Quality of evidence?

In the course of dipping in reference 1 this morning, I came across a discussion of the evidential value of the lots - ostraka - used in ostracism in Athens and elsewhere around 450BCE. Ostracism being a fairly short-lived political device to remove opponents, without dishonour or confiscation, for a period of ten years. A relation of the rather more primitive scapegoating.

This in the context of a wider discussion about the importance of the Greek invention of a proper alphabet with both vowels and consonants in the promotion of literacy in Greece in the period 1,000-500BCE. In his lengthy footnote, Havelock mentions the possibility that the writing of these names  might have been thought to have had magical powers, the written name being known to be potent for the near literate - rather in the way that the photographic image was potent for some First Americans.

All of which prompted what might be called a bit of surfing on the Internet.

My first intended stop was a reference from Havelock, reference 2. But while the Internet knew about this paper it did not produce copy - short of buying a booklet version from eBay for £25 or so.

On the plus side, search did turn up reference 3, which gives a good idea of the sort of physical evidence in question. Inscriptions which are tedious to make but have the important property of durability. One finds them. They are in the record.

Then reference 4, more about the inscription of names next to figures on painted pots from the same period. Used there for a bit of ancient Athenian family history.

So clearly people were writing names on pots and bits of pot at the time in question. But what does that amount to? Which leads one to the institution of ostracism.

OED (reference 5) was not particularly helpful, with its short article being mainly about the export of the practice to Ptolemaic Egypt. But I did learn about another institution, the ecclesia, an assembly of qualified citizens for political purposes. Presumably the origin of our word ecclesiastical, whose usage is confined to churches.

Wikipedia (reference 6) was much more helpful. And apart from learning about this rather crude device for political and social control, the suggestion there is that most ostraka were written by scribes rather than by voters, most of whom were probably illiterate or near illiterate.

For those with a bit more time to space there is reference 7, for which the abstract follows.

'Athenian ostracism has long captured democratic imaginations because it seems to present  clear evidence of a people (demos) routinely asserting collective power over tyrannical elites. In recent  times, ostracism has been particularly alluring to militant democrats, who see the institution as an ancient precursor to modern militant democratic mechanisms such as social media bans, impeachment measures, and lustration procedures, which serve to protect democratic constitutions from anti-democratic threats. Such a way of conceptualizing ostracism ultimately stems from Aristotle’s “rule of proportion,” or the removal of “outstanding” individuals in a polity who threaten to disturb the achievement of communal eudaimonia (Aris. Pol. 1284a). However, this way of interpreting the institution only presents a truncated view, one which is overly centered on the ultimate expulsion of an individual from the polity, rather than on its broader contextual telos—the transformation of the ostracized individual and of the community. To move past this simplified view, this paper considers all elements of ostracism with equal force, and argues that ostracism offered a shared opportunity and shared space for all members of the polis—citizens, non-citizens, and elite members alike—to reform the character of the subject individual and to instill and reaffirm democratic values in the community'.

Will I have that bit more time?

PS 1: I did not have much success with Fowler with Bing (reference 5 below), but after zooming in on the little blue label with my telephone, Google does better, as snapped above. This led, inter alia, to a copy of a 1783 book held by the University of Toronto, once sold by Fowler and now made available on the Internet Archive. So clearly he was once a serious bookseller for this prosperous seaside town.

PS 2: I thought Gemini did quite well on this bit of trivia.

PS 3: the subject of labels came up again this morning, over breakfast, in the context of the conspicuous white labels which are all too often stuck onto various consumer goods, including books. Removal of said labels being all too likely to leave an even more unsightly splodge of some kind of fierce glue, requiring the intervention of white spirit or even petrol, possibly damaging the substrate. Booksellers of old managed rather better with their much more discrete blue labels, just inside one of the covers: one was not moved to try and remove them.

Conclusions

Good evidence that writing was around in the Athens of around 500BCE, but not good evidence of how many people could do it. That said, given that these votes were cast by the thousand, suggestive that writing had spread beyond the narrow caste of scribes to which it appears to have been confined in Phoenicia across the water, with their rather cruder, syllabic alphabet.

References

Reference 1: The literate revolution in Greece and its cultural consequences - Eric A Havelock - 1982. A collection of essays.

Reference 2: Ostracism at Athens - Eugene Vanderpool - 1969. Semple Lectures, Cincinnati. A short monograph. Not readily available.

Reference 3: Ostraka from the Athenian Agora, 1970-1972 - Eugene Vanderpool - c1980. A short paper about some finds from a dig. The source of the snap at the head of this post.

Reference 4: Kallias Kratiou Alopekethen - H A Shapiro - c1980. A short paper in Hesperia.

Reference 5: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD) - various editors - 1957. My copy from Fowler of Eastbourne, via a long dead secondhand bookshop near Wimbledon Station.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism.

Reference 7: Pruning of the People: Ostracism and the Transformation of the  Political Space in Ancient Athens - Emily Salamanca - 2023.