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A Phenomenology of Democracy:
Ostracism as Political Ritual
This article has two objectives. First, and in particular, it seeks to reinterpret the ostracism
procedure of early democratic Athens. Since Aristotle, this has been understood as a rational,
political weapon of collective defense, intended to expel from Athens a disproportionately
powerful individual. In this article, by putting emphasis on the materiality, gestures, and location
of ostraka-casting, I propose instead that the institution can more fruitfully be understood as
a ritual enactment of civic unity. Second, and more generally, I hope to explore the frames
within which early Athenian democracy is placed: while Greek kingship and tyranny (i.e.
“primitive” polities) have been very successfully explored through anthropological and cross-
cultural comparison, Greek democracy for the most part has remained in the domains of
the institutional historian and political theorist. Taking a phenomenological and comparative
approach, this article asks how the citizens of early democratic Athens experienced and
comprehended their new sovereignty and the invented procedures of mass decision-making
through which it was expressed.
A recurring event in the history of archaic and classical Greece was the
conscious remodeling of political institutions,1 and none is more famous or
significant than Cleisthenes’ program of reforms in late sixth-century Athens.
The now standard identification of this moment as the epochal “foundation of
democracy”—recall the celebrations in 1992/3 of its 2500th anniversary—has
This article has benefitted enormously from the comments and criticisms of Jan Bremmer, Emma
Dench, Susanne Ebbinghaus, Adriaan Lanni, Nino Luraghi, Duncan MacRae, Ian Moyer, and the
journal’s anonymous readers. Parts of the argument were presented to a workshop at Harvard
University. I am grateful to Leslie Kurke and Richard Neer for sharing with me the manuscript of
their 2014 article.
1. See, e.g., Murray 1990.
Classical Antiquity. Vol. 34, Issue 1, pp. 121–161. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e).
Copyright © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.
DOI:10.1525/CA.2015.34.1.121.
2. Ober 2007.
3. For the same reason, it features as the subject of historical declamation; see Gribble 1997
and Heftner 2001 on [Andocides] 4.
4. Brief mention and a few ostraka attest the existence of parallel procedures in fifth-century
Argos, Cyrene, Megara, Miletus, (Sicilian) Naxos, Syracuse, the Tauric Chersonese, and Thurii; see
Bacchielli 1994, Vinogradov and Zolotarev 1999, Greco 2010, and Schirripa, Lentini, and Cordano
2012. The technology seems to have been similar to Athenian ostracism, except at Syracuse where,
according to Diod. Sic. 11.87, olive leaves were used instead of pottery sherds.
5. On the danger of ritual-in-text, see Buc 2001. Like royal coronations, ostracism was regular
enough to have a clear procedural script, yet sufficiently singular for specific ostrakophoriai to be
remembered for their targets and outcomes.
6. According to [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 43.5, at the same meeting preliminary complaints were
brought against sycophants and deceivers of the dēmos; see Christ 1992. For the lack of discussion,
see [Andoc.] 4.3.
7. See below. Plut. Alc. 7.4: να τπον τ ς γορς περιπεφραγμνον ν κκλω δρυφκτοις.
Poll. Onom. 8.20: περισχοινσαντας δ τι τ ς γορς μρος . . . ες τ ν περιορισθντα τπον.
8. Philochorus FGrHist 328 F30; Sch. on Arist. Eq. 855.
9. This may be depicted on a red-figure vase by the Pan Painter (Oxford 1911.617); see Siewert
2002: T4.
10. Calderini 1945: 38–39.
11. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 22.1 and 3; Ael. VH 13.24; Philochorus FGrHist 328 F30; Sch. Ar. Eq.
855; Diod. Sic. 11.55.1 (implicitly).
18. These were dismissed by Carcopino 1935: 6 as “les détails pittoresques.” For theoretical
criticisms of functionalism, see Rappaport 1979: 43–96. On “ritual involution,” see Tambiah 1985:
153.
19. The edited volume of Moore and Myerhoff 1977 was crucial; see also Kertzer 1988 and
Bell 1997: 128–35.
20. Bell 1992.
OSTRAKA AS SYMBOLS
The iconic object of ostracism, after which the entire procedure was named,
was the ostrakon, or potsherd, on which an Athenian participating in the os-
trakophoria would inscribe the name of his target. These potsherds are typically
treated as mere pragmatic text-bearers: banal, quotidian, and culturally invisible
planes for the words inscribed upon them.21 In fact, certain surviving ostraka and
ancient descriptions of their use indicate that, at least for some participants, they
were symbolically meaningful in themselves. As symbols, they demonstrate both
a multivocality of association and an economy of reference in clustering these
into a single object.22
Even before they were written upon, the genesis of ostraka and their ob-
servable, tactile properties made them appropriate symbols for ostracism. While
many ostraka were recycled pieces of accidentally broken vases, it is clear that at
least some were specifically generated for a particular ostrakophoria by smashing
vessels in advance or on site in the Agora.23 The violent gesture that broke up a
ceramic vessel transformed a single, smooth-surfaced, and in some cases beautiful
container into a multitude of sharp, jagged-edged sherds. The smashing was an
audibly brittle and visibly immediate crash. It was irreversible. It is no surprise,
therefore, that the breaking of a pot was a common metaphor in the wider ancient
world for human mortality, urban violence, and even earthly cataclysm.24 On
occasion, the pot-smash was used in rites of magical annihilation, as in Mid-
dle Kingdom Egypt’s execration vases, which were inscribed with the names of
targeted enemies of the state and then broken.25 Still today we can recognize
the concentration of emotions and their immediate release in acts as common as
the smashing of a child’s clay piggy-bank or as considered as Ai Weiwei’s 1995
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.
That pot-smashing held symbolic significance for Athenian ostracism is nicely
illustrated by two non-joining ostraka, targeting Megacles, son of Hippocrates,
that come from a single red-figure vase of the Pistoxenus painter. One of these
ostraka (Fig. 1) identifies its target as Megakl[es], the name scratched on the inside
surface; yet on the other side of the same sherd we find the phrase, painted in glaze
during the vase’s manufacture, Meg[akles] | kalo[s] (“Meg[acles] is handsome”).
The dating of the vessel requires that this handsome Megacles, honored in this
way by the vase’s maker, be the politician’s homonymous son.26 In other words, at
least two citizens, wishing to target Megacles, deliberately selected a sympotic
vessel which already contained his name and advertised his son’s noble good
looks, smashed it (perhaps accompanied with hostile pronouncements), inscribed
his name on the sherds, and used those pieces in the ostrakophoria. By necessity,
only one of these ostraka could carry the original dipinto, the fortunate survival of
which allows us to reconstruct this episode, but the significance of the ritualized
destruction may have carried over to all the sherds that originally came from
this vase. It is possible that such self-conscious selection and destruction of
vessels was much more common than we can ever know. The targeting of
ostracized politicians in this mode—first destroying a citizen’s praise-object and
then reusing the material against the same person—is attested elsewhere: for
instance, the bronze statue dedicated on the Athenian Acropolis by the first target
of demotic ostracism, Hipparchus, son of Charmus, was melted down after the
ostrakophoria and turned into a stele, on which, beginning with his own, the names
of the city’s traitors or ostracized politicians were inscribed.27 The symbolism of
the shattered vase is recognized in a fragment of a lost play by Aristophanes,
where one speaker says to the other, “What shall I do with you, you devil
(kakodaimon), you ostracized sherd of amphora (amphoreus exostrakistheis)?”28
With only this line preserved the precise significance of the figure is obscure, but
it is plausible that the addressee, perhaps the ostracized politician Thucydides
or Hyperbolus, is identified in his misfortune with the ceramic vessel broken up
for the ostrakophoria.29 Similarly, a proverb preserved by the imperial-period
grammarian Diogenianus may confirm this: kerameus anthrōpos, a pottery man,
means someone who is “cracked” (epi tou sathrou), i.e. unsound, impotent, or,
appropriately enough for ostracism, treacherous.30
Moreover, the shape and texture of the potsherds made them ideal hand-
weapons. Two lawcourt speeches indicate that they could be used to maim and
kill personal enemies.31 Such violent associations of ostraka’s materiality were
well suited to the aggression and personal hatreds of the ostracism procedure,
even if the targeted politicians were not physically attacked with the sherds.
The late antique lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria refers to ostracism as the
Indeed, it should be noted that the first count at the end of an ostrakophoria,
to determine whether or not the quorum of six thousand had been reached,
deliberately overlooked the ostraka’s inscriptions and so foregrounded their
basic physicality; only at the second count were the names read. One ostrakon
even speaks its political charge from the potsherd’s perspective: “This ostrakon
says. . . .”38
Meaningful in their materiality, ostraka were turned into more complex
symbol-bearers by the inscription of words or images. The most basic and
commonly attested addition to ostraka was the name, sometimes with patronymic
and/or demotic, of the targeted citizen. Labeling the potsherd in this way was
the pragmatic means for the ballot to weigh against the selected politician in the
second count at the end of an ostrakophoria (if the quorum had been surpassed).
But the inscribing of a name on a sherd had, at least for some participants,
significant associations derived from other practices.
Named ostraka recall the tokens that could be used in sortition or lot-taking to
identify a politician or leader. For instance, Ajax was identified as the Achaean
champion by the selection of his marked or named lot.39 Plutarch reports that
the Thessalians asked the Delphic priestess to select their king from a number
of beans on each of which a different name had been written.40 On the basis of
several seventh- and sixth-century potsherds inscribed with names, sometimes of
known aristocrats like Peisistratus or Aristion and found in the Agora or on the
Acropolis, it has been suggested that an early, pre-Cleisthenic ostrakon-based lot
was used at Athens.41 A lot oracle at Delphi, precise details unclear, may have
used similar name-bearing tokens.42 Certainly, the bean-lot for the selection of
the city’s archons, the officials who presided over the ostrakophoria, was first
used in 487/6, the second year of demotic ostracism.43 The full significance of this
will become clear below, where we will see that the gestures of ostraka-casting
evoked lot-taking or diagnosis rites; but, by itself, the formal similarity of the
name-bearing ostrakon to a lot token could gather to it some of the significance of
divinely sanctioned identification.44
To be identified in sortition or lot-taking was, for the most part, either
positive or neutral; but an ostrakon used in ostracism was intended to harm
45. This has been observed in passing by, among others, Ogden 1997: 142; Rosenbloom 2004:
337; Forsdyke 2005: 157–58; Collins 2008: 65.
46. Some curses were even inscribed on the circular kylix feet, a preferred type of ostracism
ostrakon (see n.29 above). Gager 1992: 4. Lebedev 1996a and 1996b.
47. Jeffery 1955: 72–76. The binding spell in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (staged in 458 bce) assumes
public familiarity with their use; see Faraone 1985: 152 and Eidinow 2007: 141.
48. Audollent 1904: l; Gager 1992: 5.
49. Steiner 1994: 71–75; Collins 2008: 4. Verbs of cursing or binding were frequently com-
pounds of graphō. On the importance of individual autocommunication, even in collective ritual, see
Rappaport 1979: 178.
50. Phrynichus Ephialtes F3 (= Ath. 165b): 9χουσι γρ τι κντρον ν το:ς δακτλοις,
| μισνθρωπον +νθος ;βης< | ε=θ% 8δυλογο>σιν ?πασιν ε( κατ7 τ-ν γορ7ν περιντες. | π(
το:ς βθροις @ταν Aσιν, κε: τοτοις οBς 8δυλογο>σιν | μεγλας μυχ7ς καταμξαντες κα(
συγκψαντες ?παντες γελ/σιν. With such imagery and location, is this a joke about the practices of
the ostrakophoria?
51. Gager 1992: 5; there are several examples of jumbled spelling in Jordan 1985.
52. Lebedev 1996a and 1996b.
53. Brenne 1994: 23 gives the proportions as 87.4% nominative, 9.8% dative, 2.7% accusative,
and 0.1% genitive.
54. See, for example, Lang 1990: #114, 117, 127, 300, 305, 542, 751, 762, 816, 1049, and
1053. One ostrakon from the Agora (Siewert 2002: T1/141), for a certain Myrrhinicus, breaks up the
name in an intriguing and apparently deliberate way (Μυρρ|νικος | Dτο | Μυρ). Nothing seems to
have broken off the edge or bottom of the ostrakon. It is unlikely that mur is an abbreviation for
the deme-names Myrrhinoutta or Myrrhinous, as these usually follow immediately after the name
and before any verbal injunction. Perhaps the idea was that victory, nikē, is taken from Myrrhinicus.
55. Pace Siewert 2002: 153–54.
56. Lang 1990: #89 (with Fig. 4).
57. Siewert 2002: T1/93. On the significance of the adjective, see Hatch 1908: 157–62.
58. Siewert 2002: T1/48.
59. Plut. Arist. 7.7–8. The anecdote is usually invoked in discussions of vicarious literacy; see,
e.g., Missiou 2011: 59.
60. Siewert 2002: T1/112 against Megacles δρυμE hνεκα (“on account of the copse”);
perhaps also T1/109 and T1/110, again against Megacles, πρας hνεκα (“on account of the
(land?) beyond”).
61. Siewert 2002: T1/86 against Megacles FΡοκω χριν (“for the sake of Rhoecus”).
62. Faraone 1991b; Riess 2012: 164–234.
63. Siewert 2002: T1/43; on such Konsonantenreihen, see Delatte 1913: 247–48 and Dornseiff
1925: 60–61.
64. Siewert 2002: T1/157, see Consogno 2005: 352–53 and Apollodorus FGrHist 244 F109
= Ath. 7.325a-b.
65. Siewert 2002: T1/114.
66. Siewert 2002: T1/42; Raubitschek (in Vanderpool 1949: 403) thought it equivalent to ς
κρακας. See Hall 1989: 98 on these “imprecations of a plainly sacral character.”
67. Siewert 2002: T1/156–64.
68. Siewert 2002: T1/159.
69. Siewert 2002: T1/65, 41, 50–55, and 37, respectively.
70. Siewert 2002: T1/156 and T1/157; see Brenne 1992: 178–82.
71. Megacles is accused of being philarguros, “silver-loving” (Siewert 2002: T1/111). Leagrus
is termed a baskanos, “sorcerer” (Siewert 2002: T1/72), and melas, “dark” (Siewert 2002: T1/73); see
Buxton 2013: 60–71 on the possible implications of melas. Crates is given the sobriquet Phrynondas
(Siewert 2002: T1/69), a name associated with magic and sorcery (see Phillips 1990: 129–33).
72. On these politikai arai, see Vallois 1914, Ziebarth 1985, and Parker 1996: 192–96.
73. ML 30; SEG 45 1628; see Herrmann 1981.
74. Dem. 19.70 and 20.107; Isoc. Paneg. 157; Ar. Thesm. 331–71 (in parody); see also Din.
2.16 on curses against bribe-takers.
75. Siewert 2002: T1/75–81.
76. E.g., Lys. 22 (against the grain-dealers).
77. Plut. Quaest. conviv. 693f: 9ξω Βολιμον 9σω δ' Πλο>τον κα( FΥγειαν. Note the
description of ostracism as the keramikē mastix, above. See Herter 1950: 117–18.
78. TAM III.1 103 ll.6–7: δωξε γ7ρ ες ?λα λιμν.
79. Zenobius 4.93, Diogenianus 6.13, and Apostol. 10.69 (Λιμο> πεδον). For personified
Hunger at Sparta, see Polyaenus Strat. 2.15 and Callisthenes FGrHist 124 F13 = Ath. 10.452a-b.
Once the pots had been smashed and the ostraka inscribed, whether with
a politician’s name, additional magical symbols, or even “Hunger,” they were
carried by all participants into the Agora. The ostraka were then cast across a
barrier—the ballistic verb rhiptō, “I throw,” is used—into a circular enclosure.83
This expulsive casting of ostraka was a regular kinetic movement, a marked,
significant gesture within individual and collective frames of reference.
We have seen, above, that the inscribing of a name or portrait onto the ostrakon
turned the sherd into a metonymic bearer of the targeted person (or personifica-
tion): one Athenian could even write on the ostrakon he took to the barrier, “I
am carrying (pherō) Megacles,” totally assimilating potsherd and politician.84
Embedding the target’s identity in the ostrakon meant that its manipulation could
intensify and sympathetically enact the inscriber’s purpose. Several inscriptions
on ostraka indicate the symbolic force of the throwing gesture: “Cimon, son of
Miltiades, should get out of here (itō), and take (your sister) Elpinice with you!”85
“Megacles, son of Hippocrates, should flee (pheugetō)!”86 “Megacles, son of Hip-
pocrates, out with him again (echsō eiseltheis)! But not to Eretria!”87 “Callixenus,
son of Aristonymus, should go (ioi)!”88 “Myrrhinicus should go (itō), Myr-!”89
“Themistocles, son of Neocles, should go (itō)!”90 and even “[I?] expel (pheu–)
Hunger!”91 As before, it is likely that these expulsive verbs indicate what was
regularly spoken or shouted over the majority of ostraka that bear the targets’
names alone. The same third-person imperative, itō, “he should go!,” appears on
an ostracism ostrakon from the Tauric Chersonese, pointing to the ubiquity of the
injunction.92 The casting away from the citizen and over a barrier was a gesture
that precisely paralleled the orders inscribed on, and presumably spoken over,
the ostrakon: action and utterance are different sides of a single analogous act.93
Presumably, the varying violence of the gesture and volume of the injunction gave
83. Throw: Tzetz. Chil. 13.449 (ρρπτουν); Vat. Graec. 1144 (Lπτειν ες τ το> βουλευτηρου
περφραγμα). Note that the same verb was also used of ostrakinda, the children’s game identified
with ostracism (Pollux 9.112: . δ' Lπτων τ 0στρακον πιλγει “ν)ξ 8μρα”). Barrier: Pollux
8.19 (τ ν περιορισθντα τπον); Plut. Ar. 7.4 (να τπον τ ς γορς περιπεφραγμνον ν κκλω
δρυφκτοις). According to Vat. Graec. 1144, bouleutic ostraka were cast into a similar enclosure (τ
το> βουλευτηρου περφραγμα).
84. Siewert 2002: T1/84.
85. Siewert 2002: T1/67; on the incest accusation, see below.
86. Siewert 2002: T1/85.
87. Siewert 2002: T1/94.
88. Consogno 2005: 349 (P17772).
89. Siewert 2002: T1/141.
90. Siewert 2002: T1/43–46.
91. Siewert 2002: T1/81.
92. Vinogradov and Zolotarev 1999: #7; Schirripa, Lentini, and Cordano 2012: 125.
93. See Corbeill 2004: 3 on how linked gestures and spoken utterances derive from a single,
underlying mental process.
public expression, in a way not possible for a hand-vote or secret ballot, to the
intensity of an individual’s opinion.94
This expulsive verbalized gesture shares the forms and behavior of Greek
sympathetic magic, according to which a marked action was performed while
an incantation projected this activity onto the absent victim. As Christopher
Faraone has demonstrated, “in most cases the similia similibus formula employs
a third-person imperative or optative”;95 these are the precise verbal forms we
have on the ostraka. In addition, the words and gestures of this political ritual
are strikingly close to apotropaic formulae used across the Greek world against
illness, hunger, demons, and ghosts:96 “Go out (exō), Hunger!”97 “To the door
(thuraze), ghosts!”98 “Flee, flee (pheuge pheug’), leave (iou) bile!”99 If we recall
the “I(?) expel Hunger” sherd, cast at the Athenian ostrakophoria, it is evident
that the new political ritual is situated, for at least some Athenians, within a similar
thought-world.
While the individual’s casting of his ostrakon can be assimilated to sym-
pathetic magic, the simultaneous throwing by a crowd of citizens held different
meanings. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Athenians, gathering from all parts
of Attica around the circular enclosure in the Agora, together cast their ostraka
into the center. This collective activity was charged by deeply rooted chains of
cognition related to group throwing, associations that seem to be of long duration
and close affinity.
The simultaneous throwing of sharp, hard objects by a crowd of citizens ar-
rayed in a circle recalls nothing so much as stoning.100 For ostracism and lapidation
share three fundamental characteristics. First, both were mass-participation ac-
tions that were strongly marked as demotic and ideally enacted (and thereby
witnessed) by a good part of the community. The identification of stoning
with the dēmos is evident in narratives which give the entire population (“the
Athenians,”101 “the Mytileneans,”102 “the Coans,”103 “the Arcadians,”104 etc.) as
the active subject of stoning verbs and in such literary compounds or juxtaposi-
tions as dēmoleuston, “dēmos-stoned,”105 dēmorrhipheis leusimous aras, “dēmos-
94. See Faig 1993: 144 on this effect of the Spartan shout-vote, and Schwartzberg 2010.
95. Faraone 1988: 282.
96. See Rotolo 1980 and Faraone 2004.
97. Plut. Quaest. conviv. 693f.
98. Photius s.v. Θραζε Κρες.
99. Heim 1892: #57 (Alex. Trall. II p.377); see also #58–60 (Marc. 8.193).
100. On stoning, see Pease 1907, Gras 1984, Rosivach 1987, Cantarella 1991: 73–87, Steiner
1995. The connection with ostracism has been noted in passing by Gras 1984: 85 and Rosenbloom
2004: 337.
101. Hdt. 9.5.2.
102. Hdt. 5.38.1.
103. Apollod. Bibl. 2.7.1.
104. Paus. 8.5.13.
105. Soph. Ant. 36 and Lycoph. Alex. 331.
ther in the next section, included such ridicule as incest (Elpinikēn labōn),123
adultery (moichos),124 impudence or stupidity (aphelēs),125 and being a passive
sexual partner (katapygōn).126 These echo the verbal obscenity, or aischrolo-
gia, that accompanied Athenian stone-throwing festivals.127 Aristotle considered
such abusive language a form of violent aggression, comparable to assault and
murder.128
These structural similarities between ostracism and lapidation can be seen
at work in the punishment of Lycidas in 479, a paradigmatic case of aggressive
Athenian patriotism. Herodotus reports that, when the Persian Mardonius sent
the Hellespontine Murychides to the Athenian council, evacuated to Salamis,
in order to offer terms of surrender, one of the councillors, Lycidas, alone
proposed that the matter be considered. Herodotus suggests that Lycidas either
had been bribed or was happily medizing. The Athenians in the council and those
outside were so incensed at Lycidas’ betrayal that they surrounded him in a circle
(peristantes) and stoned him to death (kateleusan ballontes); at this great noise
(genomenou thorybou), presumably indicating shouts and curses, the citizens’
wives, one calling on another, then stoned Lycidas’ wife and children. The
foreigner Murychides was allowed to leave unharmed.129 In Lycurgus’ version of
the same event, the councillors removed their crowns of office before the stoning,
thereby acting merely as citizens.130 Lycidas’ crimes—treason and medism—
are among those targeted by ostracism, especially in the five or six successful
interwar ostrakophoriai of the 480s. The stoning is an in-group punishment.
Although the episode takes place on Salamis, to where the Athenians have
evacuated, the stoning outside of the temporary Bouleuterion, where a crowd of
citizens had gathered, schematically reproduces the dynamics (Athenians standing
in a circle, shouting, throwing) and the precise location of the Agora-based
ostrakophoria.131
Despite these evident similarities, ostracism, of course, had no tyrant, traitor,
or abusive magistrate physically present at the center of the circle. The violence of
the stoning of Lycidas and his family should be understood as a maximal extreme,
made possible by the wartime setting and the dislocation of the polis to Salamis.
A number of fifth-century sources recognize that stoning was exceptionally
cruel132 and so could be sublimated into functionally equivalent but more civilized
practices. Sublimation and substitution have, of course, been guiding concepts
for ethological or psychological interpretations of Greek sacrifice, ritual, and
games.133 I would suggest that the Greeks understood this political ritual in
a similar framework. So, lapidation could be identified with or transfigured
into democratic voting, encouraged by the shared technology of the psēphos,
“pebble,” used in both demotic practices.134 At the battle of Plataea, for example,
Amompharetus showed his objection to the withdrawal of the Spartan army by
picking up a large stone (petron megan) with both hands, throwing (katabalōn)
it at the feet of Pausanias, and declaring, “This is my vote (psēphon)!”—the threat
of stoning is unexpressed but evident.135 Hipponax and the dramatists frequently
play on the identification between communal decision-making and lapidation.136
Xanthus of Lydia even preserves an appropriate mythic aetiology: when the gods
wanted to punish Hermes for killing Argos, but needed to restrain themselves since
he had acted at Zeus’ behest, they threw their voting pebbles at his feet (instead of
at him) and thereby created the first herm.137 Similarly, the spontaneous lapidation
could be institutionalized: Deinias reports that the Argives located their legal
trials at the very spot where they had stoned to death Melachrus and Cleometra.138
Exile could also be considered a less severe version of stoning.139 If these three
demotic practices—voting, judging, and exile—were recognized as substitutions
for stoning, as the considered and regularized sublimation of spontaneous demotic
violence,140 then I would suggest that we can infer this for the closely related
practice of ostrakophoria as well.
Lapidation was incorporated into two additional forms of demotic violence,
actual or symbolic, with which the casting of ostraka was associated: scapegoat
132. Aesch. Eum. 179–90 lists lapidation alongside such cruel punishments as gouging, amputa-
tion, and beheading, all not to be associated with Apollo and Delphi.
133. See, e.g., Burkert 1983; Mack 1987; Herman 2006: 303–309.
134. See Burkert 1983: 165n.16; Steiner 1995: 193; Hollmann 2012: 9.
135. Plut. Arist. 17.3. Cf. Diod. Sic. 13.87.4–5, who describes the stoning of Acragantine
generals in the city’s ekklēsia.
136. E.g., Hipponax F128 (West): @πως ψηφ:δι 〈κακ S〉 κακ ν ο=τον 0ληται | βουλ S δημοσηS
παρ7 θ:ν% τρυγτοιο; Aesch. Sept. 198–99: ψ φος κατ% α$τ/ν 5λεθρα βουλεσεται, | λευστ ρα
δ3μου δ% οU τι μ- φγηS μρον: Eur. Ion 1222–23: Δελφ/ν δ% +νακτες 1ρισαν πετρορριφ |
θανε:ν μ-ν δσποιναν ο$ ψ3φω μιW; Eur. Or. 48–50: κυρα δ% ;δ% 8μρα | ν Xι διοσει ψ φον
Αργεων
Y πλις, | ε χρ- θανε:ν ν& λευσμω πετρ\ματι; 440–42:—ψ φος καθ% 8μ/ν οDσεται τ Sδ%
8μραW. |—φεγειν πλιν τ3νδ’; ^ θανε:ν ^ μ- θανε:ν;—θανε:ν _π% στ/ν λευσμω πετρ\ματι;
Cratinus Drapetides F62 KA: Λμπωνα, τ ν ο$ βροτ/ν | ψ φος δναται φλεγυρ7 δεπνου
περγειν.
137. Xanthus FGrHist 765 F29 = Etym. Magn. s.v. FΕρμα:ον.
138. Deinias FGrHist 306 F3 = Schol. Eur. Or. 872. Note that Michelakis 2002: 56–57 has argued
that a civic solution domesticates the threatened stoning of Achilles in Aeschylus’ fragmentary
Myrmidons, but the details remain unclear.
139. Soph. OC 434–36.
140. Note that Allen 2000: 50–59 has drawn attention to the importance of city-regulated/regu-
lating anger (Soph. Ant. 354–55: στυνμους 5ργ7ς) for the politics of punishment at Athens.
141. See, e.g., Parker 1996: 257–80. Ar. Ran. 730–33 comments that Athens is led by politicians
who previously would not even have been considered appropriate as scapegoats. [Lys.] 6.53
suggests that the exile of Andocides would purify the city like the expulsion of a scapegoat
(ν>ν οaν χρ- νομζειν τιμωρουμνους κα( παλλαττομνους Ανδοκδου Y τ-ν πλιν καθαρειν κα(
ποδιοπομπε:σθαι κα( φαρμακ ν ποπμπειν κα( λιτηρου παλλττεσθαι, Pς bν τοτων ο#τς
στι). Demosthenes was condemned by Aesch. in Ctes. 131 as “the polluting demon of Greece” (A τ ς
FΕλλδος λειτ3ριε). Scapegoating terminology is found on several ostraka: Siewert 2002: T1/92–
93, T1/153 (Megacles and Xanthippos, respectively, as aleitēros, “cursed”), T1/149 (Themistocles
as hypegaios agos, “a curse on the land”); see Faraone 2004: 239.
142. Vernant 1972: 125–26; Burkert 1985: 83; Parker 1996: 269–71; Ogden 1997: 142; Dreher
2000: 74. Ammonius’ definition of a pharmakos (142 Valckenaer) is “one who is cast out to purify
the city” (. π( καθρσει τ ς πλεως Lιπτμενος), using the same verb as the casting of ostraka.
It is worth considering if the ostracized politician would have departed Athens through the gate used
for scapegoats and refuse (Plut. de curiositate 518b).
143. Philostr. VA 4.10; Plut. Quaest. Graec. 26 (297b); Schol. Ar. Eq. 1136; Tzetz. Chil.
5.728–40; see Bremmer 1983 and 2008: 191–92, Cantarella 1991: 83–84, and Luraghi 2013: 57–60.
144. Schol. Callim. Aet. F90; Schol. Ov. Ib. 467; see Bremmer 1983: 315.
145. Suda s.v. φαρμακς (= Ister FGrHist 334 F50). Rosenbloom 2004: 339 has noted that, like
mythical Pharmakos, Hyperbolus was accused of stealing cups (Leucon Phratry-Members F1).
146. Hipponax F6, F7, F128; see Masson 1948 and Faraone 2004.
147. Ar. Ach. 182, 282–85.
148. Hsch. s.v. κραδηστης (φαρμακς, . τα:ς κρδαις βαλλμενος); Hipponax F5: πλιν
καθαρειν κα( κρδηSσι βλλεσθαι, F6: βλλοντες ν χειμ/νι κα( Lαπζοντες | κρδηSσι κα(
σκλληSσιν 1σπερ φαρμακν. See Bremmer 2008: 184–89.
149. Hsch. s.v. κραδης νμος.
150. Consogno 2005: 349–52.
the same context Cratinus’ joke against Pericles, whom “the ostrakon has passed
by” (toustrakon paroichetai)—a reference to the ostrakophoria at which his rival
Thucydides, son of Melesias, received more votes—as a “squill-headed Zeus” (ho
schinokephalos Zeus).151
Ostraka-casting could also be identified with the precipitation of a living
body or dead corpse. This practice shared with ostracism a two-stage geography,
transitioning from the identification and punishment, often by stoning, of a
citizen at the city’s heart to the expulsion of his remains into a pit or over a
border.152 Throwing stones and throwing the body were linked and analogous
gestures: the Delphians both stoned Aesop (hoi polloi lithois auton ballontes) and
pushed him off a cliff (kata krēmnou eōsan);153 the Arcadians stoned Aristocrates
(katalithōsantes) and then cast him unburied beyond their boundaries (ekballousin
ataphon);154 Plato proposed in his Laws that, if someone were found guilty of
murder, he should be executed and cast out naked (ekballontōn gymnon) at a
crossroads, where all the magistrates, acting on behalf of the city, would first
stone him (lithon hekastos pherōn . . . ballōn) and then cast out his corpse beyond
the borders unburied (eis ta tēs chōras horia pherontes ekballontōn . . . ataphon).155
Even where stoning is not found, the expulsion of a corpse beyond the borders
was often a second stage: the Leucadians, according to a picturesque custom
described by Strabo, would tie false wings and live birds to a criminal, throw
him off a sea cliff (rhipteisthai), collect his remains in a boat, and dispose of
them over the state’s boundaries.156 The significance of corpse-expulsion for the
Athenians’ conceptualization of ostracism is shown by the Megacles ostrakon,
discussed above, onto which a naked corpse had been drawn (Fig. 4). In the
previous section, I argued that the act of inscribing this image may have been
symbolic or allegorical, turning the ostrakon into a kind of curse-tablet or “voodoo
doll.” Here, where we are examining the throwing gesture, we may go further,
to suggest that the casting of such a corpse-ostrakon was intended to recall the
expelling of the naked body of a public enemy over the Athenian border or into
the barathron, the natural chasm that was used for these punishments.157 We can
identify such a self-conscious association in the literary tradition as well. Plutarch
reports that Aristides, at the height of his competition with Themistocles, advised
his fellow citizens as he was leaving the Assembly one day that Athens would
not be secure unless they threw both himself and his rival into the barathron
151. Cratinus F73 (Kassel and Austin) = Plut. Per. 13.9. This has usually been treated as a
reference to Pericles’ supposed cranial abnormality; see, e.g., Cohen 1991.
152. See Rosivach 1983 and Cantarella 1991: 91–105.
153. Vitae G and W; see Nagy 1979: 280–81.
154. Paus. 4.22.7.
155. Pl. Leg. 9.873b.
156. Strabo 10.2.9.
157. On the barathron, see Gernet 1924, Gras 1984: 81, Cantarella 1991: 96–105, and Allen
2000: 216–21; on its location, see Lalonde 2006: 114–16.
158. Plut. Arist. 3.2: λλ% ε=πεν π τ ς κκλησας πι\ν, Pς ο$κ 9στι σωτηρα το:ς Αθηναων
Y
πργμασιν, ε μ- κα( Θεμιστοκλα κα( α$τ ν ες τ βραθρον μβλοιεν.
159. On the voluntariness of the pharmakos, see Bremmer 2008: 183–84.
160. Ar. Eq. 1362–63: +ρας μετωρον ες τ βραθρον μβαλ/, | κ το> λρυγγος κκρεμσας
FΥπρβολον.
161. See Rappaport 1979: 91.
162. Ostracism corresponds to Burkert’s model of religious therapy, expounded most schemat-
ically in Burkert 1996: 103.
163. Zenobius 5.75; Robbins 1916; Graf 2012: 37–39.
164. Champeaux 1990a. On the use of the inscribed lot for Roman Republican political practice,
see Stewart 1998: 22–51.
165. Hom. Il. 7.175–76; on this episode, see, e.g., Steiner 1994: 10–15.
166. Tac. Germ. 10.1.
167. 1 Samuel 10:19–22.
using a technology similar to Tacitus’ Germans, the subject who had caused his
king’s illness, even determining guilt by majority vote.168 In the Hebrew Bible,
the Phoenician sailors carrying Jonah to Tarshish throw lots to discover on whose
account the tempest threatened their safety and then, in a precipitation-like act,
throw the prophet overboard.169 An episode in the book of Joshua pulls together
many of the phenomena we have explored: when the Israelites were suffering
God’s anger because of the theft of some religious dedications a lengthy process
of lot-casting within the camp identified a certain Achan as responsible; he was
then led far away, stoned to death, and left unburied beneath the heap of thrown
rocks.170 The Hebrew verbs of lot-casting were also used for expulsive throwing.171
No ancient source explicitly links the ostrakophoria with casting-divination, but
the identity of gesture, diagnostic purpose, and inscribed tokens suggests that the
association was possible.172
In sum, ancient narratives and the images and phrases inscribed on some
sherds suggest that ostraka-casting can be understood as a ritual gesture, sym-
pathetically enacting expulsive intentions and imitating long-established forms
of demotic punishment or diagnosis. Stanley Tambiah has argued that the mean-
ing of ritual gestures is situated precisely in this capacity to codify analogically
and to express multiple implications simultaneously.173 The gesture is not just a
way to express something but is itself an aspect of that which it is expressing.174
Furthermore, even if only a minority of participants conceptualized the ostraka-
casting in any of these ways, the simultaneity of gesture by itself would have
forged among all a kind of political communion.175 If the bare occurrence of an
ostrakophoria signaled factionalism and interpersonal distrust, then the group
casting of sherds into the center of a circle gave a unity of expression to the
citizens’ individualized, contradictory opinions. That is to say, even though each
Athenian had his own target, his inscription was unknown to the crowd and his
voice lost in their thorybos; the collective throwing of ostraka toward the same
center posited, behind the polyphony of competing voices, an idealized vision
of a homogeneous and united polis. Unlike hand-raising or the secret ballot, the
ostrakophoria’s ritual gesture allowed the fantasy of the unanimous vote. The
gestural associations, with lapidation in particular, disguised the incipient stasis
168. Hdt. 4.67–68. See also Amm. Marc. 31.2.24 on the Alani. On the use of such stick-lots
by Gauls, Germans, and Scythians, see Champeaux 1990b.
169. Jonah 1:7, 12. Note that the verb for throwing Jonah into the sea (the hiphil form of tul)
is also used of casting lots (e.g., Proverbs 16:33).
170. Joshua 7.
171. See Lindblom 1962.
172. On the religious authority of the dēmos in classical Athens, see, e.g., Garland 1984.
173. Tambiah 1985: 53; see also Rappaport 1979: 199.
174. On the “obvious” aspects of ritual, see Rappaport 1979: 173–222.
175. Cf. Ozouf 1975 and Kertzer 1988: 23. A Biblical proverb teaches that the casting of lots
together generates friendship (Proverbs 1:14: “Throw in your lot among us; we will all have one
purse”). See also Riess 2012 on the integrative effect of civic violence.
as a citizenry “hating with one mind.”176 Compare, for example, the Spartan ephor
Sthenelaı̈das’ reification of division, by physically grouping into two separate
sections the Spartiates who supported and those who opposed war with Athens in
432,177 with the ostrakophoria’s common action at the Agora’s circular enclosure.
Indeed, the growing accumulation of ostraka would have been an effective symbol
of this unity-through-gesture, like the pile of rocks that engulfed the victim of
lapidation and gave visual confirmation of both the number and consensus of
participants.178 If, as I argued above, any individual ostrakon could symbolize the
broken unity that generated it, then the ingathering of several thousands of these
provided a powerful image of restored and unstriated unity.179 The significance of
this massive aggregation of sherds is shown by the double-count that followed
their casting: the ostraka were first tallied up as a single unit, without being read,
to see if the quorum had been surpassed. This first reckoning can be considered
a formal confirmation of their collective and unifying function.
Such an analysis follows an influential body of Durkheimian scholarship,
which has identified political integration as a primary social effect of ritual and
the cloaking or domestication of intragroup conflict as a subset of this.180 A key
insight of such analyses, helpful for our understanding of ostrakophoriai, is that
such social solidarity can be generated by people doing the same things rather than
thinking the same things. Precisely because ostracism was a procedure emerging
from a dramatic diversity of opinion, social coherence came from the publicly
visible unity of gesture and the associated suppression of explicit speech.
The circular enclosure around which the Athenian citizens gathered to cast
their inscribed sherds was erected in the new Agora to the northwest of the
Acropolis. As far as we can gather, this periphragma was located in the open
area below the Kolonos Agoraios, between the Cleisthenic Bouleuterion, the
Altar of the Twelve Gods, and the Tyrannicide statues on the Sacred Way.181
Kolb has suggested that the ostracism enclosure was raised on the so-called
Orchestra.182 This setting should be considered a meaningful ritual location. As
we have seen, the ostracism procedure began with a preliminary binary hand-vote
176. Aesch. Eum. 986: στυγε:ν μιW φρεν. On Athens’ self-idealization as free of conflict and
at peace, see Loraux 1991.
177. Thuc. 1.87; see Faig 1993.
178. E.g., Philostr. VA 4.10; Xanthus FGrHist 765 F29 = Etym. Magn. s.v. FΕρμα:ον.
179. On the symbolic unity of the Cleisthenic system, see Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet 1996.
180. See, e.g., Turner 1957; Gluckman 1962: 40–41; Bell 1992: 172–76; Wulf and Zirfas 2004:
22.
181. For the early fifth-century Agora, see Kolb 1981; Camp 1986: 36–63; Shear Jr. 1994; Millett
1998: 211–14; Anderson 2003: 87–102; Neer and Kurke 2014.
182. Tim. Soph. Lex. Plat. s.v. 5ρχ3στρα; Paus. 1.8.5; see Kolb 1981: 27–54 and Brenne 1994:
20.
194. Ar. Vesp. 488–91. On the comic Agora, see Wilkins 2000: 156–201. Steiner 1994: 191
observes that the democrats of the Piraeus, overthrowing the Thirty Tyrants and restoring democracy,
gathered in the Agora and not the Pnyx.
195. See Morris 2000: 134–38.
196. The location of the statue group is described by Tim. Soph. Lex. Plat. s.v. 5ρχ3στρα, Paus.
1.8.5, and Arr. Anab. 3.16.8.
197. Plin. HN 34.17; on synchronisms invented for ideological effect, see Feeney 2007.
198. Taylor 1981: 26; Ma 2013: 113–14.
199. It was returned to Athens by Alexander (Arr. Anab. 3.6.8), Seleucus I (Val. Max. 2.10 ext.1),
or Antiochus I (Paus. 1.8.5). Its artistic priority was immediately evident to Pausanias.
507.200 The most famous runs, “In a branch of myrtle I’ll carry my sword, like
Harmodius and Aristogeiton when they killed the tyrant (ton tyrannon ktanetēn)
and made Athens isonomous.”201 The later group depicted Harmodius and Aris-
togeiton energetically striding forward, weapons in hand, in the act of striking
down Hipparchus. Many scholars have noted the absence of the victim from the
composition, leaving the monument unbalanced and open-ended, incorporating
the citizen viewer into the action, and so transforming a historical moment into
a political paradigm.202 The sculpture was paraenetic, encouraging imitation of
the heroes and the ongoing targeting of would-be tyrants and oligarchs:203 in the
skolia, quoted above, we see citizens play-acting the Tyrannicides; Herodotus
has Miltiades call on Callimachus, polemarch at Marathon, to join battle with
the Persians and so surpass even the Tyrannicides in civic honor;204 the chorus
of old men in the Lysistrata adopts the pose of Aristogeiton in their defense of the
constitution.205 Julia Shear has persuasively argued that the assassination of the
oligarch Phrynichus in the Agora in 411, for seeking peace with Sparta, was a
deliberate re-enactment of the Hipparchus episode.206 Accordingly, ostrakopho-
riai took place beside an idealized, hortatory visualization of tyrant-killing, a
monument that legitimized and promoted civic violence in defense of the dēmos.
Furthermore, it is likely that these statue groups were erected on or near the very
location of the slaying of Hipparchus.207 In other words, the monument identified
the Agora and, more particularly, the open area at its center, where ostrakophoriai
took place, as the historical birthplace of Athenian democracy. The circular en-
closure, into which ostraka were cast, may have been considered the very site
of Hipparchus’ death.208
So, during an ostrakophoria, thousands of citizens, wielding their potsherds,
converged on the celebrated killing zone of the tyrant. The Tyrannicide statues
would necessarily have been incorporated into the assembling hubbub, triggering
200. The issue’s many complications need not detain us here; see, e.g., Lavelle 1993 and Thomas
1989: 238–61.
201. Poetae Melici Graeci #893–96.
202. Brunnsåker 1971: 163–64; Ober 2003: 218 and 221; Neer 2010: 78–85; Ma 2013: 114.
203. Ober 2003 has shown that democrats assimilated oligarchic opposition to tyranny.
204. Hdt. 6.109.3.
205. Ar. Lys. 631–34.
206. Thuc. 8.92; Shear 2011: 28–29, 60. According to Lycurg. Leocr. 113, his bones were
expelled from Attica. Note that it also echoes the stoning of Lycidas on Salamis, also outside the
Bouleuterion and also for proposing peace with the great enemy.
207. Taylor 1981: 42; Castriotia 1998: 202; Ajootian 1998: 3. Hipparchus was killed in the
vicinity of the Leocorium ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 18.3; Thuc. 1.20.2, 6.57.3), the shrine of the daughters
of Leos, who sacrificed themselves to ward off famine (Ael. VH 12.28; Aristid. Pan. 13.119). This
was a familiar landmark in the northern or central part of the Agora, beside the Panathenaic Way; see
Wycherley 1957: 108–13.
208. Cf. Timoleon’s razing the palace of Dionysius II of Syracuse and building courts of justice
on the very site (Plut. Tim. 22.1–3)—a similar localization of anti-tyrant aggression; on house razing,
see Connor 1985.
209. SIG3 284; SEG 32 1143; Heisserer 1979; Gauthier 1982: 215–21; Ober 2003: 227.
210. Pace Forsdyke 2005: 279, who, with her focus on the expulsive telos of ostracism, considers
it a re-enactment of the expulsion of Cleisthenes’ rival Isagoras after the fall of the tyranny.
211. Plut. Per. 7.1–2.
212. Camp 1986: 36–77; Hölscher 1991; Shear Jr. 1994; Millett 1998.
213. Camp 1986: 42; Shear Jr. 1994: 231. Note that the democrats erased from the Altar of
the Twelve Gods the dedicatory inscription of Pisistratus, son of the tyrant Hippias (Thuc. 6.54.7),
demonstrating to Athenians the symbolic power of names and their removal at this very spot.
214. Pind. F75. Note, however, that Neer and Kurke 2014 have argued that the Altar of the
Twelve Gods was originally erected in the old Agora, to the east of the Acropolis, and relocated
to the markedly democratic space of the new Agora at some point in the fifth century.
215. Lycurg. Leocr. 5; Aeschin. 3.176; Dem. 20.158, 22.77, and 24.60; see Millett 1998: 224.
was intended to expel far beyond the boundaries of the state someone considered
guilty of treason, bribery, and other polluting personal offences. How can we
reconcile this?
The ostraka enclosure should be considered, to adopt Foucault’s term, a
heterotopia.216 That is to say, for the duration of the ostrakophoria, this bounded
circle at the navel of the polis came to represent an anti-Athens populated by anti-
Athenians. It was a space into which citizens symbolically disposed of both what
they did not like—tyranny, incest, hunger, and so on—and those they did not wish
to have among them. The circle, therefore, represented an absolute break from the
regular time and space of the Agora; it was marked off physically by a barrier
and ritually, as I have argued, by a repeated gesture. As a locus of pollution,
deviance, and political danger it operated in a relation of inverted analogy to
the idealized democratic polis; such a polar reversal may have been effected
precisely because it was located at Athens’ geographic and conceptual center.
Circle-tracing has a recognized ability to mark off a space as heterotopic,217 and
certain ostraka may represent this in the shape of their inscriptions. An ostrakon
against Callias, for instance, schematically locates the targeted politician within
this heterotopia by placing his name and deme (Kallias Alōpekēthen) at the center
of the sherd, around which a circle of writing records his patronymic (Kratiou)
and his crime (hos e(m) Mēdōn, “the one from Media”); another has the same
Callias’ name inscribed across the top of the sherd and the similar accusation, hos
em Mēdōn hēkei, “who has come from Media,” written in a full circle beneath.218
The casting of these “from Media” circle sherds into the enclosure may have been
an analogous expulsion back to the foreign locale. Similarly, the inscription nea
kōmē, on a couple of ostraka targeting Megacles, son of Hippocrates, may indicate
something like “a new village [for you]!” identifying the circle with the generically
non-Athenian, non-polis life of the exile.219 If I am correct to understand the
casting of the Megacles-corpse ostrakon as a symbolic precipitation (see above),
then the enclosure becomes the barathron or equivalent. The circle in which
the ostraka accumulated, therefore, was capable of juxtaposing in a single real
space several imagined destinations that were in themselves incompatable but
gained a unity from their shared expulsive relation to Athens. In other words,
the ostrakophoria procedure temporarily transformed this delimited part of the
Agora into a dystopic a-polis.
216. The term was introduced by Foucault 1986 and developed by Soja 1996: 154–63.
217. On the symbolism of the circle in archaic and early classical thought, see Vernant 1969:
170–80. Circle-tracing was a widespread technique of ancient magic used for, amongst other things,
protection against demons, thaumaturgy, rain magic, and debt obligations; see Cameron 1928, Goldin
1963, and Kosmin 2014: 129–30.
218. Siewert 2002: T1/56.
219. Siewert 2002: T1/107–108. Cf. the fetial rite for inaugurating a Roman war, according to
which a spear was thrown into a piece of land beside the temple of Bellona at Rome that temporarily
represented foreign territory (Serv. ad Aen. 9.52); see Ando 2011: 19–36 and Rich 2011: 204–209.
The Agora offered ostraka-casting what the Pnyx could not: the city’s central
location, an association with quotidian anti-elite behavior, and the foundational
site of democratic freedom. The ostrakophoria would have been charged by its
proximity to these demotic monuments and memories. But ostracism was not only
a passive receiver. A procedure of such scale and emotion would in turn have con-
tributed to this ideological and physical program of agoracization: the citizenry
performed to itself the Agora’s significance as the city’s spatial, demotic center
and, by repeated negation, limned all that Athens should be. Indeed, the ingather-
ing of the citizenry in this form can be understood as a moment of democratic
socialization: to paraphrase d’Azeglio, if Cleisthenes’ reforms had made Athens
a democracy, Athenians still had to be made democratic. Moore and Myerhoff
have noted how political ritual can objectify and reify social relationships or ideas
that are otherwise invisible.220 So, the ostrakophoria asserted in one and the same
place the physical reality of the new political order by, for instance, grouping the
population entering the Agora into its ten otherwise discontiguous new tribes,221
publicly deploying the administrative responsibilites of the magistrates and coun-
cillors, and demonstrating the ultimate and aggressive sovereignty of the dēmos.
For the duration of the ostrakophoria, the Agora was a microcosm of the state.
Such political socialization was already observed by George Grote, first modern
defender of the ostracism institution: “It was necessary to create in the multitude,
and through them to force upon the leading ambitious men, that rare and difficult
sentiment which we may term a constitutional morality.”222
DISENCHANTMENT
Any account of ostracism’s emergence must also find room for its desuetude.
From its almost annual frequency during the 480s, the institution declined to
perhaps three completed ostracisms in the 470s, maybe two in the 460s, possibly
one in the 450s, a couple in the 440s, none during the 430s or 420s, and
finally ended with that of Hyperbolus in 416 or 415.223 While it is likely that
the preliminary question continued to be asked of the Assembly throughout the
later fifth and fourth centuries224 and it is possible that several below-quorum
ostrakophoriai have not entered the historical record, the overall pattern is
undeniable. Explanations for the waning of the institution argue either that its
functional niche was filled by the lawcourts and the eisangelia prosecution225
220. Moore and Myerhoff 1977: 14. See also Wulf and Zirfas 2004: 18–20.
221. It is still debated whether they would have been seated by tribe in the Assembly; see Hansen
1977 and 1987: 39–41, 127 and Stanton and Bicknell 1987.
222. Grote 1856: 4.205; see also Petzold 1990: 172 on ostracism’s contribution to the dēmos’
self-awareness.
223. Phillips 1982: 27.
224. Heftner 2003.
225. E.g., Mossé 2000; Dreher 2000; Riess 2012: 97, 163, 389–90.
or, following ancient accounts, that it was made disreputable by Nicias’ and
Alcibiades’ turning of it against low-born Hyperbolus.226 The approach taken
in this paper can add a further insight: the ostraka themselves, where they
can be dated by target’s name or orthography, show a decline in associative
or symbolic richness over the course of the fifth century. Most of the sherds
that have been particularly helpful for the above analysis, with their images,
imprecations, magical signs, and so forth, date to the 480s or 470s; with a
couple of exceptions, such “superfluous” elements are almost entirely absent
by the 460s or 450s. Furthermore, a similar reduction occurs in the use of the
accusative and dative cases for the targets’ names and, presumably, the verbal
injunctions that would have accompanied them: of the 31 dative-case published
ostraka from the Agora, 28 date to ostracism’s early period (the 480s and 470s),
2 to the middle period (460s-440s), and only one to the late period (410s); of
the 13 accusative-case sherds, 11 are early, 2 late.227 (The Kerameikos data
have not yet been processed in this way.) Additionally, the scatter-vote seems to
narrow from a broad range to the few major players. These changes suggest that,
even if, as Old Comedy demonstrates, ostracism could still attract symbolic or
ritualized meanings, nonetheless the institution had undergone a routinization and
disenchantment (Entzauberung).228 The ensemble of practices and associations
that generated ostracism ultimately opened a space for the idea of ostracism
itself. That is to say, the inscribing and casting of ostraka became increasingly
situation referential, referring to the institution for which they were used and not
to the reperformance by allusion or analogy of other rites.229 Such narrowing of
ostracism’s associative or symbolic fan correlates with the institution’s declining
frequency.
We can see this in the last successful ostracism, of the rabble-rouser Hyper-
bolus, which, according to Plutarch’s three accounts, discredited the procedure
among the Athenians because, on the one hand, it turned against a ponēros an
institution properly used to target elite citizens230 and, on the other, the proce-
dure was openly manipulated by Alcibiades, Nicias, and possibly also Phaeax.231
The Hyperbolus ostracism can be considered a ritual breakdown or infelicity232 —
publicly instrumentalized, socially divisive rather than integrative, inverting the
ritual script, and so producing an inappropriate result233 —all predicated on the
226. Thuc. 8.73.3; Plut. Arist. 7.3–4, Nic. 11.4–6, Alc. 13.4–5. See, e.g., Connor and Keaney
1969.
227. Lang 1990: 17, with nn.64–65.
228. For these Weberian concepts, dispersed through his writings, see Koshul 2005: 9–39.
229. On situation referentiality, see Fernandez 1965: 911–12.
230. The identification between ostracism and elite status was so close that Demetrius of Phaleron
argued that Aristides was wealthy simply on the basis that he had been ostracized (FGrHist 228 F43
= Plut. Arist. 1.2).
231. Plut. Arist. 7.3–4, Nic. 11.4–6, Alc. 13.4–5; see Fuqua 1965 and Rosenbloom 2004.
232. On ritual failure, see Geertz 1957, Grimes 1990, and Hüsken 2007.
233. Cf. Hoffmeister 2007, on the breaking of the social script in serial killings.
CONCLUSION
In Spring 488/7, the victors of Marathon assembled in their ten new tribes
in their new Agora to take part for the first time in a new procedure—to write on a
broken piece of pottery the name of a fellow citizen and to cast this into a circular
enclosure. The strangeness of this political ritual must not be overlooked: we
can imagine Athenians questioning their neighbors on the procedure; disagreeing
about whom to target or whether private grudge outweighed public misdemeanor;
the growing thrill of collective might; the heightened resentment and envy and
revenge; the fun of it all, or the fear; the Tyrannicide model; the breath of
magic and sacrality. Such a study of ostracism does not require us to divide
its features between the “political”—the rationally motivated, goal-oriented,
individualized choice-making that has dominated scholarship—and the “ritual”—
all the symbolic, affective, and communal elements discussed above. They are
inseparable. Rather, the emerging picture of ostracism as an assemblage of
practices and meanings allows us to understand the procedure, and, I would
suggest, the Cleisthenic moment of political reform in general, as bricolage.234
No element in ostracism—the shattering of vases, the inscription of hostile
messages, the casting of tokens, the demotic aggression, or the expulsion of
a dangerous or polluted citizen—was newly invented. Cleisthenes creatively
recycled cultural wares, combining preexisting, pre-signified materials into a
new ensemble. This is not the “invention of tradition” popularized by Eric
Hobsbawm235 but the “inventiveness of tradition,”236 where the meaning and
particularity of new cultural formulations derive from the embedded logics and
intelligibilities of their constituent parts. Given the brazen, engineered artificiality
of much of the new democratic order, and so the need to generate genuine group
sentiment, it is easy to see why borrowing and resignifying was an effective
strategy: in addition to ostracism, we can observe it in the adoption of Doric
sanctuary architecture for the newly constructed Council Chamber, probably its
first use for a non-temple building in the entire Greek world,237 or the selection
of preexisting Attic heroes as the Stammväter of the ten new tribes.238 In this
way, the reform program of Cleisthenes is comparable to other “revitalization
movements” that express ideological innovation through cultural syncretism,
the novel use of old things, and borrowing across traditional boundaries.239 For
instance, Hugh Urban has recently shown how L. Ron Hubbard, as a religious
bricoleur, incorporated into the Dianetics rite of his new Scientology materials and
ideas drawn from eastern religions, science fiction, the occult, psychoanalysis, and
even police lie-detecting, and that each of these brought to the invented procedure
quite distinct sets of associations.240 Similarly, Emily Chao has demonstrated
that revived Chinese exorcism has introduced political and military elements,
such as punchy quotations from Chairman Mao, anti-Japanese marching hymns,
and phrases from the national anthem, all to charge the religious rite with the
expulsive power and historical memory of battlefield resistance.241 As we have
seen, the inscriptions on several ostraka indicate that the migration to the center of
democratic politics of technologies and gestures from magical, symbolic, or ludic
practices also carried over, for at least some Athenians, their preexisting and pre-
embedded associations. This is a well-paralleled phenomenon: it has been shown,
for instance, that rituals in T’ang China echoed, implied, and assumed other
rites,242 or that modern voting behavior among the indigenous Tzotzil of southern
Mexico resembles prayer and shamanic practices.243 Speaking more generally, I
am arguing that participants in the newly invented procedures of early democracy
needed to cross-reference domains of meaning in order to supply associations and
information from well-known spheres or practices to the newer ones. Ostracism
shows us that in early democratic politics, as presumably in other spheres of life,
Athenians thought through objects, gestures, and locations as well as about them.
Harvard University
pjkosmin@fas.harvard.edu
237. Shear Jr. 1994: 232–39; Anderson 2003: 97–102: “The appeal lay . . . in its suggestion of the
traditional practices and cultural permanence associated with structures hitherto built in this idiom”
(202).
238. Kearns 1985: 201.
239. The concept of revitalization—a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a
society to construct a more satisfying culture—was introduced by Wallace 1956 to theorize phe-
nomena as varied as cargo cult, messianic communities, political and religious reform movements,
and revolution; it has been developed in material-focused directions by Liebmann 2008.
240. Urban 2011.
241. Chao 1999.
242. Bell 1992: 129.
243. Vogt and Abel 1977.
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