δικασταί) was a legal office in ancient Greece that signified, in the broadest sense, a judge or juror, but more particularly denotes the Attic functionary of the democratic period, who, with his colleagues, was constitutionally empowered to try to pass judgment upon all causes and questions that the laws and customs of his country found to warrant judicial investigation.
[1] In the circumstance of a plurality of persons being selected from the mass of private citizens, and associated temporarily as representatives of the whole body of the people, adjudicating between its individual members, and of such delegates swearing an oath that they would well and truly discharge the duties entrusted to them, there appears some resemblance between the constitution of the Attic dikasterion (court) and an English or American jury, but in nearly all other respects the differences between them are large.
Of the precise method of their appointment our information is somewhat obscure, but we may gather that selection took place every year under the conduct of the nine archons and their official scribe; that each of these ten archons drew by lot the names of six hundred persons of the tribe, or phyle, assigned to him; that the whole number so selected was again divided by lot into ten sections of 500 each, together with a supernumerary one consisting of a thousand persons, from among whom the occasional deficiencies in the sections of 500 might be supplied.
[2] The inscriptions upon these plates consist of the following letters: Δ. ΔΙΟΔΩΡΟΣ ΦΡΕΑ, Ε. ΔΕΙΝΙΑΣ ΑΛΑΙΕΥΣ, and Β. ΑΝΤΙΧΑΡΜΟΣ ΛΑΜΠ, and also bear representations of owls and Gorgon heads, and other devices symbolic of the Attic people.
Before proceeding to the exercise of his functions the dikast was obliged to swear the official oath of office, which was done in the earlier ages at a place called Ardettus, just outside Athens, on the banks of the Ilissos, but in later times at some other spot, of which nothing is known.
As soon as the allotment had taken place, each dikast received a staff, on which was painted the letter and color of the court awarded him, which might serve both as a ticket to procure admittance, and also to distinguish him from any loiterer that might endeavor to obtain a sitting after business had begun.
[9] The German classicist Philipp August Böckh inferred from these passages that the triobolon was introduced by Cleon about 421 BC, but this opinion is disputed, however, and some scholars think that the pay of three oboli for the dikasts existed before that time.