Остракизм в Афинах

As regards the socalled «Androtion's testimony» (FGrHist 324 F6), which was previously the main argument of scholars who thought ostracism was introduced in early 480es B.C., that evidence is in fact fruit of misunderstanding. The late lexicographer Harpocration who preserved the fragment incorrectly cited Androtion's «Atthis». There is no forcible reason for maintaining that Androtion believed the law on ostracism to be of such a late date. The twenty-year break between the introduction of ostracism and its first use also cannot be an argument against the direct statement by Aristotle (Ath. pol. 22) and other ancient writers that Clisthenes was the initiator of the law. The break is quite explainable by specific reasons particular for internal political situation in Athens on the verge of Archaic and Classical periods.

10. In section 2 «Ostracism before Clisthenes?» we pose the question in a broader way: should Clisthenes be considered the «father» of ostracism? If we mean the «classical» form of ostracism, in which this institution existed in fifth-century Athens, from the exile of Hipparchus son of Charmus to the exile of Hyperbolus, the answer will naturally be yes. However, on the base of various direct and indirect data aggregated it is possible to say with sufficient confidence that the «classical» procedural form of ostracism was neither the sole nor the earliest one. The institution in some other form (or similar procedures) existed in Athens and in Greece as a whole even in pre-Classical time. Ostracism did not arise finished from Clisthenes' head like Athena from Zeus' head. The reformer did not create something absolutely new; rather he modified an institution already in existence and adjusted it to the conditions of the new-born democratic polis. He made ostracism a prerogative of the demos, the ekklesia, and he perhaps also made it a procedure of regular and not sporadic character. By the way, there was a trend in the narrative tradition that did not consider Clisthenes the inventor of ostracism. In particular, such a competent scholar as Theophrastus (fr. 131 Wimmer) thought that already Theseus had been ostracized. To be sure, we by no means believe in the ostracism of that mythological figure as an historical fact, but it is important that there was a notion of a pre-Clisthenic origin of the institution.

Therefore, procedures that gave birth to ostracism (we call such procedures «proto-ostracism») existed even before Clisthenes, that is, in the archaic and aristocratic epoch of Athenian history. The main difference was that the voting was carried out at that time not yet by the assembly but by the Council (in the sixth century B.C. by the Council of Four Hundred, and earlier, before Solon, possibly by the Areopagus). It is interesting that a procedure similar to ostracism but conducted by the Council of Five Hundred was known in Athens as late as the fourth century B.C. (socalled ekphyllophoria). Even more interesting is that at the Athenian Agora some dozens of ostraka have been discovered, which date manifestly not from Classical but from Archaic period (the seventh and sixth century B.C.), a ballot against Pisistratus among them. If they are not connected with some early form of ostracism, they are in fact impossible to interpret at all.

The shaping of ostracism was, as far as we can judge, not an action that took place at one and single moment but a long process. At its initial stages, rites of religious and magic character played an important part, particularly the rite of scapegoat or pharmakos. However, in any case we should detach the question of the phenomenon's aetiology from the question of its actual function. Whatever ritual roots of ostracism might be, in the fifth century B.C. it was undoubtedly apprehended already as an institution quite secularized, and victims of ostracism scarcely were straightly associated with scapegoats (if only on the subconscious level).

As a result of the democratization in the Athenian polis, on the verge of the Archaic and Classical epochs, ostracism passed on from the hands of the aristocracy to the competence of the whole civil body. Such was the general character the emergence of Athenian democracy had: the demos perceived aristocratic by their origin institutions, aristocratic values, and adjusted them to itself, spread them to the whole mass of citizens. It adapted and did not dismantle them, to use S. Brenne's apt turn of phrase.