The best known instance of a political system widely grounded on election by lot was in ancient Greece, especially in the Athenian democracy, where the citizens were appointed to many public offices every year. Election by lot was the procedure by which they were assigned to the City Counsel (Boulé), to juries and to administrative tasks. The fact that the citizens who had exercised an office could
not be re-elected allowed a large rotation and an involvement of many citizens. We have also evidence of election by lot in the mythical tradition and in the religious background, that was exhibited in cult practices and in games. This system, however, had several restrictions: financial and military offices were assigned by voting and not by lot; the candidates were required to show they had qualifications, moral qualifications too, for the offices; at the end of the year each office-holder should present a report to be submitted to public control. The election by lot was strongly rejected by adversaries of the democracy, such as the so-called Old-oligarch or Plato, who judged it contrary to any form of expertise, but also by Isocrates and Aristotle. Also in republican Rome the use of the lot was restricted to some military practices or for establishing the order of succession according to which the single tribes or centuriae (numerically different) were called to vote. It was therefore a mixed system of both voting and lot, particularly fitting to the aristocratic or oligarchic character of republican Rome. This mixed system was employed also in medieval and renaissance Italian city-states, for example in Arezzo or Perugia or Venice. Montesquieu grasped clearly that election by lot, with its restrictions, was a distinctive character of the democratic form of government, but also that it was an anachronism in modern age. Generally the modern political thinkers such as Hobbes or Spinoza, but also Rousseau, did not assign a relevant role to election by lot in their theories. The emphasis on representation in modern political theories of democracy naturally tends to exclude election by lot from the horizon. And marxist theorists, even if they criticize the institute of representation, present
the same attitude.