Hey, Johanna. Hey, Ella. Today, I want to take you back to ancient Greece, okay?

Hmm, okay. I want you to imagine it's a spring day, and all of the eligible voters of Athens are invited for a very special kind of vote. So that would not include us. It's men only.

Naturally. The event is going to be taking place

at the Agora. You've actually been there, right? The Athenian Agora? I have. I went in, I believe,

2018 with my aunts. It was like a girl's trip. I don't know how much you remember. You

definitely weren't there in the 5th century BC, so I'm going to describe that for you first.

Okay.

Okay.

So back then, the agora was a central gathering place.

There's an open area with a market around that.

There were some buildings, like the one that the Athenian Council met in, and some stoas, which are, like, imagine these very classic Greek structures, you know, tall rows of columns holding up a roof. Yes. Yes. And so if you were living in Athens back in the 5th century BC,

you might go to the Agora to shop at the market or meet friends, or you might come for an event like

this one, a banishment. This was a vote to pick one person you wanted to exile from Athens.

This sounds like a slightly tamer version of the Shirley Jackson story, The Lottery.

Possibly the source of inspiration. So on a day of a banishment vote, the voters would head over to the Agora with their ballot. And this was a piece of broken pottery on which they'd scratch the name of the person they wanted out. Not a piece of paper. Apparently paper was kind of expensive, but broken pottery plentiful in ancient Greece. This broken piece of pottery was actually called an ostracon, which might sound familiar,

because Ostrachon gave its name to a practice we call ostracism.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura.

And I'm Ella Fetter, and today we're talking about ostracisms at the Athenian Agora.

Ostracism by vote might sound like a cruel mob sport, but for Athenian democracy, it might have been more useful than you think.

I'm not sure I'm questioning the usefulness.

It seems like this one's pretty useful, honestly.

I'm... Ella, I will say that I can imagine certain scenarios where ostracism may not seem like the worst course of action.

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