years of age may travel abroad. Bodies are to be exposed for three days before burial, to see if they are really dead. Magistrates shall give a yearly account of their office before certain public "Examiners," who must be carefully selected, and, if found worthy, shall have special honours paid to them during life, and at their death a solemn public burial,—not with sorrow or lamentation; but the corpse shall be clad in robes of white, and choruses of youths and men shall chant their praises, and yearly contests in music and gymnastics be celebrated at their tomb.
Lastly, there is to be a supreme council of twenty members—ten of the oldest citizens, and ten younger men afterwards added to their number—who shall hold their meetings before daybreak. This council, like a "central Conservative organ,"[1] is to be the anchor of the constitution—carrying out in every detail the original intention of the founder, making his laws irreversible as the threads of fate, and securing that uniformity of faith among the citizens, and that belief in the unity of Virtue, which can be the only safeguard of the "City of the Magnetes"—the new colony which they are about to found.
- ↑ Grote, iii. 447.
