Citizens as judges
In classical Athens, the people who decided a lawsuit were ordinary male citizens, not judges. Athens had magistrates who received cases and presided at hearings, but they did not direct the jurors on the law or decide the verdict. That job belonged to large panels of citizens, who heard each side and voted. The system developed in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and is known mainly from surviving speeches by orators such as Lysias and Demosthenes, from the Aristotelian work on the Athenian constitution, and from inscriptions.
Who could serve
Each year a pool of jurors was drawn from volunteers. Sources describe a pool of 6,000, who swore a juror’s oath, and a minimum age of 30. Women, enslaved people and foreigners were excluded. Because the poorer citizens could attend, pay for jury service was introduced, traditionally in the mid-fifth century BCE. It was a modest daily sum, and sources suggest it was increased later. Payment helps explain why large numbers of citizens, including the poor and the elderly, were able to sit.
Selection by lot
Athenians trusted the lottery as the fairest way to prevent bribery and favouritism. On the day of a trial, jurors were assigned to a particular court by lot, so that litigants could not know in advance who would hear their case. In the fourth century BCE, this was done using stone allotment machines, a device known as a kleroterion, fragments of which have been found in the Agora. Each juror carried a bronze ticket with his name, and the machine used coloured balls to select tickets at random. The details of the process changed over time, and some points are known from a single source.
The size of the panel depended on the case. Sources mention juries of 201 or 401 for private disputes, 501 as the standard figure for public cases, and larger panels of 1,001 or more for the most important matters. An odd number made ties impossible. The Athenian democracy placed great faith in the judgement of such crowds, which could also be swayed by emotion and rhetoric.
Bringing a case
Athenian law distinguished between private suits, brought by the wronged person, and public cases, where any eligible citizen could prosecute on behalf of the community. There was no public prosecutor. A prosecutor first summoned the defendant before a magistrate, who accepted the case and set a hearing date. Some cases involving homicide went to special courts, including the Areopagus, a council of former magistrates, rather than the popular jury courts.
Litigants had to speak for themselves. They could not hire an advocate to speak for them, although they could hire a professional speechwriter, called a logographer, to compose a speech they would learn and deliver. Friends could also speak in support. The speeches that survive give vivid insight into Athenian life, but they are one-sided presentations written to persuade, so they are not neutral records.
Water clocks and time limits
Speeches were timed with a water clock, a clepsydra, a clay vessel from which water flowed out at a set rate. Each side received an allotment of time, often measured in jugs of water, with the length depending on the type of case. When the court clerk read out documents or testimony, the water flow was stopped so that the litigant did not lose time. The system forced both sides to keep within the same limits, and it ensured that a single trial could be heard and decided in a day.
Voting and verdicts
Once the speeches were finished, there was no deliberation among the jurors and no instruction from a judge on the law. Each juror voted in secret. In the fourth century BCE, jurors were given two bronze discs, one with a solid axle and one with a hollow one, and dropped the disc representing their vote into an urn. Majority carried, and a tied vote favoured the defendant.
Many cases had fixed penalties. In others, after a guilty verdict, the prosecutor and the defendant each proposed a penalty and the jurors had to choose one of the two without compromise. This was intended to push both sides toward reasonable proposals. In the account of the trial of Socrates in 399 BCE, preserved in Plato’s works, the philosopher is said to have made a defiant proposal, a story that illustrates how the procedure could backfire. Thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle had doubts about rule by crowds that could be moved by rhetoric, and the Socratic method of patient questioning stands in contrast to the persuasive speeches heard in court.
Strengths and criticisms
The system had real strengths. It involved many citizens directly in justice, it limited the power of officials, and it made it hard to bribe a court. Critics, both ancient and modern, point to its weaknesses: juries had no expert on the law to guide them, a good speaker might defeat a better case, and the possibility of prosecution by private citizens encouraged malicious lawsuits, especially against wealthy and prominent men. Athenians used the label sycophant for those accused of abusing the system to blackmail others, although the term’s exact meaning in practice is debated.
Reconstructions of the system also depend on a small number of sources, many of them from the fourth century BCE, so details for the fifth century may have been different.