By Sara Forsdyke
This publication explores the cultural and political value of ostracism in democratic Athens. not like past interpretations, Sara Forsdyke argues that ostracism used to be basically a symbolic establishment whose which means for the Athenians was resolute either through earlier stories of exile and by way of its position as a context for the continued negotiation of democratic values.
The first a part of the publication demonstrates the powerful connection among exile and political strength in archaic Greece. In Athens and somewhere else, elites seized strength via expelling their opponents. Violent intra-elite clash of this type was once a hugely risky kind of "politics that used to be basically quickly checked via numerous makes an attempt at elite self-regulation. a long-lasting strategy to the matter of exile used to be discovered basically within the past due 6th century in the course of a very extreme sequence of violent expulsions. at the present, the Athenian humans rose up and seized concurrently keep watch over over judgements of exile and political strength. The shut connection among political energy and the ability of expulsion explains why ostracism was once a critical a part of the democratic reforms.
Forsdyke exhibits how ostracism functioned either as an emblem of democratic strength and as a search phrase within the ideological justification of democratic rule. the most important to the author's interpretation is the popularity that ostracism was once either a remarkably gentle kind of exile and one who was once from time to time used. by way of examining the illustration of exile in Athenian imperial decrees, within the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and in tragedy and oratory, Forsdyke indicates how exile served as an enormous time period within the debate concerning the most sensible type of rule.
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Extra resources for Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy: The Politics of Expulsion in Ancient Greece
Sample text
P. 76).
For the debate about the role of social agents in archaeology generally, see Dobres and Robb 2000. Flannery 1999 responds to the challenge of these theorists by arguing for the integration of process (systemic forces) and agency (individual social actors). Earle 1997, though adopting a broadly neo-evolutionary framework, focuses on power strategies among elites. See also Mann 1986 for the importance of competition for power among leaders as the cause of socio-political change. 4 With regard to the early Greek poleis, I show that despite the evidence for the emergence of some features of a state in the eighth and seventh centuries (civic religion, formal public offices), non-state or extra-state social formations (especially personal relations between elites) continued to have a decisive impact on the development of the polis.
2003), R. , 1996a), Raaflaub (1991, 1993, 1997a, 1997b), Snodgrass (1971, 1980, 1987, 1993), Whitley (1988, 1991a, 1991b), and many others are also extremely important. 2 For intra-elite conflict as a key factor in archaic Greek political development, see, for example, R. Osborne 1996a, 187–97; Raaflaub 1997b, 57. For class conflict and the emergence of a middling ideology, see especially I. Morris 1987, 177; 1996. 3 Brumfiel 1992, 1994; Blanton et al. 1996; Blanton 1998. For the debate about the role of social agents in archaeology generally, see Dobres and Robb 2000.
