a sovereign tribunal at Athens, famous for the justice and impartiality of its decrees, to which the gods themselves are said to have submitted their differences. It was in the town, on a rock or hill opposite to the citadel. The word signifies strictly, rock of Mars.
Plutarch attributes the establishment of the Areopagus to Solon. Other authors think differently; and with good reason; for it appears undeniable, that this tribunal was instituted before Solon. But the best authorities allow him the honour of its restoration. The city of Athens, governed till this time by tribunals of a circumscribed jurisdiction, which were multiplied by the most trifling accidents and circumstances, took no fixed political or civil form, however closely united the members of those tribunals were by their general views towards the public good, and by the common love of their country. As each of those tribunals could only act in proportion to the power delegated to it, it was impossible that so many different and unequal impressions should give to the great machine of the state that uniform and regular movement which, by an impulse always the same, would keep each part in the situation it should maintain with relation to the whole.
To effect this universal and harmonious power, it was necessary to unite the different channels of public authority, which, by being too much distributed, lost its force. This authority Solon collected, and placed it all in the court of Areopagus, which consequently became the main spring of the government. The judges of this court, who, under Draco, decided only in cases of murder, now took cognizance of crimes of every kind; and the same tribunal which inflicted capital punishment on murder, poisoning, burning of houses, theft, &c. struck at the roots of those crimes, by arraigning idleness, luxury and debauchery. Equally attentive to stimulate the indolence of the young, and the languor of the old, these sage judges roused in the one the laudable ambition to serve the state, and restored to the others their former activity. Satisfied that extremes produce the same effects, they thought the republic had as much to fear from the excess of wealth as from the gripe of poverty. Hence they exacted a minute account of the effects of every individual. Hence their great severity to those idle citizens, who, instead of being useful members in a state, are its bane and its dishonour. Ifocrates draws a most beautiful and striking picture of those venerable and astonishing men, and of the order and harmony which flourished in Athens by their wise administration.
The judges of the Areopagus, says that author, were more inducive to prevent crimes, by representing them in an odious light, than to establish modes of punishment. It was their opinion, that the enemies of the state were the instruments destined by the gods to punish the wicked; but that it was their province to correct and reform public and private manners. They were vigilantly attentive to the conduct of all the citizens, but particularly to that of the youth. They well knew that the impetuosity of juvenile passion gave the most violent shocks to health and growing virtue; that it was the duty of inspectors of education to soften the austerity of moral discipline with innocent pleasure; and that no recreations were more eligible than bodily exercises, which enable a young man to give a good education its full play, which improve health, give a pleasurable and agreeable vivacity, and even fortify the mind. The fortunes of the Athenians were too unequal to admit the same mode of education; and therefore the youth were trained in a manner suitable to the rank and circumstances of their respective families. Areopagus lies. Those of the inferior classes were taught agriculture and commerce; from this principle, that idleness is followed by indigence, and that indigence excites to the most daring and atrocious crimes. Having thus endeavoured, by wise precautions, to preclude the entrance of moral evil, they thought they had little to fear.
Exercises of the body, such as horsemanship and hunting, were objects of education to the youth of liberal fortune. In this savage distribution, their great aim was to prevent the poor from committing crimes, and to facilitate to the rich the acquisition of virtue. Not satisfied with having established good laws, they were extremely careful to see that they were observed. With this view they had divided the city into quarters, and the country into cantons. Thus everything passed under their eyes; nothing escaped them; they were acquainted with the private conduct of every citizen. Those who had been guilty of any irregularity were cited before the magistrates, and were reprimanded, or punished in proportion to their misdemeanor.
The same Areopagites obliged the rich to relieve the poor. They repressed the intemperance of the youth by a severe discipline. Corruption in magistrates was suppressed by the punishments denounced against it; and the old men, at the sight of the employments of the young, felt themselves animated with a degree of juvenile vigour and activity.
Religion came likewise under the cognizance of the Areopagites. Plato durst never, as we are told by Justin Martyr, divulge his private opinion concerning the Deity. He had learned from the Egyptians the doctrine of Moses. It appeared to him the best, and he embraced it with ardour. But his dread of the Areopagites, who were attached to the prevailing system, would not permit him even to name the author of sentiments which opposed the common tradition.
The public edifices, the cleanliness of the streets, the pay of the soldiers, the distribution of the public money; in a word, whatever interested the republic, was under the direction of the Areopagus. The people themselves, jealous as they were of their power, did nothing without consulting this assembly, and suffered it without a murmur, to amend their precipitate decrees. Yet this authority, however great it may seem, was subject to the laws; by them rewards and punishments were determined; and those respectable judges gave an account of the exercise of their trust to public censors, who were placed between them and the people, to prevent the aristocracy from growing too powerful.
The most important qualifications were required in those who entered into the Areopagus. Solon made a law, by which they who had not been archons for a year should not be admitted members of the Areopagus. To give more force to his law, he subjected himself to it, and was only admitted on that title. This was but the first step; those annual magistrates, after having given law to the republic, were interrogated on their administration. If their conduct was found irreproachable, they were admitted Areopagites with eulogium; but the smallest misconduct excluded them from that honour for ever. What administration was not to be expected from a tribunal so well composed?
What veneration was not due to men of such rare talents and virtue? Such respect was paid them, that people professed not to laugh in their presence; and to well establish their reputation for equity, that those whom they condemned, or dismissed without granting their petition, never complained that they had been unjustly treated.
The edifice of the Areopagus was extremely simple; and its roof, which was at first of the most common materials, remained in that state till the time of Augustus. This we learn from Vitruvius. Orestes was the first who thought of embellishing it. He raised it on an altar to Minerva. He likewise adorned it with two seats of solid silver; on one of which the accuser sat, and the accused on the other. The one seat was consecrated to Injury, and the other to Impudence. This religious sketch was brought to perfection by Epimenides, who erected altars to those allegorical deities, and soon after a temple, which Cicero mentions in his second book of laws. This temple corresponded with that which Orestes had built to the Furies, who brought him to Athens, and procured him the protection of Minerva. Epimenides dedicated it a second time to the Furies, or severe Goddesses, as they were termed by the Athenians. A man was thought lost without resource, and a victim to every human ill, if he enforced a perjury by invoking the sacred name of those tremendous divinities.
Those who employed their thoughts in solving the mysteries of Paganism, imagined that the Eumenides had their temple so near the court Areopagus, that they might enlighten the judges by their inspiration, and, by their continual assistance, prevent them from committing those errors to which human weakness is liable. To propitiate those terrible deities, and to procure their favour for the Areopagus, they were worshipped with great punctuality and devotion; and the senate itself appointed their priests. Demosthenes had been nominated to preside over their sacrifices; and he thought it very extraordinary, that he, to whom the republic had confided so important an office, should be publicly impeached.
It was natural to associate with the Eumenides the other deities who shared with them the sovereign empire over the dead. Epimenides placed in their temples the statues of Pluto, of Mercury, and of Telaus. They were all, according to Pausanias, of an agreeable form. Each of them was placed upon an altar, on which the citizens, or strangers, who had been acquitted by the Areopagus made their grateful offerings. But it was not to gratitude alone that these several deities owed all the incense that smoked upon their altars. They who had been accused before the senate, harassed with superstition, and uncertain how these deities would be affected towards them, were lavish of sacrifices to obtain their clemency, by which they hoped their judges would likewise be influenced.
The tomb of Oedipus was another of the ornaments of the Areopagus. It was in the outward court of the Areopagus, where a barge was likewise placed, which made a part of the pomp at the public games.
Whatever homage and implicit obedience the court of Areopagus might derive from all this religious parade, the public good was always dearer to them than than any lower advantages they might have drawn from the altars and temples with which they were surrounded.
The senate assembled in a hall built on the summit of a hill, which was ascended with difficulty by the old men bent with age. However, as for some time they only assembled on the three last days of each month, they bore with patience this inconvenient situation. But public affairs multiplied to such a degree, that they were obliged to add to the three former fittings a fourth, which was held on the seventh day of the month, and which was soon succeeded by an assembly, every day. Their meetings were so regular, that they were not interrupted by the most solemn festivals, till Cephalostrus was archon, who, in the third year of the 10th Olympiad, made a decree, which obliged the Areopagites to celebrate, after the example of the other courts, the Apaturian feasts, which lasted five days.
This assiduous and painful exercise of their office made the Areopagites feel all the inconvenience of the situation of their tribunal, and determined them to remove it to a part of the city called the Royal Portico. It was a square, exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather. When the judges, who assembled there in profound silence, had taken their places, they were inclosed by a thread, or rather a cord, drawn round them.
They held their assemblies in the night, that their attention to public affairs might not be diverted by external objects,—and (adds Lucian) that they might only be influenced by the arguments, and not by the presence and action, of the speakers. This circumstance explains a passage in Athenaeus, who tells us, that none knew the numbers nor faces of the Areopagites. The custom of administering justice in the open air was not peculiar to them. It was followed by all the other tribunals when they tried for murder: for two reasons:—1st, That the judges, the sworn protectors of innocence, might not be hurt by being under cover with criminals, whose hands were polluted with blood. 2dly, that the accuser and the accused might not be under the same roof.
When all the members of the senate were convened, a herald enjoined silence, and ordered the people to retire. As soon as they had departed, the assembly proceeded to business; and as they deemed the least preference a flagrant injustice, the causes which they were to determine were drawn by a kind of lottery; and the same chance which brought them up, distributed them to different numbers of judges, small or great, according to the importance of the several causes.
In early times, the parties themselves stated their cause in a simple manner. The eloquence of advocates was thought a dangerous talent, fit only to varnish crimes. But afterwards the Areopagus, on this point, relaxed from their severity;—at first the accused, and soon after the accusers, were permitted to engage those to make the attack and the defence, whose profession it was to exert the art of speaking for others, with accuracy and elegance.
Sextus Empiricus seems not to have sufficiently distinguished times, where he says, that the court of Areopagus did not suffer those who are to be tried at their bar to avail themselves of the abilities of others.
What undoubtedly led him into that mistake, was Areopagus, an inviolable custom of that tribunal, which prohibited, in pleadings, all that warm and picturesque oratory which seduces the judgment and inflames the passions. When the suffrages were collected, each person gave his in silence. They voted with a small flint, which they held betwixt the thumb and the two next fingers, and which they put into one of the two urns that stood in a corner of the hall. One stood before the other. The first was called the urn of death; the second, the urn of compassion. That of death was of brass, and was termed proper; that of compassion was of wood, and was termed improper. The judges commonly brought their flint to the assembly, and put it into the urn; but, that all the suffrages might be collected, the herald took the two urns, and presented them, one after another, to every senator, commanding him, in the name of the republic, no longer to deter his acquittal or condemnation.
For this method of giving sentence, which was called κεκλεισμένη ἐκλογή, because it kept the vote of each person undiscovered, the Thirty Tyrants, to make themselves masters of the decisions of the Areopagus, substituted another, by means of which they knew exactly the opinion of each of the judges; for they obliged them to bring their flints publicly, and lay them upon two tables placed before them, the situation of which was quite opposite to that of the urns; for the first of those tables was that of life, and the second that of death.
The first substances with which they gave their suffrages were not small pieces of the bones of a hog, as some authors assert, but sea shells, for which pieces of brass of the same form, termed spondyla, were afterwards substituted. The substances with which they voted were distinguished by their form and colour. Those which condemned were black, and perforated in the middle; the others were white, and not perforated. The precaution of piercing the black ones tends to prove, what we have already observed, that the court of Areopagus sat in the night: for what end did it serve to pierce the black shells, or flints, if the judges could have seen them and the white ones, and consequently have distinguished their colours by the assistance of the light? But as they passed sentence in the dark, it is evident that a difference besides that of colour was necessary, to know the black ones from the white. The judges were likewise permitted to multiply at pleasure the distinctions between signs, which essentially distinguished the fates of men.
After the suffrages were collected, they were taken out of the two urns, and put into a third vase of brass. They were then counted; and as the number of white or of black flints was higher or inferior, one of the judges drew with his nail a shorter or a longer line on a tablet with a waxen surface, on which the result of each cause was marked. The short line expressed acquittal; the long, condemnation.
With regard to the emoluments of the judges, they were as moderate as those of the advocates. The length of the process did not enhance its expense; and when the decision of a cause was postponed till the next day, the committee were only paid an obolus on that day. Hence Mercury, in Lucian, is surprised that such sensible old men as the senators of Areopagus were Areopagus should sell at so low a price the trouble of ascending so high.
As to the number of the judges which composed the Areopagus, some authors, attentive only to a part of Solon's regulations, by which he enacted, that for the future, none but the nine archons should be admitted members of the Areopagus, have imagined, that this tribunal was filled anew every year, and that it never consisted of more than nine magistrates. This opinion, and some others, are refuted by the circumstantial account which Diogenes Laertius gives us of the condemnation of Socrates. This great man had wished to substitute a rational hypothesis for the fabulous and extravagant system of religion which prevailed in his time. His project, however laudable, appeared impious in the eye of superstition. Information was laid against him before the Areopagus, and he had as many accusers as fellow citizens. After the charges and the answers were heard, they proceeded to suffrages. The opinions were divided, but not equally, for the number of those who condemned him exceeded by 281 the number of those who declared him innocent. He made an ironical reply to this iniquitous sentence, by telling his judges, that he took it for granted, they would admit him to a maintenance in the Prytaneum. On this sarcasm, 80 of those who had voted in his favour forsook him, went over to the opposite party, and condemned him to die. Here then we have 361 judges who condemn; to whom if we add those who persist in acquitting him, the number must be very considerable.
Of all the judgments of the Areopagus, the most famous one, excepting that of Mars, was the sentence which they passed on Orestes. His trial, which happened under Demophon the 12th king of Athens, in 375 of the Attic era, owed all its fame to a remarkable circumstance, that gave rise to a custom which was observed ever afterwards. Orestes had killed his mother. He was accused before the Areopagus, and cited to appear in that court. He would have lost his life in consequence of the equal division of the votes, had not Minerva, moved with his misfortunes, declared herself for those who had absolved him, and joined her suffrage to theirs. Thus Orestes was saved. In veneration to this miracle, the Areopagites, whenever the suffrages were equally divided, decided in favour of the accused, by granting him what they termed the shell of Minerva. Cephalus and Daedalus were condemned by the Areopagus long before the time of Orestes.
We find in ancient authors some decisions of this tribunal, which bear the strongest marks of justice, though their objects are not interesting. We shall here quote an anecdote from Aulus Gellius, and Valerius Maximus, of a woman, who was accused of having poisoned her husband and her son. She was taken and brought before Dolabella, who was then proconsul of Asia. She was no sooner in his presence than she owned the fact; and added, that she had very good reasons for putting her husband and her son to death.—"I had (said she) to my first husband a son whom I tenderly loved, and whose virtues rendered him worthy of my affection. My second husband, and the son whom I bare to him, murdered my favorite child. I thought it would have been unjust to have suffered those two monsters of barbarity to live. Areopagus, if you think, Sir, that I have committed a crime, it is your province to punish it: I certainly shall never repent of it." This affair embarrassed Dolabella. She was afterwards sent to the Areopagus; and that court, when they had examined her a long time, ordered her and her accuser to appear before them again a hundred years after, from the first day of her trial.
We must not, however, suppose that the Areopagus always preserved its old reputation; for such is the constitution of human affairs, that perfection, with regard to them, is a violent, and consequently a transitory state. Pericles, who lived about 100 years after Solon, to flatter the people and win them to his party, used his utmost efforts to weaken the authority of the Areopagus, which was then disliked by the multitude. He took from it the cognizance of many affairs which had before come under its jurisdiction; and to forward his design of humbling it, employed the eloquence of Ephialtes, whose talents were formidable, and who was an avowed enemy to the great men of Athens.
The Areopagus itself seemed to second the endeavours of a man who projected its ruin, and by its misconduct hastened its fall. The old rules of the court, by which none were admitted its members but those whose unexceptionable conduct would support its majesty, seemed too severe. They grew less delicate in their choice; and presuming that the faults with which they dispensed, would soon be reformed in the society of so many good examples, vice imperceptibly crept among them: corruption, at first secret and timid, grew intensively open and daring, and made such progress, that the most shameful crimes were soon exhibited on the stage; and they were not copied from the low and abandoned multitude, but from those senators, once the venerable and austere censors of idleness and of vice. Demetrius, the comic poet, wrote a piece which he entitled The Areopagitae, where he strips the mask off those hypocritical legislators, who were now equally apt to be seduced by wealth and by beauty. So much had the Athenian senate degenerated in the days of Isocrates, cir. 340 years before the Christian era.
Before this tribunal St Paul was called to give an account of his doctrine, and converted Dionysius one of their number.
The end of this court of judicature is as obscure as its origin, which was derived from very remote antiquity. It existed, with the other magistracies, in the time of Paulus, i.e., in the 2nd century. The term of its subsequent duration is not ascertained; but a writer, who lived under the emperors Theodosius the Elder and Younger, in the 5th century, mentions it as extinct.