In the summer of 406 BC an Athenian fleet beat a Spartan one off the Arginusae islands, and then the weather turned. Twenty-five Athenian ships had gone down with their crews. Men were alive in the water. Two officers were detailed with forty-seven triremes to go back for the shipwrecked and the dead, and the storm made it impossible. The victory was real and it was complete, and what came home with it was several hundred families who wanted to know why nobody had gone back for their sons.

Eight generals had commanded at Arginusae. Two of them, understanding what was waiting, did not come home. Six did, because they had won.

The first Assembly nearly acquitted them. The generals explained the storm and produced their pilots and shipmates as witnesses, and — this is Xenophon's word, not mine — were on the point of persuading the room. Citizens stood up and offered to post bail for them. Then the meeting was adjourned, and the reason it was adjourned is worth writing down carefully: it was late in the day, and they could no longer have distinguished the hands in the voting. It got dark. Athens counted raised arms, and the sun had gone.

In the gap, the Council drafted a procedure, and a man called Callixeinus wrote it. The Assembly would decide the guilt of all the generals together, in one vote. This was flatly illegal. Athenian law required a man to answer his own charge — the decree of Cannonus, which somebody was about to quote back at them. A single vote on six men is not a trial. It is a verdict wearing a trial's clothes.

Whether the room understood that is not really in question, because when a man stood up and said so, the room shouted for his arrest.

Fifty men who could not have been arranged

Which brings us to the officials on the platform, and to how they got there.

The Athenian Council of five hundred was not elected. It was drawn by lot, fifty citizens from each of the ten tribes, and no man could sit on it more than twice in his life. Each tribe's fifty presided over the city's business for a tenth of the year. From among that fifty, one was drawn each morning to chair, and Aristotle's description of that office is worth having exactly: "There is a single President of the Prytanes, elected by lot, who presides for a night and a day; he may not hold the office for more than that time, nor may the same individual hold it twice." One night and one day, once in a lifetime. He kept the keys to the treasuries and the state seal, he slept in the round house at the centre of the city, and in the morning he was nobody again.

The design is not subtle once you see what it is aimed at. You cannot buy a man whose name you do not yet know. Every route corruption normally takes — the quiet word the week before, the favour banked in spring and called in at harvest, the faction that works its own man into the seat — depends on knowing in advance who will be sitting in it. Sortition closes all of them at once, and it closes them without requiring anybody to be honest. That is its great economy. It does not ask for virtue. It removes the opportunity.

And the Athenians were not naive about the lottery, which is the part usually left out of the telling. They did not allot everything. Generals were elected, in the Assembly, by show of hands, because commanding a fleet is a skill and skill can be recognised. The lot was for the offices where the qualification was judgment, and judgment was held to be spread widely enough that any citizen would serve. It was a considered division of labour, and the men now on trial had come up through the other half of it.

So the machine was working perfectly on the morning it was tested. The crowd wanted an illegal vote. The law said the presiding officers had to refuse to put it. And those officers were fifty men whom no faction had chosen, whom nobody could have known to approach, most of whom would never hold public office again.

Callixeinus went back up on the platform and turned the charge on them: if they would not put the question, they could be tried alongside the generals. The room roared for it.

Xenophon records what happened next in one sentence. "Then the Prytanes, stricken with fear, agreed to put the question — all of them except Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus; and he said that in no case would he act except in accordance with the law."

He was about sixty-three. He would be dead in seven years, partly for being this kind of man in this kind of room, and at his own trial he raised this day as the only public office he had ever held.

Forty-nine

Now count what the lottery had actually delivered. Fifty officials, none of them bought, none of them buyable, selected by a process no interest in Athens could predict or influence, holding an office too brief and too unrepeatable to be worth an investment. By the standard the system was built to meet, every one of those fifty men was clean.

Forty-nine of them folded in about the time it takes to shout.

That is the sentence the story is really for. Being unpurchasable turns out to be a much smaller virtue than it sounds, because the pressure that arrived in the Assembly that day was not a purse. It was a room. And a room does not need a bought chairman; it needs only volume and an afternoon, and it had both. Athens had built an exquisite defence against arrangement, and arrangement was not what came.

The rest went quickly. Euryptolemus, kinsman to one of the accused, spoke for them and proposed the lawful alternative — try them under the decree of Cannonus, one at a time, each man with at least a day to speak. The Assembly voted between his motion and the Council's, and chose his. For a moment the illegal vote was dead. Then a man named Menecles lodged a formal objection under oath, which by law should have suspended the whole business, and instead a second vote was taken, and the second vote went the other way. All eight generals were condemned, including the two who were not in Attica to hear it. The six who were in Athens were put to death.

And then the postscript, which is the worst part. "And not long afterwards the Athenians repented." They voted to prosecute the men who had deceived them, Callixeinus among them. He eventually got back into the city, and Xenophon disposes of him in nine words: hated by everybody, dead of starvation.

But nobody had deceived them. Every material fact was on the floor that afternoon, including the law they were breaking, stated out loud by a man they threatened for stating it. The information was never missing. What was missing was an interval between deciding and doing.

We have inherited the opposite instinct, almost entirely. Our institutions defend themselves by knowing afterwards: the register, the disclosure, the recusal, the published minute, the audit that arrives in eighteen months. We guard against arrangement by making it visible in retrospect. Athens guarded against it by making it unforeseeable in prospect. Both are serious answers to the problem of a man who can be bought. Neither of them is an answer to a room that has already agreed with itself, and both of them are silent about the forty-nine — who were not corrupt, and were not brave, and were never asked to be.

The only thing that ever adjourned that Assembly was running out of light to count hands by. Not a rule. The sun.