Athens exiled its powerful men by scratching names on broken pottery

The ballot was a broken pot

Ostracize traces back to a potsherd. The Greek verb ostrakizein meant to banish a man by a vote written on potsherds, and beneath it sits ostrakon, an earthen vessel or a piece of one broken off.¹ The Athenians named the act for its ballot, a shard of broken pottery scratched with a single name.¹

Ten years gone, property kept

Ostracism ran to a fixed calendar. Once a year the Athenian assembly put a single question to a vote: should an ostracism be held?² If the answer was yes, a day was set, usually about two months later.³ On the day, citizens filled the agora, each scratched a name onto an ostrakon, and dropped it inside a railed enclosure.⁴ The man named on the most sherds had to leave Attica for ten years.⁴ He was charged with nothing, kept his property and its income, and could be recalled early.⁴³ The law was Cleisthenes', and the Athenians first used it around 488 BCE, two years after Marathon, against Hipparchus son of Charmus, a relative of the former tyrants.⁵

The sherds, and one good story

Little of this depends on trust, because the ballots survive. Excavators have pulled inscribed ostraka from the ground by the thousand: some 8,500 from a single dump tied to a vote around 471 BCE, and about 9,000 catalogued from the Kerameikos cemetery alone.⁶ The names scratched into them read like a register of famous Athenians: Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles.³ Plutarch says the Athenians moved against Themistocles as they habitually did against anyone they judged too powerful.⁷ One find is more unsettling: a cache of ballots against Themistocles, from a well on the Acropolis's north slope, had been prepared in advance and never used, a sign the vote could be worked from behind the scenes.⁶

The most repeated story rests on one late witness. Plutarch tells it of Aristides, the statesman called "the Just": on voting day an illiterate citizen who did not recognize him asked him to scratch "Aristides" onto a sherd. Aristides asked what wrong the man had suffered at his hands.

Aristides, the story goes, wrote his own name and handed the sherd back.⁴ No fifth-century source records the exchange. Plutarch set it down around 100 CE, six centuries after the ostracisms of the 480s, in a Life written to improve its readers.⁴ Even the rule that made a vote valid is unsettled. Plutarch says 6,000 sherds had to be cast in all, or the vote did not count.⁴ The earlier Athenian historian Philochorus says instead that 6,000 had to fall against the single man.³ The excavated sherds are firm ground. The anecdote is a good story, attested late.

Why the word outlived the vote

Ostracism was a fifth-century Athenian affair, and might have stayed one.¹ Instead the word traveled. Ostracism entered English by 1588 and the verb ostracize by 1649,⁸¹ carrying at first the narrow Athenian sense, then the broad one it holds now: to shut someone out of a group by common consent, no assembly required.¹ The procedure fell away and left the act it had formalized.

Today the word works far from any agora. A 2020 study of people frozen out of a group opens plainly: "Being ignored and excluded is an intensely painful experience."⁹ That is ostracize with the potsherds gone: the act the Athenians surrounded with a yearly vote, and the rest of us manage without one.