Last Ostracism: Hyperbolus

Hyperbolus’s ostracism began like all the rest and ended like none of them. The Assembly on the Pnyx voted to hold it. Citizens converged on the Agora’s fenced precinct; magistrates laid out baskets; vendors shouted under the Stoa of Attalos. The scarlet of an awning snapped; bronze flashed on a staff; red-brown ostraka scraped under styluses and clinked as they fell [2][15].

When the count crossed the 6,000-vote quorum and Hyperbolus’s name stood at the top, the crier proclaimed the terms Plutarch preserves so clearly: ten days to leave Attica; ten years away; income from property intact [2]. The mechanics were unchanged. The meaning was not. Thucydides’s judgment arrives like a hammer: Hyperbolus “had been ostracised, not from fear of his influence or position, but because he was a rascal and a disgrace to the city.” The tool meant for lions had been used on a jackal [3].

Plutarch adds the moral: “Hyperbolus was the last to be ostracized,” and the affair discredited the practice. He also reports variant traditions—Phaeax named as a rival instead of Nicias—to acknowledge how stories untangle in memory without altering the core: the city laughed at itself, then stopped using the device [2][5]. The Kerameikos road bore Hyperbolus out past graves; the joke went with him.

In the aftermath, the ritual felt tarnished. Citizens had long accepted ostracism’s bluntness because it served a preventive aim against men like Themistocles and Cimon. Using it to swat Hyperbolus, especially after elite rivals coordinated to save their own skins, made the act look petty. The clatter of ostraka into the pit outside the Gate sounded like a door closing [2][3][16].

The institution fell into desuetude. The Agora still hummed; the Acropolis’s pale stone still rose; the Pnyx still heard debates. But the shard lost its authority. New legal tools, especially the graphe paranomon, came to the fore—procedures that argued over decrees and penalized proposers in court, not by exile [2][15][17].