David Butterfield

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739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

They become a pariah.

Actually, this process of ostracism was really elegant and in some way quite merciful in the Greek system, Athenian system in particular.

What was it?

Well, clearly in this sort of hot house of democracy we're describing,

Things do go wrong.

Different parties emerge.

Different people are able to rouse up the assembly as demagogues and fall out with other groups.

It's not as though party politics disappears.

And at times, the assembly will be extremely angry with an individual.

But rather than deciding that the death penalty is the best way of handling that person, they could collectively vote as to whether they wanted to ostracize a given person.

And what that meant was banishing someone from Athens for 10 years, but not confiscating his property, not giving him any legal stigma once he returned, but effectively removing him from the hot house and giving him an enforced decade long cool down period.

And there are plenty of cases of people being ostracized and coming back and sort of getting their head down, learning from their lessons and continuing.

What's particularly nice about it is the assembly couldn't just get angry one day and say, let's ostracize this person.

It's a two-stage process.

The assembly had to decide whether it wanted to do an ostracism, and then there was a month or two-month gap, and you would write a name on a pot shard, an ostracon, which is where we get the name, and that would be voted on anonymously

the votes would be counted, and the top names, whatever they be, would be ostracized.

Unfortunately, the system is hackable.

All you need is a bit of money, and you pay someone to smash up some shards, write the same name on a lot of ostraca, and then you give it to people and say, could you vote on this?

And then you can get someone you want ostracized gone for at least 10 years.

We know that happened.

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