In the theoretical outline that Rousseau put forward two thousand years later, justice was to be guaranteed by the universality of law: each citizen, voting on laws that would apply to himself as to everyone else, would be induced to will for others what he willed for himself. In the rotation procedure, a similar effect was produced through the medium of chronological succession: those who governed were led to decide by putting themselves in the place of their subjects, for it was a place they had known and would know again. The democrats of Athens were not content merely to preach justice, exhorting those in power to imagine themselves in the place of the governed: they gave them the means and the motivation to do so.