Today is the day that those of us who are registered and eligible to vote in the UK get to stick a cross next to a name. (I am tempted to encourage you to so by invoking the ghosts of Cleisthenes, the protesters of Peterloo, Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King – to name but a few). The outcome is far from certain and the likely need for parties to compromise with each other in order to form a workable government means that a few manifesto pledges will doubtless be broken. In that spirit, I am going to break a promise which I made in my last post. I had said that this post would be about Greek rhetorical attacks on the audience.
I made a pledge, I did not stick to it , and for that I am sorry. But I can assure you that I remain fully committed to implementing my original plan in the long term and when the conditions are right for the country.
Because it’s May 7th, 2015, I’m going to talk about Greek and Roman elections instead. If I’m honest – and we’ve already established that I may not be – the only ancient voting system I know about off the top of my head is the Athenian one. But this morning, I reminded myself how voting worked in other Greek states and in Rome. At Rome the system was VERY complicated and even for Greece, it’s hard to generalize. Even to talk about ‘voting’ in isolation is to underplay the importance of ‘sortition’ (also known as ‘allotment’) to the Greek and Roman electoral-governmental landscape. So, rather than spend hours simplifying and thereby misrepresenting things in my own words, I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing the fine Oxford Classical Dictionary entries of Peter Rhodes (for Greece) and Jeremy James Paterson (for Rome). They are at the end of this post and are provided for those who might find some detail useful.
As a Classicist, I am acutely aware of the dangers of idealizing Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic. It is an oft-repeated point that the Athenians did not allow citizen women, slaves or resident non-Athenians (‘metics’) to vote on policy or in elections for their ‘generals’ (i.e politicians like Pericles). Nor did it let them contribute to its ‘democratic’ public deliberative bodies. In the case of Rome, recent research which shows how ‘democratic’ were its voting assemblies, at least in certain periods. But this has to be balanced with lots of evidence that expressions of popular will were still constrained by an essentially oligarchic and aristocratic system.
On the other hand, I find it hard not to get a bit idealistic about the extent to which the Athenians relied on ‘lots’ (sortition) rather than vote-based elections when it came to populating their Council (Boule). This 500-strong body was responsible for the day-to-day running of the city’s affairs and met every day outside holidays and ‘days of ill omen’. It was a paid job to be a member of the Council. However, the world expert on this material, Peter Rhodes, argues that the considerable time commitment resulted in a disproportionate number of richer citizens actually serving. A new Council was appointed by lot every year and the eligibility of those whose names came up was audited by the outgoing Councillors.
The ‘sortition’ process for the Council was regulated so that the city’s different demes and tribes were always equally and fairly represented. But it was not fully democratic even within Athens’ own restricted definition of ‘rule by the people’ (demokratia). It seems that until the second half of the fourth century, the city’s poorest property class (the ‘thetes’) were not eligible, even though they had voting rights in the bigger popular assembly whose business was steered by the Council. And membership was restricted in other ways too: you had to be 30 or over; you could not serve if you had been convicted of certain crimes; by the fourth-century you couldn’t do more than two years on the Council in a lifetime.
The question of whether this ‘sortition’ system was a strength or weakness of the Athenian democracy will always be debated, not least because it is hard to decide the criteria for such a state’s ‘success’ in the first place. (Do we measure a democracy’s success by its performance and longevity relative to non-democratic systems or do we just think about the happiness and flourishing of its citizens?). Sortition certainly didn’t prevent Athens from making some terrible mistakes or from suffering two brief oligarchic coups. But it is fairly clear that ‘lots’ did wonders for fostering political expertise and commitment beyond the confines of a narrow elite. It prevented an ancient version of the modern ‘democratic deficit’ and ‘alienation from politics’ from taking hold.
