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What Happened When Athens Selected Its Leaders by Chance? - Sortition and the Stone Machine of Classical Athens | Sleepy Facts About History
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Modern democracies rely almost entirely on elections, treating the ballot box as the ultimate symbol of political legitimacy. But the most famous democracy of the ancient world did something very different for most of its government offices. In classical Athens, citizens did not elect their council members, magistrates, or jurors. They selected them by lot, using a stone machine called a kleroterion, bronze identity tickets, and colored dice. This practice, known as sortition, was a…
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