The Historians' History of the World 03

Such were the great constitutional innovations of Pericles and Ephialtes,—changes full of practical results,—the transformation, as well as the complement, of that democratical system which Clisthenes had begun and to which the tide of Athenian feeling had been gradually mounting up during the preceding twenty years. The entire force of these changes is generally not perceived, because the popular dicasteries and the nomothetæ are so often represented as institutions of Solon, and as merely supplied with pay by Pericles. This erroneous supposition prevents all clear view of the growth of the Athenian democracy by throwing back its last elaborations to the period of its early and imperfect start. To strip the magistrates of all their judicial power, except that of imposing a small fine, and the Areopagus of all its jurisdiction except in cases of homicide—providing popular, numerous, and salaried dicasts to decide all the judicial business at Athens as well as to repeal and enact laws—this was the consummation of the Athenian democracy. No serious constitutional alteration (excepting the temporary interruptions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty) was afterwards made until the days of Macedonian interference. As Pericles made it, so it remained in the days of Demosthenes—though with a sensible change in the character, and abatement in the energies, of the people, rich as well as poor.

In appreciating the practical working of these numerous dicasteries at Athens, in comparison with such justice as might have been expected from individual magistrates, we have to consider: first, that personal and pecuniary corruption seems to have been a common vice among the leading men of Athens and Sparta, when acting individually or in boards of a few members, and not uncommon even with the kings of Sparta; next, that in the Grecian cities generally, as we know even from the oligarchical Xenophon (he particularly excepts Sparta), the rich and great men were not only insubordinate to the magistrates, but made a parade of showing that they cared nothing about them. We know also from the same unsuspected source, that while the poorer Athenian citizens who served on shipboard were distinguished for the strictest discipline, the hoplites or middling burghers who formed the infantry were less obedient, and the rich citizens who served on horseback the most disobedient of all.

To make rich criminals amenable to justice has been found so difficult everywhere, until a recent period of history, that we should be surprised if it were otherwise in Greece. When we follow the reckless demeanour of rich men like Critias, Alcibiades, and Midias, even under the full-grown democracy of Athens, we may be sure that their predecessors under the Clisthenean constitution would have been often too formidable to be punished or kept down by an individual archon of ordinary firmness, even assuming him to be upright and well-intentioned. Now the dicasteries established by Pericles were inaccessible both to corruption and intimidation: their number, their secret suffrage, and the impossibility of knowing beforehand what individuals would sit in any particular cause, prevented both the one and the other. And besides that the magnitude of their number, extravagant according to our ideas of judicial business, was essential to this tutelary effect—it served further to render the trial solemn and the verdict imposing on the minds of parties and spectators, as we may see by the fact that, in important causes the dicastery was doubled or tripled. Nor was it possible by any other means than numbers to give dignity to an assembly of citizens, of whom many were poor, some old, and all were despised individually by rich accused persons who were brought before them—as Aristophanes and Xenophon give us plainly to understand. If we except the strict and peculiar educational discipline of Sparta, these numerous dicasteries afforded the only organ which Grecian politics could devise, for getting redress against powerful criminals, public as well as private, and for obtaining a sincere and uncorrupt verdict.

Taking the general working of the dicasteries, we shall find that they are nothing but jury-trial applied on a scale broad, systematic, unaided, and uncontrolled, beyond all other historical experience—and that they therefore exhibit in exaggerated proportions both the excellences and the defects characteristic of the jury system, as compared with decision by trained and professional judges. All the encomiums, which it is customary to pronounce upon jury-trial, will be found predicable of the Athenian dicasteries in a still greater degree; all the reproaches, which can be addressed on good ground to the dicasteries, will apply to modern juries also, though in a less degree.

RHETORS AND SOPHISTS