If any of you are on your way to or through Greece in the near future, may I suggest you make a beeline for the Agora Museum, on the site of the excavated ancient Agora, the original Athenian marketplace and civic center, where it all went down, birth-of-Western-Civilization-wise, in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.? The museum is, I assure you, a Dead Media treasure trove.
1) Introduction 2) The Technology of Allotment 3) The Technology of Identification 4) The Technology of Deliberation and Decision 5) The Technology of Decree
Tagging ropes
We come now to the lowest of the low technology used in identifying citizens assigned to a particular duty: the ropes, dipped in red paint, that were swung at citizens hanging out down in the Agora when everybody was supposed to be up in the Assembly.
The "police" who did the swinging were public slaves, held in common by the citizenry, and when they thwapped you with their ropes, you were truly busted: with a big red stripe across your toga, it was no use lingering in the Agora or trying to slink home. You would be fined on sight. Of course, no material traces of this technology survive for display.
All the elements of the apparatus -- the ropes, the paint, the slaves -- were quite perishable.
