ABSTRACT
The Athenian Stranger uses sortition to help select council members in the city Plato designs in the Laws (756b–e). Resorting to a method that Greek political theory and Plato specifically (757b) associated with democratic equality strikes some commentators as odd. This paper suggests otherwise. Viewing the lottery in Laws as a celebration rather than a simple election tool, I argue that Plato means to oscillate between the necessary and the unpredictable: by entrusting the council’s membership to a divine guidance that sometimes guides and sometimes does not, his Stranger both justifies and palliates the gap separating officeholders and those over whom they exercise power in his (and also real) cities.
