TRIAL OF AN OLD GREEK CORN-RING 375 



I will listen to the plaintiff and defendant both alike. 



I will give my vote on the question at issue and none other. 



I swear by Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter; I invoke utter destruction on myself 

 and my household, if I transgress any of these things and many blessings, if I 

 keep my oath. 



The jurymen, thus drawn and sworn, were divided into ten panels 

 of five hundred each. Each person, drawn, received a ticket of box- 

 wood or bronze inscribed with his own name, that of his father, his 

 residential district (the three essentials required for the legal designa- 

 tion of a free citizen) and the number of his panel. Such tickets of 

 bronze, with the Gorgon's head and the omnipresent, Athenian owl — 

 the official bird — are still extant. 



Each panel was made up of members of all ten Athenian tribes, 

 thus reducing to a minimum religious and residential prejudice and 

 favor. The smallest number on any one case mentioned by the classic 

 authors is two hundred, but we find cases with five hundred (trial of 

 Socrates), one thousand, two thousand and even as high as two thou- 

 sand five hundred jurymen-judges. An odd man seems generally to 

 have been added to break a tie vote, though from some remarks dropped 

 by the orators, we can infer that an even vote would mean the defendant 

 won. The number which sat on the jury in the prosecution of the 

 corn-ring is not known, but from the number assigned to other cases 

 of similar importance there must have been a jury of a thousand or 

 even two thousand men, as in the political trial of the informer, 

 Agoratus, by the restored democracy after the expulsion of the aristo- 

 crats. 3 The theory underlying these great juries was that they were 

 the largest possible representative committees of the whole Athenian 

 democracy, with the delegated powers of the body-politic, the nearest 

 approach to trial by the whole people. And, too, large juries were 

 safer as a protection against bribery — that nightmare of the Athenian 

 patriot. With the American reluctance to serve on the jury in mind, 

 we instinctively ask how such large panels could have been obtainable. 

 The answer ft found in the fact that the Athenians were the most 

 litigious people in history, loved the popular law-courts as the safe- 

 guard of their constitutional liberty, and were furnished by Pericles 

 and the great political bosses after him with sufficient pay for their 

 services to provide a living to the poor Athenian from jury service 

 alone, to say nothing of becoming the political equal of the richest or 

 most aristocratic citizen. The Athenian seemed to realize, in unique 

 fashion, that the hope and redress of a free people lies in the possession 

 and use of its courts, and they were so eager to attend trials and serve 

 on juries that the conservative Aristophanes satirized the typical 

 Athenian disease of law-mania. In the " Wasps/' the comic poet, in 

 trying to ridicule popular juries, especially those of the paid and 



3 Lysias, Oration 13, Sec. 35. 



