The establishment of these paid dikasteries at Athens was thus one of the most important and prolific events in all Grecian history. The pay helped to furnish a maintenance for old citizens, past the age of military service. Elderly men were the best persons for such a service, and were preferred for judicial purposes both at Sparta, and, as it seems, in heroic Greece: nevertheless, we need not suppose that all the dikasts were either old or poor, though a considerable proportion of them were so, and though Aristophanês selects these qualities as among the most suitable subjects for his ridicule. Periklês has been often censured for this institution, as if he had been the first to insure pay to dikasts who before served for nothing, and had thus introduced poor citizens into courts previously composed of citizens above poverty. But, in the first place, this supposition is not correct in point of fact, inasmuch as there were no such constant dikasteries previously acting without pay; next, if it had been true, the habitual exclusion of the poor citizens would have nullified the popular working of these bodies, and would have prevented them from answering any longer to the reigning sentiment at Athens. Nor could it be deemed unreasonable to assign a regular pay to those who thus rendered regular service: it was, indeed, an essential item in the whole scheme[723] and purpose; so that the suppression of the pay of itself seems to have suspended the dikasteries, while the oligarchy of Four Hundred was established,—and it can only be discussed in that light. As the fact stands, we may suppose that the six thousand heliasts who filled the dikasteries were composed of the middling and poorer citizens indiscriminately: though there was nothing to exclude the richer, if they chose to serve.