All committees were reconstituted annually. No man could be a member of the same committee twice in his lifetime. At the end of his year each magistrate was required to render an indescribably minute accounting of his public acts, first to specially appointed auditing committees, and finally to the heliæa. It was an easy matter to get an office in Athens, but a very difficult task to get honorably rid of it. For the lot was used to select the requisite number of members for each committee from among the citizens thirty years old or older who had not disqualified themselves by earlier service. The theory that one citizen was as competent as another for public office was thus put into practice. Every office was refilled annually by a chance group of new and necessarily inexperienced men. While defining constitutions Aristotle lays down the condition for a thorough-going democracy that all citizens should hold governmental positions in turn. On this theory, there should have been an approximate agreement between the number of places in Athens and the number of citizens reaching their thirtieth year annually. That, however, was not the case. Even if we assume that men were councilors only once and held only one magistracy in their lifetime, we need to include some of the seven hundred (?) imperial posts in our calculation, and regard them, too, as subject to the conditions of tenure assumed for domestic positions, in order to reach the required total of about thirteen hundred. This is, naturally, an unwarranted and unworkable series of assumptions. It is, however, reasonable to suppose that the majority of Athenian citizens, and practically all of those who made a habit of attending the meetings of the ecclesia held a _deme_, or municipal, position, let us say, in their youth; a post in the council or in the domestic or imperial administration in their maturity; and a place in the register of the six thousand jurors in their advancing years. Recall, now, that three hundred and sixty of the five hundred councilors had to preside at meetings of fifty and five hundred men, and, if chance willed, at one of from five to fifty thousand also; observe that magistrates had not only to know the duties of their office,--which included the reception and preparation of some kind of cases for submission to a panel of jurors, over which they had, moreover, to preside,--but had also to keep accounts which they must defend in a law court; reflect that jury service involved acting as judge and jury in both domestic and imperial litigation, and it will appear that the knowledge of reading and writing which Clisthenes presupposed in all citizens would not have carried a man far in the age of Pericles; he must then have had a working knowledge of parliamentary forms, he must have had the view of administration which comes of being on the inside of the wicket; he must have been so conversant with the law and legal procedure that he could assume heavy