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The Constitution of Athens

Historia Civilis · 1.5M views · 2017-12-15 · 19:20

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Overview

Historia Civilis explains the constitution of ancient Athens, including its assembly, offices and use of sortition to choose leaders. It draws on Aristotle and Plutarch.

On Hacker News

Recommended in governance threads for showing how randomness and short terms prevented power concentration.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2018–2026

Topics

World history
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ancient athenssortitionconstitutionhistorydemocracy

What people said

KK7NIL · 2026-03 · Recommendation

Perhaps you're joking, but Athenian democracy had a significant amount of randomness, with candidates being chosen randomly from the top vote winners. Terms were also only 1 year for most positions. These, and other systems, helped prevent any one person from monopolizing power. This is a good video on this: [VIDEO]

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vulcan01 · 2020-10 · Recommendation

The ancient Athenians used something similar to select their leaders: [LINK] EDIT: I remember this from a Historia Civilis video: [VIDEO] You should watch the whole thing (it's pretty interesting) but skip to 8m00s to watch the part about sortition.

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drexlspivey · 2018-05 · Recommendation

In ancient Athens only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military duties were able to vote, roughly 20% of the population. This seems pretty oligarchic today but it was a massive improvement in the council of elders that used to rule before that. Historia civilis has a great video on the constitution of ancient Athens. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Historia Civilis, played through YouTube.

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