walls of houses. Manzoni recounts with simple, eloquent, and impressive

had they provided their sureties, than they broke their covenant, mounted their horses and deserted to the enemy; without any regard to their sureties, who were exposed by law to the same trial and the same penalties as would have overtaken the offenders themselves. This sudden flight, together with the news that a Boeotian force was assembled on the borders of Attica, exasperated still farther the frantic terror of the public mind. The senate at once took quiet measures for seizing and imprisoning all the remaining forty whose names had been denounced; while by concert with the Strategi, all the citizens were put under arms-those who dwelt in the city, mustering in the market-place-those in and near the long walls, in the Theseium-those in Peiræus, in the square called the market-place of Hippodamus. Even the horsemen of the city were convoked by sound of trumpet in the sacred precinct of the Anakeion. The senate itself remained all night in the acropolis, except the Prytanes (or fifty senators of the presiding tribe) who passed the night in the public building called the Tholus.

detail, the incredible barbarity with which the official lawyers at Milan, under the authority of the senate, extorted, by force of torture, evidence against several persons, of having committed this imaginary and impossible crime. The persons thus convicted were executed under horrible torments: the house of one of them (a barber named Mora) was pulled down, and a pillar with an inscription erected upon the site, to commemorate the deed. This pillar, the Colonna Infame, remained standing in Milan until the close of the 18th century. The reader will understand from Manzoni's narrative the degree to which public excitement and alarm can operate to poison and barbarise the course of justice in a Christian city, without a taint of democracy, and with professional lawyers and judges to guide the whole procedure secretly-as compared with a pagan city, ultra-democratical, where judicial procedure as well as decision was all oral, public, and multitudinous.