Wandering Greeks (23 page)

In the world of the Homeric poems, and no doubt in archaic Greece in general, encounters with a fugitive must have been relatively commonplace. When Telemachus is about to sail back home to Ithaca after seeking news of his father in Sparta, he encounters the seer Theoclymenus, who informs him that it is his fate “to wander among men to avoid being killed on account of having slain a fellow-tribesman.” “Take me on board,” pleads, “since I supplicate you as a fugitive. Don't let them kill me—I know they're after me.” Telemachus agrees, saying, “I won't drive you from my ship. Come with me. You'll be looked after when I get home, with all I have” (
Od
. 15.271–82). What is striking is that Telemachus offers Theoclymenus more than he is asking for—temporary, if not permanent refuge under his roof. It is tempting to suppose that Telemachus's generosity would have been endorsed by the poet. Homer's point seems to be that fugitives may still have a useful function to fulfill, whether as the founder of a new settlement, as child-minder, as seer, or merely as manual worker.

The fact remains that a fugitive could hardly predict what kind of reception he would receive when he knocked on the door of a great house. When Priam unexpectedly enters the tent of Achilles and supplicates him for the return of his son's body, it was “as when oppressive
atê
[destructiveness] has taken hold of a man who has committed murder
in his native land and who has arrived in a foreign country at the house of a wealthy man” (
Il
. 24.480–82). The type of person who is called to the audience's mind has suffered intensely from social rejection and the point of the simile is that scarcely any condition was more wretched than that of a murderer on the run. The simile also exemplifies the unpredictability of a fugitive's lot. Priam put his life at risk when he entered Achilles' tent, just as many fugitives did when they ventured to knock on a stranger's door.

Fugitives, for obvious reasons, were hardly to be trusted. Often they sought to ingratiate themselves by purporting to offer a commodity that was in short supply in virtually every Greek household—namely, news. The swineherd Eumaeus observes to the beggarly Odysseus that he has long since ceased to trust anyone who prophesies his master's return “from the time when an Aetolian deceived me with his story, a murderer who came to my house after wandering far and wide over the earth, to whom I gave a kindly welcome” (
Od
. 14.379–81). His experience would no doubt have been all too familiar to Homer's audience, many of whom are likely to have been deceived by a vagrant spinning a plausible tale to earn a bed for the night. It is a mark of Eumaeus's uncompromising humanity that he is still prepared to offer hospitality to a stranger, one, incidentally, who is in the very act of deceiving him by assuming a false identity, even though he has already been badly burned in the past. He does so because he fears Zeus Xenios and pities his guest more than he resents being deceived by him. The only reason why princess Nausicaä is not suspicious of Odysseus when he supplicates her on the seashore is, as she tells him, because Scheria is too remote to be attacked by enemies (Hom.
Od.
6.204–5). The stranger cannot therefore have any ulterior motive. Otherwise it is highly unlikely that she would have trusted him.

Homer's attitude toward fugitives is mainly positive. Herodotus by contrast uses the example of a fugitive to demonstrate the principle that some individuals, despite their best efforts, personify bad luck. He conveys this depressing moral in an anecdote about a Phrygian called Adrestus, who was exiled by his father for accidentally killing his brother (1.35-45). In the course of his wanderings Adrestus arrives at the court
of the Lydian king Croesus, where he requests ritual purification for his crime. Croesus, being a man of principle, duly obliges and, having discovered that Adrestus's family and his are bound by ties of
xenia
, offers him refuge in his palace. Later, being plagued by a dream that prophesies his son's death, the king requests that Adrestus take care of his son while he is out hunting boar. Inadvertently Adrestus kills the son when taking aim at the boar. The story is perhaps expressive of the latent fear that many Greeks would have experienced at the thought of accommodating a killer under their roof, even one who was guilty of involuntary manslaughter. What makes it all the more tragic is that Adrestus warned Croesus of the bad luck that attended him. Croesus was just too decent to take his warning seriously. Not for nothing the name Adrestus is cognate with
adrasteia
(necessity, inevitability). Overcome with guilt at having committed involuntary manslaughter a second time, Adrestus took his own life.

Exile as Punishment for Crime

In Athenian law, and in the laws of other city-states, exile was used to punish those guilty of voluntary and involuntary homicide, politicians who had committed treason, and generals who had suffered a military defeat (see
appendix D
). Depending on the circumstances of the crime, it might be imposed either for life or for a fixed term of years. It frequently involved loss of civic rights and/or confiscation of property. However, when we read the word phugê in a literary text or inscription it is often unclear whether it signifies a sentence that has been passed in a court of law, or the voluntary flight of an accused individual engendered by fear of prosecution or violence at the hands of the murder victim's enraged countrymen. A case in point is the phugê of the historian Thucydides, who may either have been exiled or have fled in advance of prosecution (5.26.5).

The Athenian lawcode ascribed to Dracon (ca. 621/620) contains several provisions relating to exile. It recommended that exile should be the punishment for both voluntary and involuntary homicide (
IG
I
³
104 =
IG
I
²
115 =
ML
86 = Fornara 15), though a republication of this lawcode in 409/8 seems to have potentially ameliorated the situation for a person guilty of involuntary homicide by decreeing that he could be pardoned if the victim's immediate relatives unanimously voted in his favor (ll. 11–16). If a person found guilty of homicide returned illegally, he could be killed with impunity. If he was accused of another crime while living abroad, he had to make his defense in a boat moored off shore at the court known as “in Phreatto” near the piraeus (Dem. 23.77–78; [Arist.]
Ath. Pol.
57.3–4). On his return to Attica the exile was required to make a sacrifice and purify himself before being readmitted into the community (Dem. 23.72).

After the first speeches had been delivered and before judgment had been pronounced, Athenian law permitted those who had been charged with homicide to go into voluntary exile. Only in egregious cases would a posse be dispatched to hunt a convicted fugitive down. While this might seem a humane alternative to capital punishment, in practice it must have been an excruciatingly hard decision to make, since it involved second-guessing the jury (MacDowell 1963, 115). In addition, the plaintiff might propose exile as an alternative to the death penalty after a guilty verdict had been delivered—an option Socrates rejected on the grounds that he would be as unpopular abroad as he had been in Athens and so “constantly exchanging one city for another” (pl
Ap
. 37d).

Plato in the
Laws
recommended exile as a punishment for those guilty of homicide, but with a view to rehabilitating the criminal. He proposed two years for a man convicted of involuntary homicide in order that he should “learn to control his temper,” where as if his crime had been intentional his period of exile should last three years (9.867c–e). In the interim a group of twelve men were to be appointed to review his case, and when his term of banishment had expired they were to assemble on the borders of the land and inform him whether he was deemed fit to return. We may wonder whether Plato expected him to be subjected to a test, too. If the convicted man committed a similar crime in the future, he was to be banished in perpetuity. Plato also recommended
banishment lasting three years for a husband or wife who kills his or her partner, a father or mother who kills a son or daughter, or a sibling who kills another sibling (9.868c–e). Anyone who struck his father or his mother was to be banished from the city and exiled to the countryside, with the further restriction that he should not be permitted to enter any sanctuary (9.881b–d).

Once the decree of banishment had come into effect, it was illegal for anyone to befriend or give hospitality to an exile. The exile became in effect a nonperson, a condition graphically described by Orestes in Aeschylus's
Libation Bearers
(ll. 290–95):

His back is scarred by a bronze whip; for such people there is neither a share in the mixing-bowl nor in libations poured in love…. There is no hospitality for him, but despised by all and friendless he eventually dies.

Plato paints an equally dark picture in the
Laws
(9.881de):

If any free person eat, drink, or have any dealings whatsoever with a criminal [that is, sentenced to exile], or even so much as take his hand in knowledge of who he is, he shall not be permitted to enter any sanctuary or any agora or any part of the city whatsoever, without first purifying himself, as he is one who has been infected by contact with an accursed horror.

Exile was the punishment for serious crimes in cities other than Athens. A fragmentary decree from Miletus dated between 470 and 440 preserves the names of three men (more names were inscribed, but they have perished), who, along with their descendants, were exiled in perpetuity perhaps for attempting to establish a tyranny (
ML
43 = Fornara 66). Bounty amounting to 100
statêres
, extracted from their confiscated property, is to be paid out to “whoever kills any of them” (1.38). If, on the other hand, they fall into the hands of the city-state—presumably by returning illicitly—they are to be put to death (ll. 7–9).

Few human conditions would have been worse than lifelong exile, for which there is hardly any modern equivalent. Following the murder
of his wife and children in Euripides'
Madness of Heracles
, Heracles contemplates the anguish of such an existence (ll. 1281–98):

It would be an offense against religion to remain with those I love in Thebes. What shrine could I visit, what religious festival could I participate in? The deadly curse that I am afflicted with means that no one can come near me. Shall I make my way to Argos? How can I, since I am an exile? Should I head toward some other city? If I did, I'd be spotted and looked at suspiciously, kept in check by bitter gibes, like, “Isn't that the son of Zeus who murdered his wife and children? Let him die elsewhere.…” I have reached such depths of misfortune that even the earth will groan if I walk upon it, and rivers and seas if I see to cross them. My fate is like that of Ixion, bound perpetually to a wheel.

Ostracism

The importance that the Athenians attached to exile as a safety valve in a political crisis is indicated by the fact that the oath that was taken by jurors serving in the
hêliaia
(lawcourt) contained the following words (Dem. 24.149):

I will cast my vote in accordance with the laws and decrees of the Athenian people. I will not cast my vote for tyranny or oligarchy…. I will not restore
pheugontes
[exiles or fugitives] or persons condemned to death. I will not drive into exile nor allow anyone else to drive into exile
menontes
[presumably “metics”] in contravention of the established laws and decrees of the Athenian people.

In a class of his own was the politician who was sent into exile for a period of ten years, though he had not been accused of committing any crime. The procedure, known as
ostrakismos
, is thought to have been introduced into Athens in ca. 508 at the prompting of Cleisthenes, though the first known victim of ostracism was Hipparchus in 487.
Once a year the
dêmos
was formally asked if it wished to invoke the process. If it answered in the affirmative, two months later a kind of negative election took place between any number of candidates. If a minimum of 6,000 votes were cast in total—the alternative possibility of 6,000 votes for (or more strictly against) one of the candidates is less likely—the candidate who received the highest number of votes was required to leave Attica within ten days and take up residence beyond the promontory of Geraestus on the island of Euboea. The votes in the election were inscribed on potsherds known as
ostraka
, from which the name
ostrakismos
derived.

Ostracism may be viewed in part as an alternative to mass exile and was probably used at times to preempt
stasis
or civil war. Diodorus Siculus (11.55.3) states, “The Athenians introduced ostracism … in order to reduce by means of exile the arrogance of those who had risen too high.” Indeed it has been argued that ostracism performed an important symbolic function “[by] reminding élites annually of the potential of non-élites to intervene decisively in violent intra-élite conflict” (Forsdyke 2005, 151)—conflicts that would have traditionally resulted in mass expulsions by one body of supporters or another, such as we examined in
chapter 5
. Certainly what we know about the circumstances that led to the ostracism of Aristides, Cimon, and Thucydides, son of Melesias, suggests that a major motive underlying the removal of all three was to defuse political conflict.

But though the desire to eliminate rivalry between two élite politicians was one objective, the institution did not exclusively serve a political agenda—or at least it was not treated solely as a political safeguard by the
dêmos
. Graffiti on a few
ostraka
reveal that some voters were guided by religious concerns, as in the case of those indicating that the candidate was either accursed or polluted (Parker 1983, 269–70). Other voters targeted individuals for personal reasons. Callias, son of Cratias, who was probably ostracized in 485, may well have owed his exile in part to the fact that he had adopted easternizing customs (Hall 2009, 616–17). Objectionable sexual practices were also occasionally instanced in graffiti. Thus ostracism, whatever its original intention, became a way of venting popular anger. The classic instance is the story of the illiterate
country bumpkin who voted to ostracize the general and politician Aristides simply on the grounds that he was fed up hearing him always referred to as “the Just” (Plu.
Arist
. 7.5–6). It was also used frivolously by some voters. There are some
ostraka
, for instance, that were cast against
Limos
(Hunger). In short there was a wide variety of reasons that might induce an Athenian to want to see the back of a prominent individual, though responsible and informed citizens would probably have concerned themselves chiefly with his polarizing effect upon the decision-making process. The restraint of the
dêmos
in its use of this safeguard is in fact quite remarkable. Only ten Athenians are known for certain to have been ostracized. Five of these were ostracized in the years between 487 and 482, when the city was undergoing intense political upheaval. The last politician to be ostracized was Hyperbolus in ca. 417.