Here, the speaker recommends exile to deal with misconduct and avoid cycles of furious vendetta. Exile is useful precisely because it takes the wrongdoer away from the sight of those who are angry. As we shall see, the Athenians often used extremely violent methods of punishment to heal the community and restore its peace, but the idea that punishment heals the community does not necessarily require a turn to violence. The tragedy itself reflects the awareness that the problem of anger can be addressed through words and attempts to restore friendship, as well as exile. How, then, did the Athenians try to restore peace when real tragedies of wrongdoing shook the city? How did the Athenians identify the evildoers, negotiate the question of their desert, and then condemn them? Let me highlight the four issues. The first two are «why» questions. First, we will ask why the Athenians, in the sense of «How come?» punished: «What prompted them to punish and when did they find it necessary to punish?» Second, we will ask another question «why,» not «What triggered the punishment?» but rather, «For what purpose did the Athenians punish?» It is «why» in the sense of «What were their goals in the punishment?» Third, we will ask how the Athenians punished. What processes and procedures did they use to move from identifying (and, in rare cases, punishing a wrongdoer)? And fourth, we will ask what sentences they ultimately imposed on the author. The issue of punishment has always been a troubling moral issue. The problem was not that people disagreed on whether the punishment was justified or not.
Few have completely rejected punishment. The difficulty lies in the justification of punishment: various arguments have been advanced by moral philosophers, but so far none of them has found general acceptance; no justification is without those who abhor it [emphasis added] («Two Concepts of Rules» John Rawls, 37). First, it is important to understand the basic institutional structure of the city. Athenian institutions were not clearly divided into legislative, executive, or judicial ones, as are the institutions of modern democracies. Rather, they were distinguished based on how citizens participated. Citizens gathered en masse in the assembly and in the popular juries, which never had less than 200 members and could have up to 6,000 members. Or they participated as individuals who detained one of the city`s 700 or so magistrates. The great drama of Athenian punishment occurred when individuals persecuted each other and pleaded their arguments (and their views on law, justice and democracy) before their colleagues` jurors (how many times does one of us speak to 500 of our fellow citizens, let alone 1,000 or 6,000?).
But the judges probably did the modest work of punishment in Athens. In the tragedy, the characters regularly invoke anger as the reason for punishment, but they also reiterate the idea that the wrongdoing and its punishment involved the community in some kind of communal disease. This is especially evident in the tales and tales of the myth of the House of Atreus, the story of how King Agamemnon won the Trojan War and returned to his hometown of Argos, only to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who years later was killed by their son Orestes. He is then driven out of the city by the Furies. All versions of this story use the metaphor of illness to describe the effects of misconduct on the various members of a community who participate in a misconduct event and its punishment. The Athenians had two methods of convicting criminals in court. Either the law under which the accused was charged provided for the sentence, or after a conviction, the prosecutor and the accused had to propose a sentence, and the jury, again without discussion, had to vote between the two options. The median-voter theorem (in rational choice theory) states that each participant in the process aims to capture the imagination of the median voter and thus moderate his or her own extreme position in order to win the vote. The prosecutor should propose a sentence that his audience would not find too extreme; The defendant they wouldn`t find too lenient. We see this procedure, called Timesis, in the Apology of Socrates, where Socrates makes a joke about it by offering to punish him with free dinners for life. If Socrates had been willing to abide by the rules and made a serious proposal, what began as a struggle between polar opposites should have become more of an exercise in finding a solution in the middle of the road.