Apart from its other claims to fame, the importance
assigned by Classical Greece to individual achieve-
ment assures it a place among the great ages of
man. There were earlier great ages, but those peri-
ods were dominated for the most part by absolute
rulers of monolithic states; the truly creative indi-
viduals who certainly existed in Egypt, Mesopota-
mia and Anatolia are almost entirely anonymous.
Classical Greece was different. We know the
names of more than 20,000 individuals in Athens
alone, most of them recorded because of their par-
ticipation in civic affairs. Recent excavations in
the heart of Athens have yielded over a thousand
ostraka (the potsherds, or pottery fragments, that
gave their name to the institution of ostracism),
each bearing the name of some outstanding man-
Aristides, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles and many
others. Each ostrakon offers proof that at some
stage in their careers the men were suspected by
their fellow citizens of aiming at tyranny. These
ostraka remind us that the Athenians were ever
mindful of the need to maintain a balance between
personal ambition and the civic interest.
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