August 17, 2021 • 36 mins
What if you could put troublesome citizens into time out for a decade? That's what ancient Athenians did through the practice of ostracism. This vote, which wasn't the same thing as a trial, resulted in a surprisingly progressive ten-year exile for the ostracized. In today's episode, the guys take a closer look at the system, and wonder whether something like it could work in the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Well,
(00:26):
welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. That's our super producer,
the one and only Max Williams. Give it up for him.
My name is Ben Um and I owe you Noelan
Max a personal thank you for not ostracizing me even
(00:48):
though I totally dipped out of town for a minute. Well, Ben,
I mean everybody deserves to get away, to fly away. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
well that could yeah, that could be that. I like that.
I like that idea. I think maybe one of the
important things here is that I left temporarily and largely
(01:14):
of my own volition. I'd say about of my own volition.
I didn't get kicked out. Have you guys ever got
kicked out of anything? Questions? Kicked out? I once? Uh no? Yeah? Gosh, Max,
how about you? You know, and you've ever been asked
politely to leave? Oh? Politely? And I'm politely? Um. Okay.
(01:37):
If if our friends Phil and Nathaniel are listening, they
can remember us at a bar on King Street in Charleston,
South Carolina a few years ago. Yeah, we got asked
very unpolitely to leave, and we totally well, they were fine.
I totally deserved to be asked unpolitely to leave. Did
you put up a fight or did you go h quietly?
(01:59):
And Dark Knight was pretty quietly. Okay, no, no, no,
it wasn't karaoke. It was just uh, yeah, I deserved it.
I a bartender who was at that bar. If you're listening,
I am sorry. I know you don't know who I am,
but I am sorry. Max with the past, I love it. Um.
I think we've all found ourselves, sometimes at one point
(02:20):
or another, in some kind of situation where we don't
feel comfortable. And uh, we have maybe found ourselves in
a situation where one reason or another we're asked to leave,
sometimes politely like Noel said, sometimes not politely like Max said.
And uh, you know, I just think there's some jobs
where no matter what you do, you're not gonna please everyone,
(02:43):
like the job of being the president. I would say anything,
not just the US. Uh, you'll have people who want
you to g t FO And today's episode is about
what one of the um processes are, the concepts that
the very way like very early days of democracy, the
(03:04):
government in ancient Greece figured out their own solution to
this problem over in Athens, right now, Yeah, that's right.
I mean we think of the word ostracized today and
it has kind of um connotations of maybe just sort
of given someone the cold shoulder, you know, like not
letting someone hang in your click anymore. And you don't
(03:25):
do it like as a formal thing. It just sort
of happens. You sort of ghosted right over time you
start to realize, oh, my homies are not my homies anymore,
and I am sort of left alone because I see
them hanging out in the lunch room or or the
quad or whatever, um hell, and by the water cooler,
and they are no longer including me. It is a
form of excluding. But in ancient Greece and Athens, like
(03:48):
you said, this was essentially a borderline, codified solution to
keeping demagogues from rearing their ugly heads in politics, where
there was a rule built into Athenian civilization Athenian society
that allowed them to exile fellow citizen for ten years
(04:10):
if it was decided unanimously. I will get to the
official means of doing this, but if it was to
side decided animously that they were a disruption essentially, like
you know, we're gonna have to ask you to leave
for a decade, which is not an insignificant amount of time.
That's like a prison sentence. Yeah, and you know if
(04:31):
you if you spend your ten years in the figurative
quarter and you're still alive, then maybe you can come
back and be a little better behaved. This is crazy,
we've got some I like the way that New York
Daily News put it when they said this is an
unpopularity context, because yeah, there's no trial, there's no investigation.
(04:55):
A bunch of people get together and they say this
guy's a really pill or this person could be a
danger to our democracy, teld them to get out. And
that specific phrase is also mentioned in the unpopularity contest
is kind of also alluded to in Smithsonian mag when
they quote historian James Sickener of Florida State. He argues
(05:20):
that this was a way to get rid of, like
you said, an old demagogues, potential tyrants, people who could
damage or subvert the new fragile idea of democracy. This
is what we're saying is you might have people who say, hey,
I felt ostracized from a social circle, or you might
have someone who's like, oh, I was outside of this
(05:43):
hotel and I felt ostracized standing in the smoking corner
or something like that. Right, but this is way different,
and this was uh something something that really also arguably
subverted the law because again, you were not guilty of
a criminal offense. They were not like, we are ostracizing
(06:04):
you get out of town for ten years because you
know you violated the what what you violated the Toga
length law or something like that. Well, it could be that, Ben,
It could be that because it was but but again
not specifically about a crime, more about going against norms
and and things that enough people agreed was um disruptive
(06:27):
again that word again, disruptive, which is really really interesting
because it's really incredibly incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to
do that in our political system. You know, it requires
essentially voting someone out of office and then they have
the upper hand because aside from impeachment, which we know
doesn't work ever. I mean, you can certainly, you know,
enact impeachment proceedings, but I don't know that we've ever
(06:49):
seen it happen officially in our lifetime other than you know,
with Nixon, he didn't he he would have been impeached
if he had not resigned, you know, he would have
been officially removed from office. We always misconstrued idea of
being impeached with being removed from office as a result
of impeachment proceedings. Right, but this only required a vote
of six thousand individuals in the entire society, which I mean,
(07:14):
I'm sure population had to play a play a role
in this, but to have someone ostracized, and again, according
to historian James Sickinger of Florida, stay who you cited earlier, Ben,
this happened at least a dozen times between four hundred
and eight seven to four hundred and sixteen BC. Yeah, yeah,
(07:34):
And the point of making with that Toga reference is
that what I'm emphasizing here is they were not found
guilty legally offense uh this vote. And and of course, yes,
this is ancient Greece, this is Athens, so it's not
as though everybody could vote this. This idea was. It
(07:58):
took place as soon after the Athenian forces one the
Battle of Marathon against Persian forces in four nine b C.
And they were trying to curb the power of any
rising tyrant. And this is. Historians believe that this is
partially due to the fact that they're old tyrant hippieus
(08:22):
have been thrown out years earlier. And when he was
thrown out, this guy get this. He went with the
Persian fleet to the Battle of Marathon, and he hoped
that when the Persians won, he would be uh he
would be in charge of Athens, who would be reinstalled
in power and Athens even though most of the people
(08:43):
didn't want him. There a word about the voting. If
you're a citizen in the city state of Athens around
this time, that means that you are not for and born,
you are not a slave, and you are not a woman.
So even though the total number of citizens could be
as high as sixty thousand, there was also just like today,
(09:07):
even though there are a lot of people in the
US who can vote, they're relatively few as percentage of
the population who actually do right. So this was think
of the voters here as the people who really had
an acts to grind. But how many you said there were? Um,
he said, there were dozens. That this happened too, But
(09:28):
was it was it based on like personal beef? Ever,
it seems hard to get six thousand people to have
your back just because you know, you don't like the
guy who stole your girl at the dance or something. Yeah,
I don't think so. It seems uh, you're right, I mean,
that seems like a high enough number. It'd be kind
of hard to rig it. I mean, I'm sure many tried,
(09:49):
because it certainly seemed like a real, full proof way
of getting rid of a political rival, you know, if
you wanted to, or I imagine perhaps scandals could have
been trumped up perhaps or in the same way that
you know, a political rival might hire you know, a
private detective to photograph someone in like compromised situation that
maybe the reality of isn't necessarily matching what the picture
(10:12):
would be. Um, that's very vague, but I think you
know what I'm saying, Like, there's there's ways of making
people look bad when they actually didn't do anything wrong.
So that certainly could have happened too. And if you
can sway enough people public opinion, I think that's what
the six thousand represents, right then the six thousand is
a microcosm of the greater population that represents public opinion. Yeah. Yeah,
(10:33):
and maybe we could talk a little bit about the
process here. Once a year, everybody would get together and
decide whether or not to ostracize people, and they didn't
have to just choose one person. It's theoretically possible that
(10:55):
six thousand male citizens could have gotten together and said,
let's kick out winning four people because you know, we
don't like them. So first there would be a popular
assembly of athletes, the ecclesia, and what During the ecclesia,
about six thousand male citizens would vote whether or not
(11:16):
to proceed with ostracization by just raising their right hand,
so you could kind of just read the room when
you looked out in the crowd, unless it was very um,
I guess, unless it was very tense. I feel like,
if you asked for the vote and it looked like
everybody was raising your hand, then you've you've got the
vote to go forward to the special meeting known as
(11:36):
the Austra Couporia, which was the without getting to the
weeds of the calendar that was that was the next step,
and then the voting was supervised by council of five
people and nine highest officials in the land who are
known as the archons so Ben I mean there were
factions in these days, or I mean, this is the
(11:58):
earliest days of democracy. So there were parties, you could say.
I mean, you know, they always have been as long
as people have agreed to do things in a certain way,
people have disagreed, you know, so I imagined, But I
imagine that six thousand correct me if I'm wrong, would
have been made up of not just rivals of that individual,
and I would have had to be some sort of coalition, right,
(12:19):
some sort of across the aisle type situation. Otherwise it
would be just kind of a railroad job. Yeah, that's
a really good point, because it would be it would
be strange to imagine that these six thousand people all
got along together on everything. But when it was time
to do the vote, the vote was anonymous, something that
Athens figured out way before the U S. If you've
(12:41):
heard our our earlier episodes of voting in this country.
They they took this piece of broken pottery and they
scratched the name of the person that they wanted ostracized
onto the piece of pottery. And a lot of this
(13:02):
is coming from a gath a dot g R, which
has a great breakdown of how this worked, as well
as pictures of actual pottery shards where they would write
the names, and so they were where election officials or
I guess voting officials who would collect these pieces of
broken pottery and make sure that nobody was trying to
(13:22):
rig the vote and vote, you know, multiple times. If
there was a minimum of six thousand votes cast, then
the officials would announce which person had amassed the most
votes and then boom, that person is kicked out exile.
You cannot appeal this, but really uncontestable. You get like
(13:45):
they tell you, uh, they give you a little bit
of time to get your stuff together and high tailor right.
I think they give you ten days to your ten
years to get your stuff together and get out of dodge.
By the way, a gath a dot g are is
the website of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens,
and overall is just a really really cool, rich resource.
(14:08):
Highly recommended if you're into like this kind of classical studies.
But I mean, this would have been the kiss of death, dude,
can you imagine? Yeah, it's when you put it that way,
of like a day for each year, that that sounds
really difficult. It is interesting that you still get to
keep your citizenship and apparently your personal property is not
(14:31):
confiscated at least according to the letter of the process,
the letter of the law. But I don't know how
much that actually held true in real life. Because someone's
gone for ten years, does that mean that your family
stays on your estate and looks after your property or something.
Is it like a situation where you know, your partner
(14:52):
or your kids are like, hey, will try try to
visit you. Is that and allowed? Would that make them lepers,
you know essentially, or make them ostracized by default? We
wouldn't really see anything in the research to my knowledge
that imposes this you know, fate on family members. But
(15:14):
we know that does happen. There's certainly plenty of situations
where I mean, hell, this is actually pretty progressive. You know.
Typically when you think of this kind of situations where
there's you know, political beef or you know, someone is
seen as a as an undesirable usually they're just killed
along with their family and all of their heirs. This
is like a pretty thoughtful way of doing business. Yeah,
(15:35):
it is. It seems surprisingly progressive. If you if you're
ostracized but you're not like guilty of a crime, you
don't go to jail, you don't get tortured, you don't
get fined. Ten years go by, if you're still alive,
you can come back. And if you were in office
when you got ostracized, you can still come back to politics.
(15:56):
And what happens, right, if you're like you're up for
ostratization and they ultimately don't vote to ostracize you, you
can stay. You can just kick it. And then apparently
this is the weirdest part, Well, this is one of
the weirdest parts. Apparently after you voted, after you turn
in your pottery shard, and after everything was counted, these
(16:17):
things which were called ostraca were just thrown in the street.
And so people who have been conducting excavations in Athens
have found thousands, like eleven thousand examples of these broken
pottery votes. And this is like a window into the
power politics of the day. And I'm sure stute ridiculous
(16:42):
historians have put this together already. But the term ostracized
came from the term for this pottery, which was a
very very uh durable baked pottery called ostraca. Like you said, ostracized,
and yeah, you're right, I mean eleven thousand examples of
these means that they were far more votes than actual ostracizations,
(17:05):
like successful votes. Right, yeah, yeah, And this is interesting
because back to our historian Sickensure here, he says that
written ballots were kind of unusual in Athenian democracy, and uh,
during assemblies where people voted on laws, you just you
(17:26):
typically did what they did in the first stage of
the ostracization vote. You just raised your hands. So if
you think about it, these bits of pottery are hidden,
broken shards of history that often weren't noticed by the
ancient sources of the time or the contemporary sources of
(17:47):
that time, because it's like, why would you write in
depth about a vote that ultimately didn't result in something dramatic, Right,
that's just day to day. Uh, And you know, people
like people had Maximilian Uh william As sees here we go,
all right, whatever, Macks, we're going with it. And and uh,
(18:10):
they had that guy off for ostracization, but he didn't
get the votes for the unpopularity contest. He's fine, why
would you write about it? We're done, we did the process,
the process worked, We're thrown away our pottery shards. Um,
that does seem incredibly progressive for the time. I agree with,
you knowl but we also found that there were some
(18:31):
examples of abuse of the system, didn't we Yeah, we
we do see that. And I just want to point
out too at this point that this I said, this
was a kiss of death, and it certainly could have been,
but there were plenty of examples of folks that returned
and we're able to kind of you know, get back
into life, you know, almost like getting out of prison
and being assimilated back into you know, civilized society or whatever.
(18:54):
But like I said earlier, I mean, it wasn't impossible
to game this system. We do have historical evidence of
you know, small sects of of of people that kind
of colluded against the policies of a particular person. Because again,
the fact they were able to return back to society
after their ostracization does seem to indicate that this is
(19:18):
more about voting against people's politics rather than the people themselves, right, Yeah. Yeah,
So it's kind of like this isn't a perfect comparison.
But you know, sometimes you'll talk to people who are
voting in the US and they're saying, well, I'm not
really voting for this one candidate and voting against the
(19:40):
other one, you know, and you're like, somebody might vote
to ostracize a certain individual in ancient Athens. But what
they're really, what they're really doing, is they're voting against
the policies. And when they vote against that person, what
they're they're doing is support the rival policy or the
(20:02):
rival idea. But then also, people were much the same
then as they are today. There's one funny, petty thing
here in plutarch uh in his biography of Aristides, he
says there was one guy who voted against Aristides the
(20:22):
just just because he got tired of the guy having
the nickname the Just. So it's like, imagine you're deciding
not to vote for someone because you're like, I don't know,
I think it's tie is pretentious. I think it's Tie
insist upon himself. Um, I don't like the cut of
his jib. That's basically it. You could vote to kick
(20:44):
someone out for ten years because you don't like the
cut of their jip. That's absolutely right then. And one
example of potential abuse of the system was in the
unearth thing of one hundred and ninety pieces of this
Astraca pottery in a well near the Acropolis of Athens,
which we all know and love, that amazing piece of architecture.
(21:06):
Um and the name the mysticallys was written on all
of them, but it was clear that it was done
by just a few people's hands, just a few different
examples of handwriting. So they must have rigged it in
some way. Uh, done a little ballot box stuffing as
(21:26):
it were. Right, Yeah, And first off, I think that's hilarious.
I don't know why they did it, but it's such
an obvious case of cheating. I do have to begrudgingly
note that they put some work into it, because scratching
that name in the pottery is tougher than just filling
(21:46):
in a little bubble with a with a number two pencil,
or or just writing something on papers. So they thought
about it, and they had to scratch all that name
a hundred and ninety times. But uh, maybe it's people
handing out pre written votes. I think that's one of
the speculations, you know, and we have so many Well,
as we said, there are cases where this system worked.
(22:10):
We know that the first, like actual real life ostracism
wasn't held until four eighties seven b C. When a
guy named Hipparcus who was related to the tyrant we
mentioned at the top, Hippieus. He became the first person
(22:32):
who was successfully exiled through the process of ostracism. And
I think in the next two years there were a
couple more people, and they were historians largely believed that
these three guys, mega Cles, Callius, and Hipparcus, we're all
found guilty or thought to be guilty of supporting Persia.
(22:56):
And so they're like, all right, well, you know what,
come back in ten years, tell us what you think
about it then. But nol, I have a question. If
you're exiling people for the same perceived you know, violation
of norms or the same danger, what's to stop them
from getting together outside of town and like staging some
(23:17):
sort of revolt right right? You see where I'm going
with us. I don't see where you're going with us.
It's a good question, ben like some sort of like
reverse lynch mob. I don't know. I think the numbers
wouldn't be on their side. I don't feel like there
was any there's any number. I mean, like the highest
number too, to your point earlier, would probably be in
the twenties, you know, I highly doubt they were like
exiling enough, uh that they could come back on mass
(23:41):
I see what you're saying. Yeah, and then a public
opinion is already against them so much they would have
to get help from a foreign power. So if you
if you look at this and you just think about
the relatively snarky nature of people, you might feel a
ridiculous historians assume that all of the prominent power players
(24:05):
and politicians in Athens or at some point targets for
ostracization or ostracism, you would be correct, ding ding first
prize to you. Even the legendary Pericles was a candidate
for this treatment. We know that when they held these votes,
they often concentrated on just like two or three people
(24:28):
who might get kicked out. But some, according to these
shards of pottery, these ostraka, some people that scholars never
even learned about anywhere else, also got really big votes
for ostracism. So again back to Sickener, He says that
writers from this time tend to focus on just the
(24:50):
big names, the few big names. But if you look
at these shards of pottery, you'll see there were a
lot of people that didn't make it into the historical
record otherwise is that we're a big enough deal for
Athenes to be concerned. Yeah, that's right, and um we
you know again, we learn all of this from archaeological digs,
and our historian Seeking gerb had this to say about
(25:13):
exactly what you're talking about that writers from antiquity quote,
writers from antiquity focus on just a few big men.
History was the history of leading figures, powerful individuals, generals
and politicians, but others or maybe not quite as prominent,
but clearly prominent enough that dozens or hundreds of individuals
thought them worthy of being ostracized. That's very interesting because
(25:35):
it sort of speaks to what you're talking about, Ben.
I think what the biggest concern would be is if
someone with a lot of sway, Because we know that
even though it only took six thousand votes to ostracize someone,
we're talking about a population the dwarfs that number. So
the issue would be if enough people were not on
(25:56):
board with the ostracization of their guy, then maybe they
follow him, and then that would be a coup that
could be staged. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. There
are serious political concerns here. But also because this show
is about ridiculous history. Folks. We would be remiss if
(26:17):
we didn't share some of the funny roast and disses
and things that were written about people when they were
up for an ostracism vote. You can see a lot
of what Athenians thought about other citizens. Some have these
(26:39):
like they didn't just write the name, they added some
extra here's why to it. There's like lie gross Glacon
nos Slanderer, Yeah, collected us the trader ex Antipus Eraphon
Sun is declared by this ostracon to be the out
and out winner amongst a cursed sinners. And we have
(27:07):
another historian to thank for the record of all of
this and how it really informs what was going on
with the politics of ancient Greece, Stephen Brenn of the
University of Geeseon in Germany. He actually cataloged all nine
thousand pieces of this Ostraka pottery that were um dug
up in uh Kara Micos between nineteen ten and just
(27:32):
as recently as two thousand five, and bren says that
some of these comments, those uh comments that we mentioned
earlier were these kind of personal political grievances against candidates
um that were perhaps used in almost like yeah, like
(27:52):
what you would think of as as a campaign right
leading up to one of these votes, so you know,
you would almost in the same way you lead up
to like say, voting for the Oscars for your consideration
or the Emmys or whatever. They would have had these
like slogans or you know, the stay with any political
process leading out to us. So a lot of these
things that were written would have reflected those types of campaigns.
(28:14):
For sure. There were things like accusations of incest. Uh.
There were also there's one really interesting thing where some
folks found examples of Athenians casting their votes not for
a specific human citizen, but uh casting to ostracized famine.
(28:36):
And according to signature. It's kind of tough to tell
whether this was sincere or whether this was sarcastic, because
some Greek cities did have rituals where they would pick
typically an enslaved person, make them a scapegoat representing hunger,
and then drive them out of the city. So it's
a little bit faster and looser than a lot of
(28:58):
voting today. But we do know that the end of
ostracism occurred around four seventeen b c e. There was
a guy named Hyperbolos who wanted to exile one of
his two great rivals. He had two people that would
(29:19):
rather not be in town, and he thought things would
go better for me if I get one of them
out of the game. These were Alcabiades and Nicias. But
instead his rivals teamed up and got him voted out
of the city. And this political maneuvering apparently made enough
people disgusted that they decided collectively to end ostracism, and
(29:44):
after that point, even though it was still legally possible
to do this, nobody was ostracized, and there was still
on the books until the fourth century b c. Instead,
if he didn't like someone, if you had a political rival,
you would int age in a process called graph a paranomon,
where anybody could make a formal accusation against anyone else
(30:09):
and say, hey, their ideas, their policies, their proposals, those
are unconstitutional. And if the person you accused was found
guilty of the charge, you would get fined. You have
to pay a lot of money. And then there was
a three strikes law. Can you believe it? If you
lost three cases of graph a paranoman, then you could
(30:31):
no longer be in politics, which is funny because you know,
it's so tempting Noll to have to think that maybe
modern democracies would be better with this kind of three
strikes law for politicians A million percents. I mean, we
should have some sort of mechanism like this. I wouldn't say,
(30:52):
you know, leave the city for ten years, but there
should be some popular way to recall people that doesn't
involve like all of this crazy pedantic um, you know,
kind of bureaucracy that we have to deal with. Because again,
like we've seen with uh, you know, we're not a
political show. We're not. We don't we don't put our
we don't wear our political views on our sleeves. But
(31:13):
I think we can all agree that there have been
situations throughout history where perhaps we would have benefited if
there was some accepted way of ousting someone at their
very least kind of knocking them a couple of runs
off of their pedestal, you know, for stuff that we
would just consider absolutely unacceptable. Yeah. Yeah, and and uh,
(31:35):
to have consequences for some actions of corruption or so on,
like those consequences can frankly be hard to uh, hard
to follow through with in many cases, and this this
is something that led our pal Gave to ask whether
ostracism is worth a second look today. He was citing
(32:01):
that New York Daily News op ed we mentioned at
the very very top of the show, and this was
an op ed by Stephen Ruddy, and in this op ed,
Ruddy says the process of ostracism holds advantages over the
American system of impeachment because he notes that the Athenian
(32:22):
process of ostracizing someone was based on policy often right,
And people would like your point earlier about how six
thousand people might not agree on everything, but they kind
of went across whatever their faction lines were. One would hope, yeah,
one one would. And that doesn't happen with the US
(32:44):
system of impeachment. Yeah, it tends to go around partisan lines.
But with this, I think we can see the very
serious and progressive roots of a phrase that that a
lot of us you're kind of misusing in the modern day.
I felt I told somebody that I felt ostracized for
(33:07):
some of my Okay, I'll admit stridently militant opinions about
certain foods, you know, but that wasn't ostracization. That was
my friends saying Hey, man, you're getting real weird about
case that he is I was still allowed to sit
at the table. Well, that's called intervention. That's not that's
the people that that's people that care about you and
(33:28):
want to make sure you're okay. They want you around.
They just thought you maybe went a little too far
down that case of the a rabbit hole band. And
we just want to help you. Man. We love you,
We love you, and we love you. I I think
I know, Matt, I think we could have so much
fun if well, how do we define so much fun
for us? If we're hanging out with some of our
(33:48):
coworkers or something, and it's someone like we'll just pick
a point they they have an opinion about something. It
could be Alex Williams, who could post our track. Alex
says something that the three of us could exchange significant glances,
and I'll bring the pottery sharks and we can put
on pottery sharts. Yeah, well we'll hit up pottery barn.
(34:09):
I think all you would need would be one of
those big planters, you know, and that's that will be
enough for for our vote. We don't need six thousand though,
I think that seems a bit much within our little
podcast sphere. Maybe twenty money is ambitious on it zone. Yeah,
I think that's great. But U but let us let
us know what you think, folks. We'd love to hear
(34:32):
from you. We'd love to hear what you think about
the process of ostracization or ostracism, whether it should return
in the modern day. You could tell us all about
it on our Facebook page, Ridiculous Historians to meet the
best part of the show your fellow listeners. Also, uh,
we have an email address, right, absolutely do It's real.
(34:55):
You can write to us at Ridiculous at I heart
media dot com. I don't think people are we need
to start maybe saying this at the top of the show.
Ben still get the emails set up. I don't get
the email. This is crazy. Then you're once again being
punished for being an honor student. I vote to ostracized.
I t ostracized. I T I love that. That's a
good slope, good chance. Um, yeah, thirded, thirded. We should
(35:20):
thank some people. Doesn't that mean we have a quorum.
Isn't that a quorum what we have here? I forget
parliamentary procedure, but we will thank some people who definitely
do not want to ostracize. That's, of course you already
mentioned Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Max Williams, superproducer
of the year, of the century, of the millennium. Um,
you would have been a really great Greek pray tour
(35:42):
or something, you know, one of those like dudes that
wears the robe and just holds up two fingers and
looks very like a mystic. Yeah. I think it would
also have been a great orator, Max. Uh, you've got
some gravatoas about you. Uh, speaking with gravatoas of course,
big big thanks to Casey Pegram, Christopher Hasiotis, Eve's Jeff Cote,
(36:04):
our Shining Star Research gave Louisier and uh, Noel, I
have to ask you, Max, I have to ask you
my last question for the day, real talk. Would you
vote to ostracize the quister? I don't know, Man, I
kind of missed the guy. Yeah, yeah, we should just
let him stay. Let's let him stay, all right. Nobody
(36:25):
telling me said that, but yeah, I agreed. We'll see
you next time. Folks. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Well,
(00:26):
welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. That's our super producer,
the one and only Max Williams. Give it up for him.
My name is Ben Um and I owe you Noelan
Max a personal thank you for not ostracizing me even
(00:48):
though I totally dipped out of town for a minute. Well, Ben,
I mean everybody deserves to get away, to fly away. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
well that could yeah, that could be that. I like that.
I like that idea. I think maybe one of the
important things here is that I left temporarily and largely
(01:14):
of my own volition. I'd say about of my own volition.
I didn't get kicked out. Have you guys ever got
kicked out of anything? Questions? Kicked out? I once? Uh no? Yeah? Gosh, Max,
how about you? You know, and you've ever been asked
politely to leave? Oh? Politely? And I'm politely? Um. Okay.
(01:37):
If if our friends Phil and Nathaniel are listening, they
can remember us at a bar on King Street in Charleston,
South Carolina a few years ago. Yeah, we got asked
very unpolitely to leave, and we totally well, they were fine.
I totally deserved to be asked unpolitely to leave. Did
you put up a fight or did you go h quietly?
(01:59):
And Dark Knight was pretty quietly. Okay, no, no, no,
it wasn't karaoke. It was just uh, yeah, I deserved it.
I a bartender who was at that bar. If you're listening,
I am sorry. I know you don't know who I am,
but I am sorry. Max with the past, I love it. Um.
I think we've all found ourselves, sometimes at one point
(02:20):
or another, in some kind of situation where we don't
feel comfortable. And uh, we have maybe found ourselves in
a situation where one reason or another we're asked to leave,
sometimes politely like Noel said, sometimes not politely like Max said.
And uh, you know, I just think there's some jobs
where no matter what you do, you're not gonna please everyone,
(02:43):
like the job of being the president. I would say anything,
not just the US. Uh, you'll have people who want
you to g t FO And today's episode is about
what one of the um processes are, the concepts that
the very way like very early days of democracy, the
(03:04):
government in ancient Greece figured out their own solution to
this problem over in Athens, right now, Yeah, that's right.
I mean we think of the word ostracized today and
it has kind of um connotations of maybe just sort
of given someone the cold shoulder, you know, like not
letting someone hang in your click anymore. And you don't
(03:25):
do it like as a formal thing. It just sort
of happens. You sort of ghosted right over time you
start to realize, oh, my homies are not my homies anymore,
and I am sort of left alone because I see
them hanging out in the lunch room or or the
quad or whatever, um hell, and by the water cooler,
and they are no longer including me. It is a
form of excluding. But in ancient Greece and Athens, like
(03:48):
you said, this was essentially a borderline, codified solution to
keeping demagogues from rearing their ugly heads in politics, where
there was a rule built into Athenian civilization Athenian society
that allowed them to exile fellow citizen for ten years
(04:10):
if it was decided unanimously. I will get to the
official means of doing this, but if it was to
side decided animously that they were a disruption essentially, like
you know, we're gonna have to ask you to leave
for a decade, which is not an insignificant amount of time.
That's like a prison sentence. Yeah, and you know if
(04:31):
you if you spend your ten years in the figurative
quarter and you're still alive, then maybe you can come
back and be a little better behaved. This is crazy,
we've got some I like the way that New York
Daily News put it when they said this is an
unpopularity context, because yeah, there's no trial, there's no investigation.
(04:55):
A bunch of people get together and they say this
guy's a really pill or this person could be a
danger to our democracy, teld them to get out. And
that specific phrase is also mentioned in the unpopularity contest
is kind of also alluded to in Smithsonian mag when
they quote historian James Sickener of Florida State. He argues
(05:20):
that this was a way to get rid of, like
you said, an old demagogues, potential tyrants, people who could
damage or subvert the new fragile idea of democracy. This
is what we're saying is you might have people who say, hey,
I felt ostracized from a social circle, or you might
have someone who's like, oh, I was outside of this
(05:43):
hotel and I felt ostracized standing in the smoking corner
or something like that. Right, but this is way different,
and this was uh something something that really also arguably
subverted the law because again, you were not guilty of
a criminal offense. They were not like, we are ostracizing
(06:04):
you get out of town for ten years because you
know you violated the what what you violated the Toga
length law or something like that. Well, it could be that, Ben,
It could be that because it was but but again
not specifically about a crime, more about going against norms
and and things that enough people agreed was um disruptive
(06:27):
again that word again, disruptive, which is really really interesting
because it's really incredibly incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to
do that in our political system. You know, it requires
essentially voting someone out of office and then they have
the upper hand because aside from impeachment, which we know
doesn't work ever. I mean, you can certainly, you know,
enact impeachment proceedings, but I don't know that we've ever
(06:49):
seen it happen officially in our lifetime other than you know,
with Nixon, he didn't he he would have been impeached
if he had not resigned, you know, he would have
been officially removed from office. We always misconstrued idea of
being impeached with being removed from office as a result
of impeachment proceedings. Right, but this only required a vote
of six thousand individuals in the entire society, which I mean,
(07:14):
I'm sure population had to play a play a role
in this, but to have someone ostracized, and again, according
to historian James Sickinger of Florida, stay who you cited earlier, Ben,
this happened at least a dozen times between four hundred
and eight seven to four hundred and sixteen BC. Yeah, yeah,
(07:34):
And the point of making with that Toga reference is
that what I'm emphasizing here is they were not found
guilty legally offense uh this vote. And and of course, yes,
this is ancient Greece, this is Athens, so it's not
as though everybody could vote this. This idea was. It
(07:58):
took place as soon after the Athenian forces one the
Battle of Marathon against Persian forces in four nine b C.
And they were trying to curb the power of any
rising tyrant. And this is. Historians believe that this is
partially due to the fact that they're old tyrant hippieus
(08:22):
have been thrown out years earlier. And when he was
thrown out, this guy get this. He went with the
Persian fleet to the Battle of Marathon, and he hoped
that when the Persians won, he would be uh he
would be in charge of Athens, who would be reinstalled
in power and Athens even though most of the people
(08:43):
didn't want him. There a word about the voting. If
you're a citizen in the city state of Athens around
this time, that means that you are not for and born,
you are not a slave, and you are not a woman.
So even though the total number of citizens could be
as high as sixty thousand, there was also just like today,
(09:07):
even though there are a lot of people in the
US who can vote, they're relatively few as percentage of
the population who actually do right. So this was think
of the voters here as the people who really had
an acts to grind. But how many you said there were? Um,
he said, there were dozens. That this happened too, But
(09:28):
was it was it based on like personal beef? Ever,
it seems hard to get six thousand people to have
your back just because you know, you don't like the
guy who stole your girl at the dance or something. Yeah,
I don't think so. It seems uh, you're right, I mean,
that seems like a high enough number. It'd be kind
of hard to rig it. I mean, I'm sure many tried,
(09:49):
because it certainly seemed like a real, full proof way
of getting rid of a political rival, you know, if
you wanted to, or I imagine perhaps scandals could have
been trumped up perhaps or in the same way that
you know, a political rival might hire you know, a
private detective to photograph someone in like compromised situation that
maybe the reality of isn't necessarily matching what the picture
(10:12):
would be. Um, that's very vague, but I think you
know what I'm saying, Like, there's there's ways of making
people look bad when they actually didn't do anything wrong.
So that certainly could have happened too. And if you
can sway enough people public opinion, I think that's what
the six thousand represents, right then the six thousand is
a microcosm of the greater population that represents public opinion. Yeah. Yeah,
(10:33):
and maybe we could talk a little bit about the
process here. Once a year, everybody would get together and
decide whether or not to ostracize people, and they didn't
have to just choose one person. It's theoretically possible that
(10:55):
six thousand male citizens could have gotten together and said,
let's kick out winning four people because you know, we
don't like them. So first there would be a popular
assembly of athletes, the ecclesia, and what During the ecclesia,
about six thousand male citizens would vote whether or not
(11:16):
to proceed with ostracization by just raising their right hand,
so you could kind of just read the room when
you looked out in the crowd, unless it was very um,
I guess, unless it was very tense. I feel like,
if you asked for the vote and it looked like
everybody was raising your hand, then you've you've got the
vote to go forward to the special meeting known as
(11:36):
the Austra Couporia, which was the without getting to the
weeds of the calendar that was that was the next step,
and then the voting was supervised by council of five
people and nine highest officials in the land who are
known as the archons so Ben I mean there were
factions in these days, or I mean, this is the
(11:58):
earliest days of democracy. So there were parties, you could say.
I mean, you know, they always have been as long
as people have agreed to do things in a certain way,
people have disagreed, you know, so I imagined, But I
imagine that six thousand correct me if I'm wrong, would
have been made up of not just rivals of that individual,
and I would have had to be some sort of coalition, right,
(12:19):
some sort of across the aisle type situation. Otherwise it
would be just kind of a railroad job. Yeah, that's
a really good point, because it would be it would
be strange to imagine that these six thousand people all
got along together on everything. But when it was time
to do the vote, the vote was anonymous, something that
Athens figured out way before the U S. If you've
(12:41):
heard our our earlier episodes of voting in this country.
They they took this piece of broken pottery and they
scratched the name of the person that they wanted ostracized
onto the piece of pottery. And a lot of this
(13:02):
is coming from a gath a dot g R, which
has a great breakdown of how this worked, as well
as pictures of actual pottery shards where they would write
the names, and so they were where election officials or
I guess voting officials who would collect these pieces of
broken pottery and make sure that nobody was trying to
(13:22):
rig the vote and vote, you know, multiple times. If
there was a minimum of six thousand votes cast, then
the officials would announce which person had amassed the most
votes and then boom, that person is kicked out exile.
You cannot appeal this, but really uncontestable. You get like
(13:45):
they tell you, uh, they give you a little bit
of time to get your stuff together and high tailor right.
I think they give you ten days to your ten
years to get your stuff together and get out of dodge.
By the way, a gath a dot g are is
the website of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens,
and overall is just a really really cool, rich resource.
(14:08):
Highly recommended if you're into like this kind of classical studies.
But I mean, this would have been the kiss of death, dude,
can you imagine? Yeah, it's when you put it that way,
of like a day for each year, that that sounds
really difficult. It is interesting that you still get to
keep your citizenship and apparently your personal property is not
(14:31):
confiscated at least according to the letter of the process,
the letter of the law. But I don't know how
much that actually held true in real life. Because someone's
gone for ten years, does that mean that your family
stays on your estate and looks after your property or something.
Is it like a situation where you know, your partner
(14:52):
or your kids are like, hey, will try try to
visit you. Is that and allowed? Would that make them lepers,
you know essentially, or make them ostracized by default? We
wouldn't really see anything in the research to my knowledge
that imposes this you know, fate on family members. But
(15:14):
we know that does happen. There's certainly plenty of situations
where I mean, hell, this is actually pretty progressive. You know.
Typically when you think of this kind of situations where
there's you know, political beef or you know, someone is
seen as a as an undesirable usually they're just killed
along with their family and all of their heirs. This
is like a pretty thoughtful way of doing business. Yeah,
(15:35):
it is. It seems surprisingly progressive. If you if you're
ostracized but you're not like guilty of a crime, you
don't go to jail, you don't get tortured, you don't
get fined. Ten years go by, if you're still alive,
you can come back. And if you were in office
when you got ostracized, you can still come back to politics.
(15:56):
And what happens, right, if you're like you're up for
ostratization and they ultimately don't vote to ostracize you, you
can stay. You can just kick it. And then apparently
this is the weirdest part, Well, this is one of
the weirdest parts. Apparently after you voted, after you turn
in your pottery shard, and after everything was counted, these
(16:17):
things which were called ostraca were just thrown in the street.
And so people who have been conducting excavations in Athens
have found thousands, like eleven thousand examples of these broken
pottery votes. And this is like a window into the
power politics of the day. And I'm sure stute ridiculous
(16:42):
historians have put this together already. But the term ostracized
came from the term for this pottery, which was a
very very uh durable baked pottery called ostraca. Like you said, ostracized,
and yeah, you're right, I mean eleven thousand examples of
these means that they were far more votes than actual ostracizations,
(17:05):
like successful votes. Right, yeah, yeah, And this is interesting
because back to our historian Sickensure here, he says that
written ballots were kind of unusual in Athenian democracy, and uh,
during assemblies where people voted on laws, you just you
(17:26):
typically did what they did in the first stage of
the ostracization vote. You just raised your hands. So if
you think about it, these bits of pottery are hidden,
broken shards of history that often weren't noticed by the
ancient sources of the time or the contemporary sources of
(17:47):
that time, because it's like, why would you write in
depth about a vote that ultimately didn't result in something dramatic, Right,
that's just day to day. Uh, And you know, people
like people had Maximilian Uh william As sees here we go,
all right, whatever, Macks, we're going with it. And and uh,
(18:10):
they had that guy off for ostracization, but he didn't
get the votes for the unpopularity contest. He's fine, why
would you write about it? We're done, we did the process,
the process worked, We're thrown away our pottery shards. Um,
that does seem incredibly progressive for the time. I agree with,
you knowl but we also found that there were some
(18:31):
examples of abuse of the system, didn't we Yeah, we
we do see that. And I just want to point
out too at this point that this I said, this
was a kiss of death, and it certainly could have been,
but there were plenty of examples of folks that returned
and we're able to kind of you know, get back
into life, you know, almost like getting out of prison
and being assimilated back into you know, civilized society or whatever.
(18:54):
But like I said earlier, I mean, it wasn't impossible
to game this system. We do have historical evidence of
you know, small sects of of of people that kind
of colluded against the policies of a particular person. Because again,
the fact they were able to return back to society
after their ostracization does seem to indicate that this is
(19:18):
more about voting against people's politics rather than the people themselves, right, Yeah. Yeah,
So it's kind of like this isn't a perfect comparison.
But you know, sometimes you'll talk to people who are
voting in the US and they're saying, well, I'm not
really voting for this one candidate and voting against the
(19:40):
other one, you know, and you're like, somebody might vote
to ostracize a certain individual in ancient Athens. But what
they're really, what they're really doing, is they're voting against
the policies. And when they vote against that person, what
they're they're doing is support the rival policy or the
(20:02):
rival idea. But then also, people were much the same
then as they are today. There's one funny, petty thing
here in plutarch uh in his biography of Aristides, he
says there was one guy who voted against Aristides the
(20:22):
just just because he got tired of the guy having
the nickname the Just. So it's like, imagine you're deciding
not to vote for someone because you're like, I don't know,
I think it's tie is pretentious. I think it's Tie
insist upon himself. Um, I don't like the cut of
his jib. That's basically it. You could vote to kick
(20:44):
someone out for ten years because you don't like the
cut of their jip. That's absolutely right then. And one
example of potential abuse of the system was in the
unearth thing of one hundred and ninety pieces of this
Astraca pottery in a well near the Acropolis of Athens,
which we all know and love, that amazing piece of architecture.
(21:06):
Um and the name the mysticallys was written on all
of them, but it was clear that it was done
by just a few people's hands, just a few different
examples of handwriting. So they must have rigged it in
some way. Uh, done a little ballot box stuffing as
(21:26):
it were. Right, Yeah, And first off, I think that's hilarious.
I don't know why they did it, but it's such
an obvious case of cheating. I do have to begrudgingly
note that they put some work into it, because scratching
that name in the pottery is tougher than just filling
(21:46):
in a little bubble with a with a number two pencil,
or or just writing something on papers. So they thought
about it, and they had to scratch all that name
a hundred and ninety times. But uh, maybe it's people
handing out pre written votes. I think that's one of
the speculations, you know, and we have so many Well,
as we said, there are cases where this system worked.
(22:10):
We know that the first, like actual real life ostracism
wasn't held until four eighties seven b C. When a
guy named Hipparcus who was related to the tyrant we
mentioned at the top, Hippieus. He became the first person
(22:32):
who was successfully exiled through the process of ostracism. And
I think in the next two years there were a
couple more people, and they were historians largely believed that
these three guys, mega Cles, Callius, and Hipparcus, we're all
found guilty or thought to be guilty of supporting Persia.
(22:56):
And so they're like, all right, well, you know what,
come back in ten years, tell us what you think
about it then. But nol, I have a question. If
you're exiling people for the same perceived you know, violation
of norms or the same danger, what's to stop them
from getting together outside of town and like staging some
(23:17):
sort of revolt right right? You see where I'm going
with us. I don't see where you're going with us.
It's a good question, ben like some sort of like
reverse lynch mob. I don't know. I think the numbers
wouldn't be on their side. I don't feel like there
was any there's any number. I mean, like the highest
number too, to your point earlier, would probably be in
the twenties, you know, I highly doubt they were like
exiling enough, uh that they could come back on mass
(23:41):
I see what you're saying. Yeah, and then a public
opinion is already against them so much they would have
to get help from a foreign power. So if you
if you look at this and you just think about
the relatively snarky nature of people, you might feel a
ridiculous historians assume that all of the prominent power players
(24:05):
and politicians in Athens or at some point targets for
ostracization or ostracism, you would be correct, ding ding first
prize to you. Even the legendary Pericles was a candidate
for this treatment. We know that when they held these votes,
they often concentrated on just like two or three people
(24:28):
who might get kicked out. But some, according to these
shards of pottery, these ostraka, some people that scholars never
even learned about anywhere else, also got really big votes
for ostracism. So again back to Sickener, He says that
writers from this time tend to focus on just the
(24:50):
big names, the few big names. But if you look
at these shards of pottery, you'll see there were a
lot of people that didn't make it into the historical
record otherwise is that we're a big enough deal for
Athenes to be concerned. Yeah, that's right, and um we
you know again, we learn all of this from archaeological digs,
and our historian Seeking gerb had this to say about
(25:13):
exactly what you're talking about that writers from antiquity quote,
writers from antiquity focus on just a few big men.
History was the history of leading figures, powerful individuals, generals
and politicians, but others or maybe not quite as prominent,
but clearly prominent enough that dozens or hundreds of individuals
thought them worthy of being ostracized. That's very interesting because
(25:35):
it sort of speaks to what you're talking about, Ben.
I think what the biggest concern would be is if
someone with a lot of sway, Because we know that
even though it only took six thousand votes to ostracize someone,
we're talking about a population the dwarfs that number. So
the issue would be if enough people were not on
(25:56):
board with the ostracization of their guy, then maybe they
follow him, and then that would be a coup that
could be staged. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. There
are serious political concerns here. But also because this show
is about ridiculous history. Folks. We would be remiss if
(26:17):
we didn't share some of the funny roast and disses
and things that were written about people when they were
up for an ostracism vote. You can see a lot
of what Athenians thought about other citizens. Some have these
(26:39):
like they didn't just write the name, they added some
extra here's why to it. There's like lie gross Glacon
nos Slanderer, Yeah, collected us the trader ex Antipus Eraphon
Sun is declared by this ostracon to be the out
and out winner amongst a cursed sinners. And we have
(27:07):
another historian to thank for the record of all of
this and how it really informs what was going on
with the politics of ancient Greece, Stephen Brenn of the
University of Geeseon in Germany. He actually cataloged all nine
thousand pieces of this Ostraka pottery that were um dug
up in uh Kara Micos between nineteen ten and just
(27:32):
as recently as two thousand five, and bren says that
some of these comments, those uh comments that we mentioned
earlier were these kind of personal political grievances against candidates
um that were perhaps used in almost like yeah, like
(27:52):
what you would think of as as a campaign right
leading up to one of these votes, so you know,
you would almost in the same way you lead up
to like say, voting for the Oscars for your consideration
or the Emmys or whatever. They would have had these
like slogans or you know, the stay with any political
process leading out to us. So a lot of these
things that were written would have reflected those types of campaigns.
(28:14):
For sure. There were things like accusations of incest. Uh.
There were also there's one really interesting thing where some
folks found examples of Athenians casting their votes not for
a specific human citizen, but uh casting to ostracized famine.
(28:36):
And according to signature. It's kind of tough to tell
whether this was sincere or whether this was sarcastic, because
some Greek cities did have rituals where they would pick
typically an enslaved person, make them a scapegoat representing hunger,
and then drive them out of the city. So it's
a little bit faster and looser than a lot of
(28:58):
voting today. But we do know that the end of
ostracism occurred around four seventeen b c e. There was
a guy named Hyperbolos who wanted to exile one of
his two great rivals. He had two people that would
(29:19):
rather not be in town, and he thought things would
go better for me if I get one of them
out of the game. These were Alcabiades and Nicias. But
instead his rivals teamed up and got him voted out
of the city. And this political maneuvering apparently made enough
people disgusted that they decided collectively to end ostracism, and
(29:44):
after that point, even though it was still legally possible
to do this, nobody was ostracized, and there was still
on the books until the fourth century b c. Instead,
if he didn't like someone, if you had a political rival,
you would int age in a process called graph a paranomon,
where anybody could make a formal accusation against anyone else
(30:09):
and say, hey, their ideas, their policies, their proposals, those
are unconstitutional. And if the person you accused was found
guilty of the charge, you would get fined. You have
to pay a lot of money. And then there was
a three strikes law. Can you believe it? If you
lost three cases of graph a paranoman, then you could
(30:31):
no longer be in politics, which is funny because you know,
it's so tempting Noll to have to think that maybe
modern democracies would be better with this kind of three
strikes law for politicians A million percents. I mean, we
should have some sort of mechanism like this. I wouldn't say,
(30:52):
you know, leave the city for ten years, but there
should be some popular way to recall people that doesn't
involve like all of this crazy pedantic um, you know,
kind of bureaucracy that we have to deal with. Because again,
like we've seen with uh, you know, we're not a
political show. We're not. We don't we don't put our
we don't wear our political views on our sleeves. But
(31:13):
I think we can all agree that there have been
situations throughout history where perhaps we would have benefited if
there was some accepted way of ousting someone at their
very least kind of knocking them a couple of runs
off of their pedestal, you know, for stuff that we
would just consider absolutely unacceptable. Yeah. Yeah, and and uh,
(31:35):
to have consequences for some actions of corruption or so on,
like those consequences can frankly be hard to uh, hard
to follow through with in many cases, and this this
is something that led our pal Gave to ask whether
ostracism is worth a second look today. He was citing
(32:01):
that New York Daily News op ed we mentioned at
the very very top of the show, and this was
an op ed by Stephen Ruddy, and in this op ed,
Ruddy says the process of ostracism holds advantages over the
American system of impeachment because he notes that the Athenian
(32:22):
process of ostracizing someone was based on policy often right,
And people would like your point earlier about how six
thousand people might not agree on everything, but they kind
of went across whatever their faction lines were. One would hope, yeah,
one one would. And that doesn't happen with the US
(32:44):
system of impeachment. Yeah, it tends to go around partisan lines.
But with this, I think we can see the very
serious and progressive roots of a phrase that that a
lot of us you're kind of misusing in the modern day.
I felt I told somebody that I felt ostracized for
(33:07):
some of my Okay, I'll admit stridently militant opinions about
certain foods, you know, but that wasn't ostracization. That was
my friends saying Hey, man, you're getting real weird about
case that he is I was still allowed to sit
at the table. Well, that's called intervention. That's not that's
the people that that's people that care about you and
(33:28):
want to make sure you're okay. They want you around.
They just thought you maybe went a little too far
down that case of the a rabbit hole band. And
we just want to help you. Man. We love you,
We love you, and we love you. I I think
I know, Matt, I think we could have so much
fun if well, how do we define so much fun
for us? If we're hanging out with some of our
(33:48):
coworkers or something, and it's someone like we'll just pick
a point they they have an opinion about something. It
could be Alex Williams, who could post our track. Alex
says something that the three of us could exchange significant glances,
and I'll bring the pottery sharks and we can put
on pottery sharts. Yeah, well we'll hit up pottery barn.
(34:09):
I think all you would need would be one of
those big planters, you know, and that's that will be
enough for for our vote. We don't need six thousand though,
I think that seems a bit much within our little
podcast sphere. Maybe twenty money is ambitious on it zone. Yeah,
I think that's great. But U but let us let
us know what you think, folks. We'd love to hear
(34:32):
from you. We'd love to hear what you think about
the process of ostracization or ostracism, whether it should return
in the modern day. You could tell us all about
it on our Facebook page, Ridiculous Historians to meet the
best part of the show your fellow listeners. Also, uh,
we have an email address, right, absolutely do It's real.
(34:55):
You can write to us at Ridiculous at I heart
media dot com. I don't think people are we need
to start maybe saying this at the top of the show.
Ben still get the emails set up. I don't get
the email. This is crazy. Then you're once again being
punished for being an honor student. I vote to ostracized.
I t ostracized. I T I love that. That's a
good slope, good chance. Um, yeah, thirded, thirded. We should
(35:20):
thank some people. Doesn't that mean we have a quorum.
Isn't that a quorum what we have here? I forget
parliamentary procedure, but we will thank some people who definitely
do not want to ostracize. That's, of course you already
mentioned Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Max Williams, superproducer
of the year, of the century, of the millennium. Um,
you would have been a really great Greek pray tour
(35:42):
or something, you know, one of those like dudes that
wears the robe and just holds up two fingers and
looks very like a mystic. Yeah. I think it would
also have been a great orator, Max. Uh, you've got
some gravatoas about you. Uh, speaking with gravatoas of course,
big big thanks to Casey Pegram, Christopher Hasiotis, Eve's Jeff Cote,
(36:04):
our Shining Star Research gave Louisier and uh, Noel, I
have to ask you, Max, I have to ask you
my last question for the day, real talk. Would you
vote to ostracize the quister? I don't know, Man, I
kind of missed the guy. Yeah, yeah, we should just
let him stay. Let's let him stay, all right. Nobody
(36:25):
telling me said that, but yeah, I agreed. We'll see
you next time. Folks. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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