Athenian courtroom water clock
Clepsidra judicial ateniense
- Date
- c. 400 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Athenian Agora, Attica, Greece
- Credited to
- Citizens of Athenian democracy
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A pottery vessel with a calibrated hole in the bottom that drained a fixed amount of water to limit the time of each speech in the law courts. A specimen survives from the agora, and Aristotle records how the water was shared between prosecution and defence.
Fourth-century BC Athens kept standardised clepsydras for the courts and the Assembly; each vessel's time unit was a few minutes. Their accuracy depended on the water's temperature and viscosity.
What it led to
- equal speaking times for both parties in trials
- use of the water clock as a measure of time in public life
- constant-flow water clocks of the Hellenistic period