Tuesday, October 28, 2008 Malilong: Ostracism, anyone? By Frank Malilong The Other Side
ONCE upon a time in the city-state of Athens, all it took to expel a prominent citizen were broken pieces of pottery.
The process was called ostracism, according to Wikipedia. Once every year, the Athenians meet in an assembly to decide whether they wished to have someone expelled. If the answer is “yes,” the citizens would gather two months later in the agora to choose whom to expel.
Everybody was a candidate and there was no need for a just cause to oust him. The Athenians etched the name of the one they wished to expel on potshards or ostraka which they afterwards deposited in urns.
If the number of potshards submitted reached a minimum of 6,000, the presiding officials proceeded to canvass them. The person whose name appeared on the most number of potshards was then asked to leave the city within 10 days and stay out of it for 10 years. Any attempt to return during that period was punished by death.
The process had nothing to do with the justice system. It was a political act through which the Athenians commanded one of them to go on exile usually in order to defuse a confrontation between political enemies, neutralize someone who is perceived to be a threat to the state or do away with a potential tyrant.
There was no charge and no defense. “The two stages of the procedure ran in the reverse order from that used under almost any trial system--here it is as if a jury are first asked, “Do you want to find someone guilty?”, and subsequently asked “Whom to you wish to accuse?”.
Sometime in the 5th century, Hyperbolos campaigned to ostracize one of his two rivals, Nicias and Alcibiades, who were themselves at odds with each other. Faced with a common enemy, they temporarily set aside their differences and combined to have Hyperbolos ousted instead. (The dictum that in politics there are no permanent relationships, only permanent interests is not a modern invention after all.) The incident angered the Athenians into discarding the practice.
The provision on “recall” in the Local Government Code is said to be a take-off from the ancient practice of ostracism but I am not sure if it is an improvement or not. For one the process is too cumbersome and too convoluted to be effective.
Instead of going through the practice of soliciting signatures and holding a recall election, why don’t we just let our citizens etch on a piece of broken pottery the name of the official they want expelled?
