Random people5/20/2023 The use of lot to select nominators made it more difficult for political sects to exert power, and discouraged campaigning. Lot was not used alone to select magistrates, unlike in Florence and Athens. A combination of election and lot was used in this multi-stage process. Lot was used in the Venetian system only in order to select members of the committees that served to nominate candidates for the Great Council. The Doge of Venice was determined through a complex process of nomination, voting and sortition. Voter and candidate eligibility probably included property owners, councilors, guild members, and perhaps, at times, artisans. Men, who were chosen randomly, swore an oath that they were not acting under bribes, and then they elected members of the council. The brevia was used in the city states of Lombardy during the 12th and 13th centuries and in Venice until the late 18th century. Lombardy and Venice – 12th to 18th century However, any citizen could request the suspension of a magistrate with due reason. Magistrates appointed by lot had to render account of their time in office upon their leave, called euthynai. Magistrates, once in place, were subjected to constant monitoring by the Assembly. Those selected through lot underwent examination called dokimasia to avoid incompetent officials. All male citizens over 30 years of age, who were not disenfranchised by atimia, were eligible. A citizen could not hold any particular magistracy more than once in his lifetime, but could hold other magistracies. The magistracies assigned by lot generally had terms of service of one year. In Athens, to be eligible to be chosen by lot, citizens self-selected themselves into the available pool, then lotteries in the kleroteria machines. Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld. In Ancient Greek mythology, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades used sortition to determine who ruled over which domain. Past scholarship maintained that sortition had roots in the use of chance to divine the will of the gods, but this view is no longer common among scholars. The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public." According to the author Mogens Herman Hansen, the citizen's court was superior to the assembly because the allotted members swore an oath which ordinary citizens in the assembly did not, therefore the court could annul the decisions of the assembly.īoth Aristotle and Herodotus (one of the earliest writers on democracy) emphasize selection by lot as a test of democracy, writing, "The rule of the people has the fairest name of all, equality ( isonomia), and does none of the things that a monarch does. The Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines ( kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office. Thucydides has Pericles make this point in his Funeral Oration: "It is administered by the many instead of the few that is why it is called a democracy." Ī kleroterion in the Ancient Agora Museum (Athens) Athenian democracy was characterised by being run by the "many" (the ordinary people) who were allotted to the committees which ran government. In Athens, "democracy" (literally meaning rule by the people) was in opposition to those supporting a system of oligarchy (rule by a few). It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot and as oligarchic when they are filled by election. The next is when the democrats, on the grounds that they are all equal, claim equal participation in everything. All are alike free, therefore they claim that all are free absolutely. Aristotle relates equality and democracy:ĭemocracy arose from the idea that those who are equal in any respect are equal absolutely. It was utilized to pick most of the magistrates for their governing committees, and for their juries (typically of 501 men). Sortition was then the principal way of achieving this fairness. See also: Athenian democracy § Selection by lotĪthenian democracy developed in the 6th century BC out of what was then called isonomia (equality of law and political rights).
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