Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

228 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
task of supervising the execution of condemned criminals. Athens’s
most famous prisoner was Sokrates, who was detained for several
days while awaiting his execution. (His execution was delayed
because his trial and condemnation coincided with an important
religious ritual that was taking place and to have executed him during
this period would have aroused the anger of the gods.) It used
to be believed that a building located in the southwest corner of the
Agora consisting of 12 small rooms served as Athens’s state prison,
but recently doubts have been raised about the identification.
Execution
Although murder, larceny, theft, picking pockets, housebreaking,
kidnapping, and temple robbing rarely resulted in execution,
as Sokrates’ trial indicates, any serious offense was punishable by
death if the prosecution saw fit to demand it. In extreme cases such
as treason and tomb robbery, the condemned was denied the rite
of burial. Criminals of this sort were hurled off a rock and left to
rot in the barathron, or pit, a rocky gully, which probably lay a short
distance west of the Acropolis. In Sparta, a similar practice took
place at a site called the Kaiades. This practice ensured that the
dead would never be granted access to Hades but wander disconsolately
up and down the banks of the River Styx for all eternity.
In Macedon, hanging was the preferred form of execution. There
is little evidence to suggest that decapitation was ever practiced in
the Greek world.
Conclusions
There were several weaknesses in the Athenian legal system,
excellent though it was by the standards of the day. In the first
place, a trial resembled a public spectacle, with skillful oratory
playing a disproportionate part in the outcome. Second, the large
size of many juries increased the possibility of a verdict being subject
to crowd hysteria. We know of at least one instance in which
the citizen body, sitting in assembly, made a decision in the heat of
the moment and reversed it the next day; it is likely that comparable
changes of heart among jurors occurred from time to time.
Because no procedure existed for lodging an appeal, however, only
exceptionally was a verdict overturned. Third, although some penalties
were fixed, many were not. In the latter case, this meant that
jurors often opted for one of the two choices before them on the