“Those who are set up in a city as the guardians of its liberty cannot receive a more useful and necessary authority than the power to indict citizens before the people or some sort of magistrate or council when they commit any kind of offence against free government….it provides a release for those humours that arise within cities in one way or another against certain citizens, for when these humours have no legal form of release, they resort to illegal means that bring about the ruin of the whole republic.” - Machiavelli [Discourses, I.7]
“The sentence of ostracism was not in itself a punishment for wrongdoing. It was described for the sake of appearances as a measure to humble and curtail a man’s prestige and power in cases where these had grown oppressive; but in reality, it was a humane alleviation of jealousy, which could thus vent its desire to do harm, not by inflicting some irreparable injury, but by a banishment of ten years.” - Plutarch [Life of Aristides, 7.2]
