부산대학교 도서관

Chapter One discusses the ‘prehistory’ of Athenian ostracism by studying both the attested cases of ostracism outside Athens (in Megara, Argos, Tauric Chersonesos, Cyrene, Thourioi, the Sicilian Naxos and possibly in Miletus, as well as the petalismos, or vote using olive leaves, in Syracuse) and conceivable traces of ostracism-like institutions or procedures in Athens of the archaic period. Here, on the one hand, both the famous late Byzantine testimony of the so-called ‘bouleutic ostracism’ (the manuscript Vaticanus Graecus 1144) and that of the archaic ostraca, from the Athenian Agora and the Acropolis, are discounted as unreliable witnesses to the alleged ‘ostracism before ostracism’ in Athens. On the other hand, all extra-Athenian ostracisms seem to post-date the Athenian institution by at least two decades, which bespeaks against the widely held hypothesis that ostracism in Athens was just one local elaboration of a more general Greek practice. More probably, all those institutions in the wider Greek world followed the Athenian model. Additionally, the hypothesis of the ritual origins of ostracism is reassessed and rejected. All in all, it turns out that Athenian ostracism (properly speaking) was an unprecedented Athenian invention.