in Grecian Antiquity, a judicial tribunal at Athens, consisting of 51 members, one of the terms of whose admission to office was that they should be not under fifty years of age. It was a court of great antiquity, and was believed to be coeval with the Areopagus itself. Originally the ephete sat in all the five courts; but in later times they only sat in four of them, viz., the Palladium, the Prytaneum, the Delphinion, and the Phreatto. In the Palladium they tried cases of accidental homicide; in the Delphinion, of justifiable homicide; in the Prytaneum they passed sentence upon the instrument with which a murder had been committed, if the real murderer could not be detected. In the Phreatto they tried such murders as might have been committed by Athenian citizens, who for accidental or justifiable homicide had been condemned to temporary exile. In course of time the cases which came before the ephete were of so trifling and unimportant a nature that the court fell altogether into disrepute. (See Plutarch, Solon, xix., 29; Pollux, viii. 125; Thirlwall's Hist. of Greece, vol. ii.)