political

Ostracism of Megacles

Date

-487

Part of

political

In 487/6 BCE, Megacles fell to the second ostracism—an elite name scratched onto clay as Athens pressed its new device into regular use. The vote, cast in a fenced precinct of the Agora, turned reputation into sentence in a city nervous about faction and medizing whispers [2][15][16].

What Happened

The year after Hipparchus left, the Athenians returned to the Pnyx to ask the same stark question: should we hold another ostracism? They voted yes. On the appointed day, citizens again filed into the Agora’s fenced precinct, the Stoa of Attalos throwing a band of shade over part of the line. The process had acquired rhythm—shards distributed, names muttered, letters cut into red-brown clay [2][15].

Megacles was not an unknown. The name carried weight from older elite networks and tangled family histories. To write it on an ostrakon was to register more than personal dislike; it was to mark a faction. In a city where “medizing” suspicions—the fear of leaning toward Persia—could stain, prominent men lived under constant appraisal [15][16].

Plutarch’s description of the procedure reads like stage directions. Each citizen took an ostrakon and wrote a name. If the count failed to reach 6,000, the whole exercise collapsed into noise. If it met the quorum, the top vote-getter had ten days to depart Attica for ten years, keeping property and citizenship [2]. The enforcement was real: magistrates could compel departure, and the road out past the Kerameikos toward Eleusis saw such men ride in carts or walk with a small escort.

Voices rose and fell as ballots flowed. The Agora’s sounds—the crack of a dropped amphora, the bray of a donkey, the constant conversational hum—competed with the scrape of styluses. A flash of bronze as a guard shifted by the barrier caught the eye; a splash of scarlet cloth commaed the crowd as a woman crossed the open space toward the fountain house.

When counting ended, Megacles had the most marks. The crier’s proclamation cut through the din: ten days to leave. For the next decade, his fields would pay him; his name, in law, carried no criminal stain. But the city had judged his prominence intolerable, at least for now [2][15]. He would join the lengthening list of those the democracy could do without for a while.

What mattered to Athenians was less the man’s guilt than the city’s equilibrium. With Persia still a shadow over the horizon and with rival leaders vying under the columns of the Acropolis and at the naval piers of Piraeus, ostracism let ordinary citizens express unease without needing evidence. Megacles became a symbol not of wrongdoing, but of a threshold crossed in reputation [15][16].

Why This Matters

Megacles’s ostracism confirmed that the mechanism would not remain a one-off. It showed Athenians willing to apply their new check repeatedly to prominent elites suspected—rightly or not—of being too closely tied to old factions or to foreign sympathies [15][16]. The ritual’s reliability—quorum, fenced precinct, ten-day departure—turned suspicion into a constitutional act [2].

This episode sharpens the theme of mass judgment over policy. No decree or proposal is on trial; a name is. The ostrakon becomes a referendum on standing, a crude but powerful instrument that could cut across complex political textures. That anonymity made it hard to control, yet easy to mobilize [2][15].

Placed in the timeline, Megacles’s fall sits within an early sequence—Hipparchus (488/7), Megacles (487/6), Callias (486/5), Xanthippos (485/4)—by which the city probed and normalized its new power. Later, the same logic would touch figures of greater renown, from Aristides to Themistocles and Cimon, demonstrating the system’s capacity to reach high [2][4][18].

For scholars, such early expulsions anchor lists in reference works and frame the archaeological record. When thousands of ostraka surface in the Kerameikos and more than 150 in the Agora, these named episodes supply the historical spine that the shards flesh out [8][11][15][16].