Contrary to what is often thought today, the political use of lot was
not peculiar to the Athenian democracy. Prior to the invention of
representative government, most political systems where power
was exercised by citizens, rather than by an hereditary monarch,
had used lot in varying degrees and in a variety of forms. Lot
played a part (albeit a limited one) in the assemblies (comitia) of the
Roman people. The Italian republics of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance often chose their magistrates by lot. In Florence, the
intellectual center of civic humanism and republican renewal, the
selection of magistrates by lot was a key institution of the republican
system. Finally, Venice - the Most Serene Republic whose stability
and longevity fascinated observers - continued to practice a form of
lot until its fall in 1797} The new representative governments might
call themselves republics (as the United States did from the beginning
of the revolution, or as France did from 1792); they were
nevertheless breaking with the republican tradition in finding no
place for lot.
Yet that republican tradition was still alive in the political culture
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the very least, it was
a subject of debate.2 The Venetian republic had not yet collapsed.
So, at the time when representative government was invented, it