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Ostracism (, ostrakismos) was an Athenian democratic procedure in which any citizen could be exile from the city-state of Athens for ten years. While some instances clearly expressed popular anger at the citizen, ostracism was often used preemptively as a way of neutralizing someone thought to be a threat to the state or a potential tyrant. The word continues to be used for various forms of shunning.
Each year the Athenians were asked in the assembly whether they wished to hold an ostracism. The question was put in the sixth of the ten months used for state business under the democracy (January or February in the modern Gregorian calendar). The process of ostracism could be divided into five elements according to Philochorus: 1) It was a two-stage process, 2) it was open to all Athens citizens, 3) it was overseen by outside officials, 4) must meet a specific quorum, 5) regulated penalties.
The majority of citizen must come to a unified agreement to start the procedures of Ostracism. If they voted "yes", then an ostracism would be held two months later. In a section of the agora set off and suitably barrieredAccording to some sources, part of the agora was roped-off, according to others it was temporarily immured with wooden planks. that was called perischoinisma (περισχοίνισμα), In Pollux, VIII. 20 (ed. Bethe, Leipzig, 1900–37) in the section on σκεύη δικαστικά—κιγκλίς, δρύφακτος κτλ.—we read περισχοινίσαντας (περισκηνήσαντας A) δέ τι τῆς ἀγορᾶς μέρος ἔδει φέρειν εἰς τὸν περιορισθέντα τόπον Ἀθηναίων τὸν βουλόμενον ὄστρακον ἐγγεγραμμένον τοὔνομα τοῦ μέλλοντος ἐξοστρακίƷεσθαι.[1] Perischoinisma : The roping off of an area outside a structure being used as a court. [2] [3] [4] citizens gave the name of those they wished to be ostracized to a scribe, as many of them were illiterate, and they then scratched the name on pottery shards. The shards were piled up facing down, so the votes would remain anonymous. Ostracism served as a political tool to eliminate rivals. It also helped to reflect the Athenians' belief in the importance of civic engagement and the power of collective decision making.Plutarch, The Life of Aristides, and The Life of Cimon Nine Archontes and the council of the five hundred supervised the process while the Archontes counted the ostraka submitted and sorted the names into separate piles.Burckhardt, Leonhard; Burckhardt, Leonhard Alexander; Ungern-Sternberg, Jürgen von (2000), p.69 The person whose pile contained the most ostraka would be banished, provided that a quorum was met. According to Plutarch, the ostracism was considered valid if the total number of votes cast was at least 6,000; according to a fragment of Philochorus, at least 6,000 votes had to be cast against the person who was to be banished.[5] See n. 30 Plutarch's evidence for a quorum of 6,000 agrees with the number required for grants of citizenship in the following century and is generally preferred.
The person newly ostracized had ten days to leave the city. If he attempted to return, the penalty was death. The property of the man banished was not confiscated and there was no loss of status. After ten years, he was allowed to return without stigma. It was possible for the assembly to recall an ostracized person ahead of time; before the Persian Wars of 479 BC, an amnesty was declared under which at least two ostracised leaders—Pericles' father, Xanthippus, and Aristides 'the Just'—are known to have returned. Similarly, Cimon, ostracised in 461 BC, was recalled during an emergency.Plutarch, Life of Cimon 17.2–6.
Around 12,000 political ostraka have been excavated in the Athenian agora and in the Kerameikos. The second victim, Cleisthenes' nephew Megacles, is named by 4647 of these, but for a second undated ostracism not listed above. The known ostracisms seem to fall into three distinct phases: the 480s BC, mid-century 461–443 BC and finally the years 417–415: this roughly correlates with the clustering of known expulsions, although Themistocles before 471 may count as an exception. This may suggest that ostracism fell in and out of fashion.Mabel Lang, (1990). Ostraka: 3–6, Athens.
The last known ostracism was that of Hyperbolus in circa 417 BC. There is no sign of its use after the Peloponnesian War, when democracy was restored after the oligarchic coup of Thirty Tyrants had collapsed in 403 BC. However, while ostracism was not an active feature of the fourth-century version of democracy, it remained; the question was put to the assembly each year, but they did not wish to hold one.
A further distinction between these two modes (and not obvious from a modern perspective) is that ostracism was an automatic procedure that required no initiative from any individual, with the vote simply occurring on the wish of the electorate—a diffuse exercise of power. By contrast, an Athenian trial needed the initiative of a particular citizen-prosecutor. While prosecution often led to a counterattack (or was a counterattack itself), no such response was possible in the case of ostracism as responsibility lay with the polity as a whole. In contrast to a trial, ostracism generally reduced political tension rather than increased it.
Although ten years of exile may have been challenging for Athenians, it was a lenient punishment compared to the sentences that courts could impose. When dealing with politicians held to be acting against the interests of the people, Athenian juries could inflict severe penalties such as death, unpayably large fines, confiscation of property, permanent exile, or loss of citizens' rights through atimia. Further, the elite Athenians who suffered ostracism were rich or noble men who had connections or xenoi in the wider Greek world and who, unlike genuine exiles, were able to access their income in Attica from abroad. In Plutarch, following the anti-democratic thought common in elite sources, people might be recalled early, thus being an example of the inconsistency of majoritarianism characteristic of Athenian democracy. However, ten years of exile usually resolved whatever had prompted the expulsion. Ostracism was a pragmatic measure; the concept of serving out the full sentence did not apply as it was a preventive measure, not a punitive one. An example of the practicalities of ostracism comes from the cache of 190 ostracon discovered dumped in a well next to the acropolis. From the handwriting, they appear to have been written by fourteen individuals and bear the name of Themistocles, ostracised before 471 BC, and were evidently meant for distribution to voters. This was not necessarily evidence of electoral fraud (being no worse than modern voting instruction cards), but their being dumped in the well may suggest that their creators wished to hide them. If so, these ostraka provide an example of organized groups attempting to influence the outcome of ostracisms. The two-month gap between the first and second phases would have allowed for such a campaign.
There is another interpretation, however, according to which these ostraka were prepared beforehand by enterprising businessmen who offered them for sale to citizens who could not easily inscribe the desired names for themselves or who simply wished to save time.See Surikov, pp. 284–294
The two-month gap is a key feature in the institution, much as in under modern liberal democracies. It prevented the candidate for expulsion being chosen out of immediate anger, although an Athenian general such as Cimon would have not wanted to lose a battle the week before such a second vote. It opened a period for discussion (or perhaps agitation), whether informally in daily talk or public speaking before the Athenian assembly or Athenian courts.Oration IV of Andocides purports itself to be speech urging the ostracism of Alcibiades in 415 BC, but it is probably not authentic. In this process a consensus, or rival consensuses, might emerge.
The first instance of people ostracized in the decade after the defeat of the first Persian invasion at Marathon in 490 BC were related or connected to the tyrant Peisistratos, who had controlled Athens for 36 years up to 527 BC. After his son Hippias was deposed with help in 510 BC, the family sought refuge with the Persians. Nearly twenty years later Hippias landed with an invasion force at Marathon. Tyranny and Persian aggression were paired threats facing the new democratic regime at Athens, and ostracism was used against both. Tyranny and democracy had arisen at Athens out of clashes between regional and factional groups organized around politicians, including Cleisthenes. As a reaction, in many of its features the democracy strove to reduce the role of factions as the focus of citizen loyalties. Ostracism may have been intended to work in the same to similar ends: by temporarily decapitating a faction, it could help defuse confrontations that threatened the order of the State.
In later decades when the threat of tyranny was remote, ostracism seems to have been used to decide between radically opposed policies. For instance, in 443 BC Thucydides, son of Melesias (not to be confused with Thucydides) was ostracized. He led an aristocratic opposition to Athenian imperialism and in particular to Pericles' building program on the acropolis, which was funded by taxes created for the wars against the Achaemenid Empire. By expelling Thucydides the Athenian people sent a clear message about the direction of Athenian policy.Plutarch, Life of Pericles 11– 12, 14. Similar but controversial claims have been made about the ostracism of Cimon in 461 BC.
The motives of individual voting citizens cannot be known. Many of the surviving ostraka name people otherwise unattested. They may well be just someone the submitter disliked, and voted for in a moment of private spite. Some ostraka bear the word "Limos" (hunger) instead of a human name. As such, it may be seen as a secular, civic variant of Athenian , studied in scholarly literature under the Latin name defixiones, where small dolls were wrapped in lead sheets written with curses and then buried, sometimes stuck through with nails for good measure.
In one anecdote about Aristides, known as "the Just", who was ostracised in 482, an illiterate citizen, not recognising him, asked him to write the name Aristides on his ostrakon. When Aristides asked why, the man replied it was because he was sick of hearing him being called "the Just".Plutarch, Life of Aristides 7.6 Perhaps merely the sense that someone had become too arrogant or prominent was enough to get someone's name onto an ostrakon. Ostracism rituals could have also been an attempt to dissuade people from covertly committing murder or assassination of intolerable or emerging individuals of power so as to create an open arena or outlet for those harbouring primal frustrations and urges or political motivations. The solution for murder, in Gregory H. Padowitz's theory, would then be "ostracism" which would ultimately be beneficial for all parties—the ostracised individual would live and get a second chance and society would be spared feuds, civil war, political tensions and/or murder.
In part ostracism lapsed as a procedure at the end of the fifth century because it was replaced by the graphe paranomon, a regular court action under which a much larger number of politicians might be targeted, instead of just one a year as with ostracism, and with greater severity.
It may already seemed like an anachronism as factional alliances organised around important men became less significant and power was more specifically located in the interaction of the individual speaker with the power of the assembly and the courts. The threat to the democratic system in the late fifth century came not from tyranny but from oligarchic coups, threats of which became prominent after two brief seizures of power, in 411 BC by "the Four Hundred" and in 404 BC by Thirty Tyrants, which were not dependent on single powerful individuals. Ostracism was not an effective defence against the oligarchic threat and it was not so used.
A similar modern practice is the recall election, in which the electoral body removes its representation from an elected officer.
Unlike under modern voting procedures, the Athenians did not have to adhere to a strict format for the inscribing of ostraka. Many extant ostraka show that it was possible to write expletives, short epigrams or cryptic injunctions beside the name of the candidate without invalidating the vote.see Surikov, pp. 73–80, and references therein. For example:
Williams suggests that the most common form of ostracism is silent treatment, wherein refusing to communicate with a person effectively ignores and excludes them.Williams, K. (2001). Ostracism: The Power of Silence. New York: Guilford Press. pp. 2–18. See also Sherratt, S. (2021). Workplace ostracism in academia. Australian Universities Review, 63(2):35–43.
Ghahr is avoidance of a lower-ranking family member who has committed a perceived insult. It is one of several ritualised social customs of Iranian culture.
Gozasht means 'tolerance, understanding and a desire or willingness to forgive' Iran: At War with History, by John Limbert, 1987 pp. 37–38 and is an essential component of Ghahr and Âshti for the psychological needs of closure and cognition.
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