The Dead Media Notebook (73 page)

The hollow ballot represented a vote for condemnation, the solid one was for acquittal, and the juro dropped the one that reflected his decision into a closed receptacle on his way out of the court room. The other he dropped into a box reserved for discards.

They are curious objects, the ballots, almost whimsical-looking, to those of us accustomed to the plain- paper or complex mechanical ballots of latter days. But in fact there seems to be little about the Athenian juror ballot that wasn’t shaped by years of utilitarian redesign.

The generous size and shape of the disk, for example, would have made the ballots easy to hold in the hand. The slight dimensions of the hub, more importantly, would have allowed the jurors to comfortably conceal their decision by holding the rod lightly between a thumb and finger, thus covering the tell-tale ends as they went to vote. And because the hub and disk were of a piece, and cast in durable bronze, the ballots would have been well suited for the rigors of the Athenian justice system’s high- volume information flow.

Perhaps it’s also worth noting the binary nature of the information conveyed by this particular medium. Certainly, between the massively parallel 1-bit computations of jury balloting and the 50-bit capacity of the kleroterion, the Athenians were doing what was, by the standards of antiquity, an extraordinary amount of systematic binary data processing.

Not quite as much, maybe, or in nearly so sophisticated a form as the Chinese, who had long before invented the remarkable 6-bit binary fortune-telling medium known as the I Ching, which is known, as well, to have inspired Gottfried Leibniz many centuries later to work out the theoretical foundations of binary mathematics.

But it’s not impossible that the binary workings of Athens’s technopolitical infrastructure had a similar long-term effect on the history of computing. Perhaps, for instance, they had some detectable influence on Aristotle’s rudimentary formulation of what would later be formalized as Boolean logic, and hardwired into the Von Neumann machines we use today.

Or not. I leave it to credentialed historians to connect whatever dots can be connected here. C.

OSTRAKA
The Ancient Greek word for a potsherd (which is a piece of broken ceramic) was “ostrakon,” and from it is derived the modern English word “ostracism.” This is not an obvious derivation, obviously, but it has its logic.

What’s more, it has the unique charm, for the likes of us, of preserving in the amber of everyday vocabulary a medium that lived and died more than two thousand years ago.

In the Agora Museum’s ample collection of engraved ostraka there is a large subset consisting of potsherds with the names of leading Athenian politicians carved into them.

These were ballots, used in a special kind of vote called ostracism, the purpose of which was to curb the power of men whose strength and influence had grown so great that their dominance verged on tyranny and could not be checked by normal means.

The museum’s literature describes the practice thus: “Each year the Assembly decided whether a vote of ostracism should be held. If a majority of the quorum of 6000 citizens voted affirmatively, the day was set and at that time a large open area of the Agora was fenced off. In the enclosure were ten entrances, one for each of the ten tribes. By these the citizens entered each with a potsherd on which he had scratched the name of the man who seemed to him most dangerous to the state.

“Officials at the entrance collected the sherds and kept the citizens inside the enclosure until all had voted. The sherds were then tabulated; if more than 6000 votes were cast, the man whose name appeared on the greatest number was sent into exile for ten years. Such was ostracism, introduced as a safeguard against tyranny, later used as a weapon by rival statesmen, and finally abandoned in the late 5
^th
century [B.C.] when it deteriorated into a political game.

“The potsherds, or ostraka, after being counted, were treated like so much waste paper. They were shovelled up and carried out to fill potholes in the roads leading out from the Agora.” (“The Athenian Citizen,” pp. 25-26) The virtues of the ostrakon as a medium for this sort of decision process are easy to see. Raised hands wouldn’t do, since many citizens would probably not have wanted the targets of their ostracism vote to know that they had cast it. The anonymous technologies of jury voting, on the other hand, weren’t open-ended enough to handle what was quintessentially a write-in vote. Additionally, many citizens seemed to enjoy the opportunity to scratch in a punctuating sentiment (“Out with him!” or “Traitor” or even occasionally a few lines of satirizing doggerel) beneath the name of their public enemy No. 1.

Finally, let’s not forget that it couldn’t have been a simple matter otherwise to collect in one place 6000 potsherds suitable for patching the highways of Attica. I can well imagine the Athenian DOT letting the potholes build up in the months preceding an ostracism vote, smug in the knowledge that the citizens would soon be coming together to spare them the expense of gathering the necessary roadfill.

I can imagine, too, an Athenian child playing by the roadside some late afternoon, just after the transit workers have finally come and done their job. Intrigued by the patch of fresh gravel on the road, the child digs for “buried treasure”, and finds it! A cache of broken pottery bits, all curiously inscribed. He takes one home and adds it to his small collection of strange found objects (a hawk’s feather, a piece of amber, a bronze kleroterion ball), and as he grows into his citizenship he comes at last to understand the meaning of the ostrakon.

But by then the ostracism vote has been abolished, and as this object is the closest he will have come to taking part in that tradition, he saves it, dusts it off now and then over the years, and near the end of his life takes it out to show to his grandchildren, pointing out the now legendary name carved into its surface, trying to bring to life for them a time they will nonetheless persist in thinking of as almost mythical.

No, there’s nothing in the literature to support this scenario, but I’ve found nothing there that would rule it out either. For who’s to say there weren’t dead-media enthusiasts even in the ancient world?

Source: Exhibits and literature of the Agora Museum in Athens, Greece, including the pamphlets The Athenian Citizen (revised 1987); Life, Death and Litigation in the Athenian Agora (1994); Graffiti in the Athenian Agora (revised 1988); and Socrates in the Agora (1978), published and sold as Picture Books No. 4, 23, 14, and 17 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, c/o Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.

From Julian Dibbell

The Info Tech of Ancient Athenian Democracy Part Five

The Technology of Decree

In the final phase of the Athenian political circuit, the decisions reached by the citizenry were recorded and published. In this area of endeavor, the Athenians probably didn’t break much new ground, for though the bottom-up nature of Athenian democracy was a political novelty, the top-down phenomenon of the government decree certainly was not.

Autocracies of various sorts, I can only assume, had long before worked out most of the techniques the Athenians used to publicize official policies. But I wouldn’t rule out a uniquely Athenian twist here and there.

The Athenian government seems to have published a lot of official proclamations and records, and this seems to have had as much to do with the citizens’ distinctly democratic urge to keep an eye on the doings of the state as with the state’s need to communicate its will to the citizens. But if, in consequence of this distinction, there were any peculiarly Athenian innovations in the technology of decree, I’m not qualified to identify them. For that matter, I can’t even say with confidence that all of the following media are entirely deceased. But they do give off a nice archaic aroma.

THE WRITTEN DECREE: STELES, BULLETIN BOARDS & AXONES
As far as I know, the stele (or, in Latin, stela) survives these days only in the form of the cemetery headstone. It is therefore close enough to death, in more ways than one, that it can very handily pass for dead. In ancient times, however, and particularly it seems in democratic Athens, the stele was a medium much in demand, especially for official proclamations.

As a big slab of rock, of course, the stele was well suited to this purpose.

For being big, it was hard to ignore, especially when propped up in the middle of a well-trafficked space like the Agora. And being a slab of rock, it was not likely to blow away or otherwise succumb to the abuse of circumstance. For these reasons, too, you might think that only proclamations of great and long-lasting import were published via stele.

And indeed, a lot of the surviving steles record just that sort of text: treaties with other Greek states, fundamental laws, memorials to fallen soldiers. But just as many, it seems, are covered with administrative trivia: long lists of property confiscated by the state in legal actions, minute records of the works of public agencies, yearbook-style catalogs of the extracurricular activities of young military cohorts, published at the end of their service. (Choice excerpt from one of the latter: “They made the voyage to Salamis for the games in honor of Aias.. They dedicated a cup worth 100 drachmas to the Mother of the Gods.. They kept harmony and friendship among themselves throughout the year.”

The local critics’ response to such fascinating material does not survive, but we can easily imagine it: “A gripping read! I couldn’t put it down! Then again. I couldn’t pick it up!”)

The stele, in short, was no big deal. It was simply what the government used for publishing, at least when it wanted its publication to last more than a couple weeks.

For more ephemeral communications it had other means, a centrally located bulletin board being the most important of them.

There, along the base of a set of statues honoring the 10 mythical founders of the Athenian tribes (called the Monument of the Eponymous Heroes), the government affixed wooden whiteboards displaying mobilization orders, drafts of new laws, and notices of lawsuits.

A more intriguing medium of proclamation, the axones, is mentioned in passing by the Agora Museum’s literature, but its details are left maddeningly unexplained.

On page 2 of the pamphlet “Life, Death, and Litigation in the Athenian Agora,” a sketchy drawing is presented: A wooden frame stands upright, three square- sectioned dowels or beams installed within it, horizontally, with Greek script running along the four faces of each. The inscribed cross-beams appear to be attached to the frame by free-turning spindles, with the apparent implication that users could rotate the beams to access a desired section of text.

The caption: “Reconstruction of wooden axones on which the laws of Solon were recorded in the Stoa Basileios.” That’s it.

Why the Solonic laws were displayed in this form is not discussed. Nor does the text even tell us how big the axones frame was. Taller than a person? Desktop size? If anybody out there knows more, please enlighten us.

Finally, let’s consider the medium that suffuses all of the aforementioned: writing, which though hardly extinct these days, is not exactly the spring chicken it was in ancient Athens.

The Greeks had after all been writing for only about 250 years by the time Athenian democracy was fully implemented, near the end of the 6
^th
century B.C. And we who spend our leisure hours sorting live media from dead would do well to keep in mind that the distinction between young media and old can be just as interesting.

As for how writing among the Greeks may have differed from what it has become today, I won’t go into such formal aspects as the absence of spaces between words, the general paucity of punctuation, and the snaking left-to- right-to-left direction of many ancient Greek inscriptions.

Much has been written elsewhere on these topics. But there is a subtler, more subjective type of difference to be discerned in the inscribed artifacts collected at the Agora, I think. I base my sense of it, somewhat tenuously, on a single recurring theme in the earliest of those inscriptions: the use of the first person to identify inanimate objects, as in, for example, “Of Tharrios I am the cup,” written on the side of a cup. Or on the handle of a pitcher: “I am rightfully (the possession) of Andriskos.” (“Graffiti in the Athenian Agora,” figures 5 and 52)

That this was not just a jocular convention is indicated by the fact that it can also be found in an official decree of a sort, a stele placed at the Agora’s political boundary that bears the inscription “I am a boundary marker of the Agora.” What then to make of this curious practice?

Though I’m aware it may in fact mean very little, I suspect it actually implies a semiconscious notion among the Greeks that writing bore the voice not just of the writer but of the object written on.

I suspect, further, that this notion was as much a belief as a conceit, as much magical as metaphorical. And yet I don’t mean to imply that the Greeks were therefore more primitive thinkers than we are.

On the contrary, the nearest parallel to this phenomenon that I can think of is our own semiconscious, semimagical belief that computers speak in a voice of their own. Computers, too, are merely a kind of inscribed object, after all.

Yet look at all the computer programs that have been written as if it were they, and not their programmers, who were speaking to us through the interface. Look at all the automatic teller machines that refer to themselves in the first person, look at all the anthropo- and zoomorphized software agents coming out of comp sci labs, look at our insistent attribution of personae to “artificially intelligent” programs (Deep Blue, Eliza) that are in fact a very far cry short of HAL. I’m not saying any of this is silly.

I have in fact long sympathized with the view that thinking of computers as thinking beings (a habit the philosopher Daniel Dennett refers to approvingly as the intentional stance) is a sensible cultural response to the technology’s complexity, and that it will only grow more sensible as the complexity increases.