7.5
The archons first counted the total number of ostraka cast. For if the voters were less than six thousand, the ostracism was void. Then they separated the names, and the man who had received the most votes they proclaimed banished for ten years, with the right to enjoy the income from his property. Now at the time of which I was speaking, as the voters were inscribing their ostraka, it is said that an unlettered and utterly boorish fellow handed his ostrakon to Aristides, whom he took to be one of the ordinary crowd, and asked him to write Aristides on it.
7.6
He, astonished, asked the man what possible wrong Aristides had done him. None whatever, was the answer, I don’t even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called The Just. On hearing this, Aristides made no answer, but wrote his name on the ostrakon and handed it back. Finally, as he was departing the city, he lifted up his hands to heaven and prayed—a prayer the opposite, as it seems, of that which Achilles made Hom. Il. 1.407-412 —that no crisis might overtake the Athenians which should compel the people to remember Aristides.
