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These courts were jury courts and very large ones: the smallest possible had 200 members (+1 to avoid ties) and sometimes 501, 1000 or 1500. The annual pool of jurors, whose official name was Heliaia, comprised 6000 members. At least on one known occasion the whole six thousand sat together to judge a single case (a plenary session of the Heliaia).
^ According to Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Ecclesia: A Collection of Articles 1983-1989, page 260, "apart from Plutarch, who quotes the Ath. Pol., there is no other evidence that the heliaia was a court of appeal, and the scanty contemporary sources indicate that it was a court of first instance."
For private suits, the minimum jury size was 200 (increased to 401 if a sum of over 1,000 drachmas was at issue), for public suits 501. Under Cleisthenes's reforms, juries were selected by lot from a panel of 600 jurors, there being 600 jurors from each of the ten tribes of Athens, making a jury pool of 6,000 in total. [52]
In Athenian courts, the jury tended to be made of the common people, whereas litigants were mostly from the elites of society. [20] In the Athenian legal system, the courts have been seen as a system for settling disputes and resolving arguments, rather than enforcing a coherent system of rules, rights and obligations. [21]
A kleroterion in the Ancient Agora Museum (Athens) A large kleroterion at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology in Reading, Berkshire A kleroterion (Ancient Greek: κληρωτήριον, romanized: klērōtērion) was a randomization device used by the Athenian polis during the period of democracy to select citizens to the boule, to most state offices, to the nomothetai, and to court juries.
Although neither Plato nor Xenophon of Athens identifies the number of jurors, a jury of 501 men likely was the legal norm. In the Apology of Socrates (36a–b), about Socrates's defence at trial, Plato said that if just 30 of the votes had been otherwise, then Socrates would have been acquitted (36a), and that (perhaps) less than three-fifths ...
The oath included a self-imposed curse, where jurors acknowledged the risk of divine retribution if they violated their promise to judge cases impartially, emphasizing the high moral stakes in Athenian legal proceedings. Although court voting was conducted in secret, belief in divine punishment reinforced the oath's significance. [5]
Townsend considers the failure to complete the structure to be symbolic of the decreased importance of the court system in Athenian politics in the Hellenistic period. [48] During construction of the monument base on the west side of the structure, workmen disturbed a Mycenaean grave. They reburied the grave and relocated the base further to ...