political

Ostracism of Aristides 'the Just'

Date

-482

Part of

political

In 482 BCE, Aristides—celebrated as “the Just”—was ostracized. Plutarch preserves the sting: an illiterate voter handed Aristides a shard and asked him to write “Aristides,” tired of hearing the epithet. Reputation, not indictment, carried the day in the Agora’s fenced precinct [2].

What Happened

Aristides had a title most politicians would covet and most democracies would punish: “the Just.” By 482 BCE, his sobriquet had become a burden. The Assembly voted to hold an ostracism; citizens pressed into the Agora’s enclosure; and the man known for fairness faced a vote that listened less to policy than to mood [2].

Plutarch’s anecdote has the sharpness of rumor turned memory. An unlettered citizen approached Aristides with an ostrakon and asked him to inscribe a name. “What name?” Aristides asked. “Aristides,” came the answer. “Has he wronged you?” Aristides said. “No,” the man replied, “but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called the Just.” The exchange captures ostracism’s essence: anonymous mass judgment of standing, not an itemized trial of acts [2].

The procedure did not change for a hero. Each voter wrote a single name; officials counted past the 6,000 threshold; the crier proclaimed the result. Aristides had ten days to leave Attica for ten years, keeping his property and citizenship [2][15]. The Acropolis’s pale stone watched; the Stoa of Attalos threw shade; the road past the Kerameikos offered the first stage of exile.

The Agora’s sounds—a broken jug’s crack, a donkey’s bray, the thread of voices climbing and dropping—folded around the scrape of styluses on red-brown clay. Bronze fittings flashed as magistrates moved among baskets. A band of scarlet cloth swung on a vendor’s stall. In that sensory press, a name that had become a parable of virtue turned heavy in voters’ hands.

Aristides departed under a law that framed exile as preventive and non-punitive. He suffered no confiscation; no jury condemned him. He simply became, for a decade, a man the city wanted not to see. The reasons were complex—rivalries with Themistocles, strategic disagreements—but the instrument remained blunt: write a name, remove a presence [2].

War undid the separation. In 480/79, as Persian fleets filled the Saronic Gulf and Athenian citizens crowded Piraeus, the city recalled Aristides by amnesty. He returned to help steer the war at Salamis and beyond, proof that ostracism’s ten-year pause could be shortened when the city needed a steady hand [2][15].

Why This Matters

Aristides’s ostracism dramatizes reputation as fate in a mass democracy. The anecdote of the illiterate voter shows how acclaim can curdle into impatience, and how ostracism’s anonymous ballot gave that impatience a decisive outlet. The mechanism penalized prominence, not crime, a feature that could stabilize or destabilize depending on context [2].

The episode confirms ostracism’s design as a safety valve. Ten-year exile with property intact minimized martyrdom and allowed recall. Aristides’s return in 480/79 during the Persian invasion demonstrates the system’s flexibility under external pressure, integrating ostracism into broader strategic governance [2][15].

Within the timeline, Aristides’s fall precedes Themistocles’s around 471 and Cimon’s in 461, marking mid-century as a period when ostracism pruned even the city’s most capable leaders. The archaeological record—Kerameikos’s vast hoard and the Agora’s deposits—surrounds these literary moments with the physical ballots that carried their names [8][11][17].

Historians return to Aristides because the story exposes ostracism’s psychological politics: how the demos policed self-presentation and avoided concentrations of moral authority as much as political power. It remains a case study in democratic ambivalence toward virtue that looks like superiority [2][9].