This idea was put into practical operation by a careful system of payment for every public service; to the end that even the poorest citizen should be enabled to hold office, and a wealthy office-holding caste prevented from existing. To so great an extent was this carried out that, by the time that the Age of Pericles ceased and the Peloponnesian War began, almost every citizen was in the pay of the state. The perfect equality of all the citizens, and their community of interests and privileges, was recognized by supplying them at times with free tickets to places of amusement, and by banqueting the people on great occasions at the expense of the state. To distribute widely the powers and duties of citizenship, exceedingly large juries were established for the trials of all cases. There was no king or president or prime minister. The source of authority was the Assembly which included every citizen over eighteen years of age, and held forty meetings a year. Cooperating, as a sort of committee, was a Council of Five Hundred, whose members were chosen by lot each year from citizens over thirty years of age. The success of the Athenian democracy has had a powerful influence ever since on history; because it has supplied not only a precedent but an encouragement to every people to try to escape from the individual restrictions that monarchies and all "strong governments" tend to impose. But it had another though less powerful influence also, which continued for a long while, but now has ceased, in supplying a precedent for slavery. For while the citizens of Athens were free, only the sons of Athenian fathers and Athenian mothers could be citizens; many thousand workers and merchants of all kinds could take no part in the government, and there were besides an enormous number of slaves. It was to a great degree the fact of slavery that made possible the success of the so-called Athenian democracy; for it liberated the citizens in very great measure from the drudgery of life, and gave them leisure to devote themselves to the study of government and the arts.