Departure Deadline and Quorum Enforced in Early Ostracisms

Ostracism’s ritual grace rested on firm edges. Plutarch describes them crisply. On the day of voting in the Agora’s fenced precinct, if fewer than 6,000 ballots were cast, the ostracism was void. If the threshold was met, the man with the most votes had ten days to leave Attica; his exile lasted ten years; he retained the income from his property and his civic status [2].

These numbers and deadlines gave the ceremony teeth. The quorum ensured that only broad, citywide judgment could end in exile. It prevented narrow factions from hijacking the device in low-turnout moments. The ten-day window to depart turned the crier’s proclamation into a countdown, enforced by magistrates under the Stoa of Attalos’s gaze and the Acropolis’s pale watch [2][15].

Citizens and officials enacted the rules with sensory regularity. The scrape of styluses on red-brown clay, the clink of ostraka into baskets, the murmur of counting, and then the crier’s sharp announcement. If the tally crossed 6,000, the Agora’s hum hardened. Friends helped the named man arrange departure; a cart rattled toward the Kerameikos gate; bronze fittings flashed on escorts’ spears as they ensured compliance [2][11].

These constraints structured every early case—Hipparchus in 488/7, Megacles in 487/6, Callias in 486/5, Xanthippos in 485/4, Aristides in 482. In each, the quorum legitimated the outcome; the ten-day deadline kept it swift; the ten-year term and property retention kept it mild. The rules bridged the Pnyx’s decision to hold an ostracism with the Kerameikos’s quiet pits where used shards clattered and settled into silence [1][2][8].

Because the rules were public and repeated, they stabilized expectations. A politician eyeing the Pnyx could gauge risk; a citizen fingering a shard in the Agora could trust that his mark would matter only if thousands of others marked as well. The law’s numbers curbed caprice and made ostracism a credible, but not casual, check [2][15].