I had no idea I was so popular

Just thought I'd mention that I came across what is obviously a dodgy individual who is selling a used copy of The Pericles Commission for a mere $3,396.  I know I'm a good writer, but that may be a tad excessive.


The oldest known curse inscribed on a cup

Constantina Katsari is a professor of ancient history at the University of Leicestershire.  As you might guess, she's Greek, and that's her specialty.  Over on her blog, she reports today the discovery of the oldest known curse inscribed on a drinking cup.

I've previously written about ancient Greek magic and curse tablets.  The Greeks believed in magic, though a very different kind to the sort we think of these days.  Mostly they wrote curse tablets.

Constantina reports the cup that's been discovered dates to 730-690BC, which puts it an astounding 250 years before the time of Nicolaos and Diotima, and the cup says I am (the cup) of Akesandros and (whoever steals me) will lose his eyes (or money).

Elections and Luck

With elections coming up for our friends in the US, here's a quick description of how you'd be voting if we were all back in ancient Athens.

Every election was a combination of vote and lottery.  The Athenians fiddled with the voting system constantly.  They'd only just invented democracy after all, and they weren't afraid to experiment to see what worked best.  But the system always had the same basic elements.  It went something like this:

  1. Each of the ten tribes took it in turn to supply candidates.  (So that each tribe supplied officials once every ten years.)
  2. The tribe whose turn it was selected candidates for all the elected positions.  The candidates were selected by lottery from across the tribe.
  3. All the citizens of Athens then voted from among the randomly-selected candidates for who they thought would do the best job.

Note the lottery system.  It guaranteed that, unlike modern systems, everyone had an equal chance of one day holding office, and that serial power-seekers hadn't a hope.

If you'd asked an ancient Athenian, they would have told you, in all seriousness, that the lottery system was an essential part of any democracy, and that any state that didn't have a luck element wasn't a true democracy.  Plato's quite famous for saying that anyone who wants power, shouldn't have it.  But that was actually the default Athenian view.