Perhaps the most famous anecdote concerning Athenian ostracism is that of the illiterate voter who unknowingly asked the famous Aristeides to write his own name on an ostrakon; when asked what harm Aristeides had done him, he replied “I don’t even know the man, but I’m annoyed about hearing him called ‘The Just’ everywhere!”[1] Marek Węcowski’s book is best characterised as the antithesis of this anecdote: it focuses not on the methods and motives of a singular voter or victim, but on the institution of ostracism in its totality, and rather than emphasising the idiosyncrasies and irrationalities of its use, is prepared to argue that ostracism was created for a remarkably rational, long-term, and deliberate purpose.
Chapter 1, ‘Ostracism before Ostracism?’ focuses on the evidence for potential antecedents of Athenian ostracism, both external and internal. Węcowski’s survey of the evidence quite reasonably establishes that ostracism or analogous institutions elsewhere in the Greek world—most famously, Syracusan petalismos, but also analogues in several other poleis including Argos, Megara, and Cyrene—all either definitely or very likely post-date the Athenian practice. With regard to Athenian antecedents, he convincingly demonstrates that the few surviving pre-Cleisthenic ostraka lack any supporting context in the literary sources, and the one surviving literary source (the manuscript known as Vaticanus Graecus 1144) that supposedly provides evidence for a prior stage of ‘bouleutic ostracism’ is (p. 46) “a worthless mix of the pieces of information that we otherwise know…conceived in late Byzantine scholarship by misinterpreting, ingeniously manipulating, or conflating well-known elements of ancient lexicographical traditions.”
Chapter 2, ‘Towards a Reconstruction of Ostracism in Athens: The Facts’ focuses on the introduction of ostracism, and its uses during the fifth century.[2] Following a detailed exploration of the evidence—particularly the fragment of Androtion (F6) preserved in the works of the lexicographer Harpocration—Węcowski comes down firmly, and to my mind correctly, in favour of the dominant scholarly consensus: that ostracism, as per the unambiguous testimony of the Aristotelian Athenaiōn Politeia (22.1), was created by Cleisthenes in or shortly after 508/7, and Androtion’s (or Harpocration’s) apparent statement to the contrary in fact represents textual corruption of his original source. There follows a detailed survey of the historically attested ostrakophoriai which resulted in a successful ostracism. This includes a salutary reminder about the limitations of the ostraka excavated from the Kerameikos and Agora as evidence: Węcowski quite rightly notes that with the singular exception of the ‘Great Kerameikos Deposit’ and its 4176 ostraka naming Megacles son of Hippocrates, all other deposits are far too small numerically to provide evidence that a given Athenian was successfully ostracised, and merely establish their status as a ‘candidate’ for ostracism. Once again, Węcowski is thorough, measured, and largely follows the communis opinio. He sensibly does not commit to a guess as to the identity of the anonymous third ‘friend of the tyrants’ ostracised in 485 ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 22.6); he accepts the double ostracism of Megacles (connecting the aforementioned ostraka in the ‘Great Kerameikos deposit’ to Megacles’ second ostracism in c. 471), but accepts only a single ostracism of Alcibiades the Elder, c. 460. His proposed list of the ostracised (p. 112) contains twelve entries that he considers essentially definite and two more that he considers merely probable (Menon son of Menekleides in the early 460s, and Callias son of Didymos at some point after 450). Węcowski ultimately considers it probable that there were few if any successful ostrakophoriai that are entirely unattested by the surviving literary sources, adducing as evidence in support the rarity of allusions to ostracism in the extant plays of Aristophanes, and the complete absence of any known ostraka for Cleon.
Chapter 3, ‘Towards a Reconstruction of Ostracism in Athens: The Procedures’ marks the first point at which readers of this book are likely to raise substantive objections. The short discussion at the beginning of this chapter is very much unobjectionable, reasonably inferring from the paraphrases available in our sources that the text of the ‘Law about Ostracism’ was included at least in part in the work of the anagrapheis during 410-399 and published (perhaps on or near the Royal Stoa) as a result. The short discussion at the end of the chapter concerning the terms imposed upon the ostracised is similarly sensible, correctly noting the overwhelming evidence that the default period of exile was ten years rather than five, and on the question of the geographical limitations introduced in 481/0 ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 22.8), hesitantly preferring the interpretation that the ostracised were required to remain within rather than outside the Saronic Gulf, whilst accepting that the evidence is far from definitive. Much more contentious is the middle portion of this chapter, specifically the discussion of the quorum required for a successful ostrakophoria. The majority of modern scholarship follows the testimony of Plutarch (Aristeides 7.6), who provides our most detailed account of the procedure, that an ostrakophoria required a minimum of 6,000 total votes cast to be valid. The principal alternative is the tradition reported in an excerpt of Philochorus (F30), as well as several other scholia or lexica, that the quorum was instead 6,000 votes cast specifically against a single ‘candidate’. The argument in favour of Plutarch as against Philochorus et al. is essentially one of quality versus quantity, and a close examination of the evidence does reveal that both possibilities are potentially problematic; indeed, Węcowski’s discussion has led me to re-think my previously staunch adherence to Plutarch, particularly with regard to his observation that the very different topography of the Agora compared to the Pnyx means that a number of votes well over 6,000 is much more plausible for an ostrakophoria than for a meeting of the Assembly. In Węcowski’s eventual reconstruction however, there is no quorum for an ostrakophoria at all: instead Theophrastus, by analogy with the well-established 6,000-vote quorum for certain matters in the Assembly in his own time, inserted said quorum into his original gloss on the ‘Law about Ostracism’; this was then repeated by Philochorus et al., with Plutarch’s version providing a variant reading of this invented quorum. I am decidedly unconvinced by a reconstruction that so thoroughly violates the principle of parsimony, and requires that we reject a face-value reading of both alternatives in favour of a highly specific and speculative reconstruction of textual transmission by multiple authors.
Chapter 4, ‘The Historical Context of the Cleisthenian law about Ostracism’ is mostly concerned with contextualizing the origins of ostracism within the broader debate concerning the events of 508/7. Its central contention is that, given the scope and success of Cleisthenes’ reforms (for which Węcowski prefers the ‘long’ chronology, with the reforms only completed with the establishment of the bouleutic oath in 501/0), the introduction of ostracism in particular should be interpreted in the context of Cleisthenes’ intention (p. 196) to “achieve some sort of balance in the political conflict between the powerful representatives of the Athenian élite and the interests and satisfaction of the dēmos.”
Chapter 5, ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma—Ostracism and Competition among Athenian Political Élites’, is the core of this book’s overarching argument (chapter 4, at only eight pages long, is essentially its informal preface), and finally introduces its subtitle—the famous ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ from mathematical game theory, mediated through the ‘theory of cooperation’ formulated by the mathematician and political scientist Robert Axelrod.[3] Węcowski postulates that the institution of ostracism was deliberately designed by Cleisthenes so as to place Athenian politicians into a collective ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’: whilst it might serve the interests of a particular individual to ‘defect’, and push for an ostrakophoria in the hope of ousting a rival, given the uncertainty and risk involved it was nonetheless in the collective best interests of the Athenian political elite to ‘cooperate’ by avoiding the temptation of holding an ostrakophoria in the first place. The relative infrequency of successful ostrakophoriai (established in chapter 2) is thus ingeniously (re-)interpreted as an index of success: with the exception of the particularly turbulent 480s, which saw five Athenians ostracised within a span of six years, the mere threat of a successful ostrakophoria supposedly served as an effective deterrent to serious intra-elite conflict at Athens by providing a strong incentive for Athenian politicians to adhere to an informal code of political conduct.
The book concludes with the brief ‘Epilogue and Conclusions: The Decline and Fall of Athenian Ostracism’. Here Węcowski presents his interpretation both of the final decades of ostracism as an active institution (culminating in the ostracism of Hyperbolus in c. 416) and its existence for nearly a century thereafter as an unused ‘constitutional fossil’—which, as with its relatively infrequent usage in the fifth century, is interpreted as the institution continuing to perform its intended function rather than merely fading into obsolescence. The only point of detail on which I would explicitly challenge this section is its characterisation of Hyperbolus as (p. 243) a man who “broke the rules of the game as an outsider, not being himself one of the players involved in the Athenian ‘prisoner’s dilemma’”; this seems to me too readily accepting of the caricature based on the famous verses of Plato Comicus (Kassel-Austin fr. 203) and the incidental remark of Thucydides (8.73.3)—that Hyperbolus did not deserve the honour of being ostracised—and ignoring evidence to the contrary, such as the implication by Aristophanes (Peace 679-87) that he was a leading political figure in his own right.
Ultimately, I found this both an engaging and useful study, although probably not quite for the reasons its author intended. I would recommend the first three chapters (which comprise around two-thirds of the book) as the best historical survey of Athenian ostracism available, especially to Anglophone scholars; the principal alternative, the volume edited by Peter Siewert, may be more systematic (especially with regard to the excavated ostraka), but it is much more catalogue than synthesis, and requires proficiency in German.[4] There is also virtually nothing to fault in the quality of production: the small number of illustrations are of high quality, the inclusion of a complete Index Locorum is particularly helpful, and the standard of the translation by Lidia Ożarowska is very high, with only a very occasional slightly awkward or misplaced idiom.
It is the final third of the book—specifically its focus on the ‘original purpose’ of Athenian ostracism—which is rather more open to question. One of Węcowski’s own comments is particularly, if unintentionally, revealing in this respect: having discussed previous interpretations of Cleisthenes’ motives in establishing ostracism, he subsequently (pp. 232-3) emphasises the need to consider “whether the ‘cooperative’ interpretation of how ostracism worked provides a better explanation than those proposed so far.” But establishing “how ostracism worked” is decidedly not the same as establishing its original purpose. To use a jurisprudential analogy, the limited quantity and quality of our evidence is such that one cannot expect to prove Cleisthenes’ intentions beyond reasonable doubt, yet I remain unconvinced that Węcowski’s reconstruction is correct even by the more modest standard of the balance of probabilities. It remains just as plausible, for example, that Cleisthenes initially created ostracism with at least one eye on his short-term political aims (whether the removal of Isagoras in 508/7 or some other, less immediate perceived threat), but that events ultimately rendered any such short-term goals moot, and when an ostrakophoria finally claimed its first victim two decades later, it did so under circumstances and driven by motives that Cleisthenes had not fully foreseen. This book provides an excellent foundation for the future study of Athenian ostracism—not least for students seeking a detailed introduction to the subject—and an ingenious hypothesis, yet the underlying question of Athenian ostracism and its original purpose(s) remains very much wide open.
Notes
[1] Plutarch, Aristeides 7.7-8
[2] All dates are B.C.
[3] Axelrod, R. (2006) [1984] The Evolution of Cooperation. Revised edition, with a Foreword by Richard Dawkins. London.
[4] Siewert, P., ed. (2002) Ostrakismos-Testimonien I. Die Zeugnisse antiker Autoren, der Inschriften und Ostraka über das athenische Scherbengericht aus vorhellenistischer Zeit (487-322 v. Chr.). Stuttgart.