Athens Picked Most of Its Officials by Lottery

Walk into the Athenian Agora on a fifth-century BC morning and the first thing you would see chosen by lottery is a juror. The device that did the choosing was called a kleroterion: a slab of marble incised with parallel columns of slots and fitted with an attached bronze tube. Each citizen who showed up to be considered for jury duty handed in a small bronze identity token, his pinakion, which got slotted into the column corresponding to his tribe. An attendant poured a mixture of black and white balls into the tube. White meant the row was selected; black meant it wasn't.

It was not just juries. Aristotle reports in the Athenaion Politeia that the Council of 500 — the boule that set the assembly's agenda — was filled annually by lot, fifty members from each of the ten tribes. The nine archons were chosen by lot from a pre-selected pool. The thousands of minor magistracies running grain inspection, port duties, and city maintenance were almost all sortition seats. Only offices requiring specific expertise, like the strategoi who commanded armies, were elected.

The ratio was striking. Modern estimates put roughly ninety percent of Athenian officials at lot-selected, ten percent at elected. Athenians did not see this as a compromise. They saw elections as oligarchic — a mechanism by which the wealthy and well-known would consistently outcompete ordinary citizens. The lottery, by contrast, treated every eligible citizen as equally qualified to serve.

Kleroteria have been excavated from the Agora. They look mundane, like prop-room furniture. The political theory they enacted has not had a sustained run since.