en no specific criteria for the insanity defense, after all, it was not necessary in a relatively small community where everyone knew the offender. Ancient Hebraic law stated simply that idiots, lunatics, and children below a certain age ought not to be held criminally responsible, because they could not distinguish good from evil, right from wrong, and where thus blameless in the eyes of God and man. The Greek and Roman legal texts say nothing at all on the matter, though a section of Plato's Laws specifically provides that if a criminal defendant is senile, a child, or is proven insane, he should be responsible for no more than the payment of civil damages, "except that if he has killed someone and his hands are polluted by murder, he must depart to a place in another country and live there in exile for a year,"#
             In the centuries to follow, the instructions that were actually given in courts on how to deal with the insanity defense varied enormously. Most judges then, as now, had very little experience with insanity cases or madmen, and were forced to rely on whatever sources they could find. Unfortunately, many statements originally intended as illustrative arguments rather than exclusive definitions of insanity were adopted in this way by the legal profession and transformed through repetition into standardized rules. Thus it was stated, that a madman "lacks mind and reason, and is not much removed from a brute"# The most common definition used to define insanity was the "knowledge of good and evil" test.
             In the seventeenth-century, legal commentators Edward Coke and Matthew Hale both recognized the difficulty of defining the range of insanity. Coke pointed out that there were not only idiots and the chronically insane, but episodic lunatics, who were sometimes mad but who, during "lucid intervals," must be held accountable for their crimes. Hale also added those suffering...