The dikastērion (, translit. dikastērion; pl. dikastēria) was the system of popular jury courts in Classical Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Alongside the Assembly (ekklesia) and the Council of 500 (boule), it formed one of the three central pillars of Athenian democracy. The dikastēria heard the vast majority of private suits (dikai) and public prosecutions (graphai)—excluding homicide. The term Heliaia, properly the name of the largest court venue (whose location remains unknown), came to be used by some ancient sources as a synonym for the system as a whole. Modern English-lang
The dikastērion (, translit. dikastērion; pl. dikastēria) was the system of popular jury courts in Classical Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Alongside the Assembly (ekklesia) and the Council of 500 (boule), it formed one of the three central pillars of Athenian democracy. The dikastēria heard the vast majority of private suits (dikai) and public prosecutions (graphai)—excluding homicide. The term Heliaia, properly the name of the largest court venue (whose location remains unknown), came to be used by some ancient sources as a synonym for the system as a whole. Modern English-language scholarship predominantly uses dikasterion for the institutional system.
The courts operated without professional judges, prosecutors, or lawyers. Instead, legal functions were done by panels of ordinary citizens known as dikastai, chosen by lot from an annual pool of 6,000 males aged thirty or over. Juries were large, numbering 201, 401, or 501 men, and reaching up to 1,500 or more for major political trials. From the mid-5th century BCE, jurors received a daily wage (dikastikon), a reform intended to ensure that poorer citizens could afford to take part.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).