Ostracism (Greek: ostrakismos) was a procedure under the Athenian democracy in which any citizen could be expelled from the city-state of Athens for ten years. While some instances clearly expressed popular anger at the citizen, ostracism was often used preemptively. It was used as a way of neutralizing someone thought to be a threat to the state or potential tyrant. It has been called an "honorable exile" by scholar P.J. Rhodes. The word "ostracism" continues to be used for various cases of social shunning. The name is derived from the ostraka (singular ostrakon), referring to the pottery shards that were used as voting tokens. Broken pottery, abundant and virtually free, served as a kind of scrap paper (in contrast to papyrus, which was imported from Egypt as a high-quality writing surface, and was thus too costly to be disposable).

License information: CC BY-SA 3.0
MPAA: PG
Go to source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism