Origins and Organization
When Cleisthenes reorganized the Athenian government in 508/7 BCE, he replaced the old Solonian boule, or council, of 400 with a new boule of 500. The old boule consisted of 100 members of each of the four ancestral tribes. Cleisthenes created ten new tribes and made the boule consist of 50 men from each of these tribes. Each tribe's delegation would be an executive of the boule for one-tenth of the year, so that ten groups of prytaneis served each year, a position granted by sortition. The executive officers were known as prytaneis and their term of office as a prytany (πρυτανία).
Read more about this topic: Prytaneis
Famous quotes containing the words origins and, origins and/or organization:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)