Question

In ancient athens,what punishment led to to criminals being forced to leave athens for the rest of their lives?

Answer 1

Answer:

Death Row

Explanation:

The primary form of political organisation in the ancient Greek world was the polis (pl. poleis), which is usually translated as ‘city-state’, although this can be slightly misleading because a) most Greek poleis were more like villages than cities by our standards, with populations numbering in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands, and b) we tend to think of the state as something standing above its citizens, whereas to the Greeks, the polis literally was its citizens (politai): ancient Greek writers like Thucydides didn’t write about ‘Athens’ going to war, they wrote about ‘the Athenians’ going to war. Some modern scholars have even suggested ‘citizen-state’ as an alternative translation of polis. Aristotle famously wrote that man* is a ‘political animal’ (Politics 1253a), a politikon zoon, with politikon being an adjective related to polis which in this context means something like ‘one who lives in a polis’ rather than ‘political’ in English. Living in a polis (and this did not necessarily mean within the city’s walls, since each polis had a rural hinterland) was seen as an essential part of human existence: the polis was not just a city and a state, but the fundamental element of human society, the basic unit of civilisation. At home, a Greek’s sense of communal belonging was reinforced by participation in politics, and participation in civic religion – each polis would have its own unique cults and festivals in honour of its gods. Abroad, a Greek would identify himself by reference to his home polis (e.g. ‘Xenophon the Athenian’); it was thus the most important ethnic identifier. If his polis went to war, he would be expected to fight and possibly die for it – the ultimate honour.

So if a Greek was exiled from his polis, not only was he physically expelled from his home city, he was severed from his primary identity, his primary way of defining his place in the world. It’s perhaps comparable to excommunication in the Middle Ages, or to the practice of ‘shunning’ used by some modern religious movements to expel transgressors from the community. Nevertheless, exile was a very common phenomenon. Internal political conflicts occurred frequently, and often a losing political group would find itself exiled by the winners. Voluntary migration was very common, too, the difference of course being that these migrants had the option of returning, whereas those exiled as a punishment generally did not, although there are occasions when political exiles were given amnesties, such as in 324 BC when Alexander the Great decreed that all exiles should be allowed to return home to their respective poleis (whether Alexander had the authority to do this, and whether it was actually obeyed, is another question).