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Power and populism in ancient Greek courts
- mrangle 3y agoThe article is quite the poorly reasoned effort to try to justify authoritarian court abuse toward persecuting political enemies. When "mechanisms of political accountability stop working". In other words, when prior political arguments and legal efforts fail to remove said enemies then bring not-even specious cases in heavily partisan districts.
- fmajid 3y agoAncient Greek juries were much larger than modern ones. The article mentions one trial with a jury of 883. It's also worth noting they took quite a few precautions to ensure jurors were not bribed: https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html#4 https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.h...
- wslh 3y ago883, I wonder if it is just by chance a prime number?
- thaumasiotes 3y agoYes, the size of the jury is not fixed, so all of them are the size they are by chance.
- fmajid 3y agoThe Alamut article I linked to explains how juries were selected, using a very ingenious process, in section 2.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoIt describes how the kleroterion works, but I don't see anything about how jury size is determined? It literally just says that the number of white balls (linearly related to number of jurors assuming excess demand for jury duty and a constant number of columns on the kleroterion) is "a function of the number of juries that needed to be filled".
- fmajid 3y agoThe number of tags on each column is a variable function of how many potential jurors of that jury-section-letter showed up. Towards the end of the funnel, the rows would be incomplete, thus depending on the random balls from the funnel, the final number of jurors would also vary, at least for the last juries being selected.
- c0k2z 3y ago[dead]
- seydor 3y agoBut the nature of the courts was so different. There were no judges (certainly not lifelong) andthe jury was selected by lot among the whole population using this lottery contraption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion. That would be very easy to replicate today , we already have trial by Twitter or Facebook. Maybe someone should give it a serious try
- contrarian1234 3y agoPeople would be put to death left and right. Death of Socrates x1000. Being famous would be actively dangerous haha
- 082349872349872 3y ago> When asked whether [Old Benjamin] was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey," and the [other Animals] had to be content with this cryptic answer. About the (post-Napoleonic) Bourbon Restoration, it is said that the Bourbons had learned nothing ... and forgotten nothing.
- 082349872349872 3y agoelsewhere on HN, trial by gossip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38335077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38335077