The court is called the Areios Pagos, the "Areopagus," after a rocky hill in Athens named for the war god Ares. Greek tradition held that the first murder court was founded there in the misty centuries before recorded history, attributed to the legendary kings Theseus and Cecrops. Its members, the Areopagites, served for life and judged crimes of bloodshed. In 462 BC much of its power was stripped away and handed to the popular assemblies, a defining moment in the birth of Athenian democracy. Yet the institution endured in some form into the Roman era, and its name carried an authority that two and a half millennia could not erase.

When independent Greece needed a supreme court, it reached for that history. By royal decree on 16 October 1834, the modern Areios Pagos was founded. The framers could have called it a Court of Cassation, the standard continental term, but they chose instead to revive the ancient name and bind the young nation to its classical past. The first justices were appointed in January 1835. Christodoulos Klonaris, a lawyer from Nafplion who had served as minister of justice, became the first president. The court's very first case was heard on 30 April 1835, and its decision was published the next day, the first ruling of a tribunal that would have the final word in Greek law.

Among those first appointees was Polyzoidis, and his presence on the bench was its own quiet verdict. The Kolokotronis trial had been a stain on the early state, an attempt to use the courts against a national hero for political ends. The two judges who refused to sign were, by the standards of power, insubordinate. By the standards of justice, they were doing exactly their job. That a man who had defied the government in the name of due process was then elevated to the highest court suggests the new nation understood, however imperfectly, what an independent judiciary was supposed to be. Kolokotronis was soon pardoned. The principle Polyzoidis defended outlived the politics.

Today the Areios Pagos stands at the top of Greece's civil and criminal justice system, and its decisions are final within the country. It does not retry the facts of a case; instead it asks whether a lower court applied the law correctly. If it finds that a court violated the law or the principles of legal process, it can send the case back to be heard again. Even a final Greek ruling is not entirely the last word: because Greece belongs to the Council of Europe, a litigant can carry a case onward to the European Court of Human Rights. The bench is large, led by a president and an attorney-general, with ten vice-presidents and dozens of areopagites who serve until the mandatory retirement age of 67.

The ancient Areopagites met on bare stone under the sky. Their modern successors work in a white marble courthouse on Alexandras Avenue, designed by the architect Iason Rizos and inaugurated on 23 February 1981, one of the gleaming marble civic buildings that punctuate Athens. The line of presidents stretches unbroken from Klonaris in 1835 to the present, and in recent decades it has increasingly included women at its head. The name on the door still points back to a rock where, legend says, gods and kings once judged the crime of murder, proof that in Athens the law has always been written on top of older law.