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 boxwood or bronze inscribed with his own name, that of his father, his residential district (the three essentials required for the legal designation 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 thousand 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 aristocrats.[1] 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 safeguard 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
- ↑ Lysias, Oration 13, Sec. 35.
