The cook of Menander's Samia utters this comment in response to a tumultuous event taking place inside the house behind him. While the cook himself is in the dark on the specifics of the event, the audience, who has just witnessed an angry monologue from the Athenian citizen Demeas, knows that he is ejecting his concubine—Chrysis—from his house. Overtly, the cook brings much-needed comic relief to the situation by worrying about his cookware as Demeas forces destitution on Chrysis.Footnote ² Below I propose a second meaning to the phrase playing on the multiple interpretations of the word ὄστρακα.

In addition to reflecting the cook's concern about his pots and pans, the comment also alludes to the institution of ostracism, in which the assembly votes to eject a citizen from the polis, using broken pieces of pottery—ostraka—as ballots.Footnote ³ The phrase ‘making pots ostraka’ encourages the audience to reimagine the destruction of the pans as a political act of creating the necessary voting sherds for the ostracism of Chrysis. Through the double meaning of the ostraka, Menander humorously reframes Demeas’ personal act of ejecting Chrysis from his household in political terms.

Such humour—in which characters talk about comic domestic events in terms suitable for different (and often more elevated) situations—has parallels in the Menandrian corpus. In the Perikeiromene (467–81) Polemon besieges his romantic rival's house and acts as if he is sacking a city. His slave Sosias even employs the language of siege (πολιορκίαν, 483). Earlier in the same play, Moschion, in considering a reward for his slave Daos, who claims to have secured for him a romantic relationship, proposes to appoint him προστάτην … πραγμάτων Ἑλληνικῶν | καὶ διοικητὴν στρατοπέδων (‘minister of Greek affairs and treasurer of the armies’, 279–80)—an exaggerated and impossible promise.Footnote ⁴ The cook in the Dyskolos acts as if the misfortunes of his nemesis, Knemon, stem from the gods themselves (639–47). Earlier in the Samia, Demeas describes his own domestic woes using tragic language.Footnote ⁵ The expression in which the house replaces the agora as the site of ostracism fits into a Menandrian pattern of humour in which a comic domestic calamity, for a moment, takes on a political, martial, or tragic hue.

For the above interpretation to resonate with the audience, ostracism must have possessed enough cultural relevance in the late fourth century for some of Menander's audience to associate the mention of ostraka with the institution. At first, this scenario seems unlikely as it had been approximately a century since the last ostracism had taken place.Footnote ⁶ The Athenaiōn Politeia, however, provides near-conclusive evidence that ostracism still maintained a presence, even if significantly diminished since the fifth century, in Athenian politics. Just before the passage on ostracism, the author makes it clear that he is describing institutions as they exist in his own time (ἔχει δ’ ἡ νῦν κατάστασις τῆς πολιτείας τόνδε τὸν τρόπον, ‘the constitution is now arranged in this fashion’, Ath. Pol. 42.1).Footnote ⁷ In the section on the contemporary structure of government that follows, the text clarifies that a preliminary vote on ostracism still occurs every year in the sixth prytany (περὶ τῆς ὀστρακοφορίας ἐπιχειροτονίαν διδόασιν, εἰ δοκεῖ ποιεῖν ἢ μή, Ath. Pol. 43.5). While there exists a debate concerning the history and nature of ostracism from 415 until the date of the Athenaiōn Politeia, scholars almost unanimously agree that the Athenians held a preliminary vote well into the late fourth century.Footnote ⁸ Nor does the fact that the preliminary vote in Menander's time never succeeded in bringing about an official ostracism preclude a reference to it in one of his plays. The Athenaiōn Politeia shows that some Athenian citizens—certainly very recently before Menander's career and probably during part of his career—interacted with the institution on a yearly basis, if only to reject its usage. We have no reason to doubt that a large swath of Menander's audience would get the joke.

The ostracism reference might shed light on two issues—the political nature of Menander's plays and the end of the institution of ostracism. The date for the final dissolution of even the preliminary ostracism vote remains somewhat elusive. In a close analysis of a fragment from Theophrastus’ Nomoi (frr. 18a–b Szegedy-Maszak), Heftner makes a convincing argument that ostracism saw its final demise sometime after the fallout from the Lamian War in 322 and perhaps during the reign of Demetrius of Phalerum, sometime between 317 and 307.Footnote ⁹ Heftner contends that Theophrastus’ description of the end of ostracism only makes sense if the initial vote was no longer taken (fr. 18a Szegedy-Maszak):

While Theophrastus and the scholium to Lucian's Timon 30 quoting or paraphrasing him are referring to the ostracism of Hyperbolus, the aorist passive (κατελύθη) seems unlikely to refer to an institution that still had a preliminary vote (and thus a chance of enactment) in the philosopher's own day. As Heftner also notes, a fragment from Philochorus (FGrHist 328 F 30, early third century) uses phrasing (κατελύθη τὸ ἔθος) similar to that of Theophrastus when referring to the decline of ostracism.Footnote ¹¹ The shift in language between Aristotle on the one hand and Theophrastus and Philochorus on the other likely points to a legal shift in ostracism. This conjecture puts the dissolution of ostracism somewhere between the composition of the Athenaiōn Politeia in the 330s or 320s and that of the Nomoi, which Szegedy-Maszak hesitantly proposes occurred during Demetrius' reign.Footnote ¹²

While Samia has no certain date, internal evidence points to a production early in Demetrius’ regime.Footnote ¹³ Might Menander's mention of ostracism nod to its recent total abolition—either by Demetrius himself or by his oligarchic predecessors who ruled after 322? In two scenes leading up to the ejection of Chrysis, Demeas delivers monologues that resemble forensic speeches, even addressing the crowd as though they are a jury in each scene (ἄνδρες, 269, 329).Footnote ¹⁴ The spectators themselves know that Demeas is unjustly judging Chrysis based on incomplete information about the paternity of the baby. The first speech (206–82) features an extensive narrative in which he comes to all the wrong conclusions, the second (324–56) his rash reaction to these conclusions and thus the decision to expel Chrysis. The joke, then, places Demeas as the misinformed and unjust initiator of ostracism, colouring the institution as one ripe for abuse through rash action and bad deliberation. Thus the reference offers implied support for ostracism's abolition and, as a result, hints at Menander's pro-Macedonian leanings.Footnote ¹⁵

The joke, the dating of the play, and previous scholarship on Menander's pro-Macedonian leanings all fit perfectly with Heftner's theory about the abolition of ostracism. Furthermore, as Arnott has demonstrated, the Samia has more references to contemporary political events than any other surviving Menandrian play, including a nod to a piece of Demetrius’ legislation—the abolition of the chorēgia (13).Footnote ¹⁶ Nor is the Samia the only play in which Menander addresses recent oligarchic legislation. A fragment of the Kekryphalos (fr. 208 K.–A.) references the Demetrian sumptuary laws as well as their enforcers (the γυναικονόμοι).Footnote ¹⁷ Despite existing uncertainty, the revelation of an ostracism joke in Menander adds fresh detail to the ever-expanding picture of the historical, political and literary contours of his plays.