Therefore, upon the first day of the year
(which falls in that country at the time of sowing) they would take one
hundred boys of ten years of age chosen by lot, they would make these
hundred, who had previously for one year received instruction in their
sacred language, write each a translation of the simple code engraved
upon the bronze tablets. It was invariably discovered that these artless
compositions varied only according to the ability of the lads to construe,
and that some considerable proportion of them did accurately show forth
in the vernacular of the time the meaning of those ancestral laws. They
had further a magistrate known as the Archon. whose business it was to
administrate these customs and to punish those who broke them. And this
Archon, when or if he proposed something contrary to custom in the opinion
of not less than a hundred petitioners, was judged by a court of children.
In this fashion for thousands of years did the Nepioi proceed with their
calm and ordinary lives, enjoying themselves like so many grigs, and
utterly untroubled by those broils and imaginations of State which
disturbed their neighbours.
There was a legend among them (upon which the whole of this Constitution
was based) that a certain Hero, one Melek, being in stature twelve foot
high and no less than 93 inches round the chest, had landed in their
country 150,000 years previously, and finding them very barbarous, slaying
one another and unacquainted with the use of letters, the precious metals,
or the art of usury, had instructed them in civilization, endowed them
with letters, a coinage, police, lawyers, instruments of torture, and all
the other requisites of a great State, and had finally drawn up for them
this code of law or custom, which they carefully preserved engraved upon
the tablets of bronze, which were set upon the walls of their chief temple
on the hill outside the city.
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