political

Traditional Date for Ostracism of Themistocles

Date

-471

Part of

political

Tradition places Themistocles’s ostracism in 471 BCE, a date that fits the Kerameikos hoard’s timeframe. The architect of Salamis met the shard—ten days to leave, ten years away, property intact—his name echoing through the Agora’s fenced precinct and along the Kerameikos road [1][2][11][17].

What Happened

Themistocles had steered Athens through existential crisis. He championed naval power, built Piraeus, and helped win Salamis. But the same audacity that saved the city soon grated on citizens and rivals. Around 471 BCE, tradition holds, his name filled the ostraka baskets in the Agora’s fenced enclosure, and the crier’s voice delivered the sentence prescribed by Plutarch’s rule: “banished for ten years,” with property and citizenship preserved [1][2][17].

The date aligns with the Kerameikos hoard, a c. 471 deposit of roughly 9,000 ostraka that shows repeated hands, slogans, and gibes—a hum of organization inside a roar of mass participation [11]. The hoard does not sign every shard “Themistocles,” but the scale and timing breathe his story: a hero humbled by a city determined not to be ruled by gratitude.

The day would have unfolded as others. A preliminary vote on the Pnyx approved an ostracism; then citizens lined up under the Stoa of Attalos’s shade to scratch names onto red-brown clay. The Acropolis kept silent watch. Bronze fittings glinted on magistrates’ staffs. A scarlet scarf whipped in the wind. The clatter of ostraka in baskets stitched the moment into memory [2][11].

Themistocles walked the Kerameikos road out, past graves that remembered Marathon and men who died with his strategy in their ears. Ten days had been granted; ten years were mandated. The non-punitive character of ostracism did not soften the irony. Brilliance had become dangerous in a city that preferred rotation to dominance [2][15].

He would not be recalled as Aristides and Xanthippos were in 480/79, for the crisis had passed. His exile eventually carried him farther afield, a reminder that ostracism ended one Athenian story even as it opened others. But for the democracy that sent him away, the day’s meaning was internal: a hero’s prominence disciplined by a ritual designed, in Cleisthenes’s spirit, to prevent any citizen from standing above the rest [1][2][11].

Why This Matters

Themistocles’s ostracism showed the mechanism’s willingness to reach the city’s highest achievers when admiration veered toward unease. The ten-year, non-punitive exile preserved his property yet neutralized his influence, consistent with the law’s preventive aim [2][15]. The tradition’s 471 BCE date, supported by the Kerameikos hoard’s timeframe, gives historians a material horizon for his fall [1][11][17].

The event foregrounds elite coordination within a democratic act. The Kerameikos shards’ repeated hands and slogans indicate organized campaigns around a decision that still required a mass quorum of 6,000. The blend of steering and spontaneity is a hallmark of ostracism’s practice [11][12].

In the broader arc, removing Themistocles marks a mid-century pivot from wartime consolidation to peacetime pruning. It prefigures Cimon’s ostracism in 461 and Thucydides son of Melesias’s in 443/2, as Athenians repeatedly used ostracism to manage the balance between leadership and equality [4][18].

Scholars use this case to probe democratic ambivalence about charismatic leadership and to test political-economy models of when voters choose ostracism at all, linking the Pnyx’s preliminary decision to the Agora’s final count [2][11][14].