Among all the public payments of fourth-century Athens, jury pay is conspicuous for remaining unchanged at 3 obols per diem. Cleon lifted the rate to 3 obols sometime between his return from Pylos in late 425 and the performance of Knights in early 424.Footnote 1 The rate was unchanged in 414 (Ar. Av. 1541) and was still the same in the early 320s (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 62.2, 68.2).Footnote 2 This stability is curious considering the evidence for fourth-century wage inflation. Per diem wages of workers on state building projects appear to increase over the same period, from around one drachma for unskilled workers in the Erechtheum accounts of 409/8–408/7 (see IG I3 475.272–85, 476.124–34) to 1.5 drachmas for unskilled workers and up to 2.5 drachmas for skilled workers in the Eleusis accounts of 329/8 (see IG II2 1672.26–34).Footnote 3 Alongside this small data sample, we can set the growth in the rate of the adynatos dole paid to those who were poor and physically unable to earn a living, which rose from 1 obol at the start of the fourth century (Lys. 24.13, 26) to 2 obols by the 320s ([Ath. Pol.] 49.4), as well as the pay of the prytaneis, which went from 3 obols to 1 drachma ([Ath. Pol.] 29.5, 62.2). This growth of 50–100 per cent indicates an increase in living costs and suggests that jury pay lost much of its real value in the fourth century.Footnote 4 M.M. Markle asserts that, because jury pay was only ever enough to serve as a ration payment, not a wage, and because the long-term grain price remained stable over the fourth century, the real value of jury pay did not decline.Footnote 5 Setting aside short-term price fluctuations, surviving price data suggest but cannot confirm a single ‘normal’ grain price for the entire fourth century, and it is unlikely that the price of other consumables remained constant.Footnote 6 Even if jury pay was enough to act as a ration payment most of the time, this does not mean that most jurors found it necessary to treat it as such and spend it on food.
We are therefore right to ask why the rate of jury pay remained unchanged, and what the implications were for the composition of juries. In the first place, it made financial sense not to overpay jurors. Even at the same rate of pay, one court day cost a fraction of one assembly meeting, meaning that the courts were the most cost-effective way of dealing with legal business.Footnote 7 Evidently, inflation never caused any of the problems that would have forced a pay rise: inadequate juror enrolments each year, too few volunteers each morning, or juries so unrepresentative that the reality (or just the perception) of impartial justice and popular sovereignty was undermined.Footnote 8 The first challenge is to explain why this was the case: to reconcile the declining real value of jury pay with the inference that jurors remained plentiful and that juries did not change dramatically over time. The second challenge is to address the political dimension of the problem. For while jury pay effectively went backwards, it is striking that Athens’ other payment for mass political participation, assembly pay, rose to the point that it was probably overcompensating most assemblymen for their time. Citizens at principal (kyria) assemblies became the highest paid of all those engaged in public service, and jurors the lowest ([Ath. Pol.] 62.2–3). The last time questions of jury pay and composition were considered in detail, Stephen Todd argued that jury service involved lower costs for farmers than for other citizens, and consequently that farmers dominated juries and provided them with stability.Footnote 9 More tentatively, he suggested that the higher rate of assembly pay was an ideological declaration that Athens remained an ‘assembly-based’ democracy despite the reduction of the assembly's legislative scope after 403/2.Footnote 10 Both arguments simplify a more complicated picture. Farmers alone cannot account for the persistence of the triobol, and a better explanation for the disparity in the rate of pay for jurors and assemblymen can be found when the payments are more fully contextualized in the financial politics of the Lycurgan era.
THE JURY
There was evidently plenty of enthusiasm for jury service, despite the declining value of pay. It appears that 6,000 jurors were enrolled every year, that is, around one-third of all eligible citizens (those over 30, [Ath. Pol.] 63.3).Footnote 11 Jury service, of course, had non-monetary attractions, including socializing, entertainment and the patriotic satisfaction of service (cf. Ar. Vesp. 448–630), but the value of pay must have been the key determinant of participation. As Todd acknowledges,Footnote 12 what mattered was not so much what jury pay could buy as the opportunity cost of serving as a juror instead of doing something else. If the time spent in court would otherwise have been devoted to earning a living, jury service would mean forgoing some income. Some Athenians would have been willing to make this sacrifice, but only up to a point. In explaining the stagnation of jury pay we must first look to those citizens who would not be particularly concerned about its declining value because jury service involved such low opportunity costs to begin with. Earlier treatments of jury demographics identified groups who stood to make a profit (the elderly, the very poor and the adynatoi), or incur no loss (the rich), and assumed they were always over-represented on juries.Footnote 13 Indeed, the declining value of pay must have led to an increase in the number of Athenians from these groups on juries as other citizens enrolled and volunteered less often. Though Old Comedy clearly exaggerates in depicting all jurors as old and poor, it does show that a popular association between old age, poverty and jury service already existed in the fifth century.Footnote 14 If the elderly and the poor, together with the adynatoi and the rich, constituted a large portion of the volunteers every court day by the 320s, they would have helped to make up for the declining participation of other jurors and reduced the practical need for a pay rise.
The courts sat 150–200 days each Athenian year and the system of random juror selection described in the [Ath. Pol.] (63.2–5), in use from c.378/7, required more jurors to volunteer each morning than were actually needed.Footnote 15 Assuming a requirement of 1,500, Mirhady and Schwarz calculate that 2,650 volunteers would be needed to have a 95 per cent chance of empanelling 15 jurors from each of the 10-letter sections in each of the 10 tribes.Footnote 16 Let us begin with the 2,000 Athenians who were over 60 years old, and were consequently considered to be old men (gerontes).Footnote 17 Most of them would have been at least partially reliant on their families for support. How many of them lived close enough to the courts to volunteer every sitting day? Todd follows Hansen in using bouleutic quotas to calculate that two-thirds of citizens probably lived no more than three to four hours’ walk from town, making it possible to ‘walk to Athens, attend an assembly meeting, and return home’ all in one day.Footnote 18 While we cannot know just how far an Athenian might have been willing to travel for a specific trial, jury service was less reliable and lower paid than the assembly. We can also say that travelling began to entail more significant inconvenience once it took longer than the time between first light (astronomical twilight) and sunrise to reach the courts, because this made it necessary to make some of the journey at night. Travel at night risked mishap or robbery (Ar. Av. 496–8, 1491, Eccl. 544–6, 666–71), and it was impossible to know when to set out because first light, coinciding with the rooster crow, was the only reliable indicator of the approaching sunrise (Ar. Eccl. 740–1; cf. Andoc. 1.38).Footnote 19 The only option would be to build in a time buffer by setting out much earlier than was strictly required (and so to travel at night), or to stay closer to the courts overnight. In either scenario a citizen had to invest more time than was necessary, all without a guarantee of being selected. The distance that could be covered between first light and sunrise can then serve as a rough approximation of the catchment area in which jurors who volunteered constantly or frequently would have lived. Assuming a moderate pace of 5 kilometres per hour and using modern astronomical data for Athens, a juror could live around eight kilometres (an hour and a half) away from the courts as the crow flies—the distance to the Piraeus—and still reach the courts in winter, and around nine and a half kilometres (almost two hours) away in summer.Footnote 20 The distance of 9.6 kilometres (5.9 miles) takes in almost all the city demes, including the large deme of Halimus, but easily excludes the nearest, largest rural demes of Acharnae and Aexone. The dicastic pinakia indicate that bouleutic quotas dictated how many jurors could be enrolled from each trittys in each tribe, and accordingly that 26 per cent of jurors (1,560) were registered in demes in city trittyes.Footnote 21 A group of 1,560 jurors would only be enough to provide a majority of the daily requirement of volunteers if almost all of them volunteered every court day. The actual percentage of jurors living in this area must, however, have been higher, let us say one-third, since internal migration to the asty meant that some Athenians resided in city demes while being registered elsewhere.Footnote 22 Assuming that the number of gerontes who were registered in city demes but were too frail to reach the courts was offset by additional gerontes who were non-registered residents of city demes, a guess of about five hundred gerontes volunteering each morning is realistic. Some jurors certainly served out of poverty (Dem. 24.123). It is difficult to estimate how many able-bodied Athenians earned 3 obols or fewer per day, but there could not have been many. A sum of 2–3 obols per diem is attested as the minimum adult daily income in the second half of the fourth century, and surviving wage data (see page 1 above) suggests that the great majority of citizens earned far more than this.Footnote 23 It is therefore hard to see how jury pay could offer profit, or even remuneration, for many save the adynatoi, for whom it was an easy way to supplement their dole. If we estimate that five per cent of citizens were physically unable to earn a living, and then exclude those who lived too far away, were too young, too old, or owned too much property, we are left with about one hundred and thirty adynatoi.Footnote 24 As for the wealthy, at least one liturgist juror is attested,Footnote 25 and the state debtor who sat on a jury was probably another wealthy man (Dem. 21.182). The leisured rich and those affluent enough to work only irregularly consisted of 1,200–2,000 eisphora payers, worth at least 1 talent.Footnote 26 Many probably spent a great deal of time in town, but it is also true that the wealthy had many leisure options and the politically engaged among them typically preferred roles that offered scope for individual distinction. The elderly, poor and adynatoi of the city-demes, by contrast, may well have volunteered constantly (150–200 days a year), since jury service held additional value as an opportunity for politically significant participation and as a means of resisting social marginalization.Footnote 27 Altogether, the jurors who faced the lowest-opportunity cost could not have provided more than a thousand of the approximately two thousand six hundred and fifty volunteers needed on a typical court day, but their constant presence would be a major contribution towards shielding juries from the most disruptive effects of inflation.
Most of the remaining 1,650 volunteers each morning, who came from the other 5,000 citizens in the jury pool, were penêtes—Athenians who had to work for a living.Footnote 28 Each one would have to volunteer one court day in every three. This meant journeying to the courts 50–67 days a year and, assuming that an average of 1,500 jurors were chosen out of 2,650 volunteers, spending 28–38 days a year sitting on a jury. A time commitment of this size needs explanation. Every time a penês volunteered, he accepted the possibility that he would lose the better part of that day in court, especially in winter.Footnote 29 If he was not selected, he could watch proceedings or complete errands, though important tasks would always require a dedicated trip into town. The relationship between time spent and money earned was not as direct for all Athenians as it was for those who were paid by the day and who, as a result, may not have had enough control over their work to make anything other than irregular jury service feasible. The cumulative financial effect of spending too much time in court would still, however, be felt by everyone earning more than 3 obols per diem, and in deciding how much time was too much a citizen had the yardstick of his own past experience and that of his peers. Some jurors were no doubt prepared to count the days they spent in court as paid leisure. Yet it is a fair assumption that most leisure time was taken during the approximately seventy-five days of annual festivals, during which the courts did not sit.Footnote 30 Commitments closer to home, to one's extended family or fellow demesmen, also had a claim on non-working time. For a penês, therefore, jury service typically meant forgoing the opportunity to make more money doing something else.
If we have not seriously underestimated the amount of leisure time enjoyed by the majority of Athenians, we must assume that a minority of penêtes volunteered more frequently than others, that is, more than the 50–67-day average. Todd argues that a pay rise was not necessary because ‘the vast majority’ (160) of Athenians, and consequently of jurors, were farmers, and farmers valued pay so much that its declining value did not affect their participation.Footnote 31 Rather than a majority, however, only one-third of citizens could have made their living entirely off the land.Footnote 32 Nor was constant or frequent attendance automatically easier for farmers. While it is true that a sizeable number of farmers must have lived in the city demes, these communities also contained the highest concentration of non-farmers in Attica. It is therefore likely that non-farmers were over-represented on juries, while the majority of farmers, living in the coastal and inland trittyes, were too far away for above-average attendance to be feasible.Footnote 33 Some men in their twenties from distant demes must have lived in Athens and the Piraeus for extended periods to earn a wage, but they were too young to enrol as jurors. Other arguments for a heavy agrarian presence in the courts are also open to challenge. Todd claims that the seasonal nature of agriculture generally provided farmers with stretches of quiet time outside the grain harvest that could be spent in the courts at virtually no cost.Footnote 34 The assessment and tolerance of risk will differ from individual to individual, but it is important not to underestimate the challenges of highly variable rainfall, pests and disease to the survival of farming households, and the extent to which Athenian farmers responded by investing more time in their land.Footnote 35 The strategy of crop diversification added a variety of seasonal time-sensitive tasks and so ensured that labour was not overwhelmingly concentrated in a few months of the year. Subsequent research has strengthened the case for two other hypothesized features of Athenian agriculture that Todd rejects: intensification and significant market participation.Footnote 36 Productivity was improved using more intensive methods, whether weeding, hand-tilling and terracing in a biennial fallow system, or interplanting, integrated animal husbandry and market gardening in a regime of rotating cereals with pulses. Exact agricultural practice was almost certainly highly variable,Footnote 37 but intensification is associated with population pressure in densely settled regions like Attica. The need to invest more time and energy, and perhaps to supplement yields through craft or off-farm labour, was greatest for the significant minority with fewer than 40 plethra.Footnote 38 The time demanded by diversification and intensification was further increased by the tendency of some farmers to have fragmented land holdings, in part as another safeguard against crop failure. Only wealthy farmers, freed from the need to work their land personally, could have thought that journeying into Athens 50–67 days a year involved no economic cost or, more accurately, did not elevate risk. I do not mean to suggest that Aristotle is accurate in claiming that farmers were always kept busy on their farms because they had little property (Pol. 1318b9–17),Footnote 39 merely that farmers did not have significantly more time to participate than other Athenians. Todd's farmers would also be drawn to the courts because, being almost but not totally self-sufficient, they would welcome ready cash for occasional purchases.Footnote 40 Once deemed peripheral, markets and the cash economy are increasingly recognized as playing a key role in Greek, and especially Athenian, agriculture.Footnote 41 While not forgetting that ad hoc needs could be satisfied through barter and borrowing, markets could be a critical way of managing risk because they offered a way to redress imbalances between crop yields, to survive crop failure, and to rely on cash-cropping when there was too little land to be self-sufficient. Despite Dicaeopolis’ well-known statement that he had never heard the word ‘buy’ in the country (Ar. Ach. 33–6), it bears repeating that the first thing he does upon returning home is to set up a market (719–28). Of all the farmers of Attica, those living in the city demes—closest to the courts—had the largest permanent market in the Greek world on their doorstep, and some farmers appear to have been regular market participants.Footnote 42 Nor were markets unique to the asty, for agorai are attested in over a dozen demes throughout Attica, and these may well have served as venues for periodic local markets.Footnote 43 Agriculturalists’ ongoing need for pottery, fuel and tools, especially in more populous demes, mandated the presence of non-farmers in rural settings (for example Ar. Pax 1198–202, Pl. Resp. 369d–370d, 371b) and so fuelled a local cash economy. In sum, the economics of agriculture, especially near the asty, did not mean that farmers were significantly more likely to participate in the courts than non-farmers.
Who were the most numerous penêtes on juries if not farmers? We can start by observing that the availability of leisure was not fixed across time by class or profession. While the degree to which slave and family labour freed up citizens’ time for democratic participation is uncertain,Footnote 44 T.W. Gallant's reconstruction of the life cycle of a farming household allows us to see that a householder's opportunity for leisure was greatest when the supply of labour was at its greatest and the opportunity existed for it to be invested productively.Footnote 45 This was most likely to occur when a citizen could call on the labour of adolescent or adult children. Gallant's model assumes that additional labour could be directed into more intensive cultivation, although the need to dower a daughter, for example, could mean the loss of land and hence spare capacity. Yet a young adult was still an asset, especially a son since he could go outside the household and contribute an additional income as a labourer or rower. It was even easier for non-farmers to redeploy the surplus labour of a son and so gain additional income and leisure; non-farmers were more likely to live close to the year-round labour market of the asty, and for them a dowry was less likely to reduce their productive means. Thus I suspect that fathers in their late forties and fifties were the most likely group of penêtes to volunteer at the courts, being primarily motivated by the non-monetary attractions of service. There were around five thousand six hundred men aged between 45 and 60 and even after subtracting the few jurors (c.200) who were adynatoi, very poor or rich, around one thousand six hundred would have been living in the city demes alone. The vast majority of these Athenians must have been fathers to at least one son. If they attended frequently, say one in every two court days (800 each day), then together with 1,000 constant volunteers and a number of infrequent jurors (volunteering about one court day in four, 38–50 days a year, serving 22–8 days), the courts would have an adequate average morning attendance.
This reconstruction of a demographically complex jury, rather than one dominated by a single group, provides a more plausible explanation for why inflation never compelled an increase in pay. Though necessarily speculative, the broad parameters and underlying assumptions are unlikely to be wrong. The slow decline in the value of pay reduced participation by some Athenians, but it also reduced the competition faced by those who could serve constantly or frequently, and so allowed them to grow as a proportion both of the pool and of juries. Work and pay became less widely distributed, geographically and demographically. The courts therefore followed a different trajectory to the broadening of fourth-century political participation that can be observed in the deme affiliations of stratêgoi and inferred from the growth of assembly pay.Footnote 46 This gradual decline in diversity was possible because the number of enrolments each year was still sufficient, and the juries assembled each morning still contained Athenians from a range of occupations and classes.Footnote 47 The most discernible change would have been an increase in the average age of jurors, but if this was noticed it was probably not much cause for complaint. The main criterion Athenians consistently used to discriminate between citizens was, after all, age.Footnote 48
THE ASSEMBLY
The contrasting history of assembly pay means that we also require a political explanation for the unvarying rate of jury pay. Assembly pay arose as a practical necessity. Significant citizen losses in the Peloponnesian War and post-war economic hardship made it difficult to achieve a quorum of 6,000 ([Ath. Pol.] 41.3; cf. Ar. Eccl. 184–9).Footnote 49 Sometime in the 390s, in what was most likely an attempt to find the minimum pay necessary to achieve a reliable quorum, pay was introduced at 1 obol per assembly before rising to 2 obols and then to 3 obols by c.391.Footnote 50 Then, after decades of silence, we encounter assembly pay again in the 320s ([Ath. Pol.] 62.2), when the rate was 1 drachma for an ordinary assembly and 1.5 drachmas for a lengthier kyria assembly. Economic recovery and growth in citizen numbers make it unlikely that the difficulties of the 390s persisted and kept driving up the rate. At the same time, the doubling in assembly pay from 3 obols to 1 drachma for an ordinary meeting probably outpaced wage inflation, and this is certainly true of the pay of kyria assemblies once the decision was taken to pay an additional 3 obols sometime after 390.Footnote 51 Since most assemblies lasted half a day,Footnote 52 most assemblymen in the 320s were actually being overcompensated for their time. We are left to conclude that the divergence between jury pay and assembly pay was a political phenomenon. Most of the pay gap probably opened up late in the fourth century. Near-constant campaigning in the first half of the century must have left little capacity for taking on large, recurrent expenditures. The courts themselves were temporarily shut at least twice owing to lack of funds (Dem. 39.17, 45.4). In 341, Demosthenes says that annual revenues had once fallen to just 130 talents (Dem. 10.38), probably during the Social War (357/5–355/4), and had since recovered to 400 talents, which was the approximate level of domestic revenues in 431 (Thuc. 2.13.3; Xen. An. 7.1.27). By contrast, in the third quarter of the century revenues allegedly climbed to 1,200 talents a year ([Plut.] Mor. 842F) under Lycurgus’ financial stewardship (c.336/5–326/5). It would therefore be difficult to take on much of the minimum 25 extra talents that assembly pay cost each year in the early 320s relative to 390, any time before 336.Footnote 53
Todd tentatively suggests that a much higher rate was paid for the assembly in order to make an ideological declaration that the Athenian democracy was an assembly-based democracy despite the constitutional changes made at the end of the fifth century.Footnote 54 There is little reason, however, to suspect that fourth-century Athenians were aware that the process of nomothesia and the reassignment of eisangelia cases to the courts were relatively recent innovations and that these had diminished the power of the assembly relative to the courts. nomothesia, like all laws in force, was attributed to Solon (for example Dem. 20.89–90, Hyp. 5.22). Even if this change was common knowledge, it is unlikely to have been a source of anxiety. The courts were seen as a bulwark of the democracy (for example Lyc. 1.3–4, 79, Aeschin. 3.3–8), and however their exact relationship with the assembly and the dêmos was conceived,Footnote 55 there was no sense that the division of responsibilities between court and assembly was a zero-sum game. An additional factor at work for Todd was ‘the Athenian attitude to public finance’, that is, to distribute money whenever possible.Footnote 56 An increased rate of pay would inevitably have been popular and the assembly was a more effective vehicle for distribution than the courts since all citizens could attend. Yet any desire to distribute surplus cash could be more effectively satisfied via one-off distributions, since these did not commit the polis to fresh, ongoing expenditures, and the entire fiscal approach of Lycurgus is at odds with the impulse to distribute surplus wealth on a continuing basis as an end unto itself. Lycurgus’ apparent control over financial policy was instead based on his ability to enrich and embellish Athens through meticulous and innovative financial management.Footnote 57 Even less convincing is the notion that leaders from Eubulus onwards exploited a desire for pay and used it to induce the dêmos to abandon an imperialistic foreign policy.Footnote 58 It is true that pay is depicted in terms of distribution and patronage. Pericles invented jury pay to overcome Cimon's personal largesse,Footnote 59 Cleon won the blind loyalty of jurors by increasing their pay,Footnote 60 Cleophon bought the masses with the diôbelia and Callicrates tried to do the same ([Ath. Pol.] 28.3–4), while the early-rate rises of assembly pay are associated with political one-upmanship ([Ath. Pol.] 41.3; cf. Ar. Eccl. 102–4, 184–8). Demosthenes later attacks opponents by claiming, in strikingly similar language to Aristophanes, that politicians are controlling the dêmos with theoric payments.Footnote 61 Clientelism was not absent from Athens,Footnote 62 but pay for political participation was different in key respects to typical client-patronage exchange, not least because the money already belonged to the dêmos. Our texts in fact exaggerate the power of pay: the sources of [Ath. Pol.] and Plutarch do so out of anti-democratic prejudice, whereas Aristophanes and Demosthenes articulate a topos of dysfunctional government to attack contemporary politics. To take such claims at face value is to accept an improbable view of the fourth-century dêmos as entirely venal and short-sighted.
The problem of the divergence between jury pay and assembly pay must instead be understood in relation to the Lycurgan expansion of the Pnyx. Beginning c.340, the Pnyx was enlarged from c.3,200 m2 (Pnyx II) to 5,600 m2 (Pnyx III) and so grew in capacity from approximately eight thousand to thirteen thousand and four hundred people.Footnote 63 Todd cannot be correct in assuming an unplanned relationship between the increase in capacity and the increase in pay.Footnote 64 The expansion must have been motivated by a desire to host larger assembly meetings, for there seems little point in expanding the Pnyx without the intention of making regular use of the increased space. The larger Theatre of Dionysius could, after all, have served for irregular mass meetings. Though some Athenians would doubtless have attended without pay, experience taught that increasing capacity would not, in itself, result in correspondingly larger audiences. Filling the new Pnyx would require almost half of all citizens to attend. To encourage attendance from distant demes it would be necessary not only to increase the rate of pay but also to extend it to all attendees, or at least to the nominal capacity of the Pnyx.Footnote 65
The question is why the Athenians were prepared to invest so much in increasing the average size of assemblies. The Pnyx has been seen, along with the rest of the Lycurgan construction programme, as a demonstration of power and an attempt to strengthen the democratic life of the polis.Footnote 66 A near-contemporary parallel suggests that space and pay were increased with an additional set of benefits in mind. In the rebuilding of the Theatre of Dionysus and the regularization of the theôrikon, just a few years before Pnyx III, we find the same combination of monumentalization and subsidization. Recent work has recovered the political and economic agenda behind the theatre, and has made it possible to recognize the Pnyx as a comparable project. Begun under Eubulus, the theatre was rebuilt in stone and its capacity expanded from 8,000 to as much as 17,000.Footnote 67 New spending made the Great Dionysia as magnificent as possible in a bid to enhance its international prestige (Ar. Ach. 501–8; Aeschin. 3.34).Footnote 68 These measures asserted Athens’ ownership over fifth-century tragedy in the face of emerging counterclaims.Footnote 69 In economic terms, they allowed Athens’ dramatic heritage and festival to become the basis of a lucrative ‘cultural industry’.Footnote 70 The economic benefit to the city's traders of thousands of visitors from all over Attica and Greece must have been immense, and from 335/4 the polis directly profited by selling the hides of sacrificial animals (IG II2 1496.68–92). Eric Csapo has offered a reappraisal of the theôrikon as another way in which the polis was able to profit. Prior to the rebuilding, the polis had contracted private leasees to build temporary wooden seating and allowed them to profit by charging entrance fees.Footnote 71 The theôrikon was probably the name given to irregular subsidies for these entrance fees, and these appear to have been regularized around the time the new theatre was begun. For Csapo the theôrikon was regularized to compensate theatre-goers after the decision had been taken to keep charging entrance fees even though wooden seating was being phased out. The fees collected by the polis helped to finance the reconstruction.Footnote 72
This interpretation is problematic and obscures the affinity between the theôrikon and assembly pay as payments primarily intended to maximize participation. Even if the polis was charging fees to fund the construction, it would still have to share much of the takings with leasees for some years because the need for wooden seating did not suddenly cease with the start of the project. The highest seats in the theatron do not seem to have been completed until c.320/19.Footnote 73 It is also difficult to see how the theôrikon could constitute effective compensation: in order for the polis to profit, the full cost of attendance could not be paid to everyone. Most importantly, Athenian fiscal practice makes it implausible that the polis itself would charge fees. The fees of the leasees were an economic barrier to participation in an important civic and religious event, but they were the unavoidable cost of a system that gave the polis a cost-effective way of securing the seating that allowed as many as possible to attend. It is likelier (and consistent with the entire system of public pay) that, by instituting the theôrikon, the polis was trying to ameliorate this barrier while it still existed, rather than helping to perpetuate it.Footnote 74 One of the original arguments in favour of reconstructing the theatre was, surely, that the investment would eventually eliminate the need for fees. In this way, for the Dionysia the newly regularized theôrikon would transition over time from an entrance-fee subsidy to a distribution designed to tackle the wider obstacles of time and travel that made participating in the festival harder for some Athenians.Footnote 75 This becomes even more likely in light of the increasing value of the theôrikon over time. Seats cost 2 obols (Dem. 18.28) and citizens initially received a lump-sum payment of 1 drachma—the partial cost of five days of performances at the Dionysia.Footnote 76 Both Hyperides and Dinarchus in 323 refer to incidents where someone illegally claimed ‘the five drachmas’ on behalf of someone who was absent.Footnote 77 Hyperides identifies this money as the theôrikon, and the fact that Dinarchus can refer to it as ‘the five drachmas’ without further explanation suggests that this was the well-known value of the theôrikon at the time. It therefore appears that the theôrikon went from 2 obols a day to 1 drachma a day. If the theôrikon was being paid as compensation for the ongoing collection of entrance fees, the polis would gain nothing by raising the theôrikon in line with rising fees.Footnote 78 Rather than a device to allow the polis to enjoy the profits that had once belonged to leasees, and one which only increased participation as a beneficial side-effect, the primary purpose of the theôrikon was to raise attendance. Its impact grew as the capacity of the theatre and the health of public finances increased, eventually maximizing the size of the audience and its attendant benefits of greater festal splendour and greater economic activity.
The expansion of the Pnyx and the increase in assembly pay was another use of monumentalization and subsidization to orchestrate massive public spectacles that did more than project a sense of power and democratic vigour. Like the theatre, 1 drachma per diem was eventually paid to ensure that as much of the dêmos as possible was unified through the shared experience of exercising ownership over a fundamental institution facing external threat. In the theatre it was the fifth-century tragic canon. In the Pnyx it was democratic self-determination, now staged as another treasured possession, at a time when Athens was effectively under Macedonian suzerainty.Footnote 79 The attraction of greater numbers of rural citizens in particular may have been part of the reason for lifting assembly pay. In the absence of empire the countryside (chôra) assumed new economic and military importance, and it received new cultural emphasis in the third quarter of the century. As part of the formalization of the ephêbeia c.336/5, young Athenians came to know Attica through their tour of sacred sites and subsequent duties of patrolling the countryside and serving as garrisons ([Ath. Pol.] 42.3–5).Footnote 80 In Against Leocrates Lycurgus binds Athenians together by appealing to the city and to the countryside as dual objects of civic devotion.Footnote 81 By more closely integrating asty and chôra the growth in assembly pay narrowed the gap between the reality of partial attendance and the theory of the assembly as a gathering of the entire citizenry, allowing the dêmos to gaze on its corporate self.Footnote 82 While the number of Athenians from non-city demes on fourth-century juries probably fell, the assembly became more rural than ever before.
Lycurgus could not have failed to recognize that with larger assemblies, as with larger festival crowds, came greater economic opportunities. The enlarged Pnyx made it possible to organize gatherings of citizens at regular intervals throughout the year that approached the scale of the annual Dionysia. This, in turn, meant significant injections of capital into the asty, in addition to that given out as pay, as more citizens visited more frequently. Much of the pay may have been spent in the agora, just a short walk downhill, soon after each meeting. Part of the plan of Pnyx III may in fact have been to bring the agora to the assembly: the two impressive stoas just to the south, had they been completed, would probably have hosted shops.Footnote 83 A greater rate of assembly pay also profited the polis by enhancing its capacity to attract the benefaction that was becoming increasingly vital to its welfare. Just over half of all known assembly decrees from the period 352/1–322/1 deal with honours,Footnote 84 and some show that the building programme itself was the beneficiary of largesse (IG II3 1 352, 470). One drachma in assembly pay encouraged all those citizens who had journeyed to Athens for the Dionysia, thanks in part to the 1 drachma per diem theôrikon, to stay on and attend the special assembly in the theatre at the end of the festival.Footnote 85 By ensuring the largest possible attendance, assembly pay, alongside the theôrikon, enhanced the Dionysian assembly's power to incentivize benefaction as the most prestigious venue for the proclamation of honours.Footnote 86 At the same time, by the 330s the Pnyx had been firmly incorporated into the honorific machinery of the polis as the normal venue for the proclamation of honours for citizens.Footnote 87 This created another reason to increase the magnificence of the assembly as a spectacle, since to do so ‘upgraded’ the second engine of Athens’ burgeoning honour-economy. In comparison, increased jury pay and the monumentalization of the courts would have achieved little. The limited number of jurors required most days meant that the courts, for all their importance and drama, did not have the same potential as mass spectacle. As a result, at the same time as jurors received no additional pay, no effort was made under Lycurgus to add to or redesign court venues.Footnote 88 So long as there were enough jurors willing to try their luck each morning, there was no need to pay them more.
