by Greg Johnson
ANCIENT GREEK ORIGINS
The use of sortition began with the birth of democracy in the city-states of Ancient Greece. Lotteries played an important part in Greek culture, as they were intrinsically linked with their religion. Lot was seen by the Greeks as a means by which the gods intervened in human affairs. The Delphic Oracle used lot to appoint priests, and in Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon arranged a lottery among his comrades to determine who would have the honor of fighting Hector. The outcome of the lottery was accepted as the will of the gods, but it was no doubt a shrewd political move on the part of Agamemnon to eliminate the prospect of any infighting among his ambitious generals. This essay is concerned solely with the political aspects of lot in Attica and its capital city Athens, the largest city of the Hellenic world and consequently the one that historians know most about.197
Sortition became an ingredient in the Athenian constitution following a turbulent period of aristocratic factionalism and tyrannical rule. In approximately 560 BC, Pisistratus, the ultimate victor in a factional power struggle among the aristocracy, became the first of a succession of tyrants who would rule Athens between 561 BC and 510 BC. Prior to this, government positions were acquired through elections, which aristocrats generally dominated owing to their wealth, connections, and influence. In this era, politics was dominated by the personal interest of individual scheming aristocrats who formed alliances with other aristocrats and built bases of support with the middle and lower classes. The ultimate aim of such cynical political maneuvering and factionalism was to establish an autocracy of one’s own.198
The reign of Pisitratus was perceived as beneficial for the Athenians, as the tyrant, unopposed by the aristocracy, continued the legal protection farmers enjoyed against maltreatment by the aristocracy that had been established under the archonship of Solon. However, this was not case with Pisistratus’s sons, who after 514 BC triggered a far more repressive and invasive regime than was considered tolerable. Tyranny was tolerated pragmatically on the principle that it stopped the aristocracy from exploiting the farmers; however, the tyranny itself was increasingly the source of discontent.199
This tyrannical rule was overthrown in 510 BC, and in the political vacuum, the old self-interested aristocratic factionalism began to reassert itself. Cleisthenes, a well-educated and ambitious aristocrat, sought high office by directly mobilizing the common people to participate in politics as equals. Whereas before most Athenians were mere camp followers of individual noble families, following Cleisthenes’s reforms they participated on the basis of equality.200
The political reforms that Cleisthenes introduced were not implemented ad hoc but rather were modeled on existing democratic institutions in Corinth and Argos. Cleisthenes reorganized Attica, setting up self-governing units called demes. Each deme corresponded to the size of a village, and Athens itself was divided into several. Each deme had a communal council in which membership was hereditary. These demes appointed various local officials to administer their communal property, organize festivals, and maintain the religious cults. On the larger scale Cleisthenes organized Attica into ten tribes or pylae. Each of the pylae was both a separate military formation commanded by a strategos (elected general) and a political unit which supplied 50 candidates each for the Boule in Athens.
The Boule was a council of 500 in which every representative was appointed randomly by lot and subject to strict rotation. Each representative served for a term of one year and could not be selected twice in a row, or more than twice in total. The Boule was tasked to deliberate ahead of time on legislation and decrees that were to be presented to the popular assembly. Whereas the popular assembly was open theoretically to all and seated 6,000, the very size of the assembly meant that it could only be called infrequently, and although any member of the popular assembly could demand a debate on any issue, in practice debates were only called for on controversial issues such as war, peace, and ostracism. The Boule concentrated on the day-to-day business of government such as city improvements, taxation, budget allocation, and scrutiny of public officials and political leaders. Most bills and decrees put forward by the Boule were approved by the assembly without debate.201
Not only could bills be initiated by the Boule, but any citizen with a clean record had the right to submit proposals to the Boule, which was then obliged to consider them and pass them on to the popular assembly in the form of bills. However, when an issue was up for discussion in the popular assembly, the Boule could propose their amendments to the bill. All citizens had the right to speak in assembly, and in Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates confirmed that carpenters, smiths, shoemakers, merchants, ship owners, rich and poor, aristocrats and ordinary men took the floor. As the popular assembly could seat as many as 6,000 citizens, quiet and discipline were essential to prevent the meetings from degenerating into a disorderly rabble. As a result Athens maintained a detachment of Scythian archers to enforce these conditions and on occasion to expel fools who were not acknowledged experts on technical matters such as building and ships but nevertheless pretended to pass themselves off as such. On all political matters the right to speak and present proposals was respected.202
Athens had no state bureaucracy that would be recognizable today; the executive functions of the polis were carried out by 700 magistrates who were responsible for all the administrative and organizational needs of the polis, from naval requisition to water and sanitation. Initially 600 of these magistrates were appointed by sortition and the remaining 100 were appointed through election on the grounds that their work required specialist skills or experience. This included the strategoi, the generals who would command the hoplite phalanxes in battle, financial officers, and those magistrates in charge of the Eleusinian mysteries.203 As in the past, the elections were dominated by the aristocracy who continued to occupy the most prestigious posts in the government as their education, status, and connections gave them a clear advantage in the competition for votes. They also continued to play an advisory role through the Aeropagus, which was a council made up of 300 former archons (the highest ranked magistrates).204 The authority of the Aeropagus was much reduced following the expansion of citizenship to the thetes, an urban class who unlike the farmers owned little or no land but formed the bulk of the manpower required by the Athenian navy.205
Whether magistrates were elected or selected by lot, the Boule rigorously checked the accounts of each magistrate every year to guard against corruption. They also would scrutinize the performance of each magistrate in office and impose sanctions against those who failed to perform their duties. In addition, individual citizens had the right to mount court actions against those considered to be acting against the best interest of the polis. This ensured a high standard of public behavior in their officials, considering the very low entry barriers to political office.206
The final part of the Athenian constitution in which sortition played a role was in the Dikasterion or jury courts. Juries were selected annually from a list of 6,000 citizens by sortition. Selected from any social class, the size of the jury was most commonly 501, but this varied depending on the type of case presented before the Dikasterion. The courts not only dealt with commercial and criminal law, but they served a political function in delivering judgment against magistrates accused by individual citizens of corruption or incompetence and also functioned like a supreme court in testing the constitutionality of controversial laws passed by the Boule. Unlike in the popular assembly or Boule, the jury had an entirely passive role in the proceedings. They would listen to the claims and counterclaims of the contesting parties and then without deliberation deliver a yes or no verdict by secret ballot.207
These reforms ultimately led to the emergence of a new type of politics among the aristocracy, in which aristocratic identity was increasingly focused on serving the common good of the polis. These elected magistrates were selected on the grounds of competency and were held accountable to the citizens. The political leaders who emerged in Athens
were not organization men whose influence depended on their position within a party or alliance but rather skilled orators who aligned themselves with the interests of the majority.208
Sortition in Athens played a key role in diffusing the concentrations of power and factionalism that had hitherto destabilized the city, thus enabling the formulation of policies that were in the interests of the majority of Athenians. The offices that were subject to sortition and carefully scrutinized by a representative group of Athenian citizens were an effective guard against ambitious men who would have subverted them for their own ends by establishing patronage networks for their supporters. In these respects the crowd was kept well-informed, and their choice of leaders and laws was certainly wiser than in the older system. The social position of the aristocracy became greatly reduced, and it is no coincidence that the lavish burial practices of the aristocracy ceased shortly after Cleisthenes’ reforms.209 But social hierarchies, inevitable in nature, remained in Athenian society, as did significant class barriers.
Hellenistic culture was focused on great deeds and their celebration, so the surviving records of this period are orientated towards this. Nevertheless it is possible to piece together enough fragments to gain a glimpse into the impact that sortation-derived democracy had upon the ordinary people of Athens. Athens possessed a rudimentary welfare system which largely dealt with both the positive and negative consequences of waging war. Grain given as tribute was distributed among the citizenry, and provision was made for children orphaned through war.210 Also jury duty played an important welfare role, as those employed as rowers for the navy in wartime often became jurors in peacetime in return for a modest stipend. It also provided elderly Athenians with an income and so provided a measure of social security.211
Although the Athenian citizens did not contemplate redistribution of land from their own aristocrats, land captured from other aristocrats in war was considered fair game and divided widely among the citizenry. For example after defeating Chalcis in the 6th century BC, the land taken from the Chalcidian aristocrats was divided up among 4,000 Athenian citizens.212
At the same time there is evidence that the Aristocracy complained about the Dikasterion, which they perceived as biased against them, which is somewhat ironic considering that previously the courts were in the pockets of the aristocrats, and debtors who defaulted could find themselves seized as an asset and sold into slavery.213
Not only did sortition lower the threshold to office and increase the sense of self-worth of all Athenians, it also promoted stability and unity by eliminating or at least greatly reducing the factionalism and social conflict that threatened to undermine the polis. The Athenians were able to mobilize themselves for great collective projects, none more so than the reorganization of their military. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus credited the rise of Athens as a military power to the new democratic form of government in Athens. He stated that when the Athenians lived under tyranny they did not excel over any of their neighbors, but when they threw off their tyranny, they became the premiere military power.214 The Athenians constructed a new fortified harbor at Piraeus and built and trained a formidable navy. They also mobilized the entire population of Athens to construct a network of walls over 26 kilometers long to secure Attica from invasion by land. As the Athenians possessed the most powerful navy in the region at that time, their entire territory could be turned into a fortified island in the event of a siege, with their lines of communication with the rest of region protected by their navy.215 The military prowess of the Athenians on land and sea is observed in their famous defeat of the Persian Empire at Marathon in 490 and Salamis in 480.
The defeat of the Persians led to the emergence of Athens as a hegemonic power in Greece until their defeat in the Peloponesian War at the hands of Sparta in 404. Athens was the leading member of the Delian league, an alliance of up to 200 Greek city-states that was dedicated to liberating the Ionian Greeks from Persian domination and resisting further encroachments. The Delian League later morphed into an informal empire centered on Athens.216 Thucydides recognized this dynamism in the Athenian Greeks stating,
The Athenians are addicted to innovation and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution. . . . They are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgement, and in danger they are sanguine. . . . Their unwavering determination is matched on your side by procrastination; they are never at home, you are ever away from it . . . . [The Athenians] were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.217
In terms of the scientific, philosophical, and artistic achievements of the Athens, the argument that the blind mechanism of sortition played a decisive role in this development is certainly unfounded. Such achievements have been reproduced under varied political systems. However, a case can be made that sortition was one factor in creating and maintaining a stable civil society which provided ideal conditions for these developments to arise. Western civilization’s inheritance owes more to Athens than to Sparta, and the question is worth asking whether Hellenistic civilization would still have had a major impact on the history of the western world if the Athenian state merely alternated between tyranny and aristocratic oligarchy.218
Although sortition contributed to the success of the Athenian polis, the Athenian constitution was far from perfect, and there were key factors which limited the democratic crowd’s wisdom.
The popular assembly was not selected by sortition, but the vast numbers who attended the assembly compared to the actual population of Attica, meant that the people were directly represented. Unlike the Dikasterion, citizens played an active role in the proceedings. This meant that the citizens were subject to conformist pressures, which, in controversial matters of war and peace would certainly sway the judgment of the assembly, as whenever the Athenians met to discuss the merits of peace and war, the proponents of war usually won the debate. This is because opponents risked disgrace by being labeled cowards. If a majority or even a sizable minority wanted war, the opponents unwilling to pay the social price of dissension found themselves easily intimidated into line.219
In addition, as citizenship was extended to the lowest thete, the Aeropagus, the elite aristocratic council, was dissolved. This was a foolish move, as the Aeropagus was made up of former magistrates, strategoi, and diplomats who had held the highest offices and accordingly held the most political experience and knowledge, especially in foreign affairs. Soon after this political revolution, Athens canceled its alliance with Sparta and initiated a series of geopolitical realignments which ultimately resulted in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta that tore the Greek world apart and led to the fall of Athens as a great power.
The twin factors of conformity and ignorance had turned what was a wise and informed crowd in domestic matters into a herd of stampeding buffalo whenever it turned to foreign affairs.220
The defeat of Athens led to the first collapse of Athenian democracy and the emergence of a short-lived pro-Spartan oligarchy which became known as the rule of the thirty tyrants. Their despotic rule reminded the Athenians that whatever the faults of their democracy, it was certainly preferable to the alternative. During a single year, an estimated 1,500 men were killed, and many more forced into exile.221
When democracy was restored, greater reliance was placed on sortition as a method of selection. The powers of the popular assembly were greatly reduced, and those of the Dikasterion were increased, as the Athenians had recognized that the democratic crowd was far wiser and delivered better judgment in the Dikasterion, where the people sat in passive judgment, than the emotive cut and thrust of the popular assembly.
Secondly all magistrates were now to be selected by lot. This change can be explained by reference to the fact that the thirty tyrants seized power through a conspiracy within the administration. By removing the electoral element, it not only broke up centers of power to prevent another conspiracy to impose a tyranny, but also in vi
ew of the Athenians’ recent traumatic history of war and repression, sortition was also intended to prevent the polis from disintegrating into factionalism. However, the price of this was that positions that required professional skills and knowledge were now being filled by candidates who lacked them. This was an inappropriate use of sortition and certainly made the institution easier to demonize as the chaotic rule of incompetents.222
MEDIEVAL ITALY
Following the Greeks’ experiment in democracy, sortition did not play any political role in the western world until the 11th century, when a relative power vacuum in Northern Italy led to the emergence of independent city-states.
At the time, the political and social conditions in Northern Italy were vastly different from the feudal system in Northern Europe. In Northern Europe, states were ruled by hereditary monarchs to whom the land-owning nobility professed allegiance and from whom they courted favors. In Northern Italy, however, feudal ties were comparatively weaker, and the aristocracy were fiercely independent and rarely recognized any higher authority. The self-governing Italian city-states therefore needed to find a way of keeping aristocratic rivalry and ambition in check, and they developed novel political election methods known as the brevia and the scrutiny, in which sortition played a key role.223