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The pay of each man serving as a juror was determined and punctually paid. The importance of this revolution will be seen when these dikasts thus became the exclusive assemblies, of course popular, in which all cases, civil and criminal, were tried. The magistrates were thus deprived of the judicial functions which they once enjoyed, and were confined to purely administrative matters.
The magistrate, instead of deciding causes and inflicting punishment beyond the imposition of a small fine, was constrained to impanel a jury to try the cause. In fact, the ten dikasts became the leading judicial tribunals, and as these were composed, each, of five hundred citizens, judgments were virtually made by the people, instead of the old court.
It is enough to say that it was by means of Pericles that the magistrates were stripped of judicial power, and the Areopagus of all its jurisdiction, except in cases of homicide, and numerous and paid and popular dikasts were substituted to decide judicial cases, and repeal and enact laws; this, says Grote, was the consummation of the Athenian democracy.
The people were called into direct action as dikasts, or jurors; all citizens were eligible to the magistracy, even to the archonship; ostracism, which virtually was exile without disgrace, became a political necessity to check the ascendency of demagogues.
The innovations which Pericles effected, of causing the jury courts, or Dikasteries, to be regularly paid, again threw into public life the poorer citizens. But the great change which he effected was in transferring to the numerous dikasts, selected from the citizens, a new judicial power, heretofore exercised by the magistrates, and the senate of the Areopagus.
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