#who allowed them to defray the logistical burden of the system

[whetstonefires]

Thinking endlessly about how the classical Athenians were like, so, on the one hand, many administrative tasks on which our civic apparatus relies require expertise.

But on the other hand, if we appoint leaders to necessary positions on the basis that they're the ones who are best suited to that work due to knowing all about it, that's putting real power in their hands, for an extended period instead of a safe little increment, which sets up our nice democracy of Every Free Adult Native Male Who Can Afford Armor to collapse very quickly into a narrow oligarchy.

But the fact remains that administration actually is skilled labor, especially on the tens-of-thousands-of-people scale they were dealing with, and also involves situations where it's impractical to run every step of a process through a committee. Not that they really wanted to acknowledge this but they were stuck with it a bit. If nothing else, people have day jobs, they can't always be voting.

But fulltime governators for whom this is their day job have too much power.

And the way they solved this was, most of the institutional memory and expertise and even exercise of force in the name of civic order was invested in slaves.

Mint workers? Executive accountancy clerks? Cops? All state property.

Very Important Job of distinguishing counterfeit coinage: public slave. Fifty lashes if he shirked or fucked up or cheated. Considerable authority in the context of the job. Could live quite a comfortable life. Absolutely no chance of his using this role as a springboard for building a political base and usurping authority, because he didn't have legal status.

This freed the actual executive positions up to be filled by people given one-year terms by lottery who had the authority to make (routine) calls but no personal power associated with the office; they didn't have to know shit to do the job and this kept them interchangeable.

Except generals, apparently. The Athenians were like, okay generals really do have to know what the fuck they're doing or we'll all die, but we can't make military service the defining feature of citizenship, and then put ourselves under the command of a non-citizen.

(Not even because like they couldn't entrust a slave with so much power, although being under threat of a lashing if people don't like your decisions probably isn't great for making strong strategic and tactical calls; it's the cognitive dissonance.)

So they had ten elected generalships, with less term limitation, and it was in fact a good avenue by which to build a political career.

But like, what the fuck huh?