After the period of Athenian greatness was past, it was found needful to pay citizens for the time given to these meetings; but, while Athens ruled an empire, patriotism alone brought men to grant this serious tax upon their time.

195. The Waning of the Areopagus. The decline of the archonship to an ornamental office involved a like fate for the Areopagus - made up, as it was, of ex-archons. As a body holding office for life, it was always unpopular. During the Persian War, it is true, it had won high credit, justly; and for some years afterward it was allowed to resume something of its ancient importance in the state, but, after the banishment of Cimon, Ephialtes reduced it to a minor criminal court.

196. The Dicasteries. The chief judicial business fell now to large popular courts, whose importance became fully developed under Pericles. Six thousand citizens were chosen by lot each year (probably only from those who offered themselves), of whom one thousand were held in reserve, while the others were divided into ten jury courts of five hundred each, called dicasteries. For important cases, several of these were sometimes thrown together.

To these bodies the Assembly turned over the trial of officials, so that they became high courts of impeachment. It was with a view to this duty that each dicast took an oath "above all things to favor neither tyranny nor oligarchy, nor in any way to prejudice the sovereignty of the people." Besides performing this semi-political function, the dicasteries made: (a) supreme imperial courts to settle all disputes between separate cities of the empire; (b) courts of appeal for all important law cases in each of the subject cities; and (c) the ordinary courts for all Athenians. A dicastery was both judge and jury; it decided by majority vote, and no appeal was possible.

Large bodies of this kind, without the check that even our smaller juries have in trained judges to guide them, gave many wrong and evil verdicts, no doubt. Passion and emotion and bribery all interfered, at times, with even-handed justice; but,

on the whole, the system worked astonishingly well. Probably no other community has ever been educated up to a point where it could have made so great a success of such judicial machinery. In particular, it is notable that any citizen of a subject city was sure to get redress, if wronged by an Athenian officer. The public conscience was commendably sensitive upon that matter.

197. State Pay. Since these courts exercised so great weight and tried political offenders, it was essential to the democratic idea that they should not fall altogether into the hands of the rich. To prevent this Pericles introduced payment for jury duty. The amount (three obols a day, or about ten cents) would furnish a day's sustenance for one person in Athens, but it did not suffice for a family. Moreover, even at such pay, a dicast could hardly count upon employment on more than two hundred days in the year; and it is clear that jury pay could not have been a serious financial object with any large portion of the citizens, especially when it is remembered that Athens had no pauper class.

Afterward, Pericles extended the principle of public payment to other political services. Aristotle says that some twenty thousand men over half the whole body of citizens were constantly in the pay of the state. Half of this number, however, were engaged in some form of military service, and in some cases were not citizens. But, besides the six thousand jurymen, there were the five hundred senators, seven hundred city magistrates, seven hundred more officials representing Athens throughout the empire, and many inferior state ser

1 It was about one third the average day's wage for a workingman, or one fifth that of a skilled artisan. The older estimates of wages in Athens seem to have been erroneous. See a discussion in Hellenic Studies, 1895, pp. 229247. The enemies of the system ridiculed paid juries, as hostile critics may ridicule them, indeed, with us, by pointing to the "professional jurymen known in parts of our country, who for the sake of the fee hang about the courtroom to get places when the regular panel is exhausted. Such ridicule does not condemn the system.

vants-keepers of public buildings, overseers of markets and the ports, jailers, and the like; so that always from a third to a fourth of the citizens were in the civil service.

Pericles has been accused sometimes of corrupting the Athenians by the introduction of such payment. But there is no evidence that the Athenians were corrupted under the system; and further, such a system was inevitable when the democracy of a little city became the master of an empire. It was quite as natural and proper as is the payment of congressmen and judges with us.

In the United States, only one man in about a hundred ever holds even a nomination for office, though our citizens give more universal attention to politics than is the case in any other modern country. Athens demanded the services of all her citizens over half the time (counting the military service). Of course, such a system involved public pay for the whole population of the ruling city.

Sparta, it will be remembered, attained a less desirable end in a less desirable manner. She kept her whole citizen class on constant military footing by giving them the free use of state slaves to till their lands. In both Athens and Sparta the practice was totally different from the later custom, with which it is sometimes classed (§ 414), of distributing free corn as a gratuity or a bribe to the rabble of Rome.

198. Political Capacity of the Average Athenian. Many of the numerous offices in Athens (nearly all the higher ones, in fact) could be held only once by the same man, so that each Athenian citizen could count upon serving his city at some time in almost every public capacity. Politics was his occupation; office-holding, his normal function. An unusually high average of intelligence is the only explanation of the fact that such a system worked. It certainly did work well. With all its faults, the empire was vastly superior to the rude despotism that followed in Greece under Sparta, or the anarchy under Thebes; it gave to a large part of the Hellenic world a peace and security never enjoyed before, nor again until the rise of Roman

power; while Athens itself, during and after its empire, was better and more gently governed than oligarchic cities like Corinth.

Indeed, there is reason in the contention of Edward Freeman that the average Athenian's political training and ability resembled more nearly that of the average member of Parliament (or of the American Congress) than that merely of the average citizen of England or America.

“Moderns are apt to blame the Athenian Democracy for putting power in hands unfit to use it. The truer way of putting the case would be to say that the Athenian Democracy made a greater number of citizens fit to use power than could be made fit by any other system. . . . The Assembly was an assembly of citizens-of average citizens without sifting or selection; but it was an assembly of citizens among whom the political average stood higher than it ever did in any other state. . . . The Athenian, by constantly hearing questions of foreign policy and domestic administration argued by the greatest orators the world ever saw, received a political training which nothing else in the history of mankind has been found to equal." 1

199. Imperfect Nature of the Democracy; the Final Verdict upon the Empire. — It is easy to see that the Athenian system was imperfect, tried by later standards of representative institutions; but it is more to the point to see that it was an advance in political development over anything before attempted. To be sure, in Attica itself the thirty-five thousand male citizens were less than half the adult male population. Even adding the cleruchs, the fifty thousand cannot have been more than one fifteenth of the adult males of the empire; while - worse than the mere limitation in numbers - they stood all for one locality, and admission to their ranks came only by blood descent. It certainly is to be regretted that Athens could not

1 Freeman, Federal Government. On the advantages of small states, read pp. 37-43 (first edition), from which these passages are taken. Read also a spicy paragraph in Wheeler's Alexander, 116, 117. Galton argues that the average natural ability of the Athenian was as much higher than ours as ours is above that of the African negro (Hereditary Genius, 342, American edition, 1887); but probably Freeman is nearer right in placing the emphasis upon difference in training.

continue to admit her resident aliens to citizenship, as had been done once by Cleisthenes; it is to be regretted that she could not extend to the men of her subject and allied cities that imperial citizenship which she did leave to her cleruchs, as Rome was to do much later. But the important thing is, that she had moved farther in both directions than had any other state up to this time. The admission of metics by Cleisthenes and the cleruch citizenship were notable advances. The broadest policy of the age ought not to be condemned as narrow.

200. Leaders and Parties: Pericles. - A few words will summarize party history up to the leadership of Pericles. All factions in Athens had coalesced patriotically against Persia, and afterward in fortifying the city; but the brief era of good feeling was followed by a renewal of party strife. The aristocrats rallied around Cimon, while the two wings of the democrats were led at first, as before the invasion, by Aristeides and Themistocles. Themistocles was ostracized,' and his friend Ephialtes became the leader of the extreme democrats. When Ephialtes was assassinated by aristocratic opponents, Pericles stepped into his place.

The aristocratic party had been ruined by its pro-Spartan policy (§ 185); the two divisions of the democrats reunited, and for a quarter of a century Pericles was in practice as absolute as a dictator, so that Thucydides characterizes Athens during this period of her greatness as "a democracy in name only, in reality ruled by its ablest citizen." Pericles belonged

1 Special topic: Themistocles after Plataea; note opposing views, and see especially Cox, Athenian Empire, 15-24.