The view generally held among scholars is that the court drew its name from the ancient Greek verb ἡλιάζεσθαι (héliázesthai), which means congregate.
[4] Moreover, each juror was given a color-coded staff that represented their court designation, which reinforced their status as a unique group responsible for voting on cases and making decisions.
[ε] Taking the jurisdiction over the so-called graphe paranomon,[14] the Heliaia replaced the Areios Pagos in the execution of the legal control of the decisions of the ecclesia.
Until Ephialtes' reforms the Areios Pagos had the duty of guarding the laws and to keep watch over the greatest and the most important of the affairs of state.
After the formation of the jury, the hegemon had to submit the conclusions of his preliminary investigation, announcing and defining the litigation on which the court should decide.
The arguments were exposed by the litigants themselves, without the legal support of a lawyer,[ζ] in the form of an exchange of single speeches timed by water clock.
In this way the judicial cases became a vehement fight of impressions, since the jurors did not constitute a little group of mature citizens, such as the Court of Areios Pagos, which was interested only in the correct application of the law.
Nothing, however, stopped jurors from talking informally among themselves during the voting procedure and juries could be unruly, shouting out their disapproval or disbelief of things said by the litigants.
The lato sensu "corporeal sentences" included death, imprisonment (for the non-Athenian citizens), atimia (sometimes along with confiscation) and perpetual exile (ἀειφυγία).
Heliaia was the primary court in ancient Athens, composed of large juries selected from the citizens to ensure democratic participation in judicial processes.
Nonetheless, Socrates did not lose his calm demeanor and, although during the trial he could propose to the jury his self-exile, he did not do it when his friends offered to help him flee afterward, since life away from his beloved city was pointless for him.
Before the war a bill was passed, on the motion of Dracontides, according to which Pericles should deposit his accounts of public moneys with the prytanes and the jurors should decide upon his case with ballots which had lain upon the altar of the goddess on the acropolis.
This clause of the bill was however amended with the motion that the case be tried before fifteen hundred jurors in the ordinary way, whether one wanted to call it a prosecution for embezzlement and bribery, or malversation.
The name "Heliaia" has often been attached to a large unroofed rectangular enclosure at the southwestern corner of the Classical Agora of Athens.
The identification was tentatively suggested by the excavator when the structure was discovered in the 1950s, but in the absence of any positive evidence to support it, he admitted that it was "nothing more than a likely hypothesis.
"[21] For lack of a better suggestion the name became widely used and appeared on plans of the site, but the uncertainty remained, and in a comprehensive final publication of the lawcourts in the Athenian Agora, published in 1995, the structure was referred to simply as the "Rectangular Peribolos," a neutral descriptive label that assumed no specific identification.
[22] A few years later, a thorough review of the question, prompted by new epigraphical evidence, led to the suggestion that the enclosure was in fact the Aiakeion, a shrine dedicated to the hero Aiakos of Aegina,[23] and this identification has since been widely accepted.