The Prisoner’s Dilemma—Ostracism and Competition among Athenian Political Élites

Abstract

AbstractChapter Five offers a tentative interpretation of the original purpose of ostracism in Athens, namely that Athenian ostracism was in fact a mechanism devised to impose compromise on the main political players of the Athenian political life. Once the preliminary vote proved positive, one or another among the powerful political leaders was doomed to banishment and nobody could feel truly safe. Cleisthenes’ idea was to make the leading Athenian politicians to meet backstage and strike a deal before this happens. They only needed to make a unanimous stand against ostracism during the preliminary vote. But to reach a reliable agreement there must have been a minimum of mutuial trust all year long, which must have kept the temperature of the Athenian political life under (some) control. Accordingly, as long as the mechanism was effective, ostrakophoriai were not implemented, because the initial vote was usually negative. It took extremely intransigent and self-assured leaders (such as Themistocles and Pericles) and/or unusually tense situations (such as the external danger of the Persian Wars) to hold one. To support this hypothesis, the author refers to the theory of the ‘evolution of cooperation’ by the American mathematician and political scientist Robert Axelrod based on the ‘iterated prisoner’s dilemma’ in game theory. By introducing the two-stage procedure of ostracism, Cleisthenes put the Athenian political elites in the position we would identify with the ‘iterated prisoner’s dilemma’.