Drawing Lots

Book excerpt: This book offers the first comprehensive study of drawing lots as a central, ubiquitous institution of ancient Greek society. Led by an egalitarian mindset, Greeks drew lots as a matter of course to distribute inheritance, booty, sacrificial meat, and lands, to mix groups, select individuals, and set turns. Lot-oracles were used for divination; otherwise, the gods guarded the justice of the procedure but rarely determined the outcome. When drawing lots was gradually applied to polis governance, classical Athens made sortition the basis of the first democracy in human history. A Greek innovation, drawing lots for governance inspires new democratic politics today.