One cube.
Five tickets.
Two people can each have an equal chance.
That does not make their chances independent.
Keep two identities in view. Move one ticket.
Will they enter the service pool together?
Constitution of the Athenians, 63–64.
A small modern experiment with an ancient procedure.
Who shares a row?
What this board assumesStart with A1 and B1 in the same row. Keep this board, then move the second ticket down. Inspect the chances in both placements before drawing.
To swap, choose two tickets in the same letter column. All twenty identities are invented.
White admits a row to the service pool; black rejects it. This does not assign a courtroom.
Chance model: placement is already fixed. Every colour order with the stated cube counts is equally likely; each cube is removed without replacement.
What if the placement is still random?
Keep a board to preserve its placement, pair, cube supply and released sequence before making a change.
Every possible colour order
W = white, B = black. Read left to right from row 1. Choose a strip to put that complete order on the board. A chosen example is recorded as chosen, separately from a random draw.
Read what the lots decide.
Back to the boardClose English
Loading the printed witness…
Leaf 77 and leaf 78 both print the heading LXIV. The chapter-64 page is leaf 77, where sequential numbering would give LXIII. We retain the printed heading and identify the leaf. Inspect this page at Internet Archive.
Read the edition and source record
F. G. Kenyon, Aristotelis Atheniensium Respublica, Oxford, first published 1920; the scanned imprint lists reprints through 1958. The work is late fourth century BCE and conventionally attributed to Aristotle. Square brackets retain this editor’s supplies, including supplies crossing a word boundary. English and word notes are new. All three full pages retain the critical apparatus. The row mechanism follows a material interpretation of the text, rather than treating the old translation “balloting-room” as a machine description.
Source and license notice · Retrieval and rendering record · File identities · Center for Hellenic Studies: jury selection
Keep the reasoning.
What changed when the tickets stopped sharing a row? What did not change? Explain the role of the placement assumption and cite κατὰ πέντε πινάκια εἷς.
This page does not autosave. Save an editable study to keep your explanation, placement, draw and comparison.
Take the experiment with you.
The link includes both boards and their draws. Your explanation stays out of the link. The illustrated reading embeds the diagrams, fonts, Greek, English, all source pages and licenses; it works without scripts or a connection.
The procedure and the experiment.
What the text supplies
Two devices per tribe (63.2); ten approximately equal letter groups within each tribe (63.4); a chosen ticket inserter and five frames per device (64.2); white and black bronze cubes, one per five tickets, with the inserter also counted (64.3); a further allotment to a court (64.4).
What you are operating
One schematic five-column board for ordinary tickets in five letter groups of one tribe. A–E and the numbers are modern identifiers, not copies of Greek inscriptions. Four, six or eight full rows; no uneven attendance or empty slots. The inserter is outside these tickets. The row chances do not compute a historical jury quota. Drawing every row is an explanatory completion, not a claim about historical stopping rules.
What the numbers assume
Fixed placement; an unbiased order of a fixed supply of white and black cubes. The chance calculation is exact under these assumptions. Moving and shuffling tickets are experiments in how placement matters, not evidence that a historical official could arrange it freely. No result establishes how tamper-resistant the real process was.
Who is absent
This was not a lottery of all Athenians. Jury service concerned eligible adult male citizens, with age and status restrictions (63.3); women, enslaved people and resident foreigners were excluded. The service pool is not a single court, and selection says nothing about a later verdict.