political

First Ostracism: Hipparchus son of Charmus

Date

-488

Part of

political

In 488/7 BCE, Athenians held their first ostracism and voted Hipparchus son of Charmus into ten years’ exile. The ballots had to reach 6,000; they did, and the proclamation carried over the Agora’s din as red-brown shards clinked in baskets [1][2][15].

What Happened

Two years after Marathon’s shock, the Athenians gathered on the Pnyx and decided they would open the city’s new trapdoor. The preliminary vote passed. On the appointed day, citizens streamed into the Agora, where officials had fenced off a precinct. Each man carried a small shard of pottery—an ostrakon—its surface pale against sunburnt fingers [1][2][15].

Hipparchus son of Charmus was not a general poised to crown himself. He was, Aristotle says, simply the first whose name the city agreed to expel under the new law [1]. He belonged to the old aristocratic web, and to vote him away was to signal that no faction would stand above the demos. Inside the enclosure, the process unfolded with almost liturgical calm.

Plutarch preserves the mechanics. “Each voter took an ostrakon, wrote on it the name,” he says, “and the man upon whom the largest number of such votes had been cast was banished for ten years, with the right to enjoy the income from his property.” If fewer than 6,000 votes were cast, the ostracism failed [2]. As the city scratched letters, the sound rose—the soft rasp of charcoal on clay, the clatter as shards fell into wicker baskets, the low hum of arguments under the colonnades of the Stoa of Attalos.

Late in the day, officials counted. The quorum was met. The proclamation echoed across the open rectangle: Hipparchus must leave Attica within ten days, and remain away for ten years [2][15]. It was a blow cushioned by law. His fields still yielded him income; his houses stayed in his name. The mechanism avoided martyrdom by refusing humiliation.

The places around the vote made the decision feel both grand and ordinary. The Acropolis loomed to the southeast, the Pnyx hill to the west where the decision to hold the vote had been made, and the Kerameikos road led out past graves toward the countryside that would host Hipparchus’s exile [11][15]. Bronze glinted on helmets as citizens dispersed; the scarlet flash of a cloak at the edge of the crowd drew eyes, then disappeared into the traffic of carts and cattle.

Athens had used its new law. The instrument that would shape the city’s politics for the next seven decades had found its first target. More would follow—Megacles, Callias, Xanthippos—until the ritual felt almost familiar. But that first afternoon, the city learned the power of its own whisper written on clay [1][2][15].

Why This Matters

Hipparchus’s removal proved the device worked exactly as designed: a non-judicial, mass decision that neutralized a perceived risk without touching property or honor in law. The 6,000-vote quorum and the ten-day departure deadline hardened the procedure into civic habit, giving officials enforceable benchmarks [2][15].

The episode also underscored reputation’s centrality. No prosecutor laid out a case. The city judged a name. That logic would define later ostracisms—Aristides’s sobriquet “the Just” becoming a liability; Themistocles’s brilliance drawing suspicion; Cimon’s Spartan affinities triggering backlash [2][4][18].

As the first use after Cleisthenes’s law, the event connected the reform’s abstract promise to lived practice across the city’s spaces, from the Pnyx to the Agora to the Kerameikos road. It established a rhythm—preliminary vote, fenced precinct, counting, ten-day departure—that survives in literary testimony and in the archaeological record of thousands of ostraka [2][8][11].

For historians, Hipparchus anchors chronology. Aristotle’s note fixes 488/7 BCE as the inaugural ostracism, helping to date early sequences and interpret later caches, like the mid-480s Agora deposit and the c. 471 Kerameikos hoard, within an evolving tradition [1][8][11][15].