The Athenian Art of Voting Someone Off the Island
- Argo Crew
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
What if your whole city could vote to send you away for ten years? Discover the true story of Aristides the Just!
Ostracism means something a little different today than it did in the ancient world. Now, we use the word to describe someone who's being left out or ignored by a group, but "ostracise" actually comes from the Greek verb ostrakízein, which comes from óstrakon, meaning "potsherd" - a broken piece of pottery. That's because in ancient Athens, ostracism was a real vote, and a strange one! It was used to answer one simple question: "Who here has gotten a bit too big for their sandals?" If enough people agreed, that person got kicked out of the city for ten whole years!
Here's how it worked: once a year, the people of Athens gathered for a meeting called the ekklesia, and voted on whether to hold an ostracism. If they said yes, a special day was picked, and up to 6000 citizens showed up in the marketplace, the agora, each carrying a broken piece of pottery called an ostrakon. Everyone scratched one name onto their piece, the name of the person they thought should be sent away. Officials collected all the pieces, made sure no one had voted twice, and then counted them. Whoever's name showed up the most had 10 days to pack up and leave Athens for ten years. The good news? They didn't lose their house, their belongings, or even their citizenship. Plenty of people who got ostracised were welcomed right back into public life once their ten years were over!
Enter Aristides. People called him "Aristides the Just" because he was famously honest and fair - almost annoyingly so! Aristides was said to have handled so much public money over his career that he could easily have become one of the richest men in Athens, but instead he stayed poor simply because he refused to skim a drachma off the top.
The historian Herodotus once called him "the best and most honourable man in Athens." You'd think a reputation like that would keep you safe! Instead, it's part of what got him ostracised.
Plutarch tells us a funny story about the day of Aristides' own ostracism. A man who couldn't read or write walked up to him, not realising who he was, and asked him to scratch the name "Aristides" onto his ostrakon. A little confused, Aristides didn't tell him who he was and asked the man what Aristides had ever done to wrong him. "Nothing," the man shrugged, "I don't even know him. It's just annoying hearing him called 'the Just' everywhere I go." Aristides didn't argue, he simply wrote his own name down and handed the shard back.
He was exiled around 482 BCE, most likely because he'd been arguing with another Athenian leader named Themistocles.
The two disagreed about what to do with a big pile of silver the city had just discovered in the mines at Laurium. Themistocles wanted to pour it into a massive new navy but Aristides didn't agree. Themistocles won the argument, Aristides lost his citizenship privileges for a decade, and Athens got its new fleet.
Except the story doesn't end in exile! Within three years, the Persian king Xerxes was leading his army towards Greece, and Athens needed every skilled leader it had, including the ones it had just sent away. Aristides was called back home in 480 BCE, fought at the decisive Battle of Salamis that same year (sailing with the very fleet he had once argued against), and led the Athenian soldiers at Plataea in 479 BCE when the Persians were finally driven out of Greece for good. Not long after that, other Greek cities decided they trusted Aristides so much that they asked Athens to lead a brand-new alliance. That alliance was called the Delian League, and it eventually grew into the powerful Athenian Empire. Pretty impressive for someone who'd been kicked out of his own city just a few years earlier!
Ostracism sent away plenty of other famous Athenians over the years. Themistocles himself got voted out in 471 BCE after people accused him of taking bribes, and the general Cimon was ostracised in 461 BCE for being too friendly with Athens' rival, Sparta. A leader named Pericles even used ostracism to get rid of a political rival named Thucydides (a different guy from the famous historian with the same name!). Eventually, around 417 BCE, a politician named Hyperbolos tried to use ostracism to get rid of one of his two big rivals, but instead his two rivals teamed up and got him ostracised. After that slightly embarrassing mix-up, Athens basically stopped using ostracism altogether, even though it technically stayed a real rule for about another hundred years.
The idea of the scapegoat cast out of the community in times of crisis to restore balance is a tradition found from ancient Athens to the Hebrew Yom Kippur ritual. Ostracism gave 6000 ordinary citizens the power to reset the scales and send home anyone who had started to seem too powerful for the good of the city. As Aristides discovered, sometimes all it took was being a little too well-liked!
Until next time,
λεῖος πλόος!
Written by Eleanor Russell
Education and Programs Officer
Hellenic Museum
Comments