How it began
Athens filled its juries and many of its offices by lot. At first jurors were taken on a first come, first served basis. From 403 BCE the city reformed its allotment in a series of steps, and from 370 BCE onward it used the kleroterion. Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians describes the procedure, with five of the devices in each room set aside for the drawing. Archaeologists first found kleroteria in the Athenian Agora in the 1930s and dated those examples to the second century BCE.
How it works
The device was a slab of stone cut with rows of slots, with a tube attached to its side. Each citizen had a bronze ticket, called a pinakion, that identified him. The tickets were pushed into the slots in columns, one column for each section of a tribe. An official, the archon, then dropped a mix of black and white dice into the tube and drew them out one at a time. A white die meant that the whole row at the top was chosen. A black die meant that row was passed over. He went on down the rows until every seat for the day was filled.
What changed first
Because the dice fell in an order nobody controlled, and whole rows across all the tribes rose or fell together, no one could know in advance who would sit on a given jury. The first citizen drawn became the ticket inserter and served as a juror himself. A modern press account describes the device as a machine the ancient Greeks used to fight corruption.
Where it stands today
Surviving kleroteria can be seen in the Museum of the Ancient Agora in Athens, where a marble example is shown with the bronze tickets that went in its slots. Another large one is in the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at Reading in England. The museum in Athens describes the object as an allotment machine used for the random selection of citizens to civic offices.
