OSTRACISM, a political device instituted as a constitutional safeguard for the Athenian democracy. Its effect was to remove from Athens for a period of ten years any person who threatened the harmony and tranquillity of the body politic. In the sixth prytany (see PRYTANEUM) of each year the representatives of the Boule asked the Ecclesia whether it was for the welfare of the state that ostracism should take place. If the answer was in the affirmative, a day was fixed for the voting in the eighth prytany. No names were mentioned, but it is clear that two or three names at the most could have been under consideration. The people met, not as usual in the Pnyx, but in the Agora, in the presence of the archons, and recorded their votes by placing in urns small fragments of pottery (ostraka) on which they wrote the name of the person whom they wished to banish. Ostracism did not take effect unless ten thousand votes in all were recorded. The ostracised person was compelled to leave Athens for ten years, but he was not regarded as a traitor or criminal. When he returned, he resumed possession of his property and his civic status was unimpaired. The adverse vote simply implied that his power was so great as to be injurious to the state. Ostracism must therefore be carefully distinguished from exile in the Roman sense, which involved loss of property and status, and was for an indefinite period (i.e., generally for life). At the same time it
was strictly unjust to the victim, and a heavy punishment to a cultured citizen for whom Athens contained all that made life worth living. Its political importance really was that it trans ferred the protection of the constitution from the Areopagus to the Ecclesia. It was later replaced by the Graphe Paranotn,on.
The object was primarily to get rid of the Peisistratid faction without perpetual recourse to armed resistance. Aristotle's Con stitution of Athens (22) gives a list of ostracized persons, the first of whom was a certain Hipparchus of the Peisistratid family (488 B.C.). This, however, may conceivably be simply the list of those recalled from ostracism at the time of Xerxes' invasion, all of whom must have been ostracized less than ten years before 481 (i.e., since Marathon). With the end of the Persian Wars, the original object of ostracism was removed, but it continued in use for forty years and was revived in 417 B.C. It then became a mere party weapon, and the farcical result of its use in 417 in the case of Hyperbolus led to its abolition. Such a device inevi tably lent itself to abuse (see Aristotle, Pol. 38, 1284 b. 22).