BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Seven
office was then filled by a lottery process in the deme. 7 When the klērōtēria came to be
used for this selection process, the entire process was centralized, as sortition for each
office was performed in the Theseion. 8
Needless to say, the klērōtērion procedure for jury selection was considerably
more complicated than has been suggested by this cursory overview. In his Constitution
of Athens Aristotle spends four chapters—out of a total sixty-nine—describing the
allotment procedure for jurors (AP 63-6). Each juror had a personalized box-wood ticket
(pinakion) with his name, his father’s name, his deme, and a letter of the alphabet A-K
(AP 63.4). On the morning of a court day, jurors filed by tribe into one of ten holding
rooms and deposited their pinakion into a chest inscribed with a matching letter A-K on it
(AP 64.1). From there in each room an affixer was appointed at random to draw ten
pinakia, one from each chest, and affix those pinakia to the klērōtērion (AP 64.1-2). The
archon then drew lots of white and black copper dice, the white number corresponding to
the number of jurymen required. As the dice were slotted into the klērōtērion, they fell
next to pinakia affixed to the machine. If a white die fell next to a pinakion, that juror
would serve on a jury (AP 64.2-3). Each selected juror then drew from an urn an acorn
also inscribed with a letter and entered a second holding room, where he was given a
7 Demont (2003: 44) posits that a still earlier procedure—selection of magistrates using white and black
beans—was in effect for most of the fifth century. Other magistracies, like the archonship, were always
allotted by tribes. The lottery process using clay tokens is described at length in Lang (1959), Staveley
(1972: 70-2), and Whitehead (1986: 280-7), although Whitehead (1986: 286) rightly underscores that it
was a potentially (very) short-lived process.
A plausible reconstruction of the sortition process at the Theseion is as follows. Rectangular clay
allotment tokens were painted with the abbreviation of the name of a tribe on one side and then cut in half
with a jigsaw cut so that one half could be re-fitted only with its original matching half. The two halves
were then placed into different piles. For one pile, the abbreviation of a deme within that tribe was written
on the reverse of every token; for the other pile, either a blank or the abbreviation of a magistracy was
inscribed in the lower portion of the token. In this way, only the exact number of magistracies needed was
inscribed on the tokens. When the tokens were reassembled, demes were matched with either a magistracy
or nothing. On these clay tokens, see further Thompson (1951).
8 So AP 62.1. Cf. Staveley (1972: 48-51, 69-72). For the date of this change, see Kroll (1972), Whitehead
(1986: 287-90).
298