A Phenomenology of Democracy: Ostracism as Political Ritual

PAUL J. KOSMIN

A Phenomenology of Democracy: Ostracism as Political Ritual

This article has two objectives. First, and in particular, it seeks to reinterpret the ostracism procedure of early democratic Athens. Since Aristotle, this has been understood as a rational, political weapon of collective defense, intended to expel from Athens a disproportionately powerful individual. In this article, by putting emphasis on the materiality, gestures, and location of ostraka-casting, I propose instead that the institution can more fruitfully be understood as a ritual enactment of civic unity. Second, and more generally, I hope to explore the frames within which early Athenian democracy is placed: while Greek kingship and tyranny (i.e. “primitive” polities) have been very successfully explored through anthropological and crosscultural comparison, Greek democracy for the most part has remained in the domains of the institutional historian and political theorist. Taking a phenomenological and comparative approach, this article asks how the citizens of early democratic Athens experienced and comprehended their new sovereignty and the invented procedures of mass decision-making through which it was expressed.

In memory of Getzel Cohen. A recurring event in the history of archaic and classical Greece was the conscious remodeling of political institutions,1 and none is more famous or significant than Cleisthenes’ program of reforms in late sixth-century Athens. The now standard identification of this moment as the epochal “foundation of democracy”—recall the celebrations in 1992/3 of its 2500th anniversary—has

This article has benefitted enormously from the comments and criticisms of Jan Bremmer, Emma Dench, Susanne Ebbinghaus, Adriaan Lanni, Nino Luraghi, Duncan MacRae, Ian Moyer, and the journal’s anonymous readers. Parts of the argument were presented to a workshop at Harvard University. I am grateful to Leslie Kurke and Richard Neer for sharing with me the manuscript of their 2014 article. 1. See, e.g., Murray 1990. Classical Antiquity. Vol. 34, Issue 1, pp. 121–161. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e). Copyright © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/CA.2015.34.1.121.

122

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

given an inevitable teleology to its historical investigations, whether in postEphialtic Athens, the fourth-century city, or contemporary western polities. And so, even where agency has been relocated from Cleisthenes to the d¯emos,2 most scholarship has focused on questions of intentioned, reasoned reform and its political or institutional effects. Taking ostracism as a case study, this paper instead explores how the Athenian citizenry experienced and comprehended their new sovereignty and the invented procedures of mass decision-making through which it was expressed. Since Aristotle, ostracism has been understood as a rational, political weapon of collective defense, intended to remove from Athens a disproportionately powerful individual. By putting emphasis on the process of ostracism rather than its end result, this paper proposes that the institution can be more fruitfully understood as a ritual enactment of civic unity, borrowing technologies, gestures, and symbols more usually associated with acts of magic and pollution-cleansing. Ostracism allows the historian an incomparably thick description because of the confluence of three kinds of data. First, ostracism’s targeting of leading politicians and its importance as a moment of reversal in their careers made it a cluster-point for the character-revealing anecdote in ancient biography and historiography.3 Second, the strangeness of the practice prompted detailed descriptions in antiquarian mode by the Atthidographers, the author of the Athenai¯on Politeia, scholiasts, and lexicographers. Finally, many thousands of ostraka, the inscribed sherds of pottery with which Athenian citizens identified their targets, have been excavated from the Agora and the Kerameikos; these, the very ballots cast, are first-hand testimony of individual citizens’ sentiments and mental associations. In short, ostracism gives us our earliest and richest evidence for the practicing and self-understanding of Athenian people-power.4 It is to early democracy what Old Comedy and forensic oratory are for the later fifth and fourth centuries. These three sets of sources can be combined to give the following schematic description of Athenian ostracism after Marathon; the reality no doubt was far messier, contested, and variable than our texts indicate.5 At the meeting of the Athenian ekkl¯esia in the sixth prytany, in mid-January, the assembled d¯emos was asked to vote, by a show of hands and without discussion, whether or not 2. Ober 2007. 3. For the same reason, it features as the subject of historical declamation; see Gribble 1997 and Heftner 2001 on [Andocides] 4. 4. Brief mention and a few ostraka attest the existence of parallel procedures in fifth-century Argos, Cyrene, Megara, Miletus, (Sicilian) Naxos, Syracuse, the Tauric Chersonese, and Thurii; see Bacchielli 1994, Vinogradov and Zolotarev 1999, Greco 2010, and Schirripa, Lentini, and Cordano 2012. The technology seems to have been similar to Athenian ostracism, except at Syracuse where, according to Diod. Sic. 11.87, olive leaves were used instead of pottery sherds. 5. On the danger of ritual-in-text, see Buc 2001. Like royal coronations, ostracism was regular enough to have a clear procedural script, yet sufficiently singular for specific ostrakophoriai to be remembered for their targets and outcomes.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

123

they wished to conduct an ostrakophoria, the casting of ostraka, that year.6 If a simple majority opposed the preliminary suggestion, that was the end of the matter until the following year. If a majority were in favor, the ostrakophoria itself was held at the beginning of the eighth prytany, in late March or early April. On the appointed day, the Athenian Agora was fenced off and a circular enclosure was erected at its center.7 With the archons and the Council presiding,8 the d¯emos, gathered from all over Attica, entered the delimited area through ten separate gates, one for each of the new Cleisthenic tribes. Each citizen carried face-down a single ostrakon, which was either pre-prepared or inscribed on location. This ostrakon was then cast into the circular enclosure. Once all the ostraka had been deposited, they were gathered together and counted.9 If fewer than six thousand ostraka had been cast,10 they were disposed of in the old wells and land-fills of the Agora and Kerameikos and the procedure ended; these aborted ostracisms are unreported in the textual tradition but must be represented by some of our surviving sherds. If the quorum of six thousand had been surpassed, the ostraka were then counted again, this time by name, to determine which citizen had been targeted most frequently, and then discarded in the same way. The result was proclaimed by public herald. The most targeted citizen was obliged to leave Athens within ten days, to remain for his exile outside of the Geraestus and Scyllaeum promontories of Euboea and the Argolid, respectively, while retaining full rights to his property, and to return only after ten years had elapsed or a decree for recall had been issued. The process was repeated at the next meeting of the sixth prytany. For purposes of clarity, I shall use the terms “ostracism” for the full procedure, from the preliminary decision to the politician’s return, and “ostrakophoria” for the inscribing and casting of ostraka in the Agora. There are nine firmly attested ostracisms, and possibly five more, beginning with the ostracism of Hipparchus, the son of Charmus, in 488/7 and ending with that of Hyperbolus in 416/5; from the report of the Athenaio¯ n Politeia it is likely that ostracism remained on the books but unused into the later fourth century. The two-decade delay between the law’s supposed promulgation by Cleisthenes11 and its first use against Hipparchus, son of Charmus, after Marathon has been met with varying skepticism and ingenuity, but an attractive solution 6. According to [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 43.5, at the same meeting preliminary complaints were brought against sycophants and deceivers of the d¯emos; see Christ 1992. For the lack of discussion, see [Andoc.] 4.3. 7. See below. Plut. Alc. 7.4: να τπον τ ς γορς περιπεφραγμνον ν κκλω δρυφκτοις. Poll. Onom. 8.20: περισχοινσαντας δ τι τ ς γορς μρος . . . ες τ ν περιορισθντα τπον. 8. Philochorus FGrHist 328 F30; Sch. on Arist. Eq. 855. 9. This may be depicted on a red-figure vase by the Pan Painter (Oxford 1911.617); see Siewert 2002: T4. 10. Calderini 1945: 38–39. 11. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 22.1 and 3; Ael. VH 13.24; Philochorus FGrHist 328 F30; Sch. Ar. Eq. 855; Diod. Sic. 11.55.1 (implicitly).

124

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

is provided by Vaticanus Graecus 1144.12 This fifteenth-century miscellany of kulturgeschichtliche items includes an unparalleled but internally consistent report of Cleisthenes’ introduction of a proto-ostracism process: each member of the boul¯e, having deliberated for a number of days, would inscribe on an ostrakon the name of whichever citizen he wished to exile and throw this sherd into an enclosure within the Bouleuterion; whoever received two hundred or more votes would be required to leave Athens for ten years, retaining usufruct of their property. At a later stage, perhaps under the influence of Themistocles and certainly by the time of the ostracism of Hipparchus, the practice was relocated from the boul¯e to the d¯emos.13 Most, if not all, ancient and modern discussions of the institution have isolated one moment—the expulsion of a citizen for ten years—as the telos of the process and so telescoped into this ostracism’s entire significance. Accordingly, ostracism has been interpreted as a weapon of removal, serving to safeguard the new democratic constitution by banishing from the community those who would most endanger it, whether the friends and family of the Peisistratid tyrants, medizing or overweening aristocrats, or factional leaders. From this perspective, as argued most insightfully by Sara Forsdyke, ostracism was a secular, rational, political tool that filled the niche once occupied in the archaic period by intraaristocratic exilings.14 Such a mode of interpretation ultimately derives from Aristotle’s comparative constitutional inquiries, in which the removal of superlative or outstanding elements, “the rule of proportion,” is identified as common to all politeiai, whether the Argonauts expelling Heracles, the kings of Persia humbling the Babylonians, Greek tyrants lopping off “the tallest ears of wheat,” or democracies ostracizing their most influential citizens.15 But such focus on the single, generalizable fact of expulsion overlooks two things. First, unlike other forms of exile, the return of the politician was an explicit and necessary part of the ostracism institution, albeit sometimes unfulfilled. Put schematically, ostracism, focalized on the targeted politician, has not the double home-away structure of banishment but the triple structure of a rite de passage—separation, marginality, and reaggregation16 —that transforms a dangerous or treacherous politician into a safe member of the Athenian community.17 Second, and more importantly, 12. McCargar 1976; Develin 1977; Pecorella Longo 1980. 13. See Lehmann 1981, Hall 1989, and Doenges 1996. 14. Forsdyke 2005. Needless to say, “secular,” “rational,” and “political” are each much disputed terms; they are used in this paper to characterize a rational-choice analytic model of ostracism which assumes that the electoral preferences of voters are motivated exclusively by the electoral outcomes which their participation generated; see Schuessler 2000. 15. Arist. Pol. 1284a-b. 16. The terms are those of Turner 1969: 94–95, adapting van Gennep 1960. 17. [Andoc.] 4.5 responds directly to this idea—if a citizen is exiled because he was bad (πονηρς), leaving Athens will not cure him (ο#τος ο$δ% πελθ&ν νθνδε πασεται). Note that Calame 1999 has cautioned against the reductionism and over-simplicity of van Gennep’s model; but it remains helpful as an ideal classification of processual rites.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

125

the functionalist reduction of ostracism to expulsion bypasses all the supposedly irrational, overly formalized, and superfluous elements of the institution.18 The removal of a dangerous citizen by communal vote could have been achieved in far simpler ways. Both the ancient evidence (the ostraka above all) and modern anthropological theory suggest that the enactment of the ostracism procedure, the mass ceremonial in all its processual, expressive, emotional, and embodied strangeness, was as important as the expulsion which it sometimes prompted. An analysis of ostracism, especially the ostrakophoria, as a political ritual can illuminate the procedure and, more generally, shed light on the practices and mental categories with which the Athenian citizenry made sense of the new democratic order. While the hermeneutic of ritual makes ostracism more amenable to scrutiny, it assumes a particular methodological stance. On the one hand, it requires extending a frame of analysis developed for social moments that possessed both particular morphological characteristics (stylization, staging, repetition, a collective dimension, etc.) and supernatural referents (religious or magical) to those with the formal element alone or primarily. On the other hand, it must move beyond the theorization of long-established rituals in long-existing societies, with the Durkheimian emphasis on social maintenance and homeostasis that follows, to an examination of newly-crafted procedures that self-consciously proclaim their novelty. Fortunately, both political and invented procedures have been the object of effective ritual analysis over the past couple of decades.19 Useful analogies for thinking about ostracism range from the political ceremonies created for the new states of the global South to non-traditional spiritual movements like Scientology or Fang Reformative Cult; the rituals in each case, while straight off the typewriter, were promulgated with the expectation of permanence. Such an approach is further validated if we follow Catherine Bell in considering ritual as not a clearly delineated and autonomous category of traditional social life, but a strategic way of acting (“ritualization”) that can be deliberately adopted to differentiate or privilege particular moments and activities.20 The three key ingredients of ritualization—symbolic objects, prescribed gestures, and a distinguished location—are present throughout ostracism, most evidently in the ostrakophoria. In the following analysis, I will explore the multiple intentions and levels of experience or representation that are unified around each of these constituent parts.

18. These were dismissed by Carcopino 1935: 6 as “les de´tails pittoresques.” For theoretical criticisms of functionalism, see Rappaport 1979: 43–96. On “ritual involution,” see Tambiah 1985: 153. 19. The edited volume of Moore and Myerhoff 1977 was crucial; see also Kertzer 1988 and Bell 1997: 128–35. 20. Bell 1992.

126

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

OSTRAKA AS SYMBOLS

The iconic object of ostracism, after which the entire procedure was named, was the ostrakon, or potsherd, on which an Athenian participating in the ostrakophoria would inscribe the name of his target. These potsherds are typically treated as mere pragmatic text-bearers: banal, quotidian, and culturally invisible planes for the words inscribed upon them.21 In fact, certain surviving ostraka and ancient descriptions of their use indicate that, at least for some participants, they were symbolically meaningful in themselves. As symbols, they demonstrate both a multivocality of association and an economy of reference in clustering these into a single object.22 Even before they were written upon, the genesis of ostraka and their observable, tactile properties made them appropriate symbols for ostracism. While many ostraka were recycled pieces of accidentally broken vases, it is clear that at least some were specifically generated for a particular ostrakophoria by smashing vessels in advance or on site in the Agora.23 The violent gesture that broke up a ceramic vessel transformed a single, smooth-surfaced, and in some cases beautiful container into a multitude of sharp, jagged-edged sherds. The smashing was an audibly brittle and visibly immediate crash. It was irreversible. It is no surprise, therefore, that the breaking of a pot was a common metaphor in the wider ancient world for human mortality, urban violence, and even earthly cataclysm.24 On occasion, the pot-smash was used in rites of magical annihilation, as in Middle Kingdom Egypt’s execration vases, which were inscribed with the names of targeted enemies of the state and then broken.25 Still today we can recognize the concentration of emotions and their immediate release in acts as common as the smashing of a child’s clay piggy-bank or as considered as Ai Weiwei’s 1995 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. That pot-smashing held symbolic significance for Athenian ostracism is nicely illustrated by two non-joining ostraka, targeting Megacles, son of Hippocrates, that come from a single red-figure vase of the Pistoxenus painter. One of these ostraka (Fig. 1) identifies its target as Megakl[es], the name scratched on the inside surface; yet on the other side of the same sherd we find the phrase, painted in glaze during the vase’s manufacture, Meg[akles] | kalo[s] (“Meg[acles] is handsome”). The dating of the vessel requires that this handsome Megacles, honored in this 21. See, e.g., the recent discussion of Missiou 2011: 41–84. 22. Turner 1962 and 1967: 19–43. 23. Several ostraka join together; though inscribed with different names they come from the same vessel (Siewert 2002: 72–76). 24. E.g., Ecclesiastes 12:6, The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur (“in Ur, people were smashed as if they were clay pots”), Death of Gilgamesh (“For six days, Gilgamesh lay ill like a shattered pot”); see Foster 2010: 143–45. See Diehl 1964: 146 on the deliberate breaking of hydria for child burials and Vinken 1958 on the broken vase as a figure for female loss of virginity and male impotence. 25. Pritchard 1958: 225; Posener 1966: 277–79; Weiss 1969: 150–51; Faraone 1991a: 174–75 and 1993: 78–79; Redford 1992: 87–89.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

127

way by the vase’s maker, be the politician’s homonymous son.26 In other words, at least two citizens, wishing to target Megacles, deliberately selected a sympotic vessel which already contained his name and advertised his son’s noble good looks, smashed it (perhaps accompanied with hostile pronouncements), inscribed his name on the sherds, and used those pieces in the ostrakophoria. By necessity, only one of these ostraka could carry the original dipinto, the fortunate survival of which allows us to reconstruct this episode, but the significance of the ritualized destruction may have carried over to all the sherds that originally came from this vase. It is possible that such self-conscious selection and destruction of vessels was much more common than we can ever know. The targeting of ostracized politicians in this mode—first destroying a citizen’s praise-object and then reusing the material against the same person—is attested elsewhere: for instance, the bronze statue dedicated on the Athenian Acropolis by the first target of demotic ostracism, Hipparchus, son of Charmus, was melted down after the ostrakophoria and turned into a stele, on which, beginning with his own, the names of the city’s traitors or ostracized politicians were inscribed.27 The symbolism of the shattered vase is recognized in a fragment of a lost play by Aristophanes, where one speaker says to the other, “What shall I do with you, you devil (kakodaimon), you ostracized sherd of amphora (amphoreus exostrakistheis)?”28 With only this line preserved the precise significance of the figure is obscure, but it is plausible that the addressee, perhaps the ostracized politician Thucydides or Hyperbolus, is identified in his misfortune with the ceramic vessel broken up for the ostrakophoria.29 Similarly, a proverb preserved by the imperial-period grammarian Diogenianus may confirm this: kerameus anthr¯opos, a pottery man, means someone who is “cracked” (epi tou sathrou), i.e. unsound, impotent, or, appropriately enough for ostracism, treacherous.30 Moreover, the shape and texture of the potsherds made them ideal handweapons. Two lawcourt speeches indicate that they could be used to maim and kill personal enemies.31 Such violent associations of ostraka’s materiality were well suited to the aggression and personal hatreds of the ostracism procedure, even if the targeted politicians were not physically attacked with the sherds. The late antique lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria refers to ostracism as the 26. Willemsen 1991; Siewert 2002: T1/87. 27. Lycurg. Leocr. 117–18. On this passage, see Connor 1985: 92 and Schreiner 1970. 28. τ δ' σο( δρσω, κακδαιμον, μφορε)ς | ξοστρακισθες; Ar. F661 (KA) = Plut. Comp. Ar. et Men. 853c. Siewert 2002: T13. 29. The number of small drinking-vessel bases used as ostraka—for example, 122 of the 191 famous Themistocles ostraka found in 1937 on the north slope of the Akropolis were kylix feet (see Missiou 2011: 60)—raises the possibility (it is nothing more) that the “decapitation” of these cups for use in the ostrakophoria was a moment of marked significance; it is striking that Arist. Pol. 1284a compares ostracism to Periander’s snapping off the tops of the highest ears of wheat. 30. Diogenianus Paroemiae s.v. κεραμε)ς +νθρωπος. 31. Lys. 3.27–28 and 4.6–7. On the use of ostraka as weapons in Athenian law, see Phillips 2007: 74–105.

128

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

keramik¯e mastix, “the pottery whip”;32 the phrase, perhaps originating as an Old Comedy joke, nicely captures the skin-tearing qualities of the ostrakon, the gestures associated with its casting (see below), and the sublimated violence of the entire procedure. Indeed, these physical characteristics of ostraka may explain why they were considered appropriate for the casting of hostile magical spells.33 Old Comedy identifies a more playful association of the ostrakon. An Athenian children’s chase-game, ostrakinda, used a potsherd, black on one side, termed “Night,” red or white on the other, “Day,” as its main token. Athenian boys would divide themselves into two groups, Night and Day, separated by a line drawn in the dust. The ostrakon would be tossed into the middle and, depending on which of the colors landed face up, one team would chase after the other. The first member of the pursued team to be caught was made to sit down and named onos, “the donkey.”34 The game is explicitly linked with ostracism in a fragment of the comic poet Plato’s Alliance and in Aristophanes’ Knights.35 In the latter passage, the Sausage-Seller tells personified Demos that he need but frown and look for a game of ostrakinda, and Cleon and his associates “at night (nukto¯ r), running (theontes) to seize the shields [won from the Spartans at Sphacteria and dedicated in the Stoa Poikile in the Agora], would occupy the entrances (tas eisbolas) of our grain.” Demos’ ostrakinda is clearly intended to recall ostracism and the lines skilfully interweave the language of the children’s game—ostrakinda, “night,” “running”—with the terminology and location of ostracism and conspiracy—the hostility of the d¯emos, the prospective treason of Cleon, the Agora location, the eisbolai through which grain arrived at the city and also the ten tribes entered the Agora for ostrakophoriai. The association of the two potsherd-based activities (political ritual and children’s game) is recognized in an ostrakon excavated from the Kerameikos, which identifies the intended target of an ostrakophoria as the captured victim of ostrakinda—Agasias Lamptreus onos, “Agasias, of the deme Lamptrae, the donkey.”36 The suitability of the game’s association for ostracism lies in its enactment of division, selection and abuse of a victim, arbitrariness,37 and, above all, the materiality of the potsherd. All of these associations derived from the ostraka themselves, even before anything had been written on them: any ostrakon predicated a unity which had been broken and continued to manifest the violence of this destructive act. 32. Hsch. s.v. κεραμικ- μστιξ (= Adespota F363 KA). 33. Collins 2008: 66; see, e.g., PGM CXXIV.1–43. For ostrakon curse-tablets, see Gager 1992: 31n.5 and below. 34. Pollux 9.112; Eust. in Il. 1161.37: . μ'ν τονυν ληφθε(ς τ/ν φευγντων 0νος ο#τος κθηται. See also Pl. Tht. 146a. 35. Plato Com. F168 KA; Ar. Eq. 855–57 (1στ% ε σ) βριμ3σαιο κα( βλψειας 5στρακνδα, | νκτωρ καθαρπσαντες 6ν τ7ς σπδας θοντες | τ7ς εσβολ7ς τ/ν λφτων 6ν καταλβοιεν 8μ/ν). See also Plato Phaedrus 241b (5στρκου μεταπεσντος). 36. Bicknell 1986; Siewert 2002: T1/35. 37. Particularly clear in the Plato Comicus passage; see Siewert 2002: T11 and Rosenbloom 2004: 80.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

129

Indeed, it should be noted that the first count at the end of an ostrakophoria, to determine whether or not the quorum of six thousand had been reached, deliberately overlooked the ostraka’s inscriptions and so foregrounded their basic physicality; only at the second count were the names read. One ostrakon even speaks its political charge from the potsherd’s perspective: “This ostrakon says. . . .”38 Meaningful in their materiality, ostraka were turned into more complex symbol-bearers by the inscription of words or images. The most basic and commonly attested addition to ostraka was the name, sometimes with patronymic and/or demotic, of the targeted citizen. Labeling the potsherd in this way was the pragmatic means for the ballot to weigh against the selected politician in the second count at the end of an ostrakophoria (if the quorum had been surpassed). But the inscribing of a name on a sherd had, at least for some participants, significant associations derived from other practices. Named ostraka recall the tokens that could be used in sortition or lot-taking to identify a politician or leader. For instance, Ajax was identified as the Achaean champion by the selection of his marked or named lot.39 Plutarch reports that the Thessalians asked the Delphic priestess to select their king from a number of beans on each of which a different name had been written.40 On the basis of several seventh- and sixth-century potsherds inscribed with names, sometimes of known aristocrats like Peisistratus or Aristion and found in the Agora or on the Acropolis, it has been suggested that an early, pre-Cleisthenic ostrakon-based lot was used at Athens.41 A lot oracle at Delphi, precise details unclear, may have used similar name-bearing tokens.42 Certainly, the bean-lot for the selection of the city’s archons, the officials who presided over the ostrakophoria, was first used in 487/6, the second year of demotic ostracism.43 The full significance of this will become clear below, where we will see that the gestures of ostraka-casting evoked lot-taking or diagnosis rites; but, by itself, the formal similarity of the name-bearing ostrakon to a lot token could gather to it some of the significance of divinely sanctioned identification.44 To be identified in sortition or lot-taking was, for the most part, either positive or neutral; but an ostrakon used in ostracism was intended to harm 38. Siewert 2002: T1/153 ([τδε] φεσ(ν . . . τ0στρακ[ον]); see below. 39. Hom. Il. 7.175–76. 40. Plut. De fraterno amore 21 492a-b. She chose the bean representing Aleuas the Red, eponymous founder of the Aleuadae of Larissa and political organizer of Thessaly (see Helly 1995: 121–22). 41. Vanderpool 1949: 405–407; Mosse´ and Schnapp Gourbeillon 1998: 50. 42. Philochorus FGrHist 328 F195; Callim. Hymn 2.45; Hsch. s.v. θρια; Steph. Byz. s.v. θρια; see Eidinow 2007: 35–36. 43. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 22.5; see Raaflaub 1998: 44–45. Rhodes 1981: 274 suggests that the new procedure may have been introduced in the previous year, that of the first known ostracism. 44. The most explicit statement is Pl. Leg. 6.759c. On the combination of randomness and divine sanction in sortition procedures, see Stewart 1998 and Johnston 2003.

130

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

the named individual. Accordingly, there is a more important formal connection, of the name-inscribed potsherd to the magical curse-tablet.45 In the most general terms, ostraka and curse-tablets were each technologies for the manifestation of individualized, interpersonal antipathy through the inscribing and manipulation of a small, hand-held writing-surface. While the dominant medium for cursetablets was lead, ceramic potsherds were also used, some of which are, on first sight, indistinguishable from ostracism’s ostraka.46 Such curse-ostraka were not only synchronous with Athenian ostracism—appearing in Sicily and the Greek mainland in the early fifth century47 —but even, it seems, deliberately emulated by some participants in the ostrakophoria. The association operates on two levels. First, fundamental to the inscribing of curse-tablet and ostrakon was a belief in the metonymic power of naming. The vast majority of both ostraka and classical curse-tablets carry only the target’s name; even when lengthier phrases are used the name is given first.48 It has been demonstrated of curse-tablets that this very name-writing was a charged moment of spite, transference, and selfcommunication, in terms of the sharp cutting gestures of scratching letters on lead or ceramic and the verbal curses or injunctions that accompanied them.49 Scratching with a sharp point, such as was used to inscribe ostraka, appears in Phrynichus’ fragmentary Ephialtes as a metaphor for the Athenian youth who would nastily mock their fellow citizens in the Agora: “holding some point in their fingers . . . wandering about the Agora . . . scratching with deep scratches those to whom they were formerly pleasant.”50 Moreover, the curse was sympathetically enacted or reinforced by the scrambling or retrograde writing of the target’s name;51 curling the inscribed name or phrase into a circle has also been recognized as some kind of magical act.52 Many ostraka share these features, indicating that name-writing had a more than pragmatic significance. Like early curse-tablets, citizens’ names on ostraka are found in the accusative and dative cases as well as the more standard nominative, implying that the moment of

45. This has been observed in passing by, among others, Ogden 1997: 142; Rosenbloom 2004: 337; Forsdyke 2005: 157–58; Collins 2008: 65. 46. Some curses were even inscribed on the circular kylix feet, a preferred type of ostracism ostrakon (see n.29 above). Gager 1992: 4. Lebedev 1996a and 1996b. 47. Jeffery 1955: 72–76. The binding spell in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (staged in 458 bce) assumes public familiarity with their use; see Faraone 1985: 152 and Eidinow 2007: 141. 48. Audollent 1904: l; Gager 1992: 5. 49. Steiner 1994: 71–75; Collins 2008: 4. Verbs of cursing or binding were frequently compounds of graph¯o. On the importance of individual autocommunication, even in collective ritual, see Rappaport 1979: 178. 50. Phrynichus Ephialtes F3 (= Ath. 165b): 9χουσι γρ τι κντρον ν το:ς δακτλοις, | μισνθρωπον +νθος ;βης< | ε=θ% 8δυλογο>σιν ?πασιν ε( κατ7 τ-ν γορ7ν περιντες. | π( το:ς βθροις @ταν Aσιν, κε: τοτοις οBς 8δυλογο>σιν | μεγλας μυχ7ς καταμξαντες κα( συγκψαντες ?παντες γελ/σιν. With such imagery and location, is this a joke about the practices of the ostrakophoria? 51. Gager 1992: 5; there are several examples of jumbled spelling in Jordan 1985. 52. Lebedev 1996a and 1996b.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

131

their inscribing or casting was accompanied with some kind of aggressive or disadvantaging verbal pronouncement;53 we will see below that even nominativecase names could be integrated into performative speech-acts. Moreover, the politicians’ names are often written backwards or in circles, even where this is not demanded by the shape of the potsherd.54 Such meaningfulness of writing is confirmed by the deliberate erasure of certain names or adjectives, presumably as a kind of “persuasive analogy” for destruction.55 For instance, in the 480s an Athenian inscribed on his potsherd the name Boutalion in the accusative case (so the object of a verb), scratched a couple of horizontal lines through it, and then, to secure the identification for counting, rewrote the name and added the demotic.56 A carefully inscribed four-line ostrakon against Megacles, found in the Kerameikos, gave the politician’s name (in the accusative case), his patronymic, his demotic, and then, just visible on the final line, the adjective aleit¯eron, “accursed”; each letter of this word has been separately and carefully scratched away (Fig. 2).57 An ostrakon targeting Callias, son of Cratias, calls him a Mede (M¯edos), but scratches out the first three letters of this treacherous ethnic identifier.58 For a culture familiar with the significance of the hostile writing of names, the famous tale in Plutarch, where Aristides inscribes an ostrakon with his own name on behalf of an illiterate peasant who does not recognize him, may illustrate not merely the uprightness of this most just of Athenians when asked to ostracize himself, but also a memorable act of auto-imprecation;59 note that the anecdote is immediately followed by another description of Aristides’ selfless self-exile, when, departing from Athens following the ostrakophoria, he raises his hands in prayer that the d¯emos need have no occasion to be reminded of him. Second, several ostraka bear additional words or magical symbols that, while superfluous to the political name-count of ballots, were evidently considered worthwhile and efficacious within the broader social context of the ostrakophoria. In certain cases, this was the channeling of a private grudge, keenly felt, in no way publicly significant, and in consequence mysterious to the modern historian: land

53. Brenne 1994: 23 gives the proportions as 87.4% nominative, 9.8% dative, 2.7% accusative, and 0.1% genitive. 54. See, for example, Lang 1990: #114, 117, 127, 300, 305, 542, 751, 762, 816, 1049, and 1053. One ostrakon from the Agora (Siewert 2002: T1/141), for a certain Myrrhinicus, breaks up the name in an intriguing and apparently deliberate way (Μυρρ|νικος | Dτο | Μυρ). Nothing seems to have broken off the edge or bottom of the ostrakon. It is unlikely that mur is an abbreviation for the deme-names Myrrhinoutta or Myrrhinous, as these usually follow immediately after the name and before any verbal injunction. Perhaps the idea was that victory, nik¯e, is taken from Myrrhinicus. 55. Pace Siewert 2002: 153–54. 56. Lang 1990: #89 (with Fig. 4). 57. Siewert 2002: T1/93. On the significance of the adjective, see Hatch 1908: 157–62. 58. Siewert 2002: T1/48. 59. Plut. Arist. 7.7–8. The anecdote is usually invoked in discussions of vicarious literacy; see, e.g., Missiou 2011: 59.

132

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

disputes,60 interpersonal conflicts,61 and other things we cannot begin to identify. Such resentments may explain the so-called “scatter-vote,” i.e., individual ostraka cast against unknown and obscure Athenians, which stood no chance of expelling their target but nonetheless satisfied some social-psychological function. We are dealing with the very same face-to-face, intensely competitive world in which curse-tablets were deployed.62 This is confirmed by the explicitly magical signs that appear on some ostraka. Inscribed on one, in the line between the name Hippocrates and his patronymic Alcmaeonides, are the three letters or symbols N N N, meaningless except as magic;63 an ostrakon against Callixenus bears, among other symbols, a drawing of a mullet, a fish associated with Hecate and the dead (Fig. 3);64 the Eumenides (Euneides or Eumeides) may be invoked in another;65 one seems to begin with the imprecation ma tisin s’, “Yes! Vengeance against you” or equivalent.66 A small number of ostraka contain profile portraits, much as one finds on curse-tablets, embedding the target more deeply into the sherd and so making its sympathetic manipulation (see below) all the more effective.67 One particularly horrific ostrakon (Fig. 4), cast against Megacles, depicts him as a corpse, lying dead on the ground,68 either sublimating a violent hostility into the ostracism ballot or intending this image, in the manner of black-magic figurines, to have some kind of analogical effect. While these features indicate the use of ostraka as therapeutic responses to personal anxieties or resentments, additional accusations point to more public concerns. A number of ostraka, especially from the 480s (between the first and second Persian invasions), accuse political targets of treason and medism, directly (e.g., “Callixenus, the traitor,” “Against the medizing Habronichus, of the deme Lamptrae”) or by asserted ethnic or kinship link (e.g., “Callias, the Mede,” “Arist—, the brother of Datis”).69 Some of these charges are also illustrated on ostraka, depicting, for example, Callias in the costume of a Persian archer or Callixenus with the beard and crown of the Great King (Fig. 3).70 60. Siewert 2002: T1/112 against Megacles δρυμE hνεκα (“on account of the copse”); perhaps also T1/109 and T1/110, again against Megacles, πρας hνεκα (“on account of the (land?) beyond”). 61. Siewert 2002: T1/86 against Megacles FΡοκω χριν (“for the sake of Rhoecus”). 62. Faraone 1991b; Riess 2012: 164–234. 63. Siewert 2002: T1/43; on such Konsonantenreihen, see Delatte 1913: 247–48 and Dornseiff 1925: 60–61. 64. Siewert 2002: T1/157, see Consogno 2005: 352–53 and Apollodorus FGrHist 244 F109 = Ath. 7.325a-b. 65. Siewert 2002: T1/114. 66. Siewert 2002: T1/42; Raubitschek (in Vanderpool 1949: 403) thought it equivalent to ς κρακας. See Hall 1989: 98 on these “imprecations of a plainly sacral character.” 67. Siewert 2002: T1/156–64. 68. Siewert 2002: T1/159. 69. Siewert 2002: T1/65, 41, 50–55, and 37, respectively. 70. Siewert 2002: T1/156 and T1/157; see Brenne 1992: 178–82.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

133

Other accusations include financial dishonesty and sorcery.71 Importantly, these crimes—tyranny, treason, medism, abuse of authority, and magic—are precisely those publicly condemned by priests or magistrates with officially intoned curses at political gatherings, sacrifices, and festivals throughout the Greek world.72 In early fifth-century Teos, for instance, the city’s Timouchoi pronounced curses against those who used poisons, interfered with grain imports, conducted or condoned piracy, betrayed the territory, or worked in some way against the polis.73 In Athens, a similar commination text was recited at every assembly and council meeting, condemning medism, tyranny, and subversion of the laws.74 Ostracism shares with these public curses a protective function, a prospective (rather than retrospective) temporality, and internal (rather than foreign) targets, but the potsherd technology allows a double individuation: on the one hand, each citizen, rather than the priests or magistrates representing them, can condemn these acts of public betrayal and, on the other, specific targets can be identified by name. That some Athenians considered inscribing (and casting out, see below) ostraka magically or symbolically efficacious is corroborated by eight ostracism sherds excavated from the Kerameikos. On these we find, instead of the name of a fellow citizen or dominant politican, the word limos, “Hunger” or “hunger,” in the nominative and accusative cases, twice the object of the verb ostrakid¯o, “I ostracize,” once, intriguingly, termed eupatrid¯es, “nobly born” or “aristocratic.”75 Food-shortage was, of course, a constant Greek concern and those who contributed to it were the target of law cases76 and, as we have seen above, curses. In addition, apotropaic rituals were used to expel personified Hunger: Plutarch describes how the inhabitants of his home city of Chaeronia would drive a chosen slave out of the house, beating him with branches, while saying “Get out Hunger (Boulimon)! Come in Wealth and Health!”;77 an imperial-period inscription from Termessus in Lycia praises a certain Onoratus for protecting the grain supply and “pursuing hunger into the sea,” perhaps indicating a similar such ritual;78 Athens seems to have dedicated a plain in Attica in propitiation of Hunger.79 These ostraka indicate that at least eight citizens considered the potsherd a suitable technology and the 71. Megacles is accused of being philarguros, “silver-loving” (Siewert 2002: T1/111). Leagrus is termed a baskanos, “sorcerer” (Siewert 2002: T1/72), and melas, “dark” (Siewert 2002: T1/73); see Buxton 2013: 60–71 on the possible implications of melas. Crates is given the sobriquet Phrynondas (Siewert 2002: T1/69), a name associated with magic and sorcery (see Phillips 1990: 129–33). 72. On these politikai arai, see Vallois 1914, Ziebarth 1985, and Parker 1996: 192–96. 73. ML 30; SEG 45 1628; see Herrmann 1981. 74. Dem. 19.70 and 20.107; Isoc. Paneg. 157; Ar. Thesm. 331–71 (in parody); see also Din. 2.16 on curses against bribe-takers. 75. Siewert 2002: T1/75–81. 76. E.g., Lys. 22 (against the grain-dealers). 77. Plut. Quaest. conviv. 693f: 9ξω Βολιμον 9σω δ' Πλο>τον κα( FΥγειαν. Note the description of ostracism as the keramik¯e mastix, above. See Herter 1950: 117–18. 78. TAM III.1 103 ll.6–7: δωξε γ7ρ ες ?λα λιμν. 79. Zenobius 4.93, Diogenianus 6.13, and Apostol. 10.69 (Λιμο> πεδον). For personified Hunger at Sparta, see Polyaenus Strat. 2.15 and Callisthenes FGrHist 124 F13 = Ath. 10.452a-b.

134

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

ostrakophoria an appropriate moment for such an act of symbolic expulsion. Dismissed by Brenne as “wasted votes,”80 these sherds are in fact evidence for the bottom-up interpretation or co-option of the new democratic ceremony to relieve an ancient and deeply felt anxiety. Far from being banal writing-surfaces for a rational, political process, ostraka seem to have been treated by at least some Athenians as ritual symbols, both in their genesis-in-violence and in the way that inscribing them could sympathetically manifest personal or public hostility. That is to say, the coherence of object, function, and symbol made ostraka as appropriate to expressive, affective satisfactions as to narrowly instrumental objectives. Even if the evidence for this comes from a small proportion of excavated ostraka, it can suggest the emotions and oral pronouncements that may commonly have accompanied the more simply inscribed majority. Indeed, precisely because ostracism was a designed, self-consciously artificial procedure, we can expect the ostrakon to have achieved its symbolic charge by involving associations beyond its immediate role in the ostrakophoria.81 It is crucial to recognize that individual ostraka, which is really to say individual Athenian citizens, show considerable variation in their associative conceptualization of ostracism, ranging from a children’s game and hunger-expulsion to private black magic and public imprecation. In a 1965 study of Bwiti Reformative Cult in the northern Gabon, a post-independence deliberate reworking of Fang ancestral religion, anthropologist James Fernandez demonstrated that, despite all participants testifying to the efficacy of the new cult’s rituals, there was considerable variation in the individual interpretation of commonly experienced phenomena. For instance, the ngombi, or native harp, the central object of Bwiti cult, meant nothing beyond a musical instrument to some informants, a representative of the female element in the universe to others, and a complex configuration of mythic symbols to still others.82 Like Bwiti, ostracism, especially in its first decade, performed a number of different purposes and allowed individuals to select those that most suited their temperaments and spoke to their condition. Consensus lay neither in shared political targets—for ostracism encouraged the individuation of political opinion—nor in a common interpretation of the procedure, but in the imposed, and therefore synthesizing, technology through which a congeries of intentions was made manifest.

80. Brenne 1994: 21. 81. See, e.g., Turner 1961 and 1962 on the subtle web of associations called up by commonplace symbols in Ndembu ritual and Versnel 2006 on the culturally ingrained, spontaneous associations of Greek ritual. 82. Fernandez 1965.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

135

THE CASTING GESTURE

Once the pots had been smashed and the ostraka inscribed, whether with a politician’s name, additional magical symbols, or even “Hunger,” they were carried by all participants into the Agora. The ostraka were then cast across a barrier—the ballistic verb rhipto¯ , “I throw,” is used—into a circular enclosure.83 This expulsive casting of ostraka was a regular kinetic movement, a marked, significant gesture within individual and collective frames of reference. We have seen, above, that the inscribing of a name or portrait onto the ostrakon turned the sherd into a metonymic bearer of the targeted person (or personification): one Athenian could even write on the ostrakon he took to the barrier, “I am carrying (pher¯o) Megacles,” totally assimilating potsherd and politician.84 Embedding the target’s identity in the ostrakon meant that its manipulation could intensify and sympathetically enact the inscriber’s purpose. Several inscriptions on ostraka indicate the symbolic force of the throwing gesture: “Cimon, son of Miltiades, should get out of here (ito¯ ), and take (your sister) Elpinice with you!”85 “Megacles, son of Hippocrates, should flee (pheugeto¯ )!”86 “Megacles, son of Hippocrates, out with him again (echs¯o eiseltheis)! But not to Eretria!”87 “Callixenus, son of Aristonymus, should go (ioi)!”88 “Myrrhinicus should go (ito¯ ), Myr-!”89 “Themistocles, son of Neocles, should go (ito¯ )!”90 and even “[I?] expel (pheu–) Hunger!”91 As before, it is likely that these expulsive verbs indicate what was regularly spoken or shouted over the majority of ostraka that bear the targets’ names alone. The same third-person imperative, ito¯ , “he should go!,” appears on an ostracism ostrakon from the Tauric Chersonese, pointing to the ubiquity of the injunction.92 The casting away from the citizen and over a barrier was a gesture that precisely paralleled the orders inscribed on, and presumably spoken over, the ostrakon: action and utterance are different sides of a single analogous act.93 Presumably, the varying violence of the gesture and volume of the injunction gave 83. Throw: Tzetz. Chil. 13.449 (ρρπτουν); Vat. Graec. 1144 (Lπτειν ες τ το> βουλευτηρου περφραγμα). Note that the same verb was also used of ostrakinda, the children’s game identified with ostracism (Pollux 9.112: . δ' Lπτων τ 0στρακον πιλγει “ν)ξ 8μρα”). Barrier: Pollux 8.19 (τ ν περιορισθντα τπον); Plut. Ar. 7.4 (να τπον τ ς γορς περιπεφραγμνον ν κκλω δρυφκτοις). According to Vat. Graec. 1144, bouleutic ostraka were cast into a similar enclosure (τ το> βουλευτηρου περφραγμα). 84. Siewert 2002: T1/84. 85. Siewert 2002: T1/67; on the incest accusation, see below. 86. Siewert 2002: T1/85. 87. Siewert 2002: T1/94. 88. Consogno 2005: 349 (P17772). 89. Siewert 2002: T1/141. 90. Siewert 2002: T1/43–46. 91. Siewert 2002: T1/81. 92. Vinogradov and Zolotarev 1999: #7; Schirripa, Lentini, and Cordano 2012: 125. 93. See Corbeill 2004: 3 on how linked gestures and spoken utterances derive from a single, underlying mental process.

136

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

public expression, in a way not possible for a hand-vote or secret ballot, to the intensity of an individual’s opinion.94 This expulsive verbalized gesture shares the forms and behavior of Greek sympathetic magic, according to which a marked action was performed while an incantation projected this activity onto the absent victim. As Christopher Faraone has demonstrated, “in most cases the similia similibus formula employs a third-person imperative or optative”;95 these are the precise verbal forms we have on the ostraka. In addition, the words and gestures of this political ritual are strikingly close to apotropaic formulae used across the Greek world against illness, hunger, demons, and ghosts:96 “Go out (ex¯o), Hunger!”97 “To the door (thuraze), ghosts!”98 “Flee, flee (pheuge pheug’), leave (iou) bile!”99 If we recall the “I(?) expel Hunger” sherd, cast at the Athenian ostrakophoria, it is evident that the new political ritual is situated, for at least some Athenians, within a similar thought-world. While the individual’s casting of his ostrakon can be assimilated to sympathetic magic, the simultaneous throwing by a crowd of citizens held different meanings. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Athenians, gathering from all parts of Attica around the circular enclosure in the Agora, together cast their ostraka into the center. This collective activity was charged by deeply rooted chains of cognition related to group throwing, associations that seem to be of long duration and close affinity. The simultaneous throwing of sharp, hard objects by a crowd of citizens arrayed in a circle recalls nothing so much as stoning.100 For ostracism and lapidation share three fundamental characteristics. First, both were mass-participation actions that were strongly marked as demotic and ideally enacted (and thereby witnessed) by a good part of the community. The identification of stoning with the d¯emos is evident in narratives which give the entire population (“the Athenians,”101 “the Mytileneans,”102 “the Coans,”103 “the Arcadians,”104 etc.) as the active subject of stoning verbs and in such literary compounds or juxtapositions as d¯emoleuston, “d¯emos-stoned,”105 d¯emorrhipheis leusimous aras, “d¯emos-

94. See Faig 1993: 144 on this effect of the Spartan shout-vote, and Schwartzberg 2010. 95. Faraone 1988: 282. 96. See Rotolo 1980 and Faraone 2004. 97. Plut. Quaest. conviv. 693f. 98. Photius s.v. Θραζε Κρες. 99. Heim 1892: #57 (Alex. Trall. II p.377); see also #58–60 (Marc. 8.193). 100. On stoning, see Pease 1907, Gras 1984, Rosivach 1987, Cantarella 1991: 73–87, Steiner 1995. The connection with ostracism has been noted in passing by Gras 1984: 85 and Rosenbloom 2004: 337. 101. Hdt. 9.5.2. 102. Hdt. 5.38.1. 103. Apollod. Bibl. 2.7.1. 104. Paus. 8.5.13. 105. Soph. Ant. 36 and Lycoph. Alex. 331.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

137

thrown stoning curses,”106 and leust¯era d¯emou, “the d¯emos’ stoning.”107 It is explicitly understood as a weapon of the weak many, brought about by mutual encouragement and reinforcement.108 Second, ostracism and lapidation, as demotic weapons, were collective regulations of leadership. That is to say, stoning targeted the same kinds of individuals for the same kinds of crime as ostracism: tyrants or would-be tyrants,109 treacherous leaders,110 medizing politicians,111 magistrates who interfered with the grain supply112 or accepted bribes,113 generals who did not press their advantage,114 and those guilty of generating stasis.115 Lapidation was the manifestation of demotic opposition to the humiliation of self-interested leadership, the outrage of abusive authority, and the fear of treachery and betrayal. Several narratives indicate that it was considered an appropriate punishment only for in-group leaders, not external threats. Third, in both stoning and ostracism the casting of the ballistic object was linked with the simultaneous uttering of accusations or curses.116 Danielle Allen has shown that this was considered an integral part of the lapidation punishment.117 We find curses and stones combined in such formulations as d¯emorrhipheis leusimous aras, “d¯emos-thrown stoning curses,”118 apeilas . . . litholeuston Are, “threats . . . stony stoning violence,”119 ballein kai boan, “to pelt and to shout,”120 and mixtaque cum saxis . . . verba mala, “harsh words mixed with stones.”121 We have already discussed some of the hostile comments inscribed on certain ostraka—traitor, medizer, silver-lover, sorcerer—and presumably spoken at the point of inscription and casting. As a comparison, Xenophon describes how his Greek mercenaries began to stone Dexippus, “proclaiming him ‘the traitor’” (anakalountes ton prodot¯en).122 Other ostrakon accusations, to be examined fur106. Aesch. Ag. 1616. 107. Aesch. Sept. 199. 108. For instance, in Eur. IT 331–33 the heroic Orestes and Pylades are surrounded and disarmed by a greater number of weaker but stone-throwing herdsmen. On mutual encouragement, see, e.g., Hdt. 9.5.3, Xen. Anab. 5.7.19 and 5.7.21–23, and Tzetz. Chil. 5.965. On the emotional dynamics of ritual, see Chaniotis 2006. 109. Hdt. 5.38; Diod. Sic. 3.47.4; Plut. Sol. 12.1; Nicolaus of Damascus F51 (Dindorf); Diog. Laert. 9.26; Val. Max. 3.3.2; Plut. Sol. 12.1; Tzetz. Chil. 5.965. 110. Aesch. Myrmidons F132; Xen. Anab. 1.3.1–2 and 6.6.7; Sch. Eur. Or. 432; Paus. 8.5.13. 111. Hdt. 9.5. 112. Plut. Parallela minora 313b; also piracy, Apollod. Bibl. 2.7.1. 113. Paus. 8.5.8–9. 114. Thuc. 5.60.6; Diod. Sic. 13.87.4–5; Hyp. Against Autocles F59 and 63 (Jensen). 115. Paus. 2.32.2. 116. See Bers 1985 and Schwartzberg 2010 on Pl. Leg. 876b, where the multitude uses thorybos, shouts of blame or praise, to compel the acceptance of its values in the assembly, the theatre, the military encampment, and the lawcourt. 117. Allen 2000: 206; see also Watson 1991: 46–50. 118. Aesch. Ag. 1616. 119. Soph. Aj. 252–254; cf. Eur. Ion 1240 120. Ar. Ach. 353. 121. Prop. 4.5.78. 122. Xen. Anab. 6.6.7.

138

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

ther in the next section, included such ridicule as incest (Elpinik¯en labo¯ n),123 adultery (moichos),124 impudence or stupidity (aphel¯es),125 and being a passive sexual partner (katapygo¯ n).126 These echo the verbal obscenity, or aischrologia, that accompanied Athenian stone-throwing festivals.127 Aristotle considered such abusive language a form of violent aggression, comparable to assault and murder.128 These structural similarities between ostracism and lapidation can be seen at work in the punishment of Lycidas in 479, a paradigmatic case of aggressive Athenian patriotism. Herodotus reports that, when the Persian Mardonius sent the Hellespontine Murychides to the Athenian council, evacuated to Salamis, in order to offer terms of surrender, one of the councillors, Lycidas, alone proposed that the matter be considered. Herodotus suggests that Lycidas either had been bribed or was happily medizing. The Athenians in the council and those outside were so incensed at Lycidas’ betrayal that they surrounded him in a circle (peristantes) and stoned him to death (kateleusan ballontes); at this great noise (genomenou thorybou), presumably indicating shouts and curses, the citizens’ wives, one calling on another, then stoned Lycidas’ wife and children. The foreigner Murychides was allowed to leave unharmed.129 In Lycurgus’ version of the same event, the councillors removed their crowns of office before the stoning, thereby acting merely as citizens.130 Lycidas’ crimes—treason and medism— are among those targeted by ostracism, especially in the five or six successful interwar ostrakophoriai of the 480s. The stoning is an in-group punishment. Although the episode takes place on Salamis, to where the Athenians have evacuated, the stoning outside of the temporary Bouleuterion, where a crowd of citizens had gathered, schematically reproduces the dynamics (Athenians standing in a circle, shouting, throwing) and the precise location of the Agora-based ostrakophoria.131 Despite these evident similarities, ostracism, of course, had no tyrant, traitor, or abusive magistrate physically present at the center of the circle. The violence of the stoning of Lycidas and his family should be understood as a maximal extreme, made possible by the wartime setting and the dislocation of the polis to Salamis. A number of fifth-century sources recognize that stoning was exceptionally 123. Siewert 2002: T1/67. 124. Siewert 2002: T1/106. 125. Siewert 2002: T1/119–30. 126. Siewert 2002: T1/150; Vinogradov and Zolotarev 1999: #8 (in Tauric Chersonese). 127. See Parker 2005: 274; Forsdyke 2008: 48–49; and, related, Hsch. s.v. γεφρις, with Rusten 1977. 128. Arist. Eth. Nic. 1131a9, Pol. 1262a27; see Halliwell 1991. 129. Hdt. 9.5. 130. Lycurg. Leocr. 122. Allen 2000: 144 suggests that this was to show that the councilors did not abuse their magisterial power by punishing beyond their legally prescribed limits. 131. Theodorus Metochites, Miscellanea p. 609 (Mu¨ller-Kiessling): Pς Qθροιστο . δ μος παντθεν ες τ βουλευτ3ριον; see discussion below.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

139

cruel132 and so could be sublimated into functionally equivalent but more civilized practices. Sublimation and substitution have, of course, been guiding concepts for ethological or psychological interpretations of Greek sacrifice, ritual, and games.133 I would suggest that the Greeks understood this political ritual in a similar framework. So, lapidation could be identified with or transfigured into democratic voting, encouraged by the shared technology of the ps¯ephos, “pebble,” used in both demotic practices.134 At the battle of Plataea, for example, Amompharetus showed his objection to the withdrawal of the Spartan army by picking up a large stone (petron megan) with both hands, throwing (katabalo¯ n) it at the feet of Pausanias, and declaring, “This is my vote (ps¯ephon)!”—the threat of stoning is unexpressed but evident.135 Hipponax and the dramatists frequently play on the identification between communal decision-making and lapidation.136 Xanthus of Lydia even preserves an appropriate mythic aetiology: when the gods wanted to punish Hermes for killing Argos, but needed to restrain themselves since he had acted at Zeus’ behest, they threw their voting pebbles at his feet (instead of at him) and thereby created the first herm.137 Similarly, the spontaneous lapidation could be institutionalized: Deinias reports that the Argives located their legal trials at the very spot where they had stoned to death Melachrus and Cleometra.138 Exile could also be considered a less severe version of stoning.139 If these three demotic practices—voting, judging, and exile—were recognized as substitutions for stoning, as the considered and regularized sublimation of spontaneous demotic violence,140 then I would suggest that we can infer this for the closely related practice of ostrakophoria as well. Lapidation was incorporated into two additional forms of demotic violence, actual or symbolic, with which the casting of ostraka was associated: scapegoat 132. Aesch. Eum. 179–90 lists lapidation alongside such cruel punishments as gouging, amputation, and beheading, all not to be associated with Apollo and Delphi. 133. See, e.g., Burkert 1983; Mack 1987; Herman 2006: 303–309. 134. See Burkert 1983: 165n.16; Steiner 1995: 193; Hollmann 2012: 9. 135. Plut. Arist. 17.3. Cf. Diod. Sic. 13.87.4–5, who describes the stoning of Acragantine generals in the city’s ekkl¯esia. 136. E.g., Hipponax F128 (West): @πως ψηφ:δι 〈κακ S〉 κακ ν ο=τον 0ληται | βουλ S δημοσηS παρ7 θ:ν% τρυγτοιο; Aesch. Sept. 198–99: ψ φος κατ% α$τ/ν 5λεθρα βουλεσεται, | λευστ ρα δ3μου δ% οU τι μ- φγηS μρον: Eur. Ion 1222–23: Δελφ/ν δ% +νακτες 1ρισαν πετρορριφ | θανε:ν μ-ν δσποιναν ο$ ψ3φω μιW; Eur. Or. 48–50: κυρα δ% ;δ% 8μρα | ν Xι διοσει ψ φον Αργεων Y πλις, | ε χρ- θανε:ν ν& λευσμω πετρ\ματι; 440–42:—ψ φος καθ% 8μ/ν οDσεται τ Sδ% 8μραW. |—φεγειν πλιν τ3νδ’; ^ θανε:ν ^ μ- θανε:ν;—θανε:ν _π% στ/ν λευσμω πετρ\ματι; Cratinus Drapetides F62 KA: Λμπωνα, τ ν ο$ βροτ/ν | ψ φος δναται φλεγυρ7 δεπνου περγειν. 137. Xanthus FGrHist 765 F29 = Etym. Magn. s.v. FΕρμα:ον. 138. Deinias FGrHist 306 F3 = Schol. Eur. Or. 872. Note that Michelakis 2002: 56–57 has argued that a civic solution domesticates the threatened stoning of Achilles in Aeschylus’ fragmentary Myrmidons, but the details remain unclear. 139. Soph. OC 434–36. 140. Note that Allen 2000: 50–59 has drawn attention to the importance of city-regulated/regulating anger (Soph. Ant. 354–55: στυνμους 5ργ7ς) for the politics of punishment at Athens.

140

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

ceremonies and corpse expulsion. Similarities between Greek pharmakos or scapegoat rituals and ostracism have long been recognized, with scholarship focusing on either the rhetorical characterization of politicians as scapegoats141 or the idea of city-purification through expulsion.142 These are important frames of comparison, but attention has not been given to the close connection between the gestures used in scapegoat rituals and ostraka-casting. Stoning played a central role in the mythic aetiologies and ritual practice of Greek scapegoating. It was used against the pharmakos to dispel plague, drought, or famine.143 In Athens, Massilia, and Abdera the pharmakos was pelted with stones and chased over the border;144 the Athenian Thargelia festival re-enacted the Myrmidons’ lapidation of mythical Pharmakos;145 Hipponax frequently refers to the stoning of pharmakoi;146 and Aristophanes’ Acharnians characterize Dicaeopolis as a scapegoat and traitor before they stone him.147 Alongside lapidation, Hipponax and Hesychius describe how a pharmakos was publicly whipped with squill- and fig-branches148 and then paraded out of the city to the tune of the “fig melody.”149 It is interesting in this light to recall that ostracism was called the keramik¯e mastix, “pottery whip.” Indeed, one ostrakon against Callixenus has scratched onto it, alongside the mullet fish and medizing portrait, discussed above, a leafy branch (Fig. 3). Consogno has recently and persuasively argued that this was the squill-branch with which a pharmakos was beaten: the inscriber assimilated his thrown ostrakon to the scapegoating whip and so Callixenus to a pharmakos.150 We may wish to place in

141. See, e.g., Parker 1996: 257–80. Ar. Ran. 730–33 comments that Athens is led by politicians who previously would not even have been considered appropriate as scapegoats. [Lys.] 6.53 suggests that the exile of Andocides would purify the city like the expulsion of a scapegoat (ν>ν οaν χρ- νομζειν τιμωρουμνους κα( παλλαττομνους Ανδοκδου Y τ-ν πλιν καθαρειν κα( ποδιοπομπε:σθαι κα( φαρμακ ν ποπμπειν κα( λιτηρου παλλττεσθαι, Pς bν τοτων ο#τς στι). Demosthenes was condemned by Aesch. in Ctes. 131 as “the polluting demon of Greece” (A τ ς FΕλλδος λειτ3ριε). Scapegoating terminology is found on several ostraka: Siewert 2002: T1/92– 93, T1/153 (Megacles and Xanthippos, respectively, as aleit¯eros, “cursed”), T1/149 (Themistocles as hypegaios agos, “a curse on the land”); see Faraone 2004: 239. 142. Vernant 1972: 125–26; Burkert 1985: 83; Parker 1996: 269–71; Ogden 1997: 142; Dreher 2000: 74. Ammonius’ definition of a pharmakos (142 Valckenaer) is “one who is cast out to purify the city” (. π( καθρσει τ ς πλεως Lιπτμενος), using the same verb as the casting of ostraka. It is worth considering if the ostracized politician would have departed Athens through the gate used for scapegoats and refuse (Plut. de curiositate 518b). 143. Philostr. VA 4.10; Plut. Quaest. Graec. 26 (297b); Schol. Ar. Eq. 1136; Tzetz. Chil. 5.728–40; see Bremmer 1983 and 2008: 191–92, Cantarella 1991: 83–84, and Luraghi 2013: 57–60. 144. Schol. Callim. Aet. F90; Schol. Ov. Ib. 467; see Bremmer 1983: 315. 145. Suda s.v. φαρμακς (= Ister FGrHist 334 F50). Rosenbloom 2004: 339 has noted that, like mythical Pharmakos, Hyperbolus was accused of stealing cups (Leucon Phratry-Members F1). 146. Hipponax F6, F7, F128; see Masson 1948 and Faraone 2004. 147. Ar. Ach. 182, 282–85. 148. Hsch. s.v. κραδηστης (φαρμακς, . τα:ς κρδαις βαλλμενος); Hipponax F5: πλιν καθαρειν κα( κρδηSσι βλλεσθαι, F6: βλλοντες ν χειμ/νι κα( Lαπζοντες | κρδηSσι κα( σκλληSσιν 1σπερ φαρμακν. See Bremmer 2008: 184–89. 149. Hsch. s.v. κραδης νμος. 150. Consogno 2005: 349–52.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

141

the same context Cratinus’ joke against Pericles, whom “the ostrakon has passed by” (toustrakon paroichetai)—a reference to the ostrakophoria at which his rival Thucydides, son of Melesias, received more votes—as a “squill-headed Zeus” (ho schinokephalos Zeus).151 Ostraka-casting could also be identified with the precipitation of a living body or dead corpse. This practice shared with ostracism a two-stage geography, transitioning from the identification and punishment, often by stoning, of a citizen at the city’s heart to the expulsion of his remains into a pit or over a border.152 Throwing stones and throwing the body were linked and analogous gestures: the Delphians both stoned Aesop (hoi polloi lithois auton ballontes) and pushed him off a cliff (kata kr¯emnou e¯osan);153 the Arcadians stoned Aristocrates (katalitho¯ santes) and then cast him unburied beyond their boundaries (ekballousin ataphon);154 Plato proposed in his Laws that, if someone were found guilty of murder, he should be executed and cast out naked (ekballonto¯ n gymnon) at a crossroads, where all the magistrates, acting on behalf of the city, would first stone him (lithon hekastos pher¯on . . . ballo¯ n) and then cast out his corpse beyond the borders unburied (eis ta t¯es cho¯ ras horia pherontes ekballonto¯ n . . . ataphon).155 Even where stoning is not found, the expulsion of a corpse beyond the borders was often a second stage: the Leucadians, according to a picturesque custom described by Strabo, would tie false wings and live birds to a criminal, throw him off a sea cliff (rhipteisthai), collect his remains in a boat, and dispose of them over the state’s boundaries.156 The significance of corpse-expulsion for the Athenians’ conceptualization of ostracism is shown by the Megacles ostrakon, discussed above, onto which a naked corpse had been drawn (Fig. 4). In the previous section, I argued that the act of inscribing this image may have been symbolic or allegorical, turning the ostrakon into a kind of curse-tablet or “voodoo doll.” Here, where we are examining the throwing gesture, we may go further, to suggest that the casting of such a corpse-ostrakon was intended to recall the expelling of the naked body of a public enemy over the Athenian border or into the barathron, the natural chasm that was used for these punishments.157 We can identify such a self-conscious association in the literary tradition as well. Plutarch reports that Aristides, at the height of his competition with Themistocles, advised his fellow citizens as he was leaving the Assembly one day that Athens would not be secure unless they threw both himself and his rival into the barathron

151. Cratinus F73 (Kassel and Austin) = Plut. Per. 13.9. This has usually been treated as a reference to Pericles’ supposed cranial abnormality; see, e.g., Cohen 1991. 152. See Rosivach 1983 and Cantarella 1991: 91–105. 153. Vitae G and W; see Nagy 1979: 280–81. 154. Paus. 4.22.7. 155. Pl. Leg. 9.873b. 156. Strabo 10.2.9. 157. On the barathron, see Gernet 1924, Gras 1984: 81, Cantarella 1991: 96–105, and Allen 2000: 216–21; on its location, see Lalonde 2006: 114–16.

142

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

(eis to barathron embaloien).158 It is hardly likely that Aristides is suggesting his own precipitation; rather, the ancedote is surely a reference to the purpose and gestures of the sherd-casting ostrokaphoriai, through which his rivalry with Themistocles played out, and yet another variation on the theme of his patriotic and voluntary self-ostracism—recall his ostrakon auto-inscription and departure prayer, discussed above.159 Another possible example: in Aristophanes’ Knights, personified Demos promises to throw the politician Hyperbolus, who would be ostracized almost a decade later, into the barathron.160 A final association. We have seen that a meeting of the Assembly in midJanuary determined by hand-vote and without discussion whether or not an ostrakophoria should take place that year; in other words, the procedure existed in two possible states—not occurring or occurring—each of which signaled something about the political health of Athens.161 By itself, the ostrakophoria was both the public recognition that something was rotten and the diagnosis of that evil.162 Indeed, as the famous tale of Aristides’ auto-inscription demonstrates, ideally and in practice the guilty party would be one of the participants in the ostrakophoria. Given the formal similarity between inscribed ostraka and lots or religious tokens (see above), the throwing of these sherds into the circular enclosure to identify the most hated citizen would have resembled forms of casting-divination used in Greece and throughout the ancient Mediterranean. A lot-oracle was associated with Delphi, where the cast tokens were known as thriai or mantikai ps¯ephoi;163 the practice was widely attested in the Italian peninsula.164 In Iliad 7 each Achaean who wished to enter single combat with Hector marked a token (kl¯eron es¯em¯enanto) and threw it (ebalon) into Agamemnon’s helmet.165 Tacitus reports on Germans who took auspices by marking signs on sticks and casting them (spargunt) onto a white cloth, from where they were read and interpreted by a civic priest.166 Like Aleuas the Red of Thessaly, Saul was identified by lot as the first king of Israel.167 More relevantly, the casting of lots could be used to determine which in-group individual was responsible for a public malaise of some kind. So, Herodotus’ Scythian soothsayers could identify,

158. Plut. Arist. 3.2: λλ% ε=πεν π τ ς κκλησας πι\ν, Pς ο$κ 9στι σωτηρα το:ς Αθηναων Y πργμασιν, ε μ- κα( Θεμιστοκλα κα( α$τ ν ες τ βραθρον μβλοιεν. 159. On the voluntariness of the pharmakos, see Bremmer 2008: 183–84. 160. Ar. Eq. 1362–63: +ρας μετωρον ες τ βραθρον μβαλ/, | κ το> λρυγγος κκρεμσας FΥπρβολον. 161. See Rappaport 1979: 91. 162. Ostracism corresponds to Burkert’s model of religious therapy, expounded most schematically in Burkert 1996: 103. 163. Zenobius 5.75; Robbins 1916; Graf 2012: 37–39. 164. Champeaux 1990a. On the use of the inscribed lot for Roman Republican political practice, see Stewart 1998: 22–51. 165. Hom. Il. 7.175–76; on this episode, see, e.g., Steiner 1994: 10–15. 166. Tac. Germ. 10.1. 167. 1 Samuel 10:19–22.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

143

using a technology similar to Tacitus’ Germans, the subject who had caused his king’s illness, even determining guilt by majority vote.168 In the Hebrew Bible, the Phoenician sailors carrying Jonah to Tarshish throw lots to discover on whose account the tempest threatened their safety and then, in a precipitation-like act, throw the prophet overboard.169 An episode in the book of Joshua pulls together many of the phenomena we have explored: when the Israelites were suffering God’s anger because of the theft of some religious dedications a lengthy process of lot-casting within the camp identified a certain Achan as responsible; he was then led far away, stoned to death, and left unburied beneath the heap of thrown rocks.170 The Hebrew verbs of lot-casting were also used for expulsive throwing.171 No ancient source explicitly links the ostrakophoria with casting-divination, but the identity of gesture, diagnostic purpose, and inscribed tokens suggests that the association was possible.172 In sum, ancient narratives and the images and phrases inscribed on some sherds suggest that ostraka-casting can be understood as a ritual gesture, sympathetically enacting expulsive intentions and imitating long-established forms of demotic punishment or diagnosis. Stanley Tambiah has argued that the meaning of ritual gestures is situated precisely in this capacity to codify analogically and to express multiple implications simultaneously.173 The gesture is not just a way to express something but is itself an aspect of that which it is expressing.174 Furthermore, even if only a minority of participants conceptualized the ostrakacasting in any of these ways, the simultaneity of gesture by itself would have forged among all a kind of political communion.175 If the bare occurrence of an ostrakophoria signaled factionalism and interpersonal distrust, then the group casting of sherds into the center of a circle gave a unity of expression to the citizens’ individualized, contradictory opinions. That is to say, even though each Athenian had his own target, his inscription was unknown to the crowd and his voice lost in their thorybos; the collective throwing of ostraka toward the same center posited, behind the polyphony of competing voices, an idealized vision of a homogeneous and united polis. Unlike hand-raising or the secret ballot, the ostrakophoria’s ritual gesture allowed the fantasy of the unanimous vote. The gestural associations, with lapidation in particular, disguised the incipient stasis 168. Hdt. 4.67–68. See also Amm. Marc. 31.2.24 on the Alani. On the use of such stick-lots by Gauls, Germans, and Scythians, see Champeaux 1990b. 169. Jonah 1:7, 12. Note that the verb for throwing Jonah into the sea (the hiphil form of tul) is also used of casting lots (e.g., Proverbs 16:33). 170. Joshua 7. 171. See Lindblom 1962. 172. On the religious authority of the d¯emos in classical Athens, see, e.g., Garland 1984. 173. Tambiah 1985: 53; see also Rappaport 1979: 199. 174. On the “obvious” aspects of ritual, see Rappaport 1979: 173–222. 175. Cf. Ozouf 1975 and Kertzer 1988: 23. A Biblical proverb teaches that the casting of lots together generates friendship (Proverbs 1:14: “Throw in your lot among us; we will all have one purse”). See also Riess 2012 on the integrative effect of civic violence.

144

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

as a citizenry “hating with one mind.”176 Compare, for example, the Spartan ephor Sthenela¨ıdas’ reification of division, by physically grouping into two separate sections the Spartiates who supported and those who opposed war with Athens in 432,177 with the ostrakophoria’s common action at the Agora’s circular enclosure. Indeed, the growing accumulation of ostraka would have been an effective symbol of this unity-through-gesture, like the pile of rocks that engulfed the victim of lapidation and gave visual confirmation of both the number and consensus of participants.178 If, as I argued above, any individual ostrakon could symbolize the broken unity that generated it, then the ingathering of several thousands of these provided a powerful image of restored and unstriated unity.179 The significance of this massive aggregation of sherds is shown by the double-count that followed their casting: the ostraka were first tallied up as a single unit, without being read, to see if the quorum had been surpassed. This first reckoning can be considered a formal confirmation of their collective and unifying function. Such an analysis follows an influential body of Durkheimian scholarship, which has identified political integration as a primary social effect of ritual and the cloaking or domestication of intragroup conflict as a subset of this.180 A key insight of such analyses, helpful for our understanding of ostrakophoriai, is that such social solidarity can be generated by people doing the same things rather than thinking the same things. Precisely because ostracism was a procedure emerging from a dramatic diversity of opinion, social coherence came from the publicly visible unity of gesture and the associated suppression of explicit speech. THE AGORA LOCATION

The circular enclosure around which the Athenian citizens gathered to cast their inscribed sherds was erected in the new Agora to the northwest of the Acropolis. As far as we can gather, this periphragma was located in the open area below the Kolonos Agoraios, between the Cleisthenic Bouleuterion, the Altar of the Twelve Gods, and the Tyrannicide statues on the Sacred Way.181 Kolb has suggested that the ostracism enclosure was raised on the so-called Orchestra.182 This setting should be considered a meaningful ritual location. As we have seen, the ostracism procedure began with a preliminary binary hand-vote 176. Aesch. Eum. 986: στυγε:ν μιW φρεν. On Athens’ self-idealization as free of conflict and at peace, see Loraux 1991. 177. Thuc. 1.87; see Faig 1993. 178. E.g., Philostr. VA 4.10; Xanthus FGrHist 765 F29 = Etym. Magn. s.v. FΕρμα:ον. 179. On the symbolic unity of the Cleisthenic system, see Le´veˆque and Vidal-Naquet 1996. 180. See, e.g., Turner 1957; Gluckman 1962: 40–41; Bell 1992: 172–76; Wulf and Zirfas 2004: 22. 181. For the early fifth-century Agora, see Kolb 1981; Camp 1986: 36–63; Shear Jr. 1994; Millett 1998: 211–14; Anderson 2003: 87–102; Neer and Kurke 2014. 182. Tim. Soph. Lex. Plat. s.v. 5ρχ3στρα; Paus. 1.8.5; see Kolb 1981: 27–54 and Brenne 1994: 20.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

145

in the ekkl¯esia in mid-January; if a majority were in favor, an ostrakophoria was held in early spring. The two moments were distinguished from one another by a temporal delay, different decision-making technologies, and, above all, a change of location. We do not know where the early fifth-century Assembly met: if it already gathered on the Pnyx hill by the time of the first demotic ostrakophoria, the spatial distinction between the preliminary vote and the Agora-based sherdcasting was present ab initio;183 if the Assembly met in the Agora until later into the fifth century,184 when the ekkl¯esia was moved to the Pnyx the ostrakophoria was left in its original location. In either case, the Agora setting was deliberate. The findspots of ostraka in Cyrene, Sicilian Naxos, and Thurii suggest that these extraAthenian ostrakophoriai also took place in their cities’ agorai.185 Functionalist explanations of ostracism have explained away this preference as a mere pragmatic necessity: Rosenbloom proposes that an ostrakophoria summoned a larger crowd than the Pnyx could hold,186 Carcopino that the Agora’s flatness of ground made it more suitable.187 One could also add that, if bouleutic preceded demotic ostracism, as the Vatican manuscript suggests, then the procedure simply moved outdoors in the same location. Whether or not these hold, I will argue here that the Agora was chosen for ostrakophoriai because of its association with the demotic regulation of hierarchy and its identification as the spatial center of Attica. The location of the ostrakophoria was colored by two forms of demotic coercion: anti-elite gossip and anti-tyrannical violence. By at least the second half of the fifth century, the Agora was recognized as the privileged Athenian location for day-to-day free speech and loidoria (personal abuse directed at named figures).188 The widespread envy endemic to Athenian society could find expression in bad-mouthing the elite.189 Such activities were characterized as agoraic and, conversely, considered typical of those who spent much time there.190 This is where Theophrastus stations his rumor-monger.191 Phrynichus’ spiteful youths, who “scratch with a sharp point” their fellow citizens (the metaphor is discussed, above), are always wandering around the Agora (aei kata t¯en agoran periontes).192 Aristophanes’s Knights identifies the combative language of the Sausage-Seller (named “Agoracritus”) with the space.193 And in his Wasps 183. Martin 1951: 290. 184. A plausible suggestion; see Thompson 1982: 136n.10 and Osborne 2007: 197. 185. Bacchielli 1994; Greco 2010; Schirripa, Lentini, and Cordano 2012: 135–44. 186. Rosenbloom 2004: 96. 187. Carcopino 1935: 76. 188. See, e.g., Hunter 1990, Halliwell 1991, Steiner 1994: 187–93, Lewis 1996: 14–19, Forsdyke 2008, and Storey 2010. 189. Walcot 1978; Eidinow 2010: 25–27. Note that Plut. Them. 22.4–5 and Alc. 7.1 identifies ostracism as a form of appeasing this envy. 190. On the Agora as locus of information exchange, see Dem. 24.15, Hyp. 4.21, Isoc. 18.9, Lys. 24.20. 191. Theophr. Char. 8; see also Dem. 24.15. 192. Phrynichus Ephialtes F3 (= Ath. 165b). 193. Ar. Eq. 217–19.

146

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

a speech of Bdelycleon indicates, in a typical conflation of food and politics, that this is where suspicions of hostility to the democratic order were raised: “The word [tyranny] is being bounced around the Agora. . . . ‘That man looks as if he’s buying special fish with a view to tyranny!’ . . . ‘You’re asking for an onion. Is that for setting up a tyranny?’”194 The concentration of gossip and ridicule in this particular space made it a site for the projection and enforcement of normative values and democratic attitudes.195 The several ostraka that bear accusations, both political (treason, medism, bribery) and personal (incest, sexual passivity, adultery), indicate that the verbalized gestures of ostraka-casting could function as an intensification or institutionalization of this spatially situated demotic criticism. It was argued in the previous section that ostrakophoriai substituted for the more extreme weapons of lapidation and precipitation. This is reinforced by the fact that the precise environment of ostraka-casting was a space of demotic violence. Ostracism’s circular enclosure was erected in the immediate vicinity of the famous statue group of the Tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton.196 The first sculptural pair, carved by Antenor, was set up at some point between the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny and Xerxes’ invasion; Pliny’s synchronism of the group’s erection with the expulsion of the Roman kings (510/9) may only be a convenient fiction.197 After Xerxes stole this away to Persia in 479, a replacement was quickly made by Critius and Nesiotes. These monuments, one replacing the other, remained the only statues of Athenian citizens in the Agora for the entire fifth century; moreover, the area around the group was left empty, giving prominence by isolation to the two figures.198 In other words, every single known ostracism took place in the shadow of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and these were the only sculpted human forms, the only Athenians honored with statues, visible during the procedure. This is significant for a couple of reasons. Although we know nothing of Antenor’s sculpture, standing during the ostracisms of the 480s,199 a couple of contemporary skolia, or drinking songs, indicate that the depicted citizens were already celebrated for their murder of “the tyrant” Hipparchus (in fact, younger brother of the senior Peisistratid, Hippias) and their supposed establishment of isonomia, a face-saving narrative that occluded the corruption of the Pythia and the consequent Spartan intervention in 194. Ar. Vesp. 488–91. On the comic Agora, see Wilkins 2000: 156–201. Steiner 1994: 191 observes that the democrats of the Piraeus, overthrowing the Thirty Tyrants and restoring democracy, gathered in the Agora and not the Pnyx. 195. See Morris 2000: 134–38. 196. The location of the statue group is described by Tim. Soph. Lex. Plat. s.v. 5ρχ3στρα, Paus. 1.8.5, and Arr. Anab. 3.16.8. 197. Plin. HN 34.17; on synchronisms invented for ideological effect, see Feeney 2007. 198. Taylor 1981: 26; Ma 2013: 113–14. 199. It was returned to Athens by Alexander (Arr. Anab. 3.6.8), Seleucus I (Val. Max. 2.10 ext.1), or Antiochus I (Paus. 1.8.5). Its artistic priority was immediately evident to Pausanias.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

147

507.200 The most famous runs, “In a branch of myrtle I’ll carry my sword, like Harmodius and Aristogeiton when they killed the tyrant (ton tyrannon ktanet¯en) and made Athens isonomous.”201 The later group depicted Harmodius and Aristogeiton energetically striding forward, weapons in hand, in the act of striking down Hipparchus. Many scholars have noted the absence of the victim from the composition, leaving the monument unbalanced and open-ended, incorporating the citizen viewer into the action, and so transforming a historical moment into a political paradigm.202 The sculpture was paraenetic, encouraging imitation of the heroes and the ongoing targeting of would-be tyrants and oligarchs:203 in the skolia, quoted above, we see citizens play-acting the Tyrannicides; Herodotus has Miltiades call on Callimachus, polemarch at Marathon, to join battle with the Persians and so surpass even the Tyrannicides in civic honor;204 the chorus of old men in the Lysistrata adopts the pose of Aristogeiton in their defense of the constitution.205 Julia Shear has persuasively argued that the assassination of the oligarch Phrynichus in the Agora in 411, for seeking peace with Sparta, was a deliberate re-enactment of the Hipparchus episode.206 Accordingly, ostrakophoriai took place beside an idealized, hortatory visualization of tyrant-killing, a monument that legitimized and promoted civic violence in defense of the d¯emos. Furthermore, it is likely that these statue groups were erected on or near the very location of the slaying of Hipparchus.207 In other words, the monument identified the Agora and, more particularly, the open area at its center, where ostrakophoriai took place, as the historical birthplace of Athenian democracy. The circular enclosure, into which ostraka were cast, may have been considered the very site of Hipparchus’ death.208 So, during an ostrakophoria, thousands of citizens, wielding their potsherds, converged on the celebrated killing zone of the tyrant. The Tyrannicide statues would necessarily have been incorporated into the assembling hubbub, triggering

200. The issue’s many complications need not detain us here; see, e.g., Lavelle 1993 and Thomas 1989: 238–61. 201. Poetae Melici Graeci #893–96. 202. Brunnsa˚ker 1971: 163–64; Ober 2003: 218 and 221; Neer 2010: 78–85; Ma 2013: 114. 203. Ober 2003 has shown that democrats assimilated oligarchic opposition to tyranny. 204. Hdt. 6.109.3. 205. Ar. Lys. 631–34. 206. Thuc. 8.92; Shear 2011: 28–29, 60. According to Lycurg. Leocr. 113, his bones were expelled from Attica. Note that it also echoes the stoning of Lycidas on Salamis, also outside the Bouleuterion and also for proposing peace with the great enemy. 207. Taylor 1981: 42; Castriotia 1998: 202; Ajootian 1998: 3. Hipparchus was killed in the vicinity of the Leocorium ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 18.3; Thuc. 1.20.2, 6.57.3), the shrine of the daughters of Leos, who sacrificed themselves to ward off famine (Ael. VH 12.28; Aristid. Pan. 13.119). This was a familiar landmark in the northern or central part of the Agora, beside the Panathenaic Way; see Wycherley 1957: 108–13. 208. Cf. Timoleon’s razing the palace of Dionysius II of Syracuse and building courts of justice on the very site (Plut. Tim. 22.1–3)—a similar localization of anti-tyrant aggression; on house razing, see Connor 1985.

148

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

memories, modeling attitudes, and characterizing the procedure; perhaps some participants even emulated their stance. The association must have been especially close for the early ostracisms, which directly targeted the family and friends of the assassinated tyrant—the first victim was a Peisistratid named Hipparchus. A late fourth- or third-century inscription from Erythrae demonstrates the ongoing aggression of such tyrannicide monuments: the public decree reports how oligarchic revolutionaries removed the sword (exeilon to xiphos) from an old statue of the tyrannicide Philites, “thinking that the statue’s stance was entirely aimed at them (nomizontes katholou t¯en stasin kath’ auto¯ n einai).”209 I would suggest, therefore, that the location of ostrakophoria, in addition to its archetypal tyrant-killing mass gesture, turned the procedure into a ritualized repetition of the originary, generative act of anti-tyrant violence.210 Such re-enactment is implied in Plutarch’s suggestion that Pericles was fearful of being ostracized (phoboumenos exostrakisth¯enai) because he physically resembled the tyrant Peisistratus (edokei Peisitrato¯ i to¯ i tyranno¯ i to eidos empher¯es einai).211 No portrait of the tyrant could have been made or survived for such resemblance to be observed. Rather, the comment implies that, just as ostracism assimilated the d¯emos to the Tyrannicides, so it made tyrants of the targeted politicians. In addition to being imbued with demotic aggression, the new Agora had also been turned into the symbolic center of all Attica. A comprehensive program of public construction and relocation of functions, beginning under the Peisistratids and accelerating after Cleisthenes’ reforms, demarcated and developed the southern and western edges of the Agora.212 Most importantly, the new Altar of the Twelve Gods, close to the Orchestra and the Tyrannicide statues, was selected as Athens’ geographic node, to and from which all distances were measured;213 Pindar terms it the city’s omphalos, “navel.”214 Furthermore, the marking out of the Agora with horoi and lustral basins made it a sacred space, from which those guilty of murder, mistreating their parents, impiety, cowardice, or desertion were formally excluded.215 The ostrakophoria, therefore, possesses a paradoxical directionality, a strange combination of the centripetal and the centrifugal: on the one hand, Athenians gathered from all over Attica at the sacred and pure center of the city to cast a sherd into the middle of a circle; on the other, the action 209. SIG3 284; SEG 32 1143; Heisserer 1979; Gauthier 1982: 215–21; Ober 2003: 227. 210. Pace Forsdyke 2005: 279, who, with her focus on the expulsive telos of ostracism, considers it a re-enactment of the expulsion of Cleisthenes’ rival Isagoras after the fall of the tyranny. 211. Plut. Per. 7.1–2. 212. Camp 1986: 36–77; Ho¨lscher 1991; Shear Jr. 1994; Millett 1998. 213. Camp 1986: 42; Shear Jr. 1994: 231. Note that the democrats erased from the Altar of the Twelve Gods the dedicatory inscription of Pisistratus, son of the tyrant Hippias (Thuc. 6.54.7), demonstrating to Athenians the symbolic power of names and their removal at this very spot. 214. Pind. F75. Note, however, that Neer and Kurke 2014 have argued that the Altar of the Twelve Gods was originally erected in the old Agora, to the east of the Acropolis, and relocated to the markedly democratic space of the new Agora at some point in the fifth century. 215. Lycurg. Leocr. 5; Aeschin. 3.176; Dem. 20.158, 22.77, and 24.60; see Millett 1998: 224.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

149

was intended to expel far beyond the boundaries of the state someone considered guilty of treason, bribery, and other polluting personal offences. How can we reconcile this? The ostraka enclosure should be considered, to adopt Foucault’s term, a heterotopia.216 That is to say, for the duration of the ostrakophoria, this bounded circle at the navel of the polis came to represent an anti-Athens populated by antiAthenians. It was a space into which citizens symbolically disposed of both what they did not like—tyranny, incest, hunger, and so on—and those they did not wish to have among them. The circle, therefore, represented an absolute break from the regular time and space of the Agora; it was marked off physically by a barrier and ritually, as I have argued, by a repeated gesture. As a locus of pollution, deviance, and political danger it operated in a relation of inverted analogy to the idealized democratic polis; such a polar reversal may have been effected precisely because it was located at Athens’ geographic and conceptual center. Circle-tracing has a recognized ability to mark off a space as heterotopic,217 and certain ostraka may represent this in the shape of their inscriptions. An ostrakon against Callias, for instance, schematically locates the targeted politician within this heterotopia by placing his name and deme (Kallias Alo¯ pek¯ethen) at the center of the sherd, around which a circle of writing records his patronymic (Kratiou) and his crime (hos e(m) M¯edo¯ n, “the one from Media”); another has the same Callias’ name inscribed across the top of the sherd and the similar accusation, hos em M¯edo¯ n h¯ekei, “who has come from Media,” written in a full circle beneath.218 The casting of these “from Media” circle sherds into the enclosure may have been an analogous expulsion back to the foreign locale. Similarly, the inscription nea k¯om¯e, on a couple of ostraka targeting Megacles, son of Hippocrates, may indicate something like “a new village [for you]!” identifying the circle with the generically non-Athenian, non-polis life of the exile.219 If I am correct to understand the casting of the Megacles-corpse ostrakon as a symbolic precipitation (see above), then the enclosure becomes the barathron or equivalent. The circle in which the ostraka accumulated, therefore, was capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several imagined destinations that were in themselves incompatable but gained a unity from their shared expulsive relation to Athens. In other words, the ostrakophoria procedure temporarily transformed this delimited part of the Agora into a dystopic a-polis.

216. The term was introduced by Foucault 1986 and developed by Soja 1996: 154–63. 217. On the symbolism of the circle in archaic and early classical thought, see Vernant 1969: 170–80. Circle-tracing was a widespread technique of ancient magic used for, amongst other things, protection against demons, thaumaturgy, rain magic, and debt obligations; see Cameron 1928, Goldin 1963, and Kosmin 2014: 129–30. 218. Siewert 2002: T1/56. 219. Siewert 2002: T1/107–108. Cf. the fetial rite for inaugurating a Roman war, according to which a spear was thrown into a piece of land beside the temple of Bellona at Rome that temporarily represented foreign territory (Serv. ad Aen. 9.52); see Ando 2011: 19–36 and Rich 2011: 204–209.

150

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

The Agora offered ostraka-casting what the Pnyx could not: the city’s central location, an association with quotidian anti-elite behavior, and the foundational site of democratic freedom. The ostrakophoria would have been charged by its proximity to these demotic monuments and memories. But ostracism was not only a passive receiver. A procedure of such scale and emotion would in turn have contributed to this ideological and physical program of agoracization: the citizenry performed to itself the Agora’s significance as the city’s spatial, demotic center and, by repeated negation, limned all that Athens should be. Indeed, the ingathering of the citizenry in this form can be understood as a moment of democratic socialization: to paraphrase d’Azeglio, if Cleisthenes’ reforms had made Athens a democracy, Athenians still had to be made democratic. Moore and Myerhoff have noted how political ritual can objectify and reify social relationships or ideas that are otherwise invisible.220 So, the ostrakophoria asserted in one and the same place the physical reality of the new political order by, for instance, grouping the population entering the Agora into its ten otherwise discontiguous new tribes,221 publicly deploying the administrative responsibilites of the magistrates and councillors, and demonstrating the ultimate and aggressive sovereignty of the d¯emos. For the duration of the ostrakophoria, the Agora was a microcosm of the state. Such political socialization was already observed by George Grote, first modern defender of the ostracism institution: “It was necessary to create in the multitude, and through them to force upon the leading ambitious men, that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term a constitutional morality.”222 DISENCHANTMENT

Any account of ostracism’s emergence must also find room for its desuetude. From its almost annual frequency during the 480s, the institution declined to perhaps three completed ostracisms in the 470s, maybe two in the 460s, possibly one in the 450s, a couple in the 440s, none during the 430s or 420s, and finally ended with that of Hyperbolus in 416 or 415.223 While it is likely that the preliminary question continued to be asked of the Assembly throughout the later fifth and fourth centuries224 and it is possible that several below-quorum ostrakophoriai have not entered the historical record, the overall pattern is undeniable. Explanations for the waning of the institution argue either that its functional niche was filled by the lawcourts and the eisangelia prosecution225 220. Moore and Myerhoff 1977: 14. See also Wulf and Zirfas 2004: 18–20. 221. It is still debated whether they would have been seated by tribe in the Assembly; see Hansen 1977 and 1987: 39–41, 127 and Stanton and Bicknell 1987. 222. Grote 1856: 4.205; see also Petzold 1990: 172 on ostracism’s contribution to the d¯emos’ self-awareness. 223. Phillips 1982: 27. 224. Heftner 2003. 225. E.g., Mosse´ 2000; Dreher 2000; Riess 2012: 97, 163, 389–90.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

151

or, following ancient accounts, that it was made disreputable by Nicias’ and Alcibiades’ turning of it against low-born Hyperbolus.226 The approach taken in this paper can add a further insight: the ostraka themselves, where they can be dated by target’s name or orthography, show a decline in associative or symbolic richness over the course of the fifth century. Most of the sherds that have been particularly helpful for the above analysis, with their images, imprecations, magical signs, and so forth, date to the 480s or 470s; with a couple of exceptions, such “superfluous” elements are almost entirely absent by the 460s or 450s. Furthermore, a similar reduction occurs in the use of the accusative and dative cases for the targets’ names and, presumably, the verbal injunctions that would have accompanied them: of the 31 dative-case published ostraka from the Agora, 28 date to ostracism’s early period (the 480s and 470s), 2 to the middle period (460s-440s), and only one to the late period (410s); of the 13 accusative-case sherds, 11 are early, 2 late.227 (The Kerameikos data have not yet been processed in this way.) Additionally, the scatter-vote seems to narrow from a broad range to the few major players. These changes suggest that, even if, as Old Comedy demonstrates, ostracism could still attract symbolic or ritualized meanings, nonetheless the institution had undergone a routinization and disenchantment (Entzauberung).228 The ensemble of practices and associations that generated ostracism ultimately opened a space for the idea of ostracism itself. That is to say, the inscribing and casting of ostraka became increasingly situation referential, referring to the institution for which they were used and not to the reperformance by allusion or analogy of other rites.229 Such narrowing of ostracism’s associative or symbolic fan correlates with the institution’s declining frequency. We can see this in the last successful ostracism, of the rabble-rouser Hyperbolus, which, according to Plutarch’s three accounts, discredited the procedure among the Athenians because, on the one hand, it turned against a pon¯eros an institution properly used to target elite citizens230 and, on the other, the procedure was openly manipulated by Alcibiades, Nicias, and possibly also Phaeax.231 The Hyperbolus ostracism can be considered a ritual breakdown or infelicity232 — publicly instrumentalized, socially divisive rather than integrative, inverting the ritual script, and so producing an inappropriate result233 —all predicated on the 226. Thuc. 8.73.3; Plut. Arist. 7.3–4, Nic. 11.4–6, Alc. 13.4–5. See, e.g., Connor and Keaney 1969. 227. Lang 1990: 17, with nn.64–65. 228. For these Weberian concepts, dispersed through his writings, see Koshul 2005: 9–39. 229. On situation referentiality, see Fernandez 1965: 911–12. 230. The identification between ostracism and elite status was so close that Demetrius of Phaleron argued that Aristides was wealthy simply on the basis that he had been ostracized (FGrHist 228 F43 = Plut. Arist. 1.2). 231. Plut. Arist. 7.3–4, Nic. 11.4–6, Alc. 13.4–5; see Fuqua 1965 and Rosenbloom 2004. 232. On ritual failure, see Geertz 1957, Grimes 1990, and Hu¨sken 2007. 233. Cf. Hoffmeister 2007, on the breaking of the social script in serial killings.

152

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

above process of routinization and rationalization. Indeed, the tension between the ritualized ostracism examined in this paper and the functionalist ostracism of Aristotle and most modern scholarship is not only the result of the respective foregrounding of embodied participation or intellectualized choice, but also itself an effect of the disenchantment of the procedure. The richness of semantic association, ritual identification, and symbolic or magical analogy manifested in early fifth-century ostraka was unavailable or unknowable to fourth-century analysis. CONCLUSION

In Spring 488/7, the victors of Marathon assembled in their ten new tribes in their new Agora to take part for the first time in a new procedure—to write on a broken piece of pottery the name of a fellow citizen and to cast this into a circular enclosure. The strangeness of this political ritual must not be overlooked: we can imagine Athenians questioning their neighbors on the procedure; disagreeing about whom to target or whether private grudge outweighed public misdemeanor; the growing thrill of collective might; the heightened resentment and envy and revenge; the fun of it all, or the fear; the Tyrannicide model; the breath of magic and sacrality. Such a study of ostracism does not require us to divide its features between the “political”—the rationally motivated, goal-oriented, individualized choice-making that has dominated scholarship—and the “ritual”— all the symbolic, affective, and communal elements discussed above. They are inseparable. Rather, the emerging picture of ostracism as an assemblage of practices and meanings allows us to understand the procedure, and, I would suggest, the Cleisthenic moment of political reform in general, as bricolage.234 No element in ostracism—the shattering of vases, the inscription of hostile messages, the casting of tokens, the demotic aggression, or the expulsion of a dangerous or polluted citizen—was newly invented. Cleisthenes creatively recycled cultural wares, combining preexisting, pre-signified materials into a new ensemble. This is not the “invention of tradition” popularized by Eric Hobsbawm235 but the “inventiveness of tradition,”236 where the meaning and particularity of new cultural formulations derive from the embedded logics and intelligibilities of their constituent parts. Given the brazen, engineered artificiality of much of the new democratic order, and so the need to generate genuine group sentiment, it is easy to see why borrowing and resignifying was an effective strategy: in addition to ostracism, we can observe it in the adoption of Doric sanctuary architecture for the newly constructed Council Chamber, probably its 234. The term was introduced by Le´vi-Strauss 1966: 17–28. 235. Hobsbawm 1983: 4–7. Attempts to identify the hero Theseus as the inventor and first victim of ostracism (Suda s.v. ΑρχY Σκυρα), perhaps encouraged by his death outside Attica, are late; see Carcopino 1935: 9–14. 236. The phrase was coined by Sahlins 1999, discussing the institutionalization of sumo at the Meiji court.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

153

first use for a non-temple building in the entire Greek world,237 or the selection of preexisting Attic heroes as the Stammva¨ter of the ten new tribes.238 In this way, the reform program of Cleisthenes is comparable to other “revitalization movements” that express ideological innovation through cultural syncretism, the novel use of old things, and borrowing across traditional boundaries.239 For instance, Hugh Urban has recently shown how L. Ron Hubbard, as a religious bricoleur, incorporated into the Dianetics rite of his new Scientology materials and ideas drawn from eastern religions, science fiction, the occult, psychoanalysis, and even police lie-detecting, and that each of these brought to the invented procedure quite distinct sets of associations.240 Similarly, Emily Chao has demonstrated that revived Chinese exorcism has introduced political and military elements, such as punchy quotations from Chairman Mao, anti-Japanese marching hymns, and phrases from the national anthem, all to charge the religious rite with the expulsive power and historical memory of battlefield resistance.241 As we have seen, the inscriptions on several ostraka indicate that the migration to the center of democratic politics of technologies and gestures from magical, symbolic, or ludic practices also carried over, for at least some Athenians, their preexisting and preembedded associations. This is a well-paralleled phenomenon: it has been shown, for instance, that rituals in T’ang China echoed, implied, and assumed other rites,242 or that modern voting behavior among the indigenous Tzotzil of southern Mexico resembles prayer and shamanic practices.243 Speaking more generally, I am arguing that participants in the newly invented procedures of early democracy needed to cross-reference domains of meaning in order to supply associations and information from well-known spheres or practices to the newer ones. Ostracism shows us that in early democratic politics, as presumably in other spheres of life, Athenians thought through objects, gestures, and locations as well as about them. Harvard University [email protected]

237. Shear Jr. 1994: 232–39; Anderson 2003: 97–102: “The appeal lay . . . in its suggestion of the traditional practices and cultural permanence associated with structures hitherto built in this idiom” (202). 238. Kearns 1985: 201. 239. The concept of revitalization—a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture—was introduced by Wallace 1956 to theorize phenomena as varied as cargo cult, messianic communities, political and religious reform movements, and revolution; it has been developed in material-focused directions by Liebmann 2008. 240. Urban 2011. 241. Chao 1999. 242. Bell 1992: 129. 243. Vogt and Abel 1977.

154

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ajootian, A. 1998. “A Day at the Races: The Tyrannicides in the Fifth-Century Agora.” In K. Hartswick and M. Sturgeon, eds., ΣΤΕΦΑΝΟΣ: Studies in Honor of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, 1–14. Philadelphia. Allen, D. 2000. The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens. Princeton. Anderson, G. 2003. The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508–490 bc. Ann Arbor. Ando, C. 2011. Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition. Philadelphia. Audollent, A. 1904. Defixionum tabellae quotquot innotuerunt: tam in Graecis orientis quam in totius occidentis partibus praeter Atticas in corpore inscriptionum Atticarum editas. Paris. Bacchielli, L. 1994. “L’ostracismo a Cirene.” RivFil 122: 257–70. Bell, C. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford. . 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York. Bers, V. 1985. “Dikastic Thorubos.” In Cartledge and Harvey, 1–15. Sidmouth. Bicknell, P. J. 1986. “Agasias the Donkey.” ZPE 62: 183–84. Bremmer, J. 1983. “Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece.” HSCP 87: 299–320. . 2008. Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East. Leiden. Brenne, S. 1992. “‘Portraits’ auf Ostraka.” AM 107: 161–85. . 1994. “Ostraka and the Process of Ostrakophoria.” In Coulson, Palagia, Shear, Jr., Shapiro, and Frost, 13–24. Oxford. Brunnsa˚ker, S. 1971. The Tyrant-Slayers of Kritios and Nesiotes: A Critical Study of the Sources and Restorations. Stockholm. Buc, P. 2001. The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory. Princeton. Burkert, W. 1983. Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. Trans. Peter Bing. Berkeley. . 1985. Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffan. Oxford. . 1996. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, Mass. Buxton, R. 2013. Myths and Tragedies in their Ancient Greek Context. Oxford. Calame, C. 1999. “Indigenous and Modern Perspectives on Tribal Initiation Rites: Education according to Plato.” In M. Padilla, ed., Rites of Passage in Ancient Greece: Literature, Religion, Society, 278–312. Lewisburg. Calderini, A. 1945. L’Ostracismo. Como. Cameron, A. 1928. “Two Parallels.” CR 42: 127. Camp, J. 1986. The Athenian Agora: Excavations in the Heart of Classical Athens. London. Cantarella, E. 1991. I supplizi capitali in Grecia e a Roma. Milan. Carcopino, J. 1935. L’Ostracisme athe´nien. Paris. Cartledge, P., and F. Harvey, eds. 1985. Crux. Essays Presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th Birthday. Sidmouth. Castriota, D. 1998. “Democracy and Art in Late Sixth- and Fifth-Century Athens.” In Morris and Raaflaub, 197–216. Dubuque. Champeaux, J. 1990a. “Sors oraculi: Les oracles en Italie sous la Re´publique et l’Empire.” ME´FRA 102: 271–302.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

155

. 1990b. “Sorts et divination inspire´e. Pour une pre´histoire des oracle italiques.” ME´FRA 102: 801–28. Chaniotis, A. 2006. “Rituals between Norms and Emotions: Rituals as Shared Experience and Memory.” In Stavrianopoulou, 211–38. Lie`ge. Chao, E. 1999. “The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory.” Cultural Anthropology 14: 505–34. Christ, M. 1992. “Ostracism, Sycophancy, and the Deception of the Demos: [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 43.5.” CQ 42: 336–46. Cohen, B. 1991. “Pericles’ Portrait and the Riace Bronzes: New Evidence for ‘Schinocephaly.”’ Hesperia 60: 465–502. Collins, D. 2008. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford. Connor, W. R. 1985. “The Razing of the House in Greek Society.” TAPA 115: 79–102. Connor, R., and J. Keaney. 1969. “Theophrastus on the End of Ostracism.” AJP 90: 313–19. Consogno, A. 2005. “Gli ostraka di Kallixenos: Una nuova proposta di interpretazione.” Acme 58: 343–55. Corbeill, A. 2004. Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome. Princeton. Coulson, W., O. Palagia, T. L. Shear, Jr., H. Shapiro, and F. Frost, eds. 1994. The Archaeology of Athens and Attica under the Democracy. Oxford. Delatte, A. 1913. “E´tudes sur la magie grecque: I. La sphe`re magique du Muse´e d’Athe`nes.” BCH 37: 247–78. Develin, R. 1977. “Cleisthenes and Ostracism: Precedents and Intentions.” Antichthon 11: 10–21. Diehl, E. 1964. Die Hydria: Formgeschichte und Verwendung im Kult des Altertums. Mainz am Rhein. Doenges, N. 1996. “Ostracism and the Boulai of Kleisthenes.” Historia 45: 387–404. Dornseiff, F. 1925. Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie. Berlin. Dreher, M. 2000. “Verbannung ohne Vergehen: Der Ostrakismos (das Scherbengericht).” In L. Burckhardt and J. von Ungern-Sternberg, eds., Große Prozesse im antiken Athen, 66–77. Munich. Eidinow, E. 2007. Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks. Oxford. . 2010. “Patterns of Persecution: ‘Witchcraft’ Trials in Classical Athens.” Past and Present 28: 9–35. ¨ berlegungen zu Faig, E. 1993. “Die spartanische Abstimmung nach der Lautsta¨rke. U Thukydides 1, 87.” Historia 42: 139–60. Faraone, C. 1985. “Aeschylus’ hμνος δσμιος (Eum. 306) and Attic Judicial Curse Tablets.” JHS 105: 150–54. . 1988. “Hermes but no Marrow: Another Look at a Puzzling Magical Spell.” ZPE 72: 279–86. . 1991a. “Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil: The Defensive Use of ‘Voodoo Dolls’ in Greece.” CA 10: 165–205, 207–20. . 1991b. “The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells.” In C. Faraone and D. Obbink, eds., Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, 3–32. Oxford. . 1993. “Molten Wax, Spilt Wine, and Mutilated Animals: Sympathetic Magic in Early Greek and Near Eastern Oath Ceremonies.” JHS 113: 60–80. . 2004. “Hipponax Fragment 128W: Epic Parody or Expulsive Incantation.” CA 23: 209–45.

156

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

Feeney, D. 2007. Caesar’s Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley. Fernandez, J. 1965. “Symbolic Consensus in a Fang Reformative Cult.” American Anthropologist 67: 902–29. Forsdyke, S. 2005. Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy: The Politics of Expulsion in Ancient Greece. Princeton. . 2008. “Street Theatre and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece: Shaming, Stoning and Starving Offenders Inside and Outside the Courts.” Past and Present 201: 3–50. Foster, K. 2010. “Well-Tempered Words: Ceramic Metaphors in Mesopotamian Literature.” In S. Melville and A. Slotsky, eds., Opening the Tablet Box: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Benjamin R. Foster, 141–54. Leiden. Foucault, M. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. J. Miskowiec. Diacritics 16: 22–27. Fuqua, C. 1965. “Possible Implications of the Ostracism of Hyperbolus.” TAPA 96: 165–79. Gager, J. 1992. Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. Oxford. Garland, R. 1984. “Religious Authority in Archaic and Classical Athens.” BSA 79: 75–123. Gauthier, P. 1982. “Notes sur trois de´crets honorant des citoyens bienfaiteurs.” RPhil 56: 215–31. Geertz, C. 1957. “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example.” American Anthropologist 59: 32–54. ` propos d’un ouvrage re´cent.” RE´G 37: Gernet, L. 1924. “Sur l’exe´cution capitale: A 261–93. Gluckman, M., ed. 1962. Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations. Manchester. Gluckman, M. 1962. “Les rites de passage.” In Gluckman, 1–52. Manchester. Goldin, J. 1963. “On Honi the Circle-Maker: A Demanding Prayer.” Harvard Theological Review 56: 233–37. Graf, F. 2012. “Mantik in Griechenland.” In Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum III: 1–39. Gras, M. 1984. “Cite´ grecque et lapidation.” In Y. Thomas, ed., Du chaˆtiment dans la cite´. Supplices corporels et peine de mort dans le monde antique, 75–89. Rome. Greco, E. 2010. “Un ostrakon da Thurii.” ZPE 173: 97–101. Gribble, D. 1997. “Rhetoric and History in [Andocides] 4, Against Alcibiades.” CQ 47: 367–91. Grimes, R. 1990. Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory. Columbia, S.C. Grote, G. 1856. A History of Greece. London. Hall, L. 1989. “Remarks on the Law of Ostracism.” Tyche 4: 91–100. Halliwell, S. 1991. “The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture.” CQ 41: 279–96. Hansen, M. 1977. “How Did the Athenian Ecclesia Vote?” GRBS 18: 123–37. . 1987. The Athenian Assembly in the Age of Demosthenes. Oxford. Hatch, W. 1908. “The Use of λιτ3ριος, λιτρς, ρα:ος, ναγ3ς, νθμιος, παλαμνα:ος, and προστρπαιος.” HSCP 19: 157–86. Heftner, H. 2001. “Die Pseudo-Andokidiesche Rede ‘Gegen Alcibiades’ (And. 4)— Ein authentischer Beitrag zu einer Ostrakophoriedebatte des Jahres 415 v. Chr?” Philologus 145: 39–56. . 2003. “Ende und ‘Nachleben’ des Ostrakismos in Athen.” Historia 52: 23–38. Heim, R. 1892. Incantamenta magica graeca latina. Leipzig.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

157

Heisserer, A. 1979. “The Philites Stele (SIG3 284 = IEK 503).” Hesperia 48: 281–93. Helly, B. 1995. L’E´tat thessalien. Aleuas le Roux, les te´trades et les tagoi. Lyon. Herman, G. 2006. Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens: A Social History. Cambridge. Herrmann, P. 1981. “Teos und Abdera im 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Ein neues Fragment der Teiorum Dirae.” Chiron 11: 1–30. Herter, H. 1950. “Bo¨se Da¨monen im fru¨hgriechischen Volksglauben.” Rheinisches Jahrbuch fu¨r Volkskunde 1: 112–43. Hobsbawm, E. 1983. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 1–14. Cambridge. Hoffmeister, M. 2007. “Change of View: The Ritual Side of Serial Killings and the Conditions for Fortunate Failure.” In Hu¨sken, 223–40. Leiden. Hollmann, A. 2012. “Kleisthenes the Stoner: Herodotus 5.67.2.” Mnemosyne 65: 1–17. Ho¨lscher, T. 1991. “The City of Athens: Space, Symbol, Structure.” In Molho, Raaflaub, and Emlen, 355–80. Ann Arbor. Hunter, V. 1990. “Gossip and the Politics of Reputation in Classical Athens.” Phoenix 44: 299–325. Hu¨sken, U., ed. 2007. When Rituals go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual. Leiden. Jeffery, L. H. 1955. “Further Comments on Archaic Greek Inscriptions.” BSA 50: 67–84. Johnston, S. 2003. “Lost in the Shuffle: Roman Sortition and its Discontents.” Archiv fu¨r Religionsgeschichte: 146–56. Jordan, D. R. 1985. “A Survey of Greek Defixiones Not Included in the Special Corpora.” GRBS 26: 151–97. Kearns, E. 1985. “Change and Continuity in Religious Structures After Cleisthenes.” In Cartledge and Harvey, 189–207. Sidmouth. Kertzer, D. 1988. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven. Kolb, F. 1981. Agora und Theater, Volks- und Festversammlung. Berlin. Koshul, B. 2005. The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy: Disenchanting Disenchantment. New York. Kosmin, P. 2014. The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire. Cambridge, Mass. Lalonde, G. 2006.IG I3 1055 B and the Boundary of Melite and Kollytos.” Hesperia 75: 83–119. Lang, M. 1990. Ostraka. The Athenian Agora XXV. Princeton. Lavelle, B. 1993. The Sorrow and the Pity: A Prolegomenon to a History of Athens under the Peisistratids, c. 560–510 B.C. Stuttgart. Lebedev, A. 1996a. “Pharnabazos, the Diviner of Hermes: Two Ostraka with Curse Letters from Olbia.” ZPE 112: 268–78. . 1996b. “The Devotio of Xanthippos. Magic and Mystery Cults in Olbia.” ZPE 112: 279–83. ¨ ra Lehmann, G. A. 1981. “Der Ostrakismos-Entscheid in Athen: Von Kleisthenes zur A des Themistokles.” ZPE 41: 85–99. Le´veˆque, P., and P. Vidal-Naquet. 1996. Cleisthenes the Athenian. Trans. David Curtis. Atlantic Highlands, N.J. Le´vi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago. Lewis, S. 1996. News and Society in the Greek Polis. Chapel Hill.

158

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

Liebmann, M. 2008. “The Innovative Materiality of Revitalization Movements: Lessons from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.” American Anthropologist 110: 360–72. Lindblom, J. 1962. “Lot-Casting in the Old Testament.” Vetus Testamentum 12: 164–78. Loraux, N. 1991. “Reflections of the Greek City on Unity and Disunity.” In Molho, Raaflaub, and Emlen, 33–52. Ann Arbor. Luraghi, N. 2013. “To Die Like a Tyrant.” In N. Luraghi, ed., The Splendors and Miseries of Ruling Alone: Encounters with Monarchy from Archaic Greece to the Hellenistic Mediterranean: 49–71. Stuttgart. Ma, J. 2013. Statues and Cities: Honorific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World. Oxford. Mack, B., ed. 1987. Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene´ Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation. Stanford. Martin, R. 1951. Recherches sur l’agora grecque. Paris. Masson, O. 1948. “Sur un papyrus contenant des fragments d’Hipponax (P. Oxy. XVIII.2176).” RE´G 62: 300–19. McCargar, D. 1976. “New Evidence for the Kleisthenic Boule.” CP 71: 248–52. Michelakis, P. 2002. Achilles in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Millett, P. 1998. “Encounters in the Agora.” In P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. von Reden, eds., Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens: 203–28. Cambridge. Missiou, A. 2011. Literacy and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens. Cambridge. Molho, A., K. Raaflaub, and J. Emlen, eds. 1991. City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy. Ann Arbor. Moore, S., and B. Myerhoff, eds. 1977. Secular Ritual. Amsterdam. Moore, S., and B. Myerhoff. 1977. “Introduction. Secular Ritual: Forms and Meanings.” In Moore and Myerhoff, 3–24. Amsterdam. Morris, I. 2000. Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece. Oxford. Morris, I., and K. Raaflaub, eds. 1998. Democracy 2500? Questions and Challenges. Dubuque. Mosse´, C. 2000. “L’ostracisme d’Hyperbolos.” Eirene 36: 63–67. Mosse´, C., and A. Schnapp Gourbeillon. 1998. “Quelques re´flexions sur l’ostracisme athe´nien.” In F. De Martino, ed., Venticinque secoli dopo l’invenzione della democrazia, 39–50. Paesteum. Murray, O. 1990. “Cities of Reason.” In O. Murray and S. Price, eds., The Greek City from Homer to Alexander, 1–25. Oxford. Myerhoff, B. 1977. “We Don’t Wrap Herring in a Printed Page: Fusion, Fictions and Continuity in Secular Ritual.” In Moore and Myerhoff, 199–224. Amsterdam. Nagy, G. 1979. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore. Neer, R. 2010. The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture. Chicago. Neer, R., and L. Kurke. 2014. “Pindar Fr. 75 SM and the Politics of Athenian Space.” GRBS 54: 527–79. Ober, J. 2003. “Tyrant-Killing as Therapeutic Conflict: A Political Debate in Images and Texts.” In K. Morgan, ed., Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and its Discontents in Ancient Greece, 215–50. Austin.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

159

. 2007. “‘I Besieged That Man.’ Democracy’s Revolutionary Start.” In K. Raaflaub, J. Ober, and R. Wallace, eds., Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, 83–104. Berkeley. Ogden, D. 1997. The Crooked Kings of Ancient Greece. London. Osborne, R. 2007. “Did Democracy Transform Athenian Space?” BSA 15: 195–99. Ozouf, M. 1975. “Space and Time in the Festivals of the French Revolution.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17: 372–84. Parker, R. 1996. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford. . 2005. Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. Pease, A. 1907. “Notes on Stoning among the Greeks and Romans.” TAPA 38: 5–18. Pecorella Longo, C. 1980. “La bule´ e la procedura dell’ostracismo: Considerazioni su Vat. Gr. 1144.” Historia 29: 257–81. Petzold, K.-E. 1990. “Zur Entstehungsphase der athenischen Demokratie.” RivFil 118: 145–78. Phillips, D. 1982. “Athenian Ostracism.” In G. Horsley, ed., Hellenika: Essays on Greek Politics and History, 21–44. North Ryde, N.S.W. . 1990. “Observations on Some Ostraka from the Athenian Agora.” ZPE 83 (1990): 123–48. . 2007. “Trauma ek pronoias in Athenian Law.” JHS 127: 74–105. Posener, G. 1966. “Les textes d’envoutement de Mirgissa.” Syria 43: 277–87. Pritchard, J. 1958. The Ancient Near East—An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Princeton. Raaflaub, K. 1998. “Power in the Hands of the People: Foundations of Athenian Demcocracy.” In Morris and Raaflaub, 31–66. Dubuque. Rappaport, R. 1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond. Redford, D. 1992. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. Princeton. Rhodes, P. J. 1981. A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia. Oxford. Rich, J. 2011. “The Fetiales and Roman International Relations.” In J. Richardson and F. Santangelo, eds., Priests and State in the Roman World, 187–242. Stuttgart. Riess, W. 2012. Performing Interpersonal Violence: Court, Curse, and Comedy in Fourth-Century bce Athens. Berlin. Robbins, F. 1916. “The Lot Oracle at Delphi.” CP 11: 278–92. Rosenbloom, D. 2004. “Pon¯eroi vs. Chr¯estoi: The Ostracism of Hyperbolos and the Struggle for Hegemony in Athens after the Death of Perikles.” TAPA 134: 55–105, 323–58. Rosivach, V. 1983. “On Creon, Antigone and Not Burying the Dead.” RhMus 126: 193–211. . 1987. “Execution by Stoning in Athens.” CA 6: 232–48. Rotolo, V. 1980. “Il rito della βουλμου ξλασις.” In Miscellanea di studi classici in onore di E. Manni VI, 1947–61. Rome. Rusten, J. 1977. “Wasps 1360–1369: Philokleon’s ΤΩΘΑΣΜΟΣ.” HSCP 81: 157–61. Sahlins, M. 1999. “Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture.” JRAI 5: 399–421. Schirripa, P., M. Lentini, and F. Cordano. 2012. “Nuova geografia dell’ostracismo.” Quaderni di Acme 129: 115–32. Schreiner, J. 1970. “The Origin of Ostracism Again.” ClMed 31: 84–97. Schuessler, A. 2000. “Expressive Voting.” Rationality and Society 12: 87–119. Schwartzberg, M. 2010. “Shouts, Murmurs and Votes: Acclamation and Aggregation in Ancient Greece.” Journal of Political Philosophy 18: 448–68.

160

classical antiquity

Volume 34 / No. 1 / April 2015

Shear, J. 2011. Polis and Revolution: Responding to Oligarchy in Classical Athens. Cambridge. Shear, Jr., T. L. 1994. “YΙσονμους τ% Αθ3νας Y ποιηστην: The Agora and the Democracy.” In Coulson, Palagia, Shear, Jr., Shapiro, and Frost, 225–48. Oxford. Siewert, Peter, ed. 2002. Ostrakismos-Testimonien I. Stuttgart. Soja, E. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford. Stanton, G. R., and P. J. Bicknell. 1987. “Voting in Tribal Groups in the Athenian Assembly.” GRBS 28: 51–92. Stavrianopoulou, E., ed. 2006. Ritual and Communication in the Graeco-Roman World. Kernos Suppl. 16. Lie`ge. Steiner, D. 1994. The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece. Princeton. . 1995. “Stoning and Sight: A Structural Equivalence in Greek Mythology.” CA 14: 193–211. Stewart, R. 1998. Public Office in Early Rome: Ritual Procedure and Political Practice. Ann Arbor. Storey, I. 2010. “Origins and Fifth-Century Comedy.” In G. Dobrov, ed., Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy, 179–225. Leiden. Tambiah, S. 1968. “The Magical Power of Words.” Man 3: 175–208. . 1985. Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge, Mass. Taylor, M. 1981. The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in Fifth Century bc Athenian Art and Politics. New York. Thomas, R. 1989. Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens. Cambridge. Thompson, H. 1982. “The Pnyx in Models.” Hesperia Suppl. 19: 133–47. Turner, V. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Oxford. . 1961. Ndembu Divination: Its Symbolism and Techniques. Rhodes-Livingstone Papers 31. Manchester. . 1962. “Three Symbols of Passage in Ndembu Circumcision Ritual.” In Gluckman, 124–73. Manchester. . 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y. . 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York. Urban, H. 2011. The Church of Scientology: A New History. Princeton. Vallois, R. 1914. “APAI.” BCH 38: 250–71. van Gennep, A. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Trans. M. Vizedom and G. Caffee. Chicago. Vanderpool, E. 1949. “Some Ostraka from the Agora.” Hesperia Suppl. 8: 394–412, 493–96. Vernant, J-P. 1969. Mythe et pense´e chez les grecs: E´tudes de psychologie historique. Paris. . 1972. “Ambigu¨ıte´ et renversement. Sur la structure e´nigmatique d’OedipeRoi.” In J-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et trage´die en gre`ce ancienne, 99–131. Paris. Versnel, H. 2006. “Ritual Dynamics: The Contribution of Analogy, Simile and Free Association.” In Stavrianopoulou, 317–27. Lie`ge. Vinken, P. J. 1958. “Some Observations on the Symbolism of the Broken Pot in Art and Literature.” American Imago 15: 149–74.

kosmin: A Phenomenology of Democracy

161

Vinogradov, J., and M. Zolotarev. 1999. “L’ostracismo e la storia della fondazione di Chersonesos Taurica: Analisi comparata con gli ostraka dal Kerameiko´s di Atene.” Minima Epigraphica et Papyrologica 2: 110–31. Vogt, E., and S. Abel. 1977. “On Political Rituals in Contemporary Mexico.” In Moore and Myerhoff, 173–88. Amsterdam. Walcot, P. 1978. Envy and the Greeks. Guildford. Wallace, A. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–81. Watson, L. 1991. Arae. The Curse Poetry of Antiquity. Leeds. Weiss, M. 1969. “The Pattern of the ‘Execration Texts’ in the Prophetic Literature.” IEJ 19: 150–57. Wilkins, J. 2000. The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy. Oxford. Willemsen, F. 1991. “Ostraka einer Meisterschale.” AM: 137–45. Wulf, C., and J. Zirfas. 2004. “Performative Welten. Einfu¨hrung in die historischen, systematischen und methodischen Dimensionen des Rituals.” In C. Wulf and J. Zirfas, eds., Die Kultur des Rituals: Inszenierungen, Praktiken, Symbole, 7–45. Munich. Wycherley, R. 1957. The Athenian Agora III. Literary and Epigraphical Testimonia. Princeton. Ziebarth, E. 1985. “Der Fluch im griechischen Recht.” Hermes 30: 57–70.

[1 62] Kosmin

figures 1–4

Fig. 1: Drawing by Catherine Alexander (Siewert 2002: T1/87).

Fig. 2: Drawing by Catherine Alexander (Siewert 2002: T1/93)

Fig. 3: Drawing by Catherine Alexander (Siewert 2002: T1/157)

Fig. 4: Drawing by Catherine Alexander (Siewert 2002: T1/159)