Once, in the time before the democracy, exile had been a fate inflicted by armed menaces at the whim of faction leaders, ruinous and brutal in its effects; now, for the first time, it was to be imposed as a measured sentence of the sovereign people. Every citizen, registering his vote on the back of a piece of pottery, was obliged to choose a prominent politician’s name. At the end of the day, all the shards – ‘ostraka’, as the Greeks called them – were to be sorted into piles and counted. The citizen with the largest number of nominations would then have ten days to leave Attica. He would
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