The Dead Media Notebook (72 page)

Once all the candidates’ tickets were slotted in, the archon took a quantity of small bronze balls, some colored white, the rest black, and poured them into the funnels at the tops of the kleroteria. The total number of balls was equal to the number of rows filled with tickets, and the number of white balls was a function of the number of juries that needed to be filled that day.

So: the balls fell down into the tube, at the bottom of which they were stopped by the aforementioned crank- driven device. The crank was turned, and one ball dropped out. If the ball was black, the first row of tickets was removed from the kleroterion, and their owners were dismissed. If the ball was white, the first row of tickets remained in place, and their owners were jurors for the day. Another ball was released, another row of candidates dismissed or accepted, and so on.

At last the final ball was dropped and the judicial day began. Jury-selection was not the only task to which the kleroterion was put. Some kleroteria were located in the chambers of the legislative Council House, where they were used to select committees on which representation of all the tribes was required: as many columns of slots were filled as there were tribes, and as many white balls were dropped as there were committees to be selected.

I have left out some of the complexities of these procedures, so it may be hard to appreciate the full ingenuity of the device, but trust me: it was an elegant design.

So elegant, indeed, that I am tempted to believe that the equally elegant correspondence between the workings of the kleroterion and the workings of Athenian democracy in general was more than just coincidental.

Based upon the elemental intersection of an ordered grid (the matrix of slots) and a randomized flow (the tube of balls), the kleroterion could almost be read as an abstract diagram of the Athenian political circuitry itself. But what would be the profit in reading it thus?

We would then be left to ponder endlessly the chicken-and-egg question of whether the circuitry was built according to the diagram, or the diagram drawn according to the circuitry, and we don’t exactly have all day. Our tour of the Agora Museum has just begun.

Source: Exhibits and literature of the Agora Museum in Athens, Greece, including the pamphlets The Athenian Citizen (revised 1987); Life, Death and Litigation in the Athenian Agora (1994); Graffiti in the Athenian Agora (revised 1988); and Socrates in the Agora (1978), published and sold as Picture Books No. 4, 23, 14, and 17 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, c/o Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.

From Julian Dibbell

After the kleroterion allotment system, the second phase of an Athenian citizen’s passage through the political system was an easy one. It consisted of the citizen’s showing up for the office for which he had been selected.

And yet for Athenian society in general, this phase was fraught with the risk of inefficiency and corruption.

The citizen might not show up when needed, after all. Or he might show up at the wrong place. Or worst of all, someone not actually selected for the office might show up in his stead.

Whatever the problem, though, the Greeks had a doodad for it, and for this one, the problem of getting the right citizen in the right office at the right time, they had at least three.

ALLOTMENT TOKENS
Among the most fascinating objects in the Agora Museum, the little bits of ceramic identified as “allotment tokens” are also among the most obscurely explained by the museum literature.

Their design is clear enough. About the size of a Scrabble piece magnified by 2, these fire-hardened clay plaques differed from a Scrabble piece in shape only by virtue of the fact that one edge had an irregular, one-of- a-kind jigsaw cut to it. This edge fit neatly into the jigsawed edge of one, and only one, other token, from which it had been cleaved before being fired.

There was writing on the tokens as well. Painted onto the original clay plaque before it was cut and fired were the name of a tribe, the name of a deme, and in the case of the existing specimens, the letters “POL”, thought to be an abbreviation for a political office.

The office and deme names were written on one side of the plaque, at opposite ends from each other, and the tribe name was written across the middle of the other side, so that when the plaque was cut in two, one half bore the deme name, the other bore the office name, and each bore a piece of the bisected tribe name, which would only become legible again when the two pieces were rejoined.

What was the point of this high-concept design? The museum literature offers only the tentative suggestion that the tokens were “a possible means of allotment.”

But it’s hard to imagine how they could be sensibly used for that purpose, especially when the magisterial kleroterion already did the job handily. The seasoned Necronaut can only conclude that, like the cyrograph used in medieval monasteries to ensure the validity of copied manuscripts and the tally sticks used by the old English Exchequer to ensure the stick-bearer’s right to valuables deposited with the king, the “allotment” tokens were a kind of premodern authentication device.

I imagine it worked about like this: After a citizen was allotted a particular office, probably a low-profile one with a high turnover, he was issued the “office” half of one of the token pairs. The other half, presumably, named the citizen’s deme and was given over to an officer of his tribe whose duty it was to hold onto these things for safe keeping.

When the citizen then went to perform the duties of his newly allotted office, he took his token with him.

If anyone challenged his right to be there doing what he was doing (not unlikely; Athens, as near as I can make out, was lousy with political sticklers and cranks), he could simply produce the token.

If this didn’t satisfy the challenger, they could both walk over to the citizen’s tribal headquarters and match his token with its well- guarded mate, thus settling the matter.

Revisit the Working Notes on the cyrograph and the tally sticks and you will, I think, be struck by the remarkable similarities of design between those later devices and the Athenian allotment tokens.

Were those later inventions then copies of this earlier one? I doubt it. Simple and ingenious as it is, the idea was bound to recur of its own accord.

Indeed, as George Dyson points out in his discussion of the tally sticks, the idea has lately popped up again, in disembodied form, in certain digital authentication systems based on the splitting of very large numbers into their two prime factors. But the allotment token is an instructive artifact nonetheless, if only because it shows us that the so- called smart card, so often taken as an icon of information-age ingenuity, is in fact not only an archaic invention but an ancient one.

JUROR TICKETS
We have seen how the bronze or wooden juror tickets were used in conjunction with the allotment machine, but that was only part of their use in the jury system.

The museum literature describes the rest of it, starting with what happened after all the balls had dropped through the kleroterion’s tube and the remaining tickets, those of the selected jurors, were pulled out of their slots: “The tickets of the allotted jurors were given to the archon in charge, who, having identified each man, allowed him to draw from a box a bronze ball inscribed with a letter indicating the court to which he was assigned.

The archon then placed his ticket in the box destined to go to that court so that the juror could receive his pay and reclaim his ticket only in the court to which he had been allotted.” (“The Athenian Citizen,” Picture Book No. 4, p. 21)

The tickets served essentially the same validating purpose as the allotment tokens, in other words, although in a comparatively low-tech fashion. No wooden ones survive, as far as I know, but they no doubt resembled the bronze ones: long, thin strips, about 1 inch by 5, engraved with the ticketholder’s name.

The surviving tickets sometimes show signs of reuse, with previous holders’ names flattened out and new ones inscribed. I imagine that the greater investment of cleverness and manufacturing effort in the allotment tokens reflected a greater importance attached to the offices they secured. Or it might just have reflected a greater likelihood of fraud in the exercise of those offices.

TAGGING ROPES
We come now to the lowest of the low technology used in identifying citizens assigned to a particular duty: the ropes, dipped in red paint, that were swung at citizens hanging out down in the Agora when everybody was supposed to be up in the Assembly.

The “police” who did the swinging were public slaves, held in common by the citizenry, and when they thwapped you with their ropes, you were truly busted: with a big red stripe across your toga, it was no use lingering in the Agora or trying to slink home. You would be fined on sight.

Of course, no material traces of this technology survive for display. All the elements of the apparatus, the ropes, the paint, the slaves, were quite perishable.

Footnote: Yes, it is both oversimplifying and somewhat perverse to characterize slavery as a technological phenomenon, but I don’t think it’s an entirely misguided way of thinking about it. Certainly ancient cultures, still half-immersed in animistic worldviews, would have drawn a softer line than we do between harnessing the inner force of, say, wind or fire or metals and harnessing the inner force of fellow humans. For that matter, it probably wouldn’t be too hard, and might even be illuminating, to make the case that in some historical instances slavery has served as a kind of medium.

Source: Exhibits and literature of the Agora Museum in Athens, Greece, including the pamphlets The Athenian Citizen (revised 1987); Life, Death and Litigation in the Athenian Agora (1994); Graffiti in the Athenian Agora (revised 1988); and Socrates in the Agora (1978), published and sold as Picture Books No. 4, 23, 14, and 17 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, c/o Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.

From Julian Dibbell

Once the citizen was in his allotted place in the system, he got to work. There was a variety of jobs to do in the Athenian political sector, but they all essentially came down to one task: generating information. You argued. You heard arguments. You drew up legislation. You presented legislation. You reached your verdict. You cast your vote. You were the source, along with all your fellow citizens, of a flood of words and rulings and decisions.

This flood needed managing, and mostly it was the institutions of the state that managed it, chiefly through their structure and conventions. But inevitably they had a little help from the gadgetry; for where there are voluminous information flows, as we postmoderns know only too well, there are technologies built to channel them.

Here are a few that helped channel the flow of deliberation and decision in ancient Athens.

THE KLEPSYDRA
The water clock, called klepsydra by the Greeks (and in English usually spelled “clepsydra”), timed oral presentations in both the courts and the Council House. In trials, the plaintiff and defendant were granted equal time to make their cases, and the klepsydra was well- designed to assure all in attendance that the time was truly equal.

It was a pretty simple machine: a large clay vessel with a small bronze tube at its base and a small hole just below the rim. A plug was inserted in the tube, and the pot was filled with water, the overflow hole at the top providing a precise, and plainly visible, governor of the amount. When it was time for one of the litigants to start speaking, a slave pulled the plug and let the water start flowing into another vessel.

The speaker spoke for as long as the water flowed, and if he was smart he kept an eye on the angle of the flow in order to gauge how much time he had left. The klepsydra on display in the Agora Museum has a capacity of two “choes,” or about six quarts.

This, according to the literature, translates into approximately six minutes’ speaking time and was the amount permitted for the rebuttal speech in cases involving less than 500 drachmas.

The rigor of the klepsydra’s pacemaking put pressure on litigants to make their speeches tight and lucid, which in turn led to the rise of a profession that could rightly be considered the ancestor of the lawyer’s: speech-writing for hire.

Many of the speechwriters’ compositions survive, and in one, by the accomplished Isokrates, the klepsydra is artfully referenced: “Now about the other men he has plotted against,” Isokrates has his client say of the opposing litigant, “and the suits he has brought and the charges he has made, and the men with whom he has conspired and those against whom he has sworn falsely, not twice the amount of water would be sufficient to describe these.”

My Columbia Encyclopedia says the water clock first appeared around 2000 B.C., in Egypt, whence it was much later imported to Greece. But I wonder if the invention wasn’t largely a novelty until Athens put it to use in its court rooms and committee chambers.

In the ancient world, I suspect, the rhythms of agriculture, commerce, warfare, and even science were still too slack to have much use for the klepsydra’s precise replication of particular units of time.

But in a society where the abstract notion of equality before the law was a cornerstone, and where litigation was almost as common as pederasty, the demand for a meticulous technological embodiment of that equality must have been bottomless.

BRONZE JUROR BALLOTS
The Athenians didn’t invent voting, of course, but they surely did more of it than any other civilized society before them had.

Most of it was done by hand, but as in modern democracies, certain kinds of votes required a degree of anonymity that normal hand or voice votes didn’t provide. Hence the invention of, among other devices, the bronze juror ballot.

The juror ballot was a flat bronze disk about the diameter of the palm of a juror’s hand, with a short bronze rod intersecting the disk at its center, like the hub of a wheel. Each juror carried two of these ballots with him from deliberations: one with the hub hollowed out from end to end, tubelike, and the other with a solid hub.