Info Tech Of Ancient Democracy
http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html [www.alamut.com]
2019-04-24 22:18
The Athenians had to keep those bodies flowing smoothly, then, and that was largely a matter of keeping track of who belonged where and when. They also had to maintain a smooth and dependable flow of the information generated by those bodies -- the votes, the decrees, the endless speechifying. They had, in short, to do a lot of stuff that modern information technology would have helped them tremendously to do, and nonetheless they managed pretty well, with the materials at hand, to build the tools they needed to make their system work.
Those tools -- the info tech of ancient Athenian democracy -- are the subject of the following Notes. I present them now without further ado.