History is littered with the stories of people who, for a variety of reasons, were cast away from their homes and forced to live in foreign lands. Getting exiled was always a risk in the game of politics. Make the wrong enemy or fall from grace, and men and women who lived public lives could be banished by their opponents to get them out of the way. In the ancient world, many important historical figures were cast out of places like Athens and Rome, where citizens took banishment very seriously. The modern world continues to use exile as a political tool to push out dictators, overthrow governments, and silence inconvenient activists.