Ostracism and the Foundation of the Athenian Agora

James P. Sickinger (Florida State University)

This paper examines the date at which the agora of classical, hellenistic, and Roman Athens came to serve as the ancient city’s civic and commercial center. That agora, which sits northwest of the Acropolis and north of the Areopagos, is well known today as the ‘Athenian Agora’ thanks to excavations conducted by American archaeologists since the 1930s. But this was not the original civic center of the city. According to Thucydides (2.15), the primitive center of Athens was on and to the south of the Acropolis. In addition, several ancient shrines and public buildings, among them the Prytaneion, were located east or northeast of the Acropolis. Consequently, scholars generally believe that Athens had, in addition to its classical Agora northwest of the Acropolis, an ‘old agora’ east or northeast of the Acropolis, where many of the city’s oldest civic offices and chief shrines stood (see, e.g., N. Robertson, Hesperia [1998]).

The date at which the civic center of ancient Athens was transferred from the old agora east of the Acropolis to the classical Agora that we know today northwest of the Acropolis is not secure. The excavators of the Athenian Agora have championed a date in the sixth century B.C., although credit is variously assigned to Solon, Peisistratos, or Kleisthenes (Agora XIV; Camp, The Athenian Agora). But scholars have also proposed a post-480 date, after the Persian Wars (most recently J. Papadopoulos, Ceramicus Redivivus). Arguments for a post-Persian foundation rest on several pieces of evidence and include doubts about the dating of the Stoa Basileios, Old Bouleuterion, and other structures that stood around the periphery of the classical Agora. The construction of these buildings traditionally has been put in the sixth century B.C., but the ceramic evidence supporting this dating is not entirely conclusive. Accepting a post-Persian date for the classical Agora’s creation has consequences. It requires us to rethink how the physical space of late archaic and classical Athens was organized, and what impact the Persian destruction of Athens in 480 and 479 had on the city’s physical appearance.

One body of evidence that has played little role in these debates, and on which this paper will focus, are the approximately1500 ostraka that have been uncovered by excavation in and around the classical Agora itself. Several ancient sources report that votes of ostracism were held in the Agora, so the discovery of ostraka in its environs occasions no surprise. But nearly 1000 of the ostraka found in and around the classical Agora, including some 150 uncovered in recent excavations, emanate from ostracisms conducted before 480. The discovery of pre-480 ostraka in this area is difficult to explain if it was first dedicated to civic uses only after the Persian Wars, as some scholars have maintained. The simplest explanation for the presence of pre-480 ostraka in the classical Agora is that votes of ostracism were already being held there in the 480s; i.e., the area was being used as a public meeting place before the Persian Wars. That fact does not help us fix precisely when several Agora buildings, whose dates are disputed, were built. It does show that the area of the classical Agora already possessed some sort of civic character before 480, and that the urban center of Athens had expanded beyond its original nucleus east of the Acropolis prior to the Persian Wars.