Practice question · True or false
Most Athenian public offices were filled by lottery rather than election.
Hints
- What did the Athenians think election favoured?
- Sortition was the democratic method.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Sortition filled the Council of 500, the juries and most magistracies; election was reserved for posts needing expertise, chiefly the generals. To the Athenians election looked aristocratic, it favours the well-known and the wealthy, which inverts the modern assumption about which method is democratic.
Practise Classical Greece and the Polis
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Classical Greece and the Polis
- Athenian democracy paid citizens to attend the assembly and to serve on juries. What problem was the payment…
- Complete the description of ostracism.
- Order the construction (and stress-testing) of the Athenian experiment.
- Sort each feature: filled by lottery or by election in classical Athens?
- An ostracism only counted if enough citizens showed up to scratch a name on a potsherd. Set the quorum.
- Why did Aristotle call the lottery democratic and election aristocratic?