Collection 07 · Open · also tagged prices · slavery · religion
Law, Courts and Procedure
The machinery, reconstructable from the text. Allotment machines with bronze tickets and coloured dice, a water clock timing the speeches, two kinds of ballot with hollow and solid axles so a juror's vote could be felt but not seen, and tokens exchanged for jury pay on the way out.
The subject where ancient evidence is most surprisingly mechanical. Ath. Pol. 63–69 reads like a specification document, which makes it unusually safe ground for commentary: there is a right answer about how the kleroterion worked.
What is in it
Each strip is the places that work names, in the order it names themIn 195 BCE the women of Rome block the streets to demand repeal of a law capping how much gold a woman may own and what she may wear. Cato argues that giving way ends the republic. He loses. The fullest ancient argument about women, property and public luxury.
A young man is on trial for political violence and attempted poisoning. Cicero barely addresses the charges. Instead he goes after the prosecution's chief witness — Clodia, a widow of the highest family — and spends the speech making her the defendant: her parties, her gardens on the Tiber, her lovers, her brother. He won.
An Athenian jury of five hundred is asked to decide whether a man has been corrupting the young and importing new gods. He answers by cross-examining his accuser, telling them the god at Delphi put him up to it, and warning them that killing him will damage them more than it damages him. Convicted, and invited to propose his own penalty, he proposes free dinners for life at public expense.
Athens in about 594 BCE was close to civil war: the poor were mortgaged to the rich, and those who defaulted were being sold abroad as slaves. Solon was given power to write the laws and used it to void every debt at a stroke, free the enslaved, and forbid lending on the security of a person ever again. Then he left the country for ten years so nobody could ask him to change anything.
Forty numbered sentences, each short enough to memorise, covering the whole system: the gods are untroubled and untroubling; death is nothing to us; the limit of pleasure is the removal of all pain; if you had never feared the heavens or death you would have had no need of physics. The last eight are the surprise. Doctrines 31 to 38 make justice a contract — nothing is just or unjust in itself, justice is an agreement not to harm or be harmed, it does not exist between creatures that cannot make agreements, and a law that stops being mutually useful stops being just. It is the earliest surviving statement of a social-contract theory of justice, and it sits at the end of a text usually filed under how to be happy.
The places are the one thing here with no machine judgement in them. Every count above is of Pleiades gazetteer records opened and checked by a person, and the map on each passage draws from the same records. Named is not the same as visited, and a place that could not be verified gets no dot rather than a guessed one — which is why some works with a great many place names in them show very few, and why a work with none shows nothing at all rather than an empty frame.
Still to come
Proposed, not present — none of this is on the site yet[Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 42–69 · Lysias 12, 32 · Antiphon 6 · Twelve Tables · Gaius Institutes · Justinian Institutes · Cicero Pro Roscio, Pro Caelio, Pro Milone · Apuleius Apologia · Pliny Ep. 10.96–97 · papyrus petitions to the strategos