Citizenship in Antiquity: Civic Communities in the Ancient Mediterranean (Rewriting Antiquity) [1 ed.] 9780367687113, 9780367687120, 9781003138730, 0367687119

Citation preview

CITIZENSHIP IN ANTIQUITY Citizenship in Antiquity brings together scholars working on the multifaceted and changing dimensions of citizenship in the ancient Mediterranean, from the second millennium BCE to the first millennium CE, adopting a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective. The chapters in this volume cover numerous periods and r­ egions – from ​­​­​­ the Ancient Near East, through the Greek and Hellenistic worlds and ­­pre-​­​­​­Roman North Africa, to the Roman Empire and its continuations, and with excursuses to modernity. The contributors to this book adopt various contemporary theories, demonstrating the manifold meanings and ways of defining the concept and practices of citizenship and belonging in ancient societies and, in turn, of ­­non-​­​­​­citizenship and ­­non-​­​­​­b elonging. Whether citizenship was defined by territorial belonging or blood descent, by privileged or exclusive access to resources or participation in communal ­­decision-​­​­​­making, or by a sense of group belonging, such identifications were also open to discursive redefinitions and manipulation. Citizenship and belonging, as well as ­­non-​­​­​ ­citizenship and ­­non-​­​­​­belonging, had many shades and degrees; citizenship could be bought or faked, or even removed. By casting light on different areas of the Mediterranean over the course of antiquity, the volume seeks to explore this multi-​­​­​­ ­­ layered notion of citizenship and contribute to an ongoing and relevant discourse. Citizenship in Antiquity offers a ­­wide-​­​­​­ranging, comprehensive collection suitable for students and scholars of citizenship, politics, and society in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as those working on citizenship throughout history interested in taking a comparative approach. Jakub Filonik is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He has published on Athenian oratory, Greek law, political metaphors, and liberty ancient and modern; ­­co-​­​­​­edited special issues on ancient identities (­­Polis; The European Legacy) and a volume The Making of Identities in Athenian Oratory (­­Routledge). Jakub translated selected Athenian speeches into Polish (­­with commentary). He is currently working on monographs focussed around the rhetoric of freedom in classical Athens and Greek political metaphors. Christine Plastow is a Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University, UK. Her research interests fall into two main areas: ­­practice-­​­­­​­­​­­­as-​­​­​­research work on modern adaptations of Greek tragedy and myth (­­with By Jove Theatre Company), and the study of the rhetoric, law, and social history of Athenian forensic oratory. Her book Homicide in the Attic Orators was published by Routledge in 2020. Rachel ­­Zelnick-​­​­​­Abramovitz is a retired Professor at the Department of Classics, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research covers slavery and other non-​­​­​­ ­­ citizen groups in the Greek polis; the shifting lines between the private and public spheres in the Greek polis; Greek historiography; Greek drama; and rhetoric. She is the author of Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (­­2005), Taxing Freedom in Thessalian Manumission Inscriptions (­­2013), and articles on these subjects, published in journals and edited collections. She ­­co-​­​­​­edited Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama (­­2021) and translated Herodotus into Hebrew. Her current research project, funded by the Israel Academy of Sciences, is the verbs of speaking (­­verba dicendi) used by Greek historians to describe their own and their characters’ historiographical activity.

REWRITING ANTIQUITY

Rewriting Antiquity provides a platform to examine major themes of the ancient world in a broad, holistic, and inclusive fashion. Coverage is broad in both time and space, allowing a full appreciation of the selected topic rather than an exclusive view bound by a relatively short timescale and place. Each volume examines a key theme from the Ancient Near East to Late Antiquity, and often beyond, to break down the boundaries habitually created by focussing on one region or time period. Volumes within the series highlight the latest research, current developments, and innovative approaches, situating these within existing scholarship. Individual case studies and analysis held within sections build to form a comprehensive and comparative overview of the subject, enabling readers to view matters in the round and establish interconnections and resonance across a wide spectrum. In this way, the volumes allow new directions of study to be defined and provide differing perspectives to stimulate fresh approaches to the theme examined. CHILDREN IN ANTIQUITY Perspectives and Experiences of Childhood in the Ancient Mediterranean Edited by Lesley A. Beaumont, Matthew Dillon, and Nicola Harrington ESCHATOLOGY IN ANTIQUITY Forms and Functions Edited by Hilary Marlow, Karla Pollmann, and Helen Van Noorden CITIZENSHIP IN ANTIQUITY Civic Communities in the Ancient Mediterranean Edited by Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel ­­Zelnick-​­​­​­Abramovitz

https://­­w ww.routledge.com/­­­­Rewriting-​­​­​­A ntiquity/­­­­book-​­​­​­series/­­REWRITEANT

CITIZENSHIP IN ANTIQUITY Civic Communities in the Ancient Mediterranean

Edited by Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz

Cover image: Detail of the Constitutio Antoniniana, Universitätsbibliothek Gießen, P.Giss. 40. Used with kind permission. First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel ­­Z elnick-​­​­​­Abramovitz; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel ­­Zelnick-​­​­​ A ­ bramovitz to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library ­­C ataloguing-­​­­­​­­​­­­in-​­​­​­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress ­­C ataloging-­​­­­​­­​­­­in-​­​­​­Publication Data Names: Filonik, Jakub, editor. | Plastow, Christine, editor. | Zelnick-Abramovitz, Rachel, editor. Title: Citizenship in antiquity: civic communities in the ancient Mediterranean / Edited by Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Rewriting antiquity | Identifiers: LCCN 2022044477 (print) | LCCN 2022044478 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367687113 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367687120 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003138730 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Citizenship—Mediterranean Region—History. | Political culture—Mediterranean Region—History. | Belonging (Social psychology)—Mediterranean Region. | Community development—Mediterranean Region—History. | Mediterranean Region—Civilization. Classification: LCC JF801 .C48255 2023 (print) | LCC JF801 (ebook) | DDC 323.609182/2—dc23/eng/20221230 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044477 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044478 ISBN: ­­978-­​­­­​­­​­­­0 -­​­­­​­­​­­­367-­​­­­​­­​­­­68711-​­​­​­3 (­­hbk) ISBN: ­­978-­​­­­​­­​­­­0 -­​­­­​­­​­­­367-­​­­­​­­​­­­68712-​­​­​­0 (­­pbk) ISBN: ­­978-­​­­­​­­​­­­1-­​­­­​­­​­­­0 03-­​­­­​­­​­­­13873-​­​­​­0 (­­ebk) DOI: 10.4324/­­9781003138730 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of figures x List of tables xi List of abbreviations xii Notes on contributors xiv 1 Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz

1

PART I

Theory of citizenship

23

2 Exploring citizenship(­s) in context(­s): anthropological perspectives Catherine Neveu

25

3 Greek citizenship P.J. Rhodes

36

4 Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece: the other language of citizenship Alain Duplouy 5 Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson Markus Sehlmeyer

v

48 64

Contents PART II

The Ancient Near East

79

6 Citizens and ­non-​­citizens in the age of Hammurabi Eva von Dassow

81

7 Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia N. İlgi Gerçek

98

8 The evolution of citizen councils and assemblies in ancient Phoenicia Mark Woolmer 9 ­Neo-​­Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context Shai Gordin

111

125

PART III

The Greek world 143 SECTION I

Archaic and classical Greece 145 10 The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: city founders and reformers Irad Malkin

147

11 ‘­Citizens’ and ‘­others’ in archaic and early classical Crete Gunnar Seelentag

165

12 Spartan oliganthrōpia and homoioi 179 Ryszard Kulesza 13 Exile and conflicting identities in archaic and early classical Greece Katarzyna Kostecka

184

14 Granting citizenship to women in ancient Epirus Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli

198

15 Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos Ryszard Kulesza

209

16 Civic subdivisions and the citizen community Roger Brock

226

vi

Contents

17 The language of citizenship in Herodotus and Thucydides Stefano Frullini

240

18 Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship Bartłomiej Bednarek

250

19 Sharing in the polis: conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship Jakub Filonik

264

SECTION II

Classical Athens 281 20 The citizen body Chris Carey

283

21 Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens Fayah Haussker

296

22 Polis and oikos: citizenship and family membership in classical Athens 312 Brenda ­G riffith-​­Williams 23 Identity, status, and ‘­dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens? 327 Linda Rocchi 24 Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens? 342 Christopher Joyce 25 Places of citizenship in Athenian forensic oratory Christine Plastow

355

26 Citizenship anxieties: the Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/­345 BCE Nick Fisher

369

27 Appeals to associations and claims to citizenship in Athenian oratory 387 James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri 28 ‘­He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘­birther’ attack in classical Athens Brad L. Cook

400

29 Darkest hour: Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea 414 Janek Kucharski vii

Contents PART IV

The Hellenistic world

427

30 Citizenship in the Hellenistic period Susanne Carlsson

429

31 Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean Randall Souza

443

32 Citizenship, identification, and the metic experience in classical and early Hellenistic Greece Christian A. Thomsen 33 Hellenistic Egypt and the hybridization of ‘­citizenship’ Patrick Sänger

461 473

34 The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis 487 Christel Müller PART V

Between and beyond Greece and Rome 503 35 Citizens and citizenship in ­pre-​­Roman Carthage Dexter Hoyos

505

36 Manumission and citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello

519

37 Jewishness as ‘­citizenship’ in Jewish writings from the Hellenistic and Roman periods Katell Berthelot

533

38 Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor Lucia Cecchet

548

39 The Greeks and the right of Roman citizenship in the late Republic Andrea Raggi

564

PART VI

Rome and the Roman world

575

40 Politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies Guy Bradley

577

viii

Contents

41 Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of Roman citizenship (­­387–​­91 BCE) Roman Roth 42 Religion and citizenship in Republican Rome Craige B. Champion 43 Census, censor, citizenship: Republican subjectivity in advance of monarchy Clifford Ando

589 604

616

44 Citizenship in the Roman provinces: the example of Africa Martyna Świerk

627

45 Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE Maria Nowak

639

46 Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE Arnaud Besson

652

PART VII

Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

667

47 The uses of citizenship in the ­post-​­Roman West Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

669

48 Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom in the Latin West Els Rose 49 Citizenship and belonging: A view from Byzantium Dion C. Smythe

691 707

Index 715

ix

FIGURES

9.1 Location of Babylonian cities and main ­r ivers – ​­Euphrates and Tigris – ​ ­and related canals in the first millennium BCE 126 10.1 Greek, Phoenician, and Etruscan settlements 148 27.1 The interconnections of the three ranks of associations 388 390 27.2 Appeals to associations by primary purpose 31.1 Greek and Phoenician settlements in the Western Mediterranean 444 47.1 Map of Europe in the 480s CE 673 47.2 Map of Europe in the 620s CE 677 48.1 MS Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek MSc.Lit.1, f. 170r. 693

x

TABLES

41.1 Chronological distribution of censorial colleges and the formation of rural tribus

xi

596

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations of Greek and Latin authors and titles in this volume follow the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edn. The list can be found in printed editions and online: https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/page/abbreviations Abbreviations of classical journals follow L’Année Philologique. Abbreviations specific to individual chapters are listed at the beginning of their bibliographies. A list of epigraphic collections with their respective abbreviations can be found at the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG) Online and Packard Humanities ­Institute (PHI) websites: https://scholarlyeditions.brill.com/sego/abbreviations/ https://epigraphy.packhum.org/biblio.html AIO and AIUK refer to translations of Attic inscriptions, available online: https://­­w ww.atticinscriptions.com/ For ­­papyri-​­​­​­related abbreviations, see https://­­w ww.papyri.info/ Additional general abbreviations commonly used in this volume: 0000x edition number (­­e.g., 20223 = published in 2022, edition 3), cf. ‘­­edn’ below ad locum (‘­­to the place’, used to refer to a passage/­­line mentioned) ad loc. ap. apud (‘­­at’, used for the original location of the reference) ca circa (­­around, approximately) cf. confer (­­compare) ed. / eds editor/­­s edn edition (­­number) e.g. exempli gratia (­­for example) esp. especially et al. et alii/­­ae (­­and others) Fig. figure fr. / frg. / frag. / F fragment ibidem (­­in the same place [work]) ibid. xii

Abbreviations

id. / ead. / eid. idem / eadem / eidem (­­the same author/­­s as just mentioned) i.e. id est (­­that is) l. / ll. line(­­s) n. note nota bene (­­note, pay attention) NB / n.b. no. / nos number/­­s opere citato (­­in the work cited) op. cit. pl. / plur. plural ps.-​­​­​­ ­­pseudo-​­​­​­ repr. reprinted scilicet (­­that is to say, clearly) sc. / scil. schol. (­­ad) / Σ scholion (­­to) sg. singular Suppl. Supplement sub verbo (‘­­under the word’, under the heading) s.v. trans. / transl. translation, translated by viz. videlicet (­­namely, in other words) vol. volume versus (­­against, in opposition to) vs

xiii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Clifford Ando is David B. and Clara E. Stern Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Classics and History at the University of Chicago. His work focusses on the history of law, religion, and government in the Roman world. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including Roman Social Imaginaries (­­University of Toronto Press, 2015) and, with Myles Lavan, Roman and Local Citizenship in the Long Second Century (­­Oxford University Press, 2021). Bartłomiej Bednarek received his PhD (­­2015) in Classics from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Since 2016, he has worked at the Institute of History, University of Warsaw. He has published on Greek religion (­­especially sacrifice) and mythology (­­of Dionysus and his enemies), literature and theatre, gender and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. Katell Berthelot  is a historian of Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman period and a CNRS Professor within the University of ­­Aix-​­​­​­Marseille, France. She first worked on accusations of misanthropy against the Jews in the ­­Greco-​­​­​­Roman world and on the Jewish responses to these charges. In 2018, she published In Search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean Dynasty between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy (­­Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), which analyzes Hasmonean rule in light of biblical and Hellenistic models of war and kingship. In ­­2014–​­​­​­2019, she coordinated a programme on the political and religious challenge posed by the Roman Empire to Jews and Jewish thought in the first centuries CE (­­w ww.­­judaism-­​­­­​­­​­­­and-​­​­​­rome.org), funded by the European Research Council (­­ERC). Her last monograph, Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel (­­Princeton University Press, 2021) won the National Jewish Book Award in the category ‘­­Scholarship’ in 2021. Arnaud Besson  is a Roman historian. He got his PhD from Neuchâtel University (­­Switzerland) and was a member of the Swiss Institute in Rome. He conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, the American School for Classical Studies at Athens and the École française d’Athènes. He is now pursuing his career at Geneva University.

xiv

Notes on contributors

Guy Bradley is Professor of Roman and Early Italian History at Cardiff University. His research centres on Rome in the Republican period and on ancient Italy before and after the Roman conquest. He has particular interests in the ethnicity of the ancient Italian peoples, Latin and Roman colonization, and the history and archaeology of early Rome. Roger Brock is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Leeds. He has published extensively on Greek political history, especially citizenship and political thought; he is ­­co-​­​­​­editor, with Stephen Hodkinson, of Alternatives to Athens (­­Oxford 2000) and, with Alain Duplouy, of Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece (­­Oxford 2018). Chris Carey is Emeritus Professor of Greek at UCL and has also taught at Cambridge, St Andrews, University of Minnesota, Carleton College, and Royal Holloway. He has published on Greek epic, lyric, drama, oratory, law, history and historiography, and Hellenistic poetry. Susanne Carlsson received her PhD in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University in 2005 for a dissertation on Hellenistic democracies. She has been active at Stockholm University as a senior lecturer, and at Uppsala University as a researcher, senior lecturer, Director of Studies, Head of Department, and as one of the research leaders for the Faculty of Art’s investment in the interdisciplinary research nodes The Good City and Urban and Rural Mind, aimed at senior researchers, doctoral students, and masters students. The nodes focussed on comparative, thematic studies of different aspects of urbanity over time and space. Other research areas of interest concern sexuality and intersectionality. Lucia Cecchet is a Senior Lecturer in Greek History at the University of Milan, Italy. Her research interests focus on poverty and poverty discourses in Greek antiquity and on Greek citizenship from the classical to the imperial period. She is the author of Poverty in Athenian Public Discourse (­­2015) and ­­co-​­​­​­editor (­­w ith A. Busetto) of Citizens in the ­­G raeco-​­​­​­Roman World (­­2017) and (­­with Ch. Degelmann and M. Patzelt) of The Ancient War’s Impact on the Home Front (­­2019). Craige B. Champion teaches ancient history and classics at Syracuse University. He is the author of Cultural Politics in Polybius’s Histories (­­California, 2004) and The Peace of the Gods: Elite Religious Practices in the Middle Roman Republic (­­Princeton, 2017); editor of Roman Imperialism: Readings and Sources (­­Oxford, 2004); a founding general editor of ­­Wiley-​­​­​­Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Ancient History; and ­­editor-­​­­­​­­​­­­in-​­​­​­chief and ­­co-​­​­​ ­translator of the forthcoming Landmark Edition of Polybius’ Histories. Brad L. Cook  is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Mississippi. He writes variously on ancient biographical traditions, for example, ‘­­The essential Philip’ (­­GRBS 2005), ‘­­A watery folktale in the Alexander Romance’ (­­SyllClass 2009), and ‘­­Petrarch’s reading of Cicero’s letters’ (­­C&M 2012), with ongoing focus on Demosthenes, for example, ‘­­Athenian terms of civic praise in the 330s B.C.’ (­­GRBS 2009), ‘­­­­Swift-​­​­​ ­boating in antiquity’ (­­R hetorica 2012), ‘­­Family portraits in Demosthenes’ inheritance speeches: between rhetoric  & history’ (­­forthcoming), and a chapter in The Oxford

xv

Notes on contributors

Handbook of Demosthenes (­­2019) on the ancient and Byzantine biographies of Demosthenes, about which a ­­book-​­​­​­length study is nearing completion. Eva von Dassow teaches the history of the Ancient Near East at the University of Min­­ Hittite Song nesota. Her research includes studies of Mittani and its empire, the Hurro-​­​­​­ of Liberation, writing as an interface between languages, citizenship in Late Bronze Age polities, and participatory governance in ancient Near Eastern societies. ­­ Alain Duplouy is a Reader in Greek archaeology at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-​­​­​ ­ orbonne. He was a British Academy visiting scholar at the University of Leeds, S Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, senior fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, and Alliance visiting Professor at Columbia University. He has directed archaeological fieldwork programmes in Greece (­­Itanos) and Italy (­­Laos and now Pietragalla) and has published extensively on elites ­­ Classical Greece. He is the author of Le Prestige des élites (­­Les and citizenship in pre-​­​­​­ Belles Lettres, 2006) and Construire la cité (­­Les Belles Lettres, 2019), and has edited several collective volumes: Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece (­­OUP, 2018, with R. Brock), La Lucanie entre deux mers (­­Centre J. Bérard, 2019, with O. de Cazanove), and Attica from the Late Bronze Age to the End of the Archaic Period (­­SAIA, 2023, with N. Arvanitis). Ferdinando Ferraioli (­­PhD in Classics, University of Salerno; PhD in Ancient History, Université du Maine, Le Mans) obtained a ­­one-​­​­​­year fellowship in Greek History at the University of Salerno and then a three-​­​­​­ ­­ year fellowship in Greek history at the University of Naples ‘­­L’Orientale’. He is the author of two monographs (­­L’hekatostys: analisi della documentazione, Tivoli (­­Roma) 2012, and Un’ area di confine: la Bitinia dall’età arcaica all’ età ellenistica, Oxford 2022) and has the following research interests: Greek institutional history, Megarian colonization, writings of Aristotle’s school and Bithynia from the archaic age to the Hellenistic age. Jakub Filonik is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He has published on Athenian oratory, Greek law, political metaphors, and liberty ancient and modern; ­­co-​­​­​­edited special issues on ancient identities (­­Polis; The European Legacy) and a volume The Making of Identities in Athenian Oratory (­­Routledge); and translated selected Athenian speeches into Polish (­­with commentary). He is currently working on monographs focussed around the rhetoric of freedom in classical Athens and Greek political metaphors. Nick Fisher is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Cardiff University. His recent publications include Aeschines, Against Timarchos, Translated, with Introduction and Commentary (­­2001), jointly edited volumes (­­with Hans van Wees), Competition in the Ancient World (­­2011), and ‘­­Aristocracy’ in Antiquity (­­2015); a collection of papers on charis and social cohesion in Greek society; and articles on emotions in Greek rhetoric and tragedy, sexuality and athletics, and friendships in the Iliad. Robert Flierman is an Assistant Professor in Medieval Latin at Utrecht University. He has published a monograph on the continental Saxons in the early Middle Ages: Saxon Identities AD ­­150–​­​­​­9 00 (­­London: Bloomsbury, 2017) and worked as a postdoc in the xvi

Notes on contributors

NWO VICI Project ‘­­Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, ­­400–​­​­​­1100’. He is currently heading his own NWO VIDI project on the pragmatics of medieval letter delivery, titled ‘­­Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe’. Stefano Frullini has recently completed a PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge. His thesis was an ­­in-​­​­​­depth study of the nature and development of democratic institutions in the Peloponnese between the sixth and the second centuries BCE. He is currently studying to become a solicitor. N. İlgi Gerçek is an Assistant Professor in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and History at the Department of Archaeology, Bilkent University. She holds a BA in Archaeology and History of Art from Bilkent University, and she obtained her MA and PhD in Hittite and Mesopotamian Studies from the University of Michigan. She is mainly interested in the social and political history of Anatolia and neighbouring regions in the Late Bronze Age and has written on imperialism, frontiers, identity, mobility, and religion in Hittite Anatolia. She is ­­co-​­​­​­director of the İstanbul Sippar Project, which involves the cataloguing and publication of the cuneiform documents from ancient Sippar, housed in the İstanbul Archaeological Museums. Shai Gordin is an Assyriologist and historian of the Ancient Near East. He is also a digital humanist and founding director of the Digital Pasts Lab. Shai has published on the cuneiform scribal culture of the Hittite Empire, on Babylonian economy, cult, and history, and on the use of artificial intelligence algorithms for the study of cuneiform and the Akkadian language. He is the PI of the Babylonian Engine and MAPA projects. Brenda ­­Griffith-​­​­​­Williams, Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Greek and Latin, University College London, specializes in Athenian inheritance law. She has published A Commentary on Selected Speeches of Isaios (­­Brill, 2013) and several articles on Athenian law and rhetoric. She is ­­co-​­​­​­editor, with Chris Carey and Ifigeneia Giannadaki, of Use and Abuse of Law in the Athenian Courts (­­Brill, 2018) and, with Jakub Filonik and Janek Kucharski, of The Making of Identities in Athenian Oratory (­­Routledge, 2020). Her latest book (­­in the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series) is Greek Orators VIII: Isaeus Orations 1, 2, 4 and 6: Liverpool University Press, October 2022. Edward M. Harris is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at Durham University and a Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens (­­Cambridge) and The Rule of Law in Action in ­Democratic Athens (­­Oxford). He has ­­co-​­​­​­edited The Ancient Greek Economy (­­Cambridge), Skilled Labour and Professionalism in Ancient Greece and Rome (­­Cambridge), and The ­Destruction of Cities in the Ancient Greek World (­­Cambridge). Fayah Haussker  (­­PhD) teaches ancient Greek and Latin languages and literature (­­mainly epic and tragedy) at the Department of Classics at Tel Aviv University and ancient history at the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic studies at the Open University of Israel. Her recent publications focus on the ­­socio-​­​­​­cultural history of childhood and youth in archaic and classical Greece. xvii

Notes on contributors

Dexter Hoyos is a retired Associate Professor in Latin and Roman history at Sydney University, Australia. He has written studies of Hannibal (­­Hannibal’s Dynasty; Hannibal: Rome’s Greatest Enemy), the Punic Wars (­­Unplanned Wars; Mastering the West), Roman imperialism (­­Rome Victorious: The Irresistible Rise of the Roman Empire), and Carthage’s history and civilization (­­Truceless War; The Carthaginians; Carthage’s Other Wars; Carthage: A Biography). He edited the Wiley Blackwell Companions to the Punic Wars and Roman Imperialism, and he has collaborated with J.C. Yardley on two Oxford World’s Classics translations of Livy (­­Hannibal’s War, Books 21 to 30; Rome’s Italian Wars, Books ­­6 –​­​­​­10) and the ongoing Loeb Classical Library’s editions of Livy’s Books ­­21–​­​­​­40. He has also written Latin: How to Read It Fluently (­­1997). His other enthusiasms include family, coffee, landscape, and symphonies. Christopher Joyce was an Exhibitioner at Worcester College, Oxford, where he took an undergraduate degree in Literae Humaniores (­­1994). He completed an MA in Classics at the University of California at Berkeley (­­1996) and a PhD in Classics at Durham University (­­2002). Since then, he has worked mainly in the secondary sector and has published a range of scholarly articles and chapters on Greek legal, constitutional, and social history. His forthcoming monograph, titled Amnesty and Reconciliation in Late ­­Fifth-​­​­​ ­Century Athens: The Rule of Law under Restored Democracy, appeared in October 2022 through Edinburgh University Press. He is presently the Head of Classics at The Haberdashers’ Boys’ School in Elstree. James Kierstead is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, where he teaches Greek, Latin, and various topics within Classical Studies as broadly conceived. His research focusses mainly on ancient Greek democracy, and he has published a number of papers and reviews in the areas of Greek (­­especially Athenian) ­h istory, literature, and political thought. His book manuscript Associations and ­Democracy in Classical Athens is currently under review with Edinburgh University Press. Katarzyna Kostecka is a PhD student in Ancient History at the University of Warsaw. She is interested in the questions of mobility, identity, and religion in ancient Greece. She is the principal investigator of the NCN Preludium Grant ‘­­Mythical genealogies of aristocratic families in archaic and classical Greece’. Janek Kucharski is an Associate Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. His main research interests are classical Greek oratory and Athenian tragedy, though he has also published on Homer, ancient rituals, and the reception of antiquity in Byzantium. He is the author and co-​­​­​­ ­­ author of annotated Polish translations of Hyperides, Antiphon, and Dinarchus, as well as several papers dealing with the ­­above-​­​­​­mentioned subjects. Ryszard Kulesza is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Warsaw. His research has focussed on Athenian democracy, history of Sparta, and Spartan reception. He is the author of Die Bestechung im politischen Leben Athens im 5. und 4. Jahrhundert v.Chr. (­­Konstanz 1995); Studies in Greek History (­­Warsaw 2017); Sparta: History, State and Society (­­Berlin 2022), and ­­co-​­​­​­editor (­­w ith Nicholas Sekunda) of Studies on ancient Sparta, Akanthina series No. 14 (­­Gdańsk 2020).

xviii

Notes on contributors

Sofia Letteri is currently completing her Master’s degree in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington. She is primarily interested in Greek literature and the society that produced it, as well as the reception and translation of this literature. Her Master’s dissertation focusses on the fragmentary Homeric ­­mock-​­​­​­epic The War of the Weasel and Mice. Irad Malkin is the Israel Prize Laureate for History for 2014 and a Foreign Member of the Athens National Academy. He is Professor emeritus of Greek history at Tel Aviv University, a Visiting Professor at Oxford University (­­­­2017–​­​­​­2026), and a ­­co-​­​­​­founder and ­­co-​­​­​­editor of the Mediterranean Historical Review (­­­­1986–​­​­​2019). His research covers colonization, religion, myth, ethnicity, network theory, and the institution of drawing lots. Aside from edited books, he is the author of Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (­­1987); Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (­­1994; French: 1999); The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (­­1998; Italian, Hebrew: 2004); Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Greece (­­Hebrew: 2003); A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (­­2011; French: 2018; Greek forthcoming); and From Egalitarianism to Democracy: Drawing Lots in Ancient Greece (­­with a section by Josine Blok), accompanied by https://­­kleros.org.il/. Javier Martínez Jiménez  is a classical archaeologist specialized in late antique and early medieval Spain, and currently a María Zambrano postdoctoral researcher at the University of Granada. He began his research on ­­post-​­​­​­Roman citizenships and local identities while a member of the ERC ‘­­Impact of the Ancient City’ Project at Cambridge. Christel Müller is Professor of Greek History at Paris Nanterre University and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has extensively published not only on Greek cities, institutions, and citizenship in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but also on Boeotia and the Black Sea. She is the author of D’Olbia à Tanaïs: Territoires et réseaux d’échanges dans la Mer Noire septentrionale aux époques classique et hellénistique (­­2010), and the ­­co-​­​­​­editor of Les Italiens dans le monde grec (­­2002), Citoyenneté et participation à la basse époque hellénistique (­­2005), Identité ethnique et culture matérielle dans le monde grec (­­2014), Transitions historiques (­­2016), Statuts personnels et espaces sociaux (­­2018), Philorhômaios kai philhellèn. Hommages à ­­Jean-​­​­​­L ouis Ferrary (­­2019), La Béotie de l’archaïsme à l’époque romaine: frontières, territoires, paysages (­­2019), and De Mithridate VI à Arrien de Nicomédie: changements et continuités dans le bassin de la mer Noire entre le Ier s. a.C. et le Ier s. p.C. (­2023). Catherine Neveu  is a social anthropologist, senior researcher in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique (­­­­CNRS-​­​­​­EHESS), and chair of the GIS Participation and Democracy scientific committee. She has been working for many years on a political anthropology of citizenship processes and ordinary forms of politicization. Maria Nowak is Assistant Professor of Roman Law at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests concern history of law and legal practice in Greco-​­​­​­ ­­ Roman Egypt, especially testamentary practice, status and family, and late antique archives of Aphrodito and Western Thebes.

xix

Notes on contributors

Christine Plastow is a Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University, UK. Her research interests fall into two main areas: ­­practice-­​­­­​­­​­­­as-​­​­​­research work on modern adaptations of Greek tragedy and myth (­­with By Jove Theatre Company), and the study of the rhetoric, law, and social history of Athenian forensic oratory. Her book Homicide in the Attic Orators was published by Routledge in 2020. Andrea Raggi,  PhD University of Pisa, is currently Associate Professor of Roman History at the Department of ‘­­Civiltà e Forme del Sapere’, Pisa. He was a Visiting Graduate Student at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Fergus Millar, and a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Classics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. He has published about 80 articles in ­­p eer-​­​­​­reviewed journals and volumes; he is the author of Seleuco di Rhosos. Cittadinanza e privilegi nell’Oriente greco in età ­­tardo-​­​­​­repubblicana (­­2006), a book which was awarded the silver medal at the ‘­­VII Gérard Boulvert International Prize in Roman Law 2007’, and Senatus consultum de Plarasensibus et Aphrodisiensibus del 39 a.C. (­­2020) (­­together with Pierangelo Buongiorno). His research focusses on the political history of the late Roman Republic; the spread of the Roman citizenship; and the administrative history of the Roman Empire. He teaches Roman History, Latin Epigraphy, and Juridical Epigraphy. P.J. Rhodes (­­­­1940–​­​­​­2021) was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Durham and a member of the British Academy (­­since 1987). His inspiring research and publications focussed on ancient Greek politics and political institutions. In 2005, he was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy; he became a Fellow of Fondazione Lorenzo Valla in 2010; in 2015, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal by the University of Durham. Rhodes was the author of numerous books and scholarly articles. His most influential books are: The Athenian Boule, 1972 (­­rev. 1985); A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia, 1981 (­­rev. 1993); (­­with R. Osborne) Greek Historical Inscriptions, ­­4 04-​­​­​­323 BC, 2003 (­­corr. 2007); (­­with R. Osborne) Greek Historical Inscriptions, ­­478–​­​­​­4 04 BC, 2017; and his commentaries on Herodotus and Thucydides. Linda Rocchi is Leverhulme Abroad Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and works on the concept of ‘dishonour’ in ancient Greek law. Her research interests include ­papyrology, epigraphy, Attic oratory, and ancient Greek law and institutions. Els Rose holds the chair of Late and Medieval Latin at Utrecht University. Her work focusses on Medieval Latin hagiography, liturgy, and Christian apocryphal literature. In 2017, she was awarded a prestigious individual grant provided by the Dutch Research Council (­­N WO VICI ­­277-­​­­­​­­​­­­30-​­​­​­002) to study Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, ­­400–​­​­​­1100 with a team of junior and early career scholars. The project yielded a number of journal articles, the volume Civic Identity and Civic Participation in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (­­Brepols, CELAMA 37, 2021), ­­co-​­​­​­edited with Cédric Brélaz, and the book Het wonder van ­­Sint-​­​­​­Maarten: Utrecht een gelukkige stad (­­A Miracle of Saint Martin: Utrecht a Happy City) on Utrecht’s patron saint Martin for the city’s 900th anniversary in 2022 (­­published in Dutch by Amsterdam University Press). An additional collected volume (­­Palgrave Macmillan) and a monograph on ritual performance and the discourse of citizenship in Medieval Latin liturgy (­­Routledge) are in preparation. xx

Notes on contributors

Roman Roth is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Cape Town. He has been a Research Fellow of Peterhouse (­­Cambridge) and a Fellow of the ­­A lexander-­​­­­​­­​ ­­­von-​­​­​­Humboldt Foundation. His research focusses on the history and material culture of Italy during the Republican period; his publications include the monograph Styling Romanisation (­­Cambridge 2007), numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as the edited volumes Roman by Integration (­­with J. Keller, Portsmouth, RI 2007) and Empire, Hegemony or Anarchy (­­with S. Karataş and K.-​­​­​­J. Hölkeskamp, Stuttgart 2019). Patrick Sänger is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Münster. His main interests are the administrative, legal, and social history of the Eastern Mediterranean, especially of Egypt from the Hellenistic to the late antique period. He has also worked on the editing of documentary papyri and of Ephesian inscriptions. His most recent book examines a particular Ptolemaic form of association called politeuma (­­2019). Barbara Schipani  graduated in Classical Studies from the University of Naples ‘­­l’Orientale’ in 2008. In 2022, she completed her PhD in Greek History at the University of Naples ‘­­l’Orientale’ on the subject of mixed marriages. She studies social and legal aspects and customs of the ancient Greek world related to marriage practices and law. Her articles on polygamy, matrimonial law, and mixed marriages in the Hellenistic period are in press. She continues to collaborate with the chair of Greek History at the University ‘­­l’Orientale’. Gunnar Seelentag is Professor of Ancient History at the Leibniz University Hannover. He specializes in the socio-political orders of the Roman Principate and of Archaic and Early Classical Greece, pursuing questions inspired by sociological methodology. His publications include the books Taten und Tugenden Traians. Herrschaftsdarstellung im Prinzipat (­­2004); Das Archaische Kreta. Institutionalisierung im Frühen Griechenland (­­2015); and the ­­co-​­​­​­edited volumes Cultural Practices and Material Culture in Archaic and Classical Crete (2014) and Konkurrenz und Institutionalisierung in der Griechischen Archaik (­­2020). Markus Sehlmeyer, ancient historian (­­PhD, Privatdozent), was an Assistant Professor at the University of Rostock, research fellow for Late Antiquity in Jena, and university lecturer in Bielefeld, Osnabrück, Hildesheim, and Marburg. His main interests are ancient historiography, political culture, and the comparison of ancient and early modern migration regimes. His studies on mass migrations and refugees were crucial for his understanding of citizenship. During the ­­2019–​­​­​­2022 academic years, he was serving as interim Professor of Ancient History in Rostock. Dion C. Smythe, born in Northern Ireland (­­hence the accent!), read history at the University of St Andrews and then studied Byzantine history at the same place, supervised by Professor Paul Magdalino. His studies also took him to the College of William and Mary in Virginia and to the University of Vienna. He has taught at Queen’s University Belfast and in Saudi Arabia. His research centres on ideas of ‘­­identity’ and ‘­­belonging/­­not belonging’ in the Byzantine eleventh and twelfth centuries, using ­­h igh-​­​­​ l­ evel, literary, historiographical texts as primary sources. He has published extensively on this subject, as well as on using computers in historical research both to store data xxi

Notes on contributors

and also to analyse the data. He now lives in London full-​­​­​­ ­­ time, writing articles and reviews. Randall Souza is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Seattle University. His research concerns human mobility, community, and citizenship in the ancient Mediterranean and on Sicily in particular, with attention to archaeological and epigraphic evidence as well as traditional literary historical analysis. He is a Field Director with the Contrada Agnese Project at the site of Morgantina, for which he has ­­co-​­​­​­authored annual excavation reports and is now collaborating on the final excavation publication. His other publications have dealt with topics such as the use of sortition in land distribution, the survival of communities enslaved wholesale during wartime, and the economic activity and agency of women. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on mobility and citizenship in ancient Sicily. Martyna Świerk  is an ancient historian and Latin epigrapher educated in Wrocław and Rome. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Her research focusses on the social history of Roman provinces in North Africa. Her most recent publications concern the epigraphic culture of Roman Carthage (‘­­Epigraphic culture of Roman Carthage’, Epigraphica 83 (­­2021), ­­521–​­​­​­542) and onomastic studies in the context of ethnic identification (‘­­Roman ­Carthage  – ​­​­​­ethnic conglomeration? A study of the anthroponymy of African metropolis’, Antichthon (2022), doi:10.1017/ ann.2022.3. Christian A. Thomsen is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek History at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Politics of Association in Hellenistic Rhodes (­­Edinburgh, 2020), a study of politics and civil society in an ancient Greek democracy. He is the PI of the ­­Copenhagen-​­​­​­based research group Migrants and membership regimes in the ancient Greek world (­­400 ­­BCE–​­​­​­100 CE) which investigates the impact of migration on the Greek city states, their societies, economies, and culture. Mark Woolmer is an independent scholar who currently works as a teaching consultant for schools and universities across the Middle East. His research focusses primarily on the social and political history of Iron Age Phoenicia and coastal Syria, and on the commercial connections between Athens and the Near East during the sixth to third centuries BCE. He is the author of Ancient Phoenicia: An Introduction and A Short History of the Phoenicians and ­­co-​­​­​­editor of The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households, and ­­City-​­​­​­States. In 2016, in collaboration with the British Museum and the National Museum of Beirut, he designed and delivered the international exhibition Daily life in ancient Lebanon (­­Durham University Oriental Museum). Sara Zanovello, after graduating in Law at the University of Padua, completed a ­­joint-​­​­​ ­ hD programme between the University of Padua (­­School of Law) and the University P of Edinburgh (­­School of History, Classics and Archaeology). Her doctoral research focussed on the legal aspects of manumission in ancient Greece, which was published as a book in 2021 (­­From Slave to Free. A Legal Perspective on Greek Manumission). She has published articles on several aspects of ancient Greek and Roman law.

xxii

Notes on contributors

Rachel ­­Zelnick-​­​­​­Abramovitz  is a retired Professor at the Department of Classics, Tel Aviv University. Her research covers slavery and other non-​­​­​­ ­­ citizen groups in the Greek polis; the shifting lines between the private and public spheres in the Greek polis; Greek historiography; Greek drama; and rhetoric. She is the author of Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (­­2005); Taxing Freedom in Thessalian Manumission Inscriptions (­­2013); and of ar­­ edited Text ticles on these subjects, published in journals and edited collections. She co-​­​­​­ and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama (­­2021) and translated Herodotus into Hebrew. Her current research project, funded by the Israel Academy of Sciences, is the verbs of speaking (­­verba dicendi) used by Greek historians to describe their and their own characters’ historiographical activity.

xxiii

1 CITIZENSHIP IN ANTIQUITY Current perspectives and challenges Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz

Citizenship Citizenship is usually defined less by what it is than by what it does, as it allows its holders to enjoy privileges in a political community that others may experience only to a limited degree or not at all. It is sometimes conveniently labelled as political ‘­membership’, but it clearly traverses the boundaries of being a member of an ‘­organization of citizens’. As inherently a claim to privileges, it has commonly been a source of communal ­identity – ​­if not ­ideology – ​­of the entitled, emphasized by their being opposed to the excluded, nowadays more limited as an antithesis, since ­non-​­citizenship no longer tends to be hereditary. However, in modern p ­ ost-​­Bodin, ­post-​­industrial states, citizenship may be considered secondary to a resident status in n ­ on-​­citizens’ common aspirations, with other legal statuses often being equally helpful in regulating one’s ability to work, trade, dwell, and obtain justice in the state, even if requiring some extra formalities. When it is considered essential, it is mostly through the convenience of its permanence, not relying on shifting political attitudes as other statuses often do. At times, this certainly could have also been the case in the ancient Mediterranean, with which this volume is primarily concerned, but, first, the distance between citizens and people of different statuses was larger, more solidified, and often binary, and, second, a large body of sources for this concept and its realities tends to emphasize the political over what we would call the social or simply human. And yet citizenship keeps returning as hostage in political debates and public rhetoric as the posited better side in ‘­­us – ​­them’ antitheses, as it did in antiquity. The reasons for this are mostly beyond the scope of this book, but the volume certainly aims to look at the where and the how, with the hope of showing some shared risks and patterns of overstressing this idea. Citizenship has also been often rephrased across ­m illennia –​ ­ever since the ­proto-​­concept was ­formed  – ​­as a metonym for ‘­civic engagement’ or ‘­participation’, as seen in both a­ ntiquity-​­and m ­ odernity-​­oriented discussions in this book (­see, e.g., Neveu; Duplouy; von Dassow). Last but not least, it necessarily implies a civic (­egalitarian, inclusive) form of government or, as the bare minimum, a civic space within a more hierarchical regime, which sets one of the more difficult questions before students of citizenship’s history: can there be citizens where there are rulers DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-1

1

Jakub Filonik et al.

and subjects? With this in mind, our journey from the second millennium BCE to the ­twenty-​­first century CE begins, with classical antiquity at the core o ­ f – ​­but not the limit ­to – ​­this volume’s interests. The exclusivist aspect in citizenship and ­franchise – ​­leaving out those of the ‘­worse’ social background, ethnicity, or ­sex – ​­seems to be an almost universal pattern in political history. But so are certain degrees of egalitarianism and equality, whether encompassing a painfully narrow, moderate (­h istorically anything above 10%), or larger percentage of the population as part of the i­ n-​­group, at first often regulated by military needs and army organization. The sizes of these groups regularly fluctuated in most communities, commonly as a result of social conflict or power struggles, but sometimes through debate and joint attempts to avoid bloodshed, or even evolution resulting from changes in socio-economic structure; however, even in the most egalitarian ancient societies, this was probably never a majority of the population, not least because of the presumably large numbers of slaves, mostly unregulated ­non-​­citizen immigration, and the problem of unequal privileges of citizen women. These fluctuations, a core interest of political history, are also one of the themes of this book. Their result was usually a better understanding in a given society or state of who had the ‘­r ight to have rights’, or one’s potential ­place – ​­not just the current actual o ­ ne – ​­in the political community. How we will look at citizenship, both ancient and modern, in a decade or a century from now, given how the world is once again experiencing war refugees and mass migration in 2022, remains an open and burning question. ‘­Being a citizen’ seems to have commonly been as much a status as a statement. How a relation between the two is actualized often shows the morality and prevalent ­ideology of the ­in-​­group or the wider society. A common pattern of normative behaviour in ­ancient civic communities was reciprocity and mutual aid (­or mutual reliance), whether appearing in horizontal or vertical social relations. Such practices often led to instituting written laws and safeguarding the rights of different parts of the society, whether meeting the strict modern criteria of being always valid and forever g­ ranted  – ​­truly ‘­inalienable’ – ​­or not. On the other hand, unwritten rights and duties were necessarily part of the social practice in most ancient communities, sometimes inscribed, at other times forming part of communal and family traditions. Extracting the ‘­civic’ from them and defining the ‘­political’ against the ‘­social’ often proves to be an impossible task.

(­Not just) in antiquity ‘­Citizen’ is first defined in Greek, either as politēs or through other often unrelated, mostly territorial, ­blood-​­related, ethnic terms (­Rhodes; Frullini; Filonik in this volume), and not much l­ater  – ​­primarily as civis  – ​­in Latin, two ancient languages and societies that offer the most i­ n-​­depth look into this concept or set of concepts. Politēs is a person with (­at least the potential for) full entitlements in a polis, in this sense always masculine and denoting the privileges of enfranchised men in the classical Athenian sense (­see Brock, Gordin, Joyce; but cf. Schipani and Ferraioli on Epirus; Carlsson, Müller on Hellenistic Greece in this volume). This is not very helpful as a definition, but various contributors to this volume offer more comprehensive explanations. The term polis only contributes to the conceptual conundrum, as seen in its common rendering in modern languages, exemplified by the English ‘­­city-​­state’ or the recently popular ‘­­citizen-​­state’. These are probably the best translations, but they are also circular: a citizen is a privileged ‘­member’ or ‘­participant’ of a ­citizen-​­state, and a ­citizen-​­state 2

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

is a state made for and by citizens. A more common identification, however, would be through one’s belonging to a smaller or larger ‘­tribe’, a problem somewhat obscured by our present focus. And indeed, the older, more geographically oriented translation of polis is focused on the ‘­city’ as its crucial ­aspect – ​­the territorially enclosed, usually walled, and not too large space where a socially and politically separate ‘­p eople’, or dēmos, can live, closely studied in recent decades in its many aspects, particularly by the Copenhagen Polis Centre (­as is often the case, Sparta seems the greatest outlier; cf. Hansen and Nielsen 2004). Such ­city-​­states or ­citizen-​­states are perhaps easier to understand now, in a world where cities and metropolitan areas are getting more and more attention as contemporary centres of gravity, with some local societal engagement and politics irrespective of (­or even opposed to) wider structures, despite major differences between both worlds. Yet this t­erritory-​­oriented rendering conceals the patterns of exclusion of ­non-​­citizen inhabitants, who were physically but not politically part of such states. What links the ancient and the modern are the more civic then, and usually less so now, ‘­offices’ or ‘­magistracies’, or, to use an industrial metaphor, all the machinery of both the state and the city, which helped the polis develop as it did (­cf. Davies 2015).1 Not entirely unlike modern states, poleis were quite creative in developing and naming subordinate statuses, often taxed or used in labour but broadly underprivileged. And like citizens of modern states, ancient Greeks voted and could own land and houses in their ­city-​­states without major constraints, but they were much more widely expected to hold office and serve in the army than citizens of most states in the present day. And with a certain similarity to modernity but often a more obsessive ­in-​­group focus, some of them relied heavily on blood relations for the ability even to grant citizen status (­Davies 1977/­1978), with the exception of wealthy benefactors having their own route into it, quite like the golden passports known from recent decades, a practice common to many late classical and virtually all Hellenistic poleis. In line with the claims of social identity theory, early Greek sources also tell us more about the privileges denied to the excluded and bestowed on the newly included than about the positive definition of what is a ‘­citizen’ (­cf. Duplouy 2018: 8). Much of this continued into the world of Hellenistic poleis, but it had certainly developed new political realities, with the growing popularity of citizenship grants for benefaction, isopoliteia and sympoliteia treaties essentially allowing dual citizenship, and shifting status boundaries and communal identities (­see the chapters in Parts 5 and 6 of this volume). But starting with the Greeks is also just a traditional way of looking at the ancient political world and not the only path one could take. As the chapters in Part 2 on the Near East show, we may very well speak of a world of Babylonian and Phoenician poleis, by borrowing the Greek term but not the Greek focus. Being part of an early ­second-​­millennium BCE Mesopotamian political community often implied similar functions related to voting, witnessing, and judging, quite in line with the Aristotelian definition and important to its participants (­von Dassow in this volume). In Hittite Anatolia, further into the second millennium BCE, the relation between ‘­subjects’ and the king (‘­lord’) was of primary importance in the documents, but some of them also speak of ‘­men’ or ‘­sons of Ḫatti’ to denote affiliation to local political communities and sometimes seem to be treated as a citizen body (­or through more specific designations, as groups capable of fighting), not necessarily as a reward (­Gerçek in this volume). N ­ eo-​ ­Babylonian political practices in the first millennium BCE, in turn, reveal various ‘­acts of citizenship’ through individual and group efforts appearing in the preserved legal 3

Jakub Filonik et al.

documents despite the surrounding hierarchical ­socio-​­political structure, comparable to some ­Graeco-​­Roman practices and categories (­Gordin in this volume; cf. Isin and Nielsen 2008 on ‘­acts’). Committees of elders can also be distinguished in the same period in the s­ o-​­called Phoenician ­city-​­states of the Eastern Mediterranean, some of them dating as far back as to the Bronze Age and taking over the traditional prerogatives of monarchs earlier than others, aided by developing wider citizen assemblies, in principle comprising all men capable of fighting (­Woolmer in this volume). Where older research denied political agency to the peoples of the Ancient Near East, current studies tend to see other important differences in power structures across the Mediterranean (­see below on recent research in the field). In archaic Rome, citizenship most probably already depended on Roman civil law and developed together with similar concepts in other Latin communities (­Crawford 2012). It is debatable what in the organization of the citizen body predated the reforms of the fifth century BCE (­see Bradley; Roth in this volume), but broadly speaking, Roman citizenship matured as much with the evolution of Roman l­aw  – ​­such as intermarriage or protections for poorer citizens already in the early R ­ epublic – as ​­ with growing Roman expansion in Italy and beyond (­A ndo 2010). In the classical period, it was commonly referred to as civitas, also a name for ‘­civic community’, derived from civis ‘­citizen’. Its boundaries were, again, dependent on social dynamics and conflicts between groups, always in a fragile balance held together by the legal protections of the res publica, which shaped the early understanding of ‘­republican’ citizenship. The status of a Roman citizen by 338 BCE became broadly available ­to – ​­and was sometimes ​­ Italian tribes, at first without the right to vote (­sine suffragio) but forced ­on  – other with regular citizen duties: tax payment and military service, as ordered by Rome. As a result of the Social War, or the war with the allies, Rome granted them all citizenship through the lex Iulia of 90 BCE, a practice soon extended by Caesar’s Gallic war and new conquests, though not all citizens remained equal, not least in terms of the census (­on the latter, see Clemente 2022; Ando; Roth in this volume). ­ niversal – ​­most of all exUnder the Empire, Roman citizenship was made almost u cluding innumerable s­ laves – ​­by the emperor Caracalla (­or Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus), through an edict usually called the Constitutio Antoniniana, of ca. 212 CE (­cf. Lavan 2015; Ando 2016a; Besson in this volume). Scholars are polarized in the assessment of its significance, and it has been argued that it was as much g­ round-​­breaking as it was a mere formality to many without real access to the Empire’s social elites, done mostly to enforce taxes; recent research usually sees it as resulting in a modest change, without being truly ­universal – ​­though also not ­unwelcome – ​­outside of Italy (­A ndo 2016b; Lavan 2016; Besson 2020). Further measures to employ the practical equality of statuses were later taken by Christian emperors, most notably Justinian in the early sixth century CE. Regardless of the individual steps along the way, the model of ­w ide-​ ­ranging grants of citizenship is undeniably a product of Roman political culture that led to its successful spread on such a vast scale (­European states developing later on the basis of Greek or Near Eastern political practices would have created a much different ​­ world). Indeed, it has often been pointedly noted – following the Aristotelian categories, Polybius, and Philippe Gauthier (­1974, 1981) – ​­that only Roman Senators could be considered ‘­proper citizens’ in the Greek sense of the term, given the limited role of civic participation and open discussion in the assemblies of the Roman Republic, but this view has been challenged by scholars pointing out the importance of popular assemblies in influencing Roman legislation (­Yakobson 1999; Millar 2002, 2005; Tatum 4

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

2009). Unlike its Roman equivalent, throughout antiquity Greek citizenship was considered a scarce entity, bestowed on individuals as an honour and a privilege (­A ndo 1999, 2010, 2015; cf. Rhodes; Filonik in this volume on the Greek concept). On the other hand, the universalizing tradition of the Antonine Constitution continued throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the Christian language of belonging, surpassing legal status (­see Part 7 of this volume). And yet citizenship symbolizes not only the inner circle of belonging but also the outer circle of those who do not belong or may do so on a conditional basis. In every state, alongside those who belonged to the citizen body, resided ‘­outsiders’. In Rome, free ­non-​­citizens were called peregrini (­sg. peregrinus, from peregrinor – ​­to live in for​­ come to a place). In eign lands, to go abroad) or advenae (­sg. advena, from advenio – to Greek, they were generally called xenoi (­sg. xenos). The word xenoi usually described freeborn foreigners (­slaves, although xenoi by definition, had their special terminology); as such, however, the word also denoted ‘­g uests’ or ‘­hosts’, and also ‘­mercenary soldiers’. Xenoi were ­non-​­citizens who stayed for a short while in the host community without becoming full members of it. They lacked civic rights; they were not entitled to own real estate, unless granted this right by the polis; in Athens and other places, children born to them by women of citizen status were not considered citizens; and they ­ ost community’s law courts. Yet in some places in could not take legal action in the h Greece (­e.g., in Oeanthea and Chaleon, IG IX 12 717), special courts were established for them, and likewise in Ptolemaic Egypt in the Hellenistic period.2 There is also evidence that some poleis regulated their status by appointing special officials (­e.g., the kosmoi xenōn in Crete: IC XI 78) or by special legislation (­e.g., the xenikos nomos in Miletos: Milet I.3, ­33a–​­g). In Athens, they were also subject to a tax on market activity (­xenikon: Dem. 57.34), and if they pretended to be citizens they could be prosecuted. The xenos could use the help of the local proxenos (­a citizen of the h ­ ost city, chosen by the xenos’ city to represent and help its citizens). Some poleis made written agreements (­symbolai or symbola), which guaranteed their citizens’ safety when visiting each other’s cities (­Gauthier 1972). Xenoi who chose to settle in the host city became ­non-​­citizen residents, called in Athens and elsewhere metoikoi (­metics). Many of them could have been refugees (­cf. Rhodes; Kostecka in this volume; Gray 2016, 2018c; Rubinstein 2018, 2020). In other places, where they usually comprised a local population subjugated by the dominant group, they were called paroikoi or perioikoi; foreigners who were settled by the citizens were sometimes called katoikoi. These designations, all compounds of the word oikos, ­ on-​­citizens house (­or the verb oikein, to reside, settle), emphasized the fact that these n had their abode together with, near, or by the citizens. Metics were more p ­ rivileged –​ ­but also more ­regulated  – ​­foreigners: they were an important element in the polis’s economy (­mostly in manufacturing and commerce), and they paid a special tax, participated in some religious festivals, and served in the army.3 To the group of free n ­ on-​­citizens also belonged people freed from slavery.4 Manumission, a word of Latin origin but now widely applied, means the termination of the total domination and confinement of one person by another and the annulment of his or her legal condition as property. Being freed, the former slave became a subject of rights, limited as they were. Manumission in Greece is attested from the sixth century BCE; however, it was very likely practised even earlier. The evidence shows a variety of local practices and even statuses after manumission. Although manumission in Greece was generally the private initiative of the slave owner, the state was sometimes involved. 5

Jakub Filonik et al.

Slave owners could attach various conditions to ­manumission  – ​­foremost, payment by the former slaves or by third parties. In fact, conditional manumission seems to have been the predominant practice, emphasizing the slave’s absolute dependence and the often protracted relations of dominance, even after freedom was formally granted. These conditions were often secured by penalty clauses threatening the freed slaves with ­re-​­enslavement or corporal punishment should they fail to fulfil their obligations. Manumitted slaves in Greece remained ­non-​­citizens, even if in some regions their status was more privileged than in others. In Athens, their status was similar, though not identical, to that of metics. They had no civic rights and could not own real estate, and in some places, they were subject to special taxes. Manumission in Rome is mentioned already in the Twelve Tables of the ­m id-​­fifth century BCE. Roman law provided Roman citizens with formal means to manumit their slaves, whereby the latter became both free and citizens, but with certain limitations: they were not allowed to hold office (­but their children were full citizens). In time, manumission could also be carried out informally, but following a law of 19 CE (­the lex Iunia), slaves who were manumitted informally became de facto free but not citizens. In Rome, freed slaves owed deference, obedience, and services to their former owners, who were now their patroni. If the freed slave died intestate, his or her former owner became the heir. Under Augustus, manumission was regulated: manumission by will was limited to a certain proportion of one’s slaves, and a minimum age of 20 years for the manumittor and 30 years for slaves manumitted was established. After 212 CE, following the edict of the Emperor Caracalla (­see above), freed slaves were included among those given full Roman citizenship. Despite being freed and, in Rome, becoming citizens, manumitted slaves carried the stigma of servile origins, and their obligations to their former masters prolonged their condition of dependence long after attaining legal freedom. All of this shows the complicated and often lasting stratification of much of the ancient political world (­­Zelnick-​ ­Abramovitz 2005; Mouritsen 2011; Ismard 2017; Lewis 2018; Harris and Zanovello in this volume), even though some social boundaries and contexts seem to have remained more permeable than others (­V lassopoulos 2007; Nevett 2013; ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz 2021).

Current perspectives This book project began with a conference, jointly organized in 2019 in London by UCL and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, as part of Jakub Filonik’s postdoctoral project on the cognitive aspects of Athenian discourse of citizenship (­NCN 2016/­20/­S/­HS2/ ­00056). The event was ­co-​­organized by Chris Carey, Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Roel Konijnendijk, assisted by Brenda G ­ riffith-​­Williams, Joanna Janik, and Monika Zabrocka, and c­ o-​­funded by the Leventis Fund. It brought together over 40 scholars from different research areas (­not least Rachel ­Zelnick-​Abramovitz, joining us now as a c­ o-​­editor), encompassed a public event on citizenship ancient and modern, and had its highlights in ­thought-​­provoking keynote speeches by Engin Isin, Catherine Neveu, Clifford Ando, Josiah Ober, and John K. Davies. The present book stems from that event but not in any simple 1:1 relation. It certainly sometimes shares its vices (­a propensity for the Greek world) and virtues (­an attempt to cross simplistic historical boundaries), but it hopes to be a more comprehensive discussion of civic communities in the ancient Mediterranean by a much broader coverage of themes 6

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

and to serve as an accessible companion on the topic also to ­non-​­specialists. We are also very lucky to have the introductory chapter on Greek citizenship by the late Professor Peter Rhodes, better known as P.J. Rhodes, who remained intellectually active until the very end and was able to finish his contribution before his death in 2022. This volume is hardly the only work on citizenship to appear in our time. There have been plentiful valuable contributions to the study of ancient citizenship, with which contributors to the present book remain in a constructive dialogue. First of all, the new millennium brought many useful discussions on Near Eastern political history in antiquity. A new handbook of the Hittite Empire has only just appeared (­de Martino 2022), with its detailed explorations of governance and power structures, preceded by another one focused on the state in the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East (­Bang and Scheidel 2013) and a close study of Hittite officials and administration (­Bilgin 2018). Contributors to a volume edited by Gernot Wilhelm (­2012) explored the symbolic repertoire of power in the Ancient Near East, and Andrea Seri (­2005) analyzed the functioning of local Old Babylonian power structures, including councils of elders and assemblies. Daniel E. Fleming’s (­2004) study of 3,000 cuneiform letters from ­second-​ ­m illennium BCE Mari led to conclusions about political traditions resembling those of ­pre-​­democratic Greek poleis. Going one step further, Gojko Barjamovic (­2004) and Seth Richardson (­2018) in their papers explicitly spoke of Mesopotamian ‘­civic institutions’ and ‘­citizens’, respectively, a view not unfamiliar to contributors to the present volume (­cf. von Dassow 2012), even if still revolutionary in some disciplines, but one perhaps less controversial with respect to Phoenician c­ ity-​­states and Punic Carthage ­ on-​­Greek Mediterra(­Hoyos 2010, 2020; Quinn 2017), the latter being one of the few n nean politeiai eagerly praised by Aristotle (­Lockwood 2021; Pezzoli 2022). ​­ The ­Phoenicians – ​­as they were called by the ­Greeks – presented natural links to the ­Graeco-​­Roman world and its authors through similar modes of establishing settlements (­­city-​­states, colonies) and growing cultural contacts since the archaic period of Greek history. Carolina ­ López-​­ Ruiz (­ 2022) recently explored in detail Phoenician colonial expansion in different parts of the Mediterranean throughout antiquity. In her ­thought-​­provoking study, Josephine C. Quinn (­2017) discussed the misleading history of naming the Canaanites and replacing their ­city-­​­­state-​­based identities with ethnic ones by various ancient and modern outsiders. Dexter Hoyos (­2010) studied the political and cultural life and ­city-​­state developments of the Carthaginians up to their famous clash with Rome. Contributors to volumes edited by Henry Hurst and Sarah Owen (­2005) and Guy J. Bradley and ­John-​­Paul Wilson (­2006) discussed Greek and Roman colonization compared with each other and with their modern equivalents. Irad Malkin (­e.g., 2001, 2003, 2016) studied Greek colonization in its religious, ethnic, and political aspects, and Robert Garland (­2014) explored different categories of migrants in ancient Greece, followed by two volumes on early Greek colonization edited by Lieve Donnellan et al. (­2016a, 2016b). Tesse D. Stek and Jeremia Pelgrom (­2014) with their contributors analyzed the patterns of Roman Republican colonization, and Ramsay MacMullen (­2000) examined its continuations in the times of Augustus and the patterns of political expansion of the developing Roman Empire, while Kathryn Lomas (­2017) looked into the developments of Rome from the Iron Age to the Punic Wars. Focusing on the Greek world, a volume edited by Alain Duplouy and Roger Brock (­2018) offered insights into archaic citizenship liberated from classical definitions and focusing on the period when many concepts and ­socio-​­political mechanisms also important in the later Greek world were formed. Contributors to a recent volume edited 7

Jakub Filonik et al.

by Johannes C. Bernhardt and Mirko Canevaro (­2022) discussed the manifold aspects of ­the socio-​­political history of archaic Greece, not least from the broad institutional perspective. Josine Blok (­2017) argued for a more inclusive definition of ‘­citizen’ in both archaic and classical Athens, including women, owing to their participation and important role in religious practices. Meanwhile, a now classic contribution to the field by John K. Davies (­1977/­1978) on Athenian citizenship and its reliance on descent still remains one of the most helpful treatments of the topic (­cf. ­Griffith-​­Williams; Fisher; Haussker in this volume). The Inventory of Greek poleis edited by Mogens H. Hansen and Thomas H. Nielsen (­2004) catalogues and discusses much of the polis-​ ­related material. Books by Eric Robinson (­1997, 2011), Susanne Carlsson (­2010), and Matthew Simonton (­2017), as well as contributions to volumes edited by Roger Brock and Stephen Hodkinson (­2000), Hans Beck (­2013), and Dean Hammer (­2015) further problematized Greek citizenship under democracy and oligarchy in its diachronic and synchronic dimensions, the latter by extensively comparing Greek democracies with the Roman res publica, and a new book by Ryszard Kulesza (­2022) offers i­ n-​­depth discussions of Sparta as a state and a society. Cypriot ­city-​­states, or rather c­ ity-​­kingdoms, have been studied in the monograph recently published by Beatrice Pestarino (­2022), arguing for the existence of local councils and assemblies, with which local kings would often share their power. Chapters in a ­Graeco-​­Roman collection edited by Lucia Cecchet and Anna Busetto (­2017) brought further insights into different aspects of ancient citizenship, not least dual and multiple citizenship under Roman rule and the idea of cosmopolitanism in antiquity. Finally, Claire Taylor and Kostas Vlassopoulos (­2015), with their contributors, proposed to look at the wider communities and networks prevalent in the ancient Greek world. Many recent works are also dedicated to developments following those in classical Greek poleis. Contributions to volumes edited by Pierre Fröhlich and Chistel Müller (­2005), Onno M. van Nijf and Richard Alston (­2011), and Katell Berthelot and Jonathan Price (­2019) have brought important insights into citizenship and civic participation in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds of divergent ethnicities and identities. In a series of publications, Benjamin Gray (­2015, 2016, ­2018a–​­c) studied the public life, values, conflicts, and migrations related to the Hellenistic polis. A volume edited by Henning Börm and Nino Luraghi (­2018) was also focused on exploring the latter, while John Ma (­2013) analyzed the links between euergetism and civic identity through public statues, recently joined by Marc Domingo Gygax (­2016) with his wider study of Greek benefaction and Przemysław Siekierka et al. (­2021) with a monograph on honouring women in Greek cities. Students of the political culture of Republican Rome are now lucky to have a new companion edited by Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag (­2022). Clifford Ando (­2011, 2015) and Emma Dench (­2018) analyzed the political and legal conceptual apparatus of the Roman Empire, while Myles Lavan (­2013) studied the metaphorical discourse of slavery present in Rome’s vision of its relations with the conquered subjects; Lavan and Ando (­2021) also recently joined forces as editors to explore Roman and local citizenship in the ‘­long second century CE’. Jeremy Armstrong and James H. Richardson (­2017) edited a volume focused on Roman political developments in ­509–​­264 BCE, and Alex Imrie (­2018) and Arnaud Besson (­2020) published new comprehensive discussions of the Antonine Constitution. The issues of citizenship and communal identities in the Western Mediterranean have been studied by Jonathan Prag (­2015) and Louise Revell (­2016). Roman political thought, including the concept of classical republican 8

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

citizenship and citizen ideals, has been recently given fresh treatment by Dean Hammer (­2014) and Jed W. Atkins (­2018), while Henrik Mouritsen (­2017) explored the intricacies of Roman Republican politics. Various recent volumes, notably including one edited by Catherine Steel and Henriette van der Blom (­2013), have also given apt attention to Roman political rhetoric and public communication. There has been renewed interest in the continuations of and innovations to ‘­classical’ Greek and Roman political concepts and broader approaches to ancient citizens. Arjan ­Zuiderhoek (­2017) examined the ancient city in its many aspects, with contributors to a ­volume edited by Claudia Rapp and H.A. Drake (­2014) taking a w ­ ide-​­ranging approach to the matter, from the polis through the Roman Empire to Christian Europe, and with contributors to a volume on ancient states edited by Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson (­2017) taking up an even broader struggle with the material highlighting structures of power ranging from early Mesopotamia through the Zhou Empire and Inca despotism to Visigothic Iberia and ­Byzantium. Last but not least, contributors to a recent book edited by Cédric Brélaz and Els Rose (­2021) reflected on manifold aspects of civic identity and participation in Late ­Antiquity and early Middle Ages.

And challenges Insightful questions of both general and specific nature were asked at the London conference by John K. Davies, on whose behalf we may ask now: ‘­why did systems of citizenship emerge, and what purposes did they serve? Did those purposes change?’ and ‘­Is ancient citizenship a single institution as a single species of collective behaviour, or does the use of the word conceal major structural differences among the various collages of components that one may review in the Inventory with its disturbingly uniform format?5 Was the link between the two institutions of ­city-​­state and citizenship organic? Do we have a single viable theory of ancient citizenship, e.g., as a (­very rudimentary and selective) charter of Human Rights?’, on top of the ­inwards-​­oriented question particularly relevant to academics: ‘­W here is the discourse going, and where should it be going? . . . Is ancient citizenship properly comparable to modern citizenship, or is the ­near-​­identity of terminology dangerously misleading?’. To these we may now add: is citizenship as performance in its essence the same in a Near Eastern ­citizen-​­state, a Greek polis, medieval civitates and empires, and modern participatory democracies (­cf. Gordin; Duplouy; Bednarek; Cecchet; Champion; Rose; Smythe; Sehlmeyer)? Are politically-involved people of ­non-​­democratic regimes to a larger degree ‘­citizens’ than idle citizens by name in democracies (­von Dassow; Kulesza’s chapter 15; Souza)? Is an abstract concept, like English ‘­citizenship’, necessary for assuming the existence of the idea, or do more primary means of expression reveal more about patterns of inclusion and exclusion (­cf. Malkin; Filonik; Sänger; Martínez Jiménez and Flierman)? Do we understand the ancient biases against naturalized citizens and if so, what other than the status makes a citizen proper (­cf. ­Griffith-​­Williams; Fisher; Kucharski; Cook)? Is the meaning of citizenship different in different contexts, both ancient and modern (­cf. Neveu; Frullini; Harris and Zanovello)? What is the role of institutions and social norms in promoting and solidifying some of these meanings (­cf. Seelentag; Carey; Berthelot; Ando; Roth)? Is citizenship still the primary political identity and is there enough to connect citizens with polarized political views, other than an existential threat? Theoretical studies from the last decades often focused on ‘­g lobal citizenship’, now already being questioned together with globalization itself by the developments 9

Jakub Filonik et al.

of recent years. Yet many works have also underlined the problematic labelling of ‘­citizens’ as a posited unified group, arguably created through acquiring a forced, not an elective identity. Performative aspects of citizenship also keep reappearing in modern studies as acts through which citizens can actualize their legal status in both democratic and ­non-​­democratic polities (­Isin 2017, with bibliography). Many discussions still revolve around the liberal, republican, and communitarian interpretations of the concept, often incongruent with each other. Meanwhile, Josiah Ober (­2017) proposes a new constitutional model called Demopolis, in an attempt to creatively transplant citizenship from ancient Greek democratic poleis into a much different modern world, where civic dignity and participation need to find different venues. In this rich discursive framework, we attempt to delve into ancient citizenship once again. This volume brings together scholars working on different regions and periods of the ancient Mediterranean: from the Hittite Empire and old Babylonia through Phoenician/­P unic ­city-​­states, the ­non-­​­­Graeco-​­Roman Western Mediterranean, and ­Graeco-​­Roman Egypt and Judaea to the Greek poleis, the Roman Republic and Empire, and the Byzantine Empire. It takes up the task of providing accounts of the multifaceted and changing dimensions of citizenship across these areas and times, by adopting a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the manifold meanings and ways of defining the concept and practices of citizenship or belonging in ancient societies and, hence, of ­non-​­citizenship and ­non-​­belonging: whether citizenship was defined by territorial belonging or blood descent; by privileged or exclusive access to resources or participation in communal ­decision-​­making; by a sense of group ­belonging – ​­such identifications were also open to discursive redefinitions and manipulation. Citizenship and belonging, as well as ­non-​­citizenship and ­non-​­belonging, had many shades and degrees; citizenship could be bought or faked, or even removed. Contributors to this volume try to answer questions such as: what were the formal requirements needed to become a citizen? What were the formal and informal obligations and privileges of citizens and who was considered a citizen proper? What were the normative linguistic ways of expressing the concept? How could one lose one’s citizenship? What were the major distinctions between citizens? Who were citizens usually defined against? What laws regulated citizenship and how did they change in the place and period under discussion? The chapters in Part 1 address the theory of citizenship, both generally and in the Greek and Roman contexts. In ­Chapter  2, Catherine Neveu takes an anthropological perspective on citizenship, asking to what extent we speak about the same thing when discussing citizenship in classical antiquity and in the modern world. The chapter underlines how variability in the meanings of citizenship(­s) in context(­s) can be grasped; such versatility reveals the political projects that underpin them, how they are (­temporarily crystalized) answers to conflicts and stakes, and the imaginaries at play about society and rights. It aims to ‘­denaturalize’ the political processes through which localizations, levels, and conceptions of citizenship(­s) are produced and bundled in specific ways, and to underline how ‘­anthropologically minded’ approaches to citizenship can contribute to a better contextualization of ‘­cultures of citizenship’, in both contemporary situations and historical ones. In ­Chapter 3, P.J. Rhodes offers an overview of Greek citizenship, delineating who was entitled to it in various Greek states and what rights and responsibilities it entailed. The chapter also briefly explores other divisions of citizens and forms of civic belonging, as well as enumerating other status categories and the possibility of grants 10

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

of partial or full citizenship. It also explores situations where citizenship was not a fundamental division but people from both sides of the line could engage with one another in spite of their difference of status. In ­Chapter 4, Alain Duplouy examines Greek citizenship in the broad view from a different angle: that of performative citizenship, the act of participation in the many areas of social life and common affairs. Such a notion of performative citizenship rests on concepts borrowed from sociology, anthropology, and political sciences, such as Max Weber’s Stand (­status group), Marcel Mauss’s body, Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Lebensform (­form of life), as well as the ancient Greek concept of schēma (­attitudes and body language). All these concepts, which constitute the other language of citizenship as discussed in the chapter, refer to lifestyles and behaviours as practical fields in which citizenship could be defined and enacted in ancient Greece. The second part of the chapter explores the citizen value of the athletic lifestyle in archaic and classical cities. The final chapter in this part, by Markus Sehlmeyer, offers a contemporary model of Roman citizenship in the early Empire, focusing on the first and second centuries CE. The model by British sociologist Thomas H. Marshall based on early modern England is applied to British citizenship in modern times, but it helps to classify Roman citizen rights, which, in many cases, have analogies to the human rights of the Enlightenment. Citizenship had no priority at first; the princeps was in need of backers for constitutional and provincial reforms. The succeeding emperors showed greater effort to expand citizenship over provincial cities, resulting in progressive Romanization. The chapter closes by noting the influence of the Roman Empire for the discourse around European unification. Part 2 examines citizenship in the Ancient Near East. In ­Chapter 6, Eva von Dassow argues for the application of the analytic category of citizenship to the subjects of Ancient Near Eastern states. Using Josine Blok’s model of citizenship as membership in ­ on-​­members lack a political community that entails prerogatives and responsibilities n and that involves a distinct sense of belonging to that community, the chapter focuses particularly on legal documents concerning the status of people or illustrating community members’ participation in governance from the age of Hammurabi. These sources show that native and free status, normally based on descent, were the fundamental criteria for membership in a political community, which entailed both duty on behalf of that community and a share in its governance. N. İlgi Gerçek, in ­Chapter 7, turns to the subject of citizenship in Hittite Anatolia. The chapter moves beyond the assumption ​­ considered as ‘­subjects’ rather than ‘­citizens’ – ​­were that the people of ­Ḫatti – usually not politically active, and it studies Hittite textual evidence to explore the conceptualization(­s) and operational reality of citizenship in Ḫatti. It argues for the existence in Hittite Anatolia of different modes and scales of political affiliation and community membership that can be characterized as c­ itizenship – ​­both in the general sense of an individual’s political affiliation, and in the particular sense of a free member of a polity who bore certain rights and duties in relation to the state and participated in government. In ­Chapter 8, Mark Woolmer charts the fluctuating power and fortunes of Phoenician citizen committees from the Late Bronze Age until the end of the first millennium BCE, focusing on the Phoenician ­city-​­states of Arwad, Byblos, Berytus (­Beirut), Sidon, Sarepta, and Tyre. The chapter challenges traditional views on the status and prerogatives of Phoenician citizen councils and assemblies to show that Phoenician citizen committees retained considerable political authority and influence throughout their 11

Jakub Filonik et al.

history; that the power and prestige of these committees are best explained by internal ­socio-​­political conditions and the socio-economic activities performed by their members; and that the gradual move away from a dominant elitist strategy towards a more inclusive corporative approach eventually allowed for a smooth transition from mon­ hapter 9, Shai Gordin archy to a more democratic system of government. Finally, in C takes a comparative approach to emerging citizenship practices in the ancient urban ­ eo-​­Babylonian state. The chapter demonstrates that the N ­ eo-​ communities of the N ­Babylonian state, the emerging Athenian dēmokratia, and Rome before the Constitutio Antoniniana share aspects of citizenship acts: civic identity and prestige, based on a genealogical system of identification bound in legal terminology, as well as active involvement in cult; and institutionally bound privileges and obligations, which governed marriage, inheritance and certain economic activities, as well as certain duties towards urban and state institutions. It concludes with a comparative example of the boundaries of the rights of ­citizens – ​­the rights of foreign women marrying into elite citizen families. Part 3 treats the varied forms of citizenship in the Greek world. It begins with a first ­ hapter 10, by Irad Malkin, examines the phesection on archaic and classical Greece. C nomenon of supreme arbitrators in Greek societies in the form of colony founders and comprehensive political reformers, exploring the roles they play and their connection to concepts of egalitarianism and ‘­sharing in the polis’. The discussion takes reforms at Cyrene as a particular focus, and further analyzes their purpose and instruments, such as the probability of the drawing of lots for the purpose of inclusion, recognition, and the distribution of citizens within the polis. In ­Chapter 11, Gunnar Seelentag pursues the question of ­whether – ​­and if so, how ­far – ​­it is plausible to speak of ‘­citizenship’ as a catalogue of ­clear-​­cut criteria, consisting of set rights and obligations, for late archaic and early classical Greece, by examining four inscriptions from Cretan poleis that granted individuals who had not been among the political agents of the respective polis up to that point the right of participation in different circles of ­socio-​­political integration. The chapter illustrates that these and other modes of s­ ocio-​­political integration, which were meaningful to individuals and groups, did not result from an already strong presence of the polis community but rather were steps towards it: the participation of a man in a number of these circles and his herein reflected acceptance by his peers to be one among them were necessary preconditions for his participation in the polis. In ­Chapter  12, Ryszard Kulesza explores the interaction between citizenship and ­oliganthrōpia, the decline in the number of citizens, at Sparta in the classical period, to argue that the cause of the decline was the reduced number of citizens enjoying full civic rights, including particularly the ownership of land, and who were thus unable to ­ hapter 13, by Katarzyna fulfil all the duties associated with the status of a Spartiate. C Kostecka, takes up the subject of exiled citizens. The chapter addresses the question of how the sudden social, economic, and geographical changes that the exile experienced affected his identity; focusing on athletic contexts, it examines the different ways in which exiles presented their networks, origins, and attachment to their old and new communities. The author argues that because of his unstable position and relations, the exile needed to put a special effort into shaping the image of himself and his f­ amily, and she explores how the exile managed to balance his conflicting goals: a wish to strengthen the ties with his new community, and a hope to regain his place in the native polis. 12

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

In ­Chapter 14, Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli conduct an analysis of two decrees from Dodona granting citizenship to women, with comparisons to ideas of women’s citizenship at Athens and in reference to the few other epigraphic sources that contain individual grants of citizenship to women in classical and Hellenistic times. The chapter seeks to understand what citizenship for women meant in the context of the koinon of the Molossians in Epirus in the fourth century BCE, and whether such citizenship had a mere passive connotation, as in classical Athens, or whether the woman could exercise more actively her rights as a citizen and how. C ­ hapter 15, the second by Ryszard Kulesza, examines the formal status of the perioikoi, the free ­non-​­citizens in Sparta, who have been called ‘­­second-​­class citizens’ in scholarship. The author argues that, although there were ­h igher-​­and ­lower-​­class citizens in Sparta, no ancient source points to the perioikoi as being politai; the s­ econd-​­class citizens were not perioikoi but hypomeiones. In ­Chapter 16, Roger Brock explores connections between citizenship and the sub­ division of the citizen body into smaller units, normally organized on a territorial or ­spatial basis or in terms of fictive kinship, or else defined numerically, which was ­common to many archaic and classical Greek poleis. The chapter argues that these subdivisions formed compact communities that brokered membership of and participation in the polis and provided genuine and rewarding social interaction and communal identity in themselves. Stefano Frullini, in ­Chapter 17, explores how Herodotus and Thucydides used the words astos and politēs (­both meaning ‘­citizen’) to further our understanding of the role of the concept of citizenship in early ­h istoriography. In Herodotus, while politēs appears to emphasize the horizontal and collaborative dimension of citizenship, astos stresses its hierarchical and exclusionary aspect. By contrast, Thucydides appears to take advantage of the greater flexibility of politēs and largely limits his use of astos to dichotomies. This difference suggests that the semantic boundary was still unstable in this period, and that this flexibility could be harnessed for expressive purposes. In ­Chapter  18, Bartłomiej Bednarek treats the relationship between religion and citizenship, civic identity, and other modes of participation in or exclusion from the communities of ancient Greek cities. The author seeks a more balanced vision of the ancient societies, which would fully acknowledge the participation in the social life of all groups and individuals that have once been considered marginal, and highlights the increasing centrality of such notions as individual religion and religious experience or beliefs to the study of ancient Greek religious life. ­Chapter  19, by Jakub Filonik, discusses the language of belonging to the polis community present in the surviving political discourse of classical Greece, with a particular focus on the metaphorical conceptualizations of ‘­being a citizen’ through the concepts of ‘­sharing’. It also attempts to trace both the possible roots and the possible effects of that language in Greek polis culture, aided by methods of cognitive semantics. The second section of Part 3 turns to the particularly ­well-​­evidenced case of classical Athens. Chris Carey, in ­Chapter 20, focuses on citizenship as physical experience. The chapter explores the degree to which the privileged status attached to Athenian citizenship is physically inscribed in the person of the citizen, irrespective of any abstract consideration or physical exercise of political rights, and seeks to chart the lifelong ­ hapter 21, Fayah corporeal and experiential relationship between citizen and city. In C Haussker examines the representations of ­baby-​­smuggling narratives in different discursive areas of classical Athens in the context of children’s legal status, contemporary ­socio-​­gender perspectives and perceptions regarding obstetric tasks, pregnancy, and 13

Jakub Filonik et al.

childbirth. The chapter concludes that although the occurrence and scope of ­baby-​ ­smuggling per se is difficult to assess, it cannot be discounted outright; literary representations of the issue point to the feasibility of the existence, at least in the classical Athenian male imagination, of alternative and indeed complicated and dangerous means of conducting unofficial, unlawful adoption of male infants, thus making them eligible for citizenship by fraud. In ­Chapter  22, Brenda ­Griffith-​­Williams explores connections between the polis and the oikos in terms of citizenship. It has sometimes been argued that eligibility for citizenship was established by different criteria and through a separate system from eligibility for inheritance, with illegitimate children (­nothoi) eligible for citizenship provided both of their parents were Athenian; the chapter argues that the sources are obscure and inconclusive, but there are no unequivocal examples of ‘­citizen nothoi’, and it is far from clear how a nothos could have become a member of his father’s deme. On balance, the overall weight of the evidence points to an indissoluble link between membership of an oikos and of the polis, with marriage between citizen parents as the key to both domestic and civic status. Linda Rocchi, in ­Chapter  23, challenges the traditional, exclusively legalistic approach to the term atimia (­loss of citizen rights) and advocates a broader perspective on the notion, focusing specifically on the cases in which atimia was used against ­non-​­Athenians through forensic speeches and epigraphic sources. Rather than postulating a change in the meaning of the term, atimia is analyzed in its interconnection with the notion of timē (‘­honour’) to show that timē and atimia are categories through which Athenians conceptualized and negotiated any kind of identity, civic or otherwise. In ­Chapter 24, Christopher Joyce addresses recent scholarship which has argued that women, no less than men, were counted as Athenian citizens provided they met the same criteria of parentage and kinship which male citizens needed to be able to demonstrate. The chapter argues that though women were citizens in a limited legal sense, the fact that they were excluded from participation in the assemblies and law courts, as well as from the governance of the city (­viz. the politeia), meant that their citizenship was unequal to that of their male counterparts. Comparison with the role of metics and slaves shows that to be a social participant was not tantamount to holding citizenship, since metics and slaves played an important role in society more widely but were, nevertheless, excluded from the concept of citizenship. Christine Plastow, in ­Chapter 25, focuses on the rhetoric of citizenship through two forms of placemaking; the chapter examines the use of two Athenian places connected with citizenship, the Propylaia and the Bouleuterion, in the forensic speeches. The Propylaia holds rhetorical power as a reminder of the lineage and heritage of Athenian citizenship; the Bouleuterion can be useful as a synecdoche for the democracy, and it holds particular potency as a site for the potential corruption of the city if the judges fail to do their job. ­Chapter  26, by Nick Fisher, reconsiders the purposes and consequences of the ­diapsēphisis held in Athens in 346/­345 BCE, when a decree proposed by Demophilos imposed on all ­demes a special revision of their citizen lists. The chapter shows that the revisionist view of the Athenians’ conception of citizenship emphasizing the importance of participation by Athenian women in civic cults, combined with evidence for trials of notorious women accused of impiety, makes plausible a growth in general alarm at a threat to family life and values; it also discusses the growth of economic and social networks between citizens, foreigners, slaves and freed, which had encouraged a 14

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

significant removal of status barriers in commercial lawsuits. All these developments may have helped create a conservative backlash and a belief that a review of citizenship lists, among other ‘­reforms’, might arrest moral decline and rekindle a pride in civic identity. In ­Chapter 27, James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri survey appeals to membership in demes, phratries, genē, orgeōnes, and thiasoi in surviving oratory. The chapter finds that associations of all types are appealed to overwhelmingly with an eye to demonstrating legitimate descent, which lends further support to the ideas that associations were seen as useful sources of social information, and that genē may also have allowed citizens to bolster kinship claims with appeals to more mythological notions of descent. In ­Chapter 28, Brad L. Cook explores rhetoric from the courtroom and Old Comedy that aimed to arouse suspicions of illegitimate citizenship, particularly accusations of ‘­Scythian’ birth. The chapter makes clear that however much laughter these varied attacks may rouse, they could end in disenfranchisement and death. Aeschines’ creative persistence in deploying this motif against Demosthenes is countered by Demosthenes’ attacks on Aeschines’ own background, especially vicious in 330 BCE. With any question of his own past silenced, Demosthenes clears the path for his detailed narrative of how he has been throughout his life a true Athenian citizen. The final chapter in the section (­29), by Janek Kucharski, provides an overview of the legal merits and demerits of the infamous emergency measures introduced by the orator Hyperides in the wake ​­ naturalization to metics, r­e-​ of the Chaeronea disaster. The decree i­tself  – granting ­enfranchisement to the disenfranchised, and liberty to ­slaves – ​­though never enacted was, nevertheless, attacked in court as illegal. The chapter argues that the main legal infractions of Hyperides’ motion concerned the procedural aspects of the relevant laws and not their substance. Part 4 moves forward in time to the Hellenistic period. In C ­ hapter  30, Susanne Carlsson focuses not only on the purely formal requirements of citizenship in the Hellenistic period in political terms but also foremost on religious and social functions that suggest a broader concept of citizenship including women and resident foreigners. The notion of exclusive citizenship was relaxed in the Hellenistic period and citizenship was increasingly bestowed on praiseworthy individuals, sometimes even on slaves. The coveted status of citizenship survived well into the Roman period, and consequently ­ on-​­resident foreigners continued to be demarcated as separate categories resident and n in polis decrees. In ­Chapter  31, Randall Souza examines citizenship in the Western Mediterranean. The Greeks who settled along the central and western shores of the Mediterranean brought the polis with them, and yet centuries of interaction with the peoples already inhabiting those territories shaped notions of citizenship that differed markedly from the mainland Greek model. Because citizenship is inextricably linked with personal and group identity, the ­Greek-​­barbarian dichotomy structured much political ideology throughout the region though it was not always or even often the principal factor. The relative recency of Greek settlements with their attendant demographic needs, the relatively high mobility of populations in several modes, and the interventions of hegemonic powers, among other elements, combined to render citizenship here fundamentally a matter of practice, of culture rather than of essence. ­ hapter 32, argues that for many metics of the late classical Christian A. Thomsen, in C and Hellenistic periods, citizenship played an important role and brought very tangible benefits even in a life spent abroad. The chapter first documents the privileges offered by Greek poleis to the citizens of other, specific, poleis who visited or settled within their 15

Jakub Filonik et al.

territories, and it argues that the states were conscious of the effects that such policies had on migration and sought to encourage it. Next, the chapter addresses the problem of verification of foreigners’ citizenship and argues that Greek cities were willing to issue documents verifying identity and citizenship. The chapter’s last section considers migration and distance and argues that most metics had, in fact, not migrated very far and that many metics kept close contact with their home cities. In ­Chapter 33, Patrick Sänger seeks to take a closer look at semantic shifts in citizenship terminology in Hellenistic Egypt and the administrative or social reality behind them. The chapter argues that the linguistic hybridizations in question seem to be a consequence of the almost entire lack of polis structures in Egypt, so that the reinterpretation of Greek legal terms seemed to ­ ld-​­established poleis and could be be less problematic than in regions dominated by o used to create inclusive and adaptable concepts for different patterns of belonging. Finally, in ­Chapter 34, Christel Müller analyzes the making, poiēsis, of citizens and the way in which status groups were recomposed in the Hellenistic period. There were several ways of making a citizen: recognition, adoption, granting of politeia, all of which allowed access to participation, metousia. The dēmopoiētoi, however, were sometimes considered apart from the native citizens, as in Cos. Chronologically, beyond a certain relaxation of practices in the Late Hellenistic period, it is difficult to propose a linear evolution shared throughout the Greek world. The specificities and changes were more of a regional nature. However, the influence of wars and population displacements on oliganthropy, or that of the kings and then the Romans, should be stressed. Part 5 steps outside of traditional geographical and temporal boundaries, to explore some examples of citizenship between and beyond Greece and Rome. In ­Chapter 35, Dexter Hoyos examines citizenship in p ­ re-​­Roman Carthage. Carthaginian citizenship’s active benefits, just as in other ancient states, were for men only. These had the vote in elections to office and, in some though not all situations, in legislation. At home, the Carthaginian citizen enjoyed, or at any rate took part in, communal banquets at festivals and perhaps other occasions. Aristotle thought these shared meals important enough to mention in his brief description of the Carthaginian Republic, the only ­non-​­Greek state treated in the Politics. But citizenship was not equal: an elite minority always dominated the Republic through holding its sufeteships and generalships, and as members of the city’s senate (­the adirim) and its administrative bodies. In ­Chapter 36, Edward M. Harris and Sara Zanovello examine the reasons why the Greek poleis in general did not make manumitted slaves citizens except in exceptional circumstances while the Romans provided several ways for liberti to become citizens. In the Greek polis, isonomia among citizens ensured that there was no subordinate status within the citizen body. For this reason, the only way ­ex-​­masters had to keep their former slaves in a dependent position was to include apeleutheroi among the metic population (­thus placing them outside the citizen body) and to arrange paramonē agreements with them. In Rome, by contrast, slaves manumitted ‘­formally’ became free and citizens, and they were placed in a dependent status within the citizen body. This was possible because, unlike in Greece, differences of status among cives did exist. ­Chapter 37, by Katell Berthelot, suggests that the Jews’ adoption of civic terminology (­mostly as a metaphor) to describe their ethnos and their communities probably had to do not only with their experiences of local citizenships in the diaspora, but also with their fascination for Greek culture. It further explores the implications of the adoption of the citizenship model for conceptualizing membership in the people of Israel, as well as the specific impact of the Roman notion of citizenship on two 16

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

Jewish authors from the first century CE, Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus. In ­Chapter 38, Lucia Cecchet explores multiple citizenship in the Greek cities of Asia Minor during the imperial age. The chapter discusses some case studies of multiple citizenship holders, focusing on inscriptions and selected passages from the orators of the Second Sophistic, such as Dio Chrysostomus and Aelius Aristides, which are relevant to the performance and discourse of multiple civic identities. It argues that the distinction between actual and honorific citizenship does not do justice to the complex reality of multiple citizenships. Finally, Andrea Raggi, in C ­ hapter  39, examines the spread of the right of Roman citizenship among Greek individuals in the Republican age. The chapter argues that there was no reluctance on the part of the Romans to include ­neo-​­citizens of Greek origin in the Roman civic body. During the Social War, all the inhabitants of the cities of Magna Graecia and several bankers and merchants coming from the Greek East were granted Roman citizenship. The Mithridatic Wars, however, still hindered the process of the spread of the right in the East. During the civil wars, and in particular starting from the Caesarean period onwards, one can note a significant process of enfranchisement in the Greek Eastern regions. Part 6 deals with Rome and the Roman world, in roughly chronological order. Thus, it begins with ­Chapter 40, by Guy Bradley, on politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies. Recent study of Italic and Etruscan societies has revealed the extent to which central Italy experienced a shared cultural koinē in the period from the Orientalizing era to the Roman conquest. This was the result of extensive ­inter-​­community mobility. Rome was part of a network of central Italian cities that shared certain citizen rights in the early Republic. The complex patchwork of different practices and experiences across the peninsula was gradually transformed as Rome conquered the Italian peoples or coerced them into alliance. In ­Chapter 41, Roman Roth tracks the emergence of Roman citizenship during the m ­ id-​­Republican period and argues that the institutions of citizenship developed as part of what is commonly known as the Roman conquest of Italy. Key to understanding these dynamics are two institutions: the tribus (­citizen tribe) as a focal area of integration between new and old citizens in conquered territories, and the municipium as the vehicle for the transitioning of existing ­city-​­states into the Roman community. In addition, the chapter assesses the roles that were played by intermediate forms of integration, such as Latin colonies, praefecturae, and the ­much-​­debated civitas sine suffragio. ­Chapter 42, by Craige B. Champion, takes up ­much-​­debated questions about religion and citizenship for the Romans: should we view religion and citizenship as autonomous spheres, or rather as interdependent components of something larger, which we may choose to call the state (­res publica)? Do our analytical terms map onto Roman vocabularies and conceptions unproblematically? Focusing on discredited (­but lingering) ideas of Roman power elites incredulously manipulating religion to control non-elites, the chapter destabilizes some commonplace scholarly presumptions, and it contemplates how analytical tools may mislead for purposes of historical reconstruction. In ­Chapter 43, Clifford Ando adopts the history of the Roman censor as a lens on the broader transformation of the meaning of republican citizenship in the expanding Roman state. The chapter focuses on the presence of economic data among the information collected, and the absence of any scrutiny of moral conduct, as heuristically significant. Citizens were of interest to the state insofar as they were economic actors and owners of property; they were interpellated as such; and their sense of self in their relations with other persons similarly interpellated was as participants in households and owners of things. 17

Jakub Filonik et al.

In ­Chapter 44, Martyna Świerk expands our view of Rome to the Roman provinces in Africa. The first part of the chapter outlines the privileges that obtaining Roman citizenship could bring to the inhabitants of the province, and the process of acquiring citizenship as illustrated by two epigraphic monuments. The second part deals with individual perceptions of citizenship by provincial residents, drawing on further epigraphic evidence. The chapter aims to demonstrate the differences between perceptions of citizenship and its meaning for representatives of different groups of provincial society, in different geographical, economic, or social contexts. ­Chapter 45, by Maria Nowak, also focuses on Africa, specifically Roman Egypt before 212 CE. The chapter examines two types of citizenship in Roman E and l­ocal – ​­and ­ gypt – Roman ​­ addresses the question of whether the local citizenship of Egyptian poleis was shaped independently by each city or uniformly by the Romans. The last chapter in this part, by Arnaud Besson, offers an introduction to the legal consequences of the Antonine Constitution that granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire in 212 CE. It shows that the Antonine Constitution was a break with previous Roman citizenship policies, but one deeply imbued with legal and administrative continuity; legal pluralism was a reality before and after 212 CE. The final part, Part 7, briefly examines citizenship in Late Antiquity and the Middle ­ hapter 47, Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman present an overAges. In C view of the ways in which citizenship and civic language continued to be useful and meaningful in the ­post-​­Roman Latin West. The chapter outlines the state of affairs in the Late Roman Empire, when Roman citizenship still functioned within the legal and ­ ost-​­Roman West, discussing political framework of a Roman state. It examines the p the continued use and development of Roman citizenship as a legal category after the disintegration of the ­West-​­Roman Empire, and addresses the diverse and widespread role of local citizenships in the former Roman territories of the West. It also deals with the appropriation and repurposing of civic language in Christian discourse, the aims of which were by no means exclusively spiritual. In ­Chapter 48, Els Rose analyzes the inclusive and exclusive power of hagiographic texts and liturgical rites celebrating the life and deeds of saints, in order to gain deeper insight into the transformation of civic identities under the influence of Christianity in the late Roman and early ­post-​­Roman period. The performative texts in commemoration of urban saints form a rich source to analyze how civic belonging and the Christianization of civic concepts transformed through performance. At the same time, by liturgically enacting the life and deeds of the urban patron saint, the citizens gave expression to the boundaries of their citizenship, demarcating the identity of those who belonged as well as those who did not belong to the civic community. Finally, in ­Chapter 49, Dion C. Smythe offers a view from Byzantium, where ‘­belonging’ was more diffuse than ‘­citizenship’. The chapter discusses the use of the term ‘­intersectionality’ for the multiple ways individuals have seen themselves and have been seen by others, and it seeks to pay close attention to what the texts, our primary sources, say and what they mean, concluding that often, they may mean several different things at once. There certainly remain elements of ancient citizenship not covered by the contributions to this volume, whether geographically, temporally, or conceptually; these are excluded merely for practical reasons of space. Nevertheless, the editors hope that this volume offers a substantial ­starting-​­point for further inquiry and that its c­ over – ​­the papyrus with fragmentary remnants of the Antonine Constitution proclaimed by a

18

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges

Roman emperor but written in Greek, found in Egypt, and influencing citizen status in much of the ­Mediterranean – ​­suitably exemplifies the multifaceted nature of citizenship in antiquity.

Notes 1 In his keynote speech at the ‘­Citizenship in classical antiquity’ conference in London, Prof. Davies proposed to enhance his OCD entry (­Davies 2015) by distinguishing five separate components of Greek citizenship: military, cultic, familial, economic, and political. All of these are analyzed in various contributions to this volume, but a full treatment of each is beyond the scope of the present overview. 2 In ­fourth-​­century BCE Athens, foreigners and metics were allowed to appear in citizens’ law courts in cases involving maritime trade (­the dikai emporikai, on which see MacDowell 2004; Harris 2015). 3 On xenoi, see Gauthier (­1972), Whitehead (­1977), Wijma (­2014), Kennedy (­2014), Akrigg (­2015), and Kapparis (­2018). Many chapters in this volume discuss foreigners; see, e.g., Bednarek, Berthelot, Besson, Bradley, Carlsson, Cecchet, Champion, Filonik, Fisher, Gordin, ­Griffith-​­Williams, Haussker, Kostecka, Müller, Rhodes, Rocchi, Seelentag, Smythe, and Thomsen. 4 On the ­citizen-​­slave antithesis, see Rhodes, Gercek, Hoyos, von Dassow, Carey, Fisher, Neveu, Nowak, and Sehlmeyer in this volume. 5 Referring to Hansen and Nielsen (­2004), also mentioned above.

Bibliography Akrigg, B. (­2015) ‘­Metics in Athens’, in Taylor and Vlassopoulos (­2015) ­155–​­173 Ando, C. (­1999) ‘­Was Rome a polis?’, ClAnt 18.1, ­5 –​­34 ​­2010) ‘­Citizenship, Roman’, in M. Gagarin (­ed.) The Oxford encyclopedia of ancient ——— (­ Greece and Rome (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2011) Law, language, and empire in the Roman tradition (­Philadelphia, PA) ——— ​­(­2015) Roman social imaginaries: language and thought in contexts of empire (­Chicago) ——— ​­(­2016a) (­ed.) Citizenship and empire in Europe 2­ 00–​­1900: the Antonine Constitution after 1800 years (­Stuttgart) ——— ​­(­2016b) ‘­Sovereignty, territoriality and universalism in the aftermath of Caracalla’, in Ando (­2016a) ­7–​­27 Ando, C. and Richardson, S. (eds) (­2017) Ancient states and infrastructural power: Europe, Asia, and America (­Philadelphia, PA) Arena, V. and Prag, J. (eds) (­2022) A companion to the political culture of the Roman Republic (­Chichester and Hoboken, NJ) Armstrong, J. and Richardson, J.H. (eds) (­2017) Politics and power in early Rome ­509–​­264 BC, thematic issue, Antichthon 51 Atkins, J.W. (­2018) Roman political thought (­Cambridge and New York) Bang, P.F. and Scheidel, W. (eds) (­2013) The Oxford handbook of the state in the ancient near East and Mediterranean (­Oxford and New York) Barjamovic, G. (­2004) ‘­Civic institutions and s­ elf-​­government in Southern Mesopotamia in the ­m id-​­first millennium BC’, in J.G. Dercksen (­ed.) Assyria and beyond: studies presented to Mogens Trolle Larsen (­Leiden) ­47–​­98 Beck, H. (­ed.) (­2013) A companion to ancient Greek government (­Chichester and Malden, MA) Bernhardt, J.C. and Canevaro, M. (eds) (­2022) From Homer to Solon: continuity and change in archaic Greece (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Berthelot, K., and Price, J.J. (eds) (­2019) In the crucible of Empire: the impact of Roman citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians (­Leuven) Besson, A. (­2020) Constitutio Antoniniana: l’universalisation de la citoyenneté romaine au 3e siècle (­Basel)

19

Jakub Filonik et al. Bilgin, T. (­2018) Officials and administration in the Hittite world (­Berlin and Boston, MA) Blok, J.H. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge and New York) Börm, H. and Luraghi, N. (­eds) (­2018) The polis in the Hellenistic world (­Stuttgart) Bradley, G.J. and Wilson, J.-​­P. (­eds) (­2006) Greek and Roman colonization: origins, ideologies and ­interactions (­Swansea) Brélaz, C. and Rose, E. (­eds) (­2021) Civic identity and civic participation in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (­Turnhout) Brock, R. and Hodkinson, S. (­eds) (­2000) Alternatives to Athens: varieties of political organization and community in ancient Greece (­Oxford and New York) Carlsson, S. (­2010) Hellenistic democracies: freedom, independence and political procedure in some East Greek ­city-​­states (­Stuttgart) Cecchet, L. and Busetto, A. (­eds) (­2017) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to AD 212 (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Clemente, G. (­2022) ‘­The census’, in Arena and Prag (­2022) ­193–​­205 Crawford, M.H. (­2012) ‘­Citizenship, Roman’, in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (­eds) Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edn (Oxford) Davies, J.K. (­­1977–​­1978) ‘­Athenian citizenship: the descent group and the alternatives’, CJ 73.2, ­105–​­121 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Citizenship, Greek’, in Oxford Classical Dictionary, DOI: 10.1093/­acrefore/­97801993 81135.013.1595 (­published online July 2015) de Martino, S. (­ed.) (­2022) Handbook Hittite Empire: power structures (­Berlin and Boston, MA) Dench, E. (­2018) Empire and political cultures in the Roman world (­Cambridge and New York) Domingo Gygax, M. (­2016) Benefaction and rewards in the ancient Greek city: the origins of ­euergetism (­Cambridge and New York) Donnellan, L., Nizzo, V., and Burgers, G.-​­J. (­eds) (­2016a) Conceptualising early colonisation (­Brussels and Rome) ——— ​­(­2016b) Contexts of early colonization (­Rome) Duplouy, A. (­2018) ‘­Pathways to archaic citizenship’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­1–​­49 Duplouy, A. and Brock, R. (­eds) (­2018) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford and New York) Fleming, D.E. (­ 2004) Democracy’s ancient ancestors: Mari and early collective governance (­Cambridge and New York) Fröhlich, P. and Müller, C. (­eds) (­2005) Citoyenneté et participation à la basse époque hellénistique (­Geneva) Garland, R. (­2014) Wandering Greeks: the ancient Greek diaspora from the age of Homer to the death of ­Alexander the Great (­Princeton, NJ) Gauthier, Ph. (­1972) SYMBOLA: les étrangers et la justice dans les cités grecques (­Nancy) ——— ​­(­1974) ‘“­Générosité” romaine et “­avarice” grecque: sur l’octroi du droit de cite’, in Mélanges d’histoire ancienne offerts à William Seston (­Paris) ­207–​­215 ——— ​­(­1981) ‘­La citoyenneté en Grèce et à Rome: participation et intégration’, Ktema 6, ­167–​­179 Gray, B. (­2015) Stasis and stability: exile, the polis, and political thought, c. ­4 04–​­146 BC (­Oxford and New York) ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Exile, refuge and the Greek polis: between justice and humanity’, Journal of Refugee Studies 30.2, ­190–​­219 ——— ​­(­2018a) ‘­Approaching the Hellenistic polis through modern political theory: the public sphere, pluralism and prosperity’, in M. Canevaro, A. Erskine, B. Gray, and J. Ober (­eds) Ancient Greek history and contemporary social science (­Edinburgh) ­68–​­97 ——— (­ ​­ 2018b) ‘­A civic alternative to stoicism: the ethics of Hellenistic honorary decrees’, ClAnt 37.2, ­187–​­235 ——— ​­(­2018c) ‘­Citizenship as barrier and opportunity for ancient Greek and modern refugees’, Humanities 7, 72, DOI: 10.3390/­h7030072 Hammer, D. (­2014) Roman political thought: from Cicero to Augustine (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­ed.) (­2015) A companion to Greek democracy and the Roman Republic (­Chichester and Malden, MA) Hansen, M.H. and Nielsen, Th.H. (­eds) (­2004) An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (­Oxford and New York)

20

Citizenship in antiquity: current perspectives and challenges Harris, E.M. (­2015) ‘­The meaning of the legal term symbolaion, the law about dikai emporikai and the role of the paragraphe procedure’, Dike 18, ­7–​­36 Hoyos, D. (­2010) The Carthaginians (­London and New York) ——— ​­(­2020) Carthage: a biography (­London and New York) Hurst, H. and Owen, S. (­eds) (­2005) Ancient colonizations: analogy, similarity, and difference (­London) Imrie, A. (­2018) The Antonine Constitution: an edict for the Caracallan Empire (­Leiden and Boston) Isin, E.F. and Nielsen, G.M. (­2008) Acts of citizenship (­London and New York) Isin, E.F. (­2017) ‘­Performative citizenship’, in A. Shachar, R. Bauböck, I. Bloemraad, and M. Vink (­eds) The Oxford handbook of citizenship (­Oxford) ­500–​­523 Ismard, P. (­2017) Democracy’s slaves: a political history of ancient Greece, trans. J.M. Todd (­Cambridge, MA and London) Kapparis, K. (­2018) ‘­The social and legal position of metics, foreigners, and slaves’, in G. Martin (­ed.) The Oxford handbook of Demosthenes (­Oxford) ­221–​­232 Kennedy, R.F. (­2014) Immigrant women in Athens: gender, ethnicity, and citizenship in the classical city (­New York and London) Kulesza, R. (­2022) Sparta: history, state and society (­Berlin) Lavan, M. (­2013) Slaves to Rome: paradigms of empire in Roman culture (­Cambridge and New York) ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Constitutio Antoniniana’, in Oxford Classical Dictionary, DOI: 10.1093/­acrefore/­ 9780199381135.013.1794 (­online version from 25 February 2019) ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­T he spread of Roman citizenship, ­14–​­212 CE: quantification in the face of high uncertainty’, P&P 230, ­3 –​­46 Lavan, M. and Ando, C. (­eds) (­2021) Roman and local citizenship in the long second century CE (­Oxford and New York) Lewis, D. (­2018) Greek slave systems in their Eastern Mediterranean context, c.­8 00–​­146 BC (­Oxford and New York) Lockwood, Th. (­2021) ‘­A ristotle’s Politics on Greeks and ­non-​­Greeks’, The Review of Politics 83.4, ­465–​­485 Lomas, K. (­2017) The rise of Rome: from the Iron Age to the Punic Wars (­Cambridge, MA) ­López-​­Ruiz, C. (­2022) Phoenicians and the making of the Mediterranean (­Cambridge, MA and London) Ma, J. (­2013) Statues and cities: honorific portraits and civic identity in the Hellenistic world (­Oxford) MacDowell, D.M. (­2004) Demosthenes, speeches ­27–​­38 (­Austin, TX) MacMullen, R. (­2000) Romanization in the time of Augustus (­New Haven, CT) Malkin, I. (­2001) (­ed.) Ancient perceptions of Greek ethnicity (­Cambridge, MA and London) ——— ​­(­2003) Myth and territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (­Cambridge and New York) ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Greek colonisation: the right to return’, in Donnellan et al. (­2016a) ­27–​­50 Millar, F. (­2002) The Roman Republic in political thought (­Hanover and London) ——— ​­(­2005) The crowd in Rome in the late Republic (­A nn Arbor, MI) Mouritsen, H. (­2011) The freedman in the Roman world (­Cambridge and New York) ——— ​­(­2017) Politics in the Roman Republic (­Cambridge and New York) Nevett, L.C. (­2013) ‘­Towards a female topography of the ancient Greek city: case studies from late archaic and early classical Athens (­c.­520–​­400 BCE)’, in L. Foxhall and G. Neher (­eds) Gender and the city before modernity (­Chichester and Malden, MA) ­86–​­106 Ober, J. (­2017) Demopolis: democracy before liberalism in theory and practice (­Cambridge and New York) Pestarino, B. (­2022) Kypriōn Politeia, the political and administrative systems of the classical Cypriot ­city-​­kingdoms (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Pezzoli, F. (­2022) ‘­A ristotle and the politeia of the Carthaginians’, Araucaria 49, ­311–​­328 Prag, J.R.W. (­2015) ‘­Cities and civic life in late Hellenistic Roman Sicily’, CCG 25, ­165–​­208 Quinn, J.C. (­2017) In search of the Phoenicians (­Princeton, NJ and Oxford) Rapp, C. and Drake, H.A. (­eds) (­2014) The city in the classical and ­post-​­classical world: changing contexts of power and identity (­Cambridge and New York)

21

Jakub Filonik et al. Revell, L. (­2016) Ways of being Roman: discourses of identity in the Roman West (­Oxford and Havertown, PA) Richardson, S. (­2018) ‘­The Mesopotamian citizen conceptualized: affect, speech, and perception’, in J.L. Brooke, J.C. Strauss, and G. Anderson (­eds) State formations: global histories and cultures of statehood (­Cambridge and New York) ­261–​­275 Robinson, E.W. (­1997) The first democracies: early popular government outside Athens (­Stuttgart) ——— ​­(­2011) Democracy beyond Athens: popular government in the Greek classical age (­Cambridge and New York) Rubinstein, L. (2018) ‘Immigration and refugee crises in fourth-century Greece: an Athenian perspective’, The European Legacy 23.1–2, 5–24 Rubinstein, L. (2020) ‘Refugee crises in classical Greece and the role of the Athenian prostates’, in A. Dimopoulou, A. Helmis, and D. Karambelas (eds) Ioulian Belissaropoulou Epainesai: Studies in ancient Greek and Roman law (Athens) 191–211 Seri, A. (­2005) Local power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia (­London) Siekierka, P., Stebnicka, K., and Wolicki, A. (­2021) Women and the polis: public honorific inscriptions for women in the Greek cities from the late classical to the Roman period (­Berlin and Boston, MA) Simonton, M. (­2017) Classical Greek oligarchy: a political history (­Princeton, NJ and Oxford) Steel, C. and van der Blom, H. (­eds) (­2013) Community and communication: oratory and politics in republican Rome (­Oxford) Stek, T.D. and Pelgrom, J. (­eds) (­2014) Roman Republican colonization: new perspectives from archaeology and ancient history (­Rome) Tatum, W.J. (­2009) ‘­Roman democracy?’, in R.K. Balot (­ed.) A companion to Greek and Roman political thought (­Chichester and Malden, MA) ­214–​­227 Taylor, C. and Vlassopoulos, K. (­eds) (­2015) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) van Nijf, O.M. and Alston, R. (­eds) (­2011) Political culture in the Greek city after the classical age (­Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, MA) Vlassopoulos, K. (­2007) ‘­Free spaces: identity, experience and democracy in classical Athens’, CQ 57.1, ­33–​­52 von Dassow, E. (­2012) ‘­The public and the state in the Ancient Near East’, in Wilhelm (­2012) ­171–​­190 Whitehead, D. (­1977) The ideology of the Athenian metic (­Cambridge) Wijma, S.M. (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­­5th–​­4th century BC) (­Stuttgart) Wilhelm, G. (­ed.) (­2012) Organization, representation, and symbols of power in the Ancient Near East (­Wilson Lake, IN) Yakobson, A. (­1999) Elections and electioneering in Rome: a study in the political system of the later Republic (­Stuttgart) ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz, R. (­2005) Not wholly free: the concept of manumission and the status of ­manumitted slaves in the ancient Greek world (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Mapping inequality in ancient Greece’, in O. Cerasuolo (­ed.), The archaeology of ­inequality: tracing the archaeological record (­A lbany, NY) ­235–​­247 Zuiderhoek, A. (­2017) The ancient city (­Cambridge)

22

PART I

Theory of citizenship

2 EXPLORING CITIZENSHIP(­S) IN CONTEXT(­S) Anthropological perspectives Catherine Neveu

It might seem somehow odd to find in this volume the contribution of a French anthropologist working on contemporary citizenship processes. But it is an interesting challenge to open up a discussion between such an approach and that of scholars exploring citizenship in classical antiquity. Thus, the aim of this chapter is, by introducing a series of anthropological approaches to citizenship, to point to what is hoped might be interesting echoes and common concerns across time and disciplines. Maybe one of those shared concerns, as far as citizenship is concerned, lies in the suggestion made by Engin Isin: If we are to develop a fluid and dynamic conception of citizenship that is historically grounded and geographically responsive, we cannot articulate the question as ‘­what is citizenship?’ Rather, the challenge is to ask ‘­what is called citizenship?’ that evokes all the interests and forces that are invested in making and interpreting it one way or another. (­Isin 2009: ­368–​­369) Whether one studies contemporary or past conceptions about citizenship, the challenge is, indeed, to understand ‘­what is called citizenship’ in a given context à propos given issues and aims. And ‘­what is called citizenship’ in many cases also carries the accumulated weight of several ways to demarcate or construct it. Such a move, from looking for an unequivocal definition of citizenship to a ­context-​ ­loaded one, is all the more important since ‘­citizenship’ is certainly not just an academic concept. It circulates widely, is claimed and much sought after, and is the subject of ­never-​­ending attempts to revive, reform, or reinvent it. It acts as a point of mobilisation for many individuals and groups who identify themselves as citizens when they act, name themselves as people who would be citizens in demanding citizenship or demand that citizenship be enlarged, enhanced or transformed to engage with other issues, identities and desires. Citizenship is thus a potent keyword in social, cultural and political terms, naming actual or imagined possible relationships. (­Clarke et al. 2014: 1) DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-3

25

Catherine Neveu

This chapter will thus first underline the benefit to be gained by approaching citizenship as a (­­context-​­loaded) keyword and by including its analysis and theorizations in such a contextualized framework. It will then discuss a series of anthropological approaches to citizenship, hoping they might prove useful in building common issues and shared concerns between contemporary topics and ancient ones.

Citizenship as keyword Even without mastering ancient Greek or Latin, it can be assumed that the first common issue for anthropologists and historians of classical antiquity is one of language. Working through different languages, indeed, clearly highlights the extent to which having to ‘­translate citizenship’ reveals its constitutive versatility. For instance, whenever I use the word ‘citizenship’ in English, I am never quite sure about what the audience or readership understands: is it what would be called in France ‘­nationalité’ (­a status allowing you to be delivered a passport by the state for international travel purposes)? Is it involvement in public matters, what in ‘­French French’ will be called ‘citoyenneté’? Similar issues arise with the Spanish word, when ‘­la ciudadanía’ can describe not necessarily a status but the entire population of a neighbourhood, a city, or a state; what in English would be ‘­citizenry’, a notion for which there is, interestingly enough, no equivalent in French. Indeed, the term ‘­la citoyenneté’ can never be used to designate a community or a group, whatever the scale (­local or national), and will always refer to a status or at best to a social and political role that individuals are endowed with. That the word ‘citoyenneté’ in French can never designate a collective, but only the status or role of individuals is a clear reflection of the dominant conceptions at work, according to which ‘­the citizen’ is first and foremost seen as an individual who is capable of abstracting herself of her (­other) belongings and identifications so as to contribute to the general interest in the public sphere from an abstracted position (­Neveu 2015). This explains, for instance, why in France women were disenfranchised until 1946, since they were considered as ‘­naturally’ unable to reach such abstraction (­Scott 1996). Working through different languages thus presents the invaluable advantage that it forces you to render implicit meanings explicit (­Sassatelli 2009), to expose those layers of representations and meanings words are endowed with, those dimensions that often ‘­go without saying’ due to the ‘­cultural intimacy’ (­Herzfeld 1997) we tend to entertain with them through our socialization, as citizens as well as academics. But the aim of such clarification is not to find the ‘­proper meaning’ of citizenship.1 In his book Keywords, Raymond Williams (­1976: 17) stressed the fact that even in dictionaries, we find a history and complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; innovations, obsolescence, specialisation, extension, overlap, transfer; or changes which are masked by a nominal continuity so that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed, meanings and implications of meanings. And this is certainly the case with citizenship, the ancient Greek and Roman roots of which, for instance, are so regularly called upon to sustain its continuity and testify to its ancient legitimacy. 26

Exploring citizenship(s) in context(s)

Instead of trying to fix the meaning of keywords (­and here of citizenship), Williams invites us to look at and look for the practical and political making of meanings. According to him, the most active problems of meaning are always primarily embedded in actual social relationships, and both the meanings and the relationships are typically diverse and variable, within the structures of particular social orders and the processes of social and historical change. (­Williams 1976: 17) In the dialogue proposed here between historians of classical antiquity and anthropologists, it is worth underlining the extent to which Williams’s analysis echoes Nicole Loraux’s notion of ‘­controlled anachronism’ (­1993). According to her, it allows one to go ‘­towards the past with issues of the present in order to come back to the present, weighted by what we understood from the past’ (­Loraux 1993: 28; my translation). As an anthropologist, I was inspired by Loraux’s approach when I analyzed the 1993 reform of the Nationality Act in France as a ‘­revival’ of the Athenian ‘­autochthony myth’. According to the ancient Athenian myth of autochthony, all Athenians are, like the royal Athenian family itself, noble and born out of the soil (­Loraux 1989). This characteristic allows the Athenians to ideologically distinguish themselves from all the other Greeks, since these others, not being born ‘­autochthonous’, could only have an artificial relationship to their soil as well as to the city they were citizens of. But as Loraux emphasizes, the central issue is that ‘­one is born an Athenian, and cannot become one’. The poiētos citizen, that is, ‘­artificial’ (­adopted children and naturalized citizens), if he is seemingly part of the city, ‘­is not always perceived as such, since his patronym still designates his father as of foreign origin’ (­Loraux 1989: 19, my translation). The French 1993 Nationality Act reform showed troubling similarities with this myth: only those French becoming nationals through ius soli were forced to formally manifest their will to become or to be French nationals. A suspicion was thus thrown on the ‘­Frenchness’ of certain nationals, since only ius soli ones had to express this will, which was taken to be innate among ius sanguini nationals. Paradoxically, Republican values were seen as more surely transmitted through descent than through education and socialization. One could thus highlight the ­re-​­enactment in France of an autochthony myth, according to which only those who could assert original residence, the autochthonous, natural people, could claim unquestioned belonging to the true ‘­national community’, or ‘­­nation-​­ness’, a claim which could not be made by those who, while being de iure citizens, ‘­only’ had their actual residence in France; for instance, the fact that the police are suspicious that the French identity cards held by people having a ‘­­ non-­​­­French-​­sounding name’ are forged ones strongly calls to mind the poiētoi citizens of Athens who could be ‘­traced back’ as ‘­artificial citizens’ through their father’s name, which was part of their own name (­patronymic). In the same manner as Loraux reads Vernant’s, ­Vidal-​­Naquet’s, and her own interest in specific topics within ancient Greece2 as illustrating the fact that ‘­for the historian of antiquity the present is the most efficient engine of the drive to understand’ (­Loraux 1993: 24, my translation), Williams’ proposals on ‘­keywords’ strongly incite us to contextualize academic analysis of citizenship, to locate it ‘­w ithin the structures of particular social orders and the processes of social and historical change’. Since academics do not live in the ethereal sky of pure thought but are social actors engaged in 27

Catherine Neveu

disputes and dialogues with others and the issues they are confronted with, how they theorize and discuss citizenship always has to be located within the contexts they are part of.3 To take just one example of such processes, I will refer to how and when I first encountered ‘­citizenship’, since it clearly informed the anthropological approach I developed afterwards. This first encounter did not take place through books or theoretical discussions. It took place in 1983 in France when I became involved with some of those who were engaged in the national March for Equality and against racism. The organizers of this March, youth from social housing, suburban neighbourhoods, many of them of migrant backgrounds, fought for equality and recognition while trying to define a ‘­new citizenship’ (­Bouamama 1989). These youths were submitting dominant representations and discourses about citizenship in France to a critical reappraisal on the basis of their experience, of those social and political processes that were questioning the certitudes and inertia of dominant representations. Such a critical reappraisal was produced precisely by actors whose position in French society made quite clear to them the limitations of a citizenship regime in which it was defined as purely statutory, as ­state-​­and e­ lection-​ ­centred, and as isomorphic with nationality and national identity (­Neveu 2015). This political event constituted my first encounter with the notion of citizenship, and it has been foundational for the anthropological approach to citizenship processes I later developed. The ‘­citizenship’ I became interested in was not the one studied in books or theoretical discussions; it was a public, collective activity, which was problematized and questioned, being both appropriated, claimed and kept at bay. Having ‘­discovered’ citizenship that way, it was not for me a political philosophy concept or a purely theoretical issue, or a norm according to which one could measure degrees of belonging or conformity; it was a notion used in and for action by political subjects who were trying to make sense of their position in society, achieve actual equality for all, and redefine what it meant to be a citizen in France (­as opposed to a ‘­French citizen’). As Étienne Balibar underlines: ‘­The practical confrontation with different modes of exclusion . . . always constitutes the founding moment of citizenship, and consequently its periodical litmus test’ (­Balibar 2001: 125). A few years later, I crossed the Channel for my PhD fieldwork in the East London neighbourhood of Spitalfields, in order to explore issues of citizenship, nationality, and community such as they were envisioned and practised by its inhabitants. In a rather classical manner for anthropologists, this sidestep (­what Georges Balandier 1985 calls a détour) was conceived as a way to better understand what was at stake in the then lively debates in France about ‘­communities’ (­communitarianism), access to citizenship, nationality and the vote, as well as understanding actual reciprocal representations amongst local inhabitants in terms of rights and legitimacy to access or invent them (­Neveu 1994). If I was not travelling through time as in Loraux’s ‘­controlled anachronism’, such a détour still had the same goal: to better understand issues debated in France ‘­weighted’ by what I understood from London.

Contextualizing the analysis of citizenship Such contextualization is all the more necessary since quite often the literature on citizenship (­especially in English) implicitly relies on ‘­­Euro-​­American’ or ‘­Western’ assumptions, and I should say of the liberal type. And that is also true for anthropologists. Thus, Aihwa Ong’s research on Asian citizenship regimes in Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore 28

Exploring citizenship(s) in context(s)

(­1999) is clearly inscribed within the context of the ‘­clash of civilizations’ debate that contrasts Western civilization based on individualism with ­non-​­Western societies based on ‘­communitarian values’ (­Ong 1999: 48). For those theorists, the paradox of societies with such a flourishing market economy but lacking the parallel development of civil society can only be explained by the role played by ‘­Asian values’, according to which the ‘­public good’ is determined by the state and not by individuals. Indeed, Aihwa Ong herself underlines that ­In Asian democracies, citizens’ dignity and their demands for better government are understood not so much in terms of the degree of democratic representation, or in terms of the retrieval of individual rights, but rather in terms of state efficiency in ensuring overall social security and prosperity. (­Ong 1999: 48) But far from considering that this would reflect historical ‘­Asian values’, she shows how this equally modern ‘­regime of citizenship’ flows from the political projects of states implementing ‘­a ­post-​­developmental strategy [that seeks] to produce technically proficient and socially unified citizens attractive for capital’ (­Ong 1999: 65). But if her analysis rightly brings back political and social dimensions in what has been framed as a ‘­purely’ cultural issue […] it falls in the rut of another oversimplification: that of reducing ‘­Western citizenship’ to its liberal version, with its insistence on individual rights and freedoms. (­Clarke et al. 2014: 37) She thus seems to ignore that the ‘­p edagogical role [played by the liberal Asian state] in educating the public as to the ­ethico-​­political meaning of citizenship’ (­Ong 1999: 58) strongly echoes the ‘­governmentality strategy’ described by Yves Déloye à propos the creation of free and compulsory ‘­godless schools’ in France in 1882, in which ‘­the aim of the Republic’s pedagogues was to create a type of rationality that would be intrinsic to the art of democratic government: citizens’ s­ elf-​­discipline’ (­Déloye 1994: 27). ‘­Western citizenship’ cannot thus be reduced to only one of its historical forms, namely the liberal/­US one, since other ‘­regimes of citizenship’ in the West developed according to which individual rights were not as central as in the liberal one. So, if Ong rightly points to the need to overcome culturalist and simplistic analysis in order to understand varied and ‘­equally modern’ regimes, she misses the point of contextualizing her own standpoint.

Citizenship as ‘­more total relationships’ Contextualizing citizenship became all the more important in the last decades as a series of changes all over the world contributed to ‘­unveiling’ the contingency of its arrangements and confirmed the already observed gap between its metanarrative and actual practices. A series of political, social, and economic transformations has, indeed, for the last decades provoked ‘­trouble in citizenship’. And the renewed interest of anthropologists and other social scientists in this notion can be attributed to profound changes in the ‘­national order of things’ that laid bare the contingency of certain ‘­bundlings’ (­Sassen 2005) in which citizenship had been inscribed. The contingency of 29

Catherine Neveu

these sets of connections has been concealed in the processes of institutionalization that reified and naturalized them: The theoretical ground from which I address the issue is that of the historicity and the embeddedness of both categories, citizenship and the national state, rather than their purely formal features. Each of these has been constructed in elaborate and formal ways. And each has evolved historically as a tightly packaged bundle of what were in fact often rather diverse elements. The dynamics at work today are destabilizing these particular bundlings and bringing to the fore the fact itself of that bundling and its particularity. Through their destabilizing effects, these dynamics are producing operational and rhetorical openings for the emergence of new types of political subjects and new spatialities for politics. (­Sassen 2005: 80) Such changes and ­de-​­naturalization of bundlings not only allowed for questioning, for instance, the ‘­natural’ isomorphism between citizenship and nationality, the centrality of the language of rights, or the central if not exclusive role of ­nation-​­states in managing citizenship. They also reinforced the relevance of ­pre-​­existing approaches. One of the main changes introduced by the development of citizenship studies, to which anthropologists have contributed, has, indeed, been ‘­to conceptualize citizenship as a more total relationship inflected by identity, social position, cultural dimensions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging’ (­Hobson and Lister 2002) and to consider the diversity of the manufactures4 of citizenship and citizens (­vote, formal rights, public policies, mobilizations, and forms of relation with or in the public and urban space, as well as informal discussions and interactions). Citizenship processes then include but are not limited to the juridical relation between individuals and the state. While formal rights may constitute an important dimension of citizenship, it cannot be grasped through this sole lens. Not only the many processes by which people claim new rights, how they try to exercise them, but also a large array of other practices and dimensions should be considered as ‘­manufactures’ of citizenship. A significant part of anthropological research on citizenship analyzes those ‘­encounters’ with the state through which citizens are produced, or through which they experience the state of their citizenship. Education is a classical policy field here (­Bénéï 2005), but research also looks at other public policies of various kinds (­social, family, unemployment, housing, police of course, migration, naturalization). Obviously, a significant quantity of research is interested with ‘­legal documentation’ issues or ordinary interactions ‘­at the counter’ (­the actual working of ‘­the state’). Fernanda Wanderley has been working on such encounters in Bolivia, at the counters where people go to get their identity card or other official documents. She reminds us that the juridical relation between citizens and the state presupposes that it should be a neutral and fair arbitrator in its treatment of citizens. Within such an ­ideal-​­type, it is expected that concrete interactions between public servants and citizens in public offices and services do not reproduce those ­socio-​­economic and cultural inequalities that structure social relations in the private or market spheres. No doubt, actual interactions differ a lot from this metanarrative. Fernanda Wanderley, like many others, observed in public offices practices that (­re)­produce inequality, nullifying the meaning of formal rights and making it impossible for individuals to act on the basis of these rights. Analyzing such daily and ordinary interactions in local state administration/­counters, she asks: 30

Exploring citizenship(s) in context(s)

What are the implications flowing from the fact that begging, corruption and privilege are more used than a discourse of rights in these concrete situations of exercising one’s citizenship? Practically, rights are converted into favouritism and differentiated treatment. One could be tempted to generalize about citizenship in Bolivia on the basis of these experiences. This could lead to the conclusion that the passive dimension of citizenship prevails […] Indeed in the encounters between individuals and the state, priority is given to the way one is treated as beneficiary, with the demand for active inclusion as a member of the national political community disappearing. However, the same individuals show that the ‘­acceptance of inequality’ in these public offices does not mean they abandon their demands for better inclusion and participation. Understanding the diverse realities of citizenship allows citizens to define what are the sites and ways through which they claim for inclusion and equality. (­Wanderley 2009: 74–75; my translation) To put it differently, citizens rely on and mobilize different resources and practices, different discourses and figures of citizenship according to sites and aims. They can feel excluded in certain positions and included in others: As individual citizens, the main strategies are begging and corruption while the discourse of rights disappear as a form of relation with public servants. As collective citizens, the main strategies are group pressure and privilege, combined with a discourse of rights. Against the feeling of vulnerability or inferiority lived in the experience many Bolivians have as individual citizens confronted to the state, these same Bolivians reassert their feelings of capacity and of having rights when acting as members of associations, voluntary groups or local communities. (­Wanderley 2009: 78; my translation) But if anthropological approaches to citizenship have largely contributed to a better understanding of how citizenship is claimed or enacted in these ‘encounters’ with state agencies and agents, they have also problematized the connection between citizenship and the state in other ways. They are, indeed, paying attention to the blurred boundaries between ‘­state’ and ‘­­non-​­state’ (­Sharma and Gupta 2006). Such blurred boundaries are, of course, due to the already mentioned contemporary changes flowing from globalization and neoliberalism, in which the borders between the state and the market often dissolve. But more generally speaking, political anthropology ‘­challenged the ­taken-­​­­for-​­grantedness of the state as a “­distinct, fixed and unitary entity” operating outside and above society’ (­Wydra and Thomassen 2020: 8). Research then tends to focus on the everyday production, manifestation and effects of the state. Researchers disaggregate the state into practices and discourses [… and] show the close connection between the state and civil society, the impossibility of separating the formal from the informal, and the widespread practices of accommodation and appropriation. (­Stepputat and Nuijten 2020: 135) Recent research on housing and social policies in suburban neighbourhoods in the ­ on-​­state Netherlands (­de Koning et al. 2014), for instance, has shown the role played by n institutions such as housing companies, and diverse organizations and movements, in 31

Catherine Neveu

influencing the scope and contents of citizenship, including the expansion of rights. The authors study what they call ‘­citizenship agendas’, which ‘­are concerned with defining the meaning of membership in explicitly normative ways that go beyond conventional, ­legal-​­formal citizenship status’ (­de Koning et al. 2014: 121). Citizenship agendas identify particular groups of subjects, in a particular territory, and target them for policy intervention, implying models for more and less desirable citizens and ways to transform the latter into the former. For these authors, Rather than a more or less unified national citizenship agenda, a plethora of competing citizenship agendas are put forward by various actors and at varying scales. National citizenship agendas are fleshed out and implemented at local, regional and transnational scales, by institutions and actors who insert their own experiences, understandings and interests. (­de Koning et al. 2014: 121) If a diversity of (­state and ­non-​­state) agencies and agents formulates, promotes, or implements ‘­regimes of citizenship’, it has to be underlined that citizens are not just the passive recipients of such practices and framings. Many authors explore how they react to or deal with them, adapting their conduct and/­or subverting the frames; however, one should not limit the exploration of those ‘­manufactures’ of citizenship(­s) to the sole sphere of ­state-​­citizen relationships. A variety of sometimes complex resources can be mobilized by citizens and/­or subaltern social groups in ­imagining – ​­and ­demanding – ​­citizenship; as Sharma shows in the Indian case: Subaltern claims on citizenship, articulated from a position of subordination and difference, not equality, and through specific idioms, contest and radically transform the generic and universal slot of personhood that liberalism ­provides – ​­one that is rational, secular, sovereign, generic and individualistic. Their citizenship claims draw upon multiple discourses, extending well beyond the law, mixing morality and materiality, ethics and politics, and traditional and bureaucratic languages of power, and thereby muddying the very distinctions on which modern citizenship rests. (­Sharma 2011: 968) This capacity of the ‘­vernaculars of citizenship’ to draw on a diversity of resources and discourses has been highlighted in Renato Rosaldo’s exploration of ‘­cultural citizenship’. Understanding citizenship contextually, indeed, also requires paying attention to how people themselves define citizenship, how they define what it means for them to be or to be considered as citizens; that is, analyzing vernacular conceptions of citizenship. This is what Renato Rosaldo and his colleagues explored among Latina communities in the US through the concept of ‘­cultural citizenship’, that includes and also goes beyond the dichotomous categories of legal documents, which one either has or does not have, to encompass a range of gradations in the qualities of citizenship. Ordinary language distinguishes full from ­second-​­class citizens and tacitly recognizes that citizenship can be a matter of degree. (­Rosaldo 1994: 58) 32

Exploring citizenship(s) in context(s)

Through interviews, they thus aimed to understand how Latinos viewed their place in society and associated their sense of enfranchisement with cultural concepts such as respeto (­respect) or humiliación (­humiliation). […] the perceived elements of full citizenship can range in varying mixtures from dignity, w ­ ell-​­being, and respect to wages, housing, health ­ rst-​­class citizenship cannot be taken as a care, and education. The definition of fi given, but rather must be a central focus of research. (­Rosaldo 1994: 58)­5 Paying attention to those ‘­vernaculars’ of citizenship allows us to better understand ‘­what is called citizenship’ (­Isin 2009) by people themselves, and how by relying on these ‘­cultural’ elements and qualitative distinctions in senses of belonging, entitlement, and influence that vary in distinct situations and in different local communities, they are creating citizenship anew.6 While citizenship processes can, indeed, be grasped and analyzed in a variety of encounters between ‘­the state’ (­or more accurately state agencies or agents) and citizens or the population, and explored through their vernaculars, one should not forget the importance of the horizontal dimensions of citizenship, that is, relations between citizens within society, in daily interactions and ordinary practices. Indeed, being a citizen is not only about being considered as such by state institutions and/­or the law, but it also has to do with reciprocal recognition and mundane situations of ­co-​­citizenship.

Conclusion Understanding citizenship contextually, or contextualizing ‘­what is called citizenship’ (­by social actors but also in theories and analysis) requires us to pay close empirical attention to the many manufactures and manufacturers of citizenship. It also requires us to fully take into account its fundamentally processual and relational character, to move beyond formalistic and legalistic accounts, in order to highlight the social, political, and cultural processes of citizenship and its highly contested meanings, since such processes are also informed by conflicts and power relations around issues such as rights or recognition. As Étienne Balibar so inspiringly states, citizenship is essentially imparfaite (­imperfect): ‘­T his is not only suggesting that citizenship is a defective, rectifiable, improvable institution, it is above all suggesting that citizenship is rather a practice and a process than a stable form. It is always “­in the making”’ (­Balibar 2001).

Notes 1 Even if it is important, as Raymond Williams himself underlined, to analyze how, when, why, and for whom such ‘­proper or correct meanings’ are sites of contestation. 2 According to her, ­Jean-​­Pierre Vernant wrote Les origines de la pensée grecque in order to explain ‘­to Marxist intellectuals of the French Communist Party [ . . . . ] that democracy was born in Greece under the auspices of debate and free confrontation of adverse ideas’ ­ idal-​­Naquet explored the ‘­Athenian hoplite tradition’ in or(­Loraux 1993: 25), and Pierre V der to consider a model for a ­non-​­professional army after the Algerian War of Independence. 3 To mention but two examples, one can think here of Ernest Renan’s famous distinction between a French ‘­political’ model of nationality and a German ‘­ethnic’ one (­since people in Alsace Lorraine spoke a Germanic language, it did not make sense to rely on an ‘­ethnic’

33

Catherine Neveu trait to sustain the legitimacy of claiming this region back). This is also true of Thomas H. Marshall’s ‘­theory of citizenship’, with its three successive stages (­civil, political, and social) that reflect a certain reading of the British Welfare state project (­Clarke et al. 2014). 4 I not only rely here on Bénéï’s use of the term, after Noam Chomsky’s film Manufacturing consent, but also refer to manufacturing as ‘­to “­bring into a form suitable for use”, to “­make or fabricate from material”. Here the material thus manufactured, which may be fictitious in part, is that of memories, imaginations, emotions and practices of citizenship in their various ­dimensions – ​­political, judicial, cultural, social, historical […]’ (­Bénéï 2005: 6) 5 Renato Rosaldo stresses that ‘­culture’ in this context refers to how specific subjects conceive of full enfranchisement, and neither to a homogeneous social unit, nor to the realm of art and expressive production. Cultural citizenship ‘­refers to the right to be different (­in terms of race, ethnicity, or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the ­nation-​­state’s democratic processes’ (­Rosaldo 1994: 57). 6 Another stimulating dimension of Rosaldo’s concept is that it underlines how citizenship discourses are culturally informed, and not ‘­culturally neutral’ as they are pretended to be in many metanarratives.

Bibliography Balandier, G. (­1985) Le détour: pouvoir et modernité (­Paris) Balibar, E. (­ 2001) ‘­ Une citoyenneté sans communauté?’, in E. Balibar (­ ed.) Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’Etat, le peuple (­Paris) ­93–​­126 Bénéï, V. (­ed.) (­2005) Manufacturing citizenship: education and nationalism in Europe, South Asia and China (­London) Bouamama, S. (­1989) ‘­­Au-​­delà du droit de vote. La nouvelle citoyenneté’, Hommes et Migrations 1118, ­13–​­16 Clarke, J., Coll, K., Dagnino, E., and Neveu, C. (­2014) Disputing citizenship (­London) Déloye, Y. (­1994) Ecole et citoyenneté. L’individualisme républicain de Jules Ferry à Vichy: controverses (­Paris) Herzfeld, M. (­1997) Cultural intimacy: social poetics in the ­nation-​­state (­London) Hobson, B. and Lister, R. (­2002) ‘­Citizenship’ in B. Hobson, J. Lewis, and B. Siim (­eds) Contested concepts in gender and social politics (­London) ­23–​­54 Isin, E. (­2009) ‘­Citizenship in flux: the figure of the activist citizen’, Subjectivity 29, ­367–​­388 ­ ation-​ de Koning, A., Jaffe, R., and Koster, M. (­2014) ‘­Citizenship agendas in and beyond the n s­ tate: (­en)­countering framings of the good citizen’, Citizenship Studies 19.2, ­121–​­127 Loraux, N. (­1989) ‘­Les méandres de l’hellénitude’, EspacesTemps 42, ­17–​­22 ——— ​­(­1993) ‘­Eloge de l’anachronisme en histoire’, Le Genre Humain 27, ­23–​­39 ­ ation-​­state: a French case’, paper preNeveu, C. (­1994) ‘­Of a natural belonging to a political n pared for the symposium ‘­Transnationalism, ­Nation-​­State Building and Culture’, W ­ enner-​ ­Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research ——— ​­(­2015) Anthropologie de la citoyenneté (­­A ix- ­​­­en-​­Provence) Ong, A. (­1999) ‘­Clash of civilization or Asian liberalism? An anthropology of the state and citizenship’, in H.L. Moore (­ed.) Anthropological theory today (­London) ­48–​­72 Rosaldo, R. (­1994) ‘­Cultural citizenship in San José, California’, PoLAR 17.2, ­57–​­63 Sassatelli, M. (­2009) Becoming Europeans: cultural identities and cultural policies (­London) Sassen, S. (­2005) ‘­The repositioning of citizenship and alienage: emergent subjects and spaces for politics’, Globalizations 2.1, ­79–​­94 Scott, J. (­1996) Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man (­Harvard) Sharma, A. and Gupta, A. (­2006) ‘­Rethinking theories of the state in an age of globalization’, in A. Sharma and A. Gupta (­eds) The anthropology of the state: a reader (­Oxford) ­1–​­42 Sharma, A. (­2011) ‘­Specifying citizenship: subaltern politics of rights and justice in contemporary India’, Citizenship Studies 15.8, ­965–​­980 Stepputat, F. and Nuijten, M. (­2020) ‘­A nthropology and the enigma of the state’, in H. Wydra and B. Thomassen (­eds) Handbook of political anthropology (­Cheltenham) ­127–​­144

34

Exploring citizenship(s) in context(s) Wanderley, F. (­2009) ‘­Practicas estatales y el ejercicio de la ciudadanía: encuentros de la población con la burocracia en Bolivia’, Iconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 34, ­67–​­79 Werbner, P. and ­Yuval-​­Davis, N. (­1999) ‘­Women and the new discourse of citizenship’ in N. ­Yuval-​­Davis and P. Werbner (­eds) Women, citizenship and difference (­London) Williams, R. (­1976) Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (­London) Wydra, H. and Thomassen, B. (­2020) ‘­Introduction: the promise of political anthropology’, in H. Wydra and B. Thomassen (­eds) Handbook of political anthropology (­Cheltenham) ­1–​­17

35

3 GREEK CITIZENSHIP1 P.J. Rhodes

In the classical Greek world, there were just over 1,000 poleis (­city states) and a significant number of other communities, many forming part of larger regional bodies, with some degree of separate existence.2 The earliest inscribed Greek law, from Drerus in Crete in the seventh century, is presented as a resolution of the polis.3 A typical city had an area of ­25–​­100 km2, and only 13 (­including Athens and Sparta) had more than 1,000 km2 (­Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 7­ 0–​­73). While population figures are hard to come by for citizens, and even harder for other inhabitants, it seems likely that Athens’ adult male citizens numbered about 60,000 at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in the late fifth century; but as a result of casualties during the war and a plague in the early years of the war, they numbered about 30,000 in the fourth century (­e.g., Hansen 1986, 1988). There were perhaps about 10,000 free adult males who were not citizens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and probably fewer in the fourth century; and there were perhaps more, but not very many more, slaves than free citizen and ­non-​­citizen adult males. In Sparta, the full citizens (‘­Spartiates’) were a small minority of the total p ­ opulation: there were perhaps 8,000 at the beginning of the fifth century but fewer than 1,000 by the middle of the fourth century (­e.g., de Ste. Croix 1972: ­331–​­332). Mogens H. Hansen’s typical city of ­25–​­100 km2 might have had a total population of ca. 3,000 (­Hansen 2006: ­23–​­24). Greek thinkers considered such a limited size to be an important feature of the polis: in Plato’s Republic, even the ‘­bloated’ city had only 1,000 guardians, while the ­second-​­best city of his Laws had 5,040 landowners (­Pl. Res­p. 4.­423a–​­b; Leg. 5.­737c–​­738a); and Aristotle in his Politics complained that 5,000 citizens would require a t­ erritory as large as Babylon, and nobody could serve effectively as general or herald of a large body of citizens, but the state should be sufficient to provide for life but ­eusynoptos (­capable of being seen in a single gaze) (­Arist. Pol. 2.1264a.­9 –​­18, 7.1326a.­5 –​­b.25). While on various occasions small states coalesced to form larger units, and more rarely larger units were split into their components, states which became powerful did not, except on a small scale in their immediate locality, suppress the separate existence of other states which became dependent on them. What we think of as an Athenian empire in the fifth century was, in theory, an alliance of independent states, the Delian League, of which Athens was the leader (­as the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century was, in theory, an alliance of independent states 36

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-4

Greek citizenship

of which the Soviet Union was the leader), and those states would have considered it objectionably oppressive if Athens had obliterated their individuality by making all their people citizens of a greater Athens. Similarly, Sparta’s Peloponnesian League, from the sixth century to the fourth century, was an alliance of independent states, and although Sparta sometimes interfered in their internal affairs, it did so not by overtly suppressing their autonomy but by supporting or imposing local régimes. While the few large states were not the ‘­­face-­​­­to-​­face’ societies, in which to a significant extent everybody knew everybody else, which has sometimes been supposed,4 most were; and even the largest were communities firmly anchored in a particular place, and their citizenship denoted not just a particular status or (­in modern terms) possession of a particular passport, but also active membership of such a community. Rome, by contrast, made distant territories provinces governed by Roman officials, and over time extended its citizenship to an increasing proportion of the men living ­ ation-​ in its ­far-​­flung empire; and in the modern world, citizenship is mostly of large n ­states, territorially limited but much too large to form the kinds of community which we find in the Greek world. Each polis had its own citizens (­and some of the ­non-​­polis communities too might claim to have citizens), who might be designated astoi (­p eople of the town) or politai (­p eople of the polis): astos was the older word; over time, astos was used rather to refer to insiders as opposed to outsiders, or to those of citizen descent, and politēs to those possessing citizen rights and obligations; because of those nuances, the feminine astē is less rare than the feminine politis.5 Full citizenship with its rights and obligations was limited to adults, as in today’s world. The age at which adulthood began could vary from place to place: in Athens, it began technically at 18, but boys of 18 and 19 were in a liminal state; for ­office-​­holding and service on juries, the minimum age was 30, and there were other requirements in particular contexts;6 in Sparta, it probably began at 20 (­e.g., MacDowell 1986: 1­ 59–​­167). In the modern world, there is similar variation, though 18 is the most widely used age: in the United Kingdom, adulthood began at 21 until 1 January 1970 but since then has begun at 18,7 and there are various other requirements in particular contexts. Full citizenship was also limited to men (­as was the case throughout the world until 1893 in New Zealand8): that women were of inferior capacity was taken for granted, for example, in Aristotle’s Politics (­1.1259b.­18–​­1260b.7), but Plato in his Republic suggested that at any rate, in principle, women might possess the appropriate qualities to be guardians, and in his Laws regarded women as inferior but thought that they like men should attend common meals (­Res­p. 5.­454d–​­457c, cf. ­466c–​­d, 7.540c; Leg. 6.­780e–​­781d). The women in the assembly of Aristophanes’ comedy Ecclesiazusae perhaps reflect a discussion of women’s roles among the intellectuals of ­late-­​­­fifth-​­century Athens known as sophists (­Rhodes 2004: ­231–​­232). Women and children of citizen families were important, however, in the city’s religious observances, and wives were important as mothers of citizen sons. Normally, citizens were the natural or adopted sons of citizen fathers. How strict the requirements of citizen ancestry were would vary according to whether a city was conscious of a surplus or a lack of citizens (­Arist. Pol. 3.1278a.­26–​­34): in Athens, Pericles’ law of 451/450 required a citizen mother and a citizen father, and Ath. Pol. explains that as ‘­because of the large number of citizens’, but it may be that as a result of Athens’ growing power in the Aegean what had caused alarm was that increasing numbers of citizens were marrying foreign wives.9 In practice, in most cases of mixed marriage, the 37

P.J. Rhodes

wife would go to her husband’s home rather than vice versa, so the question of a man with a citizen mother but a foreign father would not often arise. At the other extreme, in the late third century, Larisa in Thessaly was short of citizens, Philip V wrote instructing it to grant citizenship to all Thessalians and other Greeks currently living there, Larisa obeyed at first but soon afterwards annulled the grant, and Philip wrote again to reinstate it.10 In the modern world, states commonly control entry, but they make provision for those who are allowed to enter and settle to apply for citizenship in due course; whether they can retain their previous citizenship in addition or have to choose one or the other depends on the states concerned. In the Greek world, entry was normally not controlled, though Sparta is said to have engaged in xenēlasiai (­expulsions of foreigners), about which we lack detailed information,11 and Athens in 431 in response to the incident which triggered the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War ‘­rounded up those of the Boeotians who were in Attica’ (­T huc. 2.6.2). Citizenship could be granted in special circumstances, as a reward for some special benefit or as an act of kindness to exiled foreigners who had a special claim on the awarding state’s generosity (­on Athens, see Osborne ­1981–​­1983); it was sometimes granted as an honour to men who continued to reside elsewhere and were unlikely to make use of it, but the simple fact of residence, even over a long term, never entailed an automatic right to apply for citizenship. In most of the modern world, public affairs have become professionalized: decisions are made by parliaments of representatives, and the role of lay citizens is limited to electing representatives from time to time; decisions are implemented by civil servants who have chosen this as a career; in some of the cases which come to the lawcourts, juries of theoretically typical lay citizens are used, but judges and the lawyers who represent litigants are specialists who have developed expertise in their field. For Aristotle, there was an essential equality among citizens, as a result of which, since they could not all rule simultaneously, they ruled and were ruled in turn (­e.g., Arist. Pol. 1.1259b.­4 –​­6). There were men who avoided public affairs and were regarded ‘­not as ­non-​­interfering but as useless’ by Pericles in Thucydides’ version of his Funeral Oration at Athens in 431/430 (­Thuc. 2.40.2), but probably both in Athens and in other states a high proportion of those qualified to take part did so.12 They could all take part in making decisions together by attending the citizen assemblies which commonly had the last word in ­decision-­​­­making – though normally by ​­ a process of probouleusis (­advance deliberation): the assembly’s business was prepared by a smaller council of men who devoted more of their time to public affairs. They could not all in the same way take part in implementing decisions together, so that task was given not to professional administrators but to citizen officials who were appointed for a short time, who often could not be reappointed to the same office, and who were accountable to the citizens for their conduct. Dispensing justice was again an amateur matter which relied on citizen involvement: there were no legal experts in Greece (­as there were in Rome); chairmen of courts were ­short-​­term officials like other officials; prosecution even for public wrongs was commonly left to volunteers, and litigants were commonly expected to plead their own cases; and juries were large (­in Athens never less than 201: [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 53.3, 68.1). In states which were more oligarchically inclined, all the rights associated with citizenship were dependent on a property qualification, so that the population might include men who satisfied the state’s requirement of citizen ancestry but who were 38

Greek citizenship

disqualified because their property was insufficient; and when the constitution of a state changed, there could be men who were qualified citizens before the change but not afterwards, or vice versa. Thus, in Athens, there was a property qualification of 2,000 drachmae from 321 to 318, and of 1,000 drachmae from 317 to 307, and men who had been citizens under the democracy but did not satisfy the requirement lost their citizenship.13 Even under the democracy in Athens, those who belonged to the lowest of four ­property-​­classes were entitled to attend the assembly and to sit on juries, but not to hold ­offices – ​­but that rule, while never annulled, was no longer enforced after the population had been approximately halved during the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 7.­4 –​­8.1, 47.1). Beyond taking part in public affairs, citizens were expected to support their state ‘­w ith their property and their bodies’:14 with their property, by paying taxes and/­or by taking on public responsibilities which involved expenditure (­in Athens, liturgies, or ‘­work for the people’), and with their bodies, by fighting against the state’s enemies. Because Athens’ power in the fifth and fourth centuries depended to a large extent on its navy, whose ships were rowed by poorer citizens (­and by ­non-​­citizens), Athens was a state in which even the poor could serve with their bodies, and this helps to explain why it was in Athens that a democracy developed which had a significant role even for the poorest citizens (­cf. [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.2). Education was essentially a private matter. Athens in the 330s refashioned a training scheme for 1­ 8-​­and 1­ 9-​­year olds to focus on infantry skills and devotion to the city’s history and religion; before the 330s, there is bare evidence that something existed, but it was so unprominent that we know nothing about it.15 Sparta exceptionally had a training scheme based on a series of ­year-​­groups which boys entered at the age of seven.16 Pericles in his Funeral Oration at Athens in 431/430 is represented by Thucydides as contrasting Sparta’s arduous military training with Athens’ lack of it (­Thuc. 2.39.1): that would be compatible either with a total lack of military training or with some but much less than Sparta had; and Greek infantry unless stationed in the front row of the phalanx needed fitness and s­ taying-​­power more than particular skills. Citizenship was associated also with owning land within the state’s territory: the citizen farmer, who lived off the produce of his own land, was an ideal rather than an actuality, particularly in an economically developed state such as Athens, but remained fundamental to Greek thinking;17 and the opposite side of that coin was the fact that normally ­non-​­citizens were not allowed to own land within the state’s territory. Religion was an essential element in a state’s identity: gods from the same range were worshipped, and festivals from the same range were celebrated, across the Greek world; but at the level of detail, each state gave its gods distinctive cult titles and worshipped them in distinctive ways on distinctive occasions, and participation in the state’s observances was an important part of belonging to the state.18 In many states, within the whole body of citizens, there were smaller units through which that body was articulated; and in the large states these smaller units provided the ­face-­​­­to-​­face societies which the whole state could not. Some subdivisions were based on supposed kinship, such as the four old phylai (­tribes) of Athens (­shared with other ‘­Ionian’ states) and their trittyes (­thirds), and the smaller and more numerous phratriai (­brotherhoods);19 and as membership of these was hereditary (­as, indeed, was membership of the ten new tribes and their subdivisions) over time they became actual kinship groups. Likewise, Sparta had the three tribes which it shared with other ‘­Dorian’ states.20 Other subdivisions were territorial: for instance, Athens after Cleisthenes’ 39

P.J. Rhodes

reforms in 508/­507 was organized in ten phylai, 30 trittyes, and 139 demes (­a distinctive sense of the word dēmos: local centres of habitation);21 Sparta comprised the four villages of Sparta proper and a fifth village, Amyclae, slightly to the south; and its five ‘­obes’ were probably the political and military embodiments of those villages.22 By contrast with both Athens and Sparta, Boeotia (­i mmediately to the north of Athens’ region of Attica) was a region which contained a plurality of cities with their own citizens, some being ­h igher-​­level cities, and others being ­lower-​­level cities dependent on one of the ­h igher-​­level cities; but it also had a federal structure, in the classical period dominated by Thebes, in which the ­h igher-​­level cities were represented, through which foreign policy was in theory decided for the whole of Boeotia, though at times dissident cities might try to go their own way.23 In addition to such structures as included all of the citizen body, there were others which included only some of the citizens. In Athens, for instance, some extended families are referred to as genē (­clans), and their distinguishing feature seems to have been that they were families in which priesthoods were hereditary: they were not all important families in classical Athens, but they presumably were important when they acquired their priesthoods, and it is possible that a typical phratria, though not necessarily every phratria, may have originated as a genos and its dependents.24 In addition to the citizens, there were as well as s­ hort-​­term visitors various other categories of residents in the territory of Greek states, both free and unfree. Some states had a body of free people who were of local origin but were not citizens with full rights: Athens did not, since its expansion into Attica resulted in all the men’s becoming Athenian citizens; but Sparta’s perioikoi (­those living around) are a ­well-​­known example. They seem to have been brought into subjection as the Spartans expanded from their own city into the rest of Laconia (­and later Messenia); they ran the affairs of their own communities, and may have considered themselves to be citizens of those communities; but they had no independent foreign policy but in that respect were sub­ ecision-​­making, and they fought ject to Sparta without having any share in Sparta’s d in Sparta’s army together with Sparta’s full citizens, the Spartiates (­in an increasing proportion as Sparta’s citizen numbers declined) (­e.g., Cartledge 2002: 8­ 4–​­85, ­153–​­166). Since, as I noted above, immigrants might be granted citizenship as an exceptional honour but never acquired a right to apply for it, it was, in theory, possible for an immigrant family to remain in a state but without citizenship for several generations. Such people were in Athens designated metoikoi (‘­metics’), by a word which might originally have denoted either that they were ‘­immigrants’ or that they ‘­lived with’ the citizens.25 They probably had to register as metics if they stayed in Athens for longer than a specified period, perhaps a month; they required a citizen prostatēs (­sponsor); unless granted it as a special privilege (­such as was sometimes granted to favoured metics), they could not own land or a house in Attica; they had to pay a special poll tax, and (­again, unless granted a special privilege) were liable for other taxes on less advantageous terms than citizens; and in some circumstances, they were liable for military service.26 There has been a tendency to think of the typical Athenian metic as an ‘­economic migrant’ who settled in Athens to make money in ways that did not require the ownership of land or a h ­ ouse – ​­skilled craftsmen, traders and the l­ ike – ​­and that was probably the kind of metic envisaged by Xenophon in his Ways and Means (­cf. Vect. 2). Certainly there were some metics of that kind, but there were various other ways in which a person could become a metic: in particular, manumitted slaves seem to have become metics, not citizens; and as a result of the destruction of a state, or political trouble or a 40

Greek citizenship

natural disaster in their own state people might arrive in Athens as refugees, and might either stay for a long time or return to their original state after another change there.27 Ben Akrigg suggests that a higher proportion of the metics than is normally assumed were manumitted slaves, who stayed in Athens after their manumission because they had nowhere else to go. Paul McKechnie has studied the different kinds of outsiders in the ­fourth-​­century Greek world (­McKechnie 1989). Not only were there the traders who were typical economic migrants, but also the mobile skilled workers (­such as sculptors), who would travel to where somebody commissioned work from them, and the intellectuals such as the sophists in the fifth century and the heads of philosophical schools in the fourth. Also, there were the refugees noted above; the men who whether as refugees or for another reason sought employment as mercenary soldiers, and those who established themselves in unpoliced areas as groups of pirates; and the Macedonian kings and their successors in the Hellenistic world attracted courtiers and ‘­friends’ of various kinds. There were also differing kinds of people in a servile state in Greece. As Sparta provides an instance of free inferiors in its perioikoi, it also provides an instance of a servile class in Laconia and Messenia in its helots (­a word which probably denotes ‘­captives’): the perioikoi perhaps resulted from the earlier part of Sparta’s expansion and the helots from the later, though we should not impose too much tidiness on the process. The helots had families and property of a kind; they were assigned to individual Spartiate citizens to work for them; they perhaps gave their masters a proportion of the produce of their land and kept and lived off the remainder; they were subject to various kinds of hostile and degrading treatment; and they accompanied their masters to war but did not fight in the army as the perioikoi did (­see, e.g., Cartledge 2002: ­83–​­84, ­138–​­153). Otherwise, there were various ways in which people could fall into servitude in the Greek world, including being captured as prisoners of war (­though such prisoners were often ransomed), or falling into debt and being unable to repay their d ­ ebts – ​­though in Athens Solon at the beginning of the sixth century had banned loans on the security of the p ­ erson – which ​­ seems to mean that he banned the outright enslavement of defaulters but not the kind of bondage which was ended when a debt was discharged.28 ­ on-​­Athenian and In Athens and in many places, there were individual chattel slaves, n ­ on-​­Greek, bought or the children of slaves who had been bought, and used for often n various indoor and outdoor purposes; they were the property of their owners and had minimal rights. In trying to justify the institution, Aristotle argued that a slave was a living piece of property, and some people had slavish natures and therefore ought to be slaves, but he had to admit that there were some cases in which people’s actual status did not match their nature (­Pol. 1.1253b.­32–​­33, 1254a.­17–​­1255b.15). Commonly, slaves did not enable their owners to lead an idle life but worked with their owners (­not only in their own houses and farms, but, for example, also on public buildings or in rowing warships).29 A few slaves were people with particular skills who did well for themselves: in ­fourth-​­century Athens, the bankers Pasion and Phormio began as slaves but eventually were not only manumitted but also became citizens and rich men; at the other end of the scale, the large numbers of slaves working in Athens’ silver mines endured harsh conditions and probably in most cases did not live long. In addition to slaves with individual owners, Athens had some ­state-​­owned slaves, who helped the citizen officials with the more menial aspects of their work, and some of these too were skilled men, such as those employed in the early fourth century as testers of the genuineness of silver coins.30 41

P.J. Rhodes

It has commonly been considered that the division between citizens with their families and the various categories of ­non-​­citizens with their families was one of the most fundamental divisions in a Greek state (­e.g., Rhodes 2009: 61). Recently, however, there has been growing interest in places in which and organizations through which people of different statuses could have dealings with one another.31 Some Athenian studies have focused on the agora and other places where people from different parts of Attica, and of different categories ranging from ­upper-​­class citizens to slaves, would meet one another, whether as equals or in some kind of hierarchical relationship (­e.g., buyer and seller) (­e.g., Vlassopoulos 2007: ­33–​­52, Matuszewski 2019: ­27–​­176). An early venture into this theme for Athens, by Nicholas F. Jones, was still focused primarily on the citizens, and it was devoted mostly to the territorial demes and the ten tribes in which they were grouped; but it looked also at the phratriai and at associations of other kinds before concluding with the Cretan city constructed in Plato’s Laws. This book began to explore not only Athens’ provision through the smaller units for those citizens who could not find satisfaction through the central institutions of the polis but also the development of associations in which citizens and ­non-​­citizens could join.32 The realization that a simple dichotomy cannot be maintained between citizens, who owned land and farmed it, and ­non-​­citizens, who did not own land and engaged in commercial activities, has led to further work on the crossing of that boundary. Mar­ on-​­citizens loes Deene has argued that commercial cooperation between citizens and n ‘­provided opportunities for n ­ on-​­citizens to create networks across the boundaries of legal status’: people of different categories met one another in public spaces such as the agora (­which worried Plato and Aristotle) and gymnasia, and also in the demes.33 This theme is pursued also by Claire Taylor (­2015) in her chapter in a volume on Communities and networks, while Christy Constantakopoulou in that volume studies bodies which combined citizens and ­non-​­citizens in three Aegean islands: Heraclea, Syme, and Carpathus (­Constantakopoulou 2012, revised 2015). In the 330s, mainland Greece was subjected to Philip of Macedon through a Greek kind of organization, the league of allies known as the League of Corinth. The conquests of Alexander the Great resulted in a greatly enlarged Greek world, and after his death the easternmost part was lost but the rest was divided between a number of ‘­successor’ kingdoms. In this Hellenistic period, the Greek cities continued to exist, and they maintained such independence as they could under the shadow of the kings; in the areas which had not previously been Greek, new cities were founded by Alexander and by his successors, and these new cities might be more overtly under a king’s control, with a royal epistatēs (­overseer) in the city and instructions from the king conveyed to it by him.34 The cities had to find ways of living with the kings, and on various occasions kings were happy to grant ‘­freedom’ to particular cities or to all cities, while making it clear that this freedom had been freely granted by them and not forcibly extorted from them.35 While Greek states were still largely eager to retain their local autonomy, there were developments in the direction of making it less absolute than it had been earlier. In addition to the absorption of smaller states by larger neighbours (­sometimes now referred to as sympoliteia, joint citizenship), and the occasional undoing of such absorptions, which had always been possible,36 there were occasions when one state granted isopoliteia (­equal citizenship rights) to citizens of another when they visited or migrated to it.37 And, while each state had its own laws, we often in the Hellenistic period find a state inviting ‘­foreign judges’ from outside (­the Greek term is xenikon dikastērion, ‘­foreign court’) to resolve some critical problem, on the assumption that despite local 42

Greek citizenship

differences in detail there was an underlying similarity between the laws of different states and the foreigners’ lack of involvement with either party to the dispute would outweigh their lack of local knowledge.38 Foreign judges were used also to arbitrate in disputes between two states. On the Greek mainland, two leagues (­which had already existed as regional entities in the classical period) developed and at their greatest extent included many of the individual states: unlike the leagues of Sparta and Athens in the classical period, they were not dominated by a powerful state which used them to control less powerful states. These were the Achaean League in the Peloponnese and the Aetolian League in the north.39 In the Achaean League, the citizenship of the individual states continued, but it was possible also to write of (­sym)­politeia, (­joint) citizenship, of the League.40 We have one reference to what seems to be a subsidiary unit within the League, the synteleia (­literally, contribution group) of Patrae (­Polyb. 5.94.1). Individual states belonging to the League could make judicial arrangements with one another in the same way as fully independent states (­IG V 2 357 = SdA 567.­91–​­99); and as a particular instance of foreign judges sent to arbitrate between states, we have an occasion when one member state (­Megara) supplied judges to arbitrate between two other member states (­Epidaurus and Corinth).41 In the Aetolian League, there were three tribes of Aetolians; neighbouring peoples ­ uasi-​­tribal units known as telē (­singular telos); seem to have been incorporated as q and more distant states were not incorporated in the League in the same way but were granted isopoliteia (­equal citizenship rights) either with one member state or with the League as a whole.42 However, Cius in Asia Minor seems to have been made a subject ally, with affairs under the control of an Aetolian general (­Polyb. 15.23.­7–​­9). In the end, Greece and the Greeks were absorbed into the Roman Empire. In 146, Macedonia was made a Roman province, and mainland Greece, designated Achaia, was made an appendage of that province; other parts of the Greek world were acquired by Rome at other times. Cities still existed, with varying nominal statuses reflecting degrees of dignity rather than of substance, and they could run their internal affairs as long as they did not provoke the Romans: from the Romans’ viewpoint, their ‘­c itizens’ were municipes of municipalities, while the only citizenship that mattered was that of Rome. Indeed, sometimes Romans present in a place were added to the body enacting its decrees: from Arcadia, for instance, we have one such decree from Antigonea (­Mantinea) and one from Megalopolis.43 Otherwise, internal life in the cities continued very much as before, and Roman overlordship was comparable to the overlordship of Hellenistic kings, but with no alternative to Rome there was not even an appearance of freedom to make choices in external affairs.

Abbreviation OR = Osborne, R. and Rhodes, P.J. (­eds) (­2017) Greek historical inscriptions, ­478–​­4 04 BC (­Oxford and New York)

Notes 1 See also on this subject Rhodes (­2009); but this chapter has been newly written for the present volume. All ancient dates are BCE, unless stated otherwise.

43

P.J. Rhodes 2 Poleis and other communities are listed and discussed by Hansen and Nielsen (­2004). 3 Buck 116 = ML 2 = Nomima I 81. For a study which suggests that the understanding of Athens as a polis with politai appeared only in the sixth century, see Manville (­1990). 4 Laslett (­1956); applied to Athens by Finley (­1973: 17); rightly rejected for Athens by Cohen (­1997) (­non vidi), (­2000: ­104–​­106), Osborne (­2010: 7). 5 Lévy (­1985); Hansen (­1997: 1­ 0–​­11); Cohen (­2000: ­50–​­63); Hansen, in Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: 47); Blok (­2017: ­147–​­186). 6 Ath. Pol. 42 adulthood and two years’ liminality, 30.2 ­office-​­holding (­for an oligarchic régime, but there is no reason to think that the democracy differed in this respect), 63.3 jury service. 7 Family Law Reform Act 1969: https://­www.legislation.gov.uk/­ukpga/­1969/­46/­contents (­accessed 27 July 2020). 8 https://­n zhistory.govt.nz/­politics/­­womens-​­suffrage (­accessed 27 July 2020). 9 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 26.4 with Rhodes (­1981) and Rhodes (­2017) ad loc. 10 IG IX 2 517 = SIG3 543 = Buck 32: in his second letter Philip cites the Roman practice of granting citizenship. 11 Thuc. 1.144.2, and 2.39.1 (­where Pericles says that Athens does not engage in them), Ar. Av. ­1012–​­1014, Pl. Prt. 342c, with MacDowell (­1986: 115). 12 Not just by attending the assembly, but also by holding offices and sometimes proposing decrees: for ­fourth-​­c entury Athens, see Hansen (­1989: ­1–​­72). 13 On 321, see Diod. Sic. 18.18.­4 –​­5, Plut. Phoc. 28.7; on 317, see Diod. Sic. 18.74.3. 14 E.g., Thuc. 8.65.3 (­i n an oligarchic programme). 15 The scheme of the 330s, [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42 with inscriptions collected in Reinmuth (­1971) (­he dated his no. 1 361/360, but most have dated it after the reform of the 330s). 16 Xen. Lac. ­2 –​­3, Plut. Lyc. ­16–​­25, with MacDowell (­1986: ­54–​­65, ­159–​­167). 17 In Pl. Res­p.  2.369d, the first component of the minimal ‘­necessary city’ is the farmer; in Arist. Pol. 1.1256a.­38–​­40, ‘­the largest part of mankind lives from the land and domesticated crops’. 18 The religious dimension of citizenship, and with it the role of women as members of the citizen body, is stressed by Blok (­2017). 19 The fragment from the lost beginning of [Arist.] Ath. Pol. printed as fr. 3 in F. G. Kenyon’s Oxford Text and as fr. 2 in Rhodes (­2017), whether or not it correctly represents what that work said, is badly confused. 20 The constitutional document preserved as the ‘­Great Rhetra’ in Plut. Lyc. 6 instructed the Spartans to ‘­tribe tribes and obe obes’. 21 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 21.­2 –​­5: see especially Traill (­1975). 22 See, e.g., Cartledge (­2002: ­90–​­93); this view of the obes was propounded earlier by W ­ ade-​ ­ ery (­1944: 117, 1­ 19–​­121) = (­1958: ­70–​­71, ­74–​­77). See also Brock in this volume. G 23 See Hansen (­1996), Hansen in Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: 4­ 31–​­461), Beck and Ganter (­2015). For the structure of the federation between 446 and 386, see Hell. Oxy. 19. ­2 –​­4 Chambers. 24 See Bourriot (­1976), Roussel (­1976), Lambert (­1993: ­59–​­94)  – but ​­ Theodoridis (­2002) has shown that Philoch. FGrH 328 F 35 came from Philochorus’ third book and may have been attributed to Solon (­at the beginning of the sixth century). 25 On Athenian metics, see, in general, Whitehead (­1977). On the disappearance of metic status in the Hellenistic period, see Whitehead (­1977: ­163–​­167); Niku (­2007). 26 On privileges for favoured metics, see Pečírka (­1966), Henry (­1983: ­204–​­261). See also Thomsen in this volume. 27 See especially for manumitted slaves Akrigg (­2015), (­2019: ­132–​­138); and for refugees Rubinstein (­2018, 2020) and Kostecka in this volume. Exceptionally, Athens confirmed or granted (­at least in the case of the Plataeans, a slightly limited form of) citizenship to the Plataeans in 427 (­T huc. 3.55.3, 63.2, [Dem.] 59. Neaera 1­ 04–​­106), and to the Samians in 405 (­IG II2 1 = I3 127 = OR 191.12, 3­ 2–​­34; reaffirmed in 403/402, IG II2 1 = RO 2.­43–​­44, ­52–​­54). 28 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 6. 1, Plut. Sol. ­15–​­16, with Harris (­2002) = (­2006: ­249–​­269). 29 Erechtheum, e.g., IG I3 476 = OR 181 B.­192–​­199; warships, e.g., IG I3 1032.­142–​­143 with ­254–​ 2­ 57, ­272–​­273, ­169–​­710 with 264, ­270–​­271 (­these lines not included in OR 190, but see commentary). See in general Lewis (­2018: ­167–​­195).

44

Greek citizenship 30 Various ­state-​­owned slaves are mentioned in [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 47.­5 –​­48.1, 50.2, 54.1, 64.1, 65.1, 65.4, 69.1; testers of silver coins, SEG XXVI 72 = RO 25. 31 In addition to the publications cited here, see the web site of the Copenhagen Associations Project, directed by Prof. V. Gabrielsen: https://­copenhagenassociations.saxo.ku.dk/ (­accessed 2 August 2020). 32 Jones (­1999): for provision for people other than adult male citizens, see especially ­123–​­133, ­214–​­220, ­249–​­267. 33 Deene (­2014), quoting ­p.  158. Inter alia she cites IG II2 2934, a f­ourth-​­century dedication by a group of fullers including citizens and n ­ on-​­citizens (­cf. Taylor 2015: 43 n.22), men and women. 34 E.g., orders from Philip V to Thessalonice, second century (­IG X 2.1 3 = ISE 111). 35 The first general grant of freedom was by Polyperchon in the name of Philip Arrhidaeus in 319 (­Diod. Sic. 18.­55–​­56), and the last was by the Roman Flamininus in 196 (­Polyb. 18.44.­1–​­3, 46.5); that freedom was freely granted by the king is spelled out most clearly in Antiochus III’s message to Smyrna in 196 (­Livy 33.38.6). For citizenship in the Hellenistic world, see Section 4 in this volume. 36 E.g., the absorption of Medeon by the larger Stiris in Phocis, second century (­IG IX 1 32 = SIG 3 647 = Buck 56). 37 An early instance was a s­ hort-​­lived union of Argos and Corinth in the years around 390 (­Xen. Hell. 4.4.6 etc., Diod. Sic. 14.92.­1–​­2, Andoc. 3.­26–​­27). One Hellenistic instance among many is between Messene and Phigalea ca. 240 (­IG V 2 419 = SIG 3 472 = SdA 495). See in general Gawantka (­1975). See also Müller in this volume. 38 Already in the time of Alexander the Great there is an instance in Tegea (­IG V 2 pp. ­xxxvi–​­xxxvii = RO 101.­24–​­37); an instance from the Hellenistic period, Bargylia using a judge from Teos, third century (­SIG 3 426 = IK Iasos 608). See, in general, Crowther (­1992), of which there is a summary at SEG XLIV 1708, and his discussion of some instances (­1993) and (­1994). 39 On the Achaean League in general, see Rizakis (­2015); on the Aetolian League, see Funke (­2015). 40 E.g., Xen. Hell. 4.6.1 (­early fourth century), Polyb. 2.43.1, 4. See Rizakis (­2015: 122). 41 SIG 3 471 = IG IV2 1 71 = Buck 99 (­third century). 42 Aetolian tribes, Thuc. 3.94.5, Arr. Anab. 1.10.2; telē, e.g., IG IX 12 618.­1–​­2; Ceos granted ­isopoliteia with Naupactus, IG XII 5 532 = SIG 3 522 §iii = SdA 508 §iii; Tricca granted ­isopoliteia with League, IG IX 12 136 = SdA 542. 43 IG V 2 268, 515 (­both ca. first century BCE/­fi rst century CE).

Bibliography Akrigg, B. (­2015) ‘­Metics in Athens’, in Taylor and Vlassopoulos (­2015) ­155–​­173 ——— ​­(­2019) Population and economy in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Beck, H. and Funke, P. (­eds) (­2015) Federalism in Greek antiquity (­Cambridge) Beck, H. and Ganter, A. (­2015) ‘­Boiotia and the Boiotian Leagues’, in Beck and Funke (­2015) ­132–​­157 Blok, J.H. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Bourriot, F. (­1976) Recherches sur la nature du genos (­Paris) Cartledge, P.A. (­2002) Sparta and Lakonia: a regional history, 1300 to 362 B.C., 2nd edn (London) Cohen, E.E. (­1997) ‘­A modern myth: classical Athens as a “­­face-­​­­to-​­face” society’, Common Knowledge 6, ­97–​­124 ——— ​­(­2000) The Athenian nation (­Princeton, NJ) Constantakopoulou, Ch. (­2012) ‘­Beyond the polis: island koina and other ­non-​­polis entities in the Aegean’, REA 114, ­301–​­331 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Beyond the polis: island koina and other ­non-​­polis entities in the Aegean’, in Taylor and Vlassopoulos (­2015) ­213–​­236 Crowther, C.V. (­1992) ‘­The decline of Greek democracy?’, JAC 7, ­13–​­48 ——— ​­(­1993) ‘­Foreign judges in Seleucid cities (­GIBM 421)’, JAC 8, ­40–​­77 ——— ​­(­1994) ‘­Foreign courts on Kalymna in the third century B.C.’, JAC 9, ­33–​­55

45

P.J. Rhodes Deene, M. (­2014) ‘“­Let’s work together”: economic cooperation, social capital and chances of social mobility in classical Athens’, G&R n.s. 61, ­152–​­173 de Ste. Croix, G.E.M. (­1972) The origins of the Peloponnesian War (­London) Finley, M.I. (­1973) Democracy ancient and modern (­London) Funke, P. (­2015) ‘­A itolia and the Aitolian League’, in Beck and Funke (­2015) ­86–​­117 Gawantka, W. (­1975) Isopolitie: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der zwischenstaatlichen Beziehungen in der griechischen Antike (­Munich) Hansen, M.H. (­1986) Demography and democracy (­Herning) ——— ​­(­1988) Three studies in Attic demography (­Copenhagen) ——— ​­(­1989) The Athenian ecclesia II (­Copenhagen) ——— (­ ​­ 1996) ‘­A n inventory of Boiotian poleis in the archaic and classical periods’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) Introduction to an inventory of poleis (­C.P.C. Acts 3. Copenhagen) ­73–​­116 ——— ​­(­1997) ‘­The polis as an urban centre: the literary and epigraphical evidence’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) The polis as an urban centre and as a political community (­C.P.C. Acts 4. Copenhagen) ­9 –​­86 ——— ​­(­2006) The shotgun method: the demography of the ancient Greek ­ city-​­ state culture (­Columbia, MO) Hansen, M.H. and Nielsen, T.H. (­eds) (­2004) An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (­Oxford) Harris, E.M. (­2002) ‘­Did Solon abolish ­debt-​­bondage?’, CQ 2 52, ­415–​­430 ——— ​­(­2005) Democracy and the rule of law in classical Athens (­New York) Henry, A.S. (­1983) Honours and privileges in Athenian decrees (­Hildesheim) Jones, N.F. (­1999) The associations of classical Athens (­New York) Lambert, S.D. (­1993) The phratries of Attica (­A nn Arbor, MI) Laslett, T.P.R. (­1956) ‘­The face to face society’, in id. (­ed.) Philosophy, politics and society, first series (­Oxford) ­157–​­184 Lévy, E. (­1985) ‘­Astos et politès d’Homère à Hérodote’, Ktema 10, ­53–​­66 Lewis, D.M. (­2018) Greek slave systems in their Eastern Mediterranean context, c. 8­ 00–​­146 B.C. (­Oxford) MacDowell, D.M. (­1986) Spartan law (­Edinburgh) Manville, P.B. (­1990) The origins of citizenship in ancient Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Matuszewski, R. (­2019) Räume der Reputation: zur bürgerlichen Kommunikation im Athen des 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr., Historia Einz. 257 (­Stuttgart) McKechnie, P. (­1989) Outsiders in the Greek cities in the fourth century B.C. (­London) Niku, M. (­2007) The official status of the foreign residents in Athens, 3­ 22–​­120 B.C. (­Helsinki) Osborne, M.J. (­­1981–​­1983) Naturalization in Athens (­Brussels) Osborne, R.G. (­2010) Athens and Athenian democracy (­Cambridge) Pečírka, J. (­1966) The formula for the grant of enktesis in Attic inscriptions (­Prague) Reinmuth, O.W. (­1971) The ephebic inscriptions of the fourth century B.C., Mnemosyne Sup­p. 14 (­Leiden) Rhodes, P.J. (­1981) A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2004) ‘­A ristophanes and the Athenian assembly’, in D.L. Cairns and R.A. Knox (­eds) Law, rhetoric and comedy in classical Athens: essays in honour of Douglas M. MacDowell (­Swansea) ­223–​­237 ——— ​­(­2009) ‘­Civic ideology and citizenship’, in R.K. Balot (­ed.) A companion to Greek and Roman political thought (­Chichester) ­57– ​­69 ——— ​­(­2017) The Athenian constitution written in the school of Aristotle (­Liverpool) Rizakis, A. (­2015) ‘­The Achaian League’, in Beck and Funke (­2015) ­118–​­131 Roussel, D. (­1976) Tribu et cité (­Paris) Rubinstein, L. (­2018) ‘­Immigration and refugee crises in ­fourth-​­century Greece: an Athenian perspective’, The European Legacy 23, ­5 –​­24 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­Refugee crises in classical Greece and the role of the Athenian prostates’, in A. Dimopoulou, A. Helmis, and D. Karambelas (­eds) Ἰουλίαν Βελισσαροπούλου ἐπαινέσαι: studies in ancient Greek and Roman law (­Athens) ­191–​­211 Taylor, C.E. (­2015) ‘­Social networks and social mobility in ­fourth-​­century Athens’, in Taylor and Vlassopoulos (­2015) ­35–​­53 Taylor, C.E. and Vlassopoulos, K. (­eds) (­2015) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford)

46

Greek citizenship Theodoridis, Ch. (­2002) ‘­Eine unbeachtete Buchangabe zum Bruchstück des Philochoros über die attischen Orgeonen’, ZPE 138, ­40–​­42 Traill, J.S. (­1975) The political organization of Attica, Hesperia Sup­p. 14 (­Princeton, NJ) Vlassopoulos, K. (­2007) ‘­Free spaces: identity, experience and democracy in classical Athens’, CQ n.s. 57, ­33–​­52 ­Wade-​­Gery, H.T. (­1944) ‘­The Spartan rhetra in Plutarch, Lycurgus VI’, CQ 38, ­1–​­9, ­62–​­72, and ­115–​­126 ——— ​­(­1958) Essays in Greek history (­Oxford) Whitehead, D. (­1977) The ideology of the Athenian metic, PCPS Supp. IV (­Cambridge)

47

4 LIFESTYLE AND BEHAVIOUR IN ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL GREECE The other language of citizenship Alain Duplouy

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players (­William Shakespeare, As You Like It)

These are the opening lines of Jacques’ famous monologue in Act II Scene VII of ­William Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It. The speech, which compares the world with a stage and life with a play, has long been commented, offering a variety of interpretations and variations. Without stressing too closely the analogy, Shakespeare’s words could also be applied to the practices of citizenship in archaic and classical Greece, for which lifestyles and behaviours offer an alternative language to Aristotle’s institutional approach and his w ­ ell-​­known metechein kriseōs kai archēs formula, ‘­to have a share in the administration of justice and in the holding of office’ (­Pol. 3.1275a.23). Looking at how citizens acted as citizens in order to be accepted as ­citizens – ​­as I will further explore ­here – ​­has also been a particular focus of research in social sciences when applied to current notions of citizenship, ­especially – ​­but not ­exclusively – ​­in America. When defining the contours of the American democracy, the Founding Fathers left unsettled the exact significance of ‘­We the People’, leaving the arduous task of determining the meaning of American citizenship and its content for future generations. Being a nation of immigrants, America has always known the tension between welcoming newcomers and being concerned by a possible alteration of the character of its citizenry. From the earliest times, guidelines have been issued to instruct prospective citizens on American history, values, symbols, rights, and responsibilities: How to become a citizen of the United States, Gateway to citizenship, Handbook for immigrants to the United States, Guide to the United States for the Jewish immigrant, Assimilation of the Italian immigrant, etc. Beyond practical matters of enfranchisement and a general description of the State and its government, many of these brochures also focus on aspects of the American way of life, exploring what it means to be an American and how 48

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-5

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece

to behave accordingly.1 In forging an American identity, American citizens acted not only for themselves and for future generations, but also to instil in outsiders, whether immigrants or newly enfranchised groups, a shared ideal of citizenship, as well as common beliefs and behaviours. Of course, a practical achievement of citizenship does not preclude the existence of a legal definition of citizen rights and duties; it, nevertheless, supplements it, extending the matter of citizenship to a variety of perspectives. Social sciences have been at the forefront of current academic research and political debate on citizenship, as several contributions to this volume make clear. Beyond the conventional view of citizenship as an established legal institution and the enduring narrative that assimilates citizens to members or subjects of an abstract polity (­State), a new research field has emerged on the notion of performative citizenship in contemporary societies, demonstrating how much citizenship is anything but a stable concept, and is actually enacted in everyday acts. Engin Isin (­2017, 2019), for example, highlights how people creatively perform citizenship rather than simply follow a script of given ­ on-​­democratic polities, as well as across polrights and duties, both in democratic and n ities. This means that in today’s world the way people endorse their citizenship actually plays a role in shaping and constantly ­re-​­shaping the concept itself, notably through social and political struggles, attaching new meanings and functions to it. When people act as citizens, they are not only following rules but may also transform them. Civil, political, or social rights generally come into being and become effective through acts and conventions, such as rituals, behaviours, traditions, protocols, etc., which may also include outsiders. Indeed, as Isin writes, ‘­the subject positions of citizens, strangers, outsiders, and aliens are neither static nor impermeable. There is a huge variety of social groups that move through or across these positions’ (­2017: 504) or, to put it in ­ on-​­citizens can another way, ‘­since citizenship is brought into being by performing it, n also perform citizenship’ (­2019: 50). Eventually, the notion of performative citizenship involves the ‘­art of being with others, negotiating different situations and identities, and articulating ourselves as distinct yet similar to others in our everyday lives’ (­Isin 2019: 53). This is not to deny the importance of the legal aspects of citizenship in general, but to refuse any prior delimitation by a given form or procedure. Although this emerging field is dominated by American and British scholars, European and, especially, French researchers are not to be ignored. Extending Arendt’s famous formula on the ‘­r ight to have rights’, the French philosopher Étienne Balibar (­1995 [with Hobsbawm]; 2001, 2011) has abundantly argued for defining citizenship not just by having rights, but also by claiming them, especially across borders, whether at the ­supra-​­national level of the European Union or in relation to the ­so-​­called ‘­i llegal’ immigrants. Instead of considering that citizenship exists in abstracto, he proposed to conceive it as a process, as a condition always in the making. Beyond strictly juridical approaches considering it as a fixed status, therefore, citizenship can be analyzed anthropologically as a social and political construct, as a pursuit carrying a variety of meanings and representations (­s ee also Neveu 2004 and in this volume). More precisely, Catherine Neveu (­2015) demonstrated that acts of citizenship also involve daily enactments, which can be rather consequential even if lacking a high level of visibility. Accordingly, approaching citizenship processes ‘­from the ordinary’ appears as a fruitful perspective from which the political dimension of routine practices can be grasped (­s ee also Gautier and Laugier 2006). It allows the exploration of the eminently political implications of practices, spaces, and times that are not usually considered as such. 49

Alain Duplouy

Of course, all these studies may find particular resonance when applied to the ancient world, and they will certainly do so in the coming years, as more and more classicists are exploring alternatives to the Aristotelian definition. I have to admit, shamefully, that my own formulation of ‘­citizenship as performance’ presented a few years ago (­Duplouy 2018, though initially elaborated for a conference held in 2009) was achieved without knowledge of the growing literature that had established performative citizenship as a new avenue of research in social sciences. Beyond ancient texts and material ­culture – ​­which constituted the starting point and the core of my ­research – ​­I rather elaborated on the idea of performative citizenship on classical sociology and historical anthropology, as I will explain here before developing the citizen value of an athletic lifestyle.

Stand, body, habitus, Lebensform, schēma: the other language of citizenship ‘­Men make the city’ (­andres gar polis), wrote Thucydides (­7.77.7), following Alcaeus (­fr. 112, 426). Accordingly, the Greek city is not to be defined as ‘­one of the most totally institutionalized societies in world history’ (­Hansen 2006: 113), but rather as a Bürgerstaat (­Heuss 1946: 39; Walter 1993), or ‘­citizen State’, that is a community having an existence well beyond the domain of formal institutions. This means that contrary to the Aristotelian perspective, the polis was not restricted to the sole political or judicial activities achieved through formal institutions. There is a long tradition, of course, of investigating the ancient Greek ­city-​­state as a community, starting at least from Fustel de Coulanges’ book La Cité antique (­1864). Especially, François de Polignac’s approach, strongly influenced by French anthropological structuralism and anchored ­ idal-​­Naquet’s, and Detienne’s in the s­o-​­called ‘­Paris school’ charted by Vernant’s, V works, led to a definition of the archaic city as ‘­a social entity founded upon a network of relations between the various members of a territorial community’ (­Polignac 1995: 78). More precisely, by focusing on the function of sanctuaries in the formation process of Greek cities, he assimilated the polis to the expression of a form of cultic cohesion, thus outlining the contours of citizenship that was elaborated and enacted through cult practices. ‘­Participation in religious rituals guaranteed a mutual recognition of statuses and set the seal upon membership of the society, thereby defining an early form of citizenship’, concluded Polignac (­1995: 153). This truly citizen facet of cults was central in the life of Greek cities. As Josine Blok has shown in a series of recent studies (­2011, 2014, 2017), ancient sources clearly define the polis primarily through its cults. As expressed in the recurring formula meteinai or metechein tōn hierōn kai tōn hosiōn, ‘­to have a share in the affairs of the gods and in all those of men that please the gods’, the Greeks considered the city as a cultic community whose members, men and women alike, benefited from a covenant with the gods. Even the ­integration  – ​­albeit ­limited  – ​­of foreigners as metics implied their  participation in specific city cults (­Wijma 2014). Beyond cults, however, the notion of p ­ articipative ­citizenship can also be arrived at through a consideration of sociological and anthropo­ logical models, as I explore in my last book (­Duplouy 2019). Max Weber’s concept of Stand, or status group, offers an interesting model to figure out what the Greek city was. In Weber’s work (­1921: ­531–​­540; see Gerth and Mills 1946: ­180–​­195; Roth and Wittich 1978: ­926–​­940), the notion of Stand is firstly contrasted to the concept of class. If the history of archaic Greece has often been conceived as the product of a class struggle between an elite of landowners and a dēmos of peasants (­e.g., 50

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece

de Ste. Croix 1981; Rose 2012), Weber reminds us that classes are not communities. ­Class-​­situation being exclusively determined by m ­ arket-​­situation, classes do not offer a practical model to understand Greek cities as communities. In contrast to classes, however, status groups can offer a valid social model for Greek cities. According to Weber, a Stand is a social group whose members have the same degree of prestige. But more than the various qualities that individuals possess, it is the community’s recognition of the expected qualities and their positive evaluation that confer the social dignity constituting the status. The notion of Stand is thus tightly linked to a ‘­positive or negative social estimation of honour’: ‘­above all else a specific style of life is expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle’ (­on atimia, see also Rocchi in this volume). In Weber’s model, social evaluation depends not only on individual qualities and how they are implemented, but also on the standards that other members of the community value, honour, and respect. In this sense, members of a status group adopt a particular way of life (­L ebensführung), that is, a set of behaviours and practices that derive their unity from specific mental dispositions and ethical qualities, themselves linked to education, culture, profession, tastes and ways of being, as well as social traditions and conventions. In short, it is the way of life itself that constitutes the group. A status group is, therefore, formed around particular values, norms, and a specific lifestyle. Its members maintain a sense of belonging and share the same statutory markers, so that status groups are often relatively closed communities. They appear through mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in which recognition by others is related to complying with the lifestyle valued by the group while excluding cultural ­practices – ​­sometimes even strict ­endogamy – ​­quickly erect symbolic and social barriers between distinct status groups. I am convinced that there is value in investigating archaic Greek cities using the model of the Weberian Stand, and stressing the importance of behaviours and lifestyles in the constitution of the group and its sustainability. Instead of focusing on institutions when dealing with the polis, looking at behaviours and how they were enforced and transmitted is, therefore, another way to investigate ancient citizenship, describing it as a performance (­Duplouy 2018). Instead of membership in a legal organization, which introduces a view from the top, archaic citizenship should be described as a form of participation. This is actually the very meaning of Aristotle’s concept of metechein, although he restricted it to participation in formal institutions. As a community, however, the polis was tied to all kinds of activities that the citizens had in common in their everyday lives (­­Schmitt-​­Pantel 1990; Ampolo 1996). This means that, well beyond the Aristotelian perspective, the core of the polis was not restricted to having a share in the administration of justice and in the holding of office. In ancient Greece, what we may call the ‘­political’ was embedded within society and actually related to a number of activities, be they social, judicial, political, military, religious, cultural, artistic, or economic. Since many aspects of the archaic institutions were deeply embedded in social practices, we have to lay great stress on the multiple behaviours through which citizenship could be asserted or even claimed. Besides attending the Assembly or a people’s court, which implies formal institutions, the exercise of citizenship extended to all areas of collective activity and individual performance, to all spheres or behaviours that contributed to sketching the outline of the citizen community. This was the actual double meaning of the Greek word politeia, applied not only, on the one hand, to forms of government and citizen rights, but also, on the other hand, to the way of life of the citizens, to their habits, to the frame of mind of 51

Alain Duplouy

a citizen community, which the Greeks also designated by the terms nomoi, tropoi, or epitēdeumata (­Bordes 1982: 17; ­Schmitt-​­Pantel 2009; Murray 2012). Lifestyles were thus an integral part of the way in which the Greeks conceived the city. To this point, it is worth mentioning the importance that Marcel Mauss once gave, in defining societies, to the ‘­techniques of the body’ (­Mauss 1973), in other words to the ‘­ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies’. These attitudes of the body concern all the gestures acquired by learning, from the ways of walking to the ways of sitting, dancing, swimming, and eating; from the ways of giving birth to those of breathing; from the postures of the body to the techniques of sleeping, etc. ‘­These “­habits” do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges’, noted Mauss. Referring to a ‘­collective and individual practical reason’, he emphasized the importance of education and imitation in the establishment and reproduction of these techniques: ‘­The child, the adult, imitates actions which have succeeded and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence and who have authority over him’ and ‘­It is precisely this notion of the prestige of the person who performs the ordered, authorized, tested action ­v is-­​­­à-​­vis the imitating individual that contains all the social element’. In a way, according to Mauss, there are no natural or meaningless gestures. On the contrary, these techniques, which vary in particular by gender and age, are determined not only by education but also by the circumstances of life in common, in short by society itself. This set of attitudes, whether permitted or not, is in fact part of a ­well-​­defined environment, and it even participates in the definition of a particular social context: ‘­In every society, everyone knows and has to know and learn what he has to do in all conditions’. Accordingly, the study of these ways of life is part of the way of apprehending and understanding any society. More precisely, in ancient Greece, the ways of being and behaving were not mere representations of social and political statuses defined in other instances. They were themselves structuring the community. In ancient Greek cities, because of the absence of a register certifying one’s legal status, the quality of a citizen had to be permanently demonstrated in order to be acknowledged and accepted by others. Adopting the normative behaviours of the citizens in all aspects of one’s lifestyle, therefore, provided a good means of being acknowledged as a fellow citizen. Put differently, in order to be accepted as a citizen, one had to behave like a citizen. Complying with the citizen lifestyle made you a legitimate member of the community, whereas rejecting it or being unable to adopt it made you an outsider. In this perspective, two other concepts borrowed from modern sociology and philosophy offer interesting food for thought in relation to the definition of citizenship as a performance. These are Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Wittgenstein’s concept of Lebensform. Although originating in ancient thought and medieval scholasticism, the notion of habitus was given emphasis and popularized by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus refers to the lifestyle, values, dispositions, and expectations of social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. In Bourdieu’s own words, they are ‘­structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (­Bourdieu 1977: 72, 1990: 53). The habitus is a ‘­structured structure’ because it is produced by socialization and organizes both the behaviours and the representations of individuals; and it is a ‘­structuring structure’ because it generates an infinite number of new practices. Through their education and the stages of their integration into the community, young people gradually incorporate an image of the objective structures 52

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece

of the social world in which they live. These durable and transposable dispositions, which constitute the habitus, enable them to guide their own actions, in the form of behaviours that they develop almost unconsciously. In so doing, they contribute to reproducing the set of dispositions that they themselves have integrated and which structure the way of thinking, perceiving, and acting in the world of all the members of the community to which they belong or wish to belong. In a way, the system is s­ elf-​­perpetuating and contributes to its own sustainability, while adapting to changing social, political, and historical conditions. Overall, the habitus refers to socially acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions, and tastes that are repeatedly reproduced through individual behaviours, therefore reinforcing the strength of the habitus itself. By adopting, consciously or not, a lifestyle that is valued by the whole citizen community, individuals behave in order to be accepted as insiders and to be distinguished from outsiders. Of course, in archaic and classical Greece, each ­city – ​­if not each of the various communities making up a city (­Duplouy forthcoming) – ​­had its own citizen habitus or lifestyle, defining a variety of idiosyncratic patterns of behaviours that allowed individuals to be identified as citizens. Sometimes, beyond mere identification of insiders, these behaviours may even have allowed participating outsiders to become more and more recognized as acceptable ­citizens-­​­­to-​­be. From this point of view, Wittgenstein’s concept of Lebensform offers another interesting tool to account for the importance of lifestyles in ancient Greek cities. Used by Wittgenstein ­sparingly – ​­no more than five times in his ­work – this concept has given ​­ rise to extensive literature (­e.g., Kripke 1982; Laugier 2008), as well as to interesting historical case studies. For example, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (­2013) takes Wittgenstein’s concept and applies it to the history of Western monasticism and to the study of monastic rules (­vita vel regula, forma vivendi, or forma vitae). Without entering into the complexity of Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought on language, the concept is actually related to the justification of one’s behaviour, which is often implicit and not explicitly stated when performed. Ordinarily, people do not step away from their activities in order to justify how or why they say and do what they say and do. And yet, on closer inspection, one’s words and actions will be found to reflect a particular ‘­form of life’ (­L ebensform), a mental and cultural framework that provides a justification for those very actions (­Wittgenstein 2001, § 241) – a​­ kind of ‘­practical sense’, as Bourdieu would have put it. In other words, there is often a kind of hidden justification to the people’s deeds, which can be explored and eventually explicitly stated. The concept thus refers both to a way of life and to the principles that underlie it: following a rule is nothing else than conforming to the established usage of a community. According to Wittgenstein, behaviours are not idealized as an external system to be conformed to, as theoretical grammar rules could be, but they nevertheless comply with a practical set of references that are commonly shared by a community. And of course, forms of life can be understood as changing and contingent, dependent on culture, context, and history. Beyond the notion of habitus, with its s­ elf-​­enforcing aspect of continuously reproduced behaviours through the simple fact of repetition, there is in Wittgenstein’s concept of Lebensform a further aspect of justification, which is interesting for the study of ancient behaviours: people do not act by simply reproducing or mimicking what others do, but also because they share a system of references that explains their actions in relation to the community. This allows us to set all kinds of behaviours at the heart of ancient 53

Alain Duplouy

communities as social institutions, beyond or beside the sole formal, political, or judicial ones (­see also Meister and Seelentag 2020 on the diversity of social institutions). Accordingly, when applied to the Greek polis, the concept implies that citizens behave as they do because they assume a given form of life, which gives meaning to their actions, to themselves as citizens, and to the citizen community as a whole. We can go one step further. Rather than being only a matter of legal affiliation to a previously defined state or an issue of political rights and duties, citizenship can also be conceived as a matter of communication about individual and collective identity. To this point, another theoretical ­concept – ​­this time forged by the Greeks ­themselves – ​­allows us to go deeper into the way the ancient Greeks thought about themselves. In a very stimulating book, Maria Luisa Catoni (­2005) focused on the processes of ­non-​­verbal communication in ancient Greece. Through close terminological analysis, the Italian classicist highlighted the function of schēmata in Greek culture. In Greek, the term schēma is polysemic and affects many technical meanings, particularly in the fields of geometry, astronomy, arts, and medicine. However, in visual communication, the schēma – ​­in the ­singular – ​­is the way in which someone appears in the eyes of others. The term refers not only to an individual’s general external appearance, but also to facial expressions, posture, manner of dressing and walking, attitudes, and body language. More generally, someone’s schēma encapsulates his or her lifestyle, ethical values, social position, function, role, and origin. The term also refers to the impression that an individual makes, at a glance, to the observer. Of course, this implies that the community shares this particular knowledge of body language. In the plural, the word schēmata refers specifically to dance ­figures – ​­this is the meaning of the word in the famous episode of the marriage of Agariste of Sicyon (­Hdt. 6.­126–​­131)  –​­, but more generally to the gestures which allow a sketch of the schēma of a person and to read the behavioural norms to which he or she is referring. In everyday life, the schēma is composed of not only clothes and ornaments, but also gestures and attitudes. It embodies and gives visual evidence to the values that people intend to communicate, assuming that the audience is perfectly literate in that language. Of course, an individual’s schēma could also be manipulated: the use of existing codes can provide the desired recognition, which is then based not on who you are, but on what you appear to be. One famous example is the disguise of Phye as Athena during Pisistratus’ second takeover of Athens. Herodotus (­1.60) tells how Pisistratus had a tall and beautiful girl riding in his chariot, carrying weapons and presenting the schēma of the goddess. The stratagem worked so well that the rumour spread in the city that Athena herself was bringing Pisistratus back. The trick only functions, of course, if the spectator is willing to believe in appearances, and paradoxically, if the spectator is willing to believe, there is no mystification. There is an alignment between the schēma and reality, if not an assimilation of reality to the schēma. The possibility of manipulation was certainly a source of concern for the Greeks, but it was not until the end of the fifth century, particularly in Socratic teaching, that this concern became an obsession. Only then, when the reflection on mimēsis, the imitation of nature, was current, especially in Platonic thought, did the relationship between appearance and reality become a philosophical question. According to Plato (­Re­p. 4.­420e–​­421a), if the schēmata were to be the foundations of the social and political order, then the risk would be that the city rests on appearance rather than on being. From a Platonic perspective, this seems like a nightmare, one of the most dangerous and subversive forces for society, directly threatening the permanence and fixity that 54

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece

are expected from social rules. By the end of the fifth century, this had become an obsession: the Old Oligarch ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.10) complained about being unable to distinguish between a slave and a citizen in the crowd because poor citizens were no better dressed than the slaves and metics. The appearance had become deceptive. However, these concerns did not distract the Greeks of the archaic and early classical periods, so we should avoid projecting these late classical philosophical doubts onto earlier times. Contrary to an ontological vision of social and citizen statuses, which is intrinsically linked to classical thought, citizenship in archaic ­Greece – ​­that is, broadly speaking, participation in common ­affairs – ​­was firmly established on the behavioural dimension of relationships with others. This body language concerned all moments of social life: the way of appearing in the agora, the manners adopted during rituals and ceremonies in sanctuaries, attendance and training at athletics venues, the ways of hunting and fighting, but also conduct in private banquets, philosophical conversations, and erotic relationships. As Paul Zanker (­1995: 48; see also Hölscher 2015: 60) once put it: In Classical Athens, the appearance and behaviour in public of all citizens was governed by strict rules. These applied to how one should correctly walk, stand, or sit, as well as to proper draping of one’s garment, position and movement of arms and head, styles of hair and beard, eye movements, and the volume and modulation of the voice: in short, every element of an individual’s behaviour and presentation, in accordance with his sex, age, and place in society. It is difficult for us to imagine this degree of regimentation. The necessity of making sure their appearance and behaviour were always correct must have tyrannized people and taken up a good deal of their time. This ‘­tyranny’ of appearance and behaviours, which were accepted and expected by the community, was part of the Greek way of life or, more precisely, depended on each Greek city, for every polis had its own ways. Eventually, citizenship may thus be equated with the definition of collective identity and the individual efforts made to comply with it.

Austerity and the athletic lifestyle A passage of Thucydides offers one of the most interesting sources alluding to the diversity of archaic and classical lifestyles (­diaitai) in ancient Greece: The Athenians were the first to lay aside their weapons, and to adopt an easier and more luxurious mode of life (­es to trupherōteron); indeed, it is only lately that their rich old men left off the luxury (­to habrodiaiton) of wearing undergarments of linen and fastening a knot of their hair with a tie of golden grasshoppers, a fashion which spread to their Ionian kindred and long prevailed among the old men there. On the contrary, a modest style of dressing, more in conformity with modern ideas, was first adopted by the Lacedaemonians, the rich doing their best to assimilate their way of life to that of the common people (­isodiaitoi). They also set the example of contending naked (­egymnōthēsan), publicly stripping and anointing themselves with oil (­gymnazesthai) in their gymnastic exercises. Formerly, even in the Olympic contests, the athletes who contended wore belts across their middles; and it is but a 55

Alain Duplouy

few years since that the practice ceased. To this day among some of the barbarians, especially in Asia, when prizes for boxing and wrestling are offered, belts are worn by the combatants. And there are many other points in which a likeness might be shown between the life of the Hellenic world of old and the barbarian of today. (­Thuc. 1.6.­3 –​­6, trans. R. Crawley) In this passage, full of the tropes of ­fifth-​­century Athenian propaganda, Thucydides opposes two very different lifestyles: an old one, to habrodiaiton, enshrined in luxury, which used to be common among Ionian people and in the old days of the Athenian polis, and a new one, characterized by a more austere style of dressing that went along with the diffusion of athletics, which was first adopted by the Lacedaemonians and then, after the Persian wars, by the Athenians. Incidentally, by assimilating the old way of life of the Athenians to that of the barbarians, Thucydides also depreciates and condemns past behaviours, hence the assimilation of archaic habrosunē (‘­luxury’) to Oriental truphē (‘­luxuriousness’), which is typical of ­post-​­Persian Wars thinking (­Miller 1997). Having already explored various luxury behaviours (­Duplouy 2018, 2022), I will turn here to a more ­in-​­depth analysis of the athletic lifestyle. According to Thucydides, austerity, equality, and athletics were the essential elements of a ‘­modern’ way of life, adopted first by the Lacedaemonians, then by the Athenians of his time, and which would henceforth distinguish the Greek from the barbarian. In a mirroring passage, Herodotus (­1.10) reports the same conviction about the Lydians: the barbarians consider it shameful to be seen naked, ‘­even for a man’. For Thucydides, this change in habits occurred ‘­a few years ago’ (­ou polla etē) and according to Plato, it is not long (­ou polys chronos) since the Greeks thought it disgraceful and ridiculous, as most of the barbarians do now, for men to be seen naked (­gymnous). And when the practice of athletics began (­tōn gymnasiōn), first with the Cretans and then with the Lacedaemonians, it was current for the wits of that time to make fun of these practices. (­Re­sp. 5.­452c–​­d) The reportedly pioneering character of this lifestyle has been a matter of intense discussion for a long time (­e.g., Crowther 1982; Bonfante 1989; McDonnel 1991; Stewart 1997: ­24–​­42; Golden 1998: ­65–​­69). For various political and ideological reasons related to the construction of his work, it seems that Thucydides situated this change in customs in a largely imagined historical evolution. The oldest figurative representations of naked athletes go back to the ­m id-​­seventh century, and even to the eighth if one considers naked warriors on Late Geometric vases. On Athenian pottery and in sculpture, such images had already become very common towards the ­m id-​­sixth century, so the cultural turn apparently happened more than a century before Thucydides supposed. Nor does Thucydides’ sequence from one way of life to the other exactly match the realia. 2017: ­ 100–​­ 101, 5­91–​­ 594) recently compared the chronological Wolfgang Filser (­ distribution of horses, banquets, and athletes in Athenian images: for each of these themes, the occurrence is continuous throughout the sixth century. If the horse representations begin slightly earlier than the other two, their peak around 520 occurs 20 or 30 years earlier than that of images of banqueters (­around 500) and athletes (­around 490), somehow confirming Thucydides’ sequence, but certainly not the substitution of 56

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece

one practice by another. Instead of a strictly chronological evolution between these behaviours, they were contemporary and probably competing ways of life within the Athenian community throughout the sixth and the fifth centuries. Similarly, the precocity of the Spartans in ­athletics – ​­which perhaps corresponds to the numerous victories credited to Spartan athletes in the first ­Olympiads – ​­and the anteriority of the Cretan ­customs – which ​­ is no more than a Platonic reflection of the Cretan origin of Spartan ­institutions – ​­are hardly assured. In terms of chronology, recent scholarship has thus helped to nuance old convictions. Although athletics were also part of an agonistic c­ ulture – ​­which explains the growing success of local, regional, and Panhellenic contests throughout G ­ reece –​­, the ancient Greeks perceived the gymnasium and the stadium as two very distinct contexts. As demonstrated by Paul Christesen (­2002), the word gymnazō was restricted to citizen nudity and strictly related to military exercises, with no connection with athletic competitions. Athletic performances were used as socialization processes and qualification procedures for future citizens. All over the Greek world, cities incorporated the development of athletic skills into the education of young, prospective citizens and often made athletic achievements deciding criteria in enfranchising foreigners (­Fisher 2018). Nudity, which is a characteristic of the athletic way of life according to Plato and Thucydides, repeatedly appears in Crete in various initiation rites that lead the young to adulthood and citizenship (­­Vidal-​­Naquet 1986: ­116–​­117). According to Hellenistic inscriptions, in Malla (­IC I 19.1), Dreros (­IC I 9.1), Lyktos (­IC I 19.1), and Axos (­IC II 5.24), the future citizens undress before taking their civic oath. This nudity rite probably preceded the handing over of weapons, since on the eve of their citizen enlistment the young people are said to be ‘­unarmed’ ( ­panazōsthoi or azōsthoi) or ‘­undressed’ (­egduomenoi). According to the Hellenistic author Nicander of Colophon (­quoted by Ant. Lib., Met. 17), there was also a festival of ‘­undressing’ (­Ekdysia) in Phaistos that celebrated the miraculous transformation of a girl into a boy. This etiological myth probably provided a framework for an initiation ritual in which the young men of Phaistos converted the feminine garments of childhood for a more masculine way of ­dressing – ​­whether athletic nudity or the bearing of a­ rms – and ​­ took the oath that would allow them to enter the society of adult citizens. Although our sources do not allow us to retrace the custom back to the archaic period, it is nevertheless possible that such rituals already existed in relatively early times. Incidentally, a rite of unveiling and abandonment of clothes seems to have been part of the Athenian practice as well, during the procedure through which young men were enrolled in their father’s deme at the age of 18: according to Aristophanes (­Ves­p. 578), ‘­when young boys pass the inspection (­dokimasia), we are allowed to contemplate their sex (­aidoia)’. According to Plato (­Leg. 1.625d), the carrying of light weapons, due to the mountainous nature of the Cretan terrain and the practice of running, was a remarkable feature of the lifestyle of Cretan cities, as were communal banquets (­syssitia) and athletic exercises (­gymnasia). In Crete, the link between running and citizenship is persistent. From the archaic to the Hellenistic period, a small series of inscriptions from various Cretan cities (­Gortyn, Dataleis, Lato, Olous, Lyktos, Knossos, Hierapytna, Praisos, Malla, Itanos, Eleutherna) mention the terms dromos (­race) or dromeus (­r unner, pl. dromeis). As Yannis Tzifopoulos has definitively shown, in the Cretan institutional vocabulary, these terms respectively designate, on the one hand, athletic and military ­exercises – ​­it is then a synonym of gymnasia – ​­and, on the other hand, young people who have just entered adulthood and been admitted as citizens: ‘­The examination of the evidence indicates that in 57

Alain Duplouy

Crete dromos is an “­institution” or better a Cretan way of life that seems analogous to the Athenian ephēbeia and the Spartan agōgē’ (­Tzifopoulos 1998: 164; on the institutionalization of Cretan poleis, see Seelentag 2015, and in this volume). Significantly, the young people who immediately precede this age are called apodromoi in the Gortynian Code. It goes without saying that the purpose of running was not to prepare athletes for competitions but to provide military training for young citizens of military age. According to Ephorus (­FGrH 70 F 149, quoted by Strabo 10.4.16), long walks in the mountains were part of the education of future citizens in Cretan cities. And by contrast, according to Aristotle (­Pol. 2.1264a.­21–​­22), the Cretans forbade only two things to their slaves (­douloi): ‘­to practice athletic exercises (­ta gymnasia) and to possess weapons’, validating the exclusive relationship between nudity, athletics, and citizenship in Cretan cities. In Sparta too, austerity, nudity, and athletic exercises were inseparable from a citizen community of equals (­homoioi), whose inception is traditionally linked to the reforms of Lycurgus. Notwithstanding the ­so-​­called Spartan mirage and the difficulty to assess ­pre-​­classical Sparta, the Spartan military training for adult citizens was somewhat rudimentary and unspecialized, as was the case in most Greek cities before the fourth century. It typically involved athletic exercises and dancing in arms (­van Wees 2004: 8­ 9–​­93; Hodkinson 2006: 1­ 37–​­138). As elsewhere, preparation for war also involved hunting, so that ­m iddle-​­aged Spartans could, in the words of Xenophon (­L ac. 4.7), ‘­endure the fatigues of military campaigns as much as young men’. Physical activity was an essential step and an important element in the education of young Spartans, but it was also a regular activity for adults: Xenophon attests to this on several occasions by mentioning the presence of ­m iddle-​­aged citizens in the gymnasium (­L ac. 5.8, 9.4). Pausanias (­3.14.6) also refers to the ‘­ball players’ (­sphaireis), whom he defines as the young Spartans just coming of age. What had become in Roman times a component of a reformed Spartan education as well as the occasion for many agonistic dedications ­ efore  – a​­ performance open to all was apparently in classical t­imes  – ​­and perhaps b adult citizens (­Kennell 1995: ­38–​­43, ­110–​­111, 131). As Xenophon explains (­L ac. 9.5), those who had shown themselves cowardly on the battlefield were generally not chosen by their fellow citizens to engage in this game; they were also excluded from the common meal, the gymnasium, and the choruses, in short from everything that constituted the Spartan way of life. Finally, participation in athletic competitions does not seem to have been prohibited by the city, as evidenced by the numerous victories of the archaic and classical periods at Olympia and elsewhere (­Hodkinson 1999). According to Plutarch (­Lyc. 22.4), ­the – ​­typically ­Spartan – ​­reward granted by the city to the winner of a major contest was the privilege of fighting at the king’s side. In addition to an educational system involving abundant athletic testing (­cf. Xen., Lac. 4.2), a way of life with a recurrent emphasis on physical exercise and incitement to take part in regional competitions, it was also the great religious festivals that gave nudity and physical performances a central place in the way of becoming, living, thinking of oneself, and showing oneself as Spartan. In particular, the Gymnopaedia was an annual festival and an initiation rite that contributed to defining Spartan identity (­Pettersson 1992; Richer 2012: ­383–​­422; Ducat 2016: ­265–​­274). Held in the heat of summer in honour of Apollo, it i­nvolved – at ​­ least from the end of the archaic p ­ eriod – ​­a music and dance contest in which the Spartans competed by age group ( ­paides, andres, gerontes). Presented as a commemoration of the Spartan victory over Argos for the control of the Thyreatis border ­region – ​­the famous ‘­Battle of the Champions’ of the ­m id-​­sixth century, narrated by Herodotus (­1.82) – ​­the festival was intended, according 58

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece

to Plato (­L eg. 1.633c), to test the physical endurance (­karterēsis) and military courage (­andreia) of the Spartans, especially of the young during their education. Besides the ball ­game – ​­which may have been part of the f­ estival –​­, the Gymnopaedia, as its name ­suggests – ​­‘­naked dance’ (­i.e., also ‘­unarmed’), rather than ‘­naked boys’ – ​­emphasized, above all, the athletic nakedness of the participants and hence their equality, since they were consequently devoid of any distinctive attributes. These dances were performed in the public square, in an area of the agora that Pausanias (­3.11.9) calls the choros, whose name itself refers to the practice of dancing and singing. According to Athenaeus (­14.630d, 631b), the gymnopaidikē was a peaceful counterpart of the pyrrhic dance, the armed dance par excellence; its movements were similar to those that could be observed in the palaestra or during the pankration. The stages of the festival, the location, the setting, the involvement of several age groups, and the solemnity of the moment were all conducive to a representation of Spartan society as a whole in its most characteristic form, both for the Spartans themselves and for foreigners, who we know were admitted as spectators (­Xen., Mem. 1.2.61, Plut., Cim. 10.6, Ages. 29.­3 –​­4). Everything was done, in short, to indicate that through athletic practices and the maintenance of military capacities, the Spartan way of life of the late archaic and classical periods promoted a conception of citizenship based on equality, which may, of course, have contributed to forging and maintaining the image associated with the Spartan homoioi. The most ancient occurrences of athletic training in Athens are the two Olympic victories of Kylon and Alkmaion, both at the beginning of the sixth century (­on their chronology, see Lévy 1978; Giuliani 1999). Taking advantage of his Olympic aura and the support of his Megarian f­ ather-­​­­in-​­law, the former attempted a coup in Athens, the failure of which may have precipitated Solon’s intervention, while the latter gained some fame in the first Sacred War for control over the sanctuary of Delphi. Likewise, in view of these early Athenian victories at Olympia, various pieces of legislation attributed to Solon have been regularly invoked and could obviously make sense in support of the early development of athletics in Athens (­Thompson 1978; Kyle 1984), although a critical assessment of our sources is also required. The first Solonian provision, according to Plutarch (­Sol. 23.3), was the institution of a reward granted by the city to victors in the major Panhellenic contests, namely 100 drachmas for winners at the Isthmus and 500 drachmas for winners at Olympia. Diogenes Laertius (­1.55) states that the rewards for the other contests were analogous, but that Solon had actually reduced the amount of the previous prizes because it was in bad taste, he urged, to increase the rewards of these victors, and to ignore the exclusive claims of those who had fallen in battle, whose sons ought, moreover, to be maintained and educated by the State (­dēmosia). As Nick Fisher (­2018: ­208–​­209) points out, it is unlikely that the text of the law handed down by Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius is an exact reproduction of a Solonian provision. Firstly, the Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean competitions were not reorganized until the 580s and 570s, at least a decade after Solon’s archonship. Secondly, monetary rewards cannot have been introduced at such an early date, or indeed at such high levels. Admittedly, it is possible that the provision had a Solonian core, but if so, it must have been reworked later. And yet, monetary rewards are normally alien to the system of public honours bestowed by Greek cities on their benefactors, which range from a 59

Alain Duplouy

wreath to the ‘­h ighest honours’ (­megistai timai, i.e., proedria, sitēsis or food at the Prytaneum, and an honorary statue, cf. Gauthier 1985). Of course, in addition to the sitēsis and the proedria, Xenophanes of Colophon (­fr. 2 West) alludes to a ‘­g ift’ (­d ōron) offered by his city to the victorious athletes, while criticizing these honours and rewards. Similarly, an archaic dedication discovered in the sanctuary of Francavilla Maritima in the territory of Sybaris (­Ebert 1972: ­251–​­255; Kyle 1996: 1­ 15–​­116) mentions an Olympian offering to Athena the tithe of his prizes (­aethlōn dekatan). On the model of the Solonian law and in connection with Xenophanes’ allusion, these p ­ rizes – which ​­ certainly ​­ did not emanate from ­Olympia – were usually regarded as civic rewards, although not without caution. Diogenes Laertius’ reference to war orphans might be more illuminating. It recalls above all the provisions of classical Athens, as evoked in particular in Pericles’ funeral oration (­Thuc. 2.46.1). What the Athenians called the ‘­ancestral custom’ ( ­patrios nomos), established in the second quarter of the fifth century (­probably in 464) through the public funerals celebrated at the city ‘­war memorial’ (­dēmosion sēma), provided that the children of fallen warriors should be taken care of by the city until they came of age (­Loraux 1986: ­26–​­27). Diogenes Laertius’ reference must also be contrasted with the content of a decree of the ­Assembly – ​­unfortunately rather ­mutilated – ​­passed in the 430s (­IG I3 131), probably at the proposal of Pericles, which lists the beneficiaries of the food in the Prytaneum (­sitēsis): next to the priests of Eleusis, the exegetes of Apollo and the descendants of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the winners of competitions at Olympia, Delphi, the Isthmus, and Nemea are also mentioned. It should be noted that this was a revised list, as the provisions for victorious athletes refer precisely to an earlier publicly posted text (­kata ta en tēi stēlēi gegrammena). Unfortunately, it is impossible to retrace our steps further back and follow the constitution of Athenian public honours for victorious athletes. The Solonian origin of this provision, with the doubts that surround it, must therefore remain a hypothesis. A second Solonian provision ‘­forbade slaves’, according to Plutarch (­Sol. 1.6), ‘­to rub themselves with oil (­xēraloiphein) and to practice pederastic love ( ­paiderastein)’, therefore assimilating these behaviours to exclusive citizen performances. What Plutarch relates to Solon in the category of epitēdeumata (‘­ways of living’) probably derives from Aeschines, who already cited an ancestral ­law – ​­that is, related to the ‘­founding father’ of the Athenian ­democracy – ​­prohibiting slaves from ‘­exercising (­gymnazesthai) or rubbing themselves with oil (­xēraloiphein) in the palaestra’ (­In Tim. 138). The use of the rare word xēraloiphein probably alludes not only to an archaic behaviour (­Fisher 2001: ­283–​­284), but also to the importance of perfumes in the athletic way of life. Aryballoi, the small vases containing the precious perfumed oil, recurrently appear on the thousands of images depicting athletes, both on pots and in stone, that were produced in archaic and classical Athens. In the semantic code of Athenian pottery, the aryballos is par excellence the vase of athletes: through it, the figure is qualified by his relationship to athletic exercises. In this context, it is worth quoting Socrates: so far as perfume is concerned, when once a man has anointed himself with it, the scent instantly is all one whether he be slave or free; but the odours that result from the exercises of free men demand primarily noble pursuits engaged in for many years if they are to be sweet and suggestive of freedom. (­Xen. Sym­p. 2.4) 60

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece

In other words, the Athenian citizen had a different smell from the slave, because only he was allowed to exercise naked in the gymnasium. In contrast to the Old Oligarch (­Ath. Pol. 1.10), who assumed it impossible to distinguish between a slave and a citizen in the crowd, his fellow citizen Socrates noted that it was also the smell that distinguished the free man from the slave. Here we find again the principle of the Solonian law and Cretan legislation, both of which prohibited slaves from practising athletic exercises. *** How to recognize a citizen? How to know whether someone in the crowd was part of the citizen community or outside it? These questions are not only of interest to classicists today. They were already being asked by the Greeks themselves, and probably with very tangible implications in everyday life. The Greek conception of citizenship implied a recognition through behaviours and attitudes, through what constituted the citizens’ own schēma. Behaviours, therefore, shed light on a particular conception of ancient Greek citizenship: they made it possible to construct an ­entre-​­soi in which people could recognize and identify themselves in the mirror of the other members of the group. All the world’s a stage? Shakespeare was no historian of ancient Greece, but he was a remarkable observer of the human comedy. And the Greeks are no exception. They lived their lives on a stage, and even the most specifically political aspects of their societies, citizenship, now considered a legacy to the modern world, involved performances. Acting through carefully selected behaviours and playing the role that was assigned by and expected from the citizen community allowed you to be accepted as a legitimate fellow citizen. In ancient Greece, lifestyles and behaviours formed a discourse about citizenship. If Thucydides offers the binary model of two allegedly successive Athenian ways of life, there were also many alternatives across the Greek world, as Plutarch pictorially alludes through the changing behaviour of the wandering Alcibiades: He had, as they say, one power which transcended all others, and proved an implement of his chase for men: that of assimilating and adapting himself to the pursuits and lives of others (­tois epitēdeumasi kai tais diaitais), thereby assuming more violent changes than the chameleon […] In Sparta, he was all for bodily training (­gymnastikos), simplicity of life, and severity of countenance; in Ionia, for luxurious ease and pleasure; in Thrace for drinking deep; in Thessaly, for riding hard; and when he was thrown with Tissaphernes the satrap, he outdid even Persian magnificence in his pomp and lavishness. (­Plut. Alc. 23.­4 –​­5, transl. B. Perrin) In terms of citizen behaviour, a performative system only works if it is based on a code shared by all members of the community, who act alternately as actors and spectators but are always eventually judges of the conformity of attitudes to the socially valued model. There is no doubt that the Greeks complied with this rule.

Note 1 The National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. offers a very stimulating permanent exhibition on that question (­American democracy: a great leap of faith), which finds echoes in France in the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris. I warmly thank Mariana Silva Porto for correcting my English grammar and phrasing.

61

Alain Duplouy

Bibliography Agamben, G. (­2013) The highest poverty: monastic rules and ­form-­​­­of-​­Life (­Stanford, CA) Ampolo, C. (­1996) ‘­Il sistema della polis. Elementi costitutivi e origini della città greca’, in S. Settis (­ed.) I Greci. Storia, cultura, arte, società, vol. 2.1: Una storia greca. Formazione (­Torino) ­297–​­342 Balibar, E. and Hobsbawm, E. (­1995) ‘­Une citoyenneté européenne ­est-​­elle possible?’, in B. Théret (­ed.) L’État, la finance et le social: souveraineté nationale et construction européenne (­Paris) ­534–​­559 Balibar, E. (­2001) Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple (­Paris) ——— ​­(­2011) Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique (­Paris) Blok, J. (­2011) ‘­Hosiē and Athenian law from Solon to Lykourgos’, in V. Azoulay and P. Ismard (­eds) Clisthène et Lycurgue d’Athènes: autour du politique dans la cité classique (­Paris) ­233–​­254 ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­A “­covenant” between gods and men: hiera kai hosia and the Greek polis’, in C. Rapp and H.A. Drake (­eds) The city in the classical and ­post-​­classical world: changing contexts of power and identity (­Cambridge) ­14–​­37 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Bonfante, L. (­1989) ‘­Nudity as a costume in classical art’, AJA 93, ­543–​­570 Bordes, J. (­1982) Politeia dans la pensée grecque jusqu’à Aristote (­Paris) Bourdieu, P. (­1977) Outline of a theory of practice (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­1990) The logic of practice (­Stanford, CA) Catoni, M.L. (­2005) Schemata: comunicazione non verbale nella Grecia antica (­Pisa) Christesen, P. (­2002) ‘­On the meaning of γυμνάζω’, Nikephoros 15, ­7–​­37 Crowther, N.B. (­1982) ‘­Athletic dress and nudity in Greek athletics’, Eranos 80, ­163–​­168 de Ste. Croix, G.E.M. (­1981) The class struggle in the ancient Greek world: from the archaic age to the Arab conquests (­Ithaka) Ducat, J. (­2016) Spartan education: youth and society in the classical Period (­Swansea) Duplouy, A. (­2018) ‘­Citizenship as performance’, in A. Duplouy and R. Brock (­eds) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) ­249–​­274 ——— ​­(­2019) Construire la cité: essai de sociologie historique sur les communautés de l’archaïsme grec (­Paris) ——— ​­(­2022) ‘­Hippotrophia as a citizen behaviour’, in J. Bernhardt and M. Canevaro (­eds) From Homer to Solon: continuity and change in archaic Greece (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­forthcoming) ‘­Multiple ways to citizenship and pluri-faceted archaic cities’, in L. Cecchet and C. Lasagni (­eds) Citizenship imagined, citizenship practiced: citizens and ­non-​­citizens in the ancient Greek world Ebert, J. (­1972) Griechische Epigramme auf Sieger an gymnischen und hippischen Agonen (­Berlin) Filser, W. (­2017) Die Elite Athens auf der attischen Luxuskeramik (­Berlin) Fisher, N. (­2001) Aeschines, Against Timarchos (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Athletics and citizenship’, in A. Duplouy and R. Brock (­eds) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) ­189–​­225 Fustel de Coulanges, N.D. (­1864) La cité antique (­Paris) Gauthier, P. (­1985) Les cités grecques et leurs bienfaiteurs (­Paris) Gautier, C. and Laugier, S. (­eds) (­2006) L’ordinaire et le politique (­Paris) Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C.W. (­eds) (­1946) From Max Weber: essays in sociology (­New York) Giuliani, A. (­1999) ‘­Il sacrilegio ciloniano: tradizioni e cronologia’, Aevum 73, ­21–​­42 Golden, M. (­1998) Sport and society in ancient Greece (­Cambridge) Hansen, M.H. (­2006) Polis: an introduction to the ancient Greek ­city-​­state (­Oxford) Heuss, A. (­1946) ‘­Die archaische Zeit Griechenlands als geschichtliche Epoche’, Antike und Abendland 2, ­26–​­62 Hodkinson, S. (­1999) ‘­A n agonistic culture? Athletic competition in archaic and classical Spartan society’, in S. Hodkinson and A. Powell (­eds) Sparta: new perspectives (­­London-​­Swansea) ­147–​­187 ——— ​­(­2006) ‘­Was classical Sparta a military society?’, in S. Hodkinson and A. Powell (­eds) Sparta & War (­Swansea) ­111–​­162 Hölscher, T. (­2015) La vie des images grecques: sociétés de statues, rôles des artistes et notions esthétiques dans l’art grec ancien (­Paris)

62

Lifestyle and behaviour in archaic and classical Greece Isin, E. (­2017) ‘­Performative citizenship’, in A. Shachar, R. Bauböck, I. Bloemraad, and M. Vink (­eds) The Oxford handbook of citizenship (­Oxford) ­500–​­523 ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­Doing rights with things: the art of becoming citizens’, in P. Hildebrandt et al. (­eds) Performing citizenship: bodies, agencies, limitations (­London) ­45–​­56 Kennell, N.M. (­1995) The gymnasium of virtue: education  & culture in ancient Sparta (­Chapel Hill, NC) Kripke, S. (­1982) Wittgenstein on rules and private language (­Oxford) Kyle, D.G. (­1984) ‘­Solon and athletics’, AncW 9, ­91–​­105 ——— ​­(­1996) ‘­Gifts and glory: Panathenaic and other Greek athletic prizes’, in J. Neils (­ed.) Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia & Parthenon (­Madison, WI) ­106–​­136 Laugier, S. (­2008) ‘­Règle, formes de vie et relativisme chez Wittgenstein’, Noesis 14, ­41–​­80 Lévy, E. (­1978) ‘­Notes sur la chronologie athénienne au VIe siècle. I. Cylon’, Historia 27, ­513–​­521 Loraux, N. (­1986) The invention of Athens: the funeral oration in the classical city (­Cambridge, MA); French original L’invention d’Athènes: histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la cité classique (­Paris, 1981) Mauss, M. (­1973) ‘­Techniques of the body’, Economy and Society, 2, ­70–​­88; French original ‘­Les techniques du corps’, Journal de Psychologie 32, 1936, ­271–​­293 McDonnel, M. (­1991) ‘­The introduction of athletic nudity: Thucydides, Plato, and the vases’, JHS 111, ­182–​­193 Meister, J.B. and Seelentag, G. (­eds) (­2020) Konkurrenz und Institutionalisierung in der griechischen Archaik (­Stuttgart) Miller, M.C. (­1997) Athens and Persia in the fifth century BC: a study in cultural receptivity (­Cambridge) Murray, O. (­2012) ‘­Renouveler l’histoire des mœurs’, in V. Azoulay, F. Gherchanoc, and S. Lalanne (­eds) Le banquet de Pauline Schmitt Pantel: genre, mœurs et politique dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine (­Paris) ­297–​­305 Neveu, C. (­2004) ‘­Les enjeux d’une approche anthropologique de la citoyenneté’, Revue européenne des migrations internationales 20, ­89–​­101 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Of ordinariness and citizenship processes’, Citizenship Studies 19, ­141–​­154 Pettersson, M. (­1992) Cults of Apollo at Sparta: the Hyakinthia, the Gymnopaidai and the Karneia (­Stockholm) Polignac, F. de (­1995) Cults, territory, and the origins of the Greek ­city-​­state (­Chicago) Richer, N. (­2012) La religion des Spartiates: croyances et cultes dans l’antiquité (­Paris) Rose, P.W. (­2012) Class in Archaic Greece (­Cambridge) Roth, G. and Wittich, C. (­eds) (­1978) Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology (­Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA) ­Schmitt-​­Pantel, P. (­1990) ‘­Collective activities and the political in the Greek city’, in O. Murray and S. Price (­eds) The Greek city from Homer to Alexander (­Oxford) ­199–​­213 ——— ​­(­2009) Hommes illustres: mœurs et politique à Athènes au V e siècle (­Paris) Seelentag, G. (­2015) Das archaische Kreta. Institutionalizierung im frühen Griechenland (­Berlin) Stewart, A. (­1997) Art, desire and the body in ancient Greece (­Cambridge) Thompson, J.G. (­1978) ‘­Solon on athletics’, Journal of Sport History 5, ­23–​­29 Tzifopoulos, Y.Z. (­1998) ‘“­Hemerodromoi” and Cretan “­dromeis”: athletes or military personnel? The case of the Cretan Philonides’, Nikephoros 11, ­137–​­170 van Wees, H. (­2004) Greek warfare: myths and realities (­London) ­Vidal-​­Naquet, P. (­1986) The black hunter: forms of thought and forms of society in the Greek world (­Baltimore, MD) Walter, U. (­1993) An der Polis teilhaben. Bürgerstaat und Zugehörigkeit im archaischen Griechenland (­Stuttgart) Weber, M. (­1921) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (­Tübingen) Wijma, S. (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­5th-​­4th Century BC) (­Stuttgart) Wittgenstein, L. (­2001) Philosophical investigations, the German text, with a revised English translation (­Oxford) Zanker, P. (­1995) The mask of Socrates: the image of the intellectual in antiquity (­Berkeley, CA)

63

5 MODELS OF ROMAN CITIZENSHIP FROM AUGUSTUS TO BORIS JOHNSON1 Markus Sehlmeyer

Introduction: the deficiency of Augustan models of citizenship Shifts in concepts of Roman citizenship raise hope of conceptual considerations by the Romans themselves, but only rarely do we find a spotlight on such policy. Contrary to classical Athens,2 it makes more sense in the Roman case to create models and to include relevant reflections by Roman literates and jurists. Instead of retelling the history of events, one focus will be how citizenship and wider human rights are interrelated. Looking at receptions of Roman ideas will help to estimate the importance of existing models for the present. Cicero combines the concept of citizenship with his theory of res publica.3 In the Principate, enfranchisement was de facto part of the Roman regime, the sum of principles and ­decision-​­making procedures in the relations of the Roman Empire and those affected by its power.4 Some contemporary sources mention individual grants of citizenship,5 but theoretical accounts are missing. Tacitus, known as a critical analyst of the Principate, is more interested in the freedoms lost under the ­Julio-​­Claudian and Flavian dynasties.6 In spite of their citizenship, even senators were deprived of traditional rights under these emperors. I will offer a contemporary model of Roman citizenship in the early Empire, concentrating on the first and second centuries CE. My contribution is framed by other chapters in this volume focusing on the Republic and the time of the Constitutio Antoniniana (­212 CE, see Besson in this volume), which expanded citizenship to nearly all free men in the whole Empire. I try to apply the model of the sociologist Thomas H. Marshall based on England in the eighteenth to early twentieth century. Admittedly, the English had other aims: Marshall speaks of ‘­altering the patterns of social inequality’ (­1950/­1992: 44) and analyzes the impact of citizenship on social classes. Indeed, British citizenship was a project of modernity. However, the model of Marshall7 helps to classify Roman citizen rights, which have in many cases analogies to the human rights of the Enlightenment. Augustus had to create an order,8 which had to meet the grand expectations of Roman society after a series of ­first-​­century BCE crises. Citizenship9 had no priority at first; supporters of the constitutional and provincial reforms were more necessary. Some models, 64

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-6

Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson

which we can bear in mind, are problematic: in shorter statements on Roman citizenship, it is often supposed that all recruits to the legions since Augustus were already citizens. In the East, though, the number of veterans, whose sons were suitable for recruiting, and the number of veteran colonies were low. It was necessary to recruit provincials, ­non-​­citizens (­Hassall 2000: 331). Other crises like civil war could have led to recruitment of ­non-​­citizens, too. Whether the Latin rights of a municipium (­privileges like those of ​­ former Latin confederates) were the first step to full citizenship is not c­ ertain – many municipia remained Latin for a long time (­in some cases even until 212 CE).10 Obviously, some emperors made greater efforts than others to extend citizenship to provincial cities. Augustus was relatively active in Spain, in Illyricum, and on the Rhine frontier (­Bleicken 2015: ­407–​­417). Claudius invented the military diploma as a sign of citizenship given to a veteran auxiliary soldier. Vespasian gave Latin rights to three provinces (­Spain). The latter and the effect of Romanization on citizenship will be dealt with in Part 3 below. In the last section of my contribution, I will show how the Roman model of citizenship was questioned in Late Antiquity and gradually became obsolete, while Christian ideas of human rights arose (­see Rose; Martínez Jiménez and Flierman in this volume). Paradigms like Augustine’s De civitate Dei (­City of God) became influential. The question is whether the Enlightenment or the competition of states was the most important factor for the increase of civil rights. Presumably, both factors played their part: the Enlightenment for the Atlantic Revolutions and the competition of states for the creation of alliances and later confederacies. In the contemporary discussion on the continent, the influence of Rome on European unification opened a discussion that received much attention from the public (­Johnson 2006; Engels 2017).

T.H. Marshall’s model of citizenship applied to the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries CE The idea of human rights is modern and often connected with the Age of Enlightenment. T.H. Marshall applies his model of citizenship to this age, too. His three elements are in the fullest sense to be found in England from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century (­Marshall 1950/­1992: ­10–​­17): The civil element is composed of the rights, necessary for individual ­freedom  –​ ­liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice, (…) By the political element I mean the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body. (…) By the social element I mean the whole range from right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society (…). (­Marshall 1950/­1992: 8; my emphases) Rome realized the greater part of the civil element, while the political and the social only partially. No one would today describe the Principate of the Roman Empire as a democracy (­but see Starr 1952 n.31). The rights of women were limited; slaves had nearly no rights and sustained a social death.11 In some cases, man’s inhumanity to man 65

Markus Sehlmeyer

is obvious:12 genocide in war, enslavement, murder in the arena. However, citizenship is not necessarily limited to ­democracy – ​­we find a lot of citizen rights in the Roman Republic and the Principate. The civil element in Rome: liberty of the person was first established as a result of the conflict of the Orders; the nexum (­voluntary assignment of the person for debt) was forbidden in 326 BCE. Occasionally, undesirable cults were prohibited, like in the case of the Bacchanalia (­186 BCE). Freedom of speech was r­ estricted – a​­ verbal attack on the emperor could lead to a trial on the charge of crimen maiestatis (­offence against the sovereignty or sovereign). However, to criticize the emperor at the games was tolerated (­Flaig 2020: ­111–​­115). The liberty of thought and faith was typical for classical antiquity, but cults which were seen as superstition and magical practices with certain risks were exempted. Nero regarded the Christians as enemies of the human race (­Tac. Ann. 15.44). The right to own property was not limited: even slaves were allowed to possess their own money. On the contrary, the right to justice was only rarely conceded in Rome, and senators (­and the emperor’s house) enjoyed advantages over others. The inequality amongst the inhabitants of the Roman Empire remained a reality: citizens had more rights to justice. Provincials, on the other hand, had to apply to the provincial administration or, at first, to the communal justice (­Bleicken 1995: ­186–​­193). Later, at the end of the second century, the difference between honestiores (­­noble-​­born) and humiliores (­­low-​­born) was legally established.13 The Constitutio Antoniniana made no change here. It is difficult to ascertain whether the political element of Marshall’s definition of citizenship is to be found in the Roman Empire. Political councils, especially the comitia (­meetings of the Roman citizens present in the capital), lost their competencies during the first century CE. Under the emperor Tiberius (­­14–​­37 CE), election of magistrates was transferred to the senate, a purely aristocratic council with restricted influence. Augustus had to rely on the participation of the senators to establish his ideology of the Principate, misinterpreted by Theodor Mommsen as a Dyarchy,14 a corporate regime of emperor and senate. Some emperors (­like Caligula) offended the senate or ignored this relic of aristocracy (­l ike Domitian). Under the Antonine emper­ ecision-​­making. ors, the senate was involved more often in d The communities in the Empire, municipia and coloniae, had their own councils and the political rights of communal citizens included the election of the members of the curia. Local governments in the provinces sometimes remained obscure, if the settlement did not have the status of a colonia. Collective action was no longer common, and regular instances of euergetism of single donors gained acceptance. To be a citizen in the Roman Empire seldom guaranteed social welfare. About 200,000 poor inhabitants of Rome got free grain, the plebs frumentaria. Infrastructure built by the army, like public roads (­viae publicae), were used by the general public, and fresh water from the surroundings was delivered into some important cities by viaducts.15 Education as a social element of citizenship was not understood as public commitment; there were no public schools in the Empire or other kinds of support like financial aids. Applying Marshall’s model to Roman citizenship helps to understand its gradation: human rights for the ­well-​­off and few participatory rights even for senators and curiales (­members of city councils) after the end of the Republic; social welfare only for the poor in the plebs urbana. This situation has remarkable parallels to England in the eighteenth century described by Marshall in his classical article: English citizens had 66

Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson

only minor rights in court. Marshall mentions the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 and further small steps to equality only realized in the twentieth century. Participation was restricted to the members of the House of Lords and House of Commons. Suffrage of the latter had seen great changes through the decline of some boroughs. Social elements of citizenship were hard to find. Elementary education became compulsory only at the ​­ a system of forced ­labour – is ​­ end of the nineteenth century. The Poor Law16 – obviously not comparable to the ancient world (­only slaves and subjugated people were compelled to work at the order of their owners). Looking at the sparse sources, one cannot track a straightforward development from civil to political and finally social rights in ancient Rome. At first sight, the change from patrician to nobilitarian Rome (­in the fourth century BCE) fits better the scheme of Marshall than that from the Republican aristocracy to the monarchic Principate (­since 27 BCE). But Edward Gibbon’s ‘­golden age’ of the second century CE shows a higher share of citizens because of the impending naturalization of every provincial.17 Before I offer some general remarks on provincial government and citizenship, one has to be reminded that current sociology has refined Marshall’s model, but these refinements are more necessary if we look at the world of today.18

Romanization and citizenship Creating models for Roman citizenship leads in every case to the problem that Romans themselves typically thought they would bring civilization to the barbarian world of the western provinces. This implies the notion that there was no other citizenship present in the ancient world. Barbarians were simply seen as subjects of their tribes. Hence, it is essential to contemplate the common process of Romanization at the frontiers of the Principate. Ancient sources see it as quite a positive development, as if provincials were keen to be included as citizens in the Roman Empire. Tacitus stressed the fact that his ­father-­​­­in-​­law, Agricola, governor of the Roman Britain in ­77–​­84 CE, wished to Romanize it quickly: ita honoris aemulatio pro necessitate erat. iam vero principum filios liberalibus ­artibus erudire, et ingenia Britannorum studiis Gallorum anteferre, ut qui modo ­linguam ­Romanam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balinea et conviviorum elegantiam. idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars ­servitutis esset. (­Tac. Agr. 21) As a result, they began to compete with one another for his approval, instead of having to be compelled. Further, he educated the sons of the leading men in the liberal arts and he rated the natural talents of the Britons above the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that those who just lately had been rejecting the Roman tongue now conceived a desire for eloquence. Thus even our style of dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. Gradually, too, they went astray into the allurements of evil ways, colonnades and warm baths and elegant banquets. The Britons, who had had no experience of this, called it ‘­civilization’, although it was a part of their enslavement. (­transl. A. Birley) 67

Markus Sehlmeyer

If Tacitus’ description is historically correct here, his f­ather-­​­­in-​­law has supported Romanization near his camp and thought of bringing humanitas to the Britons.19 What sounds like social welfare in the sense of Marshall is limited to the elite of a small region. Thus, Tacitus is sceptical: at first, Roman occupation results in servitus, enslavement, as he comments cynically. Although we witness in Tacitus’ Agricola a variation of the old Principate-​­libertas antagonism,20 employed in the provinces, the first steps towards citizenship for provincial elites are obvious: wearing of the toga was prohibited for ­non-​­citizens.21 Tacitus comments critically on Roman imperialism, but one cannot deny the fact that at the beginning of the second century provincialization stepped forward, without the primary aim of bringing human rights into the whole world. Géza Alföldy (­1999: 17) lists the relevant points for Romanization in the second century CE: • • • • •

recruiting of the army among provincials; expansion of citizenship; privileging of provincial cities via communal administration; inclusion of provincial elites; acceptance of provincial citizens as Roman emperors.

For our question, it is important that, during the first century, many auxiliary soldiers from the provinces obtained Roman citizenship. The sons of these men could apply for the c­ itizen-​­legions. In rare cases, auxiliaries were enfranchised before the end of their 25 years of military service. In most instances, recruitment was ­voluntary – ​­there were enough men from the provinces to serve in the army (­at first with the exception of the East, see above). Civil war, like in the year of the four emperors (­192 CE), was an exception in recruiting ­non-​­citizens. In single provinces, enfranchisement was often left to chance. The northern border of the Empire where the majority of legions were stationed offered a greater opportunity to apply for the auxiliary troops. In the Mediterranean, the senatorial provinces enjoyed ­p eace  – ​­often in the absence of any military. These differences can only be hinted at here. Andrea Raggi explains in this volume the enfranchisement of Greeks abroad and their incorporation in the Roman civic body. In the second century CE, Greek elites were granted Roman citizenship during a period when benefactors were honoured with Greek citizenship (­Cecchet in this volume). Emperors often issued privileges to Hispania: only 291 out of 399 cities were t­ ribute-​­paying under Augustus, that is, 108 were coloniae or municipia without tribute.22 Vespasian made all Spanish cities municipia, forcing the integration of communal magistrates to be incorporated into the Roman citizen body. The northern provinces were occupied late, from the reign of Caesar, Augustus, and Claudius. Romanization was intensified on the borders and alongside s­ upra-​­regional trade routes. The foundation of cities did not automatically result in enfranchisement, though veterans populated these cities, so that the number of citizens rose. In other words, Augustus had to settle masses of civil war veterans s­omewhere  – ​­a practice soon to be cancelled for excessive expense. Yet Augustus founded over 100 coloniae and municipia. Since Claudius, auxiliary troops were rewarded with Roman citizenship documented on a military diploma.23 Emperors recurring as founders of coloniae were Vespasian, Trajan, and Hadrian, but the numbers of city foundations declined during the High Empire.24 68

Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson

One might expect infrastructural development at a different pacing throughout the spacious Roman Empire. In many cases, it is nearly impossible to estimate the number of citizens in a newly founded colony. The foundation of Augusta Treverorum (­later Trier) is still a mystery. In the beginning of 17 BCE, the date of the first bridge over the Mosel, the number of Romans in the town seems to have been small: Roman administrators, soldiers, a few veterans. The colonia was established later, possibly under Claudius. Heinz Heinen (­1988: ­41–​­53; ­61–​­66) has postulated that most of the inhabitants were Treveri, Celts. Migrations from the hinterland are to be supposed, but can we be sure?25 Today, Trier is considered as one of the most beautiful Roman sites in Germany for its ­second-​­century CE facilities, including the impressive wall (­Porta Nigra), amphitheatre, thermal baths, and the administrative district (­aula, palace hall). We often assume quite a positive development in the Roman provinces due to the direct influence of Roman culture. While we don’t know how many of the provincials considered Romanization, ­upheavals – ​­even in ­Trier – ​­point to dissatisfaction of some provincials, who felt that they were slaves of the Romans (­see the statement of Tacitus), having lost their former rights. We should ask ourselves whether our model of civilization through Roman sources is correct in every case.26 A fairly positive view of Rome’s civilizing mission is to be found in Aelius Aristides’ oration ‘­On Rome’.27 Although he expressed his thoughts about 40 years after Tacitus, he constructs a model quite similar to Roman imperial ideology. At first, Aristides compares Rome to other empires and explains their despotic character. Classical Greece was not able to rule, and could not realize a stable ἀρχή. Rome, on the other hand, was able to rule the world, divided into two parts (­δύο μέρη): But there is that which very decidedly deserves as much attention and admiration now as all the rest together. I mean your magnificent citizenship (­περὶ τὴν πόλιν αἰτίαν) with its grand conception, because there is nothing like it in the records ­ mpire  – ​­and with of all mankind. Dividing into two groups all those in your E this word I have indicated the entire civilized ­world  – ​­you have everywhere appointed to your citizenship, or even to kinship with you (­πολιτικὸν ἢ καὶ ὁμόφυλον πᾶν ἀπεδώκατε), the better part of the world’s talent, courage, and leadership, while the rest you recognized as a league under your hegemony. (­Aristid. Or. 26.59 ­p. 213 Jebb, transl. James Henry Oliver) This dichotomy was no more a social reality in the 150s CE. The inclusion of provincials into the body of Rome’s civic society proceeded more than Aristides assumes. As a rather proficient propagator of the Principate, he characterizes the emperor as the best man and steward (­τῷ ἀρίστῳ ἄρχοντι καὶ κοσμητῇ, Aristid. Or. 26.60 ­p. 213 Jebb), a real princeps, who brought democracy to the whole world (­καθέστηκε κοινὴ τῆς γῆς δημοκρατία). Although Aelius Aristides’ democracy is not to be understood in the Athenian sense, rather more as politeia or isonomia (­Oliver 1953: 927), we, nevertheless, get quite a positive view of the Roman Empire.28 Aristides has an idealistic notion of Roman rule and citizenship, which is to be expected in this enkōmion, a laudatory speech. The orator’s appraisal cannot match with the social reality, which can be described more realistically in form of the Marshall model outlined above. It is unrealistic to say that every worthy person could apply for Roman citizenship (­like a green card) (­Or. 26.60), but Arnaud Besson makes the point in interpreting the passage: ‘­the openness of the Roman citizenship appears to have 69

Markus Sehlmeyer

been a tool of soft power’ (­2017: 202; cf. 2020 and in this volume). One quite modern aspect is the idea of a double citizenship suggested at some passages in the oration (§ 64). Indeed, many provincials saw themselves as citizens of their hometown and of Rome. Normative scholars used another approach to citizenship: normative reasoning. About 170 CE, the lawyer Gaius differentiated between freeborn citizens and freedmen (­Gai. Inst. 1.­9 –​­12). For the development of citizenship, much space is devoted to the route from the reduced citizenship of the freedmen to full c­ itizenship – ​­like a freeborn (­ibid. 1.­28–​­35). Reflecting the necessity to reduce the number of freed slaves, Augustus had initiated the lex Aelia Sentia in 4 CE (­1.13.­28–​­32a.­36–​­41) and the lex Fufia Caninia in 2 BCE (­1.­42–​­46).29 What is notable here is: why did Gaius write nearly nothing about the importance of Latin and full citizenship in the Roman city foundations of the Empire?30 Brent Shaw insists on the right of the emperor to grant citizenship or Latin rights to a new city, but a lot of open questions remain concerning the different types of foundations: coloniae tend to be cities of Roman citizens, and municipia often had Latin rights (­Shaw 2000: ­362–​­373). The emperor was not always consistent in the question of enfranchisement. In early Trier in Gallia Belgica, we find citizens from Italy and likewise naturalized Treveres called Iulii after the family name of the emperor. If enfranchisement is considered some kind of reward, we can explain the scepticism of the emperor. The Treveres were not always loyal: they rose up against the Romans in 30/­29 BCE and 21 CE.31 The idea of Macmullen labelling Trier and other cities ‘­peregrine coloniae’ is misleading.32 Hartmut Wolff (­1977) has regarded Trier as a colony because of an inscription (­AE 1968, 321 by Géza Alföldy, not accepted by Wolff), which differentiates between the civitas foederata (­Treveres as an allied tribe) and the colonia. The date of the inscription is difficult to establish within the first century CE. Wolff thinks of a Latin colony rather than a colony with full Roman rights (­while others think of a small colony within the wider peregrine civitas). A little astonishing is the naming Augusta Treverorum for ­Trier  –​ ­Augustus seems to have recognized the region as important but awarded citizenship only to some Gallic nobles and auxiliary soldiers. Generally, the number of rewarded auxiliary soldiers rose; cities and whole provinces were granted citizenship during the first and second centuries CE. The Severans responded to the crises induced by the reign of Commodus with several policies, first reforming the army. Caracalla made the last, consequent step: he enfranchised the remaining provincials. The importance of this act is discussed elsewhere in this volume (­Besson).33 Enfranchisement was connected not only to civil but also to some human rights. When a provincial without Latin status was naturalized, he lost his precarious position of a subject. He was a civis Romanus now with the right to justice. At first a humilior man, he could obtain a higher position in his hometown as a reward for loyal citizenship and henceforth the honestior rank, which guaranteed his personal safety (­see n.13).

From Augustine to Boris Johnson The rise of Christendom induced a dichotomy from the Christian point of view: Christians could have only one lord, Jesus, son of God. To be a Roman c­ itizen  – ​­subject to the e­ mperor – ​­was another obligation. Freedom of worship now contradicted civic obligation. This alienation was increased through the persecution of Christians with its high tide in the third century CE, an era of transformation. Hippolytus of Rome accused the emperor of enfranchising provincials only to expand the Empire.34 Other 70

Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson

Christian authors reflected on public law and citizenship as well (­cf. Rose in this volume), estimating the Empire as a necessary evil on the way to Christianization. Lactantius, following Cicero, objected that citizenship was limited to ­polytheists – ​­natural law also made monotheists full citizens through their religious loyalty (­to the One God) (­Depalma Digeser 2003: ­11–​­18). Augustine at first presented the traditional model of Roman ­citizenship  – ​­a legal privilege, which prohibits falling into servitude. In De civitate Dei, he estimates the equality of Romans and subjects: Neque enim et Romani non vivebant sub legibus suis, quas ceteris inponebant. […] Praesertim si mox fieret, quod postea gratissime atque humanissime factum est, ut omnes ad Romanum imperium pertinentes societatem acciperent civitatis et Romani cives essent. For the Romans too were not exempt from living under their own laws, the same laws that they imposed on others. […] This would be particularly true if the welcome and humane step had been taken at once that was taken later, of granting partnership in the state to all who were subjects of the Empire, so that they were Roman citizens. (­August. De civ. D. 5.17.1; transl. G. McCracken) Besides De civitate Dei, Augustine praises in other writings the advantages of Roman law, that is, to have the rights of a full citizen.35 He does not mention, but alludes to the Constitutio Antoniniana, whose initiator Caracalla was unknown even to late antique writers.36 The concept of the civitas Dei was quite another kind of ­model – ​­very appropriate in the Middle Ages, but no longer from the Renaissance onwards. Augustine contrasted the late world of the Romans, the civitas terrena (­citizenship on earth) to a new Christian community, the civitas Dei (­Inglebert 2016: ­108–​­111). The ideal citizen should be a Christian. Augustine’s model has not much to do with the reality of Late Antiquity. In the Middle Ages, a citizen with full rights was a man who lived in a city. Subjugation of the inhabitants became the normal ­case – ​­only Roman law survived, often combined with Germanic traditions and supplemented by Canon law. The citizen enjoyed legal equality in his own city, but not within the developing territorial state, where feudalism was practised. Only in the Renaissance, political theorists began thinking on more general models of citizenship and revived the Roman ideal of the High Empire, analyzed above. For the ­city-​­states of Renaissance Italy, refining medieval citizenship seemed to provide more citizen rights (­Brown 1991). The Atlantic Revolution implemented the human rights r­ e-​­invented in the Age of Enlightenment. Some ideas were obviously inspired by antiquity,37 but in other cases, greater importance was attached to the human being, a prerequisite for the banishment of racism or ­slavery – ​­practices present in many ancient states. In the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence in 1776 is the milestone of including human rights in a constitutional document. The Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (­1789) was more influenced by American and European ideas, and differentiations between active and passive citizens were made.38 In Haiti, even slavery was ­abolished – ​­the revolution (­­1791–​­1804) was of social nature.39 Other countries were influenced by these revolutionary ideas, though with some delay. The (­United) Kingdom of Great Britain is such a case (­see above on Marshall). 71

Markus Sehlmeyer

The competition of states in early modern Europe resulted in the creation of alliances. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought the negative consequences: war out of nationalism, later totalitarianism. The idea of a European confederacy took shape slowly after the First and more intensively after the Second World War. The concept of the ‘­European’, a citizen not only of his fatherland, but also of the entire continent (­seen as a community with the same ethnic origins), reflects ­post-​­war Europe. More restrained in the time of Paul Valéry (­­1871–​­1945), it was intensified by Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Jean Monnet.40 In the actual discussion on the continent, the influence of the Roman Empire for European unification is a ­much-​­noticed discourse. Géza Alföldy (­­1935–​­2011) fled Hungary some years after the 1956 revolt (­A lföldy 1997). His positive view of the Roman Empire in the line of the Agricola and Aelius Aristides has been mentioned already. Through his work with original Latin inscriptions of Italy and Spain, Alföldy, Professor in Heidelberg, was a keen traveller with great merits. He rendered outstanding services to ancient history and Latin epigraphy throughout Europe and many colleagues would appraise him as a European in the best sense, able to speak fluidly not only Hungarian and German, but also Italian and Spanish. The historian David Engels enjoins us to learn from the end of the Roman Republic for the continuance of the European Union.41 He is, like Alföldy, a travelling salesman in history and European politics, professor in Brussels and Poznań. Absence of identity caused a crisis in the last decades of the Roman Republic and provokes one now in contemporary Europe. A lot of detailed comparisons by Engels converge in the fear of a totalizing development instead of Republican ideals. In contrast, the journalist and politician Boris Johnson presents the European Union as an exaggerated (­­Roman-​­like) empire that has failure implemented in its foundation. The reality of Brexit shows that ‘­Roman ideals’ can be realized only partially today; Johnson says: ­ ard-​­bitten sort of It is a formidable ambition, and one would have to be a pretty h ­ uro-​­sceptic not to be filled with admiration for what they are trying to achieve. E Call me idealistic, but I think it would be a rather wonderful thing if the peoples of Europe did indeed share the same mind and will. Believe me, they do not, nor are they likely to do so in my lifetime or yours. (­Johnson 2006: 52) Johnson, not only a politician, but also a classicist from Oxford, does not miss the fruits of Roman imperialism: For the Romans, bloodlines were irrelevant. They believed that anyone could be a Roman citizen, if he walked the walk and talked the talk. They believed that the highest honour a Roman could be paid was to go down in history as a man who expanded the Roman Empire; and they believed there was no finer destiny for the rest of the world than to be conquered by Rome. (­Johnson 2006: 108) We acknowledge in Johnson’s ‘­The Dream of Rome’, written after his time as journalist (­and before he stepped into office as Prime Minister), an ambivalence between idealization and scepticism. His book is a ­reader-​­friendly account, a popular work in the best 72

Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson

sense.42 Like Tacitus, he sees the advantages of collaboration (­as Agricola in Britain) but is afraid of servitude (­as the Britons under Rome). We have seen that this scepticism caused a referendum in 2016 and Brexit in the end. Today, we live in a world where citizenship includes the guarantee of human rights, at least in most cases. Reference to ancient Roman models provoked political initiatives from the conservative side, represented in different ways by Boris Johnson and David Engels, who now tries to encourage a ‘­hesperialistic’43 reform of the European Union. It remains to be seen whether Western civilization will be sufficient in the reanimation of the idea of European citizenship.

Abbreviations HLL 4 = Sallmann, K. (­ed.) (­1997) Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, vol. 4 (­München) HLL 6 = Berger, J.-​­D., Fontaine, J., and Schmidt, P.L. (­eds) (­2020) Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, vol. 6 (­München)

Notes 1 I would like to express my warmest thanks to Konstantin Krieter, MA (­Hannover), who gave a lot of fruitful remarks on concepts of citizenship. 2 See Rhodes in this volume. Short introductions to Roman citizenship: Sehlmeyer (­2012); Lavan (­2019). Kendall (­2013), ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973), and Marotta (­2010) present more details. 3 Depalma Digeser (­2003: ­5 –​­10) cites the relevant passages in Rep., Leg. and Off. Examples from Cicero’s speeches are included, too (­Verr.). See Coşkun (­2010) for the ­A rchias-​­Speech. For human rights in Cicero, see Bauman (­2000: ­36–​­50). 4 According to Krasner (­1983: 185), regime is a ‘­set of explicit or implicit principles, norms, rules, and ­decision-​­making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given area of international relations’. Looking at Rome, this includes the conceptual strategic framework (­Luttwak 2016) and a set of migratory measures (­Pott et al. 2018), too. 5 Examples in Sherk (­1988: 289), s.v. ‘­citizenship’. 6 Fritz (­1957), concentrating on Tiberius’ accession; Strunk (­2017); Nesselhauf (­1952) on Domitian. 7 Although refined by more recent scholars, Marshall’s concept remains valuable, see n. 18 below. 8 Bleicken (­2015) is magisterial, full of insights and superbly documented. For the Empire Pilar Eberle (­2017) and Osgood (­2018: ­199–​­259). 9 Shaw (­2000); Marotta (­2010); more details: ­Sherwin-​­W hite (­1973: ­221–​­294). 10 Shaw (­2000: 364) further explains that Latin rights can be awarded without founding a new city like a municipium. 11 Patterson (­1982). The review of Heinen (­1988b) argues that Patterson tends to reduce the world of ancient slavery to his own system. Indeed, the better situation of house slaves in the Roman Empire is underexposed by Patterson. 12 Bauman (­2000: ­112–​­125). On the question of a ‘­female citizen’ in analogy to Athens (­πολῖτις, ἀστή), see Patterson (­2009); Chatelard and Stevens (­2016). 13 Dig. 48.19.28.2: (…) honestiores vero fustibus non subiciuntur. Dig. 48.19.38.3: (...) humiliores in metallum damnantur, honestiores in insulam relegantur aut in exilium mittuntur. 14 Bleicken (­2015: ­347–​­348). More theoretical: Flaig (­2020: ­208–​­223). 15 Blanton and Fargher (­2008: 9­ 8–​­102, 1­ 55–​­157, ­380–​­385) on the Roman Empire as one example in a data sheet of 30 premodern states. 16 The new poor law was established 1834; the unemployed had to live in a workhouse to get public alms (­Trevelyan 1942: ­550–​­553).

73

Markus Sehlmeyer 17 Bauman (­2000: 99): ‘­But by this time [­Caracalla’s], the distinction between Romans and n ­ on-​ ­Romans was largely academic’. 18 Bottomore (­1992); Dean (­2014); Cohen and Ghosh (­2018: ­39–​­45) on Marshall, (­­52–​­75) on refinements by recent researchers; Cooper (­2018: 10). In my contribution, I focus on Marshall’s historical model, not his application to ­post-​­war social development. 19 Alföldy (­1999: 16) is quite optimistic in this point. 20 Tac. Agr. 3 not only praises the return of libertas (­3.1) but also compares the former situation to servitus, slavery (­3.3). For the historical context, see Birley (­1999: 65). 21 Birley (­1999: 80) ‘­Agricola may have secured citizenship for substantial numbers of the southern British élite’. Claudius had included some Gallic nobles in the Roman Senate: Malloch (­2020). 22 Bowman (­1996: 358) recurring on Plin. HN 3. 23 Rathbone (­1996: 309). Widely known is the inclusion of Gallic nobles in the Senate induced by Claudius: Malloch (­2020). 24 ‘­High Empire’ is here to be understood as an epoch: ­70–​­192 CE, like in CAH XI². 25 However, Bleicken (­2015: ­410–​­417) argues that Augusta Treverorum ‘­could hardly have been called a town at all in Augustan times’ (­­p. 417). 26 Postcolonial studies show an alternative way: Webster and Cooper (­1994); Loar et al. (­2018). 27 ­Greek-​­English in Oliver (­1953); another introduction and interpretation is Bleicken (­1966). 28 Starr (­1952) has already pointed out that democracy tends here to be every constitution able to guarantee the imperial prosperity instead of civil war. 29 Bleicken (­2015: 453, and note on ­p. 686). 30 This has possibly to do with the character of a juristic schoolbook on private law. Book 1 deals with the law of the persons. Additional Literature: Liebs (­1997: ­188–​­195). 31 I am following here Heinen (­1988: 62), who is generally sceptical on the willingness of Gauls to be Romanized in the Augustan age. 32 Macmullen (­2000: 95). His theoretical remarks on citizenship (­p­­p. ­73–​­78) were not helpful for me. Trier is mentioned as colonia only in 121 CE, but seems to have existed before 70 CE. 33 For an English summary, see Besson (­2017) and his French Dissertation (­2020). Other short statements are Pferdehirt and Scholz (­2012) and Ando (­2016). 34 […] ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ αὕτη ἐκ πάντων τῶν ἐθνῶν συλλέγουσα τοὺς γενναιοτάτους καταρτίζει εἰς πόλεμον, Ῥωμαίους τούτους ἀποκαλοῦσα. ‘­He also raised up the most ­well-​­born men in every nation, to outfit them for war and call them ‘­Romans’. (­Hippol. Dan. 4.9.2 transl. Inglebert 2016: 100). 35 Inglebert (­2016: 109) comments on Aug. Ep. 10* (­Letter to Alypius). Madec et  al. (­2020) is more than introductory to Augustine’s work. Dougherty (­1999) treats the reception of Augustine’s ideas. 36 Ando (­2016: 9) lists the emperors, who were wrongly identified with this Antoninus from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius. 37 Siewert (­2005) has listed human rights which can be assumed in antiquity (­cf. Bauman 2000). Others are more sceptical, see the review by Kammasch and Schwarz (­2007). On the transformation of Classical ideas in the American Revolution, see Sehlmeyer (­2002). 38 Nippel (­2015: 150). Nippel’s book is an excellent study on the reception of classical political theory from the American Revolution to the twentieth century. 39 For a global view, see Osterhammel (­2014: ­522–​­543), especially for Haiti: ‘­The slaves emerged victorious from a long series of massacres and civil wars, and the colonial caste system gave way to an egalitarian society of free African American small farmers’ (­­p. 529). 40 Nippel (­2015: 360 n.21; ­368–​­370) concentrates on constitutional reforms in the European Union. 41 Engels (­2017). McAuley (­2014) and Tröster (­2014) have reviewed the French edition from 2012. 42 Clark (­2006): ‘­A nd his natural enthusiasm, which finds expression in a style that is short on detail and long on vivid portraiture, makes this a perfectly enjoyable and mostly convincing gallop through the might and main of Rome’. Cf. Gimson (­2008: ­251–​­253). 43 Engels (­2019: 18) intends to present with Hesperialismus (­i.e. favouring Western values) an alternative to a blind Europeism.

74

Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson

Bibliography Alföldy, G. (­1997) Ungarn 1956. Aufstand, Revolution, Freiheitskampf (­Heidelberg) ——— ​­(­1999) Das Imperium R ­ omanum – ​­ein Vorbild für das vereinte Europa? (­Basel). (­English edition in Chaniotis, A. (­ed.) [2007] Applied Classics [Stuttgart] ­57–​­82) Ando, C. (­ed.) (­2016) Citizenship and empire in Europe 2­ 00–​­1900. The Antonine Constitution after 1800 years (­Stuttgart) Bauman, R. (­2000) Human rights in ancient Rome (­London) Berthelot, K. and Price, J. (­eds) (­2019) In the crucible of empire: the impact of Roman citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians (­Leuven and Paris) Besson, A. (­2017) ‘­Fifty years before the Antonine Constitution’, in Cecchet and Busetto (­2017) ­199–​­220 ——— ​­(­2020) Constitutio Antoniniana: l̕ universalisation de la citoyenneté romaine au 3ᵉ siècle (­Basel); Open Access: http://­w ww.doi.org/­10.24894/­­978-­​­­3-­​­­7965-­​­­4224-​­4 (­accessed 23 March 2021) Birley, A.R. (­1999) Tacitus: Agricola and Germany, translated with an introduction and notes (­O xford) Blanton, R. and Fargher, L. (­2008) Collective action in the formation of p­ re-​­modern states (­New York) Bleicken, J. (­1966) Der Preis des Aelius Aristides auf das römische Weltreich (­or. 26K) (­Göttingen) (­NAWG Nr. 7) ——— ​­(­1995) ­Verfassungs-​­und Sozialgeschichte des römischen Kaiserreiches Bd. 1. (­Paderborn) ——— ​­(­2015) Augustus: the biography (­London) Bottomore, T. (­1992) ‘­Citizenship and social class, forty years on’, in Marshall (­1950/­1992) ­53–​­96 Bowman, A.K. (­1996) ‘­P rovincial administration and taxation’, in A.K. Bowman et al. (­e ds) Cambridge ancient history, vol. 10: The Augustan Empire, 43 B.C.–​­ A.D. 69, 2nd edn (­Cambridge) ­344–​­370 Brown, A. (­1991) ‘­City and citizen: changing perceptions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’, in A. Molho, K. Raaflaub, and J. Emlen (­eds) City states in classical antiquity and Medieval Italy (­Stuttgart and Ann Arbor, MI) ­93–​­111 Cecchet, L. and Busetto, A. (­eds) (­2017) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to 212 AD (­Leiden) Chatelard, A. and Stevens, A. (­2016) ‘­Women as legal minors and their citizenship in Republican Rome’ Clio. Women, Gender, History, No. 43 (­G ender and the citizen), ­24–​­47 Clark, A. (­2006) ‘­Empire building. Boris Johnson’s scattergun survey of the Roman Empire, The Dream of Rome, is perfectly enjoyable and mostly convincing’, The Guardian, 5 February 2006 (­https://­w ww.theguardian.com/­books/­2006/­feb/­05/­h istorybooks.features) (­accessed 30 August 2021) Cohen, E.F. and Ghosh, C. (­2018) Citizenship (­Cambridge) Cooper, F. (­2018) Citizenship, inequality, and difference (­Princeton, NJ and Oxford) Coşkun, A. (­2010) Cicero und das römische Bürgerrecht. Die Verteidigung des Dichters Archias (­Göttingen) Dean, H. (­2014) ‘­A ­post-​­Marshallian conception of global social citizenship’, in E.F. Isin and P. Nyers (­eds) Routledge handbook of global citizenship studies (­London) ­128–​­138 Depalma Digeser, E. (­2003) ‘­Citizenship and the roman res publica: Cicero and a Christian corollary’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 6, ­5 –​­21, DOI: 10.1080/­ 13698230510001702643 (­accessed 30 August 2021) Dougherty, R.J. (­1999) ‘­Citizen’, in A.D. Fitzgerald (­ed.) Augustine through the ages: an encyclopedia (­Grand Rapids and Cambridge) ­193–​­195 Engels, D. (­ed.) (­2019) Renovatio Europae. Plädoyer für einen hesperialistischen Neubau Europas (­Lüdinghausen) Engels, D. (­2017) Auf dem Weg ins Imperium. Die Krise der Europäischen Union und der Untergang der römischen Republik: historische Parallelen 2nd edn (­Berlin et al.) (­New edition of: Le déclin. La crise de l’Union européenne et la chute de la République romaine. Quelques analogies, Paris 2012; review: McAuley 2014) Flaig, E. (­2020) Den Kaiser herausfordern, 2nd edn (­Frankfurt)

75

Markus Sehlmeyer Fritz, K. von (­1957) ‘­Tacitus, Agricola, Domitian, and the problem of the Principate’, CPh 52, ­73–​­97 Gimson, A. (­2008) Boris: the rise of Boris Johnson. Updated (­London) Hassall, M. (­2000) ‘­The army’, in A.K. Bowman et al. (­eds) Cambridge ancient history, vol. 11: The High Empire, A.D. ­70–​­192, 2nd edn (­Cambridge) ­320–​­343 Heinen, H. (­1988) Trier und das Trevererland in römischer Zeit, 2nd edn (­Trier) ——— ​­(­1988b) ‘­Review of Orlando Patterson, Slavery and social death’, European Sociological Review 4, ­263–​­268 Inglebert, H. (­2016) ‘­Christian reflections on Roman citizenship (­­200–​­430)’ in Ando (­2016) ­99–​­112 Johnson, B. (­2006) The dream of Rome (­London) Kammasch, T. and Schwarz, F. (­2007) ‘­Human rights’, in BNP CT 2 (­2007) (­https://­referenceworks. brillonline.com/­entries/­­brill-­​­­s-­​­­new-​­pauly/­­human-­​­­r ights-­​­­ct-​­e1503400 (­accessed 30 August 2021) Kendall, S. (­2013) The struggle for Roman citizenship: Romans, allies, and the wars of 9­ 1-​­77 BCE (­Piscataway) Krasner, S. (­ed.) (­1983) International regimes (­Ithaca, NY) Lavan, M. (­2019) ‘­The foundation of empire? The spread of Roman citizenship from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE’, in Berthelot and Price (­2019) 2­ 1–​­54 Liebs, D. (­1997) ‘­Jurisprudenz‘, HLL 4, ­83–​­217 (§426) Loar, M., MacDonald, C. and Padilla Peralta, D. (­eds) (­2018) Rome, Empire of plunder: the dynamics of cultural appropriation (­Cambridge) Luttwak, E.N. (­2016) The grand strategy of the Roman Empire, 2nd edn (­Baltimore, MD) MacMullen, R. (­2000) Romanization in the time of Augustus (­New Haven, CT) Madec, G. et al. (­2020) ‘­Augustinus’ HLL 6, ­802–​­938 (§ 691) Malloch, S.J.V. (­2020) The Tabula Lugdunensis, a critical edition with translation and commentary (­Cambridge) Marotta, V. (­2010) Das Bürgerrecht im römischen Kaiserreich (­Münster) Marshall, T.H. (­1950/­1992) Citizenship and social class (­1950), with an essay by Tom Bottomore (­1992) (­London and Concord) McAuley, A. (­2014) ‘­Review of David Engels, Le déclin: la crise de l’Union européenne et la chute de la République romaine’, BMCRev 2014.01.13 (­https://­bmcr.brynmawr.edu/­2014/­2014.01.13/) (­accessed 30 August 2021) Nesselhauf, H. (­1952) ‘­Tacitus und Domitian’, Hermes 80, ­222–​­245 Nippel, W. (­2015) Ancient and modern democracy: two concepts of liberty? (­Cambridge); originally published as: Antike oder moderne Freiheit? Die Begründung der Demokratie in Athen und in der Neuzeit (­Frankfurt 2008) Oliver, J.H. (­1953) The ruling power: a study of the Roman Empire in the second century after Christ through the Roman oration of Aelius Aristides (­Philadelphia) ­871–​­1003 Osgood, J. (­2018) Rome and the making of a world state, 150 ­BCE–​­20 CE (­Cambridge) Osterhammel, J. (­2014) The transformation of the world: a global history of the nineteenth century (­Princeton) Patterson, C. (­2009) ‘­Citizenship and gender in the ancient world’, in S. Benhabib and J. Resnik (­eds) Migrations and mobilities: citizenship, borders, and gender (­New York) ­47–​­75 Patterson, O. (­1982) Slavery and social death: a comparative study (­London) Pferdehirt, B. and Scholz, M. (­2012) Bürgerrecht und Krise: die Constitutio Antoniniana 212 n. Chr. und ihre innenpolitischen Folgen (­Mainz) Pilar Eberle, L. (­2017) ‘­Making Roman subjects: citizenship and empire before and after Augustus’, TAPA 147, ­321–​­370 Pott, A., Rass, C., and Wolff, F. (­eds) (­2018) Was ist ein Migrationsregime? What is a migration regime? (­Wiesbaden) https://­w ww.springer.com/­g p/­book/­9783658205317 (­accessed 30 August 2021) Rathbone, D.W. (­1996) ‘­Imperial finances’, in A.K. Bowman et al. (­eds) Cambridge ancient history, vol. 10: The Augustan Empire, 43 B.C.–​­A.D. 69, 2nd edn (­Cambridge) ­309–​­323 Sehlmeyer, M. (­2002) ‘­Ü bersetzung und Transformation griechischer Staatsideen in der amerikanischen Verfassungsdiskussion’, in H.J. Wendel, W. Bernard, Y. Bizeul, and S. Müller (­eds) Brücke zwischen den Kulturen. ‘­Ü bersetzung’ als Mittel und Ausdruck kulturellen Austauschs (­Rostock) ­251–​­274

76

Models of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Boris Johnson ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­Citizenship’, EAH 3, ­1524–​­1527 Shaw, B. (­2000) ‘­Rebels and outsiders’, in A.K. Bowman et al. (­eds) Cambridge ancient history, vol. 11: The High Empire, A.D. ­70–​­192, 2nd edn (­Cambridge) ­362–​­403 Sherk, R.K. (­1988) The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian (­Cambridge) ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973) The Roman citizenship, 2nd edn (­Oxford) Siewert, P. (­2005) ‘­Human rights’, BNP 6 (­https://­referenceworks.brillonline.com/­entries/­­brill-­​­­s-­​ ­­new-​­pauly/­­human-­​­­r ights-​­e733490#e733500) (­accessed 23 March 2021) Starr, Ch.G. (­1952) ‘­The perfect democracy of the Roman Empire’, AHR 58, ­1–​­16 Strunk, T.E. (­2017) History after liberty: Tacitus on tyrants, sycophants, and Republicans (­A nn Arbor, MI) Trevelyan, G.M. (­1942) English social history, repr. 1986 (­London) Tröster, M. (­2014) ‘­A ncient Rome as a paradigm for the EU? (­Review of: Le déclin: La crise de l’Union européenne et la chute de la République r­ omaine – ​­quelques analogies historiques by D. Engels)’, CR 64, 2, ­622–​­624 Webster, J. and Cooper, N. (­eds) (­1994) Roman imperialism: ­post-​­colonial perspectives (­Leicester) Wolff, H. (­1977) ‘“­Civitas” und “­Colonia Treverorum”’, Historia 26, ­204–​­242

77

PART II

The Ancient Near East

6 CITIZENS AND ­NON-​ ­CITIZENS IN THE AGE OF HAMMURABI1 Eva von Dassow

‘­Don’t hang around the assembly’, says a Babylonian advice manual, ‘­or they will have you decide a dispute, you will be made into their witness, they will bring you to settle what’s not your affair’.2 This passage indicates that membership in Mesopotamian political communities met Aristotle’s definition of the citizen as one who may participate in judgment and office (­Pol. 1275a.­22–​­24; 1275b.­17–​­22). The citizen of a Babylonian polis was liable to be summoned to serve on a jury, or as a witness, or to participate in deciding matters brought before the assembly.3 Moreover, diverse texts from sites within and beyond Mesopotamia inform us that assemblies or other collective organs of governance not only decided lawsuits but could also manage fiscal affairs and make policy; in some ­places – ​­notably, early ­second-​­m illennium ­Assur – ​­such representative bodies could even conclude treaties with other states.4 But who qualified as a citizen, where, on what criteria? Whom did the Babylonian advice manual admonish not to hang around the assembly? And how did people know if you were eligible to be a member of it?

Criteria in context Before posing these questions to the Babylonian sources, it is necessary to interrogate Aristotle’s definition, as well as the very concept of citizenship. Josine Blok (­2017) has recently done this in her study of citizenship in classical Athens, examining how the Aristotelian definition differs from the Athenian one and why modern thinkers have preferred the former. By the Athenian definition, ­descent – ​­birth from citizen ­parents –​ ­was the fundamental criterion of citizenship, which entitled those who had it, male and female, to share in the polis. This meant, above all, participating in its sacrificial rites, an aspect Aristotle neglected, while participating in judicial and political office, which he made his criterion, is neglected in the sources that disclose what actually mattered in creating or contesting citizen status (­in particular, sources pertaining to law or lawsuits). In his inquiry into what makes an ideal politeia, Blok explains, Aristotle sought to abstract the feature of citizen status that would serve his theoretical model, setting aside features that are not generalizable; in selecting political participation as the defining feature, he also set aside the citizen status of women. As concepts and practices DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-8

81

Eva von Dassow

of citizenship developed in the modern West, participants in political and intellectual life gravitated toward the Aristotelian paradigm, concomitant restrictions included: in ­n ineteenth-​­century Europe and North America, ‘­for the men of the ruling classes, the idea of citizenship as political participation shared by free equals and exercised by taking turns in ruling and being ruled matched their own experience’ (­Blok 2017: 39). While the franchise had to be extended beyond propertied men, the paradigm still fit in the twentieth century, and classical scholars embraced the ‘­apparent congruence’ of the modern with the Aristotelian concept of citizenship (­­p. 40) – ​­even to the extent of mischaracterizing ancient reality by denying the fact of female citizens and ignoring the centrality of religion. Unlike in modern or Aristotelian theory, however, in classical Athens, or in ancient Greek society generally, the status of citizenship was not abstracted from the person (­ibid.: 22). Nor was the person abstracted from family and communal bonds, nor was citizenship conceptualized as a package of individual rights guaranteed by the state, as in its modern formulation. Citizenship in antiquity did not mean the emancipation of the individual from accidents of birth and descent into a condition of free and equal enjoyment of civil, political, and social rights, in accord with the formulation elaborated by Max Weber and crystallized in the ­m id-​­twentieth century by Thomas H. Marshall.5 On the contrary, the enjoyment of free and equal status and entitlement were conditional on kinship (­real or fictive). How about citizenship in modernity? In a recent essay, Engin Isin examines the development of modern citizenship as a ‘­technology of government’ employing racial categorization and bureaucratic management as tools of discipline to produce citizens who are capable of ruling themselves, and suggests that the result was ‘­the recoding of citizenship as nationality’; this hardly resembles the Weberian ideal (­as cited by Isin) of citizenship as ‘­a “­pure and simple” identity that was above and beyond any other affiliation or belonging’.6 The experience of many citizens of ­present-​­day Western states certainly fails to match the ideal propounded in liberal theory, and in practice, accidents of birth determine citizen status, or its denial, under almost all circumstances except naturalization. Although the word itself connotes the creation of fictive kinship in the nation, the naturalization of new citizens enacts the idea of elective affiliation, independent of birth or descent. But one cannot elect it on one’s own; rather, it depends on the assent of the community one seeks to join, concretized in an act of its government. In an essay exploring criteria for Native American identity and citizenship in tribal nations, Sarah Viren (­2021) formulates the core issue thus: ‘­are you claimed by the community you claim?’ This question would have made sense in an Athenian, Babylonian, or Israelite context, too. An affirmative answer would signify membership in a given community, without indicating whether membership qualifies as citizenship. In the essay cited above, Isin inquired about the relationship between ‘­nationality as membership in a people and citizenship as membership in a state’ (­2015: 264). At the conference, Isin conjoined the question of definition with that of comparability across societies, asking how one would know when citizenship exists, while Catherine Neveu pointed out the incommensurability of meanings conveyed by words that ostensibly translate each other, even words sharing the same derivation: ‘­citizenship’ is not identical to ‘­citoyennété’. So much less would German Staatsangehörigkeit be identical to modern Hebrew ’ezraḥūt. In a recent work, Neveu and her c­ o-​­authors argue (­following Raymond Williams) that this variation in meaning from language to language, and context to context, should not be 82

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi

flattened into a single universal definition of citizenship, rather it should be recognized as an essential dimension of the concept.7 Scholars of the ancient Near East, primed by diverse n ­ ative-​­language understandings as well as preferred models of past and present society, hold widely divergent views regarding whether the concept is applicable in the societies we study. In a recent Companion to Assyria, for example, Mario Liverani categorically denies ‘­citizenship’ to Assyrians, while other contributors to the same volume unhesitatingly characterize Assyrians as ‘­citizens’.8 In ancient Near Eastern law, an analytic category corresponding to citizenship is effectively present, notwithstanding the absence of an abstract noun that may be so translated. Raymond Westbrook (­2003: 36) defines it in terms of ‘­a notion of belonging to a political unit, which, if not having the ­clear-​­cut contours of citizenship in the modern sense, was associated with privileges and duties, and attended by legal consequences’. Those having this status were ‘­freeborn natives’, he continues, who were subjects of the ruler where the political unit to which they belonged took the form of monarchy. I have argued that the subjects of ancient Near Eastern states qualify as citizens, inasmuch as their status was defined by liberty, duties, participation in the polity, and rights in the sense of entitlement to protection of person and property in law (­von Dassow 2020: 76). Writing of ­first-​­millennium Babylonia, Michael Jursa (­2010: ­57–​­58) expresses uncertainty about the postulate that the category denoted mār banê, ‘­well born’, was a ‘­citizen class’ distinguished by legal rights that other free men did not share, yet acknowledges that they alone could exercise judicial and political roles, participating in the city assembly and representing their city to outside powers. This is the reason I foreground the Aristotelian definition: while descent may be the basis, and participation in cultic or social rites the prerogative, of membership in a community, sharing in its governance is a feature of citizenship, not other kinds of belonging. Citizenship moreover means membership in a political community, not other kinds of community. The fact and the concept are, therefore, interdependent with the question whether the community is a state, and what kind of state, which varies significantly across periods and regions in ancient Near Eastern history, and this in part explains the divergence of views among scholars. In the present discussion, I use ‘­community’ instead of ‘­state’ in order to set aside questions of scale and structure. Even the smallest city could be a ­city-​­state, in principle, and cities could retain ­self-​­governance when incorporated into larger territorial states or empires, which were notably less stable than the communities they comprised. It does make a difference to the nature of citizenship whether the political community was a ­city-​­state, a tribal state, a territorial state, or a composite of such units, but only when the concept’s elements are delineated can the differences be discerned. Bracketing these differences, we can return to the Aristotelian element of the modern concept: in Blok’s words, ‘­political participation in the state in some form by at least some citizens is a necessary condition to speak of citizens, rather than of subjects’ (­2017: 41). This condition was met in ancient Near Eastern states, and especially in cities. Blok sets aside this criterion in formulating a definition appropriate to the study of ancient Athens, as follows: citizenship consists of membership of a political community, in which an individual holds claims to whatever prerogatives and is encumbered with whatever responsibilities are attached to this membership, with communitarian ideas of membership in and attachment to this particular community. (­ibid.: 43) 83

Eva von Dassow

The key elements of her d ­ efinition – prerogatives, ​­ responsibilities, ideas of b ­ elonging –​ ­match those of the definition Westbrook formulates for the ancient Near East (­quoted above). Whether in Athenian or Aristotelian terms, then, one may speak of citizenship in ancient Near Eastern political communities. Having set forth the parameters for applying the concept of the citizen in ancient Mesopotamian contexts, I shall focus the present inquiry on the early second millennium BCE. This period features the Babylonian monument most famous today, the Laws of Hammurabi. Who qualified as a citizen in the age of Hammurabi, on what criteria, and how could one tell? The evidence available for answering such questions is seldom direct or specific.

‘­Son of a man’ Sources across all periods indicate that the primary categorical distinction among people was between native members of a community and ­non-​­natives. Native members of a community were designated ‘­son’ or ‘­daughter’ of a city or descent group.9 The concept of ‘­membership’ was extended to the next most important categorical distinction, that between free and unfree. Free persons were identified by parentage, usually paternal, so a free man was ‘­son of a man’. Upon exit from servitude, an enslaved person would acquire or r­ e-​­acquire this status, being made as ‘­son of a man’ and native of the community. In doubtful or contested cases, therefore, establishing filiation was essential to establishing whether someone had free status, was entitled to inherit or obliged for duty, and what duty, where. Tablets recording legal proceedings to establish a person’s status reveal operative norms, sometimes by addressing anomalies. An unusually elaborate document from the city of Nippur, dating to the reign of ­Samsu-​­iluna, son of Hammurabi (­late eighteenth century BCE), establishes the filiation of a man named ­Ninurta-​­ra’­im-​­zerim, whose father had died while he was in the womb. This document (­PBS 5, 100), which has been analyzed in detail by Martha Roth (­2001), records the sworn declarations of nine witnesses who were summoned in response to a joint petition by the man in question and his uncles. According to the combined statements of witnesses and petitioners, ­Ninurta-​­ra’­im-​­zerim’s paternal grandmother, having supervised his birth, had presented the newborn to a local judge; when he had grown up, his uncles as well as his grandmother took pains to make his filiation known to the assembly of Nippur, and to obtain a document attesting it. Some ­ owever – ​­his grandmother having evidently died, and his mother, t­oo –­​ years later, h ­­Ninurta-​­ra’­im-​­zerim and his uncles petitioned to have his filiation confirmed under ­ ffice-​­holders oath, presumably in response to an actual or expected challenge. The o (­A kkadian šūt têrētim) and judges (­dayyānū) of Nippur investigated, summoned wit­ inurta-​­ra’­im-​­zerim’s birth and filiation, had nesses who knew the circumstances of N them testify before the emblem of the god Ninurta, and, finding in the petitioners’ favor, reported the verdict to the city assembly. The resulting tablet did not need to say that ­Ninurta-​­ra’­im-​­zerim would, therefore, be entitled to his patrimonial inheritance (­w ith duties attached thereto), nor that he would also be entitled to participate in the assembly of Nippur, for which his filiation was confirmed. By contrast, a document from Sippar establishes someone’s lack of filiation, without apparently impairing his free status. This tablet, recently published by Klaas Veenhof, dates to the reign of Ammiditana, king of Babylon (­­mid-​­seventeenth century BCE).10 One Ṣurārum, whose mother was ­Šimat-​­Ištar, had been summoned for duty by officers 84

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi

in Sippar on the grounds that he and his brother (­k idnapped by enemy Kassites) were sons of a man named Š ­ umum-​­libši, who was among the troops under their command, and who had married ­Šimat-​­Ištar, but now her sister Lamassani has taken her nephew Ṣurārum away. Lamassani and her brother were summoned before the authorities and they stated that they had not married off their sister ­Šimat-​­Ištar, rather, she became a streetwalker and many men including ­Šumum-​­libši visited her. Since the officers could not produce witnesses to the purported marriage, they and Ṣurārum’s relatives were ordered to the gate of the ­sun-​­god Šamaš to make their declarations before the divine emblems. While the officers refused to approach the divine emblems, Lamassani did so and declared, ‘­Abisum and Ṣurārum were not born to ­Šumum-​­libši. It is I who raised them’. She thus wins custody, and the officers lose, on the grounds that the boy was not the son of a particular man. Without an identifiable father, Ṣurārum might not be obliged for duty, but he was also no man’s heir. Was he then a ‘­citizen’? Could he have a share in the community and its governance? ​­ birth, adoption, or e­ mancipation  – defined ​­ If native descent and free s­tatus  – by membership in a community, they may have been necessary but not sufficient conditions for participating in its governance.

Judgment and office Innumerable cuneiform tablets are extant that record transactions and court proceedings before witnesses, who are normally free adult males, identified by name and father’s name or occupation. These people may be known as individual persons, members of families, and social networks, when they appear in archives sufficiently substantial and interconnected for prosopographic research. Yet such texts seldom indicate their relation to the political community where they resided, for this would not normally need stating. So much less do the sources tell us about assembly membership. The assembly, called puḫrum in Akkadian, was usually referred to as a body, and so were its analogues by other terms, such as councils of elders (­or senates). Texts may name members of collective governance bodies, and again such individuals may be known in detail where the archives are rich enough. They may also be rich with ambiguity; for example, Akkadian uses one word, šībum, to denote both ‘­witness’ and ‘­elder’. There are no senate or assembly rosters, and criteria for membership are never explicated.11 The functions of the assembly of Nippur are especially well attested thanks to the survival of numerous tablets that record judicial proceedings before that body. These include both records of actual cases and model court cases, presumably based on real ones, that were used in the scribal curriculum. Certain of these documents record what may appear to be comprehensive lists of assembly members, at least those assembled to hear a particular case. An example is the record of G ­ imil-​­Marduk’s lawsuit to recover his ­g reat-​­grandfather’s prebend as priest of the goddess Ninlil, which was decided by the assembly of Nippur in the fifth regnal year of ­Samsu-​­ditana, the last of Hammurabi’s dynasty to rule Babylon, toward 1600 BCE. This case proceeded through several setbacks until it was ultimately heard by the assembly of Nippur in exile at D ­ ur-­​­­Abi-​ ­ imil-​­Marduk’s entitlement to the prebend, ­ešuḫ, as Dominique Charpin has shown.12 G which his ­g reat-​­uncle disputed, depended on his filiation. The ­case  – ​­eliding its first three ­phases  – ​­was investigated by the assembly at the order of a royal official; witnesses gave testimony before the god Ninurta, and G ­ imil-​­Marduk raised the weapon of Ninurta in the presence of the royal official and a number of named ­office-​­holders 85

Eva von Dassow

(­š ūt têrētim); in conclusion, the assembly issued a verdict affirming the plaintiff’s filiation and title to the prebend. The document was witnessed by two dozen individuals identified by name and office, mostly holders of cultic office. This selection of individuals could, however, have been conditioned by the nature of the case; meanwhile, the people before whom ­Gimil-​­Marduk raised the weapon included at least one person, ­Ibni-​­Uraš the ‘­director’, who should be an assembly member but is not recorded among the witnesses. Accordingly, the witnesses need not represent the assembly membership. Instead, the ‘­­office-​­holders’ and the assembly should be understood as distinct bodies, in accord with Martha Roth’s analysis of the legal proceeding in which ­Ninurta-​­ra’­i m-​ z­ erim’s filiation was confirmed (­2001: es­p. ­265–​­266). No holders of cultic, administrative, or judicial office feature among the members of the assembly of Nippur who heard a trial for homicide three centuries earlier. This trial is the subject of a model court case, ostensibly based on a real case that transpired during the reign of ­Ur-​­Ninurta, king of Isin (­circa 1900 BCE); as a curricular text, it does not reproduce a list of witnesses.13 The document is exceptional in that participants in deliberation are identified individually. Records of court cases typically summarize the proceeding, the evidence presented, and statements of witnesses, but not deliberation among members of the jury. This model homicide trial not only presents arguments brought forth pro and contra, but also attributes them to named assembly members. Here is the segment of the text that illustrates who the members of the assembly are:14 ­Ur-​­Gula, son of ­Lugal-​­ibila, Dudu, the ­bird-​­catcher, ­A li-​­ellati, a muškēnum, Puzu, son of ­Lu-​­Suen, Eluti, son of ­Tizkar-​­Ea, ­Šeš-​­kalla, the potter, ­Lugal-​­kam, the gardener, ­Lugal-​­a zida, son of ­Suen-​­andul, (­and) ­Šeš-​­kalla, son of Sharahar, addressed (­the assembly) as follows: ‘­As men who have killed a man, they are not living men. The three males and that woman shall be killed before the chair of ­Lu-​­Inanna, son of ­Lugal-​­urudu, the nešakkum-​­priest’, they said. Šuqalilum, the chief gendarme of (­the god) Ninurta, (­and) ­U bar-​­Suen, the gardener, addressed (­the assembly) as follows: ‘­Did ­Nin-​­Dada, daughter of ­Lu-​­Ninurta, kill her husband? What did the woman do, that she should be killed?’ they said. In the assembly of Nippur they were answered as follows: ‘­A woman who dislikes her husband may inform his enemy, that he may kill her husband. Then he would let her know that her husband has been killed,

86

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi

and she would keep silent about it. She it was who (­really) killed her husband: her guilt is greater than (­the guilt of) those who killed him.’ Nine individuals are enumerated as supporters of one argument, and two others present a ­counter-​­argument, which is answered by a further argument. Presumably these 11 men are not to be understood as composing the entire assembly of Nippur, rather they are the members who spoke. Each of the speakers is identified by his name and either his father’s name or his trade, except for one A ­ li-​­ellati, who is identified only as ­ li-​­ellati had no trade and his father was u ­ nknown –​ a ‘­subject’ (­muškēnum).15 Perhaps A ­like Ṣurārum, son of the ­streetwalker – ​­yet he nonetheless possessed whatever qualified a free man to participate in the assembly. The participants identified by their occupation include a ­bird-​­catcher, a potter, two gardeners, and a military officer. None of them is of high rank and none holds administrative office in palace or temple; indeed, none holds power, other than having a voice in the assembly. Based on the evidence of this text, then, there was no special qualification for assembly membership. Nor was there any special qualification for serving as a witness, an elder, or even a judge, that the sources disclose.16 The civic functions of participating in collective governance were evidently open to all free adult native sons of the community they governed. How about free adult native daughters? Witnesses to transactions and legal proceedings, as well as collective governance bodies, are almost always male. Exceptions seem to be occasioned by exceptional situations. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the case William Hallo dubbed ‘­The Slandered Bride’, which was resolved by female witnesses, or ‘­alderwomen’ as he translates the word (­š ībātum).17 The translation ‘­alderwomen’ seems appropriate here, since the women were not simply presenting testimony but also determining whether to convict. This case also comes from the city of Nippur, but it is a real case, and two other documents provide the back story: ­Enlil-​­issu had engaged to marry ­A ma-​­sukkal, and he received her dowry, amounting to 24 shekels of silver, but he subsequently refused to conclude the marriage. According to the present document, he slandered the ​­ woman he engaged to ­marry – probably hoping to get out of the contract by alleging her ­infidelity – ​­and he accused her of maliciously accusing him. The charges were investigated by the women of the neighbourhood. They found in favor of A ­ ma-​­sukkal and convicted ­Enlil-​­issu of slandering her, presenting their judgment before the god Ninurta (­represented by his weapon) and nine male witnesses. In response ­Enlil-​­issu declared, ‘­Convict me all you want, I won’t marry ­her – ​­let them hang me and let me pay the money’.18 In this case, presumably it was the nature of the charges to be resolved that prompted recourse to the female elders of the neighbourhood. While the document is extraordinary, nothing suggests that women’s performance of this function was. The gender of civic governance was normatively male, but perhaps it was not male by definition.

Redemption and restoration The crucial criteria for participation in governance were free and native status. These are distinct criteria, and citizen status in ancient states occupied the area of their

87

Eva von Dassow

overlap, limited by whatever further criteria were operative. Persons who were enslaved, or persons who were foreign to a community, could not participate in its governance, unless their status changed and they were freed or naturalized. Native as well as free status were readily lost in the vicissitudes of events. Debt and war were the primary avenues through which people became enslaved, removed from their natal communities, even denaturalized under the rule of a hostile power (­be it a creditor or an occupying force). But even in the absence of hostilities, travel away from home carried risks. To go where one lacked the recognition and protection of one’s own family, networks, and governing institutions entailed inherent vulnerability, hence the proverb, ‘­A visitor in a foreign land is a slave’.19 The word used for ‘­slave’ is rēšum, literally ‘­head’ (­as in cattle), connoting the person as property, not wardum, the Akkadian word usually translated ‘­slave’; while wardum, ‘­subordinate’ or ‘­servant’, may carry the meaning ‘­slave’, it lacks the intrinsic connotation of enslavement.20 If one were captured and enslaved, by debt or an enemy army or a gang of criminals, one would require redemption in order to have a chance of recovering one’s former status. Redemption of citizens and their dependents was, therefore, provided for in law. First, enslavement for debt could be terminated by a royal edict of debt remission, which annulled ­non-​­commercial debts. Such an edict established ­amar-​­gi4, literally ‘­return to mother’, in Sumerian, or andurārum in Akkadian, meaning return to original state. An edict of debt remission restored persons and real property to their original owners or to their unencumbered condition: mortgages were cancelled, distrained slaves were returned to their former masters, and freeborn persons enslaved for debt were released from bondage. Second, laws could set a term for debt bondage. The Laws of Hammurabi prescribe a t­hree-​­year time limit after which family members in debt bondage were to be released (§117).21 Third, the Laws of Hammurabi also provide for the ransom of men captured while serving in the kingdom’s armed forces, in the following terms: (§32) If a merchant ransoms either a rēdûm or a bā’irum (­soldier) who is taken captive during a royal campaign, and gets him back to his ­city  – ​­if his own assets suffice for the ransom, he shall ransom himself; if his own assets do not suffice for ransoming him, he shall be ransomed by his city’s temple; if the assets of his city’s temple do not suffice for ransoming him, the palace shall ransom him. His field, orchard, or house shall not be given for his ransom. Selling the man’s real property to pay his ransom was prohibited, because property tenure was the basis for assessing labour and military service. In addition to protecting free subjects of the crown who fell into debt bondage or captivity, the Laws of Hammurabi provide for the redemption of enslaved persons sold abroad, and these provisions differentiate between ­native-​­born and ­foreign-​­born persons (§­280–​­281). Furthermore, rulers sought to limit the amount charged for ransoming their own subjects, should they be captured and enslaved by foreign hands. Charpin (­2014) has assembled sources from early ­second-​­millennium Mesopotamia that concern the ransom of captives. The earliest, from the nineteenth century BCE, is the draft of an agreement between the rulers of Šadlaš and Nerebtum (­two small kingdoms along the lower Diyala River), after the conclusion of hostilities. The agreement stipulates differentiated tariffs for ransom: a free man (‘­son of a man’) at 20 shekels of silver; a man’s servant, 15 shekels; female servant, 10 shekels; and elderly and children at 88

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi

market price (­Charpin 2014: ­34–​­37). Similar agreements and various tariffs are attested in the e­ ighteenth-​­century archives of Mari, upstream from Babylon on the Euphrates. From the later archives found at Tell Leilan (­Šeḫna, in the upper Habur region), comes a letter reporting on negotiations to set ransom at 11 shekels, with a ruler who must consult with the elders before agreeing.22 While captives or their families could sometimes fund their own ransom, the provision quoted from Hammurabi’s laws responds to the reality that this was often impossible. Charpin adduces a letter of Hammurabi (­AbB 9, 32) ordering the payment of 10 shekels of silver from a temple’s funds for a man’s ransom, which he suggests is the type of case that inspired formulating the law.23 A few centuries later, the king of Arrapḫe, north of Babylonia, issued an edict stipulating the amount payable for ransoming its subjects, according to a memorandum found in a family archive in the town of Nuzi (­JEN 195; see Zaccagnini 1977: 175). The writer records his interaction with a merchant who has recovered a man named Ipšaḫalu from N ­ ullu-​­land, in the mountains to the north, and offers to hand him over for 60 shekels of silver. The writer made the following objection: ‘­The king issued an ­ ullu-​­land and brings edict, saying, “­If a merchant purchases a native of Arrapḫe from N him into the land of Arrapḫe, he shall take 30 shekels of silver.”’ The merchant counters with his original offer. Thus, the very text that attests this royal edict also indicates that it was unenforced, or unenforceable. So were many of Hammurabi’s laws, and archival documents show that many creative methods were devised to get around the edicts of debt remission, as well as tariffs for redemption and term limits for servitude.

Certifying status Regardless of what royal edicts declared the law to be and whether it was truly so, people seeking to evade or exit enslavement could find themselves confronting a more elementary problem: how to prove what their status was, or to what status they were entitled, if it was threatened. People weren’t usually issued civic identification tablets at birth. In normal circumstances, a person would be known by his or her kindred, associates, and neighbours, who could vouch for that person’s identity, parentage, residence, property, or deeds, in case of a legal challenge. Just such a ­process – ​­or better, just its outcome, as is typical of cuneiform legal ­documents – ​­is recorded by a tablet from Nippur dated to the first year of Samsuiluna, king of Babylon (­BE 6/­2, 62). A man named ­Bēli-​­idinnam was accosted by the officer I­ līma-​­ilum, and had to prove he was a citizen of Nippur. The text ­ ēli-​­idinnam’s kindred attested before gives no indication why his status was contested. B god that he was, indeed, a ‘­son of Nippur’, and their word was accepted as proof of his native status, confirmed by 14 witnesses and a scribe. It should be noted that witnesses, not written records, remained the primary means of f­act-​­finding in ancient Near Eastern law, even when documents were prolifically produced. Determining a person’s status would usually depend on people who could attest to it; only a change of status or a challenge thereto would generate a document. Enslaved persons might contest their status, and in some cases win release. One rather drastic example, again from Nippur, is the record of a case brought by the mother of a girl who was apparently kidnapped into slavery.24 The text is written in Sumerian except for the Akkadian word puḫrum, ‘­assembly’, in the third line. A woman named ­Manzât-​­u mmī approached the assembly of Nippur claiming that she recognized her daughter Nuṭṭuptum in the company of another woman, ­Nīši-​­īnīšu, 89

Eva von Dassow

who had renamed her ­A mat-​­ilīya, evidently having purchased her as a slave. The judges examined her case and deposed ­Manzât-​­ummī under oath. She declared that her daughter was a daughter of Nippur, that she did not sell her into slavery, nor did she give her in marriage. In conclusion, she received her daughter back from the woman who had enslaved her, who sealed the tablet recording the verdict. Thus, the ­judges – ​­perhaps a jury constituted by the ­assembly – ​­restored a ‘­d aughter of Nippur’ to her proper status. Enslaved persons could also be emancipated, a procedure attested by numerous documents. Their formulation, which varies over time and place, illuminates the contours of citizen status. To be emancipated was to acquire, or recover, the status of ‘­native son’ (­or daughter). The Sumerian word ­amar-​­gi4 and its Akkadian equivalent andurārum, the terms used for ‘­debt remission’ (­s ee the previous section), were also used to denote emancipation. Both words are often translated ‘­liberation’ or ‘­freedom’, but this is not their basic meaning; as mentioned previously, the Sumerian word literally means ‘­return to mother’, and the underlying idea is restoration to original state. In their legal and literary usage, these words are redolent of release from encumbrance, whether the encumbrances of enslavement or other kinds, thus they connote negative freedom. In Sumerian documents from the late third millennium, emancipation is formulated as establishing the a­ mar-​­gi4, ‘­return to mother’, of a subject who thus becomes a ‘­son’ or ‘­daughter’ of the community. One such record ­ u-​­Sîn, king of Ur (­­mid-­​­­twenty-​­first century of emancipation, dating to the reign of Š BCE), will serve as an example:25 Concluded case. About ­Ur-​­saguba, slave of Uḫ, whereas ­Lu-​­Baba and ­Lu-​­Ningirsu, sons of Uḫ, appeared, (­and) declared, ‘­By the life of the king, the freedom (­­amar-​­gi4) of U ­ r-​­saguba, the slave, shall be established, and he shall be made as the son of a man!’ And whereas, (­in witness) that the slave’s freedom (­­amar-​­gi4) is established, ­Ur-​ ­saguba has presented (­seven men listed by name), ­Lugal-​­dugana, ­Nin-​­šugigi, and Kalla, son of Bazi, have sworn. ­Ur-​­saguba and his sons are made as native sons. (­four men listed as judges; date) According to this document, ­Ur-​­saguba had been enslaved to a man named Uḫ, whose sons now emancipate him. They declare on oath that his a­ mar-​­gi4 shall be established and ‘­he shall be made as the son of a man’. ­Ur-​­saguba himself presents seven witnesses of his emancipation, three other men swear to it, and four more oversee it as judges. As a result, the text says, ‘­­Ur-​­saguba and his sons are made as native sons’. Here, I translate as ‘­native son’ the Sumerian term ­dumu-​­gi7, which is also translated ‘­free man’, or ‘­citizen’.26 Other sources indicate that emancipation was accomplished by ceremonial acts as well as spoken declarations. A reference manual of legal procedures dubbed the Sumerian Laws Handbook of Forms enumerates elements of the procedure for emancipation.27

90

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi

According to this text, the procedure involves publicly announcing the deed, issuing a legal record of it, and performing (­a) constitutive act(­s). Three options are listed: clearing the enslaved person’s forehead, removing his fetters, and ‘­smashing his pot’; thus, the person’s ­amar-​­gi4, ‘­freedom’, is established. Documents of emancipation do not record all three acts, generally mentioning just one or two of them.28 The value of removing fetters is ­self-​­evident, and smashing a pot has been understood to symbolize annihilating the status of slavery. ‘­Clearing the forehead’ is an abridged reference to the act of anointing the forehead of the manumittee at sunrise, facing east, so as to cleanse the person of enslavement and ‘­clear’ him or her. This element is the one mentioned in an Akkadian document from Sippar dating to the reign of Hammurabi (­CT 8, 48a), given here as an example: (­About) ­Kalkal-​­muballiṭ, son of ­Aya-​­damqat, ­ ya-​­damqat, nadītum of (­the god) Šamaš, daughter of ­Ilšu-​­ibbīšu, his mother, has A cleansed him (­and) turned his face to the sun. As long as ­Aya-​­damqat lives, ­Kalkal-​­muballiṭ shall support her. No one in the future shall have any claim on ­Kalkal-​­muballiṭ; he is clear. None of the sons of ­Ilšu-​­ibbīšu and the sons of ­Būr-​­Nunu shall have any claim on him. By the life of Šamaš, Aya, and Hammurabi they swore. (­fourteen witnesses and date) ­ ya-​­damqat’s son, but she belonged to the class Since ­Kalkal-​­muballiṭ is identified as A of consecrated women (­denoted nadītum) for whom sex was forbidden, he was presumably her slave whom she adopted as her son and then emancipated (­to protect him from claims by her brothers).29 The act of emancipation is expressed by the statement, ‘­she has cleansed him and turned his face to the sun’, whereupon no one may lay claim to him because ‘­he is clear’.

Marking status Certain texts from the same period, the eighteenth century, introduce another element, a physical mark of enslavement that was called abbuttum in Akkadian.30 This was evidently a hairstyle, for one’s head could be shaved so as to apply it or else to remove it. No images are definitely known to depict the abbuttum, but it must have been something like a mohawk, since a horse also had one.31 Rather than its application being constitutive of enslavement and its removal constitutive of emancipation, the abbuttum served as a visible feature enabling ­on-​­sight recognition of a person’s enslaved status. The Laws of Eshnunna stipulate that (§51) persons bearing fetter, shackle, or abbuttum shall not leave town without their masters’ authorization, and (§52) slaves visiting from elsewhere shall be made to bear fetter, shackle, or ­abbuttum –​ ­so they couldn’t move freely, blend into the population, pass for free, and slip the bonds of enslavement.32 The triad of fetter, shackle, and abbuttum, physical hindrances and a visible mark constraining freedom of movement, also features in a letter from the contemporary archives of Mari. This letter (­ARM 26/­1, 115) reports on an oracular inquiry the king of Mari requested, in which the god was queried about removing fetter, shackle, and abbuttum from slaves, of either the palace or its subjects, so that they might go freely

91

Eva von Dassow

about town.33 And the Laws of Hammurabi, compiled some years later, include regulations addressing the application or removal of the abbuttum: a barber who shaves off a slave’s abbuttum without his master’s authorization shall have his hand cut off (§226), or if he shaved the slave on fraudulent authorization, he so swears and the fraudster shall be executed (§227).34 Further, a maidservant who, having borne a man children in place of his wife, seeks equal status with her mistress shall be punished by the application of the abbuttum, to make her equal to slaves instead (§146). Being the mother of a free man’s children, she can’t be sold as a s­ lave – ​­but she’ll look like one, with her slave hairdo. The application of the abbuttum as a mark of enslavement is attested in a remarkable document that records a girl’s successful lawsuit to recover her freedom.35 This took place in Babylon during the reign of ­Abi-​­ešuḫ, grandson of Hammurabi. The girl, ­Nanaya-​­šamḫat, presented her case before the judges, declaring that she was the daughter of a man named ­Uruk-​­tayyār, and in the wake of a military campaign she had arrived with her parents in Babylon, where they dwelt with a smith named Ḫazippa. Her mother owed six liters of barley to Ḫazippa, and after her death he used this minuscule debt as a pretext to distrain ­Nanaya-​­šamḫat, fetter her, mark her with the abbuttum, and reduce her to slavery. She sent word to her relatives in Kish, who have arrived, so she tells the judges to inquire of them and render judgment. They do, also questioning Ḫazippa, who first claimed to have adopted the girl and then claimed to have purchased her, but the witnesses he brings cannot verify either statement. ­Nanaya-​­šamḫat’s relatives, however, confirm her story and affirm her parentage under oath, so she wins her case. Presumably she then grew her hair out as fast as she could. The peculiarity of the abbuttum as a mark of slavery is its impermanence and the need for maintenance (­never mind how to apply it to males who go bald). Masters of slaves so marked would have had to take them to the barber regularly, or soon enough they the sources never address, to my knowledge, nor wouldn’t be so ­marked – something ​­ does the scholarly literature. Only temporarily would a person feature the abbuttum​­hairstyle. While it lasted, however, he or she would be immediately identifiable as a slave, at a distance, without need of inquiry or acquaintance. Then, when enslavement ended, shaving the head would visibly signal the change of status. This is attested in a document from Sippar, dated to the first regnal year of Ammiditana of Babylon ­ bi-​­ešuh; early seventeenth century), that records a man’s recovery of (­successor of A his freedom (­CT 6, 29).36 One ­Warad-​­Bunene had fallen into slavery and been sold to someone in Eshnunna; after five years in servitude, he got free and escaped to Babylon. There, military officers sought to recruit him into the royal guard, for which purpose his free status had to be (­re)­established. The officers declared him free in the following terms: ‘­You are clear, your abbuttum is shaved (­off). You shall serve with the rēdû-​­soldiers’. But ­Warad-​­Bunene does not want to serve in that branch of the armed forces, he wants to do the ilkum-​­service incumbent on his father’s ­house – ​­that is, to return to being a ­tax-​­paying free citizen, for ilkum was the regular duty required of free, propertied subjects of the realm.37 This is fine with the officers, apparently, and ­Warad-​ ­ unene’s brothers are made to swear that they won’t enslave him (­which suggests how B he fell into slavery to begin with); thus, ­Warad-​­Bunene is freed to do the ilkum-​­duty of his father’s house. And his hair is also free to grow back. The impermanence of the abbuttum correlates with the impermanence of enslavement, as well as the shame of it and the necessity of visibly signaling it.38 I was prompted to look into the question of how people’s status was known by Kostas Vlassopoulos’s 92

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi

(­2016) article titled, ‘­W hat do we really know about Athenian society?’ Therein he explores the societal context in which the polarity of free versus unfree acquired paramount salience, and within the ‘­free’ category the distinction between citizen and ­non-​­citizen, over and above other polarities and other attributes by which people could be differentiated. Vlassopoulos observes that in the fairly large metropolis Athens had become by the fifth century, the population included people of diverse origins who could engage in many of the same activities, so that it was not possible to tell from external characteristics whether someone was free or slave, citizen or not; this required inquiry and sometimes legal discovery. I considered that the same would have been true in a typical ancient Mesopotamian city in, say, the age of Hammurabi. Perhaps there had once been a time when the civic communities of Sumer and Akkad were relatively ­self-​­contained, so that their native inhabitants could recognize each other by their accents, looks, and dress, and similarly recognize outsiders, while those among them who were enslaved were known to the community as such and dis­ erformed  – and ​­ sometimes, in the case of prisoners tinguished by the labour they p of war, by being blinded.39 If that was ever so, it certainly wasn’t by the early second millennium. Social mobility as well as immigration diversified the populations of cities while economic activity engaged people of different legal status and origins in the same occupations, and almost everyone spoke Akkadian; different accents might reflect where one grew up rather than indicating ethnic or regional origins. Thus, externally manifest characteristics were not reliable markers of status, and status was changeable anyway. Inquiry was required, and sometimes legal discovery, in order to ascertain whether someone was free or slave, native to the community or not. Under these circumstances, it made sense to introduce methods for visibly marking as well as physically encumbering enslaved persons. Fetters or shackles would serve for encumbrance, but would also restrict functioning in many lines of work, so they wouldn’t be worn by all slaves all the time. Shaving the head to create a distinctive hairstyle was a simple, ­non-​­disabling, and reversible method of signaling slavery. The temporal pattern of attestations suggests that the abbuttum-​­hairstyle was introduced in the eighteenth century and was in use here and there for several centuries thereafter, but eventually it survived only as an archaic trope in literature. In the meantime, the need to differentiate people by status also prompted an abortive attempt to establish a legal distinction between ordinary subjects and the nobility, which took concrete form in the subset of Hammurabi’s laws that distinguish muškēnum, ‘­subject’, from awīlum, ‘­free man’. The laws in this subset were a dead letter from the moment of inscription, since every man but a king was a subject, every subject who was not enslaved was a free man, and everyone’s status was subject to change. But if your hair was shaved like a mohawk, you wouldn’t be seated in the assembly, and you wouldn’t be summoned for jury duty or military ­service – ​­until your hair was free to grow back.

Conclusion The evidence discussed in this chapter shows that a status that may be termed citizenship was salient for the people of ancient Mesopotamia. It could be disputed in court, challenged or proven, lost or (­re)­gained, and when lost it could be marked in the negative. It entailed rights and responsibilities, starting with the right to inherit and the duty to fulfill service obligations in the community of which one was a member. It involved a distinct sense of belonging to that community, normally by filiation. The essential criteria 93

Eva von Dassow

for citizen status were native membership of the community and free status, which were acquired by birth or created in law through acts (­such as adoption and emancipation) that effectively ‘­naturalized’ persons as ‘­sons’ and ‘­daughters’ of the community. The status of a free, native (­or naturalized) member of a community entitled, if it did not oblige, adult males to participate in judgment and office as witnesses, jury or assembly members, and judges; in certain situations, women, too, performed such functions. While the present essay has addressed only the judicial sphere, the capacities of the citizenry could also extend to managing their communities’ fiscal and political affairs, to a degree that varied considerably depending on their circumstances as well as their form of government. In general, the circumstances of the early second millennium BCE featured a plurality of competing political communities of diverse kinds, some of which increased in power to the point of extending their authority over others, but seldom did such ­ id-​­second hegemonic states endure. When this polycentric world dissolved in the m millennium and r­e-​­consolidated into one dominated by large and relatively durable territorial states, the relation of people to political authority was also transformed, subsuming but not effacing the lineaments of citizenship as described here. That, however, is a subject for another essay.

Abbreviations Abbreviations and sigla conform to those used in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (­CAD) = M.T. Roth et al. (­eds) (­­1956–​­2010) The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vols. ­1–​­21 (­Chicago) ARCHIBAB = http://­w ww.archibab.fr/ (­last visited 11 June 2021)

Notes 1 This paper was completed with the support of the ­Kolleg-​­Forschungsgruppe ‘­Rethinking Oriental ­Despotism – ​­Strategies of Governance and Modes of Participation in the Ancient Near East’ (­FOR 2615), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, at the Freie Universität Berlin. I thank Dominique Charpin and Nele Ziegler for reading the first version of this paper and offering numerous critical remarks. In addition, several people offered comments during and after the UCL conference, which I gratefully acknowledge. Although space limits have not permitted incorporating all the suggestions I received, no one’s input has been deliberately ignored. All translations of original sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. Any errors are also mine. 2 ‘­Counsels of Wisdom’, ll. ­31–​­35; Lambert (­1960: ­100–​­101). 3 I use the word polis to signal that there is no essential difference between Greek and Near Eastern cities or c­ ity-​­states. This assertion (­hardly a novel one today) is borne out by studies of c­ ity-​­states in the ancient Near East such as those contributed to Hansen (­ed.) (­2000, 2002), notwithstanding the Hellenic exceptionalism inflecting the project that produced those volumes, and it is valid in terms of both ancient Greek usages of polis and modern analytic categories. These have been investigated in detail by Kostas Vlassopoulos (­2007), who devotes a chapter (­Ch. 4) to cities and ­self-​­government in the Near East, as well as examining ancient usage and interrogating the modern construction of the polis as a uniquely Hellenic phenomenon. 4 See von Dassow (­2012); for treaties made by the republic of Assur, Larsen (­2015: ­148–​­158). 5 Weber (­1976: ­736–​­738), denying the Orient the idea of citizenship; Marshall (­1950: ­10–​­11). 6 Isin (­2015: quotations from p­p. 268, 274, and 275). 7 See Clarke et al. (­2014: 6, 13), and Neveu in this volume. 8 Liverani (­2017b: 539); more strongly, Liverani (­2017a: 203).

94

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi 9 See in summary Westbrook (­2003: ­36–​­39); von Dassow (­2020: ­79–​­80). 10 BM 96998, Veenhof (­2003); the text is also available online at Archibab (­T1959). See now von Dassow (­2021). 11 See the detailed study of local governance by Andrea Seri (­2005), who devotes Ch. 4 to the elders and Ch. 6 to the assembly, as well as the review of Charpin (­2007: ­167–​­182). 12 Charpin (­2020: es­p. ­166–​­167). For the editio princeps of the text (­CUSAS 10, 17), with extensive commentary, see Andrew George (­2009: 1­ 23–​­152); see also the annotated translation on Archibab (­T23844). George considers the text, extant in three exemplars, to be a fictional document, albeit elaborated using historical elements; Charpin considers it to record a real case. 13 This text (­PBS 8/­2, 173), edited by Jacobsen (­1959), has repeatedly attracted comment; see Seri (­2005: ­170–​­174), with references there. Seri considers that because the homicide victim held cultic office, the assembly members may also have been ‘­temple personnel’, noting that one was a gendarme of Ninurta. This is a tenuous argument. 14 Translation adapted from Jacobsen (­1959). 15 The term muškēnum literally means ‘­subject’. It is customarily taken to denote a social class below that denoted awīlum, ‘­man’, an interpretation founded on a small subset of the Laws of Hammurabi. I have argued (­2014) that both terms denote the ‘­citizen’, awīlum from the man’s own standpoint and muškēnum from that of the ruler (­the only man in a given kingdom who is awīlum without also being muškēnum) and his administration. 16 Judicial functions were exercised by a wide range of people, depending on the context; seldom does the role of judge appear to be professionalized. For a survey, see Westbrook (­2005). 17 Hallo (­1964); the document is BE 6/­2, 58. 18 This lightly paraphrases ­Enlil-​­issu’s statement as given in lines 1­ 1–​­14. The verb I render ‘­hang’ (­alālum, var. ḫalālum) might instead be ‘­jail’ (­see Hallo 1964: 99, n. 34). 19 See Lambert (­1960: 259). The word here translated ‘­v isitor’ is translated by Lambert as ‘­resident alien’. 20 As ­Jean-​­Marie Durand points out, rēšum (= Sumerian ­sag-​­ìr) was the proper term for ‘­slave’, whereas wardum (­ìr) simply meant ‘­s ervant’ (­Durand 2012: 2­ 3–​­24). See also von Dassow (­2020: 80). 21 For the Laws of Hammurabi, see Roth (­1997: ­71–​­142). 22 Charpin (2014: ­45–​­48), with a full reedition of the text (­PIHANS 117, 153). 23 Ibid.: 49–51. Alongside it, Charpin cites an older document (­CT 6, 40c) attesting another temple’s payment of a man’s ransom, which the man was obliged to refund. 24 Ni 2773, published by Kraus (­1949 [1951]: ­156–​­174) as ARN 59. The tablet is fairly fragmentary, leaving the reading and interpretation of many lines open to erudite guesswork. 25 NG 75; translation adapted from Falkenstein (­1956 Part 2: ­123–​­125). 26 See von Dassow (­2020: 75, ­79–​­80), with references there. Cf. Falkenstein (­1956 Part 1: ­92–​­95), followed by many scholars, arguing for taking ­dumu-​­gi7 to mean ‘­conditionally free’ (­or ‘­freedman’), effectively calquing Roman legal categories onto Sumerian. 27 For this text, see Roth (­1997: ­46–​­54); the passage cited is col. ii ­1–​­13. The single exemplar, which Roth dates circa 1700 BCE, represents curricular transmission of Sumerian legal formulae. 28 On these ceremonial or symbolic acts, see Malul (­1988: ­40–​­76). 29 The word nadītum (‘­fallow’) denotes a woman consecrated to a male deity, therefore prohibited from having sexual relations with a man. Women thus consecrated could, nevertheless, acquire descendants through adoption, and those consecrated to Marduk could marry. On nadītum-​­women, see the recent study of Lucile Barberon (­2012), with references there. 30 Durand (­2012: ­36–​­52) argues that it was not a regular mark of enslavement but a mark of punishment (­which is consonant with the reading of the evidence presented here), and that the attested spellings indicate the form apputtum. For ease of reference, I retain the dictionary form in the present essay. 31 On the attestation, application, and morphology of the abbuttum, see Durand (­2012) and Potts (­2011) (­w ith literature cited there). Potts identifies one lone image that appears to correspond to this hairstyle, on the head of a bound prisoner depicted on a Sargonic stela fragment (­­twenty-​­third century BCE). If this image does depict the abbuttum, its date would be congruent with the (­putative) original inscription of the text known as ‘­The Great Revolt

95

Eva von Dassow

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

against ­Naram-​­Sin’, extant in later copies and variant versions. In the ­eighteenth-​­century versions, Sargon of Agade is said to have shaved the abbuttum and broken the fetters of the troops of his city, Kish; this, however, would be an anachronistic interpolation, not present in the original inscription (­Charpin 1997: ­12–​­13). Compare the text given in translation in Foster (­2016: 3­ 26–​­328, Appendix Ib, no. 28). For the Laws of Eshnunna, see Roth (­1997: ­57–​­70). Eshnunna was a city on the Diyala River, and the likely royal author of these laws was Daduša, an early contemporary of Hammurabi. Edition and commentary: Durand (­1988: ­282–​­283); see further Durand (­2012: 39). Such penalties do not actually seem to have been inflicted. According to Durand’s interpretation (­2012: ­49–​­50), dâkum, usually translated ‘­k ill’, should mean ‘­smite’ in this context. This tablet (­AO 5421), published as BBVOT 1, 23, is reedited by Claus Wilcke (­1997). The text of CT 6, 29 is available online at Archibab (­T24406). On ilkum and its analogues by other terms, see von Dassow (­2020: ­81–​­82) (­w ith references there). In a similar vein, Durand remarks that the abbuttum as ‘­une marque transitoire’ indicates slavery as ‘­une réalité transitoire’ (­the precarity of liberty being the other side of this coin); he adduces passages from Petronius and Apuleius, as well as Gregory of Tours, to illustrate how hair and its modification signify status (­Durand 2012: ­38–​­39, 50). On blinding captives taken in war, and on the types of labour they performed, see Steinkeller (­2013: ­143–​­144) (­w ith references there); notwithstanding his demurral, such captives were effectively enslaved.

Bibliography Barberon, L. (­2012) Les religieuses et le culte de Marduk dans le royaume de Babylone (­Mémoires de NABU 14) (­Paris) Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Charpin, D. (­1997) ‘­La version mariote de l’ “­Insurrection générale contre ­Narâm-​­Sîn”’, in D. Charpin and J.-​­M. Durand (­eds) Florilegium marianum III (­Paris) ­9 –​­17 ——— ​­(­2007) ‘­Économie, société et institutions ­paléo-​­babyloniennes’, RA 101, ­147–​­182 ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­Le prix de rachat des captifs d’après les archives ­paléo-​­babyloniennes’, in Z. Csabai (­ed.) Studies in economic and social history of the ancient Near East in memory of Péter Vargyas (­Budapest) ­33–​­70 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­Un clergé en exil: le transfert des dieux de Nippur à ­Dur-­​­­Abi-​­ešuh’, in U. Gabbay and J.J. Pérennès (­eds) Des polythéismes aux monothéismes: mélanges d’assyriologie offerts à Marcel Sigrist (­Leuven) ­149–​­187 Clarke, J., Coll, K., Dagnino, E., and Neveu, C. (­2014) Disputing citizenship (­Bristol) Durand, J.-​­M. (­1988) Archives épistolaires de Mari (= ARM 26.­1–​­2) (­Paris) ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­Esclaves punis’, in id., Th. Römer, and J.-​­P. Mahé (­eds) La faute et sa punition dans les sociétés orientales (­Leuven) ­23–​­52 Falkenstein, A. (­1956) Die neusumerischen Gerichtsurkunden, parts ­1–​­2 (= ABAW, ­Phil-​­Hist. Klasse, Neue Folge ­39–​­40) (­Munich) Foster, B.R. (­2016) The age of Agade: inventing empire in ancient Mesopotamia (­London) George, A.R. (­2009) Babylonian literary texts in the Schøyen Collection (= CUSAS 10) (­Bethesda, MD) Hallo, W. (­1964) ‘­The slandered bride’, in R.D. Biggs and J.A. Brinkman (­eds) Studies presented to A. Leo Oppenheim (­Chicago) ­95–​­105 Hansen, M.H. (­ed.) (­2000) A comparative study of thirty ­city-​­state cultures (­Copenhagen) ——— ​­(­2002) A comparative study of six ­city-​­state cultures (­Copenhagen) Isin, E. (­2015) ‘­Citizenship’s empire’, in id. (­ed.) Citizenship after orientalism: transforming political theory (­Basingstoke) ­263–​­281 Jacobsen, T. (­1959) ‘­A n ancient Mesopotamian trial for homicide’, Analecta Biblica 12, ­130–​­150 Jursa, M. (­2010) Aspects of the economic history of Babylonia in the first millennium BC (­Münster) Kraus, F.R. (­1949 [1951]) ‘­Nippur und Isin nach altbabylonischen Rechtsurkunden’, JCS 3, ­i ii–​­iv+­1–​­228 Lambert, W.G. (­1960) Babylonian wisdom literature (­Oxford)

96

Citizens and non-citizens in the age of Hammurabi Larsen, M.T. (­2015) Ancient Kanesh: a merchant colony in Bronze Age Anatolia (­Cambridge) Liverani, M. (­2017a) Assyria: the imperial mission (­Winona Lake, IN) ——— ​­(­2017b) ‘­T houghts on the Assyrian Empire and Assyrian kingship’, in E. Frahm (­ed.) A companion to Assyria (­Malden, MA) ­534–​­546 Malul, M. (­1988) Studies in Mesopotamian legal symbolism (­AOAT 221) (­Kevelaer) Marshall, T.H. (­1950) Citizenship and social class, and other essays (­Cambridge) Potts, D.T. (­2011) ‘­The abbuttu and the alleged Elamite “­slave hairstyle”’, in L. Vacín (­ed.) u4 du11-­​ ­­ga-​­n i sá ­mu-­​­­n i-­​­­ib- ​­du11: Ancient Near Eastern studies in memory of Blahoslav Hruška (­Dresden) ­183–​­194 Roth, M.T. (­1997) Law collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd edn (­Atlanta) ——— (­ ​­2001) ‘­Reading Mesopotamian law cases. PBS 5 100: a question of filiation’, JESHO 44.3, ­243–​­292 Seri, A. (­2005) Local power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia (­London) Steinkeller, P. (­2013) ‘­A n archaic “­prisoner plaque” from Kiš’, RA 107, ­131–​­157 Veenhof, K. (­2003) ‘­Fatherhood is a matter of opinion’, in W. Sallaberger, K. Volk, and A. Zgoll (­eds) Literatur, Politik, und Recht in Mesopotamien: Festschrift für Claus Wilcke (­Wiesbaden) ­313–​­332 Viren, S. (­2021) ‘­T he native scholar who wasn’t’, New York Times Sunday Magazine, 30 May 2021 Vlassopoulos, K. (­2007) Unthinking the Greek polis: ancient Greek history beyond Eurocentrism (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­W hat do we really know about Athenian society?’ Annales (­HSS) (­English Edition) 71.3, ­419–​­439 von Dassow, E. (­2012) ‘­The public and the state in the ancient Near East’, in G. Wilhelm (­ed.) Organization, representation, and symbols of power in the ancient Near East (­Winona Lake, IN) ­171–​­190 ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­Awīlum and muškēnum in the age of Hammurabi’, in L. Marti (­ed.) La famille dans le P ­ roche-​­Orient ancien: réalités, symbolismes, et images (­Winona Lake, IN) ­291–​­308 ​­ 2020) ‘­Liberty and duty in Late Bronze Age states’, Kaskal 17, ­75–​­123 ——— (­ ——— (­ ​­ 2021) Witnesses of his conception? Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 2021.3 (­September), note 69 Weber, M. (­1976) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th rev. edn, ed. J. Winckelmann (­Tübingen) Westbrook, R. (­2003) ‘­Introduction’, in id. (­ed.) A history of ancient Near Eastern law (­Leiden) ­1–​­90 ——— (­ ​­ 2005) ‘­Judges in the cuneiform sources’, in A. Skaist and B.M. Levinson (­eds) Judge and society in antiquity; Maarav 12.­1–​­2, ­27–​­39 Wilcke, C. (­1997) ‘­­Nanāja-​­šamḫats Rechtsstreit um ihre Freiheit’, in B. ­ Pongratz-​­ Leisten, H. Kühne, and P. Xella (­eds) Ana šadî Labnāni lū allik. Festschrift für Wolfgang Röllig (­­Neukirchen-​­V luyn) ­413– ​­429 Zaccagnini, C. (­1977) ‘­The merchant at Nuzi’, Iraq 39.2: ­171–​­189

97

7 CITIZENSHIP IN HITTITE ANATOLIA N. İlgi Gerçek1

Introduction: the missing citizenry The textual record of the Late Bronze Age Hittite state comprises roughly 30,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments covering a period just shy of 500 years, from its formation around 1650 BCE in central Anatolia to its dissolution around 1200 BCE. These texts allow us to trace the formation of an empire that extended, in its heyday, from the Aegean coast of Anatolia to northern Syria and n ­ orth-​­western Mesopotamia, whose rulers exercised sovereignty over diverse territories, cultures, and polities.2 From the ­m id-​­fourteenth century onwards, the Hittite Empire comprised (­a) a core territory in ­north-​­central Anatolia under the direct control of the Hittite state, (­b) a number of subordinate polities in western Anatolia and Syria, and (­c) the borderlands of the imperial heartland inhabited by ­socio-​­politically diverse communities, where Hittite control was intermittent and episodic.3 Ḫattuša-​­(­here in stem form) was the name for the Hittite polity and its capital, and referred also to the territory that constituted its heartland. This name was often written Akkadographically as (­KUR URU) ḪATTI ‘(­the land of the city) Ḫattuša’. The name Ḫatti has come to be used in modern parlance to refer to the Hittite polity and its core territory, a convention I will follow in the present study in order to distinguish the polity and its capital.4 In the scholarly output of ­Hittitology – ​­a ­c entury-​­old ­discipline – ​­one seldom comes across the terms ‘­citizen’ or ‘­citizenship’, even though some central issues that pertain to citizenship, such as personal (­legal) status, rights, duties, or social classes, have been studied in detail.5 Nor is there, to my knowledge, a discussion in the extant scholarship of whether ‘­citizenship’ is a useful or applicable analytical concept in the modern study of Hittite state and society. The fact that citizenship has not been a topic of inquiry and that this concept seldom appears in modern historiographies has to do with the nature and interpretation of both the extant and the absent evidence. The entirety of the extant Hittite textual record appears to have been produced by and for the state, generating a considerable body of scholarship on the state, its king, and its administrative apparatus.6 The rest of the local population, in contrast, is said to be ‘­almost completely invisible’ in the textual record (­van den Hout 2021: 13).7 Documents that pertain to ­non-​­state individuals or ­g roups – ‘​­ ­debt notes, contracts, adoption, 98

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-9

Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia

and tax records, census lists, consignment documents, court records, disbursals, land sale documents, memoranda, and similar texts’ which ‘­dominate the Mesopotamian written legacy’ (­van den Hout 2021: 14) and which are typically brought to bear on the study of citizenship in the ancient ­world – ​­are almost completely lacking in Hittite Anatolia. This yawning gap in the textual record has resulted in what is likely a skewed view of Hittite state and society. In modern scholarship, the Hittite polity has been described as an absolute monarchy; its ruler possessed all political power and was the sovereign authority in the judicial, military, and religious spheres.8 Throughout its history, the state and its bureaucracy, composed almost entirely of an elite with personal, often familial relations to the ruling dynasty, gradually took over the political authority of collective representative bodies and local institutions that had, at least earlier in Hittite history, participated in government. Meanwhile, the extant scholarship on the state’s ‘­subjects’ –​ ­the people of Ḫatti are rarely, if ever, referred to as ‘­citizens’ in modern h ­ istoriography –​ ­has typically focused on the terminology pertaining to social (­or professional) classes, personal status, and the rights and duties of the state’s subjects (­such as land tenure, or military and labour service). In modern historiographies, the state and its subjects have typically been viewed as polar opposites, with the underlying assumption that the latter were not politically active.9 Consequently, although this is neither explicitly stated nor problematized in Hittitological scholarship, ‘­citizenship’, with its strong association in modern scholarship with the political agency of the free individual, has been treated as anachronistic and incompatible with the Hittite state and society.10 Let us briefly digress to ponder on the methodological issue at hand. In his recent account of writing and literacy in Hittite Anatolia, Theo van den Hout criticizes what he views as the prevalent methodological approach in Hittite studies to the problem of missing or absent evidence, namely, to assume that missing text categories (­like those mentioned above) were written on perishable materials and have not been preserved in the archaeological record: they existed, we just haven’t found them yet (­2021: ­13–​­17). He favours instead the ­idea – ​­which he considers methodologically ­sounder – ​­that in Hittite society such transactions were not seen ‘­as in need of being written down’ (­2021: 13) and considers ‘­the possibility that it was not there in the first place or did not play a role of any importance’ (­2021: 16). Van den Hout asks: ‘­what does the Hittite world look like, if we take the consistent absence of certain categories of evidence seriously?’ (­16). I would argue that the extant scholarship on Hittite state and society has operated predominantly in the manner proposed by van den Hout: the available documents ‘­w ith their almost exclusive focus on the king’ have been taken as representative of Hittite state and society, with little speculation to counterbalance the ­state-​­centred narrative extracted from these texts. As an initial foray, the present study will explore the conceptualization(­s) and operational reality of citizenship in Ḫatti, with the ultimate aim of testing the applicability and usefulness of ‘­citizenship’ as an analytical concept for the study of Hittite state and society. I will argue for the existence of different modes of citizenship and raise some central questions pertaining to what and who was a citizen (­Blok 2017: 5): how was Hittite citizenship conceptualized and defined? What role did citizens play in politics and the government of their community? Can we discern the criteria and qualifications for citizenship? In this study, I define citizenship as membership and participation in a (­political) community, and I understand it as a process through which its contours and components

99

N. İlgi Gerçek

developed gradually. I will make a distinction between the interrelated terms ‘­subject’ and ‘­citizen’; I will use the former in reference to an individual or group’s relation to the state or sovereign and the latter to their membership and participation in a political community. Participation in the community not only entailed the political and judicial spheres, but also concerned, among others, the religious, economic, and military.11 This broad and less anachronistic definition of citizenship is adopted to accommodate both the lamentable gaps in the available evidence and the diverse range of conceptualizations, practices, and experiences of citizenship we may find in Hittite Anatolia. The reach and presence of the Hittite Empire and the control it exerted over territories and communities subject to Hittite authority varied considerably across time and space. Thus, ‘­citizenship’ was likely conceptualized and experienced differently in central Ḫatti, its borderlands, or the subordinate polities in western Anatolia and Syria. As in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages with which the Hittite language shared some of its administrative terminology, there was neither a word in Hittite that exclusively denoted ‘­citizen’ nor explicit statements concerning citizenship and its criteria. We may, nevertheless, observe in the Hittite sources the development of concepts and practices similar to our understanding of ­citizenship – ​­both in the broad sense of an individual’s affiliation with a political community, and in the particular sense of a free member of a polity who possessed certain rights, duties, and privileges in relation to the community or state, and, perhaps more importantly, who participated in its government. The textual sources that form the basis of my inquiry comprise, in addition to the bodies of evidence usually brought to bear on the topic, particularly the law collection and administrative documents such as treaties, or instructions and oaths for administrative personnel, sources that concern individuals or communities at the margins of the state, documents in which citizen, alien, local, or foreign may find clearer expression.12 These sources include historiographic texts that propagated royal interests and perspectives, normative documents presenting an ideal view of the state’s administration, as well as archival documents better suited to reveal what actually happened. Especially pertinent to this study are the following: (­a) the Hittite Laws (­HL), a collection of legal verdicts with a number of redactions; (­b) a rich and diverse body of documents that comprised instructions, protocols, oaths, decrees, and treaties that sought to delineate and regulate the relationship between the Hittite state, embodied by its sovereign, and the wide range of its subjects, from the rulers of vassal states to administrative officials;13 and (­c) administrative letters, particularly those that concerned the borderlands of the Hittite Empire, such as the corpus of letters from the Hittite frontier town Tapikka (­modern Maşat Höyük). Before moving on, it should be mentioned that though the following is a ­text-​­based study, certain aspects of citizenship in the ancient world, such as those pertaining to the performances and practices that distinguished citizens, including dress, burial customs, commensality, and cult participation, may be traced more fruitfully through the combined analysis of the textual and archaeological records (­e.g., Duplouy 2018: ­36–​­47).

Men and women of Ḫatti Citizenship concerns how an individual or group relates to, participates in, and constitutes a political community. Hittite documents, produced by and for the state, are predominantly concerned with how individuals or groups related to the Hittite king (­as the embodiment of the state). This relationship was most commonly expressed as one 100

Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia

between ‘­subject’ (­Sum. ARAD) and ‘­lord’ (­Hitt. išḫa-​­, Akk. BĒLU, Sum. EN): all the people over whom the Hittite king was sovereign, directly or through proxies, were the king’s ‘­subjects’, and the king their ‘­lord’.14 Hittite sources do, nevertheless, also document the existence or formation of modes of community affiliation and participation that we may understand as ‘­citizenship’. One of these modes of relating to the state, I argue, can be observed in references to ‘­men’ or ‘­sons of Ḫatti’.15 In Hittite sources, as in the sources of many other periods and places in the ancient Near East, the most common designation indicating a person or group’s affiliation with or membership in a specific polity or community was ‘­man/­men’ or ‘­son(­s) of X’, wherein X could be a city, land, lineage, or another kind of ­socio-​­political group.16 The designation ‘­man/­men of Ḫatti’ (­or ‘­woman of Ḫatti’, see below) or ‘­son(­s) of Ḫatti’ primarily denoted an individual or group’s political affiliation and in most contexts referred to the citizenry of Ḫatti, that is, those subjects of the Hittite king (­and state) who were (­native?) inhabitants of the ‘­land of Ḫatti’.17 In Hittite sources, ‘­men’ or ‘­sons of Ḫatti’ were kept distinct from the following categories: (­a) foreigners18 who were described as ‘­not of Ḫatti’;19 (­b) deportees (­also translated as ‘­transplantees’ or ‘­civilian captives’; Hitt. ­arnuwala-​­, Sum. NAM.RA), who were brought from subordinated countries in the wake of successful military campaigns and who constituted a large part of the population of Ḫatti;20 and (­c) the populations of cities, polities, or communities considered outside of Ḫatti, over which the Hittite state exercised control. The distinction of the ‘­men/­sons of Ḫatti’ from the inhabitants or citizens of subject polities and communities (­c) can easily be observed in Hittite subordination treaties, in which the subjects of the subordinate polity (­or members of subordinate community), including ‘­free’ citizens, retained their original, ‘­native’ affiliations and were not referred to as ‘­men’ or ‘­sons of Ḫatti’.21 It is important to emphasize that though the designations ‘­men’ or ‘­sons of Ḫatti’ frequently appeared in contexts where they stood in contrast to the external (­i.e., those who were not ‘­men/­sons of Ḫatti’, such as deportees or individuals from other lands/­towns), they were also applied to individuals or groups in internal administrative documents such as the ‘­instruction and oath’ documents mentioned above (­Miller 2013, no. 23 and 28). Though infrequently, we also find references to women’s political affiliation or community membership. For instance, in her ­well-​­known letter to Ramses II of Egypt, Puduḫepa, the queen of Ḫatti and consort of Ḫattušili III, boasts that she had acquired ‘­foreign’ ­daughters-­​­­in-​­law (­i.e., princesses from Babylonia and Amurru) and not ‘­a woman of Ḫatti’ (­ŠA KUR URU Ḫatti ­MUNUS-​­TUM).22 A person’s designation as ‘­man’ or ‘­son’ (­or ‘­woman’) of Ḫatti implied not only political affiliation, but also a distinct legal status. This may be inferred from the Hittite Laws dated to the later Old Kingdom, in which an individual’s designation as ‘­men’ or ‘­sons of Ḫatti’ had legal implications. In HL §19a and 19b, for instance, the abduction of a man/­slave has different consequences based on whether the abductor is a ‘­man of Ḫatti’ or ‘­man of Luwiya’ (­Hoffner 1997: ­30–​­31). HL §54 and 55 contrast ‘­sons of Ḫatti’ who owed duties to the state (­DUMU.MEŠ URUḪatti LU.MEŠ ILKU), to ‘­troops’ and professionals from other towns who are not characterized as ‘­sons of Ḫatti’ and who were exempt from duties owed the state. HL §55 seems to imply that the ­ILKU-​­men owed duty because they were ‘­sons of Ḫatti’.23 The (­legal) application of these categories and their ramifications may best be observed in an agreement or decree dating to the later Empire Period, between the king Ḫattušili III and the town Tiliura, located somewhere in the northern peripheries of Ḫatti.24 The 101

N. İlgi Gerçek

agreement is addressed to the ‘­men of the town Tiliura and whichever towns that (­are) around it’ (­obv. i ­7–​­8); the ‘­men of Tiliura’ are then further classified into ‘­men of Ḫatti’ (­who are also called ‘­men of the town’, for which see below) and ‘­Kaška men’ (­obv. i 9). In the historical introduction to the agreement, Ḫattušili III relates how his father Muršili II had rebuilt the town Tiliura but had not ‘­resettled it well’ because he resettled the town with ‘­deportees’ he had brought from his military campaigns (­obv i ­13–​­14). Ḫattušili III, in contrast, claims to have resettled the town with its ‘­earlier inhabitants’, which, it seems, are the ‘­men of Ḫatti’ or ‘­the men of the town’ addressed in the agreement. The extant parts of the document deal exclusively with ‘­Kaška men’, who are denied access to or residence within the town Tiliura and are only allowed to seek justice outside of the town. The ‘­men of the town’ are not to employ or join the ranks of ‘­Kaška men’. The reference, in broken context, to ‘­impurity’ (­rev. iv 3’) further suggests that the agreement likely also included some restrictions concerning cult activities or access to cult places. This document demonstrates that, at least in that particular place and time, deportees, ‘­men of Ḫatti’, and ‘­Kaška men’ (­who were not counted among the ‘­men of Ḫatti/­men of the town’), were kept distinct, and especially in the case of the ‘­men of Ḫatti’ and ‘­men of Kaška’, were subject to distinct legal, professional, residential, and cultic rights and restrictions. It is particularly significant for the present discussion on citizenship in Ḫatti that the ‘­men/­sons of Ḫatti’ acted and were treated as a citizen body. We may point here to evidence which suggests that ‘­men of Ḫatti’ were agents of political action and, moreover, that Hittite sovereigns relied upon their consensus and support. There are references to both real and anticipated situations in which ‘­men of Ḫatti’ support or install a king (­or a rival), issue formal complaints, or express their discontent.25 For instance, a number of interrelated and unfortunately fragmentary ‘­instruction and oath’ compositions that concern the installation of Tudḫaliya I (­I/­II) as king address ‘­men of Ḫatti’ and refer to their involvement in recognizing or installing the king.26 King Ḫattušili III, similarly, refers to how he was supported by both the Kaška, who used to be hostile to him, and ‘­all of Ḫatti’.27 In a late Empire Period ‘­instruction and oath’ composition, courtiers are warned against the ‘­men of Ḫatti’ who habitually desire the ‘­lordship of another man’.28 It is interesting to note that a similar use is attested for the citizen bodies of other polities: in treaties with western Anatolian polities, the ‘­men of Arzawa’ are described as ‘­treacherous’ and likely to plot against the ­Hittite-​­installed king ­Kupanta-​­Kurunta,29 while a treaty with the Syrian polity Amurru mentions how ‘­men of Amurru’ had informed the Hittite king: ‘­we were voluntary subjects, now we are no longer your subjects’.30 A particularly interesting case comes from the introduction of a document known as Tudḫaliya I’s Decree on Penal and Administrative Reform, which refers to how, upon the return of the king from a successful military campaign, ‘­the men of Ḫatti’ address him to complain that he is a ‘­campaigner’ and that he has neglected his judicial duties.31 The significance of the opinions and consensus of the ‘­men of Ḫatti’ may also be inferred from a remark made by queen Puduḫepa, in reference to the ­above-​­mentioned foreign princesses she took as ­daughters-­​­­in-​­law: ‘­were they not indeed a source of pride for me before the men of Ḫatti?’32 To summarize, the designation ‘­men of Ḫatti’, which appears in most contexts to refer to the citizenry of Ḫatti, denoted not only political affiliation, but also distinct rights and duties. ‘­Men of Ḫatti’ were subjects of the Hittite king, but not all subjects of the Hittite king were ‘­men of Ḫatti’. However, as will be discussed in the next section, in Hittite Anatolia, being a citizen of Ḫatti was not the only mode of membership or participation in a (­political) community and seemingly not the most salient one. 102

Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia

Men and women of the town The political geography of central Anatolia before the Hittite period was characterized by towns and ­town-​­based polities of varying size and complexity. The Hittite Empire was superimposed over a political landscape of towns and did not eradicate local, ­town-​­based ­socio-​­political identities.33 On the contrary, in a diverse range of Hittite ­sources – ​­historiographic, administrative, cultic, or ­literary – ​­most of the inhabitants of central Anatolia, including those who were classified as ‘­men/­sons of Ḫatti’ in other contexts, were most commonly identified either individually or in groups by reference to their towns. Hittite administrative documents offer glimpses into the local organization and governance of towns under Hittite control. In Hittite documentation, as in other times and places in the ancient Near East, the term ‘­town’ often designated a s­ ocio-​­political community rather than a place.34 The communities that constituted towns were often referred to as ‘­men of town X’, or, in some specific contexts, ‘­troops of town X’.35 In their dealings with the Hittite state, towns and their territories could be represented by a single, named individual, ‘­the man of town X’, and/­or collective bodies such as the ‘­men of the town’ or the elders.36 Individual or collective representatives or authority figures were not mutually exclusive; they appear in a number of texts in various combinations.37 The Hittite administration collaborated with the local ‘­city inspector’ (­LÚ. MAŠKIM.URUKI) and the elders, who carried out juridical duties and represented their communities in their relations with higher authorities or external political entities. Towns subject to or allied with Ḫatti were expected to contribute ‘­troops’ (­ÉRIN. MEŠ), which could be fighting units as well as groups of labourers, recruited from ‘­free’ men.38 These ‘­troops’ recruited from various towns in or around Ḫatti appear to have been led by ‘­dignitaries’ or ‘­commanders’ (­LÚ.MEŠDUGUD), who swore allegiance on behalf of their men and who were presumably chosen from among their ranks.39 A final group of people who appear as key intermediaries in the s­ ocio-​­economic interactions between the Hittite state and town communities were the men and women who were part of local networks of priests and temple personnel and who participated in the organization and celebration of local cult festivals.40 Town communities, as collective institutions composed of free individuals, appear to have been involved in all aspects of the social life and government of the town. They distributed agricultural land and supervised its use, imposed tax and labour duties and oversaw their organization and delivery (­Imparati 2002), and, along with temple personnel, played a role in the provisioning and maintenance of local cult institutions and the performance of cult activities.41 Women’s role in the town community is documented mostly in the textual record pertaining to local cults, where they appear regularly as local cult personnel or as participants in local cult festivals, along with the rest of the town community (­Cammarosano 2018: ­155–​­158, 2021: ­199–​­204). The myriad ways in which towns interacted with the Hittite state are best documented in texts that concern the peripheries of the Hittite heartland. Hittite royal annals are replete with accounts of towns defying Hittite authority (­e.g., by withholding troops or refusing to return fugitives), changing their political allegiance, or declaring their independence. But towns could also negotiate, trade, or participate with the Hittite state, often of their own volition and through individual or collective representa­ ath-​­taking ceremonies and negotiated the tives.42 These representatives took part in o terms of their agreements with the Hittite state. We see, for instance, in a letter from 103

N. İlgi Gerçek

an unknown location found in Ḫattuša, that ‘­the man of Tankuwa’, whose name is not recorded, was making a complaint to the Hittite administration that his city was being oppressed by the šaḫḫan and luzzi obligations (­see below).43 Being the citizen of a town and of the Hittite polity were not incompatible by default (­though they could be, as we have seen in the a­ bove-​­mentioned Tilura decree, in which ­Kaška-​­men are characterized as ‘­men of Tiliura’ but not as ‘­men of Ḫatti’). Rather, the latter superseded the former in a nested hierarchy. This can be observed in the following excerpt from the document known as the Deeds of Šuppiluliuma (­I), in which the ‘­men of (­the town) Kuruštama’ are qualified as ‘­sons of Ḫatti’: ‘­the ­Storm-​­god took the man [sic., to be understood as ‘­men’] of Kuruštama, a son [‘­sons’] of Ḫatti, and carried him [‘­them’] to the land of Egypt, and made them men of Egypt’.44 Perhaps the most fascinating example of the interrelation of membership in a town community and identification with the Hittite polity comes from a cult inventory known since the early days of Hittitology. This document describes various local cult celebrations in western Anatolia, and it includes an account of the ‘­young men’ of the town community being divided into ‘­men of Ḫatti’ and ‘­men of Maša’ (­a region in western Anatolia) to engage in a mock battle (­the ‘­men of Ḫatti’ win).45

Qualifications and criteria Who was a citizen and based on what criteria? Hittite sources present us with a number of designations for legal or economic status, tax, and labour obligations, as well as categories of people defined by their legal, economic, or social status. A considerable (­and growing) body of literature on Hittite society and economy has dealt mostly with the extant terminology.46 To summarize very briefly and (­I hope) uncontroversially: the terms ‘­free’ and ‘­unfree’ mostly referred to a person’s legal status.47 In the Hittite Laws, these categories are employed mainly in relation to criminal law or marriage and inheritance rights. The terms šaḫḫan and luzzi, regardless of how they originated and what they meant individually, together encompassed a wide range of tax and labour obligations (­possibly the entirety of duties owed the state), and they were imposed on all except those who were exempt. There are also terms that referred to specific duties and those who were obliged for these duties, such as (­LÚ) GIŠTUKUL ‘(­man of the) weapon/­instrument’, LÚ GIŠTUKUL.GÍD.DA ‘(­man of the) long weapon/­instrument’, or (­LÚ) ILKU. The interpretation of these terms remains contested.48 While we may reasonably assume that the citizen body was constituted by free individuals with distinct obligations and prerogatives, the criteria for citizenship (­of a town or the Hittite polity) are difficult to extract from the available evidence. It should be mentioned, in connection to this, that any inquiry into the contours and exclusivity of citizenship in Hittite Anatolia, particularly citizenship of the Hittite state, must take into account the interrelated environmental and demographic challenges that shaped Hittite economy and social structure. The inhabitants of Hatti relied on d ­ ry-​­farming, supplemented by animal husbandry and horticulture. The environmental and climatic conditions of central Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age (­as those of today) were characterized by dramatic fluctuations in annual rainfall, resulting in uneven, often poor agricultural yields. In addition to this, the Hittite polity had to reckon with a chronic manpower shortage. Famines, plagues, and wars surely depleted the state’s supply of manpower, but the Hittite kings’ ­well-​­documented efforts to stop or retrieve fugitives from Ḫatti and to attract fugitives from other lands 104

Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia

indicate that many people simply did not wish to be citizens or subjects. As a solution, the Hittite kings brought in massive numbers of deportees and provided them with agricultural land and provisions, thereby making them ‘­­duty-​­performing subjects’ (­von Dassow 2020: 89).49 In a recent essay, Clifford Ando demonstrates that in Republican Rome ‘­the enfranchisement of aliens originally served not as reward but as punishment for defeated communities’ (­2016: 169). We may wonder whether citizenship in Ḫatti was similarly imposed by the state or experienced by the population as a yoke or punishment.

Conclusions In this preliminary inquiry into citizenship in Hittite Anatolia, I have tried to demonstrate that ‘­citizenship’ as an analytical concept is not incompatible with the study of Hittite state and society, that Hittite sources allow us to trace different modes and scales of membership and participation in a political community, and that men and women could relate to their communities as citizens. I proposed that Hittite citizenship was superimposed on membership in ­pre-​­existing ­town-​­based communities and that membership in these communities was not mutually exclusive. The formation of a Hittite citizenship was likely an integral aspect of Hittite ­state-​ ­formation and developed ­hand-­​­­in-​­hand with the creation of a Hittite ‘­homeland’, the land of Ḫatti, which was central to Hittite political and religious ideology.50 Though the extent of this territory fluctuated throughout Hittite history, as did the presence of the state and the control it could exert, the Hittite homeland was characterized by a common material culture that was the result of the ongoing material (­re)­production of the Empire,51 as well as distinct cult traditions. Hittite citizenry was constituted not only by the ruling elite and officials of Ḫattuša, but also by the free and politically active members of the numerous town communities that dotted the land of Ḫatti. This overarching Hittite citizenry was characterized by political allegiance to the Hittite sovereign, as well as shared material culture and cult practices, produced and reproduced by the state and its citizenry.

Notes 1 I thank Gary Beckman and Müge D ­ urusu-​­Tanrıöver for reading and commenting on drafts of this chapter. Any errors or oversights are my own. 2 For the classification of the Hittite polity as an ‘­empire’, see the discussions in Schuol (­2014), Glatz (­2011, 2020), and Gerçek (­2017a). 3 For discussions of territoriality in Hittite Anatolia, see Matessi (­2016), Glatz (­2009, 2020). 4 See Kryszeń (­2017) for the names Ḫatti and Ḫattuša, with references to earlier studies on this topic. For the use of the terms ‘­Hittite’, ‘­Hittites’, ‘­A natolia’, and ‘­A natolians’, see van den Hout (­2021: 8). 5 The only exception known to me is von Dassow’s (­2020) recent discussion of citizenship and conscription in Ḫatti. 6 For concise discussions of the administrative and judicial systems of the Hittite state, see Imparati (­1999), Haase (­2003), and Archi (­2008). For a recent, comprehensive treatment of Hittite administration, see Bilgin (­2018). As noted in Bilgin (­2018: 1), though the Hittite textual record was the product of the state’s organization, administrative documents represent only a small part of the total. In fact, according to recent estimations, about 40% of extant texts from Ḫattuša, where most of the Hittite archives have been unearthed, pertain to the cult organization and administration (­Schwemer 2016: 7).

105

N. İlgi Gerçek 7 See also van den Hout (­2022: ­315–​­316), where he suggests that ‘­the history of the Hittite kingdom is the history of its elite . . . the story of the one percent ruling it, with the voices of the 99 barely heard’. 8 For recent iterations of this prevalent depiction of the Hittite polity, see Miller (­2013: 43) and Bilgin (­2018: 31), as well as several contributions in the recent edited volume Handbook of Hittite Empire: power structures (­de Martino 2022). 9 See von Dassow (­2012) for a critique of this tendency, which is not particular to Hittitology, but permeates all ancient Near Eastern scholarship. 10 Blok (­2017: ­13–​­41) demonstrates that this narrow modern association of citizenship with the ‘­free exercise of (­political) rights’ was based on Aristotle’s ‘­philosophical definition’ of citizenship with its emphasis on the political and judicial rights of the citizen, and that this definition was a theoretical construct intended to support the aims of his philosophical treatise and did not necessarily reflect the common practices and values of the Greek poleis. 11 The definition of citizenship employed here is based primarily on that of Blok (­2017: 43): ‘­citizenship consists of membership of a political community, in which an individual holds claims to whatever prerogatives and is encumbered with whatever responsibilities are attached to this membership, with communitarian ideas of membership in and attachment to this particular community’. For an overview of various approaches to citizenship, see Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Duplouy and Brock 2018), particularly its introduction (­Duplouy 2018) and concluding remarks (­Brock 2018). For citizenship as process, see particularly Giangiulio (­2017). 12 The sources at our disposal are not only geographically and chronologically patchy, with considerable gaps that leave the majority of the population governed by the Hittite state completely in the dark, but they also do not typically articulate the rules through which society operated, as these would already be known to its members (­von Dassow 2014). 13 In modern scholarship, these documents are treated as different genres, such as treaties, protocols, instructions, loyalty oaths, and are classified as either ‘­domestic’ or ‘­international’. However, as discussed in Miller (­2013: ­1–​­9), those who produced these documents actually lumped them together in the same typological and functional category, referring to them by their principal constituents, išḫiul and/­or lengai-​­, literally a ‘­bond’ or obligation and an ‘­oath’. In secondary scholarship, the label ‘­instruction and oath’ is applied particularly to documents that contain instructions for the administration of the Hittite state and/­or oaths of allegiance to the Hittite king. 14 As has been noted elsewhere (­Haase 2003: 632; von Dassow 2018, 2020: 80, 94), the Sumerian ARAD and the Hittite word it stands for (­since it is typically written logographically with the Sumerogram ARAD), were relational terms; their interpretation as ‘­subject’, ‘­slave’, or ‘­subordinate’ was contingent upon what they stood in relation to, as in the subject of a king, the servant of a god, the slave of a master, or the dependant of a household or institution. 15 This expression was commonly written logographically: LÚ(.MEŠ KUR URU)­ḪATTI/­Hattuša and DUMU(.MEŠ KUR URU)­ḪATTI/­Hattuša. For designations based on place names in the Hittite language, see Hoffner and Melchert (­2008: 60). 16 The designation ‘­man of GN (=geographical name)’ (­LÚ GN) in the singular was also used regularly in reference to the ruler of a city, territory, or polity (­Hoffner 2009: 189). The designation ‘­son of GN’ (­DUMU GN), especially in Old Hittite documentation, may have also referred to sons of the Hittite king assigned to govern a city or territory and it thus needs to be translated ‘­Prince of GN’ in certain contexts (­Bilgin 2018: ­38–​­39). 17 See Westbrook (­2003: ­36–​­37) for the ‘­native’ and ‘­subject’ perspectives of citizenship in the ancient Near East. Cf. Beckman (­2013: 203) and Klinger (­2010: 231). I fully agree with Klinger (­2010) and Giorgieri (­2005), that this need not indicate an ethnic category. 18 Hitt. araḫzena-​­‘­neighbouring, surrounding, external, foreign’. 19 KUB 13.5+ (­ CTH 264) ii 15: [­ UN-​­ aš ­a-­​­­ra-­​­­aḫ-​­zé]-­​­­na-​­aš ­Ú -​­UL-​­aš URU ­Ḫa- ­​­­at-­​­­tu-­​­­ša- ​­aš DUMU.˹LÚ.U19˺.L[U], ‘­a [forei]gn [person], a perso[n] not of Hattuša’. Restoration follows Miller (­2013: 252). See Klinger (­1992) for the attitudes towards foreigners in Hittite Anatolia, and Beckman 2013 for the wider ancient Near East. There was a clear contrast between araḫzena-​­, when used in its meaning ‘­foreigner’ and the Akkadian term UBĀRU, which referred to ‘­resident aliens’. As noted by Beckman (­2013: 211), the latter could access temples and participate in religious festivals in Ḫatti whereas persons considered araḫzena-​­ could not.

106

Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia 20 For deportees in Hittite sources, see Alp (­1950), Beckman (­2013: 210). 21 See, for instance, the treaties with western Anatolian or Syrian polities in Beckman (­1999b, no. ­4 –​­6, ­10–​­13, 14, 16, 17). 22 KUB 21.38 (­CTH 176) obv. 47’–​­52’, edited in Hoffner (­2009: ­281–​­290). Ritual specialists called ‘­Old Women’, too, could be qualified as ‘­Old Woman of Ḫatti’ or of other towns and lands, for which, see Marcuson (­2016: 94). 23 This fits in with the interpretation, recently reiterated by von Dassow (­2020: ­87–​­88, with references), that the Hittite citizens of §55 (­i.e., ‘­sons of Hatti’ who owed ILKU duty) were the same people referred to as ‘­troops’ in HL §54, who were formerly, that is, before becoming Hittite citizens, exempt from duties owed the state. For an earlier discussion of these two clauses, see Freydank (1971: 103–109). 24 This agreement is edited in von Schuler (­1965: 1­ 44–​­151) and Gonzáles Salazar (­1994: ­159–​­176). 25 My interpretation of the designation ‘­men/­sons of Ḫatti’ in these contexts differs from that of others who have suggested that ‘­men of Ḫatti’ as well as other, more inclusive references such as ‘­all of Ḫatti’ or ‘­the entire population of Ḫatti’, especially in contexts that concern their political agency, do not refer to all the inhabitants of Ḫatti, but to specific categories of men, such as: the extended royal family (­Starke 1996: 153 n. 54), administrative officials of the state (­Miller 2013: 24), a part of the population that enjoyed certain rights (­Imparati 1991: 176), or to those who defended the state or were involved in production (­del Monte 1975: 140; Giorgieri 2005: 332). The uses of the appellation ‘­men of Ḫatti’ have not been the subject of a systematic study and the suggestion that ‘­men of Ḫatti’ in certain contexts referred only to the administrative officials in Ḫattuša and/­or the extended royal family has not quite been substantiated. We may infer, however, that these suggestions rest on the prevalent assumption that the general population of Ḫatti were not involved or interested in who ruled the land (­Bilgin 2018: 438), and because the ‘­men of the city Ḫattuša’ and ‘­men of the (­land) of the city Ḫattuša’ could be written interchangeably, as noted in the introduction. In his study of the toponyms Ḫattuša and Ḫatti, Adam Kryszeń (­2017: 216) notes that when the Akkadogram Ḫatti is being used to identify anything other than the king, the short form URUḪatti is more likely to be used than the form KUR (­URU)­Ḫatti. This would allow us to interpret instances of LÚ.MEŠ URUḪatti as ‘­men of Ḫatti’ rather than ‘­men of Ḫattuša’. Moreover, the frequent appearance of the designation ‘­men of Ḫatti’ with qualifications such as ‘­all the men of Ḫatti’ or ‘­all of Ḫatti, from the highest (­ranking) to the lowest (­ranking)’ suggest to me that the designation was not intended to be limited to the ruling elite or officials of Ḫattuša. 26 CTH 271 A1 18’–​­22’ (­Miller 2013: ­157–​­158); B1 5’–​­7’ (­Miller 2013: ­162–​­163). 27 CTH 81.A iv ­26–​­29, edited in Otten (­1981: ­24–​­25). 28 CTH 255.2.A iv ­3 –​­6, edited in Miller (­2013: ­294–​­306). 29 CTH 68.A iii 3­ 1–​­60, translated in Beckman (­1999b: ­74–​­82) and Devecchi (­2015: ­139–​­151). 30 CTH 105.A i ­28–​­39, translated in Beckman (­1999b: 1­ 03–​­107) and Devecchi (­2015: ­225–​­232). 31 CTH 258.1.A i ­4 –​­12, edited in Miller (­2013: ­134–​­139). 32 KUB 21.38 (­CTH 176) obv. 47’–​­49’, edited in Hoffner (­2009: 2­ 81–​­290). 33 For a concise summary of the history and ­socio-​­political organization of central Anatolia before the Hittite Empire, in the s­ o-​­called kārum period, see Michel (­2011). 34 On the corporate nature of the town and its role as a s­ ocio-​­political community and political agent, see Fleming (2004: 170–228). For the role of the city in Hittite Anatolia, see Beckman (1999a: 161–169). 35 LÚ(.MEŠ) URUX and ÉRIN.MEŠ URUX. The determinative URU, conventionally translated as ‘­town’, does not distinguish size or complexity. The term ‘­troops’ could refer both to military units and to labour groups. This term did not designate an original s­ ocio-​­political or military organization in that community, but it was a functional term based on the service these groups rendered the Hittite state. 36 Other terms for collective or individual representatives of towns included ­tapariyalli-​­ ‘­leader(­s), ruler(­s)’ and GAL.MEŠ ‘­g reat ones’. 37 See, for instance, KUB 23.72+ (­CTH 146) rev. ­32–​­37, an agreement between the Hittite king and the ‘­elders’ of Paḫḫuwa, who are also called ‘­men’ and ‘­g reat ones’, edited in Reichmuth (­2011: ­109–​­143). 38 See CTH 133, edited in Kempinsky and Košak (­1970). 39 See CTH 260, edited in Miller (­2013: ­194–​­205).

107

N. İlgi Gerçek 40 For the ­socio-​­economic role of cult festivals in Hittite Anatolia, see Cammarosano (­2018); for local priests and priestesses, see Cammarosano (­2021). 41 Most of the functions of the ‘­men of the town’ and the elders are summarized in Imparati (­1988: 2­ 32–​­233, 1999: 350 n. 113, 2002). For the participation of the ‘­men of the town’ in local cults, along with sectors of society visible only in the ­so-​­called ‘­cult inventories’, see Cammarosano (­2018: 104, ­155–​­158). 42 Although modern narratives often see the accords between the Hittite king and towns or communities (­often in the peripheries of Ḫatti) as impositions effected in the wake of Hittite military conquests, a closer look at these documents reveals that while a number of them were indeed imposed upon recently and forcefully subordinated communities, some communities actually sought to enter into agreements with the Hittite state willingly. This can be observed in an administrative letter from the Hittite king to his official Kaššu stationed in Tapikka in the northern frontier (­HKM 10, edited in Hoffner 2009: ­111–​­117), which mentions Kaška men approaching Hittite officials to ‘­make peace’ (­the Hittite verb, takšulae-​­, conventionally translated as ‘­to make peace’ is actually better understood in these contexts as ‘­to make an agreement’). 43 VS 28.129, edited in Hoffner (­2009: 3­ 65–​­367). 44 KBo 14.12 (­CTH 40) iv ­26–​­39, edited in Güterbock (­1956: 98); see also Singer (­2011: 533). 45 For this text, see Cammarosano (­2018: ­162–​­165), with references to earlier literature. 46 Some key studies are: Imparati (­1982, 1988, 1995, 1999); Beal (­1988), Marazzi (­2008); von Dassow (­2020: 8­ 2–​­91); Klinger (­2022: 6­ 19–​­622). Eva von Dassow (­2018 and 2020), taking a decidedly different approach to the Hittite material, suggests that in Ḫatti as elsewhere in the ancient Near East, obligation for duty (­and citizenship) depended on the person’s status as free. Her interpretation of some key terminology used in Hittite documents is rather different from the established view: she suggests that ‘­free’, ‘­GIŠ­TUKUL-​­man’ (­i.e., man bearing GIŠTUKUL duty’, and ‘­­ILKU-​­man’ (­man bearing ILKU duty), did not represent special and distinct categories of people, but referred to ­duty-​­performing subjects (­von Dassow 2020: ­82–​­91). 47 As noted above, ‘­free’ (­Hitt. ­arawa-​­) and ‘­unfree’ (­w ritten logographically as ÌR) were relational terms. As demonstrated by von Dassow (­2020: 76), ‘­free’ could be used both in a legal (­i.e., rights over one’s person) and in a political (­i.e., right to participate in government) sense. ‘­Unfree’, similarly, could denote ‘­subject’ (­of a polity) or ‘slave’ (­of a master). 48 For various different interpretations of the designations (­LÚ) GIŠTUKUL, see Archi (­1979: 45); Beal (­1988); Imparati (­1995: 578, 1999: 350); von Dassow (­2020: ­82–​­91). 49 Once assigned to agricultural land, deportees became d ­ uty-​­performing GIŠ­TUKUL-​­men; see HL §40, edited in Hoffner (­1997: 4­ 7–​­50). It is unclear whether deportees who were turned into ­duty-​­performing subjects (­and subsequently their children), or ­duty-​­performing subjects in ­Hitttite-​­controlled territories outside of Ḫatti, such as Emar or Ugarit (­for which, see von Dassow 2020: 9­ 2–​­114) were ever referred to as ‘­men/­sons of Ḫatti’. However, HL §­54–​­55 discussed above (­see n. 27), suggests that this was theoretically possible, at least in earlier Hittite history. 50 See my discussion in Gerçek (­2017b: 4­ 3–​­45). 51 This theme is central to Claudia Glatz’s recent monograph The making of empire (­2020).

Bibliography Alp, S. (­1950) ‘­Die soziale Klasse der NAM.­RA-​­Leute und ihre hethitische Bezeichnung’, Jahrbuch für kleinasiatishe Forschung 1, ­113–​­135 Ando, C. (­2016) ‘­Making Romans. Citizens, subjects, and subjectivity in Republican Empire’, in M. Lavan, R.E. Payne, and J. Weisweiler (­eds) Cosmopolitanism and empire: universal rulers, local elites, and cultural integration in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean (­Oxford) ­169–​­186 Archi, A. (­1979) ‘­L’humanité des Hittites’, in E. Akurgal, F. Josephson, and E. Laroche (­eds) Florilegium anatolicum: mélanges offerts à Emmanuel Laroche (­Paris) ­37–​­48 ——— ​­(­2008) ‘­Le “­leggi ittite” e il diritto processuale’, in M. Liverani, C. Mora (­eds) I diritti nel mondo cuneiforme (­Mesopotamia e regioni adiacenti, ca. ­2500–​­500 a.C.) (­Pavia) ­273–​­292 Beal, R.H. (­1988) ‘­The GlŠ­TUKUL-​­l nstitution in second millennium Ḫatti’, Altorientalische Forschungen 15, ­269–​­305

108

Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia Beckman, G.M. (­1999a) ‘­The city and the country in Hatti’, in H. Klengel and J. Renger (­eds) Landwirtschaft im Alten Orient. Ausgewählte Vorträge der XLI. Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Berlin, 4.- ​­8 .7.1994 (­Berlin) ­161–​­169 ——— ​­(­1999b) Hittite diplomatic texts, 2nd edn (­Atlanta) ——— ​­(­2013) ‘­Foreigners in the ancient Near East’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 133, ­203–​­215 Bilgin, R.T. (­2018) Officials and administration in the Hittite world (­Berlin) Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Cammarosano, M. (­2018) Hittite local cults (­Atlanta) ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Local priests in Hittite Anatolia’, Archiv für Orientforschung 54, ­199–​­207 de Martino, S. (­2022) Handbook of Hittite Empire: power structures (­Berlin and Boston, MA) del Monte, G.F. (­1975) ‘­L e “­istruzioni militari” di Tutḫalija’, Studi classici e orientali 24, ­127–​­140 Devecchi, E. (­2015) Trattati internazionali ittiti (­Brescia) Duplouy, A. (­2018) ‘­Pathways to archaic citizenship’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­1–​­51 Duplouy, A. and R.W. Brock (­eds) (­2018) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) Fleming, D. (­2004) Democracy’s ancient ancestors: Mari and early collective governance (­Cambridge) Freydank, H. (­1971) ‘­Zu den §§54/­55 der hethitischen Gesetze’, in H. Klengel (­ed.) Beiträge zur sozialen Struktur des Alten Vorderasien (­Berlin) ­103–​­109 Gerçek, N.İ. (­2017a) ‘“­The knees of the ­storm-​­god”: aspects of the administration and ­socio-​ ­ olitical dynamics of Ḫatti’s frontiers’, in M. Alparslan (­ed.) Places and spaces in Hittite Anap tolia: Hatti and the East (­İstanbul) ­123–​­136 ——— ​­(­2017b) ‘­Hittite geographers: geographical perceptions and practices in Hittite Anatolia’ Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 4, ­39–​­60 Giangiulio, M. (­2017) ‘­Looking for citizenship in archaic Greece. Methodological and historical problems’, in L. Cecchet and A. Busetto (­eds) Citizens in the G ­ raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to AD 212 (­Leiden) ­33– ​­49 Giorgieri, M. (­2005) ‘­Zu den Treueiden mittelhethitischer Zeit’, Altorientalische Forschungen 32, ­322–​­346 Glatz, C. (­2009) ‘­Empire as network: spheres of material interaction in Late Bronze Age Anatolia’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28, ­127–​­141 ——— ​­(­2011) ‘­T he Hittite state and Empire from archaeological evidence’, in S.R. Steadman and G. McMahon (­eds) The Oxford handbook of ancient anatolia, 10,­0 00-​­323 B.C.E. (­Oxford) ­877–​­899 ——— ​­(­2020) The making of empire in Bronze Age Anatolia: Hittite sovereign practice, resistance, and negotiation (­Cambridge) Gonzáles Salazar, J.M. (­1994) ‘­Tiliura, un ejemplo de la política fronteriza durante el imperio hitita (­CTH 89)’, Aula Orientalis 12, ­159–​­176 Güterbock, H.G. (­1956) ‘­The deeds of Suppiluliuma as told by his son, Mursili II’, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 10: ­41–​­68, ­75–​­98, ­107–​­130 Haase, R. (­2003) ‘­The Hittite kingdom’, in R. Westbrook (­ed.) A history of ancient Near Eastern law (­Leiden) ­619– ​­656 Hoffner, H.A. (­1997) The laws of the Hittites: a critical edition (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­2009) Letters from the Hittite Kingdom (­Atlanta) Hoffner, H.A. and H.C. Melchert (­2 008) A grammar of the Hittite language (­Winona Lake, IN) Imparati, F. (­1982) ‘­Aspects de l’organisation de l’état hittite dans les documents juridiques et administratifs’, Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 25, ­225–​­267 ——— ​­(­1988) ‘­Interventi di politica economica dei sovrani ittiti e stabilità del potere’, in F. Angeli (­ed.) Stato, economia e lavoro nel Vicino Oriente antico. Atti del Convegno promosso dal Seminario di orientalistica dell’Istituto Gramsci toscano (­Milano) ­225–​­239 ——— ​­(­1991) ‘­Autorità centrale e istituzioni collegiali nel regno ittita’, in G. Pugliese Carratelli and S. de Martino (­eds) Studi sulla società e sulla religione degli Ittiti (­Firenze) ­369–​­388 ——— ​­(­1995) ‘­Private life among the Hittites’, in J. Sasson (­ed.) Civilizations of the ancient Near East (­New York) ­571–​­586 ——— ​­(­1999) ‘­Die Organisation des Hethitischen Staates’, in H. Klengel (­ed.) Geschichte des Hethitischen Reiches (­Leiden) ­320–​­387

109

N. İlgi Gerçek ——— ​­(­2002) ‘­Palaces and local communities in some Hittite provincial seats’, in K.A. Yener and H.A. Hoffner (­eds) Recent developments in Hittite archaeology and history: papers in memory of Hans G. Güterbock (­Winona Lake) ­93–​­100 Kempinsky, A. and Košak, S. (­1970) ‘­Der ­Išmeriga-​­Vertrag’, Die Welt des Orients 5.2, ­191–​­217 Klinger, J. (­1992) ‘­Fremde und außenseiter in Ḫatti’, in V. Haas (­ed.) Außenseiter und Randgruppen (­Konstanz) ­187–​­212 ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­Ethnogenèse et identité dans l’Anatolie de la période hittite ou: qui étaient les Hittites?’, in I. K ­ lock-​­Fontanille, K. Meshoub, and S. Biettlot (­eds) Identité et alterité culturelles: le cas des Hittites dans le P ­ roche-​­Orient ­ancien  – Actes ​­ de colloque, Université de Limoges ­27–​­28 novembre 2008 (­Bruxelles) ­227–​­237 ——— ​­(­2022) ‘­Hittite economics’, in S. de Martino (­ed.) Handbook of Hittite Empire: power structures (­Berlin and Boston, MA) ­605–​­647 Kryszeń, A. (­2017) ‘­Ḫatti and Ḫattuša’, Altorientalische Forschungen 44, ­212–​­220 Marazzi, M. (­2008) ‘­Messa a coltura e procedure di gestione e controllo dei campi nell’Anatolia hittita: caratteristiche della documentazione e stato della ricerca’, in M. Perna and F. Pomponio (­eds) The management of agricultural land and the production of textiles in the Mycenaean and Near Eastern economies (­Paris) ­63–​­88 Marcuson, H. (­2016) ‘­Word of the old woman’: studies in female ritual practice in Hittite Anatolia, diss. Chicago (­u npublished) Matessi, A. (­2016) ‘­The making of Hittite imperial landscapes: territoriality and balance of ­ outh-​­Central Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age’, Journal of Ancient Near Eastpower in S ern History 31, ­117–​­162 Michel, C. (­2011) ‘­The kārum Period on the Plateau’, in S.R. Steadman and G. McMahon (­eds) The Oxford handbook of ancient Anatolia, 10,­0 00–​­323 B.C.E. (­Oxford) ­313–​­336 Miller, J.L. (­2013) Royal Hittite instructions and related administrative texts (­Atlanta) Otten, H. (­1981) Die Apologie Hattusilis III. Das Bild der Überlieferung (­Wiesbaden) Reichmuth, S. (­2011) ‘­Mita of Pahhuwa (­CTH 146)’, in R. Fischer, D. Groddek, and H. Marquardt (­eds) Hethitologie in Dresden: Textarbeitungen, Arebeiten zur ­Forschungs-​­und Schriftgeschichte (­Wiesbaden) ­109–​­144 Schuol, M. (­2014) ‘­Das reich der ­Hethiter – ​­ein Imperium?’, in M. Gehler and R. Rollinger (­eds) Imperien und Reiche in der Weltgeschichte. Epochenübergreifende und globalhistorische Vergleiche (­Wiesbaden) ­193–​­218 Schwemer, D. (­2016) ‘­Quality assurance managers at work’, in G.G.W Müller (­ed.) Liturgie oder literatur?: Die Kultrituale der Hethiter im transkulturellen Vergleich (­Wiesbaden) ­1–​­29 Singer, I. (­2011) The calm before the storm: selected writings of Itamar Singer on the Late Bronze Age in Anatolia and the Levant (­Atlanta) Starke, F. (­1996) ‘­Zur “­Regierung” des hethitischen Staates’, Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte 2, ­140–​­182 van den Hout, T.P.J. (­2021) A history of Hittite literacy: writing and reading in Late Bronze Age Hittite Anatolia (­c. ­1650–​­1200 BC) (­Cambridge) ​­2022) ‘­Elites and the social stratification of the ruling class in the Hittite kingdom’, in ——— (­ S. de Martino (­ed.) Handbook of Hittite Empire: power structures (­Berlin and Boston, MA) ­313–​­354 von Dassow, E. (­2012) ‘­The public and the state in the ancient Near East’, in G. Wilhelm (­ed.) Organization, representation, and symbols of power in the ancient Near East (­Winona Lake, IN) ­171–​­190 ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­Levantine polities under Mittanian hegemony’, in E. ­Cancik-​­Kirschbaum, N. Brisch, and J. Eidem (­eds) Constituent, confederate, and conquered space: the emergence of the Mittani state (­Berlin) ­11–​­32 ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Liberty, bondage and liberation in the second millennium BCE’, History of European Ideas 44.6, ­658–​­684 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­Liberty and duty in Late Bronze Age states’, Kaskal: rivista di storia, ambiente e culture del vicino oriente antico 17, ­75–​­123 von Schuler, E. (­1965) Die Kaškäer. Ein Beitrag zur Ethnographie des alten Kleinasien (­Berlin) Westbrook, R. (­2003) ‘­Introduction: the character of ancient Near Eastern law’, in R. Westbrook (­ed.) A history of ancient Near Eastern law (­Leiden) ­1–​­90

110

8 THE EVOLUTION OF CITIZEN COUNCILS AND ASSEMBLIES IN ANCIENT PHOENICIA Mark Woolmer

Introduction Located on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean in and around ­present-​­day Lebanon, the Phoenicians were preeminent merchants whose trade networks eventually stretched from Britain in the West to India in the East. Their civilization was based on fiercely independent ­city-​­states, the most important of which were Arwad, Byblos, Berytus (­Beirut), Sidon, Sarepta, and Tyre. From the Middle Bronze Age until the late Hellenistic Period, these ­city-​­states were typically monarchical societies that can best be conceived as sovereign states operating under the auspices of a local potentate (­although, as will be seen, for much of their history the Phoenician ­city-​­states were in the political thrall of more powerful empires such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia). In fact, ­proto-​­monarchic institutions were an early development in Phoenicia with powerful dynasts and dynasties emerging as early as the third millennium BCE in Byblos and from at least the nineteenth century BCE in Tyre (­by the ­m id-​­fourteenth century BCE, Sidon, Berytus, and Arwad were also governed by w ­ ell-​­established and powerful dynastic houses). This conception of monarchy was heavily influenced by broader Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions, and thus Phoenician royal ideology incorporated the three fundamental and intertwined tenets of Near Eastern kingship: that the monarch belonged to heaven and thus his kingship was a G ­ od-​­given gift; that he had a judicial responsibility to safeguard his subjects against the harsh realities of life; and that kingship was sacred. However, the modest size of their kingdoms meant that Phoenician kings, unlike their Mesopotamian counterparts, were considerably more dependent upon the political, economic, and military support of their subjects. This meant that they were far more acutely aware of the divisive and destructive power of wilful disobedience or defiance against their rule. Consequently, Phoenician royal ideology also emphasized the importance of the symbiotic relationship between the king and his ­subjects – ​­a relationship in which the people granted the king authority over their lives in return for his protection against war (­in the forms of banditry, piracy, and military invasion), want (­especially poverty brought about by famine or drought), and injustice (­p ertaining to both the earthly and heavenly realms). DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-10

111

Mark Woolmer

Put simply, the most important role of a Phoenician king was to ensure the state’s survival and then to increase its wealth and prestige by managing the bureaucratic institutions that facilitated and regulated economic and political ­co-​­operation between the different social and occupational groups under his authority (­e.g., agriculturalists, industrialists, merchants, artisans etc.; Garfinkle 2013: ­259–​­278). Therefore, although Phoenician monarchs undoubtedly wielded considerable power and influence, their need to retain the support of their subjects, combined with their greater dependency on the w ­ ealth-​­producing activities of private citizens, meant that citizen committees retained a significant amount of influence and prestige throughout Phoenicia’s history. The most significant of these committees, and the primary focus of this chapter, was the council of ‘­elders’ or ‘­notables’ which comprised representatives from the wealthiest and most influential mercantile, artisanal, and agrarian families; groups whose support and c­ o-​­operation were vital to the city’s survival and success (­Sader 2019: ­125–​ ­140). Phoenician monarchs could not, therefore, act with complete political autonomy, as was typical of other Near Eastern rulers, as their actions were monitored and moderated by a powerful council whose members sought to protect the interests of the city’s wealthy and commercial elites by ensuring that they acted rationally and responsibly at all times. In several Phoenician cities, a broader ‘­citizen’ assembly placed a further check on the power of the local monarch (­most notably in Sidon and Tyre during the Persian Period). Between them, these various citizen committees would eventually ensure that all residents of Phoenicia, regardless of their affluence, occupation, or social status, had a forum in which to make their political voices and opinions heard. Following a brief exploration of their origins and evolution between ca. 7000 and ca. 1500 BCE, this chapter will chart the fluctuating power and fortunes of citizen committees from the Late Bronze Age (­LBA) until the end of the first millennium BCE (­from hereon, all dates will be BCE unless otherwise noted). This chapter has a twofold aim: first, to provide a general introduction to popular government in Phoenicia; second, to challenge traditional views concerning the power and prerogatives of Phoenician citizen councils. Prior studies have typically investigated these councils from the perspective of ‘­primitive democracy’ and so have characterized them as symbolic remnants of the warrior assemblies that were at the forefront of ­so-​­called tribal government during the Chalcolithic Period and Early Bronze Age (­primitive democracies are loosely defined as any early state in which the power of the local ruler was constrained by some form of c­ o-​­operative government such as a tribal or ancestral council: as these councils were typically composed of representatives from the most important familial groups, anthropologists consider them to be ‘­­proto-​­democratic’ institutions; see Jacobsen 1943: ­159–​­172; Evans 1958: ­1–​­11). The belief that these councils were more symbolic than functional has led to the general downplaying of their executive and legislative influence. Even at times when it is undeniable that they were exercising considerable political power and influence, their authority has generally been attributed to the endorsement ascribed to them by foreign hegemonic powers, several of which tasked them with guaranteeing the fealty and good behaviour of the local dynast (­a situation clearly implied in a ­seventh-​­century treaty between Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, and Ba‘­al, king of Tyre; see Pritchard 1969: ­533–​­534). In contrast, this chapter draws upon the ­dual-​­processual theory developed by Richard ­Blanton – ​­which determined that political leaders typically rely upon ‘­networks’ ­ ower  – ​­to show that these councils and ‘­corporations’ to build and maintain their p retained substantial political power and influence throughout their history because 112

Citizen councils and assemblies in ancient Phoenicia

of internal ­socio-​­political conditions rather than external pressures (­Blanton et  al. 1996: 1­ –​­14). The most significant development in this regard was the move away from a dominant elitist strategy (­characterized by exclusive access to prestige goods, patrimony, divinely sanctioned rulership, imperialism, and the concentration of power into the hands of the monarch and his family) towards a more inclusive corporative style approach (­typified by the decentralization of access to prestige goods, reflexive communication that sought to ensure the accountability of the ruler, and the presence of influential citizen councils and assemblies). By approaching Phoenician political history from this perspective, attention can be focused on human action and agency rather than on the theoretical typologies endorsed by proponents of early state models. Such an approach reveals two things: firstly, that councils of elders/­notables retained considerable political power, prestige, and influence in several Phoenician cities; secondly, that the political significance of these councils was due to the socio-economic activities performed by their members rather than the endorsement of a foreign hegemonic power.

The origins of citizen committees: from the Neolithic to Middle Bronze Age (­ca. ­7000–​­ca. 1500 BCE) Whilst there are no written sources documenting the existence of councils or assemblies prior to the LBA, anthropological and archaeological data can be used to cautiously reconstruct their emergence and early evolution in the region of the Levant that would become known as Phoenicia. Though it is traditional to call the inhabitants of this region ‘­Canaanites’ prior to the Iron A ­ ge – ​­and ‘­Phoenician’ from the Iron Age (­IA) onwards, this is an entirely artificial and arbitrary distinction that perpetuates a largely erroneous presumption of discontinuity between the LBA and IA. In recent years, scholars have begun to abandon this convention and so the following discussion will use the terms ‘­Phoenicia’ and ‘­Phoenician’ simply as a geographical shorthand to denote the region and inhabitants of the coastal Levant stretching from Arwad in the north to Akko in the South (­both terms will, therefore, be used independently of any chronological concerns). Furthermore, these terms will be used sparingly and only on those occasions when it is appropriate to talk in general terms rather than specifying a particular city or group of cities. As stated previously, the starting point for this current investigation is the Neolithic Period, more precisely the seventh ­m illennium – ​­the moment at which more permanent settlements were first being established throughout prehistoric Lebanon and coastal Syria. These settlements are significant for two reasons: firstly, because their founding is indicative of a gradual move away from nomadic ­hunter-​­gatherer or ­hunter-​­herder modes of production towards a more sedentary agropastoral one (­agropastoral production combines aspects of agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry), and, secondly, because they create a far more visible ‘­footprint’ in the archaeological record than the transient camps that preceded them. Despite the increased permanency of these settlements, however, these were still band or clan societies as shown by their diminutive size, the restricted spatial and temporal range of their social, economic, and political relations, and the small number of families they housed. The lack of consistent signs of social ranking, even within more ­modest-​­sized settlements (­e.g., substantial differences in house size or inventory) or of institutionalized hierarchies (­e.g., monarchy, theocracy, or warrior elites) have led archaeologists to conclude that authority in these communities 113

Mark Woolmer

was temporary and in the hands of individuals who routinely alternated between the specialized tasks of leadership and normal everyday domestic work (­Paynter 1989: ­369–​ ­399; Akkermans 2019: ­134–​­146; Perret et al. 2019: ­171–​­178). This routine transferral of leadership indicates that these communities temporarily conferred authority to the individual considered most qualified to deal with a particular problem or circumstance. Though archaeology is unable to illuminate the mechanisms by which these settlements took collective decisions or bestowed power to an individual, early ­twentieth-​ ­c entury anthropological studies of tribal groups such as the Negritos of the Southeast Asian rainforests, the African Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the Indians of the Amazon rainforest, and the Pygmies of the Congo rainforest have shown that d ­ ecision-​ making in acephalous societies usually takes the form of ‘­ campfire democracy’ ­ (­acephalous societies are those in which political power is diffused to the degree that there are no permanent institutionalized political leadership roles such as ­war-​­chiefs or kings; see Glassman 2017: ­l xxviii–​­lxxxix). Camp fire democracy is typically a ­three-​ ­phase process: (­1) informal discussions during which the community is divided into individual families and/­or friendship cliques to discuss the issue at hand (­significantly, these informal discussions involve the whole community as men, women, old, and young are all given the opportunity to express their opinion); (­2) the summoning of all ​­ which they adult males to a ­meeting – ​­traditionally convened around a ­campfire – at are tasked with the formal discussion of the issue and empowered to come up with a definite decision (­despite being excluded from the council, women, children, and adolescents are able to sit at its periphery and to interject from time to time); and (­3) arrival ­ roto-​ at a final verdict and its announcement to the community. As will be shown, the p ­democratic aspects (­the use of informal discussions to canvass the largest number of opinions possible) and the oligarchic/­aristocratic aspects (­the existence of a council with restricted membership) of this type of ­decision-​­making would survive in one form or another until the end of the first millennium. The prodigious increase in population density that had accompanied sedentism and the emergence of agropastoral communities meant that by the end of the Chalcolithic Period (­ca. 3500), there was intense and sustained competition for resources and territory. Groups which had previously been separated by ‘­neutral’ or unoccupied territory were now pressed against one another: a situation which increased the frequency and intensity of violent conflict as the advantages of raiding and pillaging were quickly realized. The rise in violent competition is attested clearly in the a­ rchaeological record: firstly, in contemporaneous grave goods which now included a much larger number and variety of weapons (­e.g., stone maces, flint knives, and flint axes); secondly, in the construction of fortification walls to protect exposed settlements (­e.g., the ­Chalcolithic ­settlement of ­Sidon-​­Dakerman which was protected by a wall covering a distance of about 60m; see Artin 2019: ­212–​­222). During the Early Bronze Age, even tiny ­settlements – ​­such as at Tell ­Fadous-​­Kfarabida, which encompassed an area of only ­ a – ​­had basic fortifications, thus highlighting how much of a concern security had 1.5 h become for communities of all sizes (­Genz 2014: ­297–​­300). It was quickly discovered, however, that security could not be guaranteed by simply constructing walls or ditches; it also required the effective martialling of people and resources. Consequently, by the dawning of the Early Bronze Age, a new type of leader had risen to prominence in communities throughout the Near East: the chieftain or warlord. These new leaders were principally esteemed warriors who were granted authority by, and over, their community in return for ensuring its security and prosperity. 114

Citizen councils and assemblies in ancient Phoenicia

Though these ‘­­war-​­chiefs’ were accorded ­decision-​­making authority, their power was not absolute as they were expected to listen to the will and advice of their people, both of which were ascertained through consultation with the council of elders (­a committee comprising all male members of the community who were too old to fight but who remained physically and mentally competent) and the ‘­warrior’ assembly (­comprising all male members of the community who were of fighting age). Unlike later ‘­k ingship’, the position of ­war-​­chief was not necessarily hereditary and it was assumed without claim to divinity or divine patronage. This system of governance is evinced in the Sumerian text Gilgamesh and Agga which dates to around 2100. According to the story, Gilgamesh, the ruler of Uruk, is determined to aggressively stand up to the ruler of Kish, Agga, who is demanding that Uruk submit to his authority. Before resisting Kish’s overtures however, Gilgamesh first consults with Uruk’s council of elders (­­ab-­​­­ba-​­uru) which cautions against the war and rejects his plan and then with its warrior assembly (­guruš) which endorses his proposal and gives him their support (­Gilgamesh and Agga ll. ­1–​­29). The story, when interpreted in its essentials, portrays Gilgamesh as an arrogant ruler who ignores the advice of the elders and relies on the support of his warriors and divine assistance (­Katz 1987: ­105–​­114). Although this episode has previously been seen as an example of primitive democracy in action, ­ roto-​­monarch overriding or manipulating his advisory it is, in fact, an example of a p councils and assemblies in order to achieve a desired outcome (­Ridley 2000: 3­ 41–​­367). It, therefore, appears to have been intended as a cautionary tale which promulgates the idea that a wise ruler takes heed of the advice offered by his elder statesmen. Significantly, this system of governance was not unique to Sumer and is found not only in slightly modified forms throughout the Near East (­e.g., the Levant and Mesopotamia) but also in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean (­e.g., Greece and Turkey), North Africa (­e.g., Libya), and Western Europe (­e.g., Germany and Scandinavia). As urbanization accelerated throughout the Early and Middle Bronze Age, it gave rise to the ‘­proto’ or ‘­m ini’ ­city-​­state (­e.g., Byblos, Arqa, Kazel, and Jamous). Such polities typically comprised a large, fortified centre and a network of smaller sites located within a radius of approximately 10 km (­Thalmann 2000: ­5 –​­74, 2007: ­219–​­232, 2010: ­86–​­101). The smaller sites appear to have provided the larger centres with agricultural goods and labourers in exchange for protection and some form of financial or material reward. The presence of fortifications and public buildings in small ­settlements – such ­ adous-​­Kfarabida that lay in the political and economic as the aforementioned Tell F ­ ini-​­states were highly organized, utilized sophistiorbit of Byblos – reveal that these m cated ­socio-​­political systems, and they relied upon the ­co-​­operation between the larger political centre and the smaller administrative ­sub-​­centres (­Genz 2010: ­205–​­217). As the rulers of these ­m ini-​­states possessed the same basic political characteristics as those encountered elsewhere in the Levant, it is now generally accepted that they were local chiefs or warlords who had successfully extended their authority over a larger territory (­Charaf 2014: ­437–​­438). Despite their expanded spheres of influence, however, these rulers were still constrained and regulated by some type of citizen committees (­what made a citizen a citizen during this period is difficult to recover; however, citizenship was undoubtedly linked to ancestry and/­or to contributions an individual or family provided to the community in the form of resources, and civic or military service). Evidence for the importance of citizen assemblies can be found in several LBA religious texts recovered from the Syrian city of Ugarit (­­modern-​­day Ras Shamra) which document the power and influence of councils and assemblies in the divine realm. 115

Mark Woolmer

Though these texts were composed in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, they can nevertheless be used to reconstruct how Ugarit was governed during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages: firstly, because the Ugaritians, like their Canaanite and Phoenician neighbours, conceptualized their gods as immortal humans who were governed by human emotions, were preoccupied with the same problems and issues as their human worshippers, and who lived in a humanlike society; secondly, because humans tend to be conservative in religious matters and so early features of human society are, as a matter of course, retained in the divine realm long after their terrestrial counterpart had disappeared (­Jacobsen 1943: ­159–​­172, 1970: ­132–​­157). According to these texts, authority in the divine realm was in the hands of a supreme god, El, whose decisions and rulings were final and binding. Interestingly, however, this supreme deity was advised and guided by a variety of councils and assemblies whose recommendations he was expected to listen to and consider. These committees included: a council comprising the most powerful gods and goddesses; a ‘­popular assembly’ that included all gods and goddesses (­excluding ‘­servant’ or ‘­helper’ deities); a familial council comprising El’s closest friends and family; and a variety of other familial councils headed by powerful gods and goddesses (­such as the councils of Ba‘­al and Ditanu) (­Smith 2001: ­41–​­46). The centrality of committees in the administration and governance of the divine realm provides indicative evidence of the importance of their earthly ­counterparts – ​­the council of ‘­elders’ and the citizen ­assembly – ​­which had become ­well-​­established by the LBA. The scant archaeological evidence illuminating political life in Early and Middle ­ roto-­​­­city-​­states Bronze Age Lebanon indicates that, as was the case in Ugarit, several p were beginning to experiment with political systems that included some form of citizen council or assembly during this period. Though there is no record of the social and occupational groups from which members of these terrestrial councils would have been drawn, the heavy dependency that small cities in Lebanon and coastal Syria had on their agricultural ­communities  – ​­both for the production of food and to supply ­ ar-​­chief’s ­army – means ​­ soldiers for the w that village elders and prominent members of the agrarian community would undoubtedly have been ­well-​­represented, as would affluent merchants who were starting to be valued for their procurement of vital commodities and resources. During the final decades of the Middle Bronze Age, as the ­ ercantile-​­capitalist economy slowly began to generate its own political auprivate m thority, these councils of elders or notables, the last remnant of tribal ­decision-​­making processes of the prehistoric period, were gradually transformed into powerful and influential ­city-​­councils that were dominated by wealthy landowners, merchants, and artisans. Accordingly, these councils began to assume greater significance in the governance and administration of ­city-​­states throughout Lebanon, coastal Syria, and Palestine, a situation which served to greatly increase their visibility in the historical record.

The Late Bronze Age (­ca. ­1550–​­ca. 1200) Across Phoenicia, the LBA was marked by the emergence of a burgeoning documentary habit. This newfound fondness for writing and record keeping gave rise to the first texts documenting the presence and prominence of citizen councils in several cities (­most prominently, Sidon, Byblos, Sumur, Arqa, and Arwad). The earliest of these documents are the correspondences recovered from the Egyptian royal archive at Tell ­El-​ ­A marna (­the site of the ­short-​­lived capital built by the ‘­heretic’ pharaoh, Akhenaton). 116

Citizen councils and assemblies in ancient Phoenicia

These documents, known collectively as the Amarna Letters, date to the middle of the fourteenth century and are typically diplomatic reports or entreaties sent to the Egyptian administration by its vassals; as such, these correspondences provide invaluable insights into the prevailing political conditions and circumstances in numerous ­city-​ ­states throughout the ancient Near East (­including several located in Phoenicia; see Bondi 1995: ­290–​­302). Significantly, several letters sent by Egypt’s Phoenician vassals refer to some type of citizen council which the local king or dynast was expected to consult regarding important matters of s­ tate – ​­in exceptional circumstances, these councils could even actively oppose or frustrate his will. For instance, the king of Byblos, ­Rib-​ ­Hadda, makes frequent reference to a citizen council (­which he refers to as ‘­the city’ or ‘­them’) of whose opinions he needed to be mindful due to their power and influence within the city (­Stockwell 2012: ­71–​­81). The Amarna archive reveals that in some instances it was even possible for these councils to act on their own authority in accordance with the will of the people. One such instance is recorded in EA 100, a letter of the city of Arqa (Irqata) and its elders sent to Egypt, declaring their continued allegiance following the death of Arqa’s ruler: ‘­This tablet is a tablet from Irqata. To the king, our lord [the pharaoh]: Message from Irqata and its elders. . . . May the heart of the king, our lord know that we guard Iraqata for him’ (­Moran 1992: 172). The fact that the council of Irqata was ruling in place of a king or ­war-​­chief is clearly evinced by their need to justify their decision to enter into an alliance with one of Egypt’s enemies, Mitanni, against another, Amurru. Similarly, a letter sent to the pharaoh by the citizens of Tunip (­Baalbek) indicates that a citizen committee could even take charge of a ­city-​­state for an extended period. According to this correspondence, the citizens of Tunip had regularly written to the pharaoh for 20 years, even though he had not sent them a single reply (‘­We have gone on writing to the king, our lord, the king of Egypt for 20 years and not a single word of our lord has reached us’, EA 59:­43–​­46) and despite the fact that all of their messengers had remained in Egypt (‘ . . . but all our messengers have stayed on with the king, our lord’, EA 59:­ 13–​­17). Though the letter is sent in the name of the citizens of Tunip, the coordinated and sustained attempt to keep diplomatic contact with the pharaoh indicates that the citizens were being guided by at least one deliberative institution, most likely a council of elders or notables. Similarly, the ‘­men of Arwad’ or the ‘­people of Arwad’ are repeatedly portrayed as acting independently of any local king or dynastic family: ‘­Moreover, whose ships have attacked me (­­Rib-​­Hadda, king of Byblos)? Is it not the men of Arwad? Indeed, they are now with you in Egypt’ (­EA 101: ­11–​­18) and ‘­The people of Arwad were (­there) to intercept th[em] (­­Rib-​­Hadda’s ships) and out they came. Consider the case of the people of Arwad. . . . ’ (­EA 105:­14–​­21). The most dramatic example of the people of Arwad acting on their own accord without mention of a monarch is when they create a pact with the Sidonian king ‘­­Zimredda – ​­who had revolted against Egyptian ­r ule – agreeing to assist him in the capture of Tyre’ (­EA 149). This agreement constituted a direct challenge to Egyptian suzerainty as Tyre was considered a ‘­maidservant’ (­important vassal) of the pharaoh. However, unlike the absence of a king in Tunip and Irqata, which appear to be anomalous and temporary, the absence of a king in Arwad appears to be a typical and enduring feature of the city’s governance. Though absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, the lack of reference to a king (­or, indeed, any type of absolute ruler) in any contemporaneous source provides a strong indication that it was the people who held power in Arwad (­Vidal 2008: 5­ –​­15). 117

Mark Woolmer

Tellingly, even in the inscriptions of ­Tiglath-​­Pileser I (­­1114–​­1076), written two and a half centuries after the Amarna Letters, it is still customary to refer to the ‘­people of Arwad’ and the ‘­ships of Arwad’ without reference to a king. This has led scholars such as Françoise B ­ riquel-​­Chatonnet (­2000: ­129–​­133) to conclude that the phrase LÚ.MEŠ URU ­ar-­​­­wa-​­da (­men of Arwad) is a reference to an ‘­aristocratic and collegiate’ form of government which must have included several different citizen councils and assemblies. Finally, ­Rib-​­Hadda reveals that the citizens of Byblos and several outlying towns and villages had turned against him and were coordinating their resistance to his rule: ‘­they have all agreed among themselves against me . . . my towns are threatening me’ (­EA 69: ­10–​­18). Again, the degree and sophistication of this resistance is indicative of a system wherein the urban and agrarian communities were accustomed to working ­together –​ ­most likely due to their leaders/­elders being members of the same citizen council(­s). Two developments largely account for the burgeoning power and prestige of citizen councils during the LBA: firstly, the majority of overland and maritime trading ventures were now organized, operated, and financed by private individuals or families; secondly, ­inter-​­regional trade had become just as important as military campaigns, if not more so, for the acquisition of wealth and resources. With the private and royal sectors of the economy now being equally profitable, both were considered vital for ensuring a state’s continued power and prosperity. Since a more inclusive corporative approach to ­inter-​­regional trade benefited everyone in ­society  – ​­even improving the wages, employment opportunities, and living standards of the average ­citizen – ​­wealthy merchants and artisans were becoming accepted as legitimate leaders of the community. Significantly, these developments not only enhanced the status and influence of wealthy mercantile and artisanal families individually; they also benefitted them collectively, as membership of the average Phoenician city council was drawn from their ranks. Consequently, as the LBA drew to a close, Phoenician citizen councils were increasing their power, prestige, and influence at the expense of local ­r ulers – ​­a trend that would continue long into the IA.

Iron Age I and II (­ca. ­1200–​­586) The earliest Iron Age text which sheds light on the constitutional arrangements in a Phoenician city is the Report of Wenamon, an Egyptian document dating to the early part of the eleventh century (­around 250 years after the Amarna Letters). It recounts the eventful journey of the titular character, a senior official in the temple of ­Amon-​­Ra, who had been tasked with acquiring Byblian cedar wood for the construction of a new sacred barge. Although the account is most likely fictitious, it is thought to present an accurate picture of the prevailing social and political conditions at the time of its composition. The text is of particular interest to those studying Phoenician constitutional arrangements, as it mentions an influential city council. According to the text, Wenamon arrived in Byblos after an arduous journey and immediately sought to obtain the cedar wood he had been tasked with acquiring. Although Wenamon is kept waiting for several weeks before being granted an audience with Zakarbaal, his eventual interactions with the king reveal that in some matters Zakarbaal had complete authority (­e.g., cedar wood could only be felled and exported upon his express authorization) whilst in others he was advised by an ‘­assembly’ (­mw’d). Here, the term ‘­assembly’ is generally understood to be an allusion to the council of elders that the Israelite prophet Ezekiel would later refer to as ‘­the ancients of Gebal [Byblos] and the wise men thereof’ (­Ezek. 27.9). 118

Citizen councils and assemblies in ancient Phoenicia

Significantly, the text indicates that the king was expected to consult this committee on issues related to ­inter-​­regional trade: something which becomes clear by Zakarbaal’s actions following the arrival of the Tjeker (­a group of maritime raiders who accuse Wenamon of theft and demand his extradition). Prior to their arrival, Zakarbaal had treated Wenamon as he saw fit, often treating him with disdain and contempt; however, following their arrival, he immediately summoned the council (­2.­70–​­74). This act reveals the limits of Zakarbaal’s power as it is only after the council had given its approval that he is able to respond to the demands of the Tjeker. This indicates that the port, and the commercial affairs conducted therein, was of such importance that the king was duty bound to liaise with this council (­which likely contained many affluent merchants, Tsirkin 1990: 36). This situation reinforces the idea that it was socio-economic activities which best accounted for the political power, prestige, and influence of citizen councils. The general picture presented in the Report of Wenamon is one in which the power of the ­kingly-​­bureaucratic state was gradually declining whilst that of mercantile and artisanal organizations was increasing. This situation was largely due to the elitist strategy of the monarchy being usurped by the corporative strategy of the citizens, a development that increased the importance and profitability of private commercial ventures. This situation is clearly evinced in Zakarbaal’s description of Byblian trade and its organization. According to Zakarbaal, he has 20 ships that are in ḥubŭr with Smendes (­the Egyptian pharaoh), and another 50 that are in ḥubŭr with Urkatel of Tanis (­scholars believe that Urkatel was a powerful and influential merchant). The term ḥubŭr, which has equivalents in Ugaritic and Hebrew, is generally understood to mean consortia, company, or trading partnership (­the latter being the most likely meaning in the context of the Report of Wenamon). The willingness of Zakarbaal to enter a partnership with Urkatel, a ­non-​­royal as far as can be ascertained, is indicative of the existence of a highly developed form of private commercial consortia which operated in tandem with a royal house. The ­ igh-​­status individuals who were intimen who made up these consortia were typically h mately linked to the palace but who retained a high degree of independence. They are ­ ssyrian-​­Babylonian tamkarum (­plur. tamkaru) who thought to be analogous with the A were merchants par excellence (­Radner 1999: ­101–​­126). As commercial experts, these men possessed specialist knowledge, business connections, and access to markets upon which the king and city depended. Combined with their increased personal wealth, this served to greatly enhance their political power, prestige, and influence. In turn, this inspired many to become more actively involved in public affairs via the ­city-­​­­councils –​ ­the membership of which they now all but monopolized (­Stockwell 2010: 127). Despite this, however, most Phoenician k ­ ings – ​­most notably those of Tyre and ­Sidon – ​­retained considerable power and authority during the tenth century. This situation changed dramatically following the Assyrian Empire’s subjugation of the Levant in the ninth century. Now in the thrall of Assyria, the Phoenician kings were reduced to ­tribute-​­paying vassals, a position which severely reduced their authority and influence both regionally and domestically. Domestically, this loss of prestige meant that by the end of the eighth century most Phoenician kings had become symbolic figureheads who were tasked with overseeing the city’s administrative systems and commanding its military forces. A partial explanation for why the decline in royal authority was so dramatic is that it coincided with a surge in private commercial ventures. During the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, entrepreneurs from several Phoenician cities (­most notably Tyre and Sidon) greatly expanded their ­inter-​­regional trading operations and networks in order to access and exploit new markets and commercial opportunities. The success 119

Mark Woolmer

of these ventures meant that they significantly increased their own personal fortunes, which, in turn, enhanced their ­socio-​­political prestige and influence. As their wealth and status continued to rise, these entrepreneurs now began to manipulate and reform traditional political structures to increase their own power whilst lessening that of the king. In several Phoenician cities, this resulted in the council of elders, which had long been a conglomerate of wealthy merchants and artisans dominated by a small number of prestigious families, gradually assuming the nature and appearance of a plutocratic oligarchy. The steady accruing of economic and political prestige, power, and independence by Phoenicia’s mercantile and artisanal communities during the ­ninth to the seventh ­century is evinced in several ways: the remarkable increase in productivity and affluence in several Phoenician cities (­including Tyre, Sidon, Sarepta, and Byblos); the appearance of the widely held belief that the Phoenicians were merchants and artisans par excellence; the transformation of numerous small, overseas trading posts into genuine commercial colonies without any royal involvement; the prominence of independent Tyrian merchants operating ­large-​­scale businesses in Babylonia, Ur, and Uruk; Homer’s depiction of Phoenician merchants as economically independent entrepreneurs rather than royal representatives conducting ­state-​­administered trade; and, finally, the decision of the Assyrian king, Tiglath-­Pilesar III, to grant the ‘­people of Sidon’, rather than the king of Sidon, permission to work and trade cedar wood (­on condition that they did not sell it to the Egyptians, Palestinians, or any potential enemy of Assyria) (­Elat 1991: ­21–​­35). By the dawning of the seventh century, it appears that Tyre’s ‘­council of elders’ had gained sufficient power and influence that it was now capable of governing alongside the local monarch: a situation evinced in a treaty between Esarhaddon, the king of Assyria, and Baal I, king of Tyre. The treaty records that Esarhaddon appointed an Assyrian official to the court of king Baal who was tasked with assisting in the governance and administration of the city. Significantly, it is made clear that the official is to work ‘­in conjunction with you (­Baal), in conjunction with the elders of your country’, a statement which seems to indicate that Tyre’s council of elders had become more than just a consultative or advisory body (­Aubet 2001: 146). That this powerful council was comprised of wealthy merchants and artisans is revealed by Tiglath-­Pilesar’s decision to offer independent Tyrian traders the same legal protection and right of access to Assyrian controlled ports as he did to commercial agents operating on behalf of the Tyrian king (­Pritchard 1969: ­533–​­534). Further evidence supporting the premise that Tyre’s council of elders (­and likely those of other Phoenician cities) had assumed powers and prerogatives traditionally ascribed to a monarch is the Carthaginian constitution. Founded by Tyrian merchants sometime between 835 and 800, Carthage was built on a pronounced headland overlooking the Gulf of Utica in ­present-​­day Tunisia. This location ensured that it was ideally positioned to control the lucrative shipping routes which passed through the narrow straits separating North Africa and Sicily. Though textual evidence for the constitution of Carthage is confined to later Greek and Roman sources (­most notably in Aristotle’s idealized presentation of it in his ­fourth-​­century treatise on Greek politics; Arist. Pol. II, ­1272b–​ ­1273b), it is clear that power lay in the hands of rich aristocratic families who dominated the city’s two most important political institutions: the suffeteship and the ‘­adrm (­which is normally translated as ‘­senate’) (­Bondi 1995: ­290–​­302; Hoyos in this volume). Though the constitution presented by Aristotle is likely to differ considerably from the one at the time of the city’s foundation (­and is presented very much from a Greek perspective), it is significant that Aristotle makes no mention of a monarchy in Carthage. 120

Citizen councils and assemblies in ancient Phoenicia

There are two possible explanations: firstly, kingship at Carthage had been phased out by the fourth century (­a popular explanation within Roman t­raditions – ​­e.g., Vergil’s Aeneid – which ​­ suggests that prior to the introduction of annually elected judges Carthage had been ruled by a monarchy), or, alternatively (­and most probably), that Carthage had never been ruled by a king in the traditional sense (­see Hoyos in this volume, who argues that the title ‘­King of the Carthaginians’ likely denotes a suffet or judge rather than a monarch per se). Either way, the Carthaginians came to favour republicanism in preference to monarchy. As the original settlers would have been influenced ­ other-​­city (­Tyre) when crafting by the political institutions and circumstances of their m their constitution, it is likely that the move toward republicanism reflects the diminishing power and prestige of Tyrian monarchs during the ninth to the seventh century BCE. As noted, the ­h ighest-​­ranking officials in Carthage were the two annually elected suffetes (­judges) who were tasked with overseeing and managing the city’s most important political institutions and procedures, and with convening and determining the agenda of the senate. Aristotle stresses that both wealth and birth were needed by those seeking to hold the highest political offices in Carthage (­the implication being that these qualifiers were a legal requirement, not just a social convention). Such prerequisites ensured that the most powerful civic offices remained in the hands of the wealthiest and most influential families. Revealingly, after Nebuchadnezzar II’s siege of Tyre (­­585–​­572), Josephus notes that Tyre was without a monarchy for seven years during which it was governed by suffetes drawn from the city’s leading families (­Joseph. A­p. ­156–​­159). Members of Carthage’s senate (­believed to number between 200 and 300) were also drawn exclusively from the aristocracy (­as evinced by several Greek authors who describe the senate as oligarchic in nature) (­Hoyos 2010: 2­ 4–​­32, es­p. ­28–​­31). Due to the array of roles the ‘­adrm fulfilled, it enjoyed a varied and broad authority. For instance: it decided on war and peace, handled foreign relations, supervised Carthage’s military forces and generals, oversaw the public treasury, approved public spending, ratified laws, and determined the city’s cultural and social policies. If the suffetes and the senate agreed on any policy, there was no need to consult the wider populace; however, if an agreement could not be reached, then the ‘­citizen assembly’ would be summoned to ascertain the will of the people (­although unrecorded, it is likely that only adult, male citizens would be invited to attend the ‘­citizen ­assembly’, as citizenship in Carthage appears to have been connected to ancestry, public and military service, and financial contributions to the state via the payment of taxes or proffering of monetary gifts: see Hoyos in this volume). The diffusion of power in Carthaginian society is perhaps most clearly revealed in a municipal inscription commemorating the opening of a new street: whereas a comparable inscription from a monarchical society would give sole credit to the king, this inscription gives praises to the suffetes, construction experts, and the traders and workers who had worked together to bring the project to completion (­Stockwell 2012: 78). Significantly, at the same time that Aristotle was commenting on the important, and sometime decisive, influence of the citizen assembly in ­decision-​­making in Carthage, there is evidence that they were also beginning to play a more prominent role in the governance of several mainland Phoenician cities.

The Babylonian period to the death of Alexander the Great (­­586–​­332) By the advent of the Babylonian Period, many Phoenician kings had been reduced to political and military figureheads whose power and prestige had largely been 121

Mark Woolmer

appropriated by citizen committees. This situation explains why the Tyrians were willing to be governed by a series of suffetes following Nebuchadnezzar II’s siege (­Tsirkin 1990: 30). It perhaps also explains why the Sidonian king, Tennes, willingly betrayed his own people during the Phoenician revolt against Persian rule in 351. Tennes owed his position to the Persian king Artaxerxes III who had handpicked him to replace the previous Sidonian king, Abd’ashtart, who had led a prior insurrection against Persia. This put Tennes in an awkward position when the citizens of Sidon, following the introduction of a series of invasive and ­heavy-​­handed Persian ­ gyptian-​­led revolt against Persian rule in 351. Although policies, decided to join an E initially leading the rebellion, Tennes’ participation appears to have been unwilling because, as soon as the opportunity arose, he betrayed his city and handed it to the Persians. Tellingly, Tennes delivered 100 of Sidon’s leading citizens into the hands of Artaxerxes who immediately crucified them (­a further 500 prominent citizens approached Artaxerxes as supplicants but were also executed). These 600 men would have included most, if not all, of the most powerful and influential individuals within Sidon’s citizen committees. This incident suggests that it was the people who had decided on resistance and that Tennes had little choice but to enact their will (­the most likely reason why Artaxerxes subsequently executed Tennes was that he had failed to prevent the uprising and had not provided an easy victory for the Persians; Diod. Sic., 16, ­43–​­45). Another striking piece of evidence revealing the increased importance of Sidon’s council of elders is a ­fourth-​­century Athenian honorific inscription (­IG II2 141, ca. ­378–​ ­376) awarded to the Sidonian king Abd’ashtart I (= Strato I). Having praised Abd’­ ashtart – ​­albeit very ­m ildly – ​­and offered him perfunctory rewards for his friendship (­recognizing his goodwill, bestowing on him the honorific title proxenos, and inviting him to a public dinner in Athens), the inscription records that all people who reside and exercise their political rights ( ­politeuomenoi) in Sidon and who travel to Athens on business were exempt from paying a variety of taxes and from undertaking public liturgies. Effectively, this provision freed all merchants who were part of the Sidonian ‘­political class’ from the financial obligations normally imposed on foreigners visiting or residing in Athens (­these were incredibly significant honours which Athens rarely bestowed; see Woolmer 2016: ­79–​­81, cf. Thomsen in this volume). Although it is unclear who the Athenians considered as having political rights in Sidon, the term politeuomenoi most likely referred to members of the city’s council of elders. The honour is clearly designed to endear the Athenians to the most powerful men in Sidon who could bring much needed commodities and revenues into their city. The formidable power and prestige of citizen committees during the Persian Period is also hinted at by several Old Testament authors (­e.g., Isa. 23.8 and Ezek. 27.9) and by Greek and Roman authors such as Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo, Diodorus, Arrian, and Quintus Curtius Rufus, all of whom, to varying degrees, portray the Phoenician kingship as weak and beholden to the views of their citizen committees (­Grainger 1991: ­26–​­228). For instance, Arrian and Curtius Rufus record that the ‘­p eople’ of Sidon made peace with Alexander the Great despite the wishes of their king (­Arr. Anab. 2.15 and Curt. 4.1.16). Arrian also reports that it was the ‘­community’ of Tyre who dispatched representatives to negotiate with Alexander prior to his siege of the city in 323 and who passed the fateful decree refusing the Macedonians entry into their city. All these examples speak to the confidence that the citizens of Tyre and Sidon had that their voices would be heard and listened to. 122

Citizen councils and assemblies in ancient Phoenicia

Final remarks Following the death of Alexander the Great in 323, which heralded the beginning of the Hellenistic Period, his empire was fought over by, and then divided between, his most powerful generals (­the diadochi or ‘­successors’). During the next 125 years, control of Phoenicia passed backwards and forwards between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic Empires before permanently becoming a Seleucid province in 198. Irrespective of which empire ruled the region, however, the dual pressures of Macedonian political domination and Greek cultural influence meant that the power and privileges of Phoenician kings continued to be eroded until the monarchy was eventually replaced by Hellenic style constitutions and political institutions in the third century (­at Byblos in ca. 302, at Tyre in ca. 274, in Sidon ca. 280, and in Arwad by ca. 218). At the heart of these new political systems were a Greek style ‘boulē’ and ‘­dēmos’ (­oligarchic council and popular assembly) which were adapted to local customs and traditions (­for instance, these committees were overseen by suffetes rather than archons as was typical in Greece). Although it is unclear whether these new constitutions assigned greater authority to the oligarchic council or to the citizen assembly, what is certain is that power now formally lay with the people. Significantly, and contrary to prior suggestions (­e.g., Glassman 2017: ­508–​­511), there is no evidence to suggest that the replacement of monarchy with a more inclusive system of government caused any significant political upheaval or disruption. Rather, the abolition of monarchy appears to have been a relatively quick and painless process which, in most cities, took less than half a century. In the opinion of this chapter, the speed and ease of this process reflects the long history of powerful and prestigious citizen committees in Phoenicia. In essence, the final demise of monarchy was simply the end of a ­c enturies-​­long process which had seen citizen committees amass increasing power and influence at the expense of local rulers. That the beginning of this process coincided with the move away from a dominant elitist strategy towards a more inclusive corporative approach is telling: first, it shows that the earliest councils of elders/­notables were not merely symbolic vestiges of a bygone era; second, it reveals that the power and influence of these councils was due to the socio-economic activities performed by their members and not because they had been ascribed authority by a foreign hegemonic power; and third, it highlights the significant executive and legislative influence that these committees continued to command throughout their history.

Bibliography Akkermans, P. (­2019) ‘­The Northern Levant during the neolithic period: Damascus and beyond’, in P.F. Bang and W. Scheidel (­eds) The Oxford handbook of the state in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean (­Oxford) ­134–​­146 Artin, G. (­2019) ‘­The Northern Levant during the chalcolithic period: the ­Lebanese-​­Syrian coast’, in P.F. Bang and W. Scheidel (­eds) The Oxford handbook of the state in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean (­Oxford) ­212–​­222 Aubet, M.E. (­2001) The Phoenicians and the West: politics, colonies, and trade (­Cambridge) Blanton, R.E., Feinman, G.M., Kowalewski, S.A., and Peregrine, P.N. (­1996) ‘­A ­dual-​­processual theory for the evolution of Mesoamerican civilization’, Current Anthropology 37, ­1–​­14 Bondi, S.F. (­1995) ‘­Les institutions, l’organisation politique et administrative’, in V. Krings (­ed.) La civilisation phénicienne et punique: manuel de recherche (­Leiden) ­290–​­302 ­Briquel-​­Chatonnet, F. (­2000) ‘­Le statut politique d’Arwad au IIe millénaire’, in M. Barthélemy and M.E. Aubet Semmler (­eds) Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de Estudios Fenicios y Púnicos: Cádiz, 2 al 6 de octubre de 1995, vol. I, ­129–​­133

123

Mark Woolmer Charaf, H. (­2014) ‘­The Northern Levant (­Lebanon) during the Middle Bronze Age’, in M.L. Steiner and K.E. Killebrew (­eds) The archaeology of the Levant c.­8 000–​­322 BCE (­Oxford) ­434–​­450 Elat, M. (­1991) ‘­Phoenician overland trade within the Mesopotamian empires’, in M. Cogan and I. Eph‘­al (­eds) Ah Assyria … historiography presented to Hayim Tadmor (­Jerusalem) ­21–​­35 Evans, G. (­1958) ‘­A ncient Mesopotamian assemblies’, Journal of Ancient Oriental Studies 78.1, ­1–​­11 Garfinkle, S. (­2013) ‘­A ncient Near Eastern ­city-​­states’, in P.F. Bang and W. Scheidel (­eds) The Oxford handbook of the state in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean (­Oxford) ­259–​­278 Genz, H. (­2010) ‘­Reflections on the Early Bronze Age IV in Lebanon’, in P. Matthiae, F. Pinnock, L. Nigro, and N. Marchetti (­eds) Proceedings of the 6th international congress on the archaeology of the ancient Near East, May ­5 –​­10, 2008 (­Rome) ­205–​­217 ​­2014) ‘­The Northern Levant (­Lebanon) in the early Bronze Age’, in M.L. Steiner and ——— (­ K.E. Killebrew (­eds) The archaeology of the Levant c.­8 000–​­322 BCE (­Oxford) ­292–​­306 Glassman, R.M. (­2017) The origins of democracy in tribes, ­city-​­states and n­ ation-​­states (­Cham) Grainger, J.D. (­1991) Hellenistic Phoenicia (­Oxford) Hoyos, D. (­2010) The Carthaginians (­London) Jacobsen, Th. (­1943) ‘­Primitive democracy in ancient Mesopotamia’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2.3, ­159–​­172 ——— ​­(­1970) ‘­Early political development in Mesopotamia’, in Moran, W.L. (­ed.), Toward the image of Tammuz and other essays on Mesopotamian history and culture (­Cambridge, MA) ­132–​­157 Katz, D. (­1987) ‘­Gilgamesh and Akka: was Urui ruled by two assemblies?’, Revue d’Assyriologie 2, ­105–​­114 Moran, W.L. (­1992) The Amarna letters (­Baltimore, MD) Paynter, R. (­1989) ‘­The archaeology of equality and inequality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 18, ­369–​­399 Perret, C., Hart, E., and Powers, S.T. (­2019) ‘­Being a leader or being the leader: the evolution of institutionalised hierarchy’, Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 31, ­171–​­178 Pritchard, J.B. (­1969) Ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old Testament (­Princeton, NJ) Radner, K. (­1999) ‘­Traders in the ­Neo-​­Assyrian period’, in J.G. Dercksen (­ed.) Trade and finance in ancient Mesopotamia (­Leiden) ­101–​­126 Ridley, R.T. (­2000) ‘­The saga of an epic: Gilgamesh and the constitution of Uruk’, Orientalia, n.s., 69.4, ­341–​­367 ­ ópez-​­Ruiz and B.R. Doak (­eds) Sader, H. (­2019) ‘­The archaeology of Phoenician cities’, in C. L The Oxford handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (­London and New York) ­125–​­140 Smith, S.M. (­2001) The origins of Biblical monotheism: Israel’s polytheistic background and the Ugaritic texts (­New York) ­41–​­46 Stockwell, S. (­2010) ‘­Before Athens: early popular government in Phoenician and Greek city states’, Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, 2.2, ­123–​­135 ——— (­ ​­2012) ‘­Israel and Phoenicia’, in B. Isakhan, and S. Stockwell (­eds) The Edinburgh companion to the history of democracy (­Edinburgh) ­71–​­81 Thalmann, J.-​­P. (­2000) ‘­Tell Arqa’, Bulletin d’archéologie et d’architecture libanaises 4, ­5 –​­74 ​­ 2007) ‘­Settlement patterns and agriculture in the Akkar plain during the late early and ——— (­ early Middle Bronze Ages’, in D. Morandi Bonacossi (­ed.) Urban and natural landscapes of an ancient Syrian capital: settlement and environment at Tell Mishrifeh/­Qatna and in c­ entral-​ ­ estern Syria (­Udine) ­219–​­232 W ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­Tell Arqa: a prosperous city during the Bronze Age’, Near Eastern Archaeology 73, ­86–​­101 Tsirkin, Y.U. (­1990) ‘­­Socio-​­political structure of Phoenicia’, Gerión 8, ­29–​­43 Vidal, J. (­2008) ‘­The men of Arwad, mercenaries of the sea’, Bibliotheca Orientalis 65.1/­2, ­5 –​­15 Woolmer, M. (­2016) ‘­Forging links between regions: trade policy in classical Athens’, in E.M. Harris, D. Lewis, and M. Woolmer (­eds) The ancient Greek economy: markets, households, and ­city-​­states (­London) ­66– ​­89

124

9 ­NEO-​­BABYLONIAN CITIZENSHIP PRACTICES IN A COMPARATIVE MEDITERRANEAN CONTEXT1 Shai Gordin Culturally, the prime loci for the ideas that shape our understanding of citizenship and the people’s polity is rooted in the Greek polis and later developments in the Latin civitas (­e.g., Isin 1997, recently Cooper 2018). The present study, however, traces elements of emerging citizenship practices in the ancient urban communities of the N ­ eo-​ ­Babylonian state. The term ‘­state’ refers to the Babylonian cities under the control of foreign and local powers: the Assyrian, independent Babylonian, and later Achaemenid Empires, between the late eighth and fifth centuries BCE (­­Figure 9.1). I attempt to draw attention to a possible comparative framework based on ­Graeco-​ ­Roman concepts of citizenship. By ­Graeco-​­Roman, I specifically refer to Athens, in the contemporary Classical period and later Hellenistic era, and Rome before the Constitutio Antoniniana. It can be demonstrated that almost at the same time when Athenian dēmokratia was developing, notions of a citizen body and claiming of ­r ights – ​­part of what Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (­2008) define as ‘­acts of citizenship’ – ​­existed in Babylonia under the first world empires. For the purposes of this study, ‘­acts’ are interchangeable with ‘­practices’, as they are defined by Turner (­1993: 2): ‘­Citizenship may be defined as that set of practices (­juridical, political, economic, and cultural) which define a person as a competent member of society, and which consequently shape the flow of resources to persons and social groups’ (­emphasis mine).2

Slaves of the king? Acts of citizenship in elite Babylonian urban communities What rights and privileges had people in the cities of ancient empires of the first millennium BCE? Scholarship on citizenship in the ancient Near East, particularly under the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid Empires, was to some extent influenced by the ancient Greeks’ view on the Persian people as slaves of their Achaemenid king (­Tuplin 2007: ­57–​­59), a sentiment which reverberates, for example, in van Driel (­2002: 155 n. 2). As a point of departure, this paints a grim picture of almost no reciprocity between rulers and the public. However, citizenship is not necessarily understood in such black and white terms, where one is either a ­r ight-​­bearing free person or a slave. To quote Morris Janowitz (­1980: 3), ‘­citizenship is a pattern and a rough balance between rights and obligations in order to make possible the shared process of ruling and of being ruled’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-11

125

Shai Gordin

­Figure 9.1 Location of Babylonian cities and main ­rivers  – ​­Euphrates (­bottom) and Tigris (­top)  – ​­and related canals in the first millennium BCE, based on data from Pedersèn (­2007); ­1-​­Sippar, ­2-​­Seleucia, ­3-​­Cutha, ­4 -​­Babylon, ­5-​­K iš, ­6 -​­Borsippa, ­7-​­Dilbat, ­8-​­Nippur, ­9-​­Isin, ­10-​­Uruk, ­11-​­Larsa, ­12-​­Ur, ­13-​­K issik.

A more complex picture of Babylonian citizenship emerges when looking at legal, social, and prosopographic evidence. The Babylonian state is commonly understood to be a patrimonial institution. This follows the definition of the ­Neo-​­Babylonian Empire as a p ­ atrimonial-​­bureaucratic state in Weberian terms, according to Michael Jursa (­2017: 44).3 Among the state institutions are also the temple bureaucracy which managed large parts of the population and its economy. In addition, each of the old cities of the Mesopotamian alluvium were led by communities based on kinship units of elite groups (­i.e., families and clans). Urban centres were made up of these communities, which governed many aspects of legal, political, and spiritual life (­Barjamovic 2004; Magdalene et  al. 2008, 2019). The power playoff between (­private) elite urban communities and state institutions (­the king and the temples) pervades all first millennium empires, from the Assyrian to the Roman, and beyond. According to this reconstruction, the stability and solidity of a king’s court relied on his urban community, to be understood as a body of (­elite) citizens. Eva von Dassow (­2012) finds a framework for defining the characteristics of the organized body of citizens, based on either the ‘­reasoning public’ of Jürgen Habermas 126

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context

(­1996), or simply communities taking care of their common interests ad hoc. Both characterizations of the organized public could be qualified as a citizen body. Her conclusions regarding the ideal ‘­public’ are important for recognizing the ability of citizen bodies in the ancient Near East to organize, govern, and exercise political authority.4 On the other hand, Jursa argued the case for the ‘­despotic power’ employed by the patrimonial ­Neo-​­Babylonian state over its subjects (­Jursa 2017). His view of the N ­ eo-​ B ­ abylonian imperial structures shows how in the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, the urban elites were under growing pressure from the royal sector to supplant local citizen authority for the king’s will and his imperial s­ tate-​­building and standardization (­see, e.g., Jursa and Gordin 2018, 2019). This argument can be extended with a minute ­ ower-​­play between the king and the citizen body diachronic analysis: the scale of the p was tipped one way or the other depending on the power and interests of the king versus those of the citizen body.5 How, though, did the citizen body gain and hold its power? Elite members of the urban communities held important positions in the temple and state institutions. Jur­ eo-​­Babylonian sa’s typology of officials in the growing bureaucratic structures of the N state fleshes out their hierarchy of wealth, access to resources such as land,6 as well as other privileges and obligations. Under the Achaemenids, for example, Babylonian urbanites, as any other subject of the Empire, were obligated to perform corvée and military duties, often in faraway Elam or Persepolis (­Wunsch 2021). Under certain circumstances, these obligations could be paid off in silver or in kind, and yet Jursa (­1999: ­104–​­105) found in records from Sippar some older rich urbanites doing them anyway; apparently considering the king’s service to be public obligations towards the ­well-​ ­being and prestige of their community or city7 – ​­much like Greek leitourgiai or Roman munera, providing services and funding that eventually support their community at their own expense.8 Further, the entrepreneur mentality in ­sixth-​­century BCE Babylonia gave potentially different classes of people the opportunity to level out their market situation (­Jursa 2010: 2­ 82–​­295, 2014: ­188–​­190), and therefore their political influence,9 a process that is generally ignored in lieu of the Weberian study of the oriental city and its classes (­cf. Isin 1997: 118). Compare the rise through the civic and priestly ranks of the highly versatile figure of ­Marduk-​­rēmanni, as studied by Caroline Waerzeggers (­2014). A descendant of immigrants from the city of Babylon, he became an influential urbanite at Sippar around the time Darius came to power (­520 BCE). ­Marduk-​­rēmanni’s family managed sizable agricultural crown lands near Sippar. These were a main early source for the family’s wealth and connections among the local urban community, as well as with Persian royal functionaries (­Waerzeggers 2014: ­39–​­41). This allowed ­Marduk-​­rēmanni to take on the role of agricultural entrepreneur, merchant, and moneylender, among other activities. Harnessing his growing fortune, network of connections with other urbanites, and royal support, he elevated himself into the board of the College of Scribes of the Ebabbar temple (­ṭupšar Ebabbar; Waerzeggers 2014: ­69–​­74). The case of ­Marduk-​­rēmanni’s family, and those of many other families who favoured the Achaemenid crown, evidently show that royal patronage carried enough clout to effect change in the urban social order. Nevertheless, without his newly accumulated wealth, ­long-​­distance mobility, and connections within his own migrant community, this relative ‘­newcomer’ to the ancient temple community of Sippar could not have risen through the ranks. 127

Shai Gordin

Another method for gaining power and influence was through the temple institution. The temples were an integral part of the ancient Babylonian city, providing the focal point of cult and community. The temples held substantial amounts of land and managed manpower on an industrial scale (­Jursa 2010: ­316–​­468). Therefore, citizens such as ­Marduk-​­rēmanni could gain power through ownership of prebends, which included duties revolving around the care of the deities (­i.e., their statues). ­Marduk-​­rēmanni unusually bought several such prebends, which constituted a primary point of clan identity among the urban elite (­e.g., Waerzeggers 2011). Prebendary income was based on the size and time frame allotted to the performance of a specific cult duty. The variety of prebendary professions is considerable.10 Importantly, priestly circles could trade their offices and pass them on to their heirs, which conceptually turned priestly offices into socially and economically crucial assets on par with landed wealth. Thus, social and economic inequality could replicate itself just as easily through the articulation of prebend ownership as through landownership. In a way, this accumulation of power by urbanites can be considered an act of citizenship: by gaining positions of power, they engaged in a structured set of practices, shaping the flow of resources within their community. But how were these positions, and therefore influences, maintained through generations? In the following two sections, I will discuss two methods of doing just that, one through internal methods (­­three-​­tier naming) and the other through external methods (­royal patronage).

Urban acts of citizenship: the ­three-​­tier naming system Legal documents differentiate community members who owned prebends and belonged to the priesthood based on a ­three-​­tier naming system made up of a personal name, a patronymic (­father’s name), and a family name (­also ancestor’s name). For in­ ēl-​­uballiṭ of the Ṣ ­ āhit-​­ginê family. Looking at stance, ­Marduk-​­rēmanni was the son of B the Early ­Neo-​­Babylonian urban elite kinship groups, John P. Nielsen (­2011) describes the rise and consolidation of the multigenerational joint families with a patriarchal ­clan-​­based structure. The priesthood from the city of Borsippa, for example, practiced strict endogamy and was arranged in ‘­paternal estates’ (­bīt abi), which were linked to land parcels granted by the king called hanšû lands (­Still 2016: ­41–​­63, ­209–​­213).11 In broad terms, the background of most families was either linked to their affinity to a certain divinity or legendary ancestor (­Wunsch 2014),12 or it was tied to certain professions, like the Nappāhu ‘­smith’-​­family, the Atkuppu ‘­reed cutter’-​­family, the Ašlāku ‘­fuller’-​­family, and many others.13 At Borsippa, a small percentage of kinship groups, who cannot be identified as priestly families, were suggested by Still (­2016: ­82–​­85) to be ‘­secular’ families, related mostly to ­non-​­prebendary professions, such as army functionaries (­e.g., Lāsimu ‘­scout’) or city and state officials (­e.g., Iššakku ‘(­­city-​­)­r uler’ or ‘(­privileged) farmer’). In this respect, family names relayed both s­ ocio-​­historical prestige and a sense of civic identity (­Nielsen 2018). This sense of civic pride was, in part, conveyed by the theophoric elements in personal names and family names, which can be linked with the urban cult of a city’s main deity: for example, Marduk in Babylon, Nabû in Borsippa, Zababa in Kish, and Ištar and Nanāya in Uruk. Community members outside these circles of urban elite clans were commonly designated with a t­ wo-​­tier name system: just a personal name with a patronymic. These were not only ­low-​­level social groups, like foreigners, women, and slaves, but also 128

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context

craftsmen or h ­ igh-​­level palace and temple officials, who were identified solely by their title or profession.14 Another type of civic designation was the gentilic: namely, members of different urban communities were made up of the ‘­p eople’ (­lú(.meš)) or ‘­descendants’ (­dumu.meš) of a certain ‘­city’ (­uruki) but could as easily be referred to by a gentilic (-​­ī, -​­īu(­m)).15 In the latter case, at least as far as it is a scribal convention, there are only slight differences between the textual designations of urban communities and that of any other ethnic groups: compare ‘­Babylonians’ (­p eople of the city Babylon) or ‘­Urukeans’ with ‘­Judeans’, ‘­Arameans’, or ‘­Egyptians’.16 Individuals and communities in Babylonia identified themselves based on their cities of origin, even when they migrated to other Babylonian cities or throughout the empires’ territories (­Jursa 2010: ­136–​­137). ­Marduk-​­rēmanni, although he established himself in the echelons of Sipparean society, was still identified with his origin in the city of Babylon. This is also the case of whole communities from the city of Babylon (­i.e., ‘­Babylonian’) identified in Uruk, Ur, or D ­ ilbat – ​­part of them also participating in the local temple assemblies (­kiništu) and citizen assemblies ( ­puhru).17 In an early ­seventh-​­century Babylonian adoption contract from Elam, Akkadīti (­literally ‘­the Akkadian girl/­woman’) was adopted by another local Babylonian immigrant family (­OIP 122 1).18 The contract clearly stipulated her status as a mārat nippuri ‘(­free) citizen of Nippur’ (­literally a ‘­daughter of Nippur’), which prevented the later selling of Akkadīti as a slave and provided her necessary legal protection (­cf. Wunsch 2010). The designation mār GN, ‘­son of ­so-­​­­and-​­so city’, and the term mār banê, literally ‘­son of good quality, of fine status’, both refer to a legally free person, usually a member of the privileged urbanite elite (­Westbrook 2004; Wunsch and Magdalene 2014; Kleber 2018). These are often translated as the ‘­citizens’ of a certain city. Divorced women or manumitted slaves, as well as adopted children, could become legally emancipated by entering the household of a mār banê (­ana bīt mār banê alāku/­šapāru: ‘­to go to/­enter/­send someone to the house of the mār banê’).19 As will be shown below, foreign women who entered the house of a mār banê did not necessarily receive such status or legal protection.

Comparative aspects in ­three-​­tier names: Athenian and Roman urban community and civic identity One can see how the full name of a Greek citizen from the classical polis incorporated both elements of the Babylonian urbanite civic identity, namely, a ­three-​­tier naming practice and the use of a gentilic. Greek citizen names were made up of a personal name (­Gr. onoma), a father’s name (­Gr. patrōnymikon), and the name of the citizen’s polis of ­affiliation – ​­when he was out of his polis.20 This last element, which resembles the Babylonian gentilic rather than the more commonplace clan name, refers to an artificial membership association, usually a toponym based on his origin ­city-​­ethnic (­Gr. ­ethnikon) or its subdivision (­Gr. dēmotikon).21 To a lesser extent, this t­hird-​­tier ­affiliation was interchangeable with other fictive affiliations or civic subdivisions, which Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: ­59–​­60) define as ­sub-​­ethnic, like that of the ‘­clan’ (­Gr. genos), ‘­brotherhood’ (­Gr. phratria), ‘­lineage’ (­Gr. patra) and the like. However, our analogy does not end on this rather flat note. An example cited by Herodotus provides ­socio-​­historical insight on the Greek point of view regarding the matter of using a ­city-​­ethnic or ­sub-​­ethnic affiliation. In the reign of Xerxes, during the battle of Salamis (­480 BCE), Herodotus reports thus: 129

Shai Gordin

Whenever Xerxes, as he sat beneath the mountain opposite Salamis which is called Aegaleos, saw one of his own men achieve some feat in the battle, he inquired who did it, and his scribes wrote down the captain’s name with his father and city of residence ( ­polis). (­Hdt. 8.90.4)­22 While some commentators see this passage as another erroneous example of projecting Greek political structures onto barbarian towns (­cf. e.g., Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 36), this does not necessarily have to be the case. Noting that there is a comparative structure of Babylonian and Greek citizen naming habits, and a wide use of gentilics in Achaemenid Empire texts,23 it seems more likely to surmise that Greek authors realized that an underlying structure of eastern urban communities could be translatable to their affinity system of ­city-​­ (­and ­sub-​­)­ethnics. In the Roman Republic and later during the Empire period, each urban political community (­Lat. civitas) designated for its citizens legal rights and privileges under a local form of the Roman civil law (­Lat. ius civile), at least until the erosion of rights caused by the blanket grant of citizenship to most f­ ree-​­born and freed people in 212 CE by Emperor Caracalla (­Tacoma 2016: ­82–​­92).24 Roman citizens, or holders of some related form of citizenship (­e.g., Latin), could be initially identified by their personal name and clan membership, through original or adopted ­three-​­tiered names (­Lat. tria nomina; Balsdon 1979: ­146–​­160, Patterson 2009: 64, Tacoma 2016: 7­ 9–​­80). This naming practice is somewhat comparable to the Greek and Babylonian legal usage described above. The Roman tria nomina is even more like the Babylonian practice in its common use of clan names for citizens.25

State sanctioned acts of citizenship: kidinnūtu and related royal instruments Until now, we have looked at how Babylonian and ­Graeco-​­Roman citizens identified themselves within urban communities based on a genealogical system, structured into their legal and economic practices. In this section, we turn to deal with citizen priv​­ ileges, primarily with those known in the context of royal f­avour – specifically kidinnūtu.26 This focus was chosen given the possibility that kidinnūtu was not claimed in any recorded legal situation as suggested by van Driel (­see above), but its background and usage permeated lexical, literary, and historical traditions regarding Babylonia’s ancient urban centres. The kidinnu was seen as physically imbued in the monumental architecture of the Babylonian cities. First and foremost among them was the city of Babylon and its special status. A ­well-​­known passage in a composition on the geography of Babylon known as Tintir (= Babylon) gives bilingual ­Sumerian-​­Akkadian epithets of the city, one of which reads: ­Uru-­​­­ubara-­​­­silla-​­duha: Babylon, the privileged city (­āl kidinni), which liberates the captive (­pāṭir(­i) kasî). (­Tintir I 48; George 1992: ­40–​­41)­27 The great wall of Babylon, ­Imgur-​­Enlil, was called by Nabopolassar: bīt kidinni ša d Anu u d Enlil: ‘­the temple of divine protection of Anu and Enlil’. (­NaplC32 II 20; Da Riva 2013: ­95–​­96) 130

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context

A gate of the temple of Ištar of Babylon, the ­E-­​­­tur-​­kalamma, is known from a gate list of the larger Esangila complex as bāb paṭār(­i) kamî ‘­the gate of liberation of the prisoner’ or ‘­outer gate of liberation’ (­BM 35046; George 1992: 9­ 4–​­95). Such names of architectural features in the urban landscape underscore the physical presence of kidinnu imbued throughout the city. Its legal repercussions are less clear. Andrew George (­1992: 397) suggests that the possible special significance of the gate mentioned was that refugees could use it to obtain sanctuary in Babylon. The rights and obligations subsumed by kidinnūtu were not consistently written down. kidinnūtu is often used by the Assyrian and Babylonian kings, who prescribed their protection of Babylonian (­and Assyrian) citizen status, debt relief, as well as certain exemptions from service obligations and other forms of taxation.28 A sworn treaty and oath (­adê u māmītu) were signed between the king and urban communities, to establish the king’s obligations towards providing the kidinnūtu alongside other types of exemptions: andurāru, šubarrû, and zakûtu.29 One of the royal land grants (­kudurru) of ­Merodach-​­Baladan (­­721–​­710, 703 BCE) was issued with the clear stated aim to restore lost land parcels to the ‘­men of the kidinnu’ (­ṣābē kidinni) from the cities of Sippar, Nippur, Babylon, and Borsippa (­VS 1 37, iii 1­ 0–​­25; Paulus 2014: 696).30 A royal inscription of the Babylonian puppet king ­Bēl-​­ibni (­­702–​­700 BCE) cites a ˹ṭuppi˺ šipirētu ša zakûti: ‘­official document of exemption’ (­l. 18).31 This document recorded rights and exemptions from ilku-​­obligation, corvée, and taxes for a certain city. This practice of issuing a ṭuppi (­ša) zakûti continued, as far as we know, until the reign of Nabonidus (­see Frazer and Adalı 2021). On the side of the community, these actions strengthened its unique core identity v­ is-­​­­à-​­vis the royal house and temple institution. On the other hand, kings who did not uphold their treaty with the urban community were infamous in historical memory (­see, e.g., Waerzeggers 2012: ­296–​­297). Such was the case of ­Nabû-­​­­šuma-​­iškun from the early eighth century, who is recounted in a Hellenistic copy of an earlier polemic text to have broken the treaty his predecessor ­Erība-​­Marduk (­c. ­760–​­748 BCE) made with the cities of Babylon, Borsippa, and Cutha, transgressing their zakūtu-​­privileges (­Cole 1994: 235, iii 4’–​­17’).32 Kraus (­1968: 34) aptly compared zakūtu-​­privileges to Roman immunitas, a partial act of citizenship given to members of certain urban communities under treaty, which was revocable in the case of ‘­free cities/­communities’ (­Lat. civitates liberae), or more permanent for ‘­allied cities/­communities’ (­Lat. civitates foederatae).33 Much like in the case of zakûtu and other related state sanctioned privileges, communities could appeal to the Roman emperor for immunitas, state granted exemption from taxes, and sometimes also civic obligations (­rarely called Lat. plenissima immunitas; Bernhardt 1980). The issue of securing a city’s kidinnūtu (­kidinnu kaṣāru) continued to be prominent throughout the discourse of Assyrian royals and their local representatives with Babylonian urban communities, especially the citizens of Babylon (­mār banê), and elite privileged families.34 The urban elites bolstered their privileged status by employing rhetoric and literary devices, based on scholarly precedents. The citizens of Babylon are referred to as the ‘­men of the kidinnu’ (­ṣābē kidinni) in important ritual contexts, such as the Erra epic and akītu festival.35 Another reflection of this may be found in an ­eighth-​­c entury BCE mirror of princes-​­type text from Nippur (­OIP 114 128),36 known by its catch line ‘­If a king does not heed justice’ (­šarru ana dīni lā iqūl). It advises the king on the proper treatment of the citizens (­lit. ‘­sons’) of Sippar, Nippur, and Babylon, suggesting that the gods decided their ‘­freedom’ (­š ubarrû) in an ‘­assembly’ ( ­puhru) (­Cole 1994: 273). 131

Shai Gordin

These texts stress the point that kidinnu is the status the urban elites believed they deserved to get. However, it does not list quantifiable privileges, and it can therefore be considered close to an abstract notion of citizenship. The kidinnu is not found to be used in practical matters to argue for the exemption of a specific person, rather always communities or cities. One such case is an intriguing petition for the rights and privileges of a specific community within a Babylonian city, the foreign women of Babylon’s elite.

Babylonian citizens petition the Assyrian state on the rights of foreign women Sometime in the early reign of Assurbanipal (­­668–​­653 BCE),37 the Assyrian king and his brother, ­Šamaš-­​­­šumu-​­ukīn king of Babylonia, were legally petitioned (­dibbu) by the members of the urban community of the city of ­Babylon  – ​­literally designated lútin. tirki-​­meš ‘­p eople of the city of Babylon’.38 Their letter (­SAA 18 158) unusually opens with the verbatim complaint of the Babylonian citizens:39 Ever since the kings, our lords, sat on the throne, you have been intent on securing our privileged status (­kaṣāri kidinnūti) and our happiness (­ṭūb libbīni). But what of us, who have had our fill of safeguarding (­šulum) those of (­our) Elamite, Tabalite and Ahlamite women! (­obv. ­1–​­5)­40 The citizens of Babylon request the Assyrian state to extend ­kidinnūtu-​­privileges to their ­non-​­Babylonian women. The ethnica of these women represent general geographical designations of common foreign groups in Babylonia at the time: Elam, the Babylonian neighbour to the ­south-​­east in the Iranian Khuzestan plain;41 Tabal, here likely a general designation of the area of central Anatolia (­Fuchs 2017); and Ahlamû, a general designation for members of Aramean tribal groups (­Herles 2007). Most striking in this letter are the learned arguments given by the citizens for granting kidinnūtu, which use a scholarly quote from the geography of Babylon Tintir quoted above: When the kings, our lords, did their elementary studies, the gods bestowed great wisdom and magnanimity on you. ‘­­Dim-​­kurkurra, Babylon, (­is) the Bond of the Lands.’42 Whoever enters inside it, his privileged status is secured (­kidinnūtu kaṣrat). Also, Babylon (­is) ‘­the bowl(?) of the Dog of Enlil.’ Its (­very) name is set up for protection (­ana kidin šakin). Not even a dog that enters inside it is killed.’ (­SAA 18 158, obv. ­6 –​­11) Most commentators rightly stress the strength of the invoked kidinnūtu as a way of granting rights to everyone within the city limits, be it dogs or foreign women (­cf. Barjamovic 2004: ­74–​­76; Kuhrt 2014: ­86–​­87). But the fact that such a petition needs to be made shows that kidinnūtu can only be extended by an institutional, specifically royal power. In this case, only the Assyrian king can perform this very specific act of citizenship and not the urban elite or temple authorities. The urban elite acknowledges, on the other hand, that it was the one securing the rights of these women so far. These were probably provided by a set of practices which gave the foreign women legal and social status to a limited extent. Thus, the importance of this letter is in it being a paradigm for different acts of citizenship, both on the level of the community and the state. 132

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context

Becoming citizens through marriage? The remaining, fragmentary sections of the letter above (­SAA 18 158) provide more information and context on the status of the citizens who married foreign wives. After producing their scholarly arguments in favour of their women, the senders turn to describe an historical precedent: The kings, our lords, know that Eṭiru and his sons grasped the feet of the king of Assyria, your father. Until Šuzubu son of Gahal came and killed them all, they kept kiss[ing] the feet of Assyria which they had grasped, and kept the watch of their lord’s house. Šuzubu received the [heads(?)], arms and feet of Eṭiru (­and) his sons together with [...] in the presence of Beliya. But the women [of...] and Šaddinnu were married in Babylon. (­obv. ­12–​­19) From the context, it is safe to assume that the women under discussion, who married Šaddinu in Babylon, were foreign wives.43 A prosopographical analysis of the people mentioned shows that they were elite members of the Babylonian society. Šuzubu can be identified as king N ­ ergal-​­ušezib (­­694–​­693 BCE), who rebelled against his Assyrian overlord, Sennacherib (­Brinkman in PNA 1/­II: ­418–​­419). The telling signs of status as a Babylonian urbanite elite are Šuzubu’s family name Gahal, and the identification of Eṭiru, whom he killed, with the chief priest (­šatammu) of the Esangila temple in Babylon.44 Eṭiru and Šaddinu, very likely the same Šaddinu in SAA 18 158, are also mentioned together in a witness list, bearing the same family name (­­Sîn-​­šadūni; ­699–​­694 B.C.; Ashmolean 1933.1101).45 This letter is not the only time we hear of marriages between the Babylonian elite and foreign women. An intelligence report sent to Esarhaddon on the chieftain of Gambūlu, one of the biggest Aramean tribes, tells that the chieftain’s daughters were married off to certain citizens of Babylon and Borsippa (­in broken context [mār b]anê). The titles of  the two men are preserved in the intelligence report as ‘­­temple-​­enterer of [Nabû] in Borsippa’ and ‘­chief shepherd of Nabû’, respectively (­SAA 18 56, obv. 1­ 4-​­rev. 5).46 It is, therefore, clear that cases of urbanite elite marriage to foreign women were not rare and were perhaps more common given specific social and political circumstances. According to Waerzeggers’s (­2020: ­117–​­118) study of mixed marriages, wealthy foreign brides marrying into the Babylonian elite (­­family-​­name bearing individuals) received the same terms as n ­ on-​­elite women. Specifically, the d ­ agger-​­clause was kept in the contract, which says if the woman adulterated, she will be killed with an iron dagger. This was the case at least up until the first quarter of the fifth century, when the terms of all marriage contracts changed under the Achaemenid Empire. This is another aspect that shows the lack of protection that foreign women received, even when marrying the highest echelon of Babylonian society.

Comparative aspects of state sanctioned citizenship in Greek sources Looking over the paradigm of Greek citizenship ­privileges – ​­and considering Athens ​­ can find some similarities with the Babyloas the basic model for ­c omparison – one nian model of citizenship. Membership of the urban collective was not only legitimated by birth right, but also further bound by a series of oaths (­Sommerstein and 133

Shai Gordin

Bayliss 2012: ­11–​­13), not unlike the sworn treaty and oath signed between the king of Babylonia and its urban communities. To be an Athenian citizen, both parents must also be local Athenian citizens (­Gr. astoi). The early citizenship law of Solon did allow naturalization to foreigners, but it was limited to those who were either perpetual exiles or professionals who migrated with their families (­Papachrysostomou 2019: ­5 –​­8). Different types of outsiders, like slaves, resident aliens (­i.e., metics), or foreigners (­Gr. xenoi), could not take part in the community assembly (­Gr. ekklēsia), and could not own land or real estate.47 Only in the global Greek imperial world of the m ­ id-​­fifth century (­e.g., laws of Pericles) and the Peloponnesian war that followed, do we find any change in the Athenian will to grant them any form of citizenship, be it not overly dramatic (­see Fisher in this volume).48 This still precluded children of mixed marriages, who could not be granted full citizenship rights, especially the inheritance of land (­Niku 2007: ­66–​­67). By the fourth century, citizenship law incorporated juridical rights of inheritance, marriage, and active participation in cult. Religious offices, like the priesthood, originally appointed based on (­fictive) genealogical affiliation to a certain clan (­Gr. genos; Blok and Lambert 2009), were now more inclusive of other citizens, or at least their offspring, as stated for instance in a grant to the Plataeans (­a group of ­non-​­Athenians): Hippocrates proposed that the Plataeans be Athenian, entitled to office from this day (­enfranchised) like the rest of the Athenians, that they have a share in all that the Athenians have a share in, both sacred and civil, except if some priesthood or rite comes from membership in a genos, nor the nine archons, whereas their offspring do. (­Demosthenes 59.104)49 For the most part, however, the Athenian state did not sanction resident aliens with legal and economic privileges. Even foreigners granted citizenship could have their privileges revoked through public indictment (­Gr. graphē paranomōn). Konstantinos Kapparis (­2005b: 112) sums up the dichotomy of the exclusive urban community, which also wishes to be cosmopolitan, rather nicely: ‘­This underlying philosophy of an open immigration policy and simultaneously an exclusive citizenship policy is behind every single law ever introduced in classical Athens’. The interest to have the state recognize citizen privileges and control them led several Attic authors of the fifth century to discuss the evidence presented in cases of foreigners, some of them foreign wives, who potentially faked their Athenian citizenship (­Kapparis 2005b). The Athenian citizenship was far more exclusionary to foreigners than the Babylonian one. Nevertheless, in both cases, marrying a foreign wife was socially acceptable, maybe even profitable for the local man, but the women could not be completely integrated within the community and citizen body. In this case, the structure of the Babylonian state gave the mixed couples the opportunity to petition their case to a higher ­jurisdiction – ​­the king. Thus, the acts of citizenship within the community and those made available by the state provided different paths to gain certain rights.

Conclusion: Babylonian acts of citizenship in a Mediterranean context To conclude, regardless of the inherent differences between the Babylonian and ­Graeco-​­Roman systems of citizenship, as framed by separate political and governmental structures, the citizenship acts within them share at least two central qualities: 134

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context

­1 Civic identity and prestige: an internal framework of citizenship developed in the urban sphere by specific communities based on a genealogical system of identification (­names, clans) bound in legal terminology (­e.g., Mesopotamian sworn treaty and oath vs. Greek oaths). Its basic denominators of status and power were (­active) involvement in cult (­e.g., priestly office), and in the Babylonian case, also political influence and connections with the royal court. ­2 Institutionally bound privileges and obligations: the external framework of citizenship was based on the interplay between, and the recognition of privileges, and fulfilment of different forms of obligations. This governed marriage, inheritance and certain economic activities (­mostly related to property or resources), as well as certain duties towards urban and state institutions (­community, government, army, temple). Taking all this into consideration, one might accept the argument that citizenship is not merely about not being the ‘­slave’ of your king, or any other state institution for that matter. Status or freedom in the Mesopotamian context is very likely much more about your ‘­bundle of privileges’, as Moses Finley calls it, than about Hannah Arendt’s ‘­r ight to have rights’.

Notes 1 This research was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation, grants nos. 674/­15 and 457/­ 19. Standard abbreviations follow those of the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (­https://­rla.badw.de/­en/­­the-​­reallexikon/­abbreviations/). ­Neo-​­Babylonian text sigla and date format follow Jursa (­2005: ­153–​­155). Babylonian name spellings follow the conventions of NaBuCCo and Prosobab databases (­https://­prosobab.leidenuniv.nl/­pdfs/­ personal_names.pdf). Foreign terminology written in italics is in the Akkadian language unless explicitly stated otherwise (­e.g., alu vs. Gr. polis). A preliminary version of the ideas herein was presented at the Institut für Orientalistik, University of Vienna (­June 2019). I thank Michael Jursa for his invitation and further remarks on the presentation. My sincere gratitude to Cornelia Wunsch for corrections, suggestions, and additions to this article. I would like to thank Avital Romach for editing my manuscript and creating ­Figure 9.1. 2 Social theory on citizenship places claiming of rights as well as imposing obligations as basic criteria across maximalist and minimalist views (­cf. Cooper 2018: ­5 –​­6). 3 Recently, Magdalene et al. (­2019: ­263–​­334) have argued that the N ­ eo-​­Babylonian Empire ­ uasi-​­bureaucratic state and the Achaemenid Empire’s rule in Babylonia better fit the q model of Eisenstadt. 4 For a recent definition of the citizen body in the ­fi rst-​­millennium BCE Mesopotamian context, see Barjamovic (­2004: ­55–​­59); cf. early ­second-​­millennium BCE civic institutions in Stol’s section of Charpin et al. (­2004: ­675–​­678) and Seri (­2005: ­139–​­180), as well as the critical remarks of Charpin (­2007: ­178–​­181). A necessary comparison can be made with the ­socio-​ ­h istorical works of Ullmann (­1961: ­280–​­287) and Weber (­1978: ­1070–​­1077) on citizen rights and privileges in feudal and ­post-​­feudal systems of European states. 5 Further study of this topic was conducted as part of the ­Vienna-​­based Imperium and Officium project; see their publications: https://­u nivie.academia.edu/­ResearchNetworkImperi umOfficium. 6 The ­Neo-​­Babylonian king and his close relations also held land, although documentation is lacking to fully understand the scope of this landownership (­Jursa 2017: 46). In the later Achaemenid period, large tracts of Babylonian land were taken over by the foreign king and his Iranian nobles. The evidence is quite limited; see Jursa (­2014: ­182–​­183). 7 Urbanites, much like other groups of people in and around the city (­e.g., workers, soldiers, foreigners etc.), were organized in homogeneous groups of ten. These groups were primarily based on their communal or neighbourhood (­bābtu) affiliation (­Still 2016: ­208–​­209, Zadok 2016: ­527–​­553).

135

Shai Gordin 8 For a possible Hellenistic parallel from Uruk, see McEwan (­1982). 9 See also the discussion in Still (­2016: ­182–​­186). 10 In Uruk, for example, we have the offices of doorkeeper (­atûtu), ­temple-​­enterer (­­ērib-​­bītūtu), cultic singer (­kalamāḫūtu), dairyman (­­m ār-​­rēʽ ût šizbi), baker (­nuḫatimmūtu), ­date-​­palm gardener (­­rab-​­banûtu), brewer (­sirāšûtu), butcher (­ṭābiḫūtu), and ‘­priest’ (­šangûtu) – ​­and the list goes on. 11 The division of hanšû lands among priestly families is nicely shown in Nielsen and Waerzeggers (­2016). 12 For a summary analysis of the historical and mythical origins of many Early ­ Neo-​ B ­ abylonian family names in the Sumerian, Amorite, or Kassite past, see Zadok (­2021). A case study in the spread of theophoric family names with Ea and Nanna/­Sîn can be found in Gordin (­2016: ­182–​­186). 13 On the origins of this naming practice and certain ‘­families’ in the Kassite period, see Brinkman (­2006). 14 Cf. Waerzeggers (­2020: ­106–​­109), who studies each social group according to its marriage contracts. 15 On the use of the gentilic in first millennium texts, especially N ­ eo-​­Assyrian evidence, see Fales (­2013). 16 For more discussion of these designations, based primarily on the evidence from the Early ­Neo-​­Babylonian letters, see Barjamovic (­2004: ­55–​­59). 17 See Bongenaar (­1997: ­150–​­153); Pirngruber (­2015: ­210–​­211); Still (­2016: ­201–​­202). 18 I wish to thank Cornelia Wunsch for bringing this text to my attention. 19 Compare, e.g., ‘­to go to where she/­he wishes’ or ‘­to go to her father’s house’; see Wunsch 2003: ­ 38–​­ 39, 2003/­ 2004: ­ 205–​­ 209) and Wunsch and Magdalene (­ 2014) in more detail. (­ Cf. Jursa (­2005: 10 n.24). 20 The evidence presented here and related discussion is based mostly on Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: ­58–​­69). See further Fraser (­1995) and Hansen (­1996). Extensive demographical surveys of citizens and ­non-​­citizens can be found in Hansen (­1986 [esp. fourth cent. BCE], 2006). 21 The ethnikon was used by a Greek usually only outside his polis, whereas demotikon was used only inside one’s polis. 22 Translation follows the digital edition: http://­ data.perseus.org/­ citations/­ urn:cts:greekLit: tlg0016.tlg001.­p erseus-​­eng1:8.90.4. 23 See, e.g., the series of articles in Persika 14, especially Henkelman and Stolper (­2009) on the Persepolis archive. 24 This event and its historical repercussions are analyzed in the collected volume Ando (­2016). For the social contextualization of ius civile and citizenship, see ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973: ­318–​ ­319) and Ando (­2014: ­247–​­253, 2015: ­53–​­56, ­84–​­86). 25 Compare, e.g., the evidence cited in Balsdon (­1979: ­146–​­160). 26 The abstract form kidinnūtu and its source noun kidinnu is a physical form of ‘­divine protection’, perhaps an emblem of some kind (­CAD K: 3­ 42–​­344). These terms are used here interchangeably throughout, keeping to the original context as well as to the difficulties in translation one faces. For a study of the legal origins of kidinnu in Old Babylonian texts from Elam, see Leemans (­1946). 27 Cf. digital edition: Novotny and Lentini (­2019), http://­oracc.org/­btto/­Q004798/. 28 See Frame and Grayson (­1988: 17, 1994: ­6 –​­8); ­Pongratz-​­Leisten (­1997); Holloway (­2002: ­293–​ ­302); Frazer and Adalı (­2021: ­258–​­259). 29 Each term was used with specific verbs in specific instances; further study is needed to clarify this point. One should also probably add paṭāru in ­Š-​­stem ‘­to free from bond, relieve from assignment’ (­CAD P: 301), used, e.g., by Cyrus in his famous Babylonian cylinder (­BM 90920 obv. 26; Schaudig 2001: 553). 30 Nielsen and Waerzeggers (­2016:  ­326–​­328) nicely demonstrate how this situation is further reflected in the early hanšû land divisions of the seventh century at Borsippa. 31 RIMB 2 6.26.1; digital edition: Bartelmus ­2015–​­16, http://­oracc.org/­r ibo/­Q006310/. 32 For a recent critical reading of this text, see Zadok (­2017). 33 See Ando (­2015: ­16–​­17); for a wider discussion of different civic communities in the context of privileges, see Millar (­1999).

136

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context 34 Take, for example, ­Bēl-​­iqiša, chief priest of Esangila, and his petitions to Sargon II and his court attested in a series of letters: see, e.g., SAA 17 21 (­digital edition: Luukko ­2009–​­2011, http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P237963/) and SAA 17, 23 (­digital edition: Luukko 2­ 009–​­2011, http://­ oracc.org/­saao/­P238347/). On the rhetoric of these letters, see Pirngruber (­2018). 35 See citations in Reviv (­1988: 292). In the Erra epic, Erra attacks Babylon and so unravels the ‘­Bond of the Lands’, a ceremonial title of Babylon, also mentioned in the Tintir passage cited above. This chaotic situation seems to be a metaphor for the loss of order. 36 The Nippurean background of this composition becomes even clearer when a key passage from it was cited by a Nippurean scholar at the court of Esarhaddon in Nineveh called ­Bēl-​­ušēzib, who petitioned the king regarding the exempt status of Nippur; see SAA 18 124 (­digital edition: Luukko ­2015–​­2016, http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P238758/). 37 For the proposed dating of the text, see Reynolds (­2003: XXVIII). 38 As far as some of his letters to this community show, Assurbanipal used kidinnūtu as political leverage during ­Šamaš-­​­­šumu-​­ukīn’s rebellion, see, e.g., SAA 21 3, obv. ­15–​­18 (­digital edition: Novotny and Luukko 2018, http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P393748/). 39 Most ­Neo-​­Babylonian letters introduce the parties’ relationship with kinship terminology (­father, brother etc.), as well as provide divine blessings; see Schmidl in Hackl, Jursa, and Schmidl (­2014: ­4 –​­16). In the case of SAA 18 158, the blessings come at the very end (­rev. 10’–​­12’). 40 Translation here for the most part follows the recent digital version of Luukko (­2015–​­2016), http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P237800/ adapted from Reynolds (­2003: 130, 132). 41 For Babylonian connections with Elam during the ­Neo-​­Babylonian and Achaemenid periods, see Zadok (­2011a, 2011b). 42 Cited from Tintir I 51, George (­1992: ­40–​­41); cf. digital edition: Novotny and Lentini (­2019), http://­oracc.org/­btto/­Q004798/. 43 The foreignness of the women is not spelled out in what remains of this section of the letter. In personal communication, Cornelia Wunsch suggests this statement in the letter simply means that the women of Šaddinnu’s family were not sold or dedicated to the temple, but rather married, i.e., transferred to a new home (­email from the 14th of Oct. 2021). Therefore, they were not necessarily foreign at all. Though I agree with her analysis of the marriage described, I believe there was no other reason to mention such a marriage here unless the women in question were foreign. 44 Brinkman and Dalley (­1988: 83, ­88–​­89). Eṭiru is further known from several letters exchanged between Babylonian priests and the Assyrian court. PNA 1/­II: 408 lists SAA 13 60 (­http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P334651/), where he is titled ‘­temple enterer’ (­­TU-​­É), and is later the šatammu in SAA 15 161 (­http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P313483/); 248 (­http://­oracc.org/­ saao/­P334711/); and SAA 17 36 (­http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P239163/). Eṭiru is also mentioned in a fragmentary context regarding a prebend in SAA 15 270 (­http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P314039/). 45 According to the reconstruction of Brinkman and Dalley (­1988: 89 and n. 47). 46 Digital edition: Luukko ­2015–​­2016, http://­oracc.org/­saao/­P237840/. 47 The now classical treatment of degrees of freedom in Athens is Raaflaub (­ 2004). For a summary of ‘­outsiders’ in the Athenian sphere and their mobility based on ‘­e conomic benefaction’, see most recently Jansen (­2012); cf. Hin (­2010: ­10–​­11) on economic rights and citizenship. 48 See examples and discussion in Patterson (­2005: ­278–​­285) and Jansen (­2012: ­726–​­732). 49 Follows the translation of Canevaro (­2010: 349); cf. Kapparis (­2005a).

Bibliography Ando, C. (­2014) ‘­Postscript: cities, citizenship, and the work of empire’, in C. Rapp and H.A. Drake (­eds) The city in the classical and p­ ost-​­classical world: changing contexts of power and identity (­Cambridge) ­240–​­256 ——— ​­(­2015) Roman social imaginaries: language and thought in contexts of empire (­Toronto) ——— ​­(­2016) Citizenship and Empire in Europe 2­ 00–​­1900: the Antonine Constitution after 1800 years (­Stuttgart) Balsdon, J.P.V.D. (­1979) Romans and aliens (­London)

137

Shai Gordin Barjamovic, G. (­2004) ‘­Civic institutions and s­ elf-​­government in Southern Mesopotamia in the ­m id-​­first millennium BC’, in J.G. Drecksen (­ed.) Assyria and beyond: studies presented to Mogens Trolle Larsen (­Leiden) ­47–​­98 Bernhardt, R. (­1980) ‘­Die Immunitas Der Freistädte’, Historia 29.2, ­190–​­207 Blok, J. and Lambert, S.D. (­2009) ‘­The appointment of priests in Attic gene’, ZPE 169, ­95–​­121 Bongenaar, A.C.V.M. (­1997) The ­neo-​­Babylonian Ebbabar temple at Sippar: its administration and its prosopography (­Leiden) Brinkman, J.A. and Dalley, S. (­1988) ‘­A royal Kudurru from the reign of ­Aššur-­​­­Nādin-​­Šumi’. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 78.1, ­76–​­98 Brinkman, J.A. (­2006) ‘­The use of occupation names as patronyms in the Kassite period: a forerunner of n ­ eo-​­Babylonian ancestral names?’ in A.K. Guinan et al. (­eds) If a man builds a joyful house: Assyriological studies in honor of Erle Verdun Leichty (­Leiden) ­23– ​­43 Canevaro, M. (­2010) ‘­The decree awarding citizenship to the Plataeans ([Dem.] 59.104)’, GRBS 50, ­337–​­369 Charpin, D., Edzard, D.O., and Stol, M. (­2004) Mesopotamien: die altbabylonische Zeit (­Fribourg) Charpin, D. (­2007) ‘­Chroniques bibliographiques. 10. Économie, société et institutions P ­ aléo-​ B ­ abyloniennes: nouvelles sources, nouvelles approches’, Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 101.1, ­147–​­182 Cole, S.W. (­1994) ‘­The crimes and sacrileges of ­Nabû-­​­­Šuma-​­Iškun’. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 84.2, ­220–​­252 Cooper, F. (­2018) Citizenship, inequality, and difference: historical perspectives (­Princeton, NJ) Da Riva, R. (­2013) The inscriptions of Nabopolassar, ­Amel-​­Marduk and Neriglissar (­Berlin) von Dassow, E. (­2012) ‘­The public and the state in the ancient Near East’, in G. Wilhelm (­ed.) Organization, representation, and symbols of power in the ancient Near East (­Winona Lake, IN) ­171–​­190 van Driel, G. (­2002) Elusive silver: in search of a role for a market in an agrarian environment: aspects of Mesopotamia’s society (­Leiden) Fales, F.M. (­2013) ‘­Ethnicity in the Assyrian Empire: a view from the Nisbe. (­I) Foreigners and “­Special” Iinner communities’, in D.S. Vanderhooft and A. Winitzer (­eds) Literature as politics, politics as literature: essays on the ancient Near East in honor of Peter Machinist (­Winona Lake, IN) ­47–​­73 Frame, G. and Grayson, A.K. (­1988) ‘­­Marduk-­​­­Zākir-​­Šumi I and the “­exemption” of Borsippa’, Annual Review of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia 6, ­15–​­21 ——— ​­(­1994) ‘­A n inscription of Ashurbanipal mentioning the Kidinnu of Sippar’, State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 8.1, ­3 –​­12 Fraser, P. (­1995) ‘­Citizens, demesmen and metics in Athens and elsewhere’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) Sources for the ancient Greek ­city-​­state (­Copenhagen) ­64–​­90 Frazer, M. and Adalı, S.F. (­2021) ‘“­The just judgements that ­Ḫammu-​­rāpi, a former king, rendered”: a new royal inscription in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums’, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie 111.2, ­231–​­262 Fuchs, A. (­2017) ‘­Assyria and the North: Anatolia’, in E. Frahm (­ed.) A companion to Assyria (­Hoboken, NJ) ­249–​­258 George, A.R. (­1992) Babylonian topographical texts (­Leuven) Gordin, Sh. (­2016) ‘­The cult and clergy of Ea in Babylon’, Die Welt des Orients 46.2, ­177–​­201 Habermas, J. (­1996) Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy (­Cambridge, MA) Hackl, J., Jursa, M., and Schmidl, M. (­2014) Spätbabylonische Privatbriefe (­Münster) Hansen, M.H. (­1986) Demography and democracy: the number of Athenian citizens in the fourth century B.C. (­Herning) ——— ​­(­1996) ‘­­City-​­ethnics as evidence for polis identity’, in M.H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub (­eds) More studies in the ancient Greek polis (­Stuttgart) ­169–​­196 ——— ​­(­2006) The shotgun method: the demography of the ancient Greek ­ city-​­ state culture (­Columbia) Hansen, M.H. and Nielsen, T.H. (­2004) An inventory of archaic and classical Poleis (­Oxford) Henkelman, W.F.M. and Stolper, M.W. (­2009) ‘­Ethnic identity and ethnic labelling at Persepolis: the case of the Skudrians’, in P. Briant and M. Chauveau (­eds) Organisation des pouvoirs et contacts culturels dans les pays de l’empire Achéménide (­Paris) ­271–​­329

138

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context Herles, M. (­2007) ‘­Zur geographischen Einordnung der ­A ḫlamû  – ​­Eine Bestandsaufnahme’, Altorientalische Forschungen 34.2, ­319–​­341 ­ reco-​­Roman world’, Hin, S.C. (­2010) ‘­Families and states. Citizenship and demography in the G in MPIDR Working Papers ­2010– ​­0 05 (­Rostock) Holloway, S.W. (­2002) Aššur is king! Aššur is king! Religion in the exercise of power in the N ­ eo-​ ­Assyrian Empire (­Leiden) Isin, E.F. (­1997) ‘­W ho is the new citizen? Towards a genealogy’, Citizenship Studies 1.1, ­115–​­132 Isin, E.F. and Nielsen, G.M. (­2008) Acts of citizenship (­London) Janowitz, M. (­1980) ‘­Observations on the sociology of citizenship: obligations and rights’, Social Forces 59.1, ­1–​­24 Jansen, J. (­2012) ‘­Strangers incorporated: outsiders in Xenophon’s Poroi’, in F. Hobden and C. Tuplin (­eds) Xenophon: ethical principles and historical enquiry (­Leiden) ­725–​­760 Jursa, M. (­1999) Das Archiv des ­B ēl-​­R ēmanni (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­2 005) ­Neo-​­Babylonian legal and administrative documents: typology, contents and archives (­Münster) ——— ​­(­2010) Aspects of the economic history of Babylonia in the first millennium BC: economic ceography, economic mentalities, agriculture, the use of money and the problem of economic growth (­Münster) ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­Factor markets in Babylonia from the late seventh to the third century BCE’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57.2, ­173–​­202 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­T he state and its subjects under the ­Neo-​­Babylonian Empire’, in R. Boer and J.G. Drecksen (­eds) Private and state in the ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 58th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Leiden, 1­ 6–​­20 July 2012 (­Winona Lake, IN) ­43–​­67 ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­Urukean priests and the ­Neo-​­Babylonian state’, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 19.­1–​­2, ­35–​­54 Jursa, M. and Gordin, Sh. (­2018) ‘­The ousting of the N ­ ūr-​­Sîns’, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 7.1, ­42–​­64 Kapparis, K. (­2005a) ‘­The Athenian decree for the naturalisation of the Plataeans’, GRBS 36.4, ­359–​­378 ——— ​­(­2005b) ‘­Immigration and citizenship procedures in Athenian law’, Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquité 52, ­71–​­113 Kleber, K. (­2018) ‘­Dependent labor and status in the ­Neo-​­Babylonian and Achaemenid periods’, in A. ­Garcia-​­Ventura (­ed.) What’s in a name? Terminology related to the work force and job categories in the ancient Near East (­Münster) ­441–​­465 Kraus, F.R. (­1968) ‘­Ein Mittelbabylonischer Rechtsterminus’, in J.A. Ankum, R. Feenstra, and W.F. Leemans (­eds) Symbolae iuridicae et historicae Martino David dedicatae (­Leiden) ­9 – ​­40 Kuhrt, A. (­2014) ‘“­Even a dog in Babylon is free”’, in T. Cornell and O. Murray (­eds) The legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano (­London) ­77– ​­87 Leemans, W.F. (­1946) ‘­K idinnu, un symbole de droit divin babylonien’, in M. David, B.A. Groningen, and E.M. Meijers (­eds) Symbolae ad jus et historiam antiquitatis pertinentes Julio Christiano van Oven Dedicatae (­Symbolae van Oven) (­Leiden) ­36– ​­61 Magdalene, F.R., Wells, B., and Wunsch, C. (­2008) ‘­­Pre-​­trial negotiations: the case of the ­r un-​ ­away slave in Dar. 53’, Iraq 70, ­205–​­213 ——— ​­(­2019) Fault, responsibility, and administrative law in Late Babylonian legal texts (­Pennsylvania) McEwan, G.J.P. (­1982) ‘­A Babylonian leitourgia?’, Die Welt des Orients 13, ­25–​­30 Millar, F. (­1999) ‘­Civitates liberae, coloniae and provincial governors under the Empire’, Mediterraneo Antico: Economie, Società, Culture 2.1, ­95–​­113 Nielsen, J.P. (­2011) Sons and descendants a social history of kin groups and family names in the Early ­Neo-​­B abylonian period, ­747– ​­626 BC (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Cultural encounters and identity formation among the urban elite in Early ­Neo-​ ­Babylonian society’, in T.K. Hertel, M.T. Larsen, and K. Ryholt (­eds) Cultural encounters in Near Eastern history (­Copenhagen) ­91–​­117 Nielsen, J.P. and Waerzeggers, C. (­2016) ‘­Interactions between temple, king and local elites: the Hanšû land schemes in Babylonia (­­8th–​­6th centuries BC)’, in J.C. Moreno García (­ed.) Dynamics of production in the ancient Near East (­Oxford) ­321–​­334 Niku, M. (­2007) The official status of the foreign residents in Athens, ­322–​­120 B.C. (­Helsinki)

139

Shai Gordin Papachrysostomou, A. (­2019) ‘­Solon’s citizenship law (­Plu. Sol. 24.4)’, Historia 68.1, ­2 –​­10 Patterson, C. (­2005) ‘­Athenian citizenship Law’, in D. Cohen and M. Gagarin (­eds) The Cambridge companion to ancient Greek law (­Cambridge) ­267–​­289 ——— ​­(­2009) ‘­Citizenship and gender in the ancient World: the experience of Athens and Rome’, in S. Benhabib and J. Resnik (­eds) Migrations and mobilities: citizenship, borders, and gender (­New York) ­47–​­75 Paulus, S. (­2014) Die Babylonischen ­Kudurru-​­Inschriften von der Kassitischen bis zur Frühneubabylonischen Zeit: untersucht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ­G esellschafts-​­und Rechtshistorischer Fragestellungen (­Münster) Pedersèn, O. (­2007) ‘­ANE site placemarks for Google Earth (­Version 10)’, Zenodo, online publication: DOI: 10.5281/­zenodo.6384045 (­accessed 15 May 2022) Pirngruber, R. (­2015) ‘­Review of A. Heller, Das Babylonien der Spätzeit (­7.-​­4. Jh.) in den klassischen und keilschriftlichen Quellen’, Archiv für Orientforschung 53, ­208–​­213 ——— (­ ​­ 2018) ‘“­The king paid no heed to any of the words we sent before” – the ​­ communication between the early Sargonids and Babylonian notables’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 108, ­125–​­141 ­Pongratz-​­Leisten, B. (­1997) ‘­Das “­negative Sündenbekenntnis” des Königs anläßlich des babylonischen Neujahrsfestes und die kidinnūtu von Babylon’, in J. Assmann, Th. Sundermeier, and H. Wrogemann (­eds) Schuld, Gewissen und Person: Studien zur Geschichte des inneren Menschen (­Gütersloh) ­83–​­101 Raaflaub, K.A. (­2004) The Discovery of freedom in ancient Greece (­Chicago) Reviv, H. (­1988) ‘­Kidinnu: observations on privileges of Mesopotamian cities’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31.3, ­286–​­298 Reynolds, F. (­2003) The Babylonian correspondence of Esarhaddon, and letters to Assurbanipal and ­Sin-­​­­Šarru-​­Iškun from Northern and Central Babylonia (­Helsinki) Schaudig, H. (­2001) Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften: Textausgabe und Grammatik (­Münster) Seri, A. (­2005) Local power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia (­London) ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973) The Roman citizenship, 2nd edn (­Oxford) Sommerstein, A.H. and Bayliss, A.J. (­2012) Oath and state in ancient Greece (­Berlin) Still, B. (­2019) The social world of the Babylonian priest (­Leiden) Tacoma, L.E. (­2016) Moving Romans: migration to Rome in the Principate (­Oxford) Tuplin, C. (­2007) ‘­Fear of slavery and the failure of the polis’, in A. Sergidhou (­ed.) Fear of ­slaves -​­fear of enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean (­Besançon) ­57–​­74 Turner, B.S. (­1993) ‘­Contemporary problems in the theory of citizenship’, in B.S. Turner (­ed.) Citizenship and social theory (­London) ­1–​­18 Ullmann, W. (­1961) Principles of government and politics in the Middle Ages (­London) Waerzeggers, C. (­2011) ‘­The Babylonian priesthood in the long sixth century BC’, BICS 54.2, ­59–​­70 ——— (­ ​­ 2012) ‘­The Babylonian Chronicles: classification and provenance’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71.2, ­285–​­298 ——— ​­(­2014) ­Marduk-​­R ēmanni: local networks and imperial politics in Achaemenid Babylonia (­Leuven) ——— (­ ​­ 2020) ‘­Changing marriage practices in Babylonia from the Late Assyrian to the Persian Period’, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 7.2, ­101–​­131 Weber, M. (­1978) Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology (­Berkeley, CA) Westbrook, R. (­2004). ‘­The quality of freedom in ­Neo-​­Babylonian manumissions’. Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie Orientale 98.1, ­101-​­108. Wunsch, C. (­2003) Urkunden zum ­E he-​­, ­Vermögens-​­und Erbrecht aus verschiedenen Neubabylanischen Archiven (­Dresden) ​­ 2003/­2004) ‘­Findelkinder und adoption nach neubabylonischen Quellen’, Archiv für Ori——— (­ entforschung 50, ­174–​­244 ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­Review of Weisberg, D.B., ­Neo-​­Babylonian Texts in the Oriental Institute Collection’, Orientalia 79, ­570–​­574 ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­Babylonische Familiennamen’, M. Krebernik and H. Neumann (­eds) Babylonien und seine Nachbarn in n­ eu-​­und spätbabylonischer Zeit: wissenschaftliches Kolloquium aus Anlass des 75. Geburtstags von Joachim Oelsner, Jena, 2. und 3. März 2007 (­Münster) ­289–​­314

140

Neo-Babylonian citizenship practices in a comparative Mediterranean context ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Summoning people: ašbu lists from the Egibi Archive’, in L. Feliu et  al. (­eds) ‘­Sentido de un empeño’: homenatge a Gregorio del Olmo Lete (­Barcelona) ­591– ​­622 Wunsch, C. and Magdalene, F.R. (­2014) ‘­Freedom and dependency: ­Neo-​­Babylonian manumission documents with oblation and service obligation’, in M. Kozuh, W. Henkelman, and C.E. Jones (­eds) Extraction & control: studies in honor of Matthew W. Stolper (­Chicago, IL) ­337–​­346 Zadok, R. (­2003) ‘­The representation of foreigners in ­Neo-​­and ­Late-​­Babylonian legal documents (­eighth through second centuries B.C.E.)’, in O. Lipschits and J. Blenkinsopp (­eds) Judah and the Judeans in the ­Neo-​­Babylonian period (­Winona Lake, IN) ­471–​­589 ——— ​­(­2011a) ‘­T he ­Babylonia–​­Elam connections in the Chaldaean and Achaemenid periods (­Part One)’, Tel Aviv 38, ­120–​­143 ——— ​­(­2011b) ‘­T he ­Babylonia-​­Elam connections in the Chaldaean and Achaemenid periods (­Part Two)’, Tel Aviv 38, ­241–​­271 ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­­Neo-​­and ­Late-​­Babylonian notes’, in I. Finkelstein, C. Robin, and T. Römer (­eds) Alphabets, texts and artifacts in the ancient Near East: studies presented to Benjamin Sass (­Paris) ­520–​­565 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­T he Account of ­Nabû-­​­­Šuma-​­Iškun revisited’, Altorientalische Forschungen 44.2, ­261–​­267 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Review of J. P. Nielsen, Personal names in early N ­ eo-​­Babylonian legal and administrative tablets, ­747– ​­626 B.C.E’, Altorientalische Forschungen 54, ­500–​­551

141

PART III

The Greek world

SECTION I

Archaic and classical Greece

10 THE SUPREME ARBITRATOR AND THE DĒMOS City founders and reformers Irad Malkin

. . . it is impossible to apply the qualification of descent from a citizen father or mother to the original colonizers or founders of a city. (­A rist. Pol. 1275b.32)

Cyrene was founded in Libya around 631 BCE and its founder, Battos I, was unique in being both a king and the progenitor of a dynasty. In the ­m id-​­sixth century BCE, about three generations since its foundation, civil discord broke out and the Cyrenaeans turned to the Delphic oracle which recommended bringing a supreme arbitrator, one Demonax of Mantineia, as katartistēr (‘­who makes things right’) (­Hdt. 4.161 with Asheri 2007 ad loc.; Plut Mor. 261b). His reform basically ­re-​­founded Cyrene and expressed a comprehensive idea of c­ itizen-​­integration.1 I shall argue that the position of the ‘­supreme arbitrator’ and that of founders of colonies overlapped in most respects: both founded, and ­re-​­founded, a political community based on notions of equality and fairness among those ‘­sharing (­metechein) in the polis’, its citizens (­­Figure 10.1). The occasional, supreme, trusted arbitrator is a fascinating feature of Greek political culture during the archaic period. When civil strife reaches a stalemate, the entire state is handed over to one person who will ‘­set things right’.2 The supreme arbitrator is there for a fixed term only and, surprisingly, he goes away like an early Roman dictator, or like Demonax here, who apparently returned to Mantineia, or like Solon, who probably found it was a good idea to take a trip abroad after his archonship (­Plutarch Sol. ­25–​­26). Pittakos had been aisymnētēs for ten years (­Arist. Pol. 3.1285a.­31–​­38), Solon was a diallaktēs for one (­Ath. Pol. 5), and Demonax returned home. We also find the theme in q ­ uasi-​­historical stories: the ashes of Lycurgus, Sparta’s primordial lawgiver, were spread at sea because Lycurgus did not want the Spartans to change his constitution on the pretext he had returned to Sparta even for burial. (­Plut. Lyc. 31 = Aristokrates, FGrH 591 fr. 3; a comparable tradition exists for Phalanthos, the founder of Taras, Justin 3.4.) They also believed, as attested by Tyrtaios in the ­m id-​­seventh century, that a comprehensive reform in their politeia was handed down by Apollo at Delphi (­Plut. Lyc. 6 = Tyrtaios, fr. 4 Gerber), similarly to what both Battos I and Demonax were

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-14

147

er

PY

RE

Agathe

(Po)

IRU

148

Rhône

500 Miles

Leptis

AFRICA

Oea

Gulf of Syrlis

­Figure 10.1 Greek, Phoenician, and Etruscan settlements from Malkin (2011).

250

500 Kilometers

)

250

Etruscans

ro

Phoenicians

b (E

Sabrata

S INE NN E AP S AN SC RU

Greeks

E

Dan

Cyrene

L I B YA

Taucheira Euhesperides

S

0

Ib

L A P adus

P S

EP

0

uero) s (D

Bay of Biscay

S

TAURIC CHERSONESUS (CRIMEA)

Tyras

Olbia

Bor ysth ene (Dni s eper )

Herakleia

Tanais

Dioskourias

CAUCAS Pityous

is na Ta n) o (D

PHOE NICIA

Sais

EGYPT

Memphis

Naukratis

SINAI

Joppa Gaza

ube Istros Massalia T Tami Pontu s Eu x inu s N Phasis EE Nikaia (Black S e a ) S Athenopolis Odessos Tagus I B E R I A Rhode Sinope s Emporion Apollonia Trapezos ruTeion Tarraco o CORSICA (SPAI N) Kromnos Amisos Rome osp Epidamnos B Byzantion I TA LY Herakleia Mago Abdera Ainos Saguntum Kyme Astakos SARDINIA Taras Neapolis BALEARIC IS. Potidaia Gades Gordium Elea Lampsakos Malatia Ti gr GREECE Carates is M Korcyra Phokaia S Tyana e T Strait of Gibraltar Chalcis d Sardis Delphi M SICILY Adona i Molya S RU Hippo Dia. t e LYDIA Selinous Rhegion Olympia Athens T A UTarsos Utica Eup r Miletos hra PELOPONNESE Corinth Hippo Reg. r te s Carthage a Syracuse Sparta n Hadrumetum CYPRUS Citium e RHODES CRETE a SAHARIEN Paphos Byblos n LAS T A Sidon S e Gortyn Tyre a

Du riu

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Loire

in e

N HIA AT P R CA

SYR IA

Se

Irad Malkin

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers

doing under the auspices of Delphi. I begin with a general discussion of founders and reformers, turning later to Demonax and Cyrene. The status of the arbitrator was similar to that of a founder of a colony (­oikistēs), who was also responsible for establishing the entire social and political order of a community. Both reformers and oikistai were effectively ‘­founders of communities’ with no privileges to their descendants (­on the posterity of founders Malkin 1987: 2­ 41–​­260). The archaeological evidence seems to support this: at Megara Hyblaia, for example, where we can observe e­ qually-​­sized plots on the ground dating to the time of foundation in the last third of the eighth century, there is only one exceptional building, which was probably related to the founder as his heröon, a ­hero-​­shrine. The posthumous elevation to the status of a hero would only emphasize the homoioi (‘­equals’, or ‘­p eers’) aspect of all other settlers.3 What may be the implications for citizens? The act of foundation (­or a r­ e-​­foundation), establishes the new social order and the inclusion of those deemed worthy of ‘­sharing in the city’ (­cf. Walter 1993). At Cyrene, there is a striking overlap between the founder, Battos I (­cf. Pind. Pyth. 5.­82–​­95), and Demonax, Cyrene’s ­re-​­founder. Both established a new, comprehensive, social and political order, following an oracle from Delphi that ‘­nominated’ them both. Although the number of known cases of supreme arbitration within communities is sufficient to appreciate the phenomenon (­for international arbitration see Piccirilli and Magnetto 1973), it is still small. However, once we add more than 300 oikistai who were active during the archaic period (­list of colonies: Tsetskhladze 2008; Hansen and Nielsen 2004), then we realize that this was a hugely significant phenomenon. Greek colonization is often studied under a heading of its own, but we need to recognize a common Greek mindset, expressed both at a mother city and at a colony, of recognizing the need for supreme arbitrators of society who also work in conjunction with Apollo. ­ fth-​­century terms, or being a ‘­citizen’, tally with How does ‘­sharing in the city’ in fi the supreme powers of the arbitrator? Both founders and comprehensive arbitrators were responsible for a ‘­clean slate’ of society. That is what revolutionaries in ­third-​ c­ entury Sparta demanded, calling for gēs anadasmos, a redistribution of lands (­Cecchet 2009). Facing dwindling numbers of full citizens, and having lands concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, this was a call for a ‘­­re-​­start’, back to the primordial ‘­clean slate’ of equality, namely, of the idealized 9000 equal klēroi that Lycurgus had supposedly distributed to the original Spartan homoioi (­Plut. Lyc. 8). Similarly, and directly relevant to Cyrene, its ousted king, Arkesilaos, tried to get himself an army at Samos ‘­collecting all the men that he could and promising them a new division of land (­gēs anadasmos) . . . ’ (­Hdt. 4.163). Gēs anadasmos had been around as a colonial term, signifying land for distribution for apoikoi, ­in-coming migrants. It conformed to the ideal image of one household (­oikos) over one plot of land (­klēros). Distribution of plots of land by lot was common in the private sphere (­partible inheritance by lot; see Asheri 1963) and on the community ­ an-​­Mediterranean, intensive historical phenomenon. When establishing level. It was a p a colony, settlers would face the issue of inclusion: who would share, or, in later terminology, who may be a ‘­citizen’, and how would that sharing be expressed. Their answer was a distribution of equal klēroi by lot in the form of a special category of prōtoi klēroi, the ‘­First Lots’ that constituted the initial equal holding of a colonist (­Asheri 1966; Malkin forthcom.: ch. 6).

149

Irad Malkin

The more power such a founder/­supreme arbitrator possessed, the more egalitarian was the political community at its initial stages. ‘­Absolute’ equality among settlers was never the issue: the equal plots of land (­klēroi) that settlers got by lot were only the minimum entry requirement. Aside from that, there was no cap on individual wealth and means (­chrēmata) and social and economic elites would soon appear, usually by the third generation after a foundation. Many ‘­colonies of colonies’ were probably established also to provide a new ‘­­re-​­start’ for ­third-​­generation settlers (­cf. Zuchtriegel 2018; Costanzi 2010; Frisone 2019). Indeed, at the moment of foundation, Greek colonists, like their Spartan namesake, were homoioi, equal to each other in some specific respects. The tension between the egalitarian and elitist vectors seems to be a salient feature of Greek poleis during the archaic period (­cf. Morris 2000). In colonies, the cultic framework was laid down by the oikistēs, as well as determining the initial sacred precincts (­Malkin 1987: ch. 4). He would have had supreme power to do so by the Delphic oracle and by the metropolis: the oikistēs, as the decree about the founding of an Athenian colony to Brea indicates, was autokratōr, with plenipotentiary powers, like Demonax and the other supreme arbitrators just mentioned (­SIG3 67; IG I2 45; IG I3 46; ML 49; OR 142; Malkin 1984). An oikistēs would be responsible for marking out an initial perimeter, dividing the land into equal klēroi, and then distributing them by lot, just as Greeks would do with partible inheritance by lot, or when distributing booty by lot (­Graham 1983: ch. 3; Malkin 1987: 1­ 35–​­203). An oikistēs would also be responsible for implementing nomima, those diacritics of a Greek community such as names and number of tribes, the terminology by which institutions and magistrates are known, and, most significantly a common sacred calendar. Thucydides (­6.­3 –​­4) uses the verb tithēmi ‘­laying down [the law]’, for that constitutive action, thus emphasizing the imposing, comprehensive, and integrative features of nomima that would homogenize the new sharers in the city as a political community (­Robu 2014, with Malkin 2011: 1­ 71–​­204). Within one or two generations, everyone would become a ‘­Chalkidian’ or a ‘­Megarian’. However, when more waves of settlers arrived, when a critical mass of the citizens might have shifted, integration could fail, which seems to have been the case at Cyrene and what Demonax came to fix. With the increase in numbers, so did the chances for stasis (­cf. ­Sybaris-​­Thourioi and Amphipolis. Thuc. 5.11; Diod. Sic. 12.11.­1–​­2; 14.7.­4 –​­5; Zuchtriegel 2018). Since the structural issues facing the new political communities were similar all over the Mediterranean, the relation founder/­arbitrator vs the community clarifies the vision of sharers in the state (­citizens) as those possessing ‘­equal portions’ distributed by the oikistēs-​­autokratōr. What was expressed on the ground eventually came to express more abstract notions of ‘­equal portions of law’, or isonomia (­cf. McInerney 2004; Wallace 2015). The term ‘­citizenship’ may be anachronistic in some cases, but it overlaps with the idea of being a ‘­homoios’ sharing in the polis (­μετέχειν τῆς πόλεως). Let us now turn to Cyrene and the reforms of Demonax: ( . . . ) The Cyrenaeans, in view of the affliction that had overtaken them, sent to Delphi to ask what political arrangement would enable them to live best (­ὅντινα τρόπον καταστησάμενοι); the priestess told them bring a mediator (­καταρτιστῆρα ἀγαγέσθαι) from Mantinea in Arcadia. When the Cyrenaeans sent their request, the Mantineans gave them their most valued citizen (­ἄνδρα τῶν ἀστῶν δοκιμώτατον), whose name was Demonax. When this man came to Cyrene and learned everything, he divided the people into three tribes (­τριφύλους ἐποίησε, τῇδε διαθείς) 150

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers

of which the Therans and perioikoi were one (­μίαν μοῖραν ἐποίησε), the Peloponnesians and Cretans the second (­ἄλλην δὲ), and all the islanders the third (­τρίτην δὲ); furthermore, he set apart certain domains and priesthoods for their king Battos, but all the rest, which had belonged to the kings, he now handed over to the people [Godley uses the passive voice here: ‘­were now to be held by the people in common’] (­ἐς μέσον τῷ δήμῳ ἔθηκε). (­Hdt. 4.161, trans. Godley, adjusted) Demonax was dokimos, excellent and ‘­w ise’, namely the quality of those who ‘­turned their attention to the organization of the polis, . . . invented laws and all the bonds that link the parts of the city together; and this invention was called wisdom’ (­Arist. fr. 8 Untersteiner; cf. Plut. Sol. 8). Settings matters right in Cyrene concerned a comprehensive reform, moving power to ‘­the middle’ (­to the people) away from the kings, and the reshuffle of the citizen body in ‘­tribes’. This perspective of a leader and equal companions has its origins, perhaps, in Homeric perception of a leader with equal hetairoi, ‘­companions’. The Theran foundation decree of Cyrene actually contrasts the founder (­Battos) with all the rest in such Homeric terms (­w ith Graham 1960): The Therans resolve that Battos be sent to Libya as leader and king (­archagetas [archēgetēs], basileus); that the Therans shall sail as his companions (­hetairoi); that they shall sail on fair and equal terms (­πλέν ἐπὶ τᾶι ἴσα[ι κ]|αὶ τᾶι ὁμοίαι). (­ML 5, ll. ­25–​­28) The Theran colonists are called hetairoi. Their status as inferior to their leader but equal among themselves, sharing equal portions of booty, foreshadows that of the ­homoios- ​­citizen. The language is archaic, like Odysseus with his hetairoi, musing about colonization in the ninth book of the Odyssey. In the late sixth century, we similarly find Philippos of Kroton joining a Spartan colonial venture with his own trireme and companions (­Hdt. 5.47). The elevated status, while seemingly Homeric, emphasized the distinction from ‘­the companions’. Most founders became cultic memories with no special status to their descendants, differentiating them from other fi ­ rst-​­generation settlers. Whereas Odysseus distributed portions of booty by lot and might have also distributed portions of land among his hetairoi, a colonial founder like Battos would distribute portions of permanent booty (­klēroi), equally and by lot. This is a significant observation if we are to understand the later notion of the politēs as an equal sharer in the polis, or ‘­citizen’. The values implied in the use of the lot are the equal chances before the lottery, and, if possible, equality of outcomes. When Odysseus divides up nine goats for each ship, he skips the simple arithmetic (­counting out nine goats per ship) in favour of a lottery, the result of which was, again, nine goats per ship. So why draw lots? A lottery implies fairness and avoids resentment: no ship would wish to get the skinny old goats because of someone’s personal decision, but with drawing lots resentment ceases to be personal and becomes something like ‘­bad luck’. A passage in the Odyssey illustrates the relation between the leader and his hetairoi: Then we took from out the hollow ship the flocks of the Cyclops, and divided them among ourselves (­dateomai), that so far as in me lay no man might go defrauded of 151

Irad Malkin

an equal share (­isēs). But the ram my ­well-​­greaved comrades gave to me alone, when the flocks were divided, as a gift apart; and on the shore I sacrificed him to Zeus, son of Cronos, god of the dark clouds. . . . (­Od. 9.­548–​­552; trans. Murray, adapted) Similarly, the distribution of booty after the raid on the Kikones is described in the same terms: There I sacked the city and slew the men; and from the city we took their wives and great store of treasure, and divided them among us, that so far as lay in me no man might go defrauded of an equal share (­isēs). (­Od. 9.­40–​­42; trans. Murray) The leader is explicitly dependent on his companions and the authority to choose and give out emanates from them. Moreover, the verb of distribution, dateomai (­note the related noun, dasmos, distribution) is usually used in the middle voice with a plural subject, meaning distribution by (­or on behalf of) a group, and for the group (­cf. West 1966, ad Hesiod Theog. 520). It is an expression of a horizontal vision of society composed of possessors of equal portions, where authority emanates from the group.4 In short, the initial situation of colonization was one of ‘­equality and fairness’ until social and economic elites would emerge in the second or third generation. This initial equality is, of course, a schematic image, but the point is that this image was a standard for what was right, or, when abused, for what deserved to be ‘­set right (­yet again)’, which is precisely what Demonax was supposed to have done. The values, concepts, and practices of equal sharing in the community are a key to the development of the classical notion of a ‘­citizen’ (­Blok 2017). Who were the settlers at Cyrene? To what extent did the ­co-​­optative ‘­funnel’ of nomima and the homoios status expected in Greek colonization forge the idea of citizenship and ‘­sharing in the polis’? The regional names of Demonax’s tribes indicate that, aside from the original Therans, Greeks from all over arrived to become Cyrenaeans. Being ‘­Greek’ seems to have been the explicit criterion for someone to participate in ­ id-​­seventh century the ­poet-​­colonist any Greek colony (­Malkin 2017). Already in the m Archilochos complained that ‘­the misery of all the Greeks’ was converging on Thasos, the colony (­Archilochos 102 Gerber, with Graham 1978; Owen 2003). Most Greek colonies were just that, Greek. Ho boulomenos, ‘­whoever wishes’ (­provided he was a Greek), could join a nucleus of founders or an existing settlement. Two generations after the foundation the Cyrenaeans turned to Delphi for an ‘­i mmigration prophecy’ addressed eis Hellenas pantas, ‘­to all the Greeks’, and promising klēroi to new settlers in the form of gēs anadasmos: . . . the Pythian priestess warned all Greeks by an oracle to cross the sea and live in Libya with the Cyrenaeans; for the Cyrenaeans invited them, promising a distribution of land (­gēs anadasmos); and this was the oracle (­Apollo is speaking): ‘­W hoever goes to beloved Libya after the division of the land (­gēs anadasmos), I say shall be sorry afterward’. So a great multitude gathered at Cyrene, and cut out great tracts of land from the territory of the neighbouring Libyans. (­Hdt. 4.159.2, trans. Godley)

152

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers

Here, gēs anadasmos serves in its usual, colonial sense of shared land. However, as in ­third-​­century Sparta, it was also a revolutionary call at Leontinoi, Herakleia, Syracuse, and Cyrene (­see on Arkesilaos, above; Hdt. 4.163; Thuc. 5.4.2; Plut. Dion passim; Justin Epit. 16.4.1). Apollo’s immigration oracle also indicates that any Greek could join and with Demonax’s reforms all would apparently become citizens (­which is pertinent to the question of ­ on-​­Greeks could become that). Sometimes, the criteria for inclusion when, if, and how n and exclusion in a new colony were ‘­­sub-​­ethnic’, yet again implying categories among Greeks. For example, at the Spartan colony of Herakleia Trachinia the settlers were perioikoi and anyone who wanted except Ionians, Achaians, and ‘­some other people’ (­Thuc. 3.92.5). On the other hand, when the Corinthians planned a colony to Epidamnos they ‘ . . . gladly sent the desired aid to Epidamnos, inviting whoever wished to go along as settlers on equal and fair terms (­epi tēi isēi kai homoiai) . . . ’ (­Thuc. 1.27.1). There was besides a significant mobility of mercenaries, traders, artisans, etc. who could join too (­Purcell 1990; Giangiulio 1996; Luraghi 2006). The practice of mixture probably enhanced collective identities that depended less on s­ ub-​­ethnic specificities of origins and enhanced commonalities, notably the idea of the equal share in the polis.

The supreme arbitrator and the Delphic Oracle It was not a king but ‘­the Cyrenaeans’ as a political community that made the inquiry at Delphi. The inquiry reveals their problem: how best to ‘­arrange, order’ (­kathistēmi) themselves. Although Herodotus paints the stasis in dynastic terms, the reforms of Demonax imply that the issues were social and political, resulting in diminishing the rights of the kings, handing power over to the dēmos, and r­ e-​­founding the social and political order by a mixture of the population in the newly reformed Cyrenaean tribes. These probably incorporated the immigrants who came to Libya in various waves and thus r­ e-​­unified the territory by acknowledging the equal status of ­land-​­holdings in relation to citizen status. Where does the authority and legitimacy of the supreme arbitrator stem from? Reformers, lawgivers, tyrants, and founders of colonies all turned to Delphi. The oikistēs is our earliest example of a historical supreme arbitrator. Greek tyrants too modelled themselves as supreme arbitrators and sometimes acted as city founders, often seeking Delphi’s support as well. During the archaic period, Delphi’s prominence grew in tandem with it being the ­avant-​­garde of comprehensive reforms and new foundations (­e.g., Hieron, craving the honours of a founder: Malkin 1987: ­93–​­97). When tyrants became unpopular, Delphi changed its tune and supported yet again the new forces, such as the Athenian Kleisthenes (­Malkin 1989). Tyrants abused conventions of equality and equity for citizens. Unlike oikistai, the later tyrants (­fi fth and fourth centuries BCE) sometimes grabbed more land for themselves and their close followers, such as: ‘ . . . Dionysios picked out the best of the territory of Syracuse and distributed it in gifts to his friends as well as to higher officers, and divided the rest of it in equal portions (­ep’ isēs). . . . ’ (­Diod. Sic. 14.7.4, trans. Oldfather). By contrast, we never hear of an oikistēs ­ uasi-​­historical and legendary accounts (­Malkin doing that, neither in historical nor in q 1987: 1­ 89–​­266; Jacquemin 1993). What people do not bother to invent indicates that such notions lie outside of their frame of reference. One major difference between an oikistēs and Demonax the katartistēr is that Demonax is not named in the oracular response to the Cyrenaeans, as is almost always

153

Irad Malkin

the case with foundation oracles (­Malkin 1987: ch. 1); the Mantineians are the ones to select him. Nonetheless, Demonax is akin to a ‘­healer of a polis’ sent by Delphi, as was the case with Epimenides who came to free Athens of miasma (­Ath. Pol. 1; Plut. Sol. 12; cf. Diog. Laert. 1.110; Parker 1983: 2­ 09–​­10 n.17). The authority of colonial oikistai was based on their personal nomination, not by their mother city but by Apollo, probably because the oikistēs embodied the transition from the potential to the actual: a mother city was not to own the colony and the colony was not yet in existence. Apollo was considered the divine exēgetēs (­expounder) for social and political healing: when the Therans suffered a natural disaster and f­amine – ​­a common motif in foundation ­stories  – ​­Apollo’s solution for Thera was to send out a colony to Cyrene. When the Athenians suffered miasma, Apollo sent a healer; when the Spartans needed it, they got the Great Rhetra from Delphi; and when the people of Cyrene suffered stasis, Apollo sent another kind of healer to set things right, a supreme political arbitrator. Supreme arbitrators and founders provided a new, equal basis for citizens in the polis. At Cyrene, all ‘­late arrivals’ were now integrated in newly organized tribes, thus foreshadowing Kleisthenes’s great democratic reform at Athens. Colonization must have contributed to the emerging notion of a ‘­citizen’. Colonization probably encouraged the articulation of political thought: instead of growing up into a given situation, young persons, detached from their elders, needed to think out their polis, penser la cité. A significant degree of abstraction of the community, its layout on the ground, its institutions, social organization and laws, must have been achieved already with the early synoikismoi ( ­poleis formed by the coalescence of existing communities), new foundations, and new, comprehensive political and institutional reforms (­Moggi 1976; Rhodes 2006). That may be why the earliest comprehensive lawgivers are reputed to have come from western colonies (­Zaleukos of Lokroi and Charondas of Katane) and why it is in colonies that we first find evidence for comprehensive spatial planning according to apparent criteria of equality. Like some modern constitutions, the comprehensive ‘­laws’ were freely exported: the laws of Charondas of Katane, for example, were adopted by Leontinoi, Zankle, Naxos and cities in southern Italy, as well as distant Kos (­A rist. Pol. 2.1274a.23; Herod. Mim. 2.48). Sparta was Cyrene’s grandmother city, and a comparison between the comprehensive reforms at both Sparta and Cyrene originated with Delphi. Tyrtaios securely anchors this before the ­m id-​­seventh century BCE: ‘­T hey heard the voice of Apollo and brought home from Pytho the oracles of the God. . . . ’ he sang (­f r. 4 Gerber, trans. Gerber, adapted). The Great Rhetra dealt with the founding of new temples at Sparta (­a symbol of political unification), the division of the people into various units, regulating the council, the status of the kings, and the authority of the assembly. Structurally, most of those elements exist also in the comprehensive reform of Demonax, except the temples. The practice and the mindset of comprehensive reforms that function as supreme arbitrations, either directly by Apollo or through a nomination of an oikistēs or that of a lawgiver/­r eformer, are therefore securely evidenced to the time, at least, of Tyrtaios in the ­m id-​­seventh century.

The arbitrator as a distributer Diodorus has a different, moral account of Demonax: he was needed because the descendants of the founder Battos I became tyrannical. Diodorus calls Demonax 154

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers

not katartistēr (­a s in Hdt. 4.161) but a diaitētēs, connoting the notion of distribution and division: For the civil strife which arose among the Cyraeneans an arbitrator (­diaitētēs) appeared in the person of Demonax of Mantinea, who was considered to be a man of unusual sagacity and justice. (­Diod. Sic. 8.30.2) Diaitētēs is also the term used by Herodotus when describing the arbitration by Periander between Athens and Mytilene (­Hdt. 5.95). The prefix ­dia-​­ as in diatithēmi and dianemein is closely linked with reforms and foundations, articulating the distributive aspect of belonging to a community, or, in later terms, equal portions of law, that is, ­iso​­nomia and citizenship. Diaitētēs belongs to the semantic field of distribution of equal portions, a sort of tangible isonomia. In an essay titled ‘­Table Talk’, Plutarch illustrates the equivalence of ‘­equal portions’ and equal distribution: ‘the Goddesses Portion (­Moira) and Lot (­L achēsis) preside with equity (­isotēti) over dinners and drinking parties’ (­Plut. ­644b-​­c, Quaest. Conv. 2.10.2, trans. Clement and Hoffleit). Plutarch also complains that ever since luxury has crept in, ‘the custom of equal share for all (­in a feast, isomoiria) was abandoned’. The supreme arbitrator, specifically, is therefore responsible for ‘­distribution’, hopefully a fair and equal one. As noted, Solon was known by a title implying distribution: he was a diallaktēs for one year (­Ath. Pol. 5.2). The Greek English Lexicon (­LSJ) stresses the meaning as ‘­reconciler’ although Solon was more of an arbitrator (­cf. Eur. Phoen. ­476–​­478; Thuc. 4.64.4; Dem. 14.40). The semantic field is that of ­dia-​­llassō: in Athenian inheritance laws, an arbitrator would settle what is equal in partible inheritance by lot. Aeschylus plays on that in Seven against Thebes calling Ares a cruel diallaktēr (­Sept. 908). So the supreme arbitrator ‘­sets things right’ by new distributions; that is perhaps why Theognis too (­­39–​­42) employs the term euthyntēr, a ‘­corrector’ in a broad sense since euthynō is to make something straight. Demonax distributed the citizen body into three tribes, probably conforming to the number of three Dorian tribes that had existed at Cyrene previously. When scholars debate how this was done, further subdivisions are brought into consideration, since we know of their existence in f­ ourth-​­century Cyrene (­Cecchet 2017). The terminology appears in the preamble to the inscription from the fourth century mentioned above, which quotes the original ‘­oath/­agreement of the Founders’ (­the foundation decree made at Thera) from the seventh century; the ­fourth-​­century occasion also deals with the integration of new citizens coming from Thera. Their acceptance relied on a promise in the ­seventh-​­century Theran Agreement (­horkion) of the Founders that Therans would have the right to integrate in Cyrene (­l l. ­11–​­16): It was decreed . . . that the Therans (­those arriving in the fourth century) should keep on equal civic rights (­isam politeiam) also in Cyrene in the same terms; that all Therans living at Cyrene should take the same oath as the one taken once by the others; that they settle themselves into a tribe, a patra and (­one amongst) the nine hetaireiai.5 However, since we cannot be sure if those terms had existed two centuries earlier, for now let us observe the purpose and means of tripartite tribal arrangement. 155

Irad Malkin

The key term seems to be moira (­part, portion, section) and Herodotus (­4.161, see above) may be saying something simple: he divided and distributed the people into three tribes: one third (­moira) was composed of Therans and perioikoi; a second ‘­third’, that is, another moira, of Peloponnesians and Cretans; and a third moira was the tribe of the ‘­islanders’. What is less clear is whether the Cyrenaeans were now generally divided into three tribes following criteria of provenance (‘­Peloponnesians’) or whether all citizens were spread over all the tribes, diluting the distinction of provenance. Note that Herodotus does not give us the actual names of the tribes. Two of the three terms, Peloponnesians and Cretans, and the islanders, are regional. The regional names hold a clue to the composition of the citizen body. Although Herodotus says that Cyrene had stayed the same during its first two generations (­ca. ­630–​­560 BCE), archaeology rather indicates a constant, early immigration. Both Apollonia and Taucheira, for example, had existed already by 600 (­cf. Schaus 1­ 985a–​­b; Shachar 2000) and Lakedaimonians kept arriving right from the beginning. An Olympic victor from Sparta, Chionis, probably came as a ­co-​­founder with Battos (­Paus. 3.14.3), perhaps conforming to the nomos which Thucydides mentions, that when a colony founds yet another colony it invites a ­co-​­founder from its original mother city (­Thuc. 6.­3 –​­4). Let us recall that during the sixth century the colonial chain of Sparta as a mother city, Thera as its colony, and Cyrene as a granddaughter colony was firmly believed (­Hdt. 4.­147–​­148.1; see discussion in Malkin 1994a: ­106–​­111 with Chamoux 1953). The existence of ­low-​­grade Lakonian pottery at Taucheira may be linked with Sparta (­i.e., nobody exported it but it had arrived with the settlers) and suggests an explanation for the elements of ‘­Peloponnesians’ in the tribal reform (­see Schaus 1985a, 1985b). Moreover, parallel to Spartan homoioi the Theran notion of belonging to a community of peers may have resembled Spartans, except that Sparta never got its own Demonax and the number of its citizens kept shrinking over the centuries. Aristotle speaks explicitly of an elite of first settlers at Thera, which is what the homoioi were considered to have been at Sparta: . . . neither is it a democracy if the free being few govern the majority who are not of free birth, as for instance at Apollonia on the Ionian Gulf and at Thera (­for in each of these cities the offices of honour were filled by the specially ­well-​­born [­eugeneia] families who had been the first settlers of the colonies, and these were few out of many) (­κατ᾽ εὐγένειαν καὶ πρῶτοι κατασχόντες τὰς ἀποικίας, ὀλίγοι ὄντες, πολλῶν) (Arist. Pol. 4.­1290b13–​­14, trans. Rackham) Eugeneia, then, refers to the entire body of the initial sharers in the polis (­cf. Aristotle observation quoted above). I suspect, with Lucia Cecchet (­2017), that latecomers did not always get a fair deal, perhaps in relation to the ‘­aristocracy of first settlers’. My aim here is not to analyze the details of the reform, since the main point is shared by all interpreters: the ‘­reshuffle’ of the citizenry into tribes and handing over power to the people.6 In terms of the purpose, a mixture and cohesiveness of the citizen body, what Demonax did foreshadowed the reform by Kleisthenes the Athenian (­for Kleisthenes’s ‘­precedents’ see Lévêque and ­Vidal-​­Naquet 1964; Vernant 1996) about half a century later. Aristotle had already compared Demonax with Kleisthenes: A democracy of this kind will also find useful such institutions as were employed by Kleisthenes at Athens when he wished to increase the power of the democracy, 156

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers

and by the party setting up the democracy at Cyrene; different tribes and brotherhoods must be created outnumbering the old ones … and every device must be employed to make all the people as much as possible intermingled with one another, and to break up the previously existing groups of associates. (­Arist. Pol. 1319b.20) The theme and vocabulary of mixture (­intermingling) and distribution into tribes appear early in the ­Spartan-­​­­Theran-​­Cyrenaean logos (­Malkin 2003). Herodotus tells the story of the Minyans who demanded integration in Sparta, saying that … the Minyans’ wish was to live with their fathers’ people, sharing in their rights (­μοῖράν τε τιμέων μετέχοντες) and receiving allotted pieces of land (­καὶ τῆς γῆς ἀπολαχόντες). The Lacedaemonians were happy to receive the Minyai . . . so they received the Minyai and gave them land and distributed them among their own tribes (­δεξάμενοι δὲ τοὺς Μινύας γῆς τε μετέδοσαν καὶ ἐς φυλὰς διεδάσαντο) (Hdt. 4.145.­4 –​­5) The Greek expressions used by Herodotus concerning integration and redistribution are paralleled in the Cyrene decree, line 32: [καὶ π]ο ̣[λιτήιας] καὶ τιμᾶμ πεδέχ[εν]. The verb apolanchanō is similarly paralleled in the foundation decree which projects a need for further distribution by lot of lands for later arrivals from the metropolis: γᾶς τᾶς ἀδεσπότω [ἀπολαγ]χάνεν (­SEG IX 3, ­33–​­4). In Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode, he sings of the Argonaut Euphemos carrying the clod of earth that gave rights of settlement in Thera. He was also a ‘­Minyan’ (­Hdt. 4.152.2; the scholia on Pindar, Pyth. 4. Malkin 1994a: 176 n.24). The Minyan story emphasizes the integrated overlap of sharing in ‘­r ights’ (­literally, ‘­portions’, moirai, and ‘­honours’, timai) and receiving allotted portions of land, all in the framework of the vocabulary of the lot (­apolanchanō; Malkin 1994a: 7­ 6–​­77; 88). In terms of Greek notions of citizenship, often expressed as μετέχειν τῆς πόλεως (­cf. Walter 1993), here we have its concrete expression: sharing in klēroi. Finally, Herodotus conceived of the Minyan integration as spreading over the existing Spartan tribes, which may have been the case with Demonax; no new ‘­Minyan tribe’ was created. In contrast to that explicit mixture of settlers, some Greek colonies retained memories of distinct origins; there was a quarter called ‘­Phokaia’ at Leontinoi in Sicily, probably made up of fugitives from Phokaia in Asia Minor (­Thuc. 5.4.4. with Frasca 2009: 60). An inscription from Sicilian Himera, dating to around 493 BCE, mentions a new tribe of ‘­Danklaians’ that include the fugitives from Zankle, according to Antonietta Brugnone’s convincing restoration of the text (­Brugnone 1997). At Amphipolis too, tribes were named according to their place of origins (­Mari 2012). Somehow, the ­re-​­arrangement of citizens in tribes must have been connected to land, but we have no idea precisely how. Perhaps the promise of the Delphic oracle for gēs anadasmos was not carried out in terms of the equality promised or implied. What seems clear is that the new citizen body of Cyrene, explicitly defined as a dēmos, was the result of an integration of various groups of settlers into the n ­ ow-​­empowered political community of Cyrene, while allotting subgroups with their klēroi on which they lived to the three phylai. No one knows who the perioikoi were; Lilian Jeffery proposed they had been of perioikoi status already at Thera (­Jeffery 1961). However, both Herodotus and the Cyrene 157

Irad Malkin

foundation decree insist on the comprehensive nature of the lottery that had selected the colonists at the metropolis: Herodotus tells us that ‘­The Therans determined to send out men from their seven regions, taking by lot one of every pair of brothers’ (­Hdt. 4.153), which is comparable to the foundation decree where it says that ‘­They are to sail on equal and fair terms (­isai kai homoiai), according to households, one son to be chosen [from each family?] of those who are in the prime of life’ (­ML 5; SEG 9.3). They may have been early Greek immigrants who got lands beyond the initial kernel of settlers. We may think of Thourioi as a parallel, where tensions broke out between the original Sybarite colonists and the newcomers, who were allocated worse, more distant klēroi (­Diod. Sic. 12.11.1). The ‘­r ight of return’ to a mother city (­Malkin 2016) indicates that social and political integration was expressed as having a share in a ‘­whole’ (­the land). To stay with Spartan colonists, those sent to found Taras in southern Italy in 706 BCE were promised that should their colonization fail, they would have the right to return home and receive ‘­one fifth of Messenia’ (­Ephoros, FGrH 70 fr. 216). In other words, ‘­portions’ of the whole of the territory overlapped with the members of the community, all ‘­sharers’ in the state. It is no wonder that in Greek the word dēmos means both ‘­land’ (­territory) and ‘­p eople’. ‘­The owner of the dēmos (­territory) was the dēmos (­the people)’ (­Donlan 1975; Donlan 1999: 308; Blok 2018: 98). What Demonax did, it seems, was a r­ e-​­instatement of that inclusiveness.

The lot Did Demonax employ the lot, thus foreshadowing Kleisthenes at Athens and his citizen distribution by lot?7 ‘ . . . (­K leisthenes) first divided the whole body into ten tribes instead of the existing four, wishing to mix them up. . . . ’ (­Ath. Pol. 21.2). It is likely that Demonax did the same, suited to the goal of his reforms, and conforming to other areas of collective distributions, such as booty, sacrificial meat, catch (­hunting, livestock booty), partible inheritance, and klēroi in colonies. Procedural lotteries determined order and turns, as in a chariot race; selective lotteries chose persons for specific tasks; and mixture lotteries were designed to make society more cohesive (Malkin & Blok, in press). When the Therans set out to settle in Libya, they chose the colonists by lot from each household. But the Theran lottery at home achieved a metaphorical as well as a concrete cohesiveness and mixture of the home community. Colonization overseas was sometimes a double act, accompanied by homogenization at home (­Malkin 1994b). In some sense, it was a ­re-​­foundation of the mother city, ­re-​­defining itself through its first attested, collective act as a community. It also implies a basic equivalence (­a major concept of citizenship) and interchangeability of all Therans: any brother would ­do – ​­and that is no small matter. Such equivalence has early expressions: in Homer, we hear of a lottery among several brothers to choose the one to go to Troy: He has six sons beside, and I am the seventh, and I shook lots ( ­pallō) with the others, and it was my lot (­klēros) to come on this venture. (­Il. 24.­399–​­400; trans. Lattimore) In partible inheritance by lot too, there was no primogeniture: any brother was equivalent to any other (­Asheri 1963; Lane Fox 1985). Each person is as valid as any other, 158

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers

a ­pre-​­condition for the formation of an egalitarian mindset and, eventually, isonomia. Drawing lots implies that the community was perceived as a whole entity, with the lottery expressing a fair mixture of society. Thus, while the ‘­equal and fair terms’ relate to what colonists would get by lot once they will have settled in Libya (­equal klēroi), the lottery at home expresses the unity of the community by its comprehensive mix of households. It also reveals a mindset which, I suggest, supports the notion that Demonax had employed the lot in Cyrene. Why is ‘­m ixture’ important for the notion of citizenship and the political community? Mark Granovetter (­1973, 1983) proposes a network theory of the ‘­strength of weak ties’: our acquaintances (­weak ties) are less likely to be socially involved with one another than are our family members or close friends (­strong ties). Each acquaintance will also have a group of friends, one of whom may be precisely the dentist you happen to need but about whom your strong ties know nothing. The weak ties exist in a ‘­­low-​ ­density network’ and become, therefore, a crucial link between the densely knit clumps of close kin or friends. It also follows that social systems with strong ties and lacking weak ones will be fragmented and incoherent, new ideas will spread slowly, and scientific endeavours will be handicapped. In other words, the ‘­strength of weak ties’ may explain how large networks that extend beyond the realm of strong, fragmenting ties of family or local interests can have an ­all-​­encompassing, strong, and dynamic connectivity in the society (­Malkin 2011: 26). Mixture by lot could resolve civic tensions. We are told that at Heraia the lottery replaced elections to avoid civil strife (­Pol. 1305a.28; 1303a.­14–​­16; cf. [Rh. Al.] 1424a.­12–​­20). Aeneas the Tactitian tells the story of Herakleia Pontike (­in the Black Sea) where, under the democracy, the rich conspired against the people (­Aen. Tact. 45 Poliorketika XI, 10 bis). It was decided to divide the population into 60 units (­probably by lot) within each of which the rich would be a minority. An elaborate lottery resolved the civil strife at Nakone: 60 pairs of opposing ‘­brothers’ were chosen by lot; to each pair three more were joined by lot, and a new cult to Harmony established. In short, lotteries, combined with mixture, afford a r­ e-​­start of a society, which is precisely the purpose of the reforms of Demonax (­SEG XXX 1119, with Gray 2015). Civil strife in Greek cities often followed groupings that threatened to break up the polis, whereas reconciliation aimed to reverse such situations by restoring the primacy of weak ties and (­re)­introducing social and political mixture by lot. Civil strife was especially acrimonious in small states; the smaller the state, the worse it was, as Aristotle notes, since there was no ‘­m iddle’ (­meson) to cushion and mitigate issues (­Arist. Pol. 4.1296a.10; Loraux 2002: 219).

The middle The transfer of power to the people by Demonax is expressed as transfer to the ‘­middle’: Demonax leaves the king with religious functions and ‘­all the rest that the kings used to control he transferred to the people’ (­literally: ‘­gave to the people in/­towards the middle (­es meson)’: es meson toi dēmōi ethēke [tithēmi]). Herodotus mentions three cases in which a ­one-​­man rule is contrasted with popular sovereignty where citizens ought to be homoioi, equal with respect to their citizen status. Following Polykrates’ tyranny at Samos, Maiandrios attempted to ‘­return power to the people’ (­es to meson), because people should be homoioi, and then proclaim isonomia (­Hdt. 3.142.3). Furthermore, ‘­the middle’ and ‘­equality’ can be considered as an expression of justice, of what just men do: instead of holding on to 159

Irad Malkin

supreme power at Kos, a man named Kadmos, because of his sense of justice (­dikaiosynē), ‘­placed power in the middle’, that is, returned it to the people as a whole (­Hdt. 7.164). What is remarkable is that this Kadmos also became a (­­re-​­)­founder of a city, an autokratōr yet again, thus transferring a position of full powers from his native city to that of a colony (­­Zankle-​­Messene in Sicily). So what is this middle? How does it relate to ‘­the people’? Converging fields of Greek philosophy and geometry, ­Jean-​­Pierre Vernant, and especially Marcel Detienne, articulate es meson in social and political terms and in relation also to egalitarian aspects.8 In Homer, for example, booty (­dasmos) is brought to the middle, es to meson. Prizes of competition and booty are ‘­brought to the middle’, in the public eye, witnessed by the assembly. Speakers in the soldiers’ assembly speak from the middle and when Agamemnon abuses this public convention and speaks from where he sits, the poet makes a special note of that (­Hom. Il.19.­76–​­77). When Agamemnon finally capitulates and wishes to pay Achilles, Odysseus (­Agamemnon’s emissary) suggests bringing the promised gifts to the ‘­m iddle of our assembly’. This, in fact, is what happens later (­Il. 19.173; 242). Agamemnon has to bring it to the middle: had he personally given the gifts, Achilles would have been indebted to him directly, instead of to the public (­Redfield 1975: 16). Setting things in the middle (­apparently of the assembly) transforms them, makes them public, exposed to a common gaze (­cf. Ready 2007). The ‘­m iddle’ implies the ‘­circle of society’ and, being middle, it is ­equi​­distant from all members. It implies a horizontal view of the community from the centre radiating outwards, the opposite of a top-down authority. A collection of early poems attributed to Theognis connects the social order with allotment. It employs the metaphor of the ‘­ship of state’ and complains that by brute force [the wicked] pillage riches, all order has vanished … who knows even when booty (­lit. the sharing out, dasmos) is still ‘­brought to the middle’ (­ἐς τὸ μέσον) to be shared out equally (­isōs)? (­Thgn. 678, trans. Gerber)­9 In Greek, deliberation on the course of action may be expressed as ‘­to set the matter down in the middle’. Finally, Herodotus too links the term isonomia (­democracy) with ‘­the middle’. In the constitutional debate, Otanes who supports isonomia, ‘ . . . was for turning the government over to the Persian people’ (­ἐς μέσον Πέρσῃσι; Hdt. 3.80.2; cf. 80.6; 3.142.3). That is how he also imagines the centre in his famous dictum: I know only one thing, and that is if all men were to bring their own ills into the centre (­es meson) so that they might be exchanged with those of others, in casting an eye on those of his fellows, each would be happy to take home with him those he had brought. (­Hdt. 7.152.2 trans. Godley) The idea is consistent: when Plutarch wrote the Life of Lycurgus, he expressed the redistribution of the land in such terms: ‘ . . . he persuaded his ­fellow-​­citizens to make one parcel of all their territory (­literally, to bring it to the middle, es meson) and divide it up anew (­ex archēs)’ (­Plut. Lyc. 8, trans. Perrin).

160

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers

Conclusion Oikistai and comprehensive reformers appear as reconcilers, arbitrators, and mediators. As the root of the English word indicates, the ‘­mediator’ stands in a ‘­m iddle’ and when he leaves (­going away like Demonax or becoming a hero after death like a founder of a colony) the political community has become, supposedly, balanced. Solon brings up the image of himself, standing in the middle between the two sides, with a shield to cover both (­Plut. Sol. 18 = fr. 5 Gerber). The diallaktēr, katartistēr, and euthyntēr stand in the middle while implementing their reform, then evacuate the middle, and bring it (­now in the sense of power) to the people, hoping, like Mariandrios, to make the citizens homoioi. The supreme arbitrator of society, with the authority of Apollo to sanction his actions, is a remarkable Greek phenomenon: he is there for a specific project, not for the domination of the political community, unlike the tyrants who modelled themselves on the figure of the oikistēs yet abused the conventions. Founding a new polis was a comprehensive act that included establishing nomima, treating of the initial territory as a ‘­whole empty land’ (­erēmos chōra) ready for spatial organization that included sacred precincts, roads, agora, house ‘­blocks’ and the equal parcellation of the initial territory into ‘­first lots’, prōtoi klēroi. For the supreme arbitrator, the project was similar: he is there for a fixed term only and his purpose is to ­re-​­found the political community. The relational ‘­triangle’ of founder/ arbitrator – ­​­­Delphi – ​­political community clarifies how an autokratōr could enhance the equivalence of each person sharing in the polis, its citizens.

Abbreviations OR = Osborne, R. and P.J. Rhodes (­eds) (­2017) Greek Historical Inscriptions ­478-​­4 04 BC (­Oxford and New York)

Notes 1 This article results from comprehensive research on ‘­Greeks Drawing Lots’, supported by the Israel Science Foundation grant no. 1033/­17. I would like to thank Thomas Harrison and Jan Haywood of the ‘­Herodotus Helpline’ (­herodotushelpline.org) for hosting a lecture that forms the basis of this chapter. 2 Cf. Hdt. 5.28 for the meaning of katartizō for arbitration: ‘ . . . until the Parians, chosen out of all the Greeks by the Milesians for this purpose, made peace (­l it. ‘­m ade things right’) among them (­μ έχρι οὗ μιν Πάριοι κατήρτισαν)’. 3 For the cult of the oikistēs: Malkin 1987: ­189–​­266. Cf. Greco 2021. 4 μή τίς οἱ ἀτεμβόμενος κίοι ἴσης is a recurrent Homeric formula, e.g., Od. 9.­39–​­42; Od. 9. ­548–​ 5­ 52; cf. Il. 11.­703–​­705. In the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, only four instances of dateomai (­i n an active (­deponent) sense) out of ­forty-​­two are in the singular. The search for the lemma dateomai has been executed via Thesaurus Linguae Graecae© Digital Library. Ed. Maria C. Pantelia. University of California, Irvine. http://­stephanus.tlg.uci.edu (­accessed Jun. 29, 2020). 5 κ ̣α ̣ὶ ̣ καταστᾶμεν ἐς φυλὰν καὶ πάτραν ἐς θ´ {ε}ἐννῆα ἑταιρῆιας see, with extensive bibliography, ML 5 with ­Dobias-​­Lalou (­2017) https://­igcyr.unibo.it/­igcyr011000). 6 For different interpretations, see Hölkeskamp (­1993); Cecchet (­2017). 7 I thank Josine Blok, for her illuminating comments on Demonax in her chapter in Malkin and Blok (in press).

161

Irad Malkin 8 Vernant (­1983: esp. at ­206–​­207). Detienne (­1965); (­1996: ­91–​­105). Cf. Wallace (­2015: ­7–​­8); for reservations Macé (­2014: 446). 9 Some MSS have isos (‘­equal’), not an adverb (­equally, isōs), but the general meaning is the same. Cf. Borecký (­1965: 73); Figueira (­1985: ­112–​­158).

Bibliography Asheri, D. (­1963) ‘­Laws of inheritance, distribution of land and political constitutions in ancient Greece’, Historia 12.1, ­1–​­21 ——— ​­(­1966) Distribuzione di terre nell’antica Grecia. Memorie dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, Serie 4a X (­Turin) ——— ​­(­2007) A commentary on Herodotus, Books ­I –​­IV (­Oxford) Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Retracing steps: finding ways into archaic Greek citizenship’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­79–​­101 Borecký, B. (­1965) Survivals of some tribal ideas in classical Greek: the use and the meaning of lagchanō, dateomai, and the origin of ison echein, ison nemein, and related idioms. Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philosophica et historica (­Prague) Brugnone, A. (­1997) ‘­Le legge di Himera sulla distribuzione della terra’, PP 52, ­262–​­305 Cecchet, L. (­2009) ‘­Γῆς ἀναδασμός: a real issue in the archaic and classical poleis?’, Biblioteca di Athenaeum 55, ­185–​­198 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­­Re-​­shaping and ­re-​­founding citizen bodies: the case of Athens, Cyrene and Camarina’, in L. Cecchet and A. Busetto (­eds) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to AD 212 (­Leiden and Boston) ­50–​­77 Chamoux, F. (­1953) Cyrène sous la monarchie des Battiades (­Paris) Costanzi, M. (­2010) ‘­Les colonies de deuxième degré de l’Italie du Sud et de la Sicile: une analyse lexicologique’, Ancient West and East 9, ­87–​­107 Detienne, M. (­1965) ‘­En Grèce archaique: géometrie, politique et société’ Annales ESC 20.3, ­425–​­4 41 ——— ​­(­1996 [1965]) The masters of truth in Archaic Greece, foreword by P. ­Vidal-​­Naquet, trans. J. Lloyd (­New York) ­Dobias-​­Lalou, C. (­2017) Inscriptions of Greek Cyrenaica, in collaboration with Alice Bencivenni, Hugues Berthelot, with help from Simona Antolini, Silvia Maria Marengo, and Emilio Rosamilia, online publication: DOI: 10.6092/­U NIBO/­IGCYRGVCYR (­accessed 1 June 2021) Donlan, W. (­1975) ‘­Changes and shifts in the meaning of demos in the literature of the Archaic period’, PP 25, ­381–​­395 ——— ​­(­1999) ‘­Homeric temenos and land economy of the Dark Age’, in id., The aristocratic ideal and selected papers (­Wauconda, IL) ­303–​­320 Duplouy, A. and Brock, R. (­eds) (­2018) Defining citizenship in Archaic Greece (­Oxford) Figueira, Th. (­1985) ‘­Theognidea and the Megarian Society’, in Th.J. Figueira and G. Nagy (­eds) Theognis of Megara: poetry and the polis (­Baltimore, MD) ­112–​­158 Frasca, M. (­2009) Leontinoi: archeologia di una colonia greca (­Rome) Frisone, F. (­2019) ‘­La promessa della terra: la ripartizione proimaria e secondaria della terra nella Sicilia coloniale, fra architteture storiche e modelli interpretatitivi’, Pallas 109, ­269–​­289 Giangiulio, M. (­1996) ‘­Avventurieri, mercanti, coloni, mercenari: mobilità umana e circolazione di risorse nel Mediterraneo antico’, in S. Settis (­ed.) I Greci: storia, cultura, arte, società, Vol. 2.1. Una storia greca: Formazione (­Turin) ­497–​­525 Graham, A.J. (­1960) ‘­The authenticity of the horkiōn tōn oikisterōn of Cyrene’, JHS 80, ­94–​­111 ——— ​­(­1978) ‘­The Foundation of Thasos’, ABSA, 73, ­61–​­98 ——— ​­(­1983) Colony and mother city in ancient Greece, 2nd edn (­Chicago) Granovetter, M. (­1973) ‘­The strength of weak ties’, American Journal of Sociology 78.6, ­1360–​­1380 ——— ​­(­1983) ‘­The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited’, Sociological Theory 1, ­201–​­233 Gray, B.D. (­2015) Stasis and stability: exile, the polis, and political thought (­Oxford) Greco, E. (­2021) ‘­Mythical and historical heroic founders: the archaeological evidence’, in K. Kalogeropoulos, D. Vassilikou and M Tiverios (­eds) Sidelights on Greek antiquity (­Berlin) ­299–​­320

162

The supreme arbitrator and the dēmos: founders and reformers Hansen, M.H. and Nielsen, Th.H. (­eds) (­2004) An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (­Oxford) Hölkeskamp, K.-​­J. (­1993) ‘­Demonax und die Neuordnung der Bürgerschaft von Kyrene’, Hermes 121, ­404–​­421 Jacquemin, A. (­1993) ‘­Oikiste et tyran: ­fondateur-​­monarque et ­monarque-​­fondateur dans l’Occident grec’, Ktema 18, ­19–​­27 Jeffery, L.H. (­1961) ‘­The pact of the first settlers at Cyrene’, Historia 10, ­139–​­147 Lane Fox, R. (­1985) ‘­Aspects of inheritance in the Greek world’, in P. Cartledge and D. Harvey (­eds) Crux: essays presented to G.E.M. de Ste Croix on his 75th birthday (­Exeter) ­208–​­232 Lévêque, P. and V ­ idal-​­Naquet, P. (­1964) Clisthène l’Athénien: essai sur la représentation de l’espace et du temps dans la pensée politique grecque de la fin du VIe siècle à la mort de Platon (­Paris) Loraux, N. (­2002) The divided city: on memory and forgetting in ancient Greece (­New York) Luraghi, N. (­2006) ‘­Traders, pirates, warriors: the protohistory of Greek mercenary soldiers in the Eastern Mediterranean’, Phoenix 60, ­21–​­47 Macé, A. (­2014) ‘­Deux formes de commun en Grèce ancienne, in Politique en Grèce ancienne’, Annales (­HSS) 69.3, ­659–​­789 Malkin, I. (­1984) ‘­W hat were the sacred precincts of Brea? (­IG I3 46)’, Chiron 14, ­44–​­48 ——— ​­(­1987) Religion and colonization in ancient Greece (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­1989) ‘­Delphoi and the founding of social order in archaic Greece’, Metis 4.1, ­129–​­153 ——— ​­(­1994a) Myth and territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­1994b) ‘­Inside and outside: colonization and the formation of the mother city’, in B. D’Agostino and F.R. Ridgway (­eds) Apoikia: i più antichi insediamenti greci in Occidente: funzioni e modi dell’organizzazione politica e sociale: scritti in onore di Giorgio Buchner (­Napoli) ­1–​­9 ——— ​­(­2003) ‘­Tradition in Herodotus: the foundation of Cyrene’, in P. Derrow and R. Parker (­eds) Herodotus and his world: essays from a conference in memory of George Forrest (­Oxford) ­153–​­170 ——— ​­(­2011) A small Greek world: networks in the ancient Mediterranean (­Oxford and New York) ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Greek colonization: the right to return’, in L. Donnellan, V. Nizzo, and G.-​­J. Burgers (­eds) Conceptualizing early colonisation (­Rome and Brussels) ­27–​­50 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­Vers une conception élargie des cercles de l’identité collective: la fondation des ­cités-​­États dans la Méditerranée antique’, in Ph. G ­ ervais-​­Lambony and I. Hurlet Fr. et Rivoal (­eds) (­Re)­Fonder. Les modalités du (­re)­commencement dans le temps et dans l’espace, Colloques de la MAE, ­René-​­Ginouvès, 14, ­63–​­78 Malkin, I and J. Blok (In press) From egalitarianism to democracy: drawing lots in ancient Greece (Oxford) Mari, M. (­2012) ‘­A mphipolis between Athens and Sparta: a philological and historical commentary on Thuc. 5.11’, Mediterraneo Antico 15, ­327–​­354 McInerney, J. (­2004) ‘­Nereids, colonies and the origins of Isegoria’, in R.M. Rosen and I. Sluiter (­eds) Free speech in classical antiquity (­Leiden) ­21– ​­40 Moggi, M. (­1976) I sinecismi interstatali greci, vol. 1: Dalle origini al 338 a. C. (­Pisa) Morris, I. (­2000) ‘­Equality for men’, in I. Morris (­ed.) Archaeology as cultural history: words and things in Iron Age Greece (­Oxford) ­109–​­124 Owen, S. (­2003) ‘­Of dogs and men: Archilochos, archaeology, and the Greek settlement of Thasos’, PCPhS, 49, ­1–​­18 Parker, R. (­1983) Miasma: pollution and purification in early Greek religion (­Oxford) Piccirilli, L. and Magnetto, A. (­1973) Gli arbitrati interstatali greci, Relazioni interstatali nel mondo antico. Fonti e studî 1.7 (­Pisa) Purcell, N. (­1990) ‘­Mobility and the polis’, in O. Murray and S. Price (­eds) The Greek city: from Homer to Alexander (­Oxford) ­29–​­58 Ready, J.L. (­2007) ‘­Toil and trouble: the acquisition of spoils in the Iliad’, TAPhA 137.1, ­3 –​­43 Redfield, J.M. (­1975) Nature and culture in the Iliad: the tragedy of Hector (­Chicago) Rhodes, P.J. (­2006) ‘­Synoikismos’, in H. Cancik and H. Schneider (­eds) Brill’s New Pauly (­Leiden) Robu, A. (­2014) Mégare et les établissements mégariens de Sicile, de la Propontide et du ­Pont-​ ­E uxin: histoire et institutions (­Bern)

163

Irad Malkin Schaus, G. (­1985a) ‘­Evidence for Laconians in Cyrenaica in the archaic period’, in G. Barker, J. Lloyd, and J. Reynolds (­eds) Cyrenaica in antiquity (­Oxford) ­395–​­403 ——— ​­(­1985b) The extramural sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Cyrene, Libya, final reports, volume II: the East Greek, Island, and Laconian pottery (­Philadelphia) Shachar, I. (­2000) ‘­Greek colonization and the eponymous Apollo’, Mediterrnean Historical Review 15, ­1–​­26 Tsetskhladze, G.R. (­ed.) (­2008) Greek colonisation: an account of Greek colonies and other settlements overseas, 2 vols. (­Leiden and Boston) Untersteiner, M. (­1963) Aristotele: Della Filosofia. Introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento (­Rome) Vernant, J.-​­P. (­1983) ‘­Geometry and spherical astronomy in early Greek cosmology’, in J.-​­P. Vernant, Myth and thought among the Greeks, trans. J. Lloyd and J. Fort (­New York) ­197–​­212 ——— ​­(­1996) ‘­Cleisthenes’s models’, in P. Lévêque and P. ­Vidal-​­Naquet (­eds) Cleisthenes the Athenian: an essay on the representation of space and time in Greek political thought from the end of the sixth century to the death of Plato (­New Jersey) ­44–​­51 Walker, K.G. (­2004) Archaic Eretria: a political and social history from the earliest times to 490 BC (­London) Wallace, R.W. (­2015) ‘­Equality, the dêmos, and law in archaic Greece’, in D.F. Leão and G. Thür (­eds) Symposion 2015. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Coimbra, 1.–​­4 . September 2015) (­Vienna) ­1–​­14 Walter, U. (­1993) An der Polis teilhaben. Burgerstaat und Zugehorigkeit im archaischen Griechenland (­Stuttgart) West, M.L. (ed.) (­1966) Hesiod, Theogony (­Oxford) Zuchtriegel, G. (­2018) Colonization and subalternity in classical Greece: experience of the nonelite population (­New York)

164

11 ‘­CITIZENS’ AND ‘­OTHERS’ IN ARCHAIC AND EARLY CLASSICAL CRETE Gunnar Seelentag

The intention of this contribution is to provide a better understanding of the character of Greek polities in archaic and early classical Greece by scrutinizing what it meant to be a ‘­citizen’ in a s­ eventh-​­to fi ­ fth-​­century ‘­­citizen-​­state’. Examples will be drawn from Crete whose polities not only present us with a ­remarkable – remarkably ​­ ‘­austere’ – ​­material culture but also offer a great number of epigraphic sources with legal content. This evidence should make Crete a major case study for the period, but it is often overlooked by archaeologists and historians alike.1 Thus, in the following pages, I would like to take a closer look at three inscriptions from the sixth and fifth centuries from different Cretan poleis which have hardly ever been adduced in discussions of what a ‘­­citizen-​­state’ in early Greece might have been. They do, however, offer a remarkable insight into the structures of ­socio-​­political participation for the archaic and early classical periods. What these inscriptions have in common is that they record the framework of socialization by which both individuals and groups that previously had not been part of the polity were integrated into the society of the polis. That these documents pertain to ‘­others’, that is, ‘­­non-​­citizens’, endowing them with specific privileges and imposing particular duties on them, allows them to convey a clearer picture of what it meant to be a fully participating a­ gent  – ​­a ‘­citizen’  – of ​­ a Greek polis-​­community. This chapter does not assume the existence of an abstract notion of citizenship in the archaic and early classical periods: ‘­citizenship’ implies a conglomerate of clearly defined rights and duties, accorded to an individual either by birth on the grounds of certain criteria, or en bloc by a citizens’ assembly, by means of a standardized procedure if only the individual fulfilled the necessary criteria. Instead, it aims to demonstrate that individuals’ integration into the polity depended on their participation in the practices of several overlapping circles of s­ ocio-​­political integration. Only then could they be accepted into the body of full political agents as equal participants, enfranchized with certain rights and duties. And we shall see that among those circles of integration meaningful for these individuals’ sense of identity and affiliation, participation ‘­in the polis’ was quite probably not the most important ­one – ​­at least in the decades we are looking at.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-15

165

Gunnar Seelentag

The sources I will discuss are the ‘­contract of employment’ of a poinikastas and mnamon (­v iz. ‘­scribe and remembrancer’) by the name of Spensithios with the polis Datala, the ‘­honorary decree’ for Dionysios of Gortyn, and the ‘­promise of protection against prosecution’ to the freedmen from Gortynian Latosion.2 So far, the different classification of the evidence in the corpora and research literature has stood in the way of any synopsis. While none of these inscriptions explicitly conveys any ‘­citizen’s rights’, they possess a common core, as they all endow individuals with diverse degrees of participation in different circles of integration within the polity.3

The scribe and remembrancer Spensithios of Datala The first document, which we should interpret as evidence of granting participation privileges, is inscribed on a bronze mitra, part of a Cretan suit of armour. Judging from the shape of the letters, the document was composed around the year 500 BCE in central Crete. The location of its discovery remains unclear; likewise, the society of Dataleis mentioned in it cannot be identified with any certainty.4 This important ­testimonial –​ ­often referred to as a ‘­contract of employment’ – ​­determines the duties and privileges of a certain Spensithios and his descendants, who are henceforth to serve the polis as a poinikastas and mnamon (­on mnamones, see Carawan 2007; Seelentag 2015: ­194–​­203). In the past, it was debated whether this scribe and remembrancer was, in fact, a citizen of the polis in which he fulfilled his duty. The question was posed as to whether Spensithios had already been a citizen of Datala at the time of his appointment, or if he had remained a n ­ on-​­citizen even after his appointment.5 However, so far, the possibility of Spensithios being included among the politai by means of the grant of the very privileges recorded here has not been discussed. We are not simply faced here with a ‘­contract of employment’; rather, the poinikastas is granted certain rights and is incorporated into certain s­ ocio-​­political circles of integration essential for the identity of the full political agents of Datala. The inscription records the following: Side A Gods! It thus pleased the Dataleis and we, the polis, that is five from each phyle, have promised Spensithios sustenance and exemption from all duties, this to him and his ­descendants – ​­under the condition that he serve the polis as scribe and remembrancer in public matters, both sacred and profane. But ­no-​­one else but Spensithios and his descendants are to serve the polis as scribe and remembrancer in public matters both of sacred and profane nature if not so determined by Spensithios himself or his descendants, as long as these being the majority of adult sons. As payment the scribe is to be annually given fifty prochooi of must (­i.e. jugs of new wine) ­and – ​­– ​­– ​­in the value of twenty drachmai ­or – ​­– ​­– ​­the must is to be given him from land, wheresoever he may choose it. But if (­someone) does not give the ­must – ​­– ​­– ​­the kosmos holding ­office – ​­– ​­– ­​­­i mpunity – ​­– ​­– ​­if they are ­not – ​­– ​­– ​­the kosmos – ​­– ​­– ​­double axes the sacred precinct (?) – ​­– ​­– ​­receive the same share as the kosmos – ​­– ​­–​­ Side B – ​­– ​­– ​­the scribe is to receive the same share. He should also be present and participate in all sacred and profane procedures where the kosmos is also present. And where a god does not have his own priest the scribe is to make the public sacrifices, and he is to have ­precinct-​­dues.

166

‘Citizens’ and ‘others’ in archaic and early classical Crete

There is to be no seizure of the scribe and no distraint is to be executed on him. Regarding litigation, whichever the scribe chooses, he is to be judged like the others or by the kosmos; anything else is not possible. As legal obligation he is to provide the andreion with ten double axes’ weight of dressed meat, in the same way as those when they assume office, and the annual fee. He is to collect the share (?). But other things are not to be obligatory if he does not wish to give them. The cultic (­functions and revenues) are to be (­accorded) to the eldest (­son?) / senior member (?). (­My translation, G.S.) In this document, the duties Spensithios is to fulfil are inseparably linked with the rights and privileges resulting from them. Only as long as he and his descendants carried out the tasks agreed upon, he and his descendants were to enjoy the privileges documented herein. We are thus able to see a temporary privileging, and yet this period of time is not limited. If the descendants of Spensithios wished to remain members of the community of the Dataleis by that definition, they were permitted to do ­so – ​­as long as they fulfilled their duties. A closer look at the privileges connected with the functions of scribe and remembrancer makes it clear that these were far more than mere compensation for services rendered. Foremost mentioned is the granting of sustenance (­trophē) to Spensithios and his descendants, as well as the exemption from any duties. A parallel contemporary Cretan inscription6 suggests that this trophē does not merely denote the securing of Spensithios’ alimentation, but his right to dine at the andreion – ​­in one of the men’s meal societies.7 This interpretation is substantiated by the scribe’s contributions to the men’s meal specified at the end of the inscription. Moreover, these represent the only exceptions to the exemption from duties granted the mnamon. So we should take this point of his being given privileges quite literally: Spensithios paid no dues. The scribe was remunerated in kind, the details mentioned here being 50 jugs of must and a product worth 20 drachmas, of which we have no further information due to the damage to the mitra. Worthy of note is the fact that he was permitted to obtain the must from any piece of land he chose. In all probability, the respective owner would have been reimbursed for any losses on his side. We should probably also interpret the following passage in the sense that the kosmos was to assist the scribe in the exercising of this right, even against the will of the owner in question, and that any seizure on the part of the kosmos on behalf of Spensithios was to remain unpunished.8 Additionally, Spensithios was to receive benefits at different occasions or from different sources. The fragmentary text of the inscription merely allows us to infer that it deals with goods accruing from the administration of real estate belonging to sacred precincts, that Spensithios was to receive the same share as the kosmos, and that any such amounts were to be calculated in the unit ‘­double axes’. Due to the parallel mention on side B of this unit to determine a particular amount of meat, it can be assumed that the benefits going to the mnamon would also have been in meat. Correspondingly, Spensithios was to administer those cults of Datala not possessing a priesthood of their own. On the basis of parallels with other Cretan poleis documenting the fact that priests received a share of the sacrificial meat, it can be assumed that Spensithios would likewise have obtained large amounts of meat on such occasions.9

167

Gunnar Seelentag

The privileges accorded to him involved a definition or modification of his legal status. There was to be no ‘­seizure’ of Spensithios. In this case, personal execution, that is, the ­extra-​­procedural access to an opponent, appears to be prohibited. Also, he is not to suffer distraint. We do not know if any of these points served to single him out from among the other politai of Datala. One might debate it was generally prohibited to treat any ‘­citizen’ that way and that Spensithios had merely been granted the rights common to any polites of Datala serving to distinguish them from the ‘­others’.10 But it seems more plausible that the explicit exemption of Spensithios meant a considerable betterment on his part compared to other political actors and we should probably consider Spensithios’ exemption from personal execution as a particular benefit. This makes sense if we take the following regulation into account, allowing the ­poinikastas to have any legal proceedings he might find himself involved in to be ­conducted by the kosmos. Once again, only a comparison with Gortyn can unravel the meaning of this passage. Extant inscriptions make it clear that, while a lawsuit was usually accepted by the kosmos, he would refer it to a dikastas who may even have had to first be appointed. The latter would then dispense judgement according to the applicable law, at least as long as the circumstances of the case and the possible question of guilt were undisputed. Should there be dissent, the dikastas would summon witnesses and order the taking of oaths, and then decide on the basis of his examination. Thereafter, the kosmos appears to have been responsible again, securing the implementation of the dikastas’ decision by way of the influence deriving from both his institutional and personal power.11 Spensithios was granted the possibility of being able to personally decide to have lawsuits conducted either according to regular procedure or by the kosmos. Against the background of the procedural law from Gortyn, this implies that the citizens of Datala usually were not permitted to take their cases before the kosmos, but that these were tried by a dikastas. If Spensithios was thus allowed to refer any legal actions to the kosmos, this did not serve to obtain a factually more competent decision. Rather, the engagement of the kosmos himself would have endowed that party of the dispute which had been able to call upon him with greater prestige: in all probability, the man holding the topmost office in a polis also held such personal power ­that – ​­the notion of institutional power being still rather ­weak – ​­any proceedings he took part in would have been guaranteed to be more binding and sustainable.12 Finally, our inscription records the duties imposed on Spensithios. Thus, he was ‘­legally obliged’ to contribute the large amount of ten double axes, around 36 kilograms, of meat to the andreion, ‘­in the same way as those when they assume office’. Moreover, he was obliged to pay an ‘­annual fee’. We should see these dues not primarily as obligations. Rather, Spensithios’ provisions to the andreion made him a contributor to the common meals, and with quite an amount.13 When we furthermore read that Spensithios was not obliged to make any additional contributions, then this means that the scribe and remembrancer was, in fact, free to make further provisions if he wished. This was of great importance, as, unlike in Sparta, the contributions of members of the Cretan andreia were relative, not absolute. They corresponded to a tenth of their e­ arnings – ​­irrespective of the latter’s absolute sizes. Accordingly, in Crete a man might, in fact, contribute quite little to his respective andreion. And yet he would still not run the risk of losing his status as full political agent and warrior in the polis due to the small size of his income. Participation in the polity was not graded by census limitations. However, the substantial contributions of the wealthier members of the 168

‘Citizens’ and ‘others’ in archaic and early classical Crete

community would have provided them with an uncatchable advance in prestige, for the less affluent members were, in fact, not capable of reciprocating in kind. To be invited to the men’s meal like a foreigner, without the possibility of acting as a contributor, was not an honour. A man continually invited thus saw himself in a position of perpetual obligation and, therefore, of social subordination. The right of contributing as much as he wished to the andreion granted to Spensithios was undoubtedly open to any fully enfranchised political agent; we should not see any particular privileging on the side of Spensithios therein. And yet it did appear worthy of mention to explicitly allow the poinikastas to compete with the established members of this polity. The latter had long since presented themselves as generous contributors to the andreion and gained the respect of their fellow citizens. And those, on the basis of the precepts of reciprocity, had committed themselves to a complementary conduct of deference and support, to an acknowledgement of the social and political superiority of the rich. All of this was to now also stand open to Datala’s new, a­ mply-​ ­funded member of the community.

Dionysios of Gortyn The process of granting certain privileges to n ­ on-​­citizens previously reserved for citizens is also apparent in our second piece of evidence: a Gortynian decree for outstanding services to the polis in favour of Dionysios and his descendants. The inscription is from the first half of the fifth century, engraved on two connected stone blocks with a combined length of 177 cm.14 Gods, good fortune! A gift was given to Dionysios, the son of Ko[– ​­– ​­–​­], because of his valour in war (?) and his benefactions, by all Gortyn and those living in Aulon: Exemption from duties in all matters (?) for himself and his descendants (?) [– ​­– ​­–​­], the wastia dika (­i.e. jurisdiction like an astos) and a house in Aulon inside of Pyrgos (­vel. in the tower) and a piece of land outside [– ​­– ​­–​­] and of the gymnasion. The list of privileges granted to Dionysios bears resemblance to the rights accorded to Spensithios. As in the case of the poinikastas of Datala, this regulation explicitly granted not only Dionysios himself but also his descendants participation in the practices mentioned. A family was being permanently integrated into the group of political actors. One difference between the inscriptions lies in the motivation for the privileging. While Spensithios was to henceforth assume the important office of scribe and ­ erits – ​­‘­for remembrancer, Dionysios is honoured for deeds already performed. His m his valour in war (?) and his benefactions’ – ​­are formulated in very general terms. Assigning Dionysios the wastia dika (­ϝαστία δίκα) meant legally privileging him. It seems this referred to the kind of treatment in legal disputes enjoyed by an astos. We have evidence for the term wastia dika from a s­ixth-​­century Gortynian law, though it is not possible to reconstruct the greater context of its introduction due to its large degree of fragmentation. However, there is the contiguous phrase: ‘­He himself is to speak the wastia dika out loud in the agora’.15 The counterpart of wastia dika was the xeneia dika (­κσενεία δίκα), mentioned in a treaty concluded at the beginning of the fifth century between Gortyn and the Rhittenians, a polity dominated by Gortyn. There, the term denotes the rules of a legal proceeding involving members of both polities.16 The xeneia dika, therefore, seems to describe the law applied in the case of a citizen 169

Gunnar Seelentag

of Gortyn finding himself in a legal dispute with a f­ oreigner – either ​­ from a Cretan or ­non-​­Cretan community.17 Thus, the wastia dika probably denoted the legal frame for a dispute between two astoi – ​­whereby the term astos would here appear to be used as a synonym for ‘­citizen’. This finding implies the existence of two legal systems or procedural paths, at least for Gortyn. It seems probable that the great majority of extant inscriptions from the archaic and classical periods are from the area of the wastia dika. Regulations from the xeneia dika seem to be referenced almost exclusively in those inscriptions that speak of the xenios kosmos. In view of the evidence, we should further assume that we have no single testimony for legal regulations applied in those cases concerning disputes among foreigners alone. This, of course, does not mean that such regulations did not actually exist, but simply that they were not found or might not have been carved in stone and monumentalized in the same manner as those regulations concerning the disputes between the citizens of the polis, which endowed the latter with greater authority.18 Against this background the question arises of the relationship between A ­ ulon  –​ ­otherwise topographically unknown to ­us – ​­and Gortyn. The appended formula ‘­and those who live in Aulon’ at first indicates that they were not seen as part of ‘­all of Gortyn’. In Aulon, we are probably witnessing a case of a polis hypekoos, a ‘­dependant polis’. Gortyn had already considerably expanded its territory in the course of the seventh and sixth centuries, either dissolving or absorbing other settlements of the Messara plain. While the inhabitants of the dependant polities were not subjugated into a state of bondage, neither did they enjoy the same legal status as the politai of Gortyn.19 It seems that Gortyn was making an effort to stress the autonomy of its tributary polities. This becomes obvious, for example, in the treaty concluded under unequal conditions between Gortyn and the Rhittenians, in which the latter are expressly identified as having ‘­their own laws and legal system’, only to then find themselves receiving instructions.20 Despite the hierarchic discrepancy between Aulon and Gortyn, this could serve to explain this gesture of purported sovereignty in the context of their approval of the privileges of Dionysios. But ultimately the authority of Gortyn over the territory and the inhabitants of Aulon stood behind this, and the inhabitants of Aulon would have been dealt with according to the xeneia dika. Thus, the privileging of Dionysios stated that, in the case of legal dispute, though neither his house nor land lay geographically within the territory covered by the Gortynian wastia dika as he did not live in the territory of Gortyn but that of Aulon, he was still to be treated as a Gortynian astos. The explicit according of the wastia dika to Dionysios meant his access to practices apparently considered by the politai of Gortyn as privileges guarded by and reserved for them. In the honouring of Dionysios, land plays an important role. Only due to the assignment of a specifically located house and a ‘­piece of land’ in a rather precisely denoted area is Dionysios accepted into the circle of those able to claim full political agency on the basis of such property. Possibly this was meant to enable him to act as a contributor to the andreion due to his income from farming. At least this is implied by comparison with the decree of Spensithios. In both cases, we see the disposition of land and the income deriving therefrom as a prerequisite for all other practices of participation. This was possible not least due to the probability that the greater part of the land of the polities of Crete was worked by the unfree inhabitants. This system granted all full political agents the necessary freedom to participate in the t­ ime-​­consuming social institutions of the polis.21 170

‘Citizens’ and ‘others’ in archaic and early classical Crete

The mentioning of γ[υν]ασίο at the ­fragmentarily-​­preserved end of the inscription is probably to be interpreted as a granting of the right to henceforth train at the gymnasion. In archaic Greece, the men frequenting it came from the elite; here they pursued an elaborate culture of beautiful bodies, elegant movements, and expensive anointing oils. And it was also here that the elites vied against one another in institutionalized and thus regulated competition. But at the same time, they distanced themselves as a group of those able to participate in these practices from all others unable to do so; the creation of alterity, therefore, promoted the cohesion of the aristoi. Thus, besides the elaborate practices of sympotic commensality, the training at the gymnasion was one of the essential social spaces for the staging of distinction and repulsion (­Mann 1998). In the course of the ­socio-​­political transformation of the Cretan polities in the second half of the seventh century, both participation in the common meal societies of the andreia as well as the training in the gymnasion were extended from a small circle to a larger group of actors.22 Even ‘­simple’ citizens thereafter possessed the opportunity ­ eat-​­eating community of warriors and athletes. This opening, of membership in the m however, did not actually signify a dilution of originally elitist practices, a democratization of the andreion and gymnasion. Rather, we can witness an ‘­aristocratization of the dēmos’. Henceforth, it was possible for any political actor to acquire fame and honour through athletic achievements in the manner formerly reserved for the aristoi. The cohesion of those dining and exercising together, as well as their exclusion of those who were not admitted to these occasions, remained a constituent factor for the s­ ocio-​ p ­ olitical sphere of the common meal societies and the gymnasion. In these two, we can see the citizens’ essential circles of ­socio-​­political integration, from ­which – ​­as pointed out by Aristotle regarding the unfree of Crete and implied by the term ‘­apetairoi’ (‘­those who do not belong to a hetaireia’) for free ­non-­​­­citizens – ​­all others were excluded.23 Like Spensithios who had been privileged with the ‘­exemption from everything’, Dionysios is granted ateleia, the ‘­exemption from duties’. We would be grateful for any further information from contemporary sources as to the nature of the duties they were exempted from. All we know of the politai of Cretan communities is that they made a regular contribution to the andreion.24 This, however, cannot be what is being referred to here. While Spensithios is granted ateleia, at the same time he is explicitly given the ­duty – ​­or the privilege, as the case may ­be – ​­to contribute to the andreion. Other than this, we have no evidence for any regular contributions or ‘­taxation’ of the politai.25 In fact, it is doubtful if the citizens were obliged to pay any such dues. Possibly referenced here are dues on the usage of infrastructure provided by the polis or on transactions executed on the territory of the polis. However, evidence for such dues for archaic and classical Crete is slight. Merely a treaty concluded around 450 BCE under the auspices of Argos between the poleis of Knossos and Tylissos records a levy on exports in maritime trade.26 It is, therefore, conceivable that the granting of ateleia in the documents discussed here could be seen as an exemption from duties levied on n ­ on-​­citizens. Aristotle reports these in his discussion of the financing of the andreia when he claims that for out of all the crops and cattle produced from the public lands and the tributes paid by the unfree, one part is assigned for the worship of the gods and the maintenance of the public services and the other for the public ­mess-​­tables, so that all the citizens are maintained from the common funds: women and children as well as men. (­Arist. Pol. 1272a.­12–​­21, trans. H. Rackham) 171

Gunnar Seelentag

And in his report on the andreia in Lyktos, the t­ hird-​­century author Dosiadas writes that of their income everyone contributes a tenth towards the hetaireia, as well as the revenues of the polis, which the magistrate of the polis assigns to the houses of the individuals. Of the douloi, each one contributes one Aeginetan stater per head. (­Dosiadas FGrHist 458 F 2 ap. Athen. 4.143a, my translation) These two testimonials, therefore, report a regular contribution of the ­non-​­citizens towards practices they were not able to participate in. We should not necessarily see this exemption from ­duties – ​­in parallel to the characteristics of the ateleia in later p ­ eriods – ​­as distinguishing those privileged accordingly from their fellow citizens. Possibly it instead designated an express exemption from those duties levied on n ­ on-​­citizens alone and thus as an exception to a practice essentially contributing towards emphasizing the lack of privilege of the ‘­others’ in respect to the citizens.27 In this case, we again can observe that it was not, in fact, ‘­citizenship’ that was being conferred. Instead, those individuals who were to participate in the polis were exempted from such practices constituting the duty of ­non-​­citizens: from then on they were to participate in the society of those freed from the payment of duties, namely the citizens.

The freedmen of Latosion Our third and last example of individuals being incorporated into a polity’s s­ocio-​ ­political circles of integration is another inscription from Gortyn from the early fifth century. It makes provisions for the settlement and protection of a group of freedmen when it decrees:28 Gods! This was decreed by the Gortynians when they voted: Of the ­freedmen – ​­– ​­–​ ­whosoever wishes (­shall) settle in Latosion under the common and equal (­law) and ­no-​­one is to enslave these [nor rob them. But if contravened], the xenios kosmos is not to let this happen. But should he neglect to do so, then the titai are to exact one hundred staters from each (­i.e. xenios kosmos) and/­or return double the amount of goods as a penitence (­to the one robbed). If the titai do not act as is written, [each of them] is to compensate the claimant double the fee and inflict it upon the polis. Here, freed slaves (­apeleutheroi) are permitted to settle in Latosion, which probably was not a mere district of Gortyn, but a polity tributary of Gortyn, such as Aulon and ­Rhitten. This also becomes plausible by the text’s mention of the competency of the ­xenios kosmos. We have knowledge of this function holder from Gortyn already from the early sixth century onwards. This confirms the office as one of the oldest institutions both in Crete and in the entire Greek world.29 The few remaining testimonials merely offer a cursory impression of the accompanying duties, though it appears evident that the xenios kosmos acted in disputes involving n ­ on-​­citizens. Thus, beside the protection of freedmen, he was responsible for punishing craftsmen from outside of Gortyn for breaches of contract with the polis in regard to their workmanship. Moreover, he was involved in the dissolution of adoptions where the former adoptees lost membership in the hetaireia of their adoptive fathers and, as participation in one of the common meal 172

‘Citizens’ and ‘others’ in archaic and early classical Crete

societies was one of its essential and indispensable criteria, thereby also their status as ‘­citizens’.30 We should see the reason for the existence of a seemingly specialized institution at such an early date in the already mentioned territorial expansion of Gortyn in the archaic period. This resulted in areas of contact with free ­non-​­citizens, in the course of which the xeneia dika and the wastika dika were distinguished from one another. In view of this, it is quite understandable that already in the seventh century Gortyn incurred responsibilities carried out by function holders reserved for these tasks. On the one hand, we should therefore see the xenios kosmos against the background of a steadily developing ­task-​­sharing and institutional differentiation within the Cretan polities at the end of the seventh century. On the other hand, we must understand the function of this office within the context of such efforts observable in different poleis of the island to guide any contact with ‘­others’ into a particular direction.31 While the Cretan poleis made an effort to grant these groups legal certainty, they were also tasked with defining the relationship between ‘­citizens’ and ‘­others’ and thus clearly delineated the boundary between them. In all probability therefore, the freedmen of our inscription were granted access to a legal status equivalent to that of foreigners who were free but did not possess Gortynian full ­socio-​­political agency. This was the reason for the xenios kosmos being responsible for their protection. And yet the provision granting the apeleutheroi protection from being enslaved or robbed seems like a redundancy. After all, they had not only been freed but had also been placed on equal footing with free men. But we should keep in mind that the mention of the apeleutheroi in this inscription is actually the first of its kind. As a matter of fact, the concept of ‘­freedmen’ was only being developed in the Greek world in the course of the fifth century (­­Zelnick-​­Abramowitz 2005: ­99–​­129, es­p. ­101–​­102, and 107). Here, a comparison with the cases discussed above may prove helpful. The release of a person from a condition of bondage possibly depended just as little on an already extant abstract conception of ‘­manumission’ – ​­the en bloc conferral of precisely defined and clearly outlined rights and ­privileges – ​­as the incorporation of individuals into the citizen body was based on an abstract concept of ‘­citizenship’. Against this background, granting the apeleutheroi the right to settle within a certain area, the guarantee of their being treated according to the wastika dika, and, finally, the assurance of their protection from enslavement and seizure would, therefore, not represent a mere redundant treatment of persons already having been set free. Indeed, assurances of this kind appear to have defined the status of freedmen in the first place. The inscription states or, rather, explicitly confirms those social circles of integration, those practices and privileges the apeleutheroi were henceforth permitted to participate in. It was these facets of participation open to all free inhabitants, and not some abstract condition of ‘­manumission’ by which the freedmen were distinguished from the unfree. Due to their weaker social position, the apeleutheroi were possibly in greater danger than their already free fellow citizens of being (­­re-​­)­enslaved or robbed. This regulation might mainly be referring to former masters attempting to extort services or goods from their freedmen.32

Participating in the early polis Even with all the differences between the pieces of evidence discussed, several s­ocio-​ ­political circles of integration and their respective constituent practices become evident, 173

Gunnar Seelentag

exhibiting notable relevancy for participation in the polity. These were, firstly, access to arable land, hence to the produce of a plot of land. It appears that on this access depended the possibility, or better: the right, to appear as a contributor to the men’s common meals, rather than being invited like a stranger who could not make any contribution. Beyond this, ‘­citizens’ seem to have enjoyed the privilege of not having to pay any other regular dues. Of great relevancy was also their right to take part in the physical exercises in the gymnasion. If we may adduce the written evidence of the fourth century, full political actors, that is, the ­weapon-​­bearers, were there distinguished from the ‘­others’ in similarly clear terms as in the andreion. We can see another circle of integration for the individual in his participation in different sacrifices, where the respective group offering the sacrifice and celebrating it with a feast repeatedly constituted itself as a cult community. And he was also a political s­ takeholder – for ​­ instance, in those d ­ ecision-​­making procedures leading to the regulations discussed here. He was part of an outwardly unanimously consenting community, as manifested in such formulas as ‘­all of Gortyn’. And, last but not least, our inscriptions emphasize the fact that the privileges granted also applied to the descendants of the beneficiaries, pointing out that the respective benefits were meant to be handed on. The sons of the men named, and then their sons in turn, would undergo the paideia, the course of education regulated by the polis. They then would spend time in the agelai – ​­the ‘­herds’ – ​­until becoming dromeis – ​­r unners or ‘­junior citizens’ – ​­for the following ten years, until finally being accepted into the andreia as full members, with all the accompanying duties, privileges, and prestige (­Kennell 2013; Seelentag 2015: ­444–​­503). Inscriptions like the ones presented here demonstrate that the citizen polities of Crete endeavoured to regulate dealings with foreigners and ­non-​­citizen inhabitants, with subject and unfree populations within certain channels. On the one hand, the members of these groups were granted certain rights, thus giving them security as long as they met certain obligations. On the other hand, these concessions on the side of the polis also repeatedly make it clear that too close a contact between citizens and foreigners was considered undesirable. The separation of both took place in plain sight, thereby also promoting the notion of the ‘­citizens’ as a closed group against these ‘­others’. The origin and significance of these dividing lines are to be seen within the context of the transformation of Cretan polities from the seventh century onwards.33 In reaction to the challenges of the increasing complexity of s­ ocio-​­political ­configurations –​ ­which, however, all parts of the Greek world were confronted ­w ith – ​­the Cretan polities appear to have struck a path where the aristoi dispensed with those cultural practices,  which were typical of other poleis, emphasizing their superiority in respect to the dēmos (­Seelentag 2015: es­p. ­34–​­57 and ­504–​­555). Especially the material evidence from the seventh to fifth centuries represents an important indication for a successful ethical homogenization of the Cretan elites. In its course, two social ideologemes found their expression, establishing norms and institutionalizing cultural practices claiming compulsoriness for all involved.34 The first ideologeme was about the homogeneity of the political actors, the fiction that all citizens were equal. This acted towards prohibiting certain modes of expression in respect to material inequality, which, of course, continued to exist. Instead, such originally elitist practices of distinction, like sympotic commensality and physical exercises, were extended to a wider circle of participants. This acted towards both demonstrating and rehearsing the homogeneity of the politai, confirmed and exercised in a number of social practices. But this construction of internal equality necessitated 174

‘Citizens’ and ‘others’ in archaic and early classical Crete

the creation of inequalities: the greater the actual differences were between those emphasizing their equality amongst one another, the greater their mutual distance as a group had to be from the ‘­others’; and, therefore, the more explicitly alterity between the ‘­equals’ and the ‘­others’ had to be institutionalized.35 One vehicle for this purpose was the ideologizing of this equality by ‘­freedom’ – ​­at least this is implied by the term eleutheroi that the politai of Gortyn used to describe themselves. Even considering all internal differences, they were indeed equal in the respect that they alone were truly free and thus able to look down contemptuously upon the ‘­others’.36 The second ideologeme stated that the ‘­polis’ bridged the different fault lines within the society of Cretan communities. The entity of the polis provided an integrative circle of superordinate identity for aristoi and members of the dēmos, for the numerous neighbourhoods and religious associations, for phylai and hetaireiai (­Seelentag 2009a, 2013, 2015: 2­ 31–​­268). The practices of participation discussed here did not take place within the space of the abstract entity that was the polis, which we indeed encounter in the decree formulas of various inscriptions, but rather in various smaller s­ ocio-​­political circles of integration discussed above. And yet these in their entirety did not simply result in ‘­the polis’. As meaningful forms of socialization for the individual, they would have competed, or even conflicted with this central institution. Still, from the seventh century onwards, it was ‘­the polis’ which appeared as the most prominent ­decision-​ ­making authority in Cretan laws. By initiating certain measures of institutionalization, it exerted influence upon the manner of the practices within the ­socio-​­political circles of integration below the level of the polis.37 These significant circles of integration by no means necessarily resulted from the ­pre-​­existence of a strong and clearly outlined polis society, but rather actually produced it in the first place, and then continually reproduced it. It should be furthermore noted that the different, meaningful circles of integration, of course, in no case existed without any overlap. Rather, their ­overlapping – ​­and this means the involvement of an individual in several different ­circles – ​­was, in fact, a requirement for his full agency in society in the first place.38 For during this time, ‘­the polity’ only manifested itself as an intersection of different circles of integration. In the period discussed here, the ‘­­citizen-​­state’ was yet to be institutionally differentiated. Thus, in archaic times we are not primarily dealing with the issue of ‘­participation in the polis’, but first of all with the matter of ‘­taking part in the practices of a number of socio-political circles of integration’.39 The awareness of a group of its existence as a political community was a prerequisite for the establishment of institutions of the polis. And so the question arises as to which ­socio-​­political configurations instigated, catalyzed, and performed this effort of institutionalization, whereby the frequently competitive circles of integration were integrated into the polis, thus transforming it into a c­ itizen-​­state. While the issue itself presents us with a worthwhile starting point for further studies in the field, archaic and classical Crete offers a wealth of evidence for its exploration.

Abbreviations G/­P = Gagarin, M. and Perlman, P. (­2016) The laws of ancient Crete, c. ­650–​­400 BCE (­Oxford) Nomima = Effenterre, H. van and Ruzé, F. (­1994/­1995) Nomima: recueil d’inscriptions politiques et juridiques de l’archaisme grec, 2 vols. (­Rome) 175

Gunnar Seelentag

Notes 1 On the material culture and institutions of Cretan poleis, see Link (­1994), Gehrke (­1997), Chaniotis (­2005), Erickson (­2010), Seelentag (­2015), Gagarin and Perlman (­2016), and Whitley (­2018). 2 These inscriptions go beyond those sources that are much more prominent in scholarship, e.g., (­1) IvO 11 = Nomima 1.21: bronze plaque from Elis dedicated at Olympia, ­500-​­475; (­2) IvO 2 = Nomima 1.23: bronze plaque from Elis dedicated at Olympia, ca. 475; (­3) ICS 217 = Nomima 1.31: bronze plaque from Idalion/­Cyprus, ca. 470; (­4) IG IX 1.32.718 = Nomima 1.43: bronze plaque from ­West-​­Lokrian Chaleion, ca. 460. 3 One might compare IC 2.5.1 = Nomima 1.28 = G/­P A1: the ‘­regulation on foreign craftsmen’ from Axos, ­525–​­500, an inscription granting foreigners only temporary and partial access to institutions of the polis, like the privilege to dine ­i n – ​­but not to contribute ­to – ​­the andreion, and to partake in selected cultic activities. 4 Jeffery and ­Morpurgo-​­Davies (­1970) = Nomima 1.22 = G/­P DA1. Pébarthe (­2006), Seelentag (­2015), and Gagarin and Perlman (­2016) offer extensive commentary and discussion. 5 Cf. the discussion, e.g., in Gorlin (­1988), Thomas (­1995), Koerner (­1993: 539), Nomima 2: 162, and Perlman (­2004: ­113–​­114). 6 Cf. IC 2.5.1.15 = Nomima 1.28 = G/­P A1.­14–​­15: Axos, ­525-​­500. On the financing system of the andreia, see Seelentag (2013) and (­2015: ­417–​­430). 7 On the andreion – ​­the central institution of participation in Cretan p ­ olities – see ​­ Seelentag (­2015: ­374–​­443), and Whitley (­2018). 8 Seelentag (­2015: ­187–​­194) discusses inscriptions dealing with the circumstances of distraint and a respective substitution, attempting to restrict the potentially violent circumstances involved in such actions. 9 Cf. IC 2.5.9 = G/­P A9: Axos, fifth century BCE. 10 In Gortyn, personal execution became forbidden only by the middle of the fifth century; see IC 4.72.1.­1–​­3 = Nomima 2.6 = G/­P G72.1. 11 Gortynian procedure offers the best, unfortunately: only, contemporary parallel of a judicial system that had both dikastai and kosmoi; see Seelentag (­2015: ­169–​­175). 12 On the mechanisms of personal and institutional power, see Seelentag (­2015: 6­ 1–​­92), (­2019), and (­2020). 13 Dosiadas FGrHist 458 F2 ap. Athen. 4.­143a-​­d, and Pyrgion FGrHist 467 F1 ap. Athen. 4.­143e-​­f. 14 IC 4.64 = Nomima 1.8 = G/­P G64 (­cf. SEG 28.731, 39.1866): Gortyn, early fifth century; the translation follows Gagarin (­2008: 125). 15 IC 4.­13g-​­h.2 = Nomima 1.1 = G/­P G13. This inscription seems to prescribe a punitive or purifying ritual for an official having violated a regulation of the wastia dika. 16 IC 4.80.8 = Nomima 1.7 = G/­P G80. 17 Some inscriptions imply that Cretan poleis distinguished between two groups of foreigners: allopolitai and xenoi; see IC 2.12.3 = Nomima 1.10 = G/­P Ele12, and IC 2.12.4 = Nomima 1.83 = G/­P Ele4: Eleutherna, late sixth century Nomima 1.12 = G/­P Lyktos 1A: Lyktos, ca. 500. IC 4.72 6.­46–​­55, here ­46–​­47 = Nomima 1.13 = G/­P G72.6: Gortyn, ­m id-​­fifth century. 18 Gagarin (­2008), and Seelentag (­2009a). Compare this with similar systems in other poleis, e.g., IG 9. l2.717 = Nomima 1.53: a ­m id-­​­­fi fth-​­c entury agreement between Chaleion and Oeantheia, which mentions xenodikai. 19 On tributary polities in Crete, see Perlman (­1996) and Chaniotis (­1996: 1­ 60–​­168). On the violent expansion of archaic Cretan poleis, see Viviers (­1994) and Erickson (­2010: es­p. ­238–​­245). 20 IC 4.80.1 = Nomima 1.7 = G/­P G80: Gortyn, ­450–400 (­αὐτ]όνο ̣μ[ο]ι κ’ αὐτόδικοι). 21 Link (­1994), van Wees (­2003), Gagarin (­2010), and Lewis (­2018). 22 Rabinowitz (­2014), Wecowski (­2014), and Seelentag (­2015: ­387–​­397). 23 Unfree inhabitants: Arist. Pol. 1264a.­21–​­22. apetairoi: IC 4.72.2.­2 –​­45, here ­2 –​­15 = Nomima ­ id-​­fifth century; on these, see Seelentag (­2015: 2­ 86–​­289). The 2.81 = G/­P G72.2: Gortyn, m ideology of the gymnasion’s orientation towards martial prowess is expatiated upon in Pl. Leg. I ­625c–​­626b, also in VII 814d, and VII ­834a–​­d. 24 Cf. IC 4.77 a­ –c = Nomima 1.49 = G/­P G77: the ‘­karpodaistai-​­i nscription’ from Gortyn, ­m id-​ ­fi fth century. 25 Cf. IC 4.184 = Chaniotis (­1996: no. 69): unequal treaty between Gortyn and Kaudos, ca. 200.

176

‘Citizens’ and ‘others’ in archaic and early classical Crete 26 IC 1.8.4, here 1­ 1–​­14, and 1.30.1 = Nomima 1.54 I and II. 27 A ­sixth-​­century decree from Cyzicus lists such dues: IMT Kyz Kapu Dağ 1447 = Nomima 1.32. 28 IC 4.78 = Nomima 1.16 = G/­P G78, with emendations by Seelentag (­2017). 29 IC 4.14 ­g-​­p = Nomima 1.82 = G/­P G14: Gortyn, ­600-​­525, see Perlman (­2002: ­208–​­211); also IC 4.30 = Nomima 2.68 = G/­P G30: Gortyn, ­600-​­525. See Seelentag (­2015: 2­ 95–​­308), and (­2017) on the xenios kosmos. 30 Craftsmen: IC 4.79 (­cf. IC 4.144) = Nomima 1.30 = G/­P G79: Gortyn, 4­ 50-​­400. Adoptions: IC 4.72.11.­10–​­7 = Nomima 2.40 = G/­P G72.11: Gortyn, ca. 450. 31 A Lyktian law even forbade the accommodation of foreigners and any violation was heavily punished; Nomima 1.12 = G/­P Lyktos 1A: Lyktos, ca. 500. 32 The main aim of the inscription, however, appears to be the endeavour to impose responsibilities on the function holders named and establish mandatory ­procedures – ​­in short: to delineate institutions. 33 Erickson (­2010), Seelentag (­2013, 2015), and the contributions in Pilz and Seelentag (­2014). 34 See Seelentag (­2020) for the concepts of ‘­i nstitutionalization’ and ‘­ethical homogenization’. 35 A catalogue of penalties in the Great Law of Gortyn draws the main social divide not ­b etween free and unfree, but between ‘­citizens’ and all ‘­others’: IC 4.72.2.­2 –​­45 = Nomima 2.81 = G/­P G72.2; see Seelentag (­2015: ­286–​­291). 36 The almost complete absence of terms such as demos, politai, or astoi in Cretan inscriptions supports the assumption that ‘­eleutheros’ most likely expressed the concept of ‘­citizen’; cf. IC 4.75b = Nomima 2.46 = G/­P G75B; IC 4.72.3.22 = Nomima 2.32 = G/­P G72.3; and IC 4.72.5.53 = Nomima 2.49 = G/­P G72.5. 37 See already a ­late-­​­­seventh-​­c entury inscription from Dreros: Nomima 1.68/­ 2.89 = G/­ P Dr3A/­B, with Seelentag (­2009b). 38 The diversity of the circles of integration relevant for individuals is conveyed by a law attributed to Solon, fr. 76a ap. Gaius Dig. 47.22.4, Leaõ and Rhodes (­2015). 39 Vlassopoulos (­2007) points out Aristoteles’ concept of the koinōniai, communities below the polis-​­level, e.g., Arist. Eth. Nic. 1160a.­4 –​­6.

Bibliography Carawan, E. (­2007) ‘­W hat the mnemones know’, in E.A. Mackay (­ed.) Orality, literacy, memory in the ancient Greek and Roman world (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­163–​­184 Chaniotis, A. (­1996) Die Verträge zwischen kretischen Poleis in der hellenistischen Zeit (­Stuttgart) ——— ​­(­2005) ‘­T he great inscription, its political and social institutions and the common institutions of the Cretans’, in E. Greco and M. Lombardo (­eds) La grande iscrizione di Gortyna. Centoventi anni dopo la Scoperta (­Athens) ­171–​­190 Erickson, B. (­2010) Archaic and classical Crete: pottery styles and island history (­Princeton, NJ) Gagarin, M. (­2008) Writing Greek law (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­Serfs and slaves at Gortyn’, ZRG 127, ­14–​­31 Gehrke, H.-​­J. (­1997) ‘­Gewalt und Gesetz: die soziale und politische Ordnung Kretas in der archaischen und klassischen Zeit’, Klio 79, ­23–​­68 Gorlin, C. (­1988) ‘­The Spensithios decree and archaic Cretan civil status’, ZPE 74, ­159–​­164 Jeffery, L.H. and ­Morpurgo-​­Davies, A. (­1970) ‘­Ποινικαστάς and Ποινικὰζειν: BM 1969. 4­ -​­2.1. A new archaic inscription from Crete’, Kadmos 9, ­118–​­154 Kennell, N. (­2013) ‘­Age class societies in ancient Greece?’, AncSoc 43, ­1–​­73 Koerner, R. (­1981) ‘­Vier frühe Verträge zwischen Gemeinwesen und Privatleuten auf griechischen Inschriften’, Klio 63, ­179–​­206 ——— ​­(­1993) Inschriftliche Gesetzestexte der frühen griechischen Polis (­Cologne) Leaõ, D. and Rhodes, P.J. (­2015) The laws of Solon (­London and New York) Lewis, D. (­2018) Greek slave systems in their Eastern Mediterranean context, c. ­8 00–​­146 BC (­Oxford) Link, St. (­1994) Das griechische Kreta: Untersuchungen zu seiner staatlichen und gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung vom 6. bis zum 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (­Stuttgart) Mann, C. (­1998) ‘­K rieg, Sport und Adelskultur: zur Entstehung des griechischen Gymnasions’, Klio 80.1, ­7–​­21

177

Gunnar Seelentag Pébarthe, C. (­2006) ‘­Spensithios, scribe ou archiviste public? Réflexions sur les usages publics de l’écriture en Crète à l’époque archaïque’, Temporalités 3: les usages publics del’écriture (­­Antiquité -​­ XXe siècle), ­37–​­55 Perlman, P. (­1996) ‘­Pólis hypékoos: The dependent polis and Crete’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) Introduction to an inventory of poleis, Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre 3 (­Copenhagen) ­233–​­287 ——— ​­(­2002) ‘­Gortyn. The first seven hundred years. Part II: The laws from the temple of Apollo Pythios’, in T.H. Nielsen (­ed.) Even more studies in the ancient Greek polis (­Stuttgart) ­187–​­227 ——— ​­(­2004) ‘­Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor: the economies of Archaic Eleutherna, Crete’, ClAnt 23, ­95–​­137 Pilz, O. and Seelentag, G. (­eds) (­2014) Material culture and cultural practices in archaic and classical Crete (­Berlin and New York) Rabinowitz, A. (­2014) ‘­Drinkers, hosts, or fighters? Masculine identities in ­pre-​­classical Crete’, in Pilz and Seelentag (­2014) ­91–​­119 Seelentag, G. (­ 2009a) ‘­ Regeln für den Kosmos: Prominenzrollen und Institutionen im archaischen Kreta’, Chiron 39, ­63–​­97 ——— ​­(­2009b) ‘­Der Abschluss der Ephebie im archaischen Kreta: Bemerkungen zu einer Gesetzesinschrift aus Dreros’, ZPE 169, ­149–​­161 ——— ​­ (­ 2013) ‘­ Die Ungleichheit der Homoioi: Bedingungen politischer Partizipation im ­archaisch-​­k lassischen Kreta’, HZ 297, ­320–​­353 ——— ​­(­2015) Das archaische Kreta: Institutionalisierung im frühen Griechenland (­Berlin and New York) ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­Der Xenios Kosmos und die Freigelassenen von Latosion: zu einer archaischen Inschrift aus dem kretischen Gortyn (­IC 4.78)’, Hermes 145, ­275–​­287 ——— (­ ​­2019) ‘­Konfliktregulierung im archaischen Griechenland zwischen P ­ rinzipien-​­und ­Regel-​­Orientierung’, in K.-​­J. Hölkeskamp et al. (­eds) Die Grenzen des Prinzips. Die Infragestellung von Werten durch Regelverstöße in antiken Gesellschaften (­Stuttgart) ­25– ​­46 (­ 2020) ‘­ Das Kartell: Ein Modell soziopolitischer Organisation in der griechischen ——— ​­ Archaik’, in G. Seelentag and J. Meister (­eds) Konkurrenz und Institutionalisierung in der griechischen Archaik (­Stuttgart) ­61–​­94 Thomas, R. (­1995) ‘­Written in stone? Liberty, equality, orality and the codification of law’, BICS 40, ­59–​­74 Viviers, D. (­1994) ‘­La cité de Dattalla et l’expansion territoriale de Lyktos en Crète centrale’, BCH 118, ­229–​­259 Vlassopoulos, K. (­2007) ‘­Beyond and below the polis: networks, associations and the writing of Greek history’, MHR 22, ­11–​­22 Wecowski, M. (­2014) The rise of the Greek aristocratic banquet, 9th to 7th century BC (­Oxford) Wees, H. van (­2003) ‘­Conquerors and serfs: wars of conquest and forced labour in archaic Greece’, in N. Luraghi and S. Alcock (­eds) Helots and their masters in Laconia and Messenia: histories, ideologies, structures (­Cambridge and London) ­33–​­80 Whitley, J. (­2018) ‘­Citizenship and commensality in archaic Crete: searching for the andreion’, in A. Duplouy and R. Brock (­eds) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) ­227–​­248 ­Zelnick-​­Abramowitz, R. (­2005) Not wholly free: the concept of manumission and the status of manumitted slaves in the ancient Greek world (­Leiden and Boston, MA)

178

12 SPARTAN OLIGANTHRŌPIA AND HOMOIOI1 Ryszard Kulesza

According to Aristotle, the Spartan state’s constant problem was oliganthrōpia, that is, a permanent decline in the number of citizens (­Pol. 1270a.34; cf. Xen. Lac. 1.1). The decrease was so rapid that, if not for the complete silence of the sources on the subject, we might suspect some sort of epidemic. Various reasons for this exceptionally drastic decrease in the number of citizens during the fifth and the fourth centuries BCE have been proposed by modern scholars, including the impact of the losses incurred during the wars, the earthquake in 464 BCE, and the low rate of natural increase. Particular importance has been ascribed to the transformations caused by the influx of wealth after the Peloponnesian War and the concentration of land in the hands of a small group of rich men. While all these factors may have in some way contributed to the shrinking number of Spartiates who constituted the citizen community, it does not seem possible for them to be responsible for the magnitude of this decrease, especially considering that between 480 and 371 BCE the demographic trend seemed stable. As decisively demonstrated by Stephen Hodkinson (­1986, 1993, 2000), the Spartan system of inheritance must be considered the fundamental reason for the constant decrease in the number of citizens, as, by favouring the concentration of land ownership, it gradually caused a large number of Spartiates to lose their citizen rights. In other words, the Spartan community was not decimated by wars or epidemics; neither was it threatened by extermination due to the low rate of natural increase. The true threat was the decrease in the number of citizens enjoying full civic rights, who thus could not fulfil all the duties associated with the status of a Spartiate. in contrast to the perioikoi, see The Spartiates, as fully enfranchized citizens (­ ­Chapter 15 in this volume), were allowed to participate in the meetings of the Assembly and hold public office. However, belonging to this elite group depended on fulfilling several conditions. The most fundamental was being born to both a Spartiate father and a Spartiate mother. It was also necessary to be brought up in the state education system, the agōgē, which was obligatory for all youth between the ages of seven and twenty. If a young man successfully completed the agōgē, he would henceforward dine ­ ining-​­group (­syssition, pl. syssitia); this, in together with the other Spartiates in his d

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-16

179

Ryszard Kulesza

turn, required him to provide a designated amount of food for those meals. To be able to fulfil this obligation, he had to own a portion of land (­klēros). According to Plutarch, Lycurgus divided the part of the land in Laconia which belonged to the city of Sparta into nine thousand klēroi (‘­allotments’; the name klēroi suggests they were originally apportioned by klērosis, the drawing of lots); the rest of Laconia was divided into 30,000 portions and assigned to the perioikoi. Plutarch adds that, according to some, Lycurgus assigned only 6,000 klēroi to the citizens and that the remaining 3,000 were added later by Polydorus (­a king of Sparta), while others say that Polydorus assigned half of those 9,000 and Lycurgus the rest (­Plut. Lyc. 8.­3 –​­6). In both scenarios, the final number of the klēroi was nine thousand; yet, not only the period in which they were created but also the very fact of their existence arouses some doubts. Whereas Plutarch and Ephorus (­FGrH 70 fr. 118) ascribed the creation of the system of klēroi to Lycurgus, Plato associated it with the coming of the Dorians to the Peloponnese. Until quite recently, most scholars saw the klēroi as inheritable property passed down from the father to the eldest son. This, however, makes it difficult to interpret ­ ew-​­born child a passage from Plutarch where the author reports that the father of a n was obliged to submit it for inspection by the elder members of his phylē (‘­tribe’), who stated whether it was healthy and consequently worth bringing up, and who assigned a klēros to it (­Plut. Lyc. 16). This would mean that the klēroi were not inherited but were rather the domain of the state, which assigned them to those who complied with the formal requirements of being a Spartiate. For this to be possible, the state would need to have a reserve of unassigned klēroi which would make it possible to, for instance, grant them to younger sons. We might wonder whether, if a Spartiate died childless, his klēros returned to the polis or to his phylē. Herakleides Lembos (­Exc. Pol. [ed. Dilts] 12 = Arist. fr. 611, 12 Rose) reports that selling land was considered shameful among the Lacedaemonians, and selling ‘­the portion of ancient land’ (­tēs archaias moiras) was forbidden. Similarly, Plutarch mentions a prohibition on selling a portion of land (­moira) which had been ascribed for a long time (­Plut. Mor. 238e). If this information is treated literally and the ‘­portion of ancient land’ is understood to be the klēros, it must be assumed that the Spartans could own other land as well. Incidentally, as the original division and allocation of the klēroi pertained only to land in Laconia, it may be the case that Spartiates could have acquired additional land in Messenia, which they subjugated in the later period; perhaps only there. This, however, is just an assumption, as no evidence survives for the rules of apportioning land in Messenia. Due to the allocation of klēroi and the role of the helots, Spartiates did not need to engage in gainful employment. In fact, they were formally obliged not to perform any paid work (­Xen. Lac. 7.2), especially physical work (­banausia) (­Plut. Lyc. 24.2). In the traditional conception, the klēroi made it possible for the Spartiates to accomplish the ideal of ‘­equality of assets’, due to which they could, among others, consider themselves homoioi: ‘­equal’, ‘­similar’, or even ‘­identical’ (­Xen. Lac. 10.7; 13.1; Hell. 3.3.5; An. 4.6.14). It is not known exactly when the Spartiates began to describe themselves as homoioi. It may relate to the adoption of the hoplite combat technique, which over the eighth and seventh centuries BCE changed the character of war, turning the hoplite class into the foundation of a state’s military might. This, in turn, resulted in an increase in the numbers of citizens enjoying full rights. Contrary to the widespread belief in the equality of Sparta’s citizens, however, the ‘­equality of assets’ never existed there. Additionally, 180

Spartan oliganthrōpia and homoioi

the term homoioi may have been introduced quite late, and to differentiate between the citizens who had full rights and the rapidly growing numbers of those who did not. On the fringes of Spartan society, we find some groups of ‘­inferior quality’ Spartans: the hypomeiones, the mothakes, the tresantes (­see ­Chapter 15 in this volume). Even among the ‘­equals’, just as in any other Greek polis, we find the better born, the kaloi k’agathoi (‘­beautiful and good’), the rich. Herodotus tells us that some Spartan families professed they were descended from heroes known from the Homeric epics. Some families, and not only the royal ones (­Thuc. 5.16.2; Xen. Ages. 1.2), claimed descent from the Heraclids (­Plut. Lyc. 24; 26). Spartan heralds, the Talthybiads, considered themselves to be descended from Agamemnon’s herald Talthybius. It is, of course, impossible to state conclusively whether they were, indeed, of a ­pre-​­Doric origin or whether they referred to Talthybius as a patron of heralds, a practice that was also widespread in other Greek poleis. Sperthies, son of Aneristus, and Boulis, son of Nicolaus, who volunteered to atone for the killing of the envoys of Darius, were ­well-​­born and from families that were particularly wealthy (­Hdt. 7.134.2). That some families held an exceptional position is also indicated by their connections, sometimes lasting for generations, with the aristocracy of other poleis; we might consider, for instance, the hereditary friendship (­xenia) between the families of the Spartiate Endius and the Athenian Alcibiades (­Thuc. 8.6.3). Some families continuously played an important role in the political life of Sparta; the family of Demarmenus may serve as an example. Two of Demarmenus’ sons (­and one of their daughters) are known to us. One of his two aunts became the second wife of King Anaxandridas, and the other was betrothed to the future King Leotychidas, until the future King Demaratus claimed her for himself and married her. Thus, both women entered royal houses, indicating the close connections between aristocratic families. The third wife of King Ariston also came from a rich and esteemed family. The existence of the elite is clearly indicated by the fact that contacts with the outside world, foreign voyages, and high positions in the military were monopolized by a small group (­Hodkinson 1993: ­146–​­175). As Hodkinson has shown, in the years 4­ 31–​ ­371 BCE, this group numbered about a hundred men in each ­decade – ​­relatively few in comparison to the number of citizens. Nominations for commanders of the fleet or harmosts (­Spartan governors in foreign cities) went to men linked by family ties, and to some of them more than once (­i n 21 out of 59 cases discussed by Hodkinson, i.e., 36% of the total; Hodkinson 1993: 155). The sources confirm that Alkamenes and Sthenelaos, sons of the ephor Sthenelaidas, were both harmosts, as was Clearchus, the son of Ramphias, a Spartan commander and envoy. Antalcidas, who commanded the fleet, was an envoy to the Persian court, and later held the office of an ephor, and Pedaritus, a harmost, were sons of Leon, a famous winner of the chariot race in Olympia and an ephor in 419/418 BCE (­Hodkinson 1993: 158). Inequality among the Spartiates is also indicated by Thucydides in his account of the campaign at Amphipolis, where Brasidas sent a message to the Lacedaemonians asking for reinforcements but was refused ‘­b ecause their leading men ( ­prōtoi) were jealous of him, and also because they preferred to recover the prisoners taken in the island’ of Sphacteria (­T huc. 4.108.7) –​ ­ risoners who, after all, belonged to the kaloi k’agathoi (­T huc. 4.40.2). Equally interp esting is the remark made by Xenophon who, in his Lakedaimoniōn Politeia, considers it impossible for Lycurgus to have accomplished his reforms without the support of Sparta’s most influential men (­Xen. Lac. 8.1). Of course, he could not have known what the true circumstances of those events had been; his conclusions were based on 181

Ryszard Kulesza

his knowledge of the situation in his own times, which informs us of the state of affairs in the fourth century BCE. These testimonies indicate that there existed in Sparta a group of families equivalent to the aristocracy known from other Greek poleis. These kaloi k’agathoi (­see Arist. Pol. 1270b.24) made use of the existing ways of amassing wealth and were increasingly open in demonstrating their affluence, especially after the end of the Peloponnesian War. In the later period, various official functions performed abroad became an important source of income. Many a Spartiate grew rich on being a harmost (­Flower 1991: 91). The Spartan elite preferred to marry within their own group for financial as much as for political reasons (­Cartledge 1981: 96). Later sources assert that daughters were not given dowries in Sparta (­Hermippus fr. 87; Plut. Mor. 227f; Ael. VH 6.6; Just. Epit. 3.3.8), but we should accord more authority to Aristotle, who reports that there were many heiresses (­epiklēroi) and large dowries were not an exception. Regardless of the criticism of Aristotle’s formulations and the understanding of his statement presented by Paul Cartledge (­1981: ­97–​­98), it is a fact that a Spartan heiress (­patrouchos, Hdt. 6.57.4) did inherit the family’s wealth (­Hodkinson 2000) and that this was what guided many ­men – ​­like that contender (­or contenders) for the hand of Lysander’s daughter (­or daughters) – ​­in their choice of a wife. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, according to a belief that is relatively universal (­especially in older studies), economic inequalities among the homoioi began to deepen rapidly after the Peloponnesian War, when gold and silver money first flowed into Sparta, and with money, greed and a desire for wealth prevailed through the agency of Lysander, who, though incorruptible himself, filled his country with the love of riches and with luxury, by bringing home gold and silver from the war, and thus subverting the laws of Lycurgus. (­Plut. Lyc. 30.1; Lys. 17) The second reason for the change was said to be the rhetra of Epitadeus, which permitted a free trade in klēroi (­Plut. Agis 5). In reality, however, even if we considered the existence of an economic elite in Sparta to be questionable, Spartans of the fifth century BCE had the same approach to wealth as all other ­Greeks – ​­as shown by Hodkinson (­1994: 1­ 83–​­222; 2000). Herodotus records no less than eight cases of corruption among the Spartans, of which five pertain to their kings (­Noetlichs 1987; see Bockisch 1974: ­219–​­220 n. 20; Hodkinson 1994: ­187–​­189). King Leotychidas, who accepted a huge bribe from the Thessalians, was charged with corruption and had to flee Sparta; his house was razed and he spent the rest of his life as an exile in Tegea (­Hdt. 6.72.5). It was rumoured ­ partans – ​­or in Sparta that Cleomenes had accepted bribes at Argos (­Hdt. 6.82.13). The S at least their l­ eaders – ​­had a reputation of being venal (­Isocr. 8 96; Arist. Pol. 1271a.­3 –​­5). ­ fth-​­and f­ ourth-​­century BCE authors. This was, in practice, a view shared by most fi Only Thucydides pointed to a certain difference in the Spartans’ attitude to material goods, writing that ‘­a modest style of dressing, more in conformity with modern ideas, was first adopted by the Lacedaemonians, the rich doing their best to assimilate their way of life to that of the common people’ (­Thuc. 1.6.4). Critias (­fr. 6 W) reported that the Spartans were circumspect in eating and in drinking wine (­see also Wecowski 2014: ­8 –​­9, ­15–​­16). Plutarch assured his readers that special regulations concerning privately owned buildings were in force in Sparta, aimed to guaranteeing that the citizens’ houses were kept simple; for instance, ‘­every house should have its roof fashioned by the axe, and its doors by the saw only, and by no other tool’ (­Plut. Lyc. 13.5). He noted further 182

Spartan oliganthrōpia and homoioi

that the very appearance of Spartan houses discouraged sumptuous furnishings (­Plut. Lykc. 13.­6 –​­7). The Spartans were certainly not the Amish of antiquity; but all this evidence pertains, in essence, to their rigorous lifestyle, not to their affluence. Thucydides did not say there were no rich men in Sparta, but rather that their lifestyle was the same as that of their less affluent neighbours. After the conquest of Messenia, the less ­prosperous – ​­if not ­all – ​­Spartiates received minimal klēroi, but the land of Laconia was not divided anew. The rich citizens retained their large estates, and the system of land ownership in Sparta remained similar to those of other Greek states (­Hodkinson 1986: ­386–​­394; 1994; 1997: 88; 2000; Flower 1991: 89; Singor 1993). Privately owned klēroi farmed by the s­tate-​­controlled helots existed in Sparta throughout the entire archaic and classical period. The equal, indivisible klēroi were created in the third century BCE in connection with the reforms planned by Agis IV and Cleomenes III; only the propaganda of the r­eformer-​­kings ­back-​­dated their creation. The concept of equal, indivisible klēroi passing, unchanged, from generation to generation and providing upkeep to all the Spartans is therefore entirely unhistorical, and the reasons for the Spartan oliganthrōpia and differentiation among the citizens ( ­politai – and ​­ as a result, the strata among the homoioi) – must ​­ be sought in the continuous concentration of land which the poor lost in favour of the rich, thereby losing their full citizen rights.

Note 1 This chapter is a shortened and adapted version of a section of the text now published as Kulesza (­2022).

Bibliography Bockisch, J. (­1974) ‘­Die s­ ozial-​­ökonomische und politische Krise der Lakedaimonier und ihrer Symmachoi im 4. Jahrhundert v. u. Z.’, in E. Welskopf, (­ed.) Hellenische Poleis. ­K reise-­​ ­­Wandlung-​­Wirkung, I (­Berlin) ­199–​­230 Cartledge, P. (­1981) ‘­Spartan wives: liberation or licence?’, CQ 31.1, ­84–​­105 Flower, M.A. (­1991) ‘­Revolutionary agitation and social change in classical Sparta’, in M.A. Flower and M. Toher (­eds) Georgica: Greek studies in honour of George Cawkwell (­London) ­78–​­97 Hodkinson, S. (­1986) ‘­Land tenure and the conflict of values in classical Sparta’, CQ 36, ­378–​­406 ——— (­​­ 1993) ‘­Warfare, wealth, and the crisis of Spartiate society’, in J. Rich and G. Shipley (­eds) War and society in the Greek World (­London and New York) ­146–​­176 ——— ​­(­1994) ‘“­Blind ploutos”? Contemporary images of the role of wealth in classical Sparta’, in A. Powell and S. Hodkinson (­eds) The shadow of Sparta (­London and New York) ­183–​­222 ——— ​­(­1997) ‘­T he development of Spartan society and institutions in the archaic Period’, in L.G. Mitchell and P.J. Rhodes (­eds) The development of institutions in the archaic period (­London) ­83–​­102 ——— ​­(­2000) Property and wealth in classical Sparta (­Swansea) Kulesza, R. (­2022) Sparta: history, state and society (­Berlin) Noetlichs, K.L. (­1987) ‘­Bestechung, Bestechligkeit und die Rolle des Geldes in der spartanischen ­Außen-​­und Innenpolitik vom 7.-​­2. Jh. V. Chr.’, Historia 36.2, ­129–​­170 ­ ancisi-​­Weerdenburg (­ed.), De AgriSingor H.W. (­1993) ‘­Spartan land lots and helot rents’, in H. S cultura. In memoriam Pieter Willem de Neeve (­­1945–​­1990) (­Lyon) ­31–​­60 Wecowski, M. (­2014) The Rise of the Greek Aristocratic Banquet (­Oxford)

183

13 EXILE AND CONFLICTING IDENTITIES IN ARCHAIC AND EARLY CLASSICAL GREECE Katarzyna Kostecka When considering the importance of citizenship and its impact on the life, status, and identity of the Greeks, it is interesting to look at those who were separated from ­it – exiles.1 Exile was a frequent phenomenon in the early Greek world, a common way of regulating political or social tension in the Greek poleis (­Balogh 1943; Baslez 1984; Forsdyke 2005; Bowie 2007). The ­ever-​­changing hierarchies and struggles between elite factions often resulted in the expulsion of the unlucky opponents of the winning clique. These people, often unprepared for the emigration they had to experience, were forced to abandon their home and look for a new life. Their position was often ­paradoxical – ​­they still had (­or hoped to have) an elite status, but without any power attached to it, separated from their polis, their rights as citizens, their main source of income, and the support of their usual networks. In this chapter, I want to address the question of how early Greek exiles negotiated their troubled identity and relations. How did their identity change when they were stripped of their role as citizens? How did they reformulate their broken relationship with their polis or show allegiance to a new one? How did they discuss the experience of the exile itself? How did they react to the assumptions made about them? To explore these questions, I will start by considering the image of the exile in early Greek literature, concentrating on what a banished citizen was believed to be deprived of. Next, I will reflect on the often contradictory strategies that exiles would use to rebuild their position. But most importantly, I will focus on how exiles could express themselves in one specific ­c ontext – ​­athletics. I will argue that athletic agons were an important platform for the banished to communicate with their fellow citizens and the wider Greek world, as well as an opportunity for them to shape their image in this problematic situation. The visibility the Panhellenic agons offered could to a certain degree compensate for the lack of access to the polis’ public life, and it could offer the banished citizen a chance to regain prestige and become more attractive for his old community or a new one. What is more, as athletics were strongly tied to citizen identity (­s ee Duplouy in this volume), they would be an important tool for the temporarily rootless individuals to gain not only recognition, but even legitimization in the eyes of their fellow citizens and other Greeks.

184

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-17

Exile and conflicting identities in archaic & classical Greece

­Exile – ​­an overview The Greek word for going into exile is φεύγω, which means to flee. The same verb was used to describe those who were banished from their community and those who decided to leave it voluntarily due to problematic circumstances (­Forsdyke 2005: 9­ –​­11; Bowie 2007: 21). For instance, Herodotus says that Demaratos ἔφυγε, even though it was his choice to abandon Sparta where he could not realize his ambitions to become a leader. The Greek exile is thus a person who does not fit in his polis anymore. The tension between himself and his polis has to be resolved by separation. Exile was a multifaceted phenomenon: both individuals and whole groups (­the wealthy, a political faction) could be sent into exile, and the reasons, course, and outcomes of each exile could be different (­Forsdyke 2005: ­7–​­11). The figures of exiles and the problem of exile appear already in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Phoenix (­I l. 9.­4 44– ​­495), Patroclus (­I l. 23.­82–​­92), Theoclymenus and Melampous (­O d. 15.­222–​­281), as well as the Cretan stranger from Odysseus’ false tales (­O d. 13.­256–​­286) were all forced or felt forced to leave their communities. In Homer’s poems, exile was connected to either murder or family conflict (­Bowie 2007: ­24–​­27; for a detailed analysis, see Perry 2010). Exile becomes a recurrent subject in ­s eventh-​­and early s­ ixth-​­century poetry: Tyrtaios describes the fate of a war refugee; Theognis gives a few indications on the problematic life of an exile and advice for those who meet an exile; Alcaeus offers a lamenting description of the exile that he experienced; Archilochus, Semonides, and Xenophanes were probably exiled and some allusions to the fact can be found in their poetry (­Bowie 2007: ­29–​­31). Pindar, the epinician poet, who will be the focus of the later part of this chapter, dedicated some odes to exiled winners (­Athanassaki 2011). Tragedies provide examples of mythical figures that went into exile (­Gorman 1994; Tantziou 1997). Last but not least, exiles are mentioned in historical a­ ccounts  – ​­Herodotus in his Histories describes the fate of several exiles, especially Athenians (­a nd according to the Suda Herodotus had been himself in exile, though he does not write about his experience; see Dillery 2007), and some material can be also found in later authors such as Strabo or Pausanias. In the ­p ost-​­Homeric sources, exile becomes more connected with solving political tension in the polis, especially in managing ­intra-​­elite ­c ompetition (­Forsdyke 2005). Exiles were usually influential members of the community, considered by their opponents to be making a problematic impact on community life. In her analysis of exile and ostracism, Sarah Forsdyke argues that exile was such a popular solution to community tensions that it shaped the way many poleis functioned (­Forsdyke 2005: ­30–​­77). Frequent exile could not only destabilize or weaken a community (­e specially if considerable groups were being banished), but also lead to the emergence of new political players and influence structural changes in the polis. But how did exile affect the citizen whose status was suddenly altered? In the next sections, I will explore the impact the exile had on the identity and status of the citizen and how this impact could be managed. I will start with the problems exiles had to face when separated from their community and their citizen status, and then explore the various ways they could find to communicate with their fellow citizens as well as those of other communities in order to better their situation.

185

Katarzyna Kostecka

Deprived citizens The early Greek literature presents banishment as one of the greatest miseries a polites could experience (­Roisman ­1984–​­1986). While exiles could improve their situation (­as will be shown in the subsequent sections), their banishment certainly created obstacles and most crucially deprived them of their position and privileges as citizens. I will now inspect what exiles were believed to be losing when separated from their community and how this loss could impact their social image. I want to consider this as a starting point for understanding the identity of the exile and how they could negotiate it. First, when sent into exile the individual was separated from the public s­ phere – the ​­ political life of his community. Alcaeus complains about the misery of his own exile: I, the wretched one, live a rustic’s life desiring to hear the assembly being summoned, Agesilaidas and the council. (­A lc. 130b, ­1–​­4, trans. Kantzios 2018, based on the Voigt 1971 edition) The poet emphasizes his inability to participate in the assembly and the council and thus to exercise his citizenship in a meaningful way. Exile is comparable to a separation from the civilized world (­Kantzios 2018). Banishment was also perceived as an experience of losing one’s public voice, a thought expressed by Euripides in Phoenissae in a dialogue between Jocasta and Polyneices: What is it like? What annoys the exile? JOCASTA: POLYNEICES: One thing most of all; he cannot speak his mind. JOCASTA: This is a slave’s lot you speak of, not to say what one thinks. (­Eur. Phoen. ­390–​­392, trans. Coleridge 1938) Secondly, the exile was set apart from his private realm: his possessions, his home, and his lands. Alcaeus continues in 130b: The things that my father and my father’s father have grown old with, among these citizens harming one another, from these things I myself have been driven away. (­A lc. 130b, ­5 –​­8, trans. Kantzios 2018) Such a separation was not only an economic problem but also a social one. It impaired the status of an aristos, who would have difficulties maintaining a costly elite lifestyle, and it deprived him of his political capital (­Seaford 2004: 161; Kantzios 2018). A separation from one’s land carried a profound symbolic meaning which is implied in Alcaeus’ poem. It created a separation not only between the exile and his previous life but also between him and his ancestors. Thirdly, the exile is separated from his usual networks: his family, friends, and political supporters. It is also difficult to construct new ones, as friendship with an exile can be risky and problematic (­Montiglio 2005: ­36–​­37). Theognis says: There’s no friend and faithful comrade to one in exile, and this is exile’s most grievous part. (­Thgn. 332a, trans. Edmonds 1931) 186

Exile and conflicting identities in archaic & classical Greece

The question of problematic networks is also tackled by Tyrtaeus: It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks while fighting for his homeland, and it is the most painful thing of all to leave one’s city and rich fields for a beggar’s life, wandering about with his dear mother and aged father, with small children and wedded wife. For giving way to need and hateful poverty, he will be treated with hostility by whomever he meets. (­Tyrt. 10.­1–​­10, trans. Edmonds 1931) Tyrtaeus’ passage indicates yet another issue: banishment was a potential source of shame (­Roisman ­1984–​­1986). Reversals of fortune in general were perceived by the Greeks as signs of divine disapproval (­Bravo 1989). The shame of exile could be problematic for not only the exile himself, but also his family and descendants. In these early ­post-​­Homeric sources, exiles are presented as those who are deprived of what constituted a free c­ itizen – ​­the ability to participate in the community’s political life and to express their voice, the possession of land, their respect, and their networks. All this made their status and social identity problematic. How could exiles construct an image of themselves and communicate while being stripped of these crucial elements of their identity? They could, of course, define themselves by their deficiency as Alcaeus does in 130b, accentuating what they have lost and the contrast between their former and present state. Yet this was not the only way to build their image. In the next sections, I will show what exiles could do besides grieving for their lost home. After all, ‘­hope, they say, is the exile’s food’ (­Eur. Phoen. 396).

Strategies of improvement The literary depictions tend to concentrate on the hopelessness of banishment. Yet when looking at the fates of specific exiles, one can note that there were several ways in which an exile could change his situation (­Garland 2014; Gray 2015; 2018; Isayev 2017; Loddo 2019a, 2019b). First, exiles could try to gather forces, fight those who exiled them, and return to power. They could offer their potential allies a promise of future gain, once they achieved their goal. This happened especially when a considerable group was exiled from their polis (­for instance, the exiled Naxians ally with Miletus’ tyrant Aristagoras who counts on becoming the tyrant of Naxos, Hdt. 5.30), though influential individuals could hope to use this strategy as well (­Pheretime, the mother of the banished Arceislaos, hopes to receive help in attacking Cyrene from Salamis’ tyrant Evelthon, Hdt. 4.162). The attack on the polis would not have to be immediate: some exiles occupied strongholds near their polis awaiting a better time to strike (­Gray 2015). Secondly, exiles could come back to their community in a more peaceful way hoping for a shift in the political climate (­p erhaps due to the death of an influential opponent; we may recall here Alcaeus’ celebration of Myrsilus’ death in fr. 332), or that they will, in time, be forgiven. This strategy, of course, would imply much more waiting, though the exile could actively try to change his reputation in his polis. ​­ Thirdly, exiles could leave their native polis for good and use their r­ esources – the ​­ settle in a new polis (­when connections and information they had and their a­ bilities – to exiled from Sparta, Leutychides moves to Tegea; Hdt. 6.72), to become mercenaries or to participate in the founding of colonies (­Philippus is banished from Croton and joins 187

Katarzyna Kostecka

the expedition of the Spartan Dorieus to found a colony, Hdt. 5.47). They could even try their luck outside of the Greek ­world – ​­many exiles could be encountered in the Persian court (­Hdt. 7.6). Of course, the reality of banishment was often more complex. An exile could choose a way in between these strategies (­for instance, a group of exiled Colophonians were received in Smyrna and during a festival took power in this polis, Hdt 1.150) or one strategy could in time be changed for another. What is important is that banishment was not entirely hopeless: there were many ways through which an exile could find new stability. Yet we should also note that the strategies that exiles employed to better their status would often be mutually exclusive. If an exile chose to attack his polis, he could not hope for a peaceful return and so on. But most importantly, making any of these solutions work would require from the exile considerable effort and much negotiating. His success depended largely on the help of others, on being accepted or receiving enough support or being forgiven. But how could an exile gain this acceptance? He would need to make himself seem attractive or useful to those who had the power to help him. He could do that by having something to ­offer – ​­a skill, some information, or a promise of future gain (­once his situation shifts for the better). But most importantly, the exile would need to work on his social image and be able to present himself as a trustworthy, solid, and loyal ally despite the instability of his status and to convince his potential supporters that he would fit their needs and their goals. It was thus crucial for exiles to find the right platforms to make their voices heard. Ewen L. Bowie shows that an important context where they could communicate were sympotic feasts (­Bowie 2007). But a context I want to explore are athletic agons, which will be the focus of the next part of this chapter.

The importance of athletics Before analyzing how athletics could be used by exiles, I want to make some remarks on their nature and significance. Athletics were crucial for the identity of the Greeks, and they were also tied to citizen identity in particular (­see Duplouy in this volume). The sports competitions at Panhellenic sites attracted Greeks from all over the Mediterranean and offered great visibility for the competitors (­Nagy 1989; Kurke 1991; Papakonstantinou 2019). A victory in a Panhellenic agon was considered to be one of the most prestigious achievements; it could thus have a significant impact on the status of the winner (­Nagy 1989; Thomas 2007). The winners wanted their victory to be widely known and remembered, so to proclaim their victory they ordered statues or epinician odes. These could become interesting tools for shaping one’s identity both in one’s native polis and against a wider Panhellenic a­ udience – the ​­ epinician odes especially (­Nagy 1989; Smith 2007; Nobili 2019). They presented not only the winner’s various achievements, but also his networks, the stories of his kin, the greatness of his polis, and the mythical beginnings of his family or community. Through the odes the victors could thus express how they perceived not only themselves, their community and their place within it, their relations, and present political programmes, but also their ethnic or social identity (­Longo 1984; Kurke 1991; Pavlou 2012). From the point of view of civic identity, athletics were significant on several levels. Panhellenic winners would often be celebrated at official public festivals, and their victories had a strong impact on their status within the polis and could even guarantee special privileges (­Fisher 2018). Poleis would organize local competitions

188

Exile and conflicting identities in archaic & classical Greece

and sponsor training in order to be represented at the prestigious Panhellenic agons. In Pindar’s odes, the praise of the polis, its myths and deities were at the very centre. At the same time, athletics functioned as a common ground for the Greeks. The Panhellenic agons gathered the aristoi from all over the Greek world who competed as equals, despite their many differences. The unifying force of athletics can be seen already in the Odyssey, when Odysseus is invited to a contest of disc throwing in Scheria; even though he is deprived of his riches and without his companions, he can still show his worth by taking part in the agon. Since athletics were significant in many poleis throughout the Greek world, participating in them could also have an impact on one’s mobility. As Nick Fisher and Zinon Papakonstantinou show, some poleis offered citizenship for athletic winners in order to be proclaimed as their community and thus enhance their own prestige (­Papakonstantinou 2013, 2019; Fisher 2018). Finally, we should bear in mind that even though athletics were typically a domain of the elite, their prestige made them especially attractive to those whose status was somehow unstable. Thomas K. Hubbard shows that while the epinician odes presented the winners as envied and admired by their fellow citizens and the whole Greek world, many of them, in fact, were a very ‘­problematic elite’ – ​­aristoi caught in political conflict, rulers with crumbling power, and, of course, exiles (­Hubbard 2001). Having all this in mind, in the next section, I will inspect how exiles used athletics to assert their legitimacy in the eyes of their fellow citizens and other Greeks, to communicate with the outside world, and to build and negotiate their identity and relations.

Cimon of ­Athens – ​­the traded victory In Book 6, Herodotus tells the story of Cimon’s banishment from Athens by Pisistratus. Cimon belonged to the family of the s­ o-​­called Philaedae, who were, as Herodotus specifies, a rich and powerful family in Athens at the time when Pisistratus came to power. It is clear that a strong rivalry existed between the two ­families – ​­Herodotus describes how Miltiades set off to become a tyrant of Chersonese, refusing to be subject to Pisistratus’ rule (­6.­35–​­6.38). The influential citizen Cimon was also a potential threat to the rule of Pisistratus and so he had to be removed from the community. But what is especially interesting is what Cimon does after being exiled: It had befallen his father Cimon son of Stesagoras to be banished from Athens by Pisistratus son of Hippocrates. While in exile he happened to take the Olympic prize in the ­four-​­horse chariot, and by taking this victory he won the same prize as his ­half-​­brother Miltiades. At the next Olympic games he won with the same horses but permitted Pisistratus to be proclaimed victor, and by resigning the victory to him he came back from exile to his own property under truce. After taking yet another Olympic prize with the same horses, he happened to be murdered by Pisistratus’ sons, since Pisistratus was no longer living. (­Hdt. 6.103, trans. Godley 1920) Cimon manages to come back from exile by using athletics as a tool. He transfers his own victory to Pisistratus, who in exchange permits him to peacefully return to the community. But what is the meaning of this exchange? I believe it is significant on several levels.

189

Katarzyna Kostecka

First, the situation shows the enormous advantage participating in athletics could have for an exile. A triumph in a Panhellenic agon is a prestigious achievement. As Leslie Kurke argues, the prestige from the victory benefited not only the winner himself, but also his family and his community (­1991). Yet in this situation, Cimon goes one step further: he resigns from the prestige that he himself acquired and transfers it to someone else (­Papakonstantinou 2013: ­99–​­118). This is, of course, possible because he participates in chariot ­races – ​­in which one usually did not compete in person, but rather hired a charioteer. The status of the winner thus becomes a movable good and one can expect to receive something valuable in exchange. Cimon as an exile was deprived of much, yet he acquired the capital of prestige that he could now trade. But there is more to this exchange. It is, in fact, a very symbolic act and a real negotiation of relations between Cimon and Pisistratus. Cimon was exiled as an overly powerful citizen who could endanger Pisistratus’ rule. The exchange was crucial in the context of the negotiations of power occurring between them. Cimon lets Pisistratus be the winner, and thus symbolically shows his own subordination to the tyrant. He can be reintegrated into the community, but only if he shows that he is able to belittle himself and consider his own inferiority towards the one who exiled him. While in exile, Cimon reshapes his social image. He makes a spectacular achievement, but then resigns from the prestige of it and thus he shows himself as someone humble and able to compromise. By giving away his identity as a Panhellenic winner, he can regain his identity as a citizen. Perhaps it is no accident that Peisistratus’ sons killed Cimon after another victory. He was no longer protected by the truce with their father, but what is more, through his new triumph he gained a dangerous visibility and thus had to be stopped.

The ­Alcmaeonidae – ​­two exile strategies Another example of exiles who used the athletic context to reclaim their position are the Alcmaeonidae. The Alcmaeondiae were exiled several times and developed various strategies to deal with banishment. What I want to concentrate on is their reconstruction of the temple of Apollo during their exile in the times of Pisistratus, and Megacles’ participation in the Pythian agon during his exile from democratic Athens. Herodotus describes the exile of the Alcmaeonidae during the tyranny of the Pisistratidae and their activity during that time in Book 5: Hippias, their tyrant, was growing ever more bitter in enmity against the Athenians because of Hipparchus’ death, and the Alcmaeonidae, a family of Athenian stock banished by the sons of Pisistratus, attempted with the rest of the exiled Athenians to make their way back by force and free Athens. They were not successful in their return and suffered instead a great reverse. After fortifying Leipsydrium north of Paeonia, they, in their desire to use all devices against the sons of Pisistratus, hired themselves to the Amphictyons for the building of the temple at Delphi which exists now but was not there yet then. (­Hdt. 5. 62, trans. Godley 1920) The Alcameonidae want to return to Athens and they have a very different strategy than Cimon in mind: they want to fight, not to negotiate, with the Pisistratidae. 190

Exile and conflicting identities in archaic & classical Greece

When they do not achieve their goal at the first take, they start gathering their forces in the fortification of Leipsydrium, but they also reconstruct the temple of Apollo in Delphi. Why was it important for them in this moment of uncertainty? By funding the reconstruction of the temple, the Alcmaeonidae would gain high visibility for themselves. Their generosity could be admired not only by the Athenians, but also by any Greek (­a nd potential ally) coming to the sanctuary or to the athletic agons. The reconstruction showed the wealth and power the Alcmaeonidae could still exercise despite their exile and how a community could benefit from their presence. It was ​­ showed the devotion of the Alcmaeonidae and their role as also a symbolic ­a ct – it mediators between the Athenians and the divine. This could be especially important for exiles, as their relationship with the gods could be perceived as problematic. As already mentioned, unexpected changes of fortune were often considered by the Greeks as a sign of divine disapproval (­Bravo 1989). Their strategy of communication during exile is very different from Cimon’­s – ​­while all want to gain more visibility, the Almcaeonidae use it to show themselves superior, not subject, to the Pisistratidae. In 486, another Alcmaeonid, Megacles, was ­exiled  – ​­ostracized from democratic Athens. While in exile, he won a victory in Delphi in horse r­ acing – ​­a most prestigious ­sport – and ​­ ordered an epinician ode from Pindar. Pythian 7 provides a great example of how one could communicate his position, identity, and relationship with his polis during exile. Interestingly, the ode for Megacles does not mention his banishment explicitly (­contrary to other odes dedicated to exiles that are discussed below). The only hints of what Megacles experienced can be found towards the end of the ode: I am pleased at your recent good fortune, but grieved that success is repaid with envy. Yet this, they say, is how the world goes: happiness that thrives and stays with a man brings with it now good things, now bad. (­Pind. Pyth 7.­18–​­22, trans. Verity 2007) Concentrating on the motif of envy, Pindar shows that Megacles’ exile was not s­ hameful – ​­it should rather be considered as a sign of his greatness that was not appreciated (­this is similar to the image of the ‘­honourable exile’ popular in the late fifth century; Roisman ­1984–​­1986). Yet aside from the subtle hints of exile, the relationship between Megacles and Athens is presented as unproblematic, as if the bond has never been broken. Athens is praised at the very beginning of the ode: Athens, that great city, is the finest prelude to lay down as a foundation for songs in praise of a chariot victory won by the powerful Alcmaeonidae. Could you make your home in a land whose name enjoys a more glorious fame in Hellas? (­Pind. Pyth 7.­1–​­5, trans. Verity 2007) Pindar thus connects the glory of the Alcmaeonidae with the glory of Athens, showing them as intertwined. What is more, by participating in athletics Alcmaeon can still, to some point, take part in the civic life of Athens, even though he is officially separated from his polis. 191

Katarzyna Kostecka

But a crucial element that Pindar uses to shape the relation between Megacles and the Athenians is the temple of Apollo: No, for the tale of Erechtheus’ citizens is known in every city, they who have made your temple at holy Pytho, Apollo, a marvellous sight. (­Pind. Pyth 7.­9 –​­11, trans. Verity 2007) Pindar introduces the temple in an unexpected way. Instead of praising Megacles or his family for the deed, he suggests that the temple was reconstructed by the Athenians. Lucia Athanassaki, who analyzes the ode in detail, argues that the passage is an important strategic move for Megacles and should be understood in the context of his exile (­Athanassaki 2011). Megacles was criticized by the Athenians for his lavishness; by emphasizing that the temple’s reconstruction was carried out by all the Athenians, Megacles purposefully minimizes himself. I believe Megacles’ strategy can also be understood in a similar light as the exchange between Miltiades and Pisistratus. Megacles symbolically transfers the prestige of reconstructing the temple from his family to the Athenian citizens as a whole. The temple, which was once used to show the greatness of the Alcmaeonidae, now becomes a propitiatory gift. The transfer of prestige to the citizens of Athens shows that Megacles is able to become subordinate and that while doing great and spectacular deeds he can put the community first. Again, an exile proves himself capable of resigning from some part of his identity as a victor, in a hope of reclaiming his identity as a citizen. Of course, in the case of Megacles, the matter was ­easier – ​­he was ostracized and so he knew he eventually would return to Athens. But his act was preparing the ground for resolving the tensions upon his return between him and the citizens who ostracized him, and it could even be connected to a hope for an earlier return (­in the end, Megacles did return in 480; he was recalled to Athens in the face of the Persian t­ hreat – [Arist.] ​­ Ath. Pol. 22.8).

Damophilos and A ­ rcesilaos – ​­the reconciliation of an exile Another way the athletic context was used by an exile can be found in Pindar’s Pythian 4. This epinician ode is not dedicated to an exile, but it does contain an exile’s plea for a return to his polis. The exile used his relationship with the epinician poet, and someone else’s victory, as well as the visibility it provided to communicate with his former community. How did he shape his identity in such a context? The ode praises Arcesilaos the king of Cyrene and his success in Delphi. In the last verses, Pindar introduces another ­Cyrenian – ​­Damophilos, an exile, on whose behalf he asks the triumphant Arcesilaos for forgiveness. Why exactly Pindar inserted such a plea is debated in scholarship. Did he meet Damophilos in Thebes and decide to help him on account of their friendship? Was he commissioned by Damophilos? I agree with the view that Arcesilaos and Damophilos already made an agreement (­Braswell 1988). It is hard to imagine Pindar not consulting his client in this matter. Damophilos’ plea was probably included with Arcesilaos’ blessing, and as the ode would be sung publicly, it would offer a possibility of making a symbolic gesture of public reconciliation. Through the ode, Damophilos would ask for forgiveness in front of the community and Arcesilaos would show his mercy as a king. Let us inspect how, through this interesting means, Pindar constructed Damophilos’ identity, his exile, and his relation with his polis. Damophilos’ exile, unlike Megacles’, is presented in a very straightforward way as his great tragedy: 192

Exile and conflicting identities in archaic & classical Greece

Cyrene and the distinguished house of Battus have come to know the good sense of Damophilos: he is young among the young, but in deliberations he is an old man who has seen a hundred years; he robs the wicked tongue of its clamorous voice, and has learned to hate the arrogant, but he does not fight against the good, nor yet delays the fulfilment of any undertaking, for opportunity’s moment lasts but a short space for men. He knows this well, and serves it as a steward, not as a hired man. The cruellest thing, they say, is to know the good but to be forced to stand apart from it. And in truth he, like Atlas, now struggles under the weight of heaven, far from his own land and possession (­Pind. Pyth. 4 ­280–​­290, trans. Verity 2007) Damophilos is separated from his community, his wealth, and his roots. At the same time, Pindar accentuates the beneficial consequences of the banishment: in the end, it enabled Damophilos to grow and to become wiser. Though exile deprived him of his position and identity as a citizen of Cyrene, it also paradoxically shaped him as its potential ideal c­ itizen – at ​­ least from the perspective of Arcesilaos. Damophilos is presented as wise and tempered, someone almost incapable of aggression. This hints at the tension that once existed between Damophilos (­or the faction to which he belonged) and Arcesilaos. Pindar wants to emphasize that should Damophilos return, he will not be a threat to Arcesialos’ rule. By showing the benefits of banishment, Pindar also manages to put both Damophilos as the exile and Arcesilaos as the one who exiled him in a good light and thus prepares the ground for their r­ econciliation. The motif of a tamed conflict appears also in the description of Cyrene: He prays that now he has drained his malignant sickness to the dregs he may one day see his home, and may at Apollo’s spring join in symposia and many times pledge his heart to the pleasures of youth, and in the company of discerning citizens may hold the decorated lyre in his hands and attain peace, causing no harm to anyone nor suffering it himself at the hands of his fellow citizens. (­Pind. Pyth. 4. ­294–​­301, trans. Verity 2007) Pindar presents Cyrene as ultimately a peaceful polis where all live in ­harmony – ​­again, an emphasis which is important in the light of the past stasis. And finally, Pindar accentuates that Damophilos has something to offer to his community: Then, Arcesilaos, he could tell what a spring of immortal verse he found when he was recently a guest in Thebes. (­Pind. Pyth. 4. ­302–​­303, trans. Verity 2007) Damophilos has learned songs and this new skill could be pleasant to his townsmen, and certainly to Arcesilaos. We should also note that Damophilos’ relation with T ­ hebes is not overly accentuated. The polis is presented as his host, but it is not indicated that Damophilos would really want to stay there. His loyalty to Cyrene is unquestioned. 193

Katarzyna Kostecka

Finally, we should note that by being praised in the ode, Damophilos becomes again a part of the civic life of Cyrene. Although he is physically distanced from his community, he ‘­appears’ in the public festival and thus can regain a part of his identity as a citizen.

Ergoteles of ­Himera – ​­the rejection of the community For the last example, I want to focus on an exile who did not intend to return to his polis: Ergoteles, a winner praised by Pindar in Olympian 12, an ode dated to 470 (­Nicholson 2016: ­237–​­253). Ergoteles was originally from Knossos but was exiled after a stasis and moved to Himera, the polis which he represented at the moment of his victory. Olympian 12 tackles three important themes: the presentation of the exile itself, the relation with Ergoteles’ fatherland, and with the new community in which Ergoteles finds himself. Let us start with how Pindar shows Ergoteles’ exile: Saviour Fortune, daughter of Zeus the Deliverer, I pray to you: watch over Himera and keep its strength secure. For it is you who guide swift ships on the open sea, and on land order tumultuous battles and c­ ounsel-​­giving assemblies. But men’s hopes are tossed up and down as they voyage through waves of empty lies. No man on earth has yet found out from the gods a sure token of things to come; man’s perception is blinded as to the future. Many things fall out for men in ways they do not expect: sometimes their h ­ oped-​­for pleasure is thwarted, sometimes, when they have encountered storms of pain, their grief changes in a moment to profound joy. Son of Philanor, the glory that your swift feet have brought you would have shed its leaves ingloriously, like a cock that fights only in its native yard, had not factional strife robbed you of Cnossus, your homeland. But, Ergoteles, now you have been crowned at Olympia once too at the Isthmus and twice at Pytho, you bring fame to the Nymphs’ warm springs and live in a land that is now your own. (­Pind. Ol. 12.­10–​­17, trans. Verity 2007) Pindar starts with the motif of changing fortune, which seems well placed in the context of exile, and one expects him to conclude that Ergoteles had to endure an unfortunate reversal. Yet Pindar twists this perspective: he shows that paradoxically Ergoteles’ fortune turned for the better. Exile gave him a unique chance to enter the wider world and achieve fame in a Panhellenic agon which he would not have been able to do had he stayed in Knossos. Pindar shows Knossos, Ergoteles’ fatherland, as a land of no opportunities, closed to the outside world, where effort is uselessly spent on quarrelling (­Silk 2007: 190; Athanassaki 2011). He does not attempt to forge a connection, even an emotional bond, between Knossos and Ergoteles, and there is no trace of regret or nostalgia, quite the ­contrary – ​­Ergoteles is cut out of the community, he has outgrown it. Instead, Pindar builds a tie between Ergoteles and his new home. Pindar starts and ends the poem with praise of Himera, which thus frames the story of the exile. Pindar connects Ergoteles to Himera on three levels. First, he builds a religious link. At the beginning of the ode, Pindar asks Zeus to bless Himera, and by the end of the ode he 194

Exile and conflicting identities in archaic & classical Greece

mentions the local ­deities – ​­you (­Ergoteles) bring fame to the Nymphs’ warm springs (­Pind. Ol. 12.20). The fact that Pindar concentrates on this religious aspect is not a­ ccidental – there ​­ is a clear link between citizen identity and partaking in the religious life of a community (­Blok 2017: ­47–​­99), thus Ergoteles’ belonging to Himera is emphasized. Second, the ode ends with important words ‘­and (­you) live in a land that is now your ­ elonging – ​­Ergoteles is now own’ (­Pind. Ol. 12.21). Land indicates a strong sense of b separated from the land of his ancestors, but he can start to build a new stability for himself and his descendants in his new polis. And finally, Pindar builds the connection between Ergoteles and Himera by accentuating that the victories are dedicated to Himera. This is crucial, especially because there are no other odes dedicated for winners from Himera, so the act of Ergoteles was something very out of the ordinary and impressive for this ­community – ​­thus he was showing through his triumph and by praising Himera what his new community can gain from him. Did Ergoteles become a citizen? We may not be entirely sure, but the ode does imply that. Ergoteles certainly has the hallmarks of a c­ itizen – ​­he partakes in the religious life of the community, and he has been offered land. Land ownership was usually a citizen’s privilege (­Duplouy 2018: 18). Interestingly, we know from Diodorus that around 476 Theron integrated in Himera both Dorians and ‘­any others who so wished’ (­Diod. Sic. 11.49) to become citizens. Since the ode is dated around 470, Egoletes would thus be a quite recent citizen. Pindar builds a completely different image of Ergoteles than of his other clients, and it is because Ergoteles’ primary goal is different. He does not expect to change the political situation in Knossos, but to build a good place for himself in his new community. We should bear in mind that even if such an exile was accepted in a new community (­or even became a citizen as Ergoteles probably did), he would still up to a point be an ­outsider – he ​­ had a different accent, did not perhaps know all the rituals, had limited networks, and had either little or no family. His position may have not been the most stable, he may be perceived as not completely belonging. It is particularly important for such an exile to promote a certain image of himself and that is why Pindar presented Ergoteles as a new ­man – ​­who does not want to retain any connection with his old community, and who is able to contribute to his new land by this impressive act. Pindar tries to wipe away the shame that could be connected to exile, turning it into the foundation of his spectacular success. Ergoteles is no longer a wretched exile missing his home but someone who is superior to his former community. *** To conclude, exiles were separated from their life and their identity as citizens and their situation was changeable and dynamic. To stabilize it, they needed to find allies willing to help them in either returning to their community, attacking it, or finding a new one. It was thus crucial for them to communicate with the outside world. Yet this was hindered since they could not use their voice in the usual context of their community’s public ­life – ​­we should remember that most exiles belonged to the elite and were accustomed to using the communicative aspects of their citizenship to gain and maintain influence within their polis. However, during their banishment, exiles still had the possibility to participate in the elite ­supra-​­polis culture within which they could regain 195

Katarzyna Kostecka

visibility and prestige. The athletic agons were especially u ­ seful – ​­they gave exiles the possibility to acquire visibility and prestige, and thus put them in a good position to negotiate their identity and relations. As we saw, athletics could be used in different ways to build the image of exiles depending on the goals they had in mind. The exile could show that he had something to ­offer – ​­either the prestige of the victory itself, or something else entirely: the prestige from their wealth, or a newly acquired skill. But mostly, they could try to alter their social image and rethink their relation with their old community or hope to build a connection with a new community. We saw how differently exiles discuss their experience of exile, their relations, and their own place in the world. But an especially important element were the attempts by exiles to rearrange their position towards the community that rejected ­them – ​­those who want to return peacefully purposefully minimize themselves in order to fit in, while those who resign from it or want to fight show themselves superior to their former community. They either outgrow their citizenship or need to reduce themselves to fit into it.

Note 1 The research on this chapter was supported by the National Science Centre grants number 2016/­23/­N/­HS3/­0 0838 (­Mythical genealogies of aristocratic families in archaic and classical Greece) and 2016/­21/­B/­HS3/­03096 (­Greek aristocratic culture [­VIII–​­V BCE]: lifestyles and value systems) conducted by Prof. Marek Węcowski.

Bibliography Athanassaki, L. (­2011) ‘­Song, politics, and cultural memory: Pindar’s Pythian 7 and the Alcmaeonid temple of Apollo’, in L. Athanassaki and E. Bowie (­eds) Archaic and classical choral song performance, politics and dissemination (­Berlin) ­235–​­268 Balogh, E. (­1943) Political refugees in ancient Greece: from the period of the tyrants to Alexander the Great (­Johannesburg) Baslez, M. (­1984) L’étranger dans la Grèce antique (­Paris) Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Bowie, E.L. (­2007) ‘­Early expatriates: displacement and exile in archaic poetry’, in J. Gaertner (­ed.) Writing exile: the discourse of displacement in ­G reco-​­Roman antiquity and beyond (­Leiden) ­21–​­50 Braswell, B. (­1988) A commentary on the fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar (­Berlin) Bravo B. (­1989) ‘­A reté e ricchezza nella polis dell’età arcaica secondo: le testimonianze dei poeti’, Index 17, ­47–​­79 Coleridge, E.P. (­trans.) (­1938) The plays of Euripides (­London) Dillery, J. (­2007) ‘­Exile: the making of the Greek historian’, in J. Gaertner (­ed.) Writing exile: the discourse of displacement in ­G reco-​­Roman antiquity and beyond (­Leiden) ­51–​­70 Duplouy, A. and Brock, R. (­eds) (­2018) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) Duplouy, A. (­2018) ‘­Pathways to archaic citizenship’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­1–​­49 Fisher, N. (­2018) ‘­Athletics and citizenship’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­189–​­226 Forsdyke, S. (­2005) Exile, ostracism, and democracy: the politics of exclusion in ancient Greece (­Princeton, NJ) Garland, R. (­2014) Wandering Greeks: the ancient Greek diaspora from the age of Homer to the death of Alexander the Great (­Princeton, NJ) Godley, A.D. (­1920) Herodotus (­London) Gorman, R. (­1994) ‘­Poets, playwrights, and the politics of exile and asylum in ancient Greece and Rome’, International Journal of Refugee Law 6, ­402– ​­424 Gray, B. (­2015) Stasis and stability: exile, the polis, and political thought, c. ­4 04–​­146 BC (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Citizenship as barrier and opportunity for ancient Greek and modern refugees’, Humanities 7.3, DOI: 10.3390/­h7030072

196

Exile and conflicting identities in archaic & classical Greece Edmonds, J. (­1931) Elegy and iambus (­London) Hubbard, T.K. (­2001) ‘­Pindar and Athens after the Persian War’, in D. Papenfuss and V.M. Strocka (­eds) Gab es das griechische Wunder? Griechenland zwischen dem Ende des 6. und der Mitte des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (­Mainz) ­387– ​­400 Isayev, E. (­2017) ‘­Between hospitality and asylum: a historical perspective on displaced agency’, International Review of the Red Cross 99, ­1–​­24 Kantzios, I. (­2018) ‘­A lcaeus fragment 130b V and the literature of exile’, Arethusa 51.3, ­191–​­207 Kurke, L. (­1991) The traffic in praise: Pindar and the poetics of social economy, Pindar and the poetics of social economy (­Ithaca, NY) Loddo, L. (­2019a) ‘­Forced migrations, ­self-​­imposed exile and opportunities for social promotion in classical Athens: prospects for groups and individuals’, Rationes Rerum 13, ­79–​­110 ——— ​­(­2019b) ‘­Political exiles and their use of diplomacy in classical Greece’, Ktema 44, ­7–​­21 Longo, O. (­1984) ‘­Su alcuni termini di parentela in Pinciaro: classificatorio e descrittivo’, in Lirica greca da Archiloco a Elitis, Studi in onore di Filippo Maria Pontani (­Padua) ­155–​­174 Montiglio, S. (­2005) Wandering in ancient Greek culture (­Chicago) Nagy, G. (­1989) ‘­The “­professional muse” and models of prestige in ancient Greece’, Cultural Critique 12, ­133–​­143 Nicholson, N. (­2016) The poetics of victory in the Greek West: epinician, oral tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire (­Oxford) Nobili, C. (­2019) ‘­Strategies of communication in agonistic epigrams’, in C. ­Ritter-​­Schmalz and R. Schwitter (­eds) Antike Texte und ihre Materialität (­Berlin and Boston, MA) ­27–​­44 Papakonstantinou, Z. (­2013) ‘­Cimon the Elder, Peisistratus and the tethrippon Olympic victory of 532 BCE’, Journal of Ancient History 1, ­99–​­118 ——— ​­(­2019) Sport and identity in ancient Greece (­London) Pavlou, M. (­2012) ‘­Fathers in absentia in Pindar’s epinician poetry’, GRBS 52, ­57–​­88 Perry, T. (­2010), Exile in Homeric epic, diss. Toronto (­unpublished) Roisman, J. (­­1984–​­1986) ‘­The image of the political exile in archaic Greece’, AncSoc 15/­17, ­23–​­32 Seaford, R. (­2004) Money and the early Greek mind (­Cambridge) Silk, M. (­2007) ‘­Pindar’s poetry as poetry: a literary commentary on Olympian 12’, in S. Hornblower and C. Morgan (­eds) Pindar’s poetry, patrons, and festivals from Archaic Greece to the Roman Empire (­Oxford) ­177–​­197 Smith, R. (­2007) ‘­Pindar, athletes, and the early Greek statue habit’, in S. Hornblower and C. Morgan (­eds) Pindar’s poetry, patrons and festivals: from archaic Greece to the Roman Empire (­Oxford) ­141–​­166 Tantziou, A. (­1997) Patterns of exile in Greek Tragedy, diss. Illinois (­unpublished).  Thomas, R. (­2007) ‘­Fame, memorial, and choral poetry: the origins of epinician ­poetry – ​­a historical study’, in S. Hornblower and C. Morgan (­eds) Pindar’s poetry, patrons and festivals: from archaic Greece to the Roman Empire (­Oxford) ­141–​­166 Verity, A. (­2007) Pindar: the complete Odes, with an introduction and notes by Stephen Inston (­Oxford) Voigt, E.-​­M. (­1971) Sappho et Alcaeus. Fragmenta (­A msterdam)

197

14 GRANTING CITIZENSHIP TO WOMEN IN ANCIENT EPIRUS1 Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli

Introductory remarks The analysis of two epigraphic texts of the fourth century BCE found in the sanctuary of Dodona which report the granting of citizenship to two women (­Cabanes 1976: 534 n.1 = SEG XV 384) provides an excellent opportunity to address the issue of female citizenship in the ancient Greek world.2 This is a matter that is still difficult to interpret and on which, to date, there is no agreement among scholars. When introducing the topic, it should be stressed that the word politeia, meaning citizenship, is rarely associated with women in the documents discovered so far. Moreover, it is also important to note that we have no evidence of any decree, from either Athens or the rest of Greece, granting citizenship to women, which predates these decrees from Dodona. The only example of a similar kind can be found in a decree from ca. 427 BCE, in which Athenian citizenship is granted to survivors of Plataea, following the attack by the Thebans and Spartans. In these circumstances, citizenship was granted en bloc by decree to all refugees: men, women, and children.3 As we know, however, this concession was collective, and women benefited from a general provision that involved all individuals and allowed them to be considered as citizens, therefore as part of the Athenian community, yet granted political rights only to the second generation, that is, to those born to the new citizens. This provision, which was made in an emergency, must be viewed in a context of crisis and as dictated by reason of necessity, as there seem to be no other similar cases. In the case of the Plataeans, women probably had the sole role of transmitting civic legitimacy. It should also be noted that the feminine forms politis and astē are found in very few cases. These two terms, which in the masculine indicate citizen status and intrinsically characterize this condition, are found in the feminine only in a few texts; among these, those from the Demosthenic corpus are notable for, as Claude Mossé and Riccardo Di Donato suggest, their potential use in reconstructing the status of women in Athens (­Mossé 1979; Mossé and Di Donato 1983). In fact, to understand the meaning and motivations that lie behind the decree of Dodona and to try to explain this and other similar rare cases found in peripheral areas and in different periods, mostly from the Hellenistic period or from the late classical period in Epirus, we must make a comparison 198

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-18

Granting citizenship to women in ancient Epirus

with Athens and its attitude towards female citizenship or in any case its conception of women as citizens (­on citizenship in classical Athens, see the essential study by Josine Blok (­2017); see also Christopher Joyce in this volume). This comparison with a fairly ­well-​­known society such as that of the Athenians will hopefully help to shed light on a complex issue. With reference to the speeches, we should first of all note that they contain two terms to indicate the woman citizen: astē and politis. The term astē is usually used to indicate a woman of Athenian birth, thus a civic status, a state of belonging to the city as a physical place. The term is found in the speeches 29 times. Then there is the word politis, used four times in matters specifically related to legal status (­Mossé and Di Donato 1983: 152). This term is found in other contexts and authors, but the occurrences are very few (­Soph. El. 1227, Eur. El. 1335, Pl. Leg. 814 c4, Arist. Pol. 1275b.33 and 1278a.28, Isoc. 14. 51). Even if one accepts the opinion of Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet, who in her article (­2016) comes to the conclusion that the low occurrence of these feminine terms is due to the selection made by tradition, the low percentage of their use is definitely evident. The importance of the different value that the Greeks gave to these two terms, as indicators of full citizenship or lack thereof, has been clearly shown in a philological study carried out by Cynthia Patterson (­1986), who claims that astos is, even in the feminine astē, used to indicate individuals born of citizens, as stated in Pericles’ law of 451/450 BCE, with particular reference to civil rights, whereas politēs was used most often with reference to male citizens to indicate the possession of all political rights. The main question is thus to understand what value female citizenship had and whether possession of this status guaranteed women rights of participation and sharing, including the possibility of accessing some positions of social value. It is also necessary to ask if granting citizenship to women was possible and, if so, for what reasons. We can safely state today that the mother of ­full-​­fledged male citizens in the Athenian polis had to be a citizen, at least from 451/­450 BCE, the year in which the proposal of Pericles was approved by the assembly (­on Pericles’ law see now Patterson 1981; Patterson 2005; Blok 2009). This was a functional status that, however, did not make the woman politically active, at least apparently, especially in those areas reserved only to men, nor allowed her to participate in the deliberative, judicial, and legislative bodies of the polis. Hence, in Athens, what were the requirements for being a citizen apart from being born of citizen parents? And furthermore, was female citizenship granted exclusively to create new citizens, or were there also other circumstances in which it could be granted? The term politeia indicates the condition of citizenship, which not only carries duties but also grants rights that the citizen can benefit from. Thus, if women were citizens too, because they were born of citizens and considered as such for practical reasons (­that of giving birth to politai), they indeed had duties towards society, but they also had to be granted rights in the social context. Therefore, in accordance with Claudine Leduc, the city of Athens in the middle of the fifth century BCE invented the status of ‘­mothers of citizens’, a condition thanks to which, we can safely state, Athenian women would be granted the status of politai, because of the involvement of the citizenship rights of the future citizens of the polis (­Leduc ­1994–​­1995). Moreover, following again the reasoning of Leduc and other scholars, we believe it is not wrong to think that in the Greek world the notion of citizenship was much broader than the concept of active participation of the individual in assemblies or in exercising justice and the powers of magistracy. It is our opinion that the case of the 199

Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli

Plataeans corroborates this broader view. In fact, while the Plataeans were accepted and welcomed in Athens and were included by decree in the civic corpus, their access to political offices was forbidden, although it was granted to their descendants. This implies that the obligation to have citizen parents in order to obtain full citizenship remained in force, and even if the decree was an emergency provision, there were no exceptions to the law. Thus, the granting of citizenship to women may be viewed as the need to create mothers of citizens, allowing them to contract a rightful marriage with citizens without being considered foreigners. Instead of an emphasis on political participation, according to Geneviève Hoffmann and again with reference to Athens, politeia for women was important mainly for the religious aspect, allowing them to take part in the religious activities of the city and the community, since worship activities were essential for good living in the community of the family and wider society (­Hoffmann 1999). The same opinion is shared by Nicolas F. Jones, who limits active female participation to worship, those activities that had to do with religion and aspects of public life connected with this realm. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that perhaps Athenian public life did not clearly separate religion from the state, and that the sacred sphere was so well regulated and structured as to allow, without too many obstacles, the access of the female part of society to religious offices. This attitude, viewed as openness by Jones, can be confirmed by the high number of priestesses (­Jones 1999: ­124–​­126, ­264–​­265). One might think that this was the natural extension of a woman’s household duties, but we must remember that worship was a very important part of public duties and of the life of a citizen, a necessary aspect of practising politeia, and therefore it was necessary that female citizens also took part in it. Even if practising only a partial politeia, as believed by many, women were members of the urban community to all effects because they were members of families and groups of citizens. Blok also argues for the importance of women’s participation in sacred activities, precisely because being a male citizen or a female citizen means, as already mentioned, taking part in the politeia (­political life) of the city (­Blok 2017). According to Hoffmann, the notion of politis, like that of politēs, means being able to perform activities compatible with the status assigned by the civic body. It is, in fact, the whole life of the city and of the citizens that constitutes politeia, both private and public life, both military and political, from which women would not be completely excluded. It is, indeed, through participation in the affairs of the city, especially in religious matters, that women find their place in the community. Thus, their responsibility in religious affairs and the recognition of their status gave women a specific place in family and community life, where everyone had a role and scope of action, not only in Athens but also in Hellenized Epirus (­Hoffmann 1999). In this context, in fact, granting politeia to women by decree may mean acknowledging their necessary contribution to good social order. Women would thus be acknowledged as belonging to a group that could also grant them protection and defence. It should not be forgotten that women in Greece could enter into contracts, possess goods and in some cases even work, and did not always require the support of a kyrios, a guardian, to do so (­on this point see, Gallo 2017; on the labour of women in classical Athens, see Brock 1994). Of course, these were not requisites that would grant citizenship, but we could speculate that a free woman, a citizen with a certain level of autonomy and legal ability, could also have access to some roles within the organization of society. 200

Granting citizenship to women in ancient Epirus

According to Sebillotte Cuchet, there were women politai in Greece. In our opinion, we could also hypothesize that because they were citizens, women held citizenship which, even if only passive or p ­ artial – ​­a consideration due above all to a political approach to the m ­ atter – ​­had greater weight than has long been believed (­S ebillotte Cuchet 2016). To support this hypothesis, it would be sufficient to consider the definition of the polis, conceived as an autonomous and sovereign political community that is identified with its all citizens, meaning men and women. It can therefore be said that, if there is a distinction between male and female citizenship, this is to be found in the different functions that the polis appointed to its citizens and not in the status or nature of citizens: the origin of this division of tasks, we believe, can be found in the internal organization of the polis, which in this division appointed women to certain functions rather than others. This is an attitude in which, in our opinion, not a discriminating tendency but rather a practical one should be sought, in a context in which roles were well defined and regulated. Furthermore, we must not forget that for the Greeks the honour, decorum, and respect associated with the members of a family were important too, both in private life and when these members held public offices, and these values had to be respected by all family members, including female ones.4 Since, as already mentioned, political life contained in itself different functions, these were distributed in the polis according to different criteria, among which was probably gender. For sure, citizenship was as important for the female part of the population as it was for men, at least at a civic level. Moreover, without female full citizens the polis could not have had citizens with full civic rights. As regards the lack of decrees granting citizenship to women, it probably should be viewed in the light of the relatively closed nature of Athenian society, which tended to preserve rights only for members of the community, allowing access to external members only in exceptional cases or for reasons of necessity. To sum up, it is quite safe to assume that in Athens there were women politai, and that these had an important impact not only within the family, where the role they played as mothers and wives of citizens is w ­ ell-​­known, but also outside of the family, where their contribution to the performance of functions which they were called to fulfil especially in the religious sphere was essential. Finally, it is our opinion that the most important political role that female politai played was precisely that of being women at the service of the community to which they belonged, and that this condition granted them an incomplete but legitimate politeia, which was probably not partial or passive as many claim but contextualized in a society based on values and beliefs that were full of limitations.

Analysis of the texts Two f­ ourth-​­century BCE decrees from the sanctuary of Dodona, engraved on the same stone, found in 1953 and published for the first time by Dimitrios E. Evangelidis (­1956), contain the first individual grants of citizenship to women, a practice attested in only very few other sources.5 Another example of this individual granting of citizenship is contained in an inscription of the third century BCE from Thermos, in which the koinon (­federal state) of the Aetolians grants citizenship to a certain Kallisto, daughter of Araichmos of Alea in Arcadia, thus giving her and her children the same citizen status as held by the other Aetolians (­IG IX 12 1, 9). In a later period, a decree from Lamia, 201

Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli

dated to 218/21­7 BCE, concerning the poet Aristodama of Smyrna, also contains a grant of proxenia (­a sort of honorary consulship) and politeia (­citizenship), together with a series of other rights (­the ability to dispose of assets, grazing rights and inviolability and safety on land and at sea).6 However, this last text must be considered with much caution, due to the honorary nature of the decree and the fact that the woman in question is a poet.7 The text of the two decrees from Dodona (­Cabanes 1976: 534 n.1 = SEG XV 384) is as follows: By good fortune. While Neoptolemos the (­son) of Alketas was king, to Philista the wife of Antimachos from Arrhonos was given citizenship, to herself and descendants, when Eidummas Arktan was prostatas, when Amphikorios Arktan was secretary, when damiorgoi were Androkades Arktan of Eurumenaioi, Laphurgas of Tripolitai, Eustratos of Kelaithoi, Amunandros of Peiales, Sabon of Geno(­i)­ aioi, Deinon of Ethnestai, Agelaos of Triphylai, Thoinos of Omphales, Kartomos of Onopernoi, Damoitas of Amymnoi, of (­month) Datuios. (­trans. Davies 2000) By good fortune. When Neoptolemos the (­son) of Alketas was king, to the family of Phinto of Arrhonos was given citizenship, to herself and descendants, when Eidummas Arktan was prostatas of Molossoi, when Amphikorios Arkt[a]n was secretary, when damiorgoi were Androkade[s] Arktan of Eurumenaioi, Laphurgas of Tripolitai, Eustratos of Kelaithoi, Amunandros of Peiales, Sabon of Genwaioi, Deinon. (­trans. Davies 2000) The two decrees are dated to the reign of Neoptolemus, son of Alketas, who is mentioned in the decree as the sole ruler. This makes it possible to date the documents to 370 BCE, because later, as Pausanias states (­1.11.3), Neoptolemus did not reign alone but together with Arybbas, who was later, as an exile, honoured by the Athenians (­Davies 2000: 243; RO ­350–​­354). The two women to whom citizenship is granted are Philista, the wife of a certain Antimachos of Arrhonos,8 and Phinto, also from Arrhonos. However, we have no other information about this place, because it is not mentioned in any other extant source. In both cases, it is specified that the grant concerns both the woman and her descendants. In the second case, the expression τᾶι Φιντοῦς γενεᾶι (‘­the family of Phinto’) is added, which had been interpreted by Jacob A.O. Larsen (­1964: ­106–​­107; 1967: ­255–​­256; 1968: ­276–​­278) as a reference to the wife of a certain man named Phinto. However, Georges Daux (­1964: ­677–​­678) and Louis Robert (­BE vol. 78, 1965: 121 n.228) have shown that the name Phinto is feminine and the term genea designates the family of the woman in question, as later explained by the expression αὐτᾶι καὶ ἐκγόνοις, that is, to her and her descendants. Given the extreme rarity of individual concessions of politeia to a woman, it is interesting to investigate the meaning of granting citizenship to a woman in Epirus in the first half of the fourth century BCE. According to Evangelidis (­1956) and David Harvey (­1969: 229), this concession would only be an empty honour, and the reasons would be, as Harvey states, ‘­purely honorific, marks of distinction bestowed upon two women and children for reasons which we do not know, without further significance’. A hypothesis on the reasons for conferring citizenship on the two women was put forward by Larsen, who sees in these 202

Granting citizenship to women in ancient Epirus

decrees a reflection of the adoption in Epirus of Pericles’ law of citizenship of 451/450 BCE, which provided for the granting of citizenship to the unborn child whose parents were both citizens. According to Larsen (­1964: 107), similar rules for granting citizenship in a ‘­backward region such as Epirus’ would be connected to the ties of the royal family of Molossia with Athens. Neoptolemus and his father were listed as members of the Second Athenian League and both his father and grandfather were honoured with Athenian citizenship (­RO ­92–​­105, Dominguez 2018: ­4 –​­6 and ­26–​­27). Contrarily, according to Pierre Cabanes (­1989: 20, cf. 2010a), a grant of citizenship was more likely associated with the possibility for a woman in Epirus to own property without needing a kyrios (­male relative who has control of the wealth of a female) and to benefit from the same tax regime that applied to other Molossians. In the epigraphic dossier from Bouthrotos, of 257 acts of manumission, women have an active role as slave owners in 224 documents, nearly 90% of the cases. Other documents show that also in Thessaly women did not need a kyrios (­Babakos 1966: 90 n.4). Furthermore, according to Cabanes, the comparison with the inscription from Thermos (­IG IX, 12 1,9) is particularly interesting, because the clause according to which Kallisto and her children were to be citizens like the other Aetolians (­ἰ ̣σόμοιρον ὅσων καὶ ̣ ο ̣ἱ ̣ [λοι]π ̣ο ̣ὶ ̣ Αἰτωλοί) should be interpreted as a possibility for the citizen woman to administer her property, in a way ‘­inimaginable à Athènes’ (­Cabanes 1989: 20). John K. Davies (­2000: 256) returned to Larsen’s hypothesis, pointing out that the need for both parents to be citizens was in this case perhaps not so much ‘­a matter of law’ as ‘­of social pressure’. Daniel Ogden too (­1996: ­280–​­281) discusses the texts of these decrees as evidence that the Molossians demanded a citizen to be descended from citizens on both sides. More recently, Hoffmann (­1999) and Elizabeth Meyer (­2012; 2013: ­46–​­51) have highlighted the importance of the religious factor in female politeia. As shown in the first section of this chapter, for Hoffmann, the woman citizen would be able to fully participate in ta hiera (­the sacred things) and ta hosia (­all things that had not been rendered hiera by some form of ritual purification) of the polis, thus finding her rightful place within the community. In an area such as Epirus, in which women had the opportunity to freely use their property without the need of kyreia, the intervention of the koinon to grant citizenship to a woman would have been particularly important, and perhaps was even intended to protect a woman who, according to this hypothesis of Hoffmann, could be at that time, for reasons unknown to us, deprived of a family authority able to protect her. Meyer has included these considerations of the religious importance of female citizenship as part of her hypotheses on the history of Molossia and Epirus. According to the traditional reconstruction of the history of Molossia and Epirus at the time of the inscriptions under examination, the Molossian koinon was already established, thus explaining the inclusion in the inscriptions of prostatas and damiorgoi, magistrates from the various districts of Molossia.9 On the other hand, Meyer believes that the state of the Molossians in this period was a lax and almost absolute monarchy, and the damiorgoi would not be magistrates of the koinon, but magistrates of the sanctuary of Dodona, like the hieromnamones of the sanctuary of Delphi. The most important change in Molossia between 430 and 370 BCE would, in fact, not consist in ‘­the creation of a federal board and a new federal state, but the new Molossian control of the sanctuary at Dodona’ (­Meyer 2012: 214). The granting of citizenship would thus come in this context, aimed at guaranteeing ‘­a 203

Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli

type of bilateral descent group so important elsewhere in the religious status’ (­Meyer 2012: 214), and this would show the involvement of the sanctuary in the procedures of granting citizenship. With regard to this hypothesis, it should be noted that the notion of a politeia granted by a religious and ­non-​­political body is ultimately quite doubtful, because it does not seem to be attested even in the case of the most important Panhellenic sanctuary, that of Delphi. Furthermore, as was recently argued by Adolfo Dominguez (­2018: ­13–​­14, 17 n.52), the existence of a currency coined in the name ‘­of the Molossians’ in the fourth century, ‘­would indicate the existence of a political body that served as expression of this State’. Regarding Larsen’s hypothesis on the need for both parents to be citizens and on the probable connection of this norm with the Athenian Periclean law of 451/­0 BCE, it is interesting to briefly discuss a passage from Aristotle’s Politics, which deals with the diffusion of the use of the citizenship of both parents as a requirement for the citizenship of children.10 The passage is Pol. 1275b.­22–​­26: But in practice citizenship is limited to the child of citizens on both sides, not on one side only, that is, the child of a citizen father or of a citizen mother; and other people carry this requirement further back, for example to the second or the third preceding generation or further. But given this as a practical and hasty definition, some people raise the difficulty, how will that ancestor three or four generations back have been a citizen? (­trans. Rackham 1932) For Aristotle, the provision according to which both parents had to be citizens in order for a child to have citizenship was common and prevalent during his time. The Aristotelian text then informs us that the law of Pericles was not perceived as an exception. A study by ­Jean-​­Marie Hannick (­1976) shows that this claim by Aristotle was founded in reality, presenting numerous places in Greece where this rule was applied. It is not improbable, as argued by Davies (­2000: 256), that this custom might not everywhere have been connected with the law as in Athens, but, in certain places specifically as in our case, with social and ­ethnic-​­tribal factors. In fact, it must be remembered that we are at an important moment for the koinon of the Molossians, which was at that time at the beginning of an expansion process that would last for the entire fourth century BCE and that therefore faced the challenge of introducing and integrating new citizens. The fact that both women come from the same place, Arrhonos, may also point to this tribal and cantonal dimension. Again, unfortunately, we know nothing about this place, of which there are no other attestations besides the inscriptions under examination. Hannick presents the case of an inscription from Arcadia, concerning a synoikia between Orchomenos and Euaimon, datable to between 360 and 350 BCE, which refers to mixed marriages and the naturalization of children and wives (­ὅτις ξέν[αν] γεγάμηκε, τὸς παῖδας [κ][α]ὶ τὰς γυναῖκας Ἐ[ρ]χ ̣ομινίας ἦναι, IG V 2 343). This is a context that is in some ways similar to that of the Molossians, in which there is the need for the naturalization of the children of foreign mothers, at a time when Arcadia was grappling with an important process of institutional reorganization, with Orchomenos first forced to join the Arcadian koinon and then, after the battle of Mantinea, interested in ­re-​ ­establishing its institutional structure and framework of local alliances. The aforementioned inscription of the first half of the third century from Thermos also refers to an ethnic context, in a moment of expansion of the Aetolians’ koinon. 204

Granting citizenship to women in ancient Epirus

Also very interesting, although not from ethnic states, is a decree of the fifth or more probably fourth century from Thasos, in which the inhabitants of Neapolis (­a colony of the Thasians), who descended from Thasian women, are to be considered Thasians and can participate, themselves and their children, in everything that Thasians take part in (­ὁπόσοι μὲν Νεοπολιτέων ἐκ Θα]σίωγ γυναικῶν εἰσιν, τότος Θα[σίος εἶναι καὶ μετεῖναι αὐτοῖς καὶ παισὶ] πάντων ὅσωμπερ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλ[οις Θα]σ[ίοις μέτεστιν).11 The requirement that both parents must be citizens for a child to be a citizen was, therefore, probably true in Athens and also in many other places in Greece, although with different connotations depending on the different types of societies. But it is interesting to reflect on the reason why the few cases of individual grants of citizenship to a woman come only from n ­ orth-​­western Greece and from ethnic contexts. The greater size of the epigraphic dossier coming from Athens makes it unlikely that it is simply connected with the random circumstances of the survival of the epigraphic material that has reached us. Moreover, as was noted by Harvey (­1969: 228), in the case of individual concessions of citizenship, such as the one made by the Athenians to the tyrant Dionysus, there are no women present. Certainly, also for women in the federal states as for Athenian women, the religious sphere was an important one in which to express their belonging to the group and to the community and their prerogatives as a citizen. However, this alone, in our opinion, does not seem to be enough to explain the presence of such individual concessions in n ­ orth-​­western Greece and not in Athens and in other poleis in which the woman citizen also had religious prerogatives. The only hypothesis that can explain this phenomenon completely seems to be the one, already supported by Cabanes, which locates these individual concessions of citizenship in the context of more open societies like those of Epirus and Aetolia, in which the woman more often had the ability to dispose of her own assets without kyreia,12 as evident in Epirus from the epigraphic documents of Bouthrotos. Very interesting, too, is a ­well-​­known inscription from Tegea of 324 BCE, in which, among the goods of the exiles that are returning to the polis following the decree of Alexander, there are goods called patroia, to which both men and women are entitled, and goods called matroia, to which are entitled only epiklēroi (­heiresses) (­Tod 1948: no. 202, ll. 4­ –​­9, ­48–​­57; for an Italian translation and commentary see Bencivenni 2003: ­29–​­133). Also at Delphi, in the corpus of manumissions datable to a period prior to the middle of the second century BCE, the involvement of women is present in more than 25% of the cases (­Gallo 2017: es­p. ­207–​­208). Also relevant are two inscriptions of the middle of the fourth century BCE, one from Olinthos (­SEG XXXVIII 670), which certifies the purchase of an oikia by a woman, and another from Amphipolis (­SEG XLI 557), which attests the selling of real estate by a mother without the intervention of her children. Also at Sparta, women had greater freedom in economic matters, as attested by a ­well-​­k nown passage of Aristotle’s Politics (­1270a.­11–​­31), in which the philosopher stigmatizes the excessive freedom granted to Spartan heiresses and asserts that this would have created a strong inequality in land ownership, with about t­ wo-​­fifths of the land in female hands (­on this passage, see principally Hodkinson 2000: ­95–​­96). On the island of Crete, at Gortyn, the famous law code shows that the heiress, called patrouchos, has in any case the right to a part of the paternal inheritance and, in the absence of brothers, she is the sole heiress of the family estate (­IC IV 72). Moreover, even in the case of Gortyn, most probably the heiress was not under the control of a kyrios.13 The attestation of 205

Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli

these private economic rights shows that in n ­ orth-western and central Greece and also in Sparta and Crete, there was, already before the Hellenistic age, a more open social structure in relation to women compared to the Athenian one. This more active role of women in a fairly open society such as that of Epirus could, therefore, probably explain the individual and not collective granting of citizenship to women, which was not an empty honour, but motivated by practical reasons.

Notes 1 The first part of the chapter is by Barbara Schipani, and the second part is by Ferdinando Ferraioli. 2 For a good introduction to the concept of the citizen in the Greek world, see Davies (­2004). For a good overview of the main topics of the contemporary debate on citizenship in ancient Greece, see the contributions in Cecchet and Busetto (­2017) and Duplouy and Brock (­2018). 3 A text of the decree is preserved in [Dem] 59.104, but almost certainly is not the original form of the document. On this point, see, amongst others, Prandi (­1988: ­112–​­115), who thinks that the text is a rewording of the original decree, and Canevaro (­2010), who thinks that the document present in the speech is a complete forgery. However, for what concerns us here, the fact of the concession of citizenship by decree en bloc to all refugees, including women, is independent of the debate on the authenticity of the document present in the speech, because it is reported in Isoc. 12.94. 4 The case of Phano in [Dem.] 59 is an interesting example. On this case, see Kapparis (­1999) and Canevaro (­2013: es­p. ­183–​­190). 5 On the sanctuary and the oracle, see Parke (­1967), Lhôte (­2006), Piccinini (­2017), and the contributions in Malacrino, Soueref, and Vecchio (­2019). 6 IG IX 2, 62. She is also honoured at Chaleion in Locris, but in that decree citizenship is not mentioned (­IG IX 12, 740). A French translation of the two documents can be found in Dana (­2011: ­98–​­101). Interesting also is an inscription from Mantinea (­IG V, 2 268) of the early imperial age, which honours Euphrosynos son of Titus. The wife of Euphrosynos, Epigone, is called a citizen by birth (­πολῖτις ἀπὸ γένους). The inscription is late, but seems to imply that, like male citizenship, female citizenship in ­i mperial-​­period Arcadia may have been available by birth or grant. On this inscription, which is considered one of the best examples of Hellenistic prose, see now Papanikolaou (­2012). On Euphrosynos as a member of the Greek elite during the Roman period, see Zoumbaki (­2008: ­31–​­32). 7 Rutherford (­2009: ­244–​­245) suggests that, while the multiplicity of citizenships earned by performers is normal in the Roman Empire, the case of Aristodama and Lamia is somewhat anomalous for the early Hellenistic age and may be connected with some poetic work made by Aristodama on behalf of the Aetolian league. 8 As argued by Vérilhac and Vial (­1998: 74), Antimachos, Philista’s husband, must have been a Molossian. 9 On the Molossians and Epirus, see generally Lepore (­1962), Hammond (­1967), Larsen (­1968: ­273–​­281), Cabanes (­1976, 2010b), Davies (­2000), Meyer (­2013, 2015), Dominguez (­2018), Pascual (­2018), and Lasagni (­2019: ­132–​­133). 10 On this law, see Blok (­2009); on the citizens by decree at Athens, see Blok (­2017: ­250–​­264). 11 IG XII 8, 264, ll. ­8 –​­10. An English translation and brief commentary can be found in Arnaoutoglou (­1998 n.77). At a later date (­third century BCE), a fragmentary decree from Dyme (­Achaia) (­Syll.3 531 = SEG XL 394) seems to permit the selling of citizenship to the ­free-​­born foreign widows of free men and to their offspring. For a commentary, see Gauthier (­1985: ­199–​­200). This document must certainly be related to the peculiar practice of selling citizenship, which is attested in the Hellenistic period for poleis with financial difficulties, but also interesting in this case is the possibility for women, in the context of the Greek federal states, to act freely and directly in a question concerning citizenship. 12 In Athenian oratory, there are hints that, in the absence of a kyrios, economic transactions could sometimes be handled by women. However, this was a matter of fact and behaviour, not of legal norms. See Cohen (­1998), Kapparis (­1999: ­16–​­19), and Harris (­2014: es­p. ­191–​­200). 13 On this point, see Gallo (­2017: ­210–​­211) with bibliographic references.

206

Granting citizenship to women in ancient Epirus

Bibliography Arnaoutoglou, I. (­1998) Ancient Greek laws: a sourcebook (­London and New York) Babakos, A.M. (­1966) Actes d’aliénation en commun et autres phénomènes apparentés après le droit de la Thessalie antique (­Salonique) Bencivenni, A. (­2003) Progetti di riforme costituzionali nelle epigrafi greche dei secoli I­ V-​­II a.C. (­Bologna) Blok, J. (­2009) ‘­Perikles’ citizenship law: a new perspective’, Historia 58.2, ­141–​­170 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge). Brock, R.W. (­1994) ‘­The labour of women in classical Athens’, CQ 44.2, ­336–​­346 Cabanes, P. (­1976) L’Épire de la mort de Pyrrhos à la conquête romaine (­­272-​­167 av. J.C.) (­Paris) ——— ​­(­1989) ‘­La femme dans les inscriptions antiques de Bouthrôtos’, L’Ethnographie 85, ­13–​­22 ​­2010a) ‘­La structure familiale dans le cadre social et économique de l’Épire antique’, ——— (­ in C. Antonetti (­ed.) Lo spazio ionico e le comunità della Grecia n­ ord-​­occidentale. Territorio, società, istituzioni. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Verona, ­7–​­9 gennaio 2010 (­Pisa) ­327–​­340 ——— (­ ​­2010b) ‘­Institutions politiques et développement urbain (­­IVe-​­IIIe s. avant J.-​­C.): réflexions historiques à partir de l’Épire’, in C. Antonetti (­ed.) Lo spazio ionico e le comunità della Grecia ­ nord-​­ occidentale: Territorio, società, istituzioni, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Verona, ­7–​­9 gennaio 2010 (­Pisa) ­117–​­140 Canevaro, M. (­2010) ‘­The decree awarding citizenship to the Plataeans ([Dem.] 59.104)’, GRBS 50, ­337–​­369 ——— ​­(­2013) The documents in the Attic orators: laws and decrees in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus (­Oxford) Cecchet, L. and Busetto, A. (­eds) (­2017) Citizens in the G ­ raeco-​­Roman world: Aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to AD 212, Mnemosyne Supplementum 407 (­Leiden) Cohen, D. (­1998) ‘­Women, property and status in Demosthenes 41 and 57’, Dike 1, ­53–​­61 Dana, M. (­2011) ‘­Une poétesse: Aristodama de Smyrne’, in S. Boehringer and V. Sebillotte Cuchet (­eds) Hommes et femmes dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine (­Paris) ­98–​­101 Daux, G. (­1964) ‘­Notes de lecture’, BCH 88.2, ­677–​­679 Davies, J.K. (­2000) ‘­A wholly ­non-​­Aristotelian universe: the Molossians as ethnos, state, and monarchy’, in R. Brock and S. Hodkinson (­eds) Alternatives to Athens: varieties of political organization and community in ancient Greece (­Oxford) ­234–​­258 ——— ​­(­2004) ‘­T he concept of the “­citizen”’, in S. Cataldi (­ed.) Poleis e Politeiai. Esperienze politiche, tradizioni litterarie, progetti costituzionali. Atti del convegno internazionale di storia greca, Torino 2002 (­A lessandria) ­19–​­30 Dominguez, A. (­2018) ‘­New developments and tradition in Epirus: the creation of the Molossian state’, in A. Dominguez (­ed.) Politics, territory and identity in ancient Epirus (­Pisa) ­1–​­42 Duplouy, A. and Brock, R.W. (­eds) (­2018) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) Evangelidis, D.E. (­1956) ‘­Psephisma tou basileos Neoptolemou ek Dodones’, AE 95, ­1–​­13 Gallo, L. (­2017) ‘­La donna e la trasmissione patrimoniale nelle società greche: l’anomalia ateniese’, RDE 7, ­203–​­214 Gauthier, P. (­1985) Les cités grecques et leurs bienfaiteurs (­­IVe-​­Ier s. av. J.-​­C.): contribution à l’histoire des institutions, B.C.H Supplement 12 (­Paris) Hammond, N.G.H. (­1967) Epirus: the geography, the ancient remains, the history and topography of Epirus and adjacent areas (­Oxford) Hannick, J.-​­M. (­1976) ‘­Droit de cité et marriages mixtes’, AC 45, ­133–​­148 Hodkinson, S. (­2000) Property and wealth in classical Sparta (­Swansea) Hoffmann, G. (­1999) ‘­De la “­Politeia” des femmes en Épire et en Attique’, in P. Cabanes (­ed.) L’Illyrie méridionale et l’Épire dans l’Antiquité. Actes du IIIe colloque international de Chantilly (­­16–​­19 Octobre 1996) (­Paris) ­403– ​­409 Harris, E.M. (­2014) ‘­Wife, household and marketplace. The role of women in the economy of classical Athens’, in U. ­Bultrighini-​­E. Dimauro (­eds) Donne che contano nella storia greca (­Lanciano) ­183–​­207 Harvey, D. (­1969) ‘­Those Epirote women again (­SEG, XV, 384)’, CP 64, ­226–​­229 Jones, N.F. (­1999) The associations of classical Athens (­New York and Oxford) Larsen, J.A.O (­1964) ‘­Epirote grants of citizenship to women’, CP 58, ­106–​­107 ​­ 1967) ‘­Epirote grants of citizenship to women once more’, CP 62, ­255–​­256 ——— (­ ——— ​­(­1968) Greek federal states: their institutions and history (­Oxford)

207

Barbara Schipani and Ferdinando Ferraioli Lasagni, C. (­2019) Le realtà locali nel mondo greco. Ricerche su poleis ed ethne della Grecia occidentale (­A lessandria) Leduc, C. (­­1994–​­1995) ‘­Citoyenneté et parenté dans la cité des Athéniens’, Mètis ­IX–​­X, ­51–​­68 Lepore, E. (­1962) Ricerche sull’antico Epiro: le origini storiche e gli interessi greci (­Napoli) Lhôte, É. (­2006) Les lamelles oraculaires de Dodone (­Genève) Kapparis, K. (­1999) Apollodorus, ‘­Against Neaira’ [D. 59] (­Berlin and New York) Malacrino, C., Soueref, K., and Vecchio, L. (­eds) (­2019) Dodonaios. L’oracolo di Zeus e la Magna Grecia (­Catalogo della mostra, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria, 8 ­marzo -​­9 giugno 2019) (­Reggio Calabria) Meyer, E.A. (­2012) ‘­Two grants of politeia and the Molossians at Dodona’, ZPE 180, ­205–​­216 ——— ​­(­2013) The inscriptions of Dodona and a new history of Molossia (­Stuttgart) ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Molossia and Epeiros’, in H. Beck and P. Funke (­eds) Federalism in Greek antiquity (­Cambridge) ­297–​­318 Mossé, C. (­1979) ‘­Citoyens actifs et citoyens “­passifs” dans les cités grecques: une approche théorique du problème’, REA 81, ­241–​­249 Mossé, C. and Di Donato, R. (­1983) ‘­Status e/­o funzione, aspetti della condizione della ­donna-​ c­ ittadina nelle orazioni civili di Demostene’, Quaderni di storia 17, ­151–​­158 Ogden, D. (­1996) Greek bastardy in the classical and Hellenistic periods (­Oxford) Papanikolaou, D. (­2012) ‘­IG V2, 268 (= SIG3 783) as a monument of Hellenistic prose’, ZPE 180, ­137–​­156 Parke, H.W. (­1967) The oracle of Zeus: Dodona, Olympia and Siwa (­Oxford) Pascual, J. (­2018) ‘­From the Fifth Century to 167 B.C.: reconstructing the history of ancient Epirus’, in A. Dominguez (­ed.) Politics, territory and identity in ancient Epirus (­Pisa) ­43–​­100 Patterson, C.B. (­1981) Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/­0 B.C. (­New York) ——— ​­(­1986) ‘­Hai Attikai: the other Athenians’, Helios 13, ­49–​­67 ——— ​­(­2005) ‘­Athenian citizenship law’, in D. Cohen and M. Gagarin (­eds) The Cambridge companion to ancient Greek law (­Cambridge) ­267–​­289 Piccinini, J. (­2017) The shrine of Dodona in the archaic and classical ages: a history (­Macerata) Prandi, L. (­1988) Platea: momenti e problemi della storia di una polis (­Padova) Rackham, H. (­1932) Aristotle, the politics, trans. H. Rackham (­London and Cambridge) Rutherford, I. (­2009) ‘­A ristodama and the Aetolians. An itinerant poetess and her agenda’, in R. Hunter and I. Rutherford (­e ds) Wandering poets in ancient Greek culture (­Cambridge) ­237–​­249 Sebillotte Cuchet, V. (­2016) ‘­Female citizens reconfiguring the political: thirty years of work on Greek antiquity’, Clio. Women, Gender, History 43, ­186–​­216 Tod, M.N. (­1948) A selection of Greek historical inscriptions, vol. II: from 403 to 323 B.C. (­Oxford) Vérilhac, A.M. and Vial, C. (­1998) Le Mariage Grec. Du VIe siécle av. J. C. à l’époque d’Auguste, B.C.H Supplement 32 (­Paris) Zoumbaki, S.B. (­2008) ‘­The composition of the Peloponnesian elites in the Roman period and the evolution of their resistance and approach to the Roman rulers’, Tekmeria 9, ­25–​­52

208

15 CITIZENSHIP AND THE SPARTAN KOSMOS Ryszard Kulesza

The ancient Lacedaemon (­L akedaimōn), now commonly known as Sparta, encompassed first of all Laconia. Lacedaemon’s population consisted of full ­citizens  – ​­the Spartiates, the perioikoi, who were personally free but did not have political rights, and the subjugated helots. The Spartan citizens stood at the top of the social ladder; they were the only ones to be described as the Spartiates (­Spartiatai) or Laconians (­L akōnes). The common term for the Spartan state, its representation, or its population was ‘­the Lacedaemonians’ (­L akedaimonioi), which referred to the collective of the free and permanent citizens. Yet, at the same time, the term Lakedaimonioi is not entirely unambiguous; at times, it refers only to citizens, but in other cases, to the entire free population. The division of the society into three groups, the citizens, the other free, ­non-​­citizen inhabitants, and the ­non-​­free population as found in Sparta, is, on the whole, similar to that known from other Greek poleis; in Athens, these groups were, respectively, the politai, metoikoi (­and also xenoi – ​­free ­non-​­citizens who did not have the metic status), and douloi. While citizens are always the main element from which the social panorama is constructed, ­Sparta – ​­according to the commonly held ­opinion – ​­would have had citizens who enjoyed full citizen rights and ‘­passive citizens’, or ‘­­second-​­class citizens’ (­Hampl 1937: 7; Lotze 1994), and it is with those that we start this analysis.

Bürger zweiter Klasse, or the perioikoi construct The word perioikoi means those ‘­dwelling peri’, that is ‘­around’ (­Sparta, in this case), and points to a certain kind of dependence. Most probably the perioikoi themselves, like the metics in Athens, preferred to use their own ethnika (­epithets of origin), which indicated their origin from a given village (­Shipley 1992: 223); to the outside world, they were simply Lacedaemonians. The formal status of the perioikoi has been the subject of many controversies. Most diverse views have been formulated, ranging from seeing them as citizens (­Mertens 2002: ­285–​­286) to seeing them as ­non-​­citizens (­Eremin 2002: 276) of the ‘­Lacedaemonian polis’. Graham Shipley (­1997) and Jonathan Hall (­2000) consider the perioikic communities to have been ‘­city-​­states in their own right’, just ‘­dependent’ on Sparta. Arguments DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-19

209

Ryszard Kulesza

were given for their autonomy within their poleis (­as c­ ity-​­states), and for the assumption t­ hat – ​­similarly to the Attic demes within the Athenian polis – ​­those communities were sui generis subdivisions of the polis Sparta. Norbert Mertens (­2002: 293) emphasizes: ‘­There is no attestation of a perioikos being called a “­polites of his polis”’. On the other hand, we do have an instance when a person is indicated as originating from a polis which we know to have been settled by the perioikoi. There are proponents of a ‘­double citizenship’ (­Hansen 2009: 387) or ‘­dual membership’ (­Hall 2000); in this case, the perioikoi would have been citizens of the Lacedaemonian polis and at the same time citizens of their own ­city-​­states. The interpretation of the place the perioikoi occupied in Sparta clearly depends on whether Lacedaemon is perceived as a c­ ity-​­state, a ‘­federal state’, or an ethnos. The perioikoi certainly did not constitute a homogeneous group (­Cartledge 1979) in terms of their origins; also, in my view, their ultimate status was not completely identical in all cases. It may be assumed that some villages were settled by the ancient Achaean population, while others, like Cythera, may have arisen as a result of Doric colonization, and still others, for instance Asine and Mothone, were founded by foreigners whom the Spartans allowed to settle there in the Archaic period. While I do not share the view that the Aegineans who settled at Thyreatis in 431 were granted the status of perioikoi, I am of the opinion that with time, if their stay there came to be permanent, they would have become similar to them and the Spartans would have treated them the same way as the perioikoi of Asine or Mothone. The ancient authors described the perioikic settlements as poleis (­cf., e.g., Hdt. 7.234.2; Thuc. 5.54.1; Xen. Lac. 15.3; see also Pherec. FGrH 3 fr. 168; Xen. Hell. 6.5.21, Ages. 2.24; Ps. Skylax 46; Isoc. 12.179; Paus. 3.2.6). Herodotus speaks of numerous poleis (­Hdt. 7.234.2), Strabo of some thirty (­peri triakonta, 8.4.11), with the remark that there used to be a hundred of them (­hekatonpolin) in the past. The names of about eighty of the perioikic poleis are known, but recent findings, making use of not only the literary sources, but also the results of archaeological research, indicate that in reality there may have existed only 22: 17 in Laconia and five in Messenia (­Shipley 2004a, 2004b). They were scattered around the entirety of Lacedaemon, but most of them were located in the border area, which made Paul Cartledge (­1998: 43) describe the perioikoi as the ‘­first line of defence’ which the enemies had to cross in order to invade Laconia. The location of the perioikic townships may also suggest that their residents helped Sparta’s domestic security. From the formal point of view, the perioikoi constituted a part of the Spartan state, which is reflected by its official name, the Lacedaemonians, which encompassed both the ­full-​­rights citizens, that is, the Spartiates, and the perioikoi. On the other hand, however, the perioikoi, being completely deprived of political rights in essential matters, were entirely dependent on Sparta. In his Panathenaicus, Isocrates perceived the Spartiates as aristocratic governors and the perioikoi as the ‘­common people’ (­dēmos, plēthos) subjugated by the aristocrats (­Isoc. 12.­177–​­181). He also stated that the perioikic townships had less power than the demes in Athens (­Isoc. 12.179). Nothing is known about the political institutions that existed in the perioikic poleis; it is not clear to what extent their political system imitated the Spartan one. Jean Ducat assumes that the ones located closer to Sparta may have resembled her ‘­in fundamental respects such as political institutions and social structures’ (­Ducat 2018: 599). In practice, we do not even know to what extent Sparta interfered in the internal affairs of the perioikic communities, although the existing scant information suggests their 210

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos

autonomy may have been of a limited character. According to Cartledge (­1987: 16), their ‘­masters allowed them only a limited form of “municipal” independence’. Isocrates reports that the ephors had the power to put to death without trial (­akritous apokteinai) as many perioikoi as they pleased (­Isoc. 12.181). Neither is it clear whether the perioikoi paid any levies from the land they farmed. It is generally assumed that they paid for the permission to cultivate the land belonging to the Spartan kings when such land lay within their territory (­Xen. Lac. 15.3). Plato (­Alc. 123a) and Strabo mention a royal tribute (­basilikos phoros, 8.5.4), which according to some scholars indicates that the perioikoi paid Sparta a tribute from the land they possessed (­MacDowell 1986: 28). Yet even if the perioikoi did not pay any special levy to Sparta, this does not mean they were entirely exempted from any economic burdens; and at this point, we return to the stereotypes. Following the traditional (­although not entirely correct) image of Sparta, in which the Spartiates were assigned the role of the warriors, the helots the role of the farmers, and the perioikoi that of the craftsmen and merchants, it would seem obvious that the production and maintenance of weapons and armour needed by the Spartiates belonged to the perioikoi. Moses Finley (­1968: 149) was of the opinion that metal ore mining and weapon production had been the duty, and at the same time the privilege, of the perioikoi (­cf. Cartledge 1979: 184; 1987: 178; Hamilton 1991: 73). The presence of a special official sent annually to perioikoi communities from Sparta is certain only in the case of the island of Cythera located close to the Peloponnesian shore. Thucydides calls him kythērodikēs (­T huc. 4.53.2), which suggests ­ as – ​­perhaps only ­initially – ​­meant to settle arguments between the island’s that he w residents. It is not known exactly how the powers of this official related to the autonomy of the locals, who, while having perioikoi status, remained Lacedaemonians to the outside world and most probably called themselves Cythereans (­Kythērioi) to highlight their citizen status; it is possible that, as assumed by Mogens H. Hansen (­1997: 34), this official governed Cythera, but there is nothing to confirm this view. According to Douglas MacDowell (­1986: 30), the official’s special title and the fact that Thucydides considers him worth mentioning indicate that this was an exceptional solution, not applied in other perioikic townships. Moreover, MacDowell suggests that the use of the past ­tense – ​­‘­a magistrate called kythērodikēs used to go (­diebainen) ​­ there from Sparta every year’ – indicates that by the time Thucydides was writing of it, the solution had been discontinued and that the obvious moment for the Spartans not to send the subsequent ‘­magistrate’ to Cythera was the year 424 BCE, when the Athenians invaded the island. It cannot be ruled out that having regained the island, the Spartans returned to the old custom of sending their magistrates there. According to Cartledge (­1979: 244), this is what is suggested by a ­fourth-​­century inscription from Cythera which records the dedication by ‘­Menandros the harmost’ (­IG V 1, 937). Yet this inscription does not clear the ­doubts  – ​­not because it fails to state where exactly Menandros served as a harmost (­m ilitary governor), but above all because the ‘­magistrate for Cythera’ (­kythērodikēs) was ­not – ​­as erroneously assumed by Cartledge (­1987: 91) – ​­identical with the harmost. In my opinion, when Sparta reclaimed Cythera, which happened towards the end of the Peloponnesian War, the harmost became the representative of Spartan authorities on the island (­which is not tantamount to saying Menandros was the harmost on Cythera, although this seems the most probable conclusion). This may be confirmed by the fact that when in the year 393 BCE Pharnabazus and Conon captured the island, 211

Ryszard Kulesza

they put its garrison under the command of Nicophemus, an Athenian, whom Xenophon calls a harmost (­Xen. Hell. 4. 8. 8), most probably employing the term which formerly denoted his Spartan predecessor. Was the Cytheran solution truly unique, then, and if so, why was it used there and nowhere else? The very name of the office may point to its uniqueness: a ‘­m agistrate for Cythera’ was certainly sent only to Cythera. The possibility that similar posts existed in other perioikic poleis cannot be completely discarded, but the considerable distance between Cythera and Sparta, as well as the island’s size and strategic location, all suggest that it may have been treated differently than other perioikic settlements. It should be noted that Cythera was a relatively recent addition to the Spartan state; as late as the ­m id-​­sixth century BCE, it had still been ruled by Argives and may have been used as a base to attack Lacedaemon. According to Thucydides, Cythera was significant for both strategic and commercial reasons, as it was visited by ships sailing from Egypt and Libya, and protected Laconia from pirate attacks. The Athenians invaded it three times. First captured by Tolmides in 456/455 BCE (­Paus. 1.27.5; schol. Aeschin. 2.75), during the Peloponnesian War the island probably remained in Athenian hands between 424 and 409, and it was seized again in 393 by Conon and Pharnabazus. This also implies that special policies were applied to the residents of Cythera, because in difficult times much depended on their loyalty to Sparta. ​­ many are known, One of the 158 politeiai originating from Aristotle’s s­ chool – this although some by title ­only – ​­was the ‘­Constitution of the Cythereans’. No other treatises devoted to the political system of other perioikic poleis, or discussing the system of perioikic poleis collectively, are known to have existed, although the ‘­Constitution of the Cypriots’ could have been an analogy to it, as in Cyprus there existed a dozen or more ­city-​­states (­incidentally, the fact that Kythēreion Politeia was written in Aristotle’s school indicates that in the latter half of the fourth century BCE, Cythera still retained a distinctive political system). Thus, we once again return to the fundamental questions of the civic liberties granted to the perioikoi and their duties towards Sparta. While the alleged economic obligations of the perioikoi raise doubts, their military contributions seem obvious. Similarly to the Athenian metics, the perioikoi were drafted into the army and participated in Sparta’s wars. Spartan authorities did not have to ask for any permission in order to call on the perioikoi to provide a given number of soldiers. The Lacedaemonian army usually (­although not always; see Lazenby 1985: ­15–​­16, 42) included perioikic units. This being said, we do not know the specific principles that governed the mobilization of the perioikoi, or the details regarding their position within the Spartan army. They were most likely led by officers who followed the orders of their ­ id-​­fifth century Spartan commanders. It is generally assumed that from about the m BCE onwards the perioikoi, who had earlier formed separate units, began to be put in the same formations as the Spartiates; yet there is nothing to confirm this view. J.F. Lazenby (­1985: ­14–​­18) assumes that the perioikoi always served in separate units, and this seems to me closer to the truth. One account states that the perioikos Deiniades became the commander of a number of galleys (­T huc. 8.22.1), yet it seems improbable that he had fully enfranchized citizens under his command. We know that the ­Sciritae – ​­inhabitants of one of the perioikic ­s ettlements – ​­were granted the privilege of forming the left wing of the Lacedaemonian army; the right one consisted of Spartiates (­T huc. 5.67.1). 212

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos

The existence of perioikic hoplite units within the Lacedaemonian army indicates that their poleis had a sizable middle class (­see Cartledge 1987: ­177–​­178), whose members were able not only to afford the required military equipment, but also to devote enough time to hoplite combat training. In practice, this means the existence of a relatively large class of landowners. Xenophon remarks that there were kaloi k’agathoi among the perioikoi (­Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). While this may mean only that the group included people whom Sparta regarded as trustworthy, it seems more probable that what Xenophon meant by the ‘­beautiful and good’ (­kaloi k’agathoi) were people of noble birth. Another signal that the perioikic society may have had a higher stratum is a passage from Plutarch, who mentions ‘­the most promising of the perioikoi’ (­chariestatoi tōn perioikōn – ​­Plut. Cleom. 11.2). Despite the seemingly obvious political handicap observable throughout most of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the perioikoi remained almost unswervingly loyal to Sparta. Did they value the peace and security guaranteed by Spartan hegemony higher than the faint hope for independence? Or perhaps their obedience was not, or not only, a matter of emotionless political calculations, but stemmed from certain deeper bonds that had developed over time and made the perioikoi identify with the Lacedaemonian state, seeing it as their own? Outsiders clearly regarded the perioikoi as a part of the Spartan political organism. In 424 BCE, the Athenians would certainly have banished the residents of Cythera had the latter not chosen to surrender to Nicias before that could happen, since, as Thucydides observes, they were Lacedaemonians and their island was close to Laconia (­Thuc. 4.54.3). After the Battle of Thermopylae, Demaratus, the ­ex-​­king of Sparta, explains to Xerxes that there is in Lacedaemon a city called Sparta, a city of about eight thousand men, all of them equal (­homoioi) to those who have fought here; the rest of the Lacedaemonians are not equal to these, yet they are valiant (­agathoi) men. (­Hdt. 7.234.2, trans. A.D. Godley) But just as no ‘­Constitution of the Perioikoi’ was written in Aristotle’s school, neither was a ‘­Constitution of the Metics’. Members of both groups belonged to the polis, but they were not its citizens. Nicias addressed the Athenian metics serving in the fleet in the following words: Bear in mind how well worth preserving is the pleasure felt by those of you who through your knowledge of our language and imitation of our manners were always considered Athenians, even though not so in reality, and as such were honored throughout Hellas, and had your full share of the advantages of our empire, and more than your share in the respect of our subjects and in protection from ill treatment. You, therefore, with whom alone we freely share our empire, we now justly require not to betray that empire in its extremity […]. (­Thuc. 7.63.­3 –​­4, trans. J.M. Dent) No one calls the metics ‘­­second-​­class citizens’ or ‘­passive citizens’, and rightly so. The perioikoi were not either. Even though there were ­h igher-​­and ­lower-​­class citizens in Sparta, no ancient source points to the perioikoi as being politai; they have been called that by modern scholars. 213

Ryszard Kulesza

­First-​­ and ­second-​­class citizens The Spartiatai All the Spartiates lived in a ‘­city’ known as Sparta (­Att. Spartē, Dor. Sparta) or Lacedaemon (­Lakedaimon). The ancient Sparta did not have a regular plan; neither did it have numerous temples or other striking, monumental edifices. It was simply a community of five villages: Limnai, Konooura, Mesoa, Pitane, and 20 stadia to the south from them, Amyklai (­Thuc. 1.10.2; Polyb. 5.19.­2–​­3). Following the ancient Hellenic pattern, those five settlements constituted the polis (­Thuc. 1.10.2). But everything indicates that from the demographic point of view, those settlements, even though they did not comply with elementary requirements for the urban character, were not villages either. This is ­because – ​­even though in the course of two centuries the situation radically c­ hanged –​ ­those Spartan ‘­villages’ were always inhabited by several hundred to a few thousand citizens. According to Aristotle, the Spartan state’s constant trouble was oliganthrōpia, that is, a permanent decline of the number of Spartiates (­Pol. 1270a.34, cf. Xen. Lac. 1.1). To recall Demaratus telling Xerxes that there was ‘­in Lacedaemon a city (­polis) called Sparta, a city of about eight thousand men’ (­Hdt. 7.234.2) – this indicates (­according to ​­ Herodotus at least) that in the period of the Persian wars, there were still 8,000 citizens. Around the year 420 BCE, there remained only some 3,500 (­Thuc. 5.68.­2–​­3). In the course of the fourth century, their number fell from 2,500 men in ca. 390 BCE (­Xen. Hell. 5.2.16) to 1,500 men in the period of the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE (­Xen. Hell. 6.1.1; 4.15.17). By the middle of the third century BCE, there were only 700 Spartiates left (­Plut. Ages. 5). The Spartiates, in contrast to the perioikoi, were allowed to participate in the meetings of the Assembly (­apella) and hold offices. However, belonging to this elite group depended on fulfilling several conditions. The most fundamental of those was being born in a family that was Spartiate on both the father’s and the mother’s side. Another condition was being brought up in the state education system, the agōgē, which was obligatory for all youngsters between the ages of seven and 20. If a young man successfully completed the agōgē, he would henceforward dine together with other Spartiates ­ ining-​­group (­syssitia); this, in turn, required him to provide a desigbelonging to his d nated amount of food for meals (­Arist. Pol. 1271a.­26–​­37). To be able to fulfil this obligation, he had to own a portion of land (­Att. klēros, Dor. klaros). The helots, ­non-​­free peasants, who tilled that land, maintained the Spartiate and his entire family. In the traditional conception, the klēroi made it possible for Spartiates to accomplish the ideal of economic equality, thanks to which they could, among other things, consider themselves homoioi, that is ‘­equal’, ‘­similar’, or even ‘­identical’ (­Xen. Lac. 10.7; 13.1; Hell. 3.3.5; An. 4.6.14). But many testimonies suggest that while Spartan citizens were equal, some were more equal than others. On the fringes of their society, we find some groups of ‘­inferior quality’ Spartans: the hypomeiones, the mothakes, the tresantes. Among the ‘­equals’, in turn, just as in any other Greek polis, we find the better born, the kaloi k’agathoi. Some families continuously played an important role in the political life of Sparta. The concept of equal, indivisible portions of land passing, unchanged, from generation to generation and providing upkeep to all the Spartans is therefore entirely unhistorical, and the reasons for the Spartan oliganthrōpia must be sought in the continuous concentration of land which the poor lost in favour of the rich, thereby losing their full citizen rights (­Hodkinson 1986, 1989, 1993, 2000; Chapter 12 in this volume). What, then, happened to a Spartiate who for one reason or another lost his full rights? 214

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos

­Second-​­class citizens The hypomeiones For the lack of a better term, the terminus technicus used by scholars to denote this group is hypomeiones. Masato Furuyama (­1991: 7) says: ‘­The hypomeiones also appear only once in the sources, but they were always present in the Spartan society’. It was certainly a very large group, because apart from going through the agōgē, participating in the syssitia and being an owner of a klēros, a Spartan citizen had to live in accordance with the principles compulsory for the homoioi. It was a citizen’s duty to maintain a lifestyle worthy of a Spartiate, sometimes termed ta kala (­Xen. Lac. 3.3; Hell. 5.3.9; Plut. Ages. 5.5). If he was unable to do so, he ceased to be one of the equals (­Xen. Lac. 10.7). Apart from the economic criterion connected with the syssitia, reasons for the loss of status can be reconstructed only in a very general manner; this is because we are aware of only three concrete aspects of behaviour that disqualified a Spartiate. The first of them was associated with the prohibition to engage in business affairs (­Xen. Lac. 7.2; Plut. Lyc. 24.2). The second was committing a grave crime. This was the case with the family of Cleandridas, who went into exile fearing a death sentence (­Plut. Per. 22.34). The third and final one was cowardly behaviour on the battlefield. A Spartiate guilty of any of these offences was subject to a punishment that drove him to the margins of the community of the ‘­equals’. However, his exclusion did not absolutely eliminate the possibility of regaining citizen status, in full or in part (­this was true of the excluded man himself and/­or his sons). Cowardice was stigmatized, but even a coward (­tresas) from Thermopylae, Aristodemus, served in the army at Plataea. Spartiates captured at Sphacteria were dealt with as follows: Those however of the Spartans who had been taken prisoners on the island and had surrendered their arms might, it was feared, suppose that they were to be subjected to some degradation in consequence of their misfortune, and so make some attempt at revolution (­neōterisōsin), if left in possession of their franchise. These were therefore at once disfranchised (­atimous epoiēsan), although some of them were in office at the time, and thus placed under a disability to take office, or buy and sell anything. (­Thuc. 5.34.2, trans. J.M. Dent) In this case, Thucydides assures us, the loss of rights (­atimia) was a temporary one: ‘­A fter some time, however, the franchise was restored to them (­epitimoi egenonto)’ (­Thuc. 5.34.2, trans. J.M. Dent). The reasons for this are not known. The sentence may have been suspended because of doubts concerning the evaluation of the attitudes of the captured men, or because of their status, or perhaps for both of those reasons. Yet however the hypomeiones are envisaged, the presence in this group of citizens who for various reasons lost their status must be considered evident. The matter of the hierarchy, always present in the scholarly debate, remains, of course, open. As put forward by Thomas Figueira (­2018: 584): ‘­The hypomeiones were probably ranked lower than perioikoi, as ­second-​­class citizens, since the latter preserved rights in their communities, but the hypomeiones could serve militarily, perhaps for compensation’. In my view, the issue is difficult to settle conclusively, especially since ‘­our’ and ‘­their’ criteria are easy to confuse. All that can be said at this point is that everywhere in Greece a man 215

Ryszard Kulesza

deprived of his rights, or a part of them, could regain them; that a man from outside the citizen community could gain them; and that with regard to the perioikoi, no data concerning such advancement, or the possibility thereof, are available to us.

The mothakes The mothakes (­sing. mothax) are one of the groups that are relatively well described in the sources. According to Phylarchus (­FGrH 81 fr. 43 ap. Athen. 6.271e), they were the syntrophoi of Lacedaemonians, that is, they grew up together with the sons of Spartan citizens. All boys from citizen families had their syntrophoi, some one, others two, and still others, a larger number. Phylarchus attests that mothakes were free men and, although not Lacedaemonians, they went through the Spartan system of upbringing (­paideia). Who, then, were these boys who participated in the agōgē alongside the young Spartans? Mentioning two helots who were brought up with Cleomenes, Plutarch states that in Sparta they were called mothakes (­Plut. Cleom. 8.1). It has, therefore, been hypothesized that mothakes were young helots who for some reason were allowed into the agōgē system. In Xenophon’s account, the troops whom Agesipolis took on his expedition against Olynthus in 381 BCE included not only perioikoi who went through Spartan upbringing (­trophimoi xenoi), but also Spartan bastards (­nothoi), regarded as an equivalent of mothakes, ‘­exceedingly ­fine-​­looking men, not without experience of the good gifts of the state’ (­Xen. Hell. 5.3.9, trans. Carleton L. Brownson). However, according to Phylarchus, the label of a mothax also applied to Lysander, the general who defeated the Athenian fleet and for his courage was elevated to the status of a citizen. His account is corroborated by Aelian (­VH 12.43), who uses this term to describe Lysander, as well as Callicratidas and Gylippus. If this information is credible, we may speculate that these men may have become mothakes because their fathers were unable to provide them with a proper education, for instance due to poverty. In addition, Aelian states that the term mothakes was used to describe the syntrophoi of wealthy youths from outside of Sparta, whose fathers sent them there to compete against Spartan boys in the gymnasion. This solution was allegedly introduced by Lycurgus, who granted Laconian citizenship to those that had completed the agōgē. Thus, the above sources indicate that mothakes, distinguishable by their participation in the agōgē, were: ­1 foreigners. Among the boys sent to Sparta to be educated were two sons of Xenophon (­Plut. Ages. 20.2; Diog. Laert. 2.54; see also Xen. Hell. 5.3.9) and the son of Phocion (­Plut. Phoc. 20.4); ­2 sons of Spartiates and helot women (­bastards, Gk. nothoi, see Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). This view is supported by, e.g., T.J. Hooker, who emphasizes that the very existence of the term points to the frequency of such liaisons (­see also Hamilton 1991: 71). According to Cartledge (­1981: 104), the words nothoi, mothōnes, and mothakes all refer to this social category; ­3 sons of Spartiates who had lost full citizen rights. The usual examples here are impoverished Spartiates whose material status no longer permitted them to participate in the syssitia. This group likely included Lysander, who was reared in poverty, even though his father was a Spartiate (­Plut. Lys. 2.­1–​­2). It is, however, possible that Lysander’s mother was a helot or a slave. 216

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos

It should, therefore, be considered whether the term mothakes truly referred to these three groups of men in the same historical period, or whether it meant something else in different times. Participation in the agōgē would have been the essential criterion throughout, but at different points in time, depending on the situation in Sparta, different groups were allowed (­as mothakes) to enter its system. What do the mothakes known by name have in common? The one that made the greatest career was Lysander, son of Aristocratus (­Poralla 1913: 504), who became first a nauarchos (­fleet commander), and then an epistoleus (­formally the deputy fleet commander but, in connection with the ban on ­re-​­election, practically the commander). Despite being a scion of an aristocratic family, he grew up in poverty (­Lotze 1964: ­11–​­14); the causes of this remain unknown. Phylarchos calls Lysander a mothax (­FGrH 81 fr. 43). The term is never used in reference to his brother Libys, who rose to the rank of nauarchos in 404/403 BCE. Earlier, that is, in 407/406 BCE, the same title was granted to the mothax Callicratidas (­Poralla 1913: 408). Another career associated with the navy (­Sicily, Aigospotamoi) is that of Gylippus (­Poralla 1913: 196), son of the ephor Cleandridas. The ephor, who had been an advisor to King Pleistoanax, was accused of bribery in 446, and sentenced to death, fled Sparta (­Plut. Per. 22.­3 –​­4; Diod. Sic. 13.106.10). The social advancement of these three men took place during the Peloponnesian War, a time that proved pivotal in the conflict between Athens and Sparta. It may be surmised that they owed their success to skills of which Sparta was in dire need at the time. As soon as the danger was over and the mothakes had done their job, they were expected to remove themselves. Lysander proved problematic in this respect, as his merits, popularity, and ambition outgrew the status quo ante. Ultimately, however, ­ ost-​­war reality, there was no both he and the other two met a sad end. In the new p place for such careers any more. The system could still accommodate young, talented and ambitious men, such as Cinadon, yet it was unable to provide them with sufficient opportunities for advancement. In that particular case, the situation led to a mutiny known as Cinadon’s conspiracy (­Xen. Hell. 3.3. ­4 –​­11, see Arist. Pol. 1306b.­33–​­35; Polyaenus Strat. 2.14.1). The leader of that conspiracy, Cinadon, was a freeman, but not a member of the homoioi. He may have belonged to the class of impoverished Spartiates (­e.g., the hypomeiones, mentioned only in connection with his conspiracy), whom the changes that Sparta was undergoing at the time had left at a disadvantage. ‘­This Cinadon’, writes Xenophon, was ‘­a young man, sturdy of body and stout of heart, but not one of the peers’ (­Xen. Hell. 3.3.5): Having been informed of the conspiracy, the ephors decided to send Cinadon to Aulon along with others of the younger men (­syn allois tōn neōterōn), and to order him to bring back with him certain of the Aulonians and Helots whose names were written in the official dispatch (­skytalē). And they ordered him to bring also the woman who was said to be the most beautiful woman (­kallistē) in Aulon and was thought to be corrupting the Lacedaemonians who came there, older and younger alike. (­Xen. Hell. 3.3.8, trans. C.L. Brownson) The task did not arouse Cinadon’s suspicions, since this was not the first time he carried out missions of this kind for the ephors. He was instructed to report to the eldest of the 217

Ryszard Kulesza

hippagretoi (­commanders of the elite hippeis unit) and ask to be given six or seven men for the task. Thus, a hypomeion (­or possibly a mothax) was to lead a group of citizens and no eyebrows were raised. In reality, the ephors ‘­had taken care that the commander should know whom he was to send, and that those who were sent should know that it was Cinadon whom they were to arrest’ (­Xen. Hell. 3.3.9, trans. Brownson). Wary of the extent of the conspiracy, the Spartan establishment did not want to make the arrest within Spartan borders. An entire regiment (­mora) of cavalry was sent after Cinadon (­Xen. Hell. 3.3.10), and the plan was executed smoothly. Thus, Cinadon was brought to Sparta, and when under torture he ‘­c onfessed everything and told the names of his confederates, they asked him finally what in the world was his object in undertaking this thing’. He replied: ‘­I wished to be inferior to no one in Lacedaemon’ (­m ēdeis hēttōn einai en Lakedaimoni)’ (­Xen. Hell. 3.3.11, trans. Brownson). Given what has been established earlier about the root cause and objectives of the plot, the meaning of Cinadon’s words may have been different, yet it was in the ephors’ own interest to misrepresent it. Cinadon did not want everyone to become homoioi. According to Ephraim David (­1979: 246), the word hēttones must have been synonymous with hypomeiones. In other words, Cinadon did not wish to overthrow the system, but only regain his rightful place within it (­F lower 1991: 94). A direct statement to that effect is offered by Aristotle, who writes that Cinadon was a brave man, but was not granted the position he deserved in the state (­A rist. Pol. 1306b). The fact that Cinadon did not want to be hēttōn to anyone clearly testifies to his ambition and explains the source of his frustration, thereby shedding light on what was most probably the principal reason behind his conspiracy.

The freedmen The Spartan system allowed for mobility and degradation within the civic community. There is also evidence of advancement from the lowest strata. Myron of Priene wrote that the Spartans often freed their slaves (­doulous), calling some ‘­released’ (­aphetai), some ‘­masterless’ (­adespotoi), some ‘­curbers’ (­eryktēres), others again ‘­­master-​ ­seamen’ (­desposionautai); the last they assigned to the sea forces. Others still they called ‘­­newly-​­enfranchised’ (­neodamōdeis), all being different from the helots. (­Myron of Priene, FGrH 106 fr. 1 ap. Ath. 6.271f, trans. C.B. Gulick) The large number of terms for freedmen in Sparta is truly puzzling. The reference to helots in one example and the freedmen’s occupation in another may suggest that Myron’s classification is not based on a single criterion. Neither does it seem to describe two different paths to freedom: one meant for douloi, while the other for helots. The majority of freedmen in Sparta likely hailed from the latter group. Out of the terms enumerated by Myron, only that last one appears in other sources. The rest may be not technical terms, but words used in the colloquial language (­MacDowell 1986: 39). As Pavel Oliva (­1971: 171) observes, the most semantically transparent of them is aphetai, which simply means helots who had been manumitted. Similarly, the term adespotoi was probably used in the general sense to denote freed helots who were no longer dependent on their masters. According to Humfrey Michell (­1964: 90), aphetai and adespotoi were sobriquets and did not denote two different classes of 218

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos

freedmen. Oliva believes that both words were used interchangeably in reference to helots who for some reason had been manumitted. Hank Singor (­1993: 57 n. 52) claims that adespotoi were those who had gained their freedom as a result of their masters’ dying without an heir. The term eryktēres, in turn, is derived from the verb erykein (­to hold back, to divert, to keep). Michell (­1964: ­90–​­91) observes that ‘­anybody’s guess is as good as another. Perhaps the most likely explanation of these mysterious freedmen is that they were policemen who served under the command of the epimeletes. We know that in Athens the policemen were slaves, the famous Scythian archers’. The last of the four terms refers to those who had something to do with naval service. Desposionautai may have been fishermen from coastal settlements, conscripted to serve in the fleet if need arose. Apart from that, everything is pure conjecture. Thus, we may only repeat a rather banal conclusion (­corroborated by the analysis of the only category of freedmen mentioned in other sources, namely, the neodamōdeis) that the most obvious, and perhaps the only, reason for manumitting a slave was his meritorious service in the army. Freedom was likely granted, as promised, to helots who risked their own lives to supply food to Spartiates stranded on Sphacteria (­Thuc. 4.26.­5 –​­6). Sparta waged wars constantly, and the continuing decrease in citizen numbers meant that it could not afford to stop using helots as soldiers, especially considering that if helots were kept away from the matters of war, demographic changes detrimental to the establishment would become even more pronounced, undermining the privileged position of the homoioi. Also, the acts of manumission may have, to some extent, acted as a safety valve, and they had a political aspect, being yet another method of applying the principle of divide et impera in relation to helots (­on helots in general, recently Lewis 2018: ­125–​­146).

The neodamōdeis The word neodamōdēs (­pl. neodamōdeis) derives from neos (­new) and damos (­the people), and thus its literal meaning is ‘­a new member of the citizen community’. Fully enfranchised citizens of Sparta were called damōdeis or dēmotai (­Hesychius); so, could this mean that a freed helot became a member of the Spartan community, with all the rights thereof? Thucydides and Xenophon evidently deny it (­Cartledge 1987: ­39–​­40). Singor (­1993: 58) suggests that the term neodamōdeis may have referred to men who had the right to establish new damoi, that is, rural communities, outside of ­Spartan-​­owned lands. Who, then, was a neodamōdēs? The name indicates that his status was in some sense similar to that of a citizen, yet not equivalent to it. Pollux (­O nom. 3.83) states that the helots who were granted freedom were called neodamōdeis by the Lacedaemonians. A similar definition is given by Hesychius (­314), who specifies that the name neodamōdēs applied to a man freed from helot status. Thus, both lexicographers attest that Myron’s mention of neodamōdeis, indeed, refers to freed helots. Did every freed helot become a neodamōdēs? Myron is not the only source implying that this was not the case. Thucydides writes that the Lacedaemonians freed the helots who fought alongside Brasidas and allowed them to settle in a place of their choice. Soon after, he adds, the Lacedaemonians settled those men in Lepreum along with neodamōdeis (­Thuc. 5.34.1). It is obvious that Thucydides did not consider the status of freed helots and neodamōdeis to be one and the same, though the criterion for their differentiation is not entirely clear. 219

Ryszard Kulesza

It should be noted that those authors who mention the neodamōdeis in action, that is, Thucydides and Xenophon, portray them as soldiers. It does not seem coincidental that we first hear about them in the context of the Peloponnesian War, when Sparta was finding it difficult to address the problems of running a military campaign. The remarks in Thucydides indicate that they only appeared during the second phase of the Archidamian War, between 424 and 421 BCE; the last passage from Xenophon which contains a reference pertains to the year 370/369. During the Peloponnesian War, the neodamōdeis numbered at least a thousand. It may be surmised that by the beginning of the fourth century BCE, they had been playing a crucial role as Sparta’s military reserve. In 397, King Agesilaus set off to his Asian campaign with 30 Spartiates, 2,000 neodamōdeis, and 6,000 allies. This being said, the neodamōdeis are described as inferior to Spartiates in terms of skill. When in 374 BCE Polydamas of Pharsalos pleaded with Sparta for military assistance, he asked them to send him citizens, saying that if they wished to send neodamōdeis, it would be better for them to stay at home (­Xen. Hell. 6.1.14). It is not clear how exactly a helot could gain the status of a neodamōdēs. According to one theory, in contrast to (­Brasidas’) helots who were promised their freedom in recognition of their deeds on the battlefield, the neodamōdeis were liberated earlier and afterwards were under the obligation to serve in the military. MacDowell (­1986: 51) believes that being mothakes, they passed through the agōgē, and after completing their period of service, they spent the rest of their lives working in garrisons in the border areas. Another suggestion is that those helots who volunteered to serve as hoplites went through training and were granted freedom at some stage of their military career (­Ducat 1990: 160). When Sparta lost its hegemony over Greece, the neodamōdeis lost their entire raison d’être.

Visual signs of social status Writing ca. 424 BCE, the Old Oligarch describes the culture shock a Spartiate must have experienced when coming to Athens: Now among the slaves and metics at Athens there is the greatest uncontrolled wantonness; you can’t hit them there, and a slave will not stand aside for you. I shall point out why this is their native practice: if it were customary for a slave (­or metic or freedman) to be struck by one who is free, you would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome. ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.1, trans. E.C. Marchant) In Sparta, this would have been impossible, because the system eliminated the risk of mistakenly identifying the social status of any person, even one encountered in passing. Interesting information on the topic may be inferred from the tale of Cinadon. His conspiracy was discovered when the ephors learnt about it from a young man whom he had tried to recruit. The young man revealed that Cinadon took him to the agora and asked him to count the Spartiates present there: ‘­A nd I’, he said, ‘­after counting king and ephors and senators and about forty others, asked “­W hy, Cinadon, did you bid me count these men?” And he replied: 220

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos

“­Believe,” said he, “­that these men are your enemies, and that all the others who are in the ­market-​­place, more than four thousand in number, are your allies”’. In the streets (­en tais hodois) also, the informer said, Cinadon pointed out as enemies here one and there two who met them, and all the rest as allies; and of all who chanced to be on the country estates (­en tois chōriois tychoien) belonging to Spartiatae, while there would be one whom he would point out as an enemy, namely the master (­despotēs), yet there would be many on each estate named as allies (­symmachoi). (­Xen. Hell. 3.3.5, trans. Brownson) The passage indicates that Spartiates were already a small minority at that time. Moreover, it appears that not all of them lived in Sparta; some spent their time, perhaps temporarily, in their ­estates – which ​­ is, again, difficult to interpret, since the decline in the number of citizens allegedly meant that a small group had control over much property. There are other doubts as well. If we count the king, the five ephors, and the 28 gerontes, that is, the members of the gerousia, the council (­if all were present), plus about 40 others, we arrive at some 74 people. If we count the king, the five ephors, and the 28 gerontes, the number 40 only leaves room for six more citizens (­see Krentz 1995: 179 and Xen. Hell. 3.3.5). The number 4,000, used to refer to the remainder of the society, is equally perplexing. Why are there so many? The proportion 100 to 1 or even 2 is strange indeed. It should, however, be surmised ­that – ​­regardless of all the problems with counting people and any mistakes in the ­numbers – ​­Cinadon clearly intended to draw attention to the fact that the homoioi were greatly outnumbered. This being said, how could a person tell one social group from another? Even Spartan kings were allegedly indistinguishable from other Spartiates. In Pierre Carlier’s view (­1984: 273), they carried no sceptre and wore no crown or purple cape. However, one passage states that the news of the birth of a son reached Ariston as he was sitting on his throne accompanied by the ephors (­en thōkō katemenō meta tōn ephorōn) (­Hdt. 6.63). Agesilaus also sat in his ‘­royal chair’ (­en tō basilikō thōkō) during audiences (­Plut. Ages. 4.5). Thus, as Spartan ephors had their official chairs, the king also had his thōkos. It is equally possible that kings had some other attributes of authority. The skēptron with which Cleomenes, overcome with madness, struck citizens in the face is usually assumed to have been a stick, but parallels with Homer’s skēptouchoi basilēes (­the kings, basilēes, holding sceptres, skēptron) indicate that other possibilities should also be taken into account. Generally speaking, it appears that attire and countenance was an indicator of status. Xenophon concludes his remarks on teknopoiia (­begetting children) with a rhetorical question: ‘­W hether he succeeded in populating Sparta with a race of men remarkable for their size and strength anyone who chooses may judge for himself’ (­Xen. Lac. 1.10, trans. Marchant).

Punishing unruly helots The Spartiates were responsible before the state for the conduct of their helots. According to Myron, if a helot was deemed unruly, he was put to death, and a Spartiate who did not instil proper discipline in his servant was fined (­Myron FGrH 106 fr. 2 ap. Ath. 14.657d). But the sense of Myron’s text raises some doubts. He mentions punishment for those Spartiates who failed to subjugate helots who had become fat (­hadroumenoi) and did not look the way slaves should (­see Ducat 1990: 1­ 07–​­108, ­119–​­120; Singor 1993: 44). 221

Ryszard Kulesza

What is this actually about? The punishment was certainly meant for a hadros, that is, a large, portly, overweight helot. The question is whether it was truly the helot’s physical appearance that was at stake. As noted by Myron (­FGrH 106 fr. 2), helots were obliged to dress in a very specific fashion. Each of them had to wear a leather cap (­kyneē) and a jacket (­diphthera). Pollux (­7.70) explains that the diphthera was a hooded chiton made of thick fabric. Contrary to what we may expect, it was not a garment reserved for slaves; outside of Sparta, it was also worn by poor countryfolk (­Ducat 1990: ­111–​­112). In the Spartan context, however, the diphthera emphasized the helots’ inferiority. A similar, no doubt partially symbolic meaning was ascribed to the kyneē (­Ducat 1990: 1­ 12–​­113). On the one hand, dress regulations were to stigmatize helots, humiliate them, constantly emphasizing the difference between them and their masters; on the other hand, given the lack of ‘­racial barriers’, it provided a way of visually distinguishing helots from citizens, especially when they were sent beyond the klēros to serve in Spartan households or accompany Spartiates on military campaigns. Spartan citizens also wore attire that identified them as such. A boy would only get one garment (­himation) per year. Again, we may wonder ­whether – ​­as Xenophon suggests (­L ac. 2.4) – ​­the aim was to get the boys accustomed to an austere lifestyle, or whether the single himation emphasized (­at least initially) the autonomy and unity of the community of youths, as was the case with the black chlamys worn by Athenian ephebes (­see Kennel 1995: ­123–​­124). An adult Spartiate was recognizable by his characteristic cape (­tribōn), a soldier by his mandatory purple robe (­Thommen 2013) ­and –​ ­contrary to the legend of barefoot ­Spartans – ​­also by his shoes (­lakōnikai, amyklaides) (­on shoes, see Sekunda 2009). There can be no doubt that, as indicated by Thucydides (­Thuc. 1.6.­4 –​­5), the Spartan lifestyle (­Laconian diaita) differed from that known in other Greek poleis. In some cases, social demotion also involved the obligation to wear stigmatizing attire. It was certainly so with the tresantes. Xenophon notes that the treatment of cowards in Sparta was unique: [ . . . ] in Lacedaemon everyone would be ashamed to have a coward with him at the mess or to be matched with him in a wrestling bout. Often when sides are picked for a game of ball he is the odd man left out: in the chorus he is banished to the ignominious place; in the streets he is bound to make way; when he occupies a seat he must needs give it up, even to a junior; he must support his spinster relatives at home and must explain to them why they are old maids: he must make the best of a fireside without a wife, and yet pay forfeit for that: he may not stroll about with a cheerful countenance, nor behave as though he were a man of unsullied fame, or else he must submit to be beaten by his betters. (­Xen. Lac. 9. ­4 –​­5, trans. Marchant) Plutarch notes that the tresantes – ​­those who survive a ­battle – ​­experience atimia: For such men are not only debarred from every office, but intermarriage with any of them is a disgrace, and any one who meets them may strike them if he pleases. Moreover, they are obliged to go about unkempt and squalid, wearing cloaks that are patched with dyed stuffs, half of their beards shaven, and half left to grow. (­Plut. Ages. 30.­2 –​­4, trans. B. Perrin) 222

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos

It may be surmised that Cinadon and his contemporaries had no trouble identifying the ephors mentioned by the informant using visual cues: When the ephors asked how many Cinadon said there really were who were in the secret of this affair, the informer replied that he said in regard to this point that those who were in the secret with himself and the other leaders were by no means many, though trustworthy; the leaders, however, put it this way, that it was they who knew the secret of all the ­others – ​­helots, freedmen, lesser Spartiatae (­tois hypomeiosi), and perioikoi; for whenever among these classes any mention was made of Spartiatae (­logos peri Spartiatōn), no one was able to conceal the fact that he would be glad to eat them raw (­hōmōn esthiein). (­Xen. Hell. 3.3.6, trans. Brownson) However, the image of the various social groups of Sparta may have been different to an outsider. The Lacedaemonian army comprised not only Spartiates but also hypomeiones, perioikoi, neodamōdeis, and even helots. For a number of reasons, Spartans preferred to conceal i­ nformation – ​­particularly their military ­secrets – ​­from the outside world. Uniformization also stemmed from purely military concerns. As has already been mentioned, by the second half of the fifth century BCE, Spartan units were not composed solely of fully enfranchised citizens. Among the 292 soldiers taken prisoner after the Battle of Sphacteria in 425 BCE, there were ca. 120 Spartiates (­Thuc. 4.38.5). The Athenians were exact in their count of prisoners but were unable to establish the number of Spartiates with the same precision. Who were the rest? They could, of course, have been perioikoi, although to the best of our knowledge members of that group did not serve as professional hoplites as Spartiates did. It is also possible that, at least at the end of the fifth century, men who had for one reason or another lost their full citizen rights fought alongside fully enfranchised Spartiates. That would explain why Thucydides did not provide the exact number of Spartiate prisoners, which would not have been too difficult if the captives were Spartiates and perioikoi (­Lazenby 1985: 45). An apt illustration of the nature of the problem is found in Plutarch’s account. Upon hearing his allies say that it was they who constituted the majority of the Lacedaemonian army, Agesilaus wanted to demonstrate the error in their thinking. He bade them sit apart, the allies to one side, the Lacedaemonians to the other. He ordered all the potters to stand up, then the smiths, the masons, and finally the merchants. Nearly all of his allies were standing, but not a single Spartiate rose; Agesilaus then said: ‘­You see, O men, how many more soldiers than you we are sending out’ (­Plut. Ages. 26, ­4 –​­5, trans. Perrin). On the other hand, it must be noted that the dwindling number of Spartan citizens meant a decrease not only in the proportion of Spartiates in morai, lochoi, and enōmotiai (­the ‘­regiments’, companies’, and ‘­platoons’ in the Spartan army), but also in their general contribution to the armies sent by the Symmachia. The Spartiates, hypomeiones, perioikoi, and neodamōdeis were indistinguishable from one another when in battle formation. Their quality in combat was another matter altogether, a fact of which both Spartans and other Greeks were well aware.

Bibliography Carlier, P. (­1984) La royauté en Grèce avant Alexandre (­Strasbourg) Cartledge, P. (­1979) Sparta and Lakonia: a regional history ­1300–​­362 B.C. (­London)

223

Ryszard Kulesza ——— ​­(­1981) ‘­Spartan wives: liberation or licence?’, CQ 31.1, ­84–​­105 ——— ​­(­1987) Agesilaos and the crisis of Sparta (­Baltimore, MD) ——— ​­(­1998) ‘­City and chora in Sparta: archaic to Hellenistic’, in W.G. Cavanagh and S.E.C. Walker (­eds) Sparta in Laconia (­London) ­39– ​­47 David, E. (­1979) ‘­The conspiracy of Cinadon’, Athenaeum 67, ­239–​­259 ——— ​­(­1989) ‘­Dress in Spartan society’, AW 19, ­3 –​­13 Ducat, J. (­1990) Les hilotes (­Paris) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­The perioikoi’, in A. Powell (­ed.) A companion to Sparta, vol. 2 (­Hoboken, NJ and Oxford) ­596–​­614 Eremin, A. (­2002) ‘­Settlements of Spartan perioikoi: poleis or komai’, in A. Powell and S. Hodkinson (­eds) Sparta: beyond the mirage (­London) ­267–​­283 Figueira, Th. (­2018) ‘­Helotage and the Spartan economy’, in A. Powell (­ed.) A companion to Sparta, vol. 2 (­Hoboken, NJ and Oxford) ­565–​­595 Finley, M.I. (­1968) ‘­Sparta’, in J.P. Vernant (­ed.) Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne (­Paris) ­143–​­160 = id. (­1975) The use and abuse of history (­1975) ­161–​­177 = in B.D. Shaw, R.P. Saller (­eds) (­1981) Economy and society in ancient Greece (­London 1981) ­24–​­40 Flower, M.A. (­1991) ‘­Revolutionary agitation and social change in classical Sparta’, in M.A. Flower and M. Toher (­eds) Georgica: Greek studies in honour of George Cawkwell (­London) ­78–​­97 Furuyama, M. (­1991) ‘­Minor groups in Sparta: mothakes, trophimoi and nothoi of the Spartiates’, Kodai 1991, 2, ­1–​­20 Hall, J. (­2000) ‘­Sparta, Lakedaimon and the nature of Perioikic dependency’, in P. ­Flensted-​ ­Jensen (­ed.) Further studies in the ancient Greek polis, CPC Papers 5 (­Stuttgart) ­73–​­89 Hamilton, C.D. (­1991) Agesilaus and the failure of Spartan hegemony (­Ithaca, NY) Hampl, F. (­1937) ‘­Die lakedaimonischen Periöken’ Hermes 72, ­1–​­49 Hansen, M.H. (­1997) ‘­A typology of dependent poleis’, in Th.H. Nielsen (­ed.) Yet more studies in the ancient Greek polis (­Stuttgart) ­29–​­37 ——— ​­(­2009) ‘­Was Sparta a normal or an exceptional polis?’, in S. Hodkinson (­ed.) Sparta: comparative approaches (­Swansea) ­385–​­416 Hansen, M.H. and Hodkinson, S. (­2009) ‘­Spartan exceptionalism? Continuing the debate’, in S. Hodkinson (­ed.) Sparta: comparative approaches (­Swansea) ­473–​­498 Hodkinson, S. (­1986) ‘­Land tenure and the conflict of values in classical Sparta’, CQ 36, ­378–​­406 ——— ​­(­1989) ‘­Inheritance, marriage and demography: perspectives upon the success and decline of classical Sparta’, in A. Powell (­ed.) Classical Sparta: techniques behind her success (­London) ­79–​­121 ——— ​­(­1993) ‘­Warfare, wealth, and the crisis of Spartiate society’, in J. Rich and G. Shipley (­eds) War and society in the Greek World (­London and New York) 1­ 46–​­176 ——— ​­(­2000) Property and wealth in classical Sparta (­Swansea) Kennel, N.M. (­1995) The gymnasium of virtue: education and culture in ancient Sparta (­Chapel Hill, NC and London) Krentz, P. (­1995) Xenophon, Hellenika II.3.­11-​­IV.28, introduction, translation, and commentary (­Warminster) Lazenby, J.F. (­1985) The Spartan army (­Warminster) Lewis, D. (­2018) Greek slave systems in their Eastern Mediterranean context, c. 8­ 00–​­146 BC (­Oxford) ­125–​­146 Lotze, D. (­1964) Lysander und der Peloponnesische Krieg (­Berlin) ——— (­ ​­1994) ‘­Bürger zweiter Klasse: Spartas Periöken. Ihre Stellung und Funktion im Staat der Lakedämoner’, Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Erfurt, Geistwissenschaftliche Klasse (­Erfurt) ­37–​­51 = id. (­2000) ‘­Bürger zweiter Klasse: Spartas Periöken. Ihre Stellung und Funktion im Staat der Lakedaimonier’, in D. Lotze, W. Ameling, and K. Zimmermann (­eds) Bürger und Unfreie im vorhellenistischen Griechenland. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (­Stuttgart) ­171–​­183 MacDowell, D.M. (­1986) Spartan law (­Edinburgh) Mertens, N. (­2002) ‘­οὐκ ὁμοῖοι, ἀγαθοὶ δέ. The perioikoi in the classical Lakedaimonian polis’, in A. Powell and S. Hodkinson (­eds) Sparta: beyond the mirage (­Swansea) ­285–​­303 Michell, H. (­1964) Sparta, 2nd edn (­Cambridge)

224

Citizenship and the Spartan kosmos Mossé, C. (­1977) ‘­Les périèques lacédémoniens. À propos d’Isocrate, Panathènaique, 177 sqq.’, Ktema 2, ­121–​­124 Müller, K.O. (­1844) Die Dorier (­Breslau) Oliva, P. (­1971) Sparta and her social problems (­A msterdam) Poralla, P. (­1913) Prosopographie der Lakedaimonier bis auf die Zeit Alexanders des Großen, (­Breslau), second edition with an introduction, addenda, and corrigenda by Alfred S. Bradford Chicago, 1985 Sekunda, N. (­2009) ‘­Laconian shoes with Roman senatorial laces’, ABSA 16, ­253–​­259 Shipley, G. (­1992) ‘­Perioikos: the discovery of classical Lakonia’, in J.M. Sanders (­ed.) Philolakon: Lakonian studies in honour of Hector Catling (­London) ­211–​­226 ——— ​­(­1997) ‘“­The other Lakedaimonians”: the dependent perioikic poleis of Laconia and Messenia’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) The polis as an urban center: symposium, August ­29–​­31, 1996, CPC Acts 5 (­Copenhagen) ­189–​­281 ——— ​­(­2004a) ‘­Lakedaimon’, in (­ed.) M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, An inventory of archaic and cassical poleis (­New York) ­569–​­598 ——— ​­(­2004b) ‘­Messenia’, in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen (­eds) An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (­New York) ­547–​­568 Singor, H.W. (­1993) ‘­Spartan land lots and helot rents’, in H. S ­ ancisi-​­Weerdenburg (­ed.), De Agricultura. In memoriam Pieter Willem de Neeve (­­1945–​­1990) (­Lyon) ­31–​­60 Thommen, L. (­2013) ‘­Der Purpur Spartas’ Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle 10, ­333–​­339

225

16 CIVIC SUBDIVISIONS AND THE CITIZEN COMMUNITY Roger Brock

Greek poleis typically identified themselves with the masculine plural ­ethnic  – ​­hoi Athēnaioi, hoi Korinthioi, hoi Samioi: that aligns with Aristotle’s definition of the polis as a ‘­community of citizens sharing a constitution’ (­Pol. 1276b.­1–​­2), and it naturally encourages us to conceive the citizen community as uniform and undifferentiated; however, as is well known, many poleis were divided into smaller units or ‘­segments’. Sometimes, these nested like ‘­Chinese boxes’, as a popular image has it,1 while in other cases they overlapped, integrating citizens into multiple networks, but in either case a citizen will consequently have had multiple formal identities within the polis,2 not to mention the additional possibility of belonging to informal and selective organizations such as eranistai or thiasoi. Such voluntary private organizations were certainly also constitutive of identity and community, and this has been the object of lively study in recent years, but my focus is on the formal subdivisions to which all citizens belonged, by virtue of being citizens.3 The scope of the discussion is also essentially restricted to the archaic and classical periods: although there is an increasing awareness of continuities, the Hellenistic world is in many ways a different political landscape, more disrupted and liable to external intervention by powerful ­monarchs – ​­something we can see already impacting citizenship in Alexander’s decree of 324 BCE requiring all poleis to readmit their exiles. Civic subdivisions could be defined according to several different principles.4 The first and perhaps most widespread was fictive kinship, the notion that members were in some sense related or ‘­family’ because their ancestry could be traced back to some notional ancestor in mythical times: at the most basic level, this conception lay behind tribal organization,5 and it is also exemplified by the phratry, etymologically a ‘­band of brothers’, and the genos.6 The second widespread organizational basis is geographical definition, which generated widespread entities such as the meros (‘­part’), kōmē (‘­v illage’), and deme, as well as less familiar and more parochial instances such as the pyrgos (‘­tower’);7 inasmuch as membership came to be hereditary, these will, of course, also have become descent groups, but the spatial aspect must have continued to be salient since the location of family graves, for example, will have been fixed and so continued to tie individuals to certain physical locations, however their normal place of residence may have changed.8 These two organizational principles were natural, since 226

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-20

Civic subdivisions and the citizen community

they correspond to the two basic conceptions of the polis itself, in human and territorial terms.9 Thirdly, citizens might be organized in terms of characteristic civic activity, notably in commensal gatherings including the Spartan syssitia and Cretan andreia.10 It is quite likely that these also had a military aspect, at least informally; however, names of subdivisions which suggest an organization specifically in military terms are rarely attested and difficult to interpret,11 though units based on other principles frequently performed such functions, as we shall see. Finally, there are numerous instances of simple ­numerically-​­based bodies, either founded on a notional membership, like the chiliastys (‘­thousand’) or hekatostys (‘­hundred’), both quite widely attested,12 or a fractional division, such as the hēmiogdoon (‘­­half-​­eighth’) at Corinth or the enatē (‘­n inth’) on Kos, or indeed the Athenian trittys; either is entirely conventional, and should serve to alert us to a considerable element of artificiality in systems of civic subdivision which appear to have been frequently ­re-​­worked. Until relatively recently, the main focus in the study of Greek civic subdivisions was the search for what they might reveal about the origins and early phases of Greek social organization and state formation, and the way in which those influenced the evolution of the polis. However, that approach was largely undermined by the publication in the same year of two heavyweight studies, of the tribe by Denis Roussel (­1976), and of the genos by Félix Bourriot (­1976), both of which demonstrated the shakiness of reconstructions based on the assumption that archaic and classical organization perpetuated arrangements from much earlier times, and argued for extensive reorganization and ­re-​­use of either component in many poleis. While this has become the new orthodoxy,13 and it is in any case arguably more productive to engage with the empirical realities in periods where there is at least some evidence, it is worth observing that in the case of the Ionian and Dorian tribes, they are attested sufficiently widely and consistently as to make it probable that they are very ancient in origin, albeit that by the time they are properly attested they are incorporated in a variety of structures and not always performing the same function.14 While the Ionian and Dorian tribes provide some common threads in certain regions, it is the diversity and particularity of the systems of civic divisions which is most striking. Indeed, that is evident even in uses made of those tribes: just as the Ionian tribes were variously deployed and augmented, the Dorian tribes might be supplemented by a fourth tribe, as at Sicyon and Argos.15 Often, a citizen population was divided in several different ways: Corinth, for example, had three Dorian tribes, eight territorial tribes, each divided into hēmiogdoa (‘­­half-​­eighths’), triakades (‘­Thirties’), which might also be linked to location, and phratries; Cos had chiliastyes (­p erhaps nine in number), triakades, and pentēkostyes, together with a system of at least ten demes. The combination of different organizational principles must often have been ­cross-​­cutting, so that some subdivisions were nested, while others combined citizens in networks of different kinds, perhaps to counter the development of sectional interests and buttress civic solidarity through multiple bonds of loyalty.16 At the same time, some communities seem to have been content with a simple tribal division, and in some regions such as Boeotia not even that, but there was no necessary correlation between size and complexity.17 Such diversity is suggestive not only of a long evolutionary process, but also of episodes of active intervention in and reform of the internal articulation of poleis, in which older elements might be repurposed, or simply overlaid by new structures which took over their functions, as in the reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens at the end of the 227

Roger Brock

sixth century.18 Here, the Ionian tribes were supplanted for practical administrative purposes by the ten new tribes, into which the new demes were distributed by new trittyes, which served to mix up all the citizens and dissolve prior associations, as Aristotle recommends (­see n.16). Nevertheless, the Ionian tribes continued to exist and to perform religious functions, as we see from the mention of the Leucotainiai, one of the old trittyes of the Ionian tribe Geleontes, in the revised sacrificial calendar published at the beginning of the fourth century, while the phylobasileis, the heads of the tribes, retained judicial functions regarding homicide that went back to Draco’s ­law-​­code.19 The religious responsibilities probably explain their survival: it would have been rash for mortals unilaterally to abrogate any part of the city’s covenant with its gods, so instead the cult arrangements were left in place; we might compare the way in which in the synoecism of Helisson in Arcadia with Mantineia, by which it became a kōmē, that is, a civic subdivision, the arrangements carefully preserve its sacrifices and religious subdivisions.20 At the same time, it seems likely that the phratries in Athens were repurposed so that all Athenians now belonged to one and thus participated in a framework that cut across deme membership.21 Cleisthenes’ reforms followed tyranny, but sometimes tyrants were themselves the reformers: indeed, two noteworthy instances have been seen as precedents for what happened at Athens. Herodotus reports (­5.68) that Cleisthenes found inspiration for his tribal reform in the actions of his grandfather, Cleisthenes tyrant of Sicyon, who had allegedly changed the names of the Dorian tribes to insulting variants that referred to domestic animals, apart from his own tribe, who became Archelaoi, rulers of the people: the ­re-​­naming was evidently directed at Argos, a gesture of independence, and it is possible that the fourth tribe was created at this point.22 Nearby Corinth has been seen as a model of a different kind, based on territorial subdivision combined with a numerical framework (­above, p. 227), in this case based on eight rather than the decimal system of Athens, a system which appears to have come into existence somewhat earlier, under the Cypselid tyranny (­Salmon 1984: 2­ 05–​­209; 2003); the geographical clustering of these three cases is suggestive of an element of p ­ eer-​­polity interaction, though the end product in each case is individual and distinctive. In Sicily, the general collapse of tyrannies at the end of the archaic period led to widespread problems concerning citizenship, since tyrants had enfranchized their supporters, including mercenaries, and had also been responsible for ­large-​­scale population movements (­Diod. Sic. 11.68, ­72–​­73, 76, es­p. 76.­4 –​ ­6). We can see the response most clearly at Camarina: the population had been deported to Syracuse by Gelon (­Hdt. 7.156), and the city had to be ­re-​­founded in 461 BCE. This is the obvious context in which to locate the archive of inscribed lead tablets, discovered in 1987, which list the citizen’s name, patronymic, and phratry, the last simply identified by an ordinal number (­the highest is ‘­fourteenth’): this has been seen as emblematic of ‘­Greek rationality’, and certainly the numbering points to the establishment of a new constitutional order based on abstract theoretical principles to which any existing entity was subordinated.23 It seems that a substantial number of communities underwent reorganization in the later archaic and even early classical period, as in the case of Argos, perhaps because the limits of the citizen body had to be redefined or were only clearly defined for the first time at this point.24 We can see similar pressures at an earlier date at Cyrene, where an increase in population through an influx of new settlers contributed to social tensions within the original colonial structures which required the recruitment of an external consultant, Demonax of Mantineia, who carried out a tribal reorganization.25 228

Civic subdivisions and the citizen community

Similarly, the Athenian foundation of Thourioi necessitated the creation of an artificial tribal system based on the origins of settlers, since it was a Panhellenic initiative, for which any existing model would have been parochial and inappropriate; the same was presumably true of Amphipolis.26 The upheavals caused by Alexander’s Exiles’ Decree would seem to be another context which created a requirement in many places for wholesale reconfiguration of the citizen body, something we can certainly see in the case of Samos.27 In order for citizenship to be complete and effective, enrolment in the requisite subdivisions was clearly essential, as we can see from the inscribed record of honorific grants of citizenship, which call, for example, at Athens for enrolment into tribe, trittys, and deme, or in equivalent structures elsewhere, such as the tribe, chiliastys, hekatostys, and genos at Samos.28 Nevertheless, the actual units which an honorand chose or was assigned to are infrequently recorded:29 while honorific grants are not entirely representative, since it was relatively unlikely that the honorand would actually exercise his political rights, this does seem to imply a lack of concern to maintain a permanent record at polis level. Indeed, it appears that Athens had no central register of citizens,30 nor was there any comprehensive centralized system of documentation, the tokens carried by jurors and cavalrymen being the closest that Athens came to anything of the kind, as indeed appears to be the case for classical Greece in general.31 Instead, it seems that poleis were dependent on local knowledge and organization, and perhaps ­self-​­interest (­see Kierstead in this volume) in the subdivisions to perform the important civic functions which they enabled, and citizens likewise relied on them to validate their status and entitlements. Hitherto, study of the functioning of civic subdivisions in themselves has focused on their role in the administration of the polis, and the civic functions which they performed or which were devolved to them, though because Athens is, as usual, by far the best documented case, they have also implicitly been studied in the context of political activity and citizen status. Mogens Hansen identifies their three main functions as being to control admission to citizenship, and to serve as electoral wards and military units.32 The role of subdivisions in regulating citizen membership is implicit in the process of enrolment, and it is exemplified in the Athenian procedure for the scrutiny of new citizens described by the Ath. Pol. (­42.­1–​­2), in which the deme plays the primary role: while their work is scrutinized by the Boule, the presumption is that their judgement is valid, and the appeal process is weighted in their favour (­Brock ­2015; Kierstead 2017 and in this volume). The crucial importance of the deme’s local knowledge is equally demonstrated by Demosthenes 57, an appeal by a member of the deme Halimous against the decision of his fellow demesmen to exclude him in the diapsēphisis of 346/345 (­see Fisher and Kierstead in this volume). The chicanery which he alleges, whether real or imagined,33 also underlines the potential for due process to be distorted by local animosities: it is striking that while the phratry is not mentioned by the author of the Ath. Pol. and so presumably did not have a formal role in the vetting of citizens, the evidence of phratry members for legitimate descent could be cited in court in lieu of, as well as in addition to that of demesmen, and since all citizens apparently belonged to a phratry, this could potentially function as a safety net in contentious cases.34 We may reasonably suppose that in other poleis too, local knowledge served to validate the criterion of citizen descent through the father or on both sides, which Aristotle identifies as the legal norm (­Pol. 1275b.­22–​­23), together with legitimate birth where that 229

Roger Brock

was a requirement, which was not always the case (­Pol. 1278a.­27–​­34, 1319b.­6 –​­10; see ­ riffith-​­Williams in this volume), and one might surmise that the same was true of stipG ulations such as the requirement to have abstained from commerce for ten years which he mentions for Thebes (­Pol. 1278a.­25–​­26). In an essentially ­un-​­bureaucratic world, local knowledge, combined with local solidarity or friction,35 was the most effective regulatory mechanism. The military function of civic subdivisions is best attested for the tribe: indeed, our earliest evidence for the three Dorian tribes, Pamphyloi, Hylleis, and Dymanes, is a fragment of Tyrtaios (­fr. 19 West) which alludes to them in a military context. Likewise at Athens, even if military efficiency was not the primary motivation for Cleisthenes’ reforms (­cf. Siewert 1982), the institution within a decade of ten generals, one per tribe, makes clear that the new tribal system necessitated military reorganization, and thereafter the fundamentally tribal structure of the Athenian army is reflected in the format of casualty lists.36 Elsewhere, the organization of casualty lists by tribe at Megara and Argos perhaps points to an early military role, though the fact that more generals than tribes are attested by the classical period would suggest that this had been superseded; tribal organization would seem to have persisted in Sicily, where it is attested for Messene and Syracuse.37 Smaller contingents are harder to detect, as indeed is the internal articulation of most hoplite armies, but on Nicholas Jones’s reading (­1987: ­98–​­101), a fragmentary Corinthian casualty list would seem to indicate that military structures there made use of the hēmiogdoon (­half of one of the eight tribes) and triakas (­a purely numerical grouping of platoon size); occasionally, such functions are attested for other units, as, for example, the hekatostys at Heracleia Pontica.38 While the demes of Attica do not seem to have been formally integrated into the system of lochoi, anecdotal evidence in the orators suggests that demesmen would stick together, again presumably out of local solidarity, and hence could vouch for each other’s performance on campaign and in combat.39 Functioning as electoral wards is the most richly documented aspect of the public roles of civic subdivisions, and the evidence is much too extensive to address in detail here:40 often, it entails inferring representation from a correspondence between the number of elected officials and of one or other subdivision, though sometimes there is epigraphic evidence of specific affiliation to tribes or other bodies. However, it is not necessarily the case that all members of the notional electoral wards were in practice eligible to vote, and Aristotle’s discussion of the manifold possible variations in the conduct of elections (­Pol. 1300a.­8 –​­b.5) should give us pause: it may be that in reality this function was the least widely shared of the three. It is also noteworthy in this context to mention how sparse is the evidence for participation in the administration of justice on this basis; there is a little more for the division of theatres by unit, which might have had some kind of impact on the conduct of assemblies.41 The issue of participation prompts the question as to how far civic subdivisions were embedded in the polis, and how far they constituted an alternative to it. In conducting his detailed audit of polis ­sub-​­units, Jones was struck by their detailed articulation in many cases, and suggested briefly in his introduction that such ‘­public associations’, as he termed them, both ‘­afforded the apparatus for the conduct of the state’s business and, as internally organized associations, satisfied the need for ­face-­​­­to-​­face fellowship in a politically innocuous manner’ (­1987: 21), a thesis he went on to explore in detail for Athens in two subsequent monographs (­1999, 2004), arguing for substantial alienation and ­non-​­participation in remoter rural demes in particular. Whatever the merits of his 230

Civic subdivisions and the citizen community

argument for Athens,42 it could only be applicable to the handful of poleis on a similar scale in population and territory; nevertheless, his data on internal organization are highly important, and the inference that subdivisions had much to offer their members is entirely justified. The first and most fundamental point is one of size. As we have seen, the evidence indicates that many poleis had several tiers of organization, and it suggests that the smallest subdivisions typically had an average membership in the high tens or low hundreds. Obviously, that ought to hold good for ­numerically-​­defined units like the pentēkostys and hekatostys, even if a degree of approximation or rounding was involved, but similar results can be achieved by calculation in cases where we have both details of the internal structure and tolerably reliable indications of population: for example, a population of 6,­000–​­7,000 Eretrians divided between ­55–​­60 demes would give an average of around ­100–​­125 members for each; at Tenos, perhaps 2,­500–​­3,000 citizens belonged to ten territorial tribes, while a total of maybe 3,­000–​­4,000 Mantineians belonged not only to five kōmai but also to 25 merē; at the upper end, perhaps 5,­000–​­6,000 Tegeans were distributed among nine demes (­unless those were subdivided by tribe).43 Similarly, on Marcello Lupi’s reading of Demetrios of Skepsis’ account of Sparta, a notional 9,000 Lycurgan Spartiates in 27 phratries would have given maximal memberships of 330, decreasing in reality as the citizen population of Sparta declined (­Lupi 2018; Demetrios of Skepsis ap. Ath. ­141e–​­f). For comparison, a nominal 30,000 Athenians in 139 demes is an average of 216, though, of course, in this case distribution was very uneven, and some demes such as Acharnai were as large in themselves as m ­ edium-​­sized poleis: it may be that they had their own internal dynamics, and recent discussions of multiple population centres and scattered distribution of habitation, and indeed burial, in Acharnai are a promising pointer in that direction.44 In those regions of Greece where civic subdivisions are not attested, including Boeotia and Thessaly, it is possible that a more dispersed settlement pattern had something of the same effect, and that might be true to some extent for the largest poleis anywhere, in which Hansen surmises that only half of the population lived within the walls. Indeed, on Hansen’s estimation, some ­two-​­thirds of all poleis were small enough, with an estimated citizen population of under a thousand, that a basic division into three or four tribes will have sufficed to generate segments of the requisite size; however, if his calculations are correct, a clear majority of individual Greeks in the classical period lived in poleis with a population of thousands, which will have required more complex segmentation to achieve the same result.45 Groupings of this size align suggestively with recent work in cognitive science, encapsulated in the concept of ‘­Dunbar’s number’, the proposition, based originally on a comparative study of social organization in primates, that human beings are only capable of maintaining around 150 stable social relationships: that is supported to some degree by modern empirical evidence, for example, the tendency of the regimental subdivisions labelled in English as ‘­companies’ to be of this size, as in the remodelled Swedish army of Gustavus Adolphus, or indeed the Roman ‘­century’. This is not to say that we should imagine a Greek politēs as more or less limiting his stable social relationships to the members of this smallest subdivision: after all, even at this level, there will have been other demands on his capabilities, not least that of kinship, and of course women and children will have multiplied the real size of the social unit several times; some account also needs to be taken of the multiple identities of a citizen which we have already noted. Nevertheless, it is plausible that the size of these basic units provided a context in 231

Roger Brock

which a member of a citizen community numbering thousands (­or, exceptionally, tens of thousands) could meaningfully and profitably invest much of his46 capacity for relationships. First of all, the compact size of these communities will have meant not only a high level of ­day-­​­­to-​­day interaction, but also a high level of mutual knowledge that will have enabled them to function efficiently and promoted ­co-​­operation, reciprocity, and trust, all of which will have made these relationships satisfying; the tendency of such units to have a particular spatial locus, either in terms of residence or through venues for shared activity, above all sanctuaries, but also agorai and in some cases theatres,47 will also have contributed to the building of a sense of identity.48 At one level, the character of civic subdivisions as internally organized, s­elf-​ ­regulating entities not only played a key role in constituting that identity, but was also attractive to ambitious individuals as an alternative venue for political activity and other forms of competition through which they could establish, demonstrate, or enhance their status. The epigraphic record at Athens and elsewhere exemplifies the way in which subdivisions frequently came to be constituted as ­decision-​­making bodies, with formal meetings to deal with community business and officers, themselves regulated through appointment, scrutiny, and audit.49 It is possible to interpret the way in which the decrees issued by these bodies mirror those published by the polis either as competitive s­ elf-​­assertion or as a kind of emulative mimicry, but it is so widespread and universal that it may actually be a reflection of something fundamental about Greek ideas of how a community ought to function.50 That is not to say that civic subdivisions did not perform a useful function as an acceptable outlet for political ambitions, especially in oligarchic poleis in which access to real power and authority might well be tightly limited. That was not an issue in democratic poleis, but Dunbar’s number may, nonetheless, have presented a problem, at least in larger poleis, since on that assumption, individuals active in a political environment which operated through direct personal contact and without the benefit of Roman nomenclatores would have lacked the capacity to maintain the requisite number of effective relationships at both deme and polis level, at least in the long term. This structural problem of capacity may well explain the phenomenon noted for Athens around the same time by both Robin Osborne (­1985: ­83–​­87) and David Whitehead (­1986: ­313–​­326) of the almost total lack of overlap between political activity at deme and polis level. That, in turn, would throw a new light on Cleon’s reported ‘­renunciation of his friends’ (­Connor 1971: ­91–​­94): it was simply a practical necessity for a man with ambitions to shine on the larger stage, however it may have been ‘­spun’ for favourable publicity as a transition to becoming philodēmos. In itself, however, local political activity would have had little substance or value without the resources which enabled small units to make meaningful decisions. Here again, the epigraphic record is illuminating: we regularly see them undertaking expenditure in conferring honours on both members and outsiders, for the commemorative inscription and any tangible reward, which if it was a gold crown would entail a substantial outlay. Much larger expenditure, though, is implied for religion and cult activity, the extent of which is illuminated for Attica by a number of sacrificial calendars (­see further below). All this was possible because demes had sources of income in taxes, levies, and liturgies, and often in revenues derived as interest on or rent from capital assets such as land or properties. Similarly, on Chios, the Klytidai decide to construct a sacred building and then pass regulations regarding its use; we know that they had very substantial landholdings from another text, which deals with the leasing of multiple properties, one of which is described as ‘­worth five thousand staters’.51 232

Civic subdivisions and the citizen community

In point of fact, resources were one of a number of areas in which civic subdivisions served to mediate between polis and individual. On the one hand, it would seem that at Athens at least their own assets were not entirely r­ ing-​­fenced and might be called in aid by the polis; on the other hand, it was natural for them to oversee the distribution of benefits to individuals. We can see this most clearly at Samos, where a Hellenistic decree provides for the chiliastyes to oversee the distribution of grain to citizens, doubtless because they would be able to identify and quantify those eligible. It is surely not coincidental that a review of Athenian citizens is reported in the ­m id-​­fifth century, precisely in connection with a donation of grain from Egypt; the theōrikon was distributed in the demes, as was meat from sacrifice at the Little Panathenaia.52 Civic subdivisions are also widely attested as the bodies participating in civic competitions, as with the tribal competitions for dithyrambic choruses of men and boys at Athens, and the t­ orch-​ ­races there and in a number of other poleis: rivalry between notionally equal bodies could be seen as fair, which minimized the potential for disharmony.53 Religion was a key activity for civic subdivisions, and central to their identity through their own covenant with the gods, which at Athens will have been both the gods of the polis, worshipped in l­ocally-​­celebrated rituals such as the Rural Dionysia, and local divinities, from influential cults like that of Nemesis at Rhamnous to the individual local heroes who were the eponyms or founders of demes: we have already noted the importance attached to continuity of cult activity when the place and role of subdivisions changed (­above p. 228). Again, the ­m id-­​­­fourth-​­century religious calendar from Cos attests to the participation of civic subdivisions, the chiliastyes, in sacrificial activity, and the decree of the Labyadai is extensively concerned with the regulation of sacrifice. Beyond the sense of a shared communion with the gods, cult activity also served to foster a sense of solidarity through commensality, the strength of which as a socially cohesive force is increasingly appreciated: thus, section D of the Labyadai regulations begins ‘­These are the customary feasts’ and then enumerates 15 occasions, as well (­p erhaps) as providing for members to participate in private sacrifices.54 At the same time, religion was another area in which subdivisions were entangled with the wider civic community, as with the case of Rhamnous, home to a cult celebrated at polis level; the deme sacrificial calendars likewise range from cults of the polis to purely local divinities, and some local cults were open to a wider ­sub-​­group of communities within the Athenian state (­Parker 1987; Ismard 2010: 2­ 09–​­251). There are also indications that local units may have been particularly concerned with burial. In Attica, responsibility for interring the dead who did not receive the customary rites (­ta nomizomena) from kinsmen fell to the demarch, and there are increasing indications of particularity in burial practices among demes. At Delphi, the Labyadai are also concerned to regulate funerary practice among members, while on Keos the constituent polis of Iulis legislated at length on the matter.55 It was also Athenian demesmen who were expected to have knowledge of the due ongoing performance of burial rites. That is one small element in the function of civic subdivisions as communities of memory, preserving an awareness of the doings of their members past and present, and of their traditions. Individual demes might possess particular mythical tales such as those Herodotus preserves concerning Decelea (­9.73), and the extensive collection reported by Pausanias for Attica, and indeed for Greece as a whole. Tribes too had their myths, on which Demosthenes draws in his funeral speech, and the commemoration of w ­ ar-​­dead by tribe also suggests that they will have had particular traditions, at Athens and elsewhere. More generally, it is evident that many demes 233

Roger Brock

were credited with particular characteristics relating to the personality and behaviour of their members (­hence the references to them in the titles of comedies) or commodities associated with them.56 All this served to consolidate a distinct community identity, alongside physical location and shared political and religious action. Civic subdivisions thus functioned at two complementary levels: they anchored their members in the polis community and enabled them to participate in it, as has long been recognized, but they also offered them the means to locate themselves comfortably and meaningfully in their everyday lives.

Abbreviations OR = Osborne, R. and Rhodes, P.J. (­eds) (­2017) Greek historical inscriptions ­478–​­4 04 BC (­Oxford and New York) RO = Rhodes, P.J. and Osborne, R. (eds) (2003) Greek historical inscriptions 404–323 BC (Oxford and New York)

Notes 1 E.g., Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: 95); Davies (­1996: 639 n.156, 642). 2 This is the central thesis of Ismard (­2010), though the point had already been made by Murray (­1986: ­201–​­204). 3 For private associations, see now the Inventory of Ancient Associations (­https://­w ww. ancientassociations.ku.dk/­CAPI/­index.php), the fruit of a l­ong-​­running project based at Copenhagen and led by Vincent Gabrielsen. The distinction is not entirely hard and fast, as Aristotle remarks (­EN ­1160a8–​­30), and Ismard (­2010), in particular, has argued for extensive entanglement of Athenian private associations with polis structures, especially in finance and religion (­b elow, 233 and n.52). Note also that groups with the same name might be private in some poleis but not others: e.g., the genos was a civic subdivision to which all citizens belonged at Samos, but a fairly exclusive private body at Athens, albeit connected to public religion (­Parker 1996: ­56–​­66). 4 The excellent study of Jones (­1987) makes available a wealth of detailed documentation of the phenomenon, which has since been supplemented to some extent by the Inventory of archaic and classical Greek poleis compiled by the Copenhagen Polis Centre (­Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 96 and n.11; there is a useful overview in Appx. 13); Jones (­1987: Index 1B) classifies public units according to their basis. 5 Though note the possibility of territorial phylai: Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: 95 and n.6). 6 As well as less widespread institutions such as the suggeneia, attested from Mylasa and its dependencies (­Jones 1987: ­328–​­332) and Thessaly (­SEG 36 548), both in the Hellenistic period. 7 Though the only clear instance of this, at Teos, seems to be ­post-​­classical: Jones (­1987: ­308–​­310). 8 The physical location of original residence might continue to be politically significant, e.g., in the Athenian deme, as we can see from the experience of Euxitheos (­above 229 and n.33). 9 Hansen (­1998: ­17–​­34, ­52–​­64). Building terms like oikos (­only attested from Karthaia on Keos: Jones 1987: 206) and pyrgos likewise sit ambiguously between the two. 10 Syssitia (­or phiditia: Arist. Pol. 1271a.­26–​­27): Hdt. 1.65.5, linking them to the military system, as also Pl. Leg. 633a; Xen. Lac. 5; Arist. Pol. 1265b.­40–​­42, 1271a.­26–​­37, 1272a.­1–​­4 (­making a link to Crete), 1294b.­26–​­27; andreia: Whitley (­2018); see Seelentag, Duplouy, and Filonik in this volume. 11 Jones cites only the startos (­probably cognate with stratos) at Gortyn and perhaps Lyttos on Crete, which he suggests was an elite section of a tribe (­1987: ­225–​­226, 228) and the naukrariai of ­pre-​­Solonian Athens (­Ath. Pol. 8.3 with Rhodes 1981 ad loc.). 12 Hekatostyes (­studied in detail by Ferraioli 2012) are attested for Byzantium, Heraclea Pontica, Chalcedon, and Megara, chiliastyes for Ephesos, Erythrae, and Kos, and pentēkostyes

234

Civic subdivisions and the citizen community for Argos and Cos: Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: ­1343–​­1344). Etymologically, the pentēkostys could be ‘­either a Fiftieth or a Fifty’ (­Jones 1987: 114), though the parallels with larger numbers, especially on Cos, would seem to point to the latter. 13 But n.b. Gehrke (­2000) for a careful discussion of the possibility that groups with an element of authentic kinship in the remoter past may have underlain at least some later subdivisions based on fictive kinship. 14 Jones (­1987: ­11–​­15), with Piérart (­1983: ­2 –​­8) for the Ionian tribes, and more generally Davies (­1996) and Gehrke (­2000) for a cautious evolutionary view; Ismard (­2010: ­44–​­83) argues for the assimilation of various disparate associations in the early formulation of citizenship at Athens. 15 Jones (­1987: 1­ 03–​­106 and 1­ 12–​­113 respectively); on Sicyon, see above 228; also very probably at Epidauros (­107) and Troizen (­111). 16 Cf. Aristotle on the creation of new loyalties through ‘­m ixing up’ in democratic reforms (­Pol. 1319b.­19–​­27). 17 Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: ­95–​­96), citing the example of Delos; cf. Jones (­1987: ­203–​­204) on the ­fourth-​­century federal organization of Keos, and see above, 231. 18 Cecchet (­2017) is a recent study of such episodes; Humphreys (­2018) is now fundamental for all aspects of Athenian social organization. 19 Parker (­1996: ­112–​­113); Ath. Pol. 57.4 with Rhodes (­ 1981); OR no. 183A ­ 11–​­ 13, with commentary. 20 Blok (­2017: 4­ 7–​­99); (­2018: ­85–​­100) for the concept; RO no. 14.­8 –​­10, with commentary. 21 Lambert (­1993: ­31–​­57 [noting the exception of some recipients of grants of citizenship], ­245–​­266). 22 So, Jones (­1987: ­103–​­106), though Hornblower (­2013: ­198–​­200, ­204–​­206) emphasizes that Herodotus’ transmitted text only attests to changes of name. 23 OR no. 124, with commentary; Cecchet (­2017: ­69–​­73) (­w ith references to earlier discussions); rationality: Murray (­1997); there is something of the same kind at Mantineia, where the citizens seem to have been divided into sections (­merē) identified by letter (­on tokens: n.31 below): Robinson (­2011: ­36–​­39). 24 As suggested in Brock (2018), noting, e.g., that Thespiai was actively recruiting citizens after the Persian wars (­Hdt. 8.75). 25 Hdt. 4.­159–​­161: it is possible that he created a c­ ross-​­cutting system which spread the three groups of settlers across three tribes, though that is not the most obvious way to read Herodotus’ words: see Cecchet (­2017: ­61–​­69), with references to earlier literature, and Malkin in this volume. 26 Diod. Sic. 12.11, with Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: no. 74); Thuc. 4.106. 27 Jones (­1987: ­197–​­202); see Ferraioli (­2012: ­85–​­91) for a careful discussion of dating, concluding that the ­post-​­322 system was a reconfiguration of ­pre-​­existing elements. The earlier return of exiles to Chios in 334 was accompanied by the imposition of democracy: RO no. 84, ­A3–​­4; n.b. also no. 101 for the resulting economic upheavals at Tegea. The expansion of hekatostyes at Heracleia Pontica (­b elow, n.38) demonstrates the possibility of ad hoc internal reorganization, too. 28 E.g., RO no. 90; Jones (­1991) surveys procedure comprehensively. 29 Exceptions are Calymnos, where a large number of inscriptions from ca. 300 BCE (­Tit. Calymnii 8) onwards record assignment by sortition to tribe and deme, and Ephesos, with even more attestations of allotment to tribe and chiliastys from ca.302 BCE (­Ephesos 17); cf. Ephesos 11 (­P ygela, tribe and genos ca. 310 BCE) and IG XII,6 1: 56 (­Samos, tribe, chiliastys, genos and hekatostys, late ­fourth-​­century BCE); a rare classical example outside western Asia Minor is IG IV 748, recording allotment to tribe at Troizen in 369 BCE. 30 From some time in the first half of the fourth century, Athens had a register (­by ­age-​­class) of those liable to hoplite service: Christ (­2001: ­409–​­416) (­though n.b. Humphreys 2018: 738 for a different view on the date). 31 Juror tokens: Kroll (­1972); the system was later extended to sortition for office: Ath. Pol. 62.1 with Rhodes (­1981); cavalry tokens: Kroll (­1977). For tokens at Camarina, see n.23; elsewhere, the use of tokens is attested at Styra (­Murray 1997: 499), Mantineia, Iasos, Rhodes (­Robinson 2011: ­37–​­38, ­161–​­162, 170), and perhaps Argos (­Robinson 2011: 1­ 4–​­15); n.b. also Kroll (­1972: ­270–​­277) for possible allotment tokens at Sinope and Thasos.

235

Roger Brock 32 Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: 95); Jones (­1987: Index 2) provides a fuller typology. 33 Osborne (­1985: ­146–​­151); Whitehead (­1986: ­104–​­109, ­291–​­301); Isae. 12 relates to another case arising from the review. 34 Phratry evidence: Lambert (­1993: ­37–​­40), Scafuro (­1994); membership: above, n.21. 35 Lysias’ client in On the olive stump takes it as axiomatic that neighbours will know even each other’s secrets, and that some will be friendly and others hostile (­7.18). 36 Initially with (­apparently) a stele for each tribe; later there was a single stele each year, but divided by tribe: OR nos. 109, 129. Cf. Nicias appealing to his trierarchs by tribe: Thuc. 7.69. 37 Megara and Argos: Low (­2003: ­101–​­102); Jones (­1987: 113); number of generals: Jones (­1987: ­94–​­95, ­115–​­116). Messene: Thuc. 3.90.2; Syracuse: Thuc. 6.100.1, Jones (­1987: ­173–​­175). 38 Aen. Tact. 11.­10b–​­11: in the anecdote their number is increased so as to disperse oligarchic plotters; see Ferraioli (­2012: 3­ 5–​­52) for full discussion. Cf. the pentēkostyes and enōmotiai of the Spartan army (­Thuc. 5.68.3, Xen. Lac. 11.4), though these were probably exclusively military units; the relationship of the five lochoi of the earlier army to the five Spartan villages (­ōbai) remains controversial: see Singor (­1999: 69, ­74–​­75) for a judicious discussion. 39 Lys. 16.14, 20.23 (­and contrast negative testimony at 13.79, 31.15), Isae. 2.42; more generally, n.b. [Dem.] 50.7; Theophr. Char. 25.3. 40 See Jones (­1987): Index II D (‘­representation of public units in the organs of government’) and F (‘­representation of the public organization in financial administration and accounting’) for full documentation and cf. J (‘­public administrative functions correlated with public units’). 41 Judicial administration: Jones (­1987): Index II E: for the classical period, perhaps only Erythrae, and that under Athenian influence OR no. 122; for theatres, see I 6b. 42 His observations about travel are valid up to a point (­see McHugh 2019 for the distances and times involved), though people in p ­ re-​­modern times were more willing to walk long distances; Taylor (­2007) registered a difference in distribution between elective (­generals) and sortitive (­tamiai) office, the former concentrated closer to the city, but not in proposers of decrees, and the Boulē must have drawn widely from Attica. 43 Population estimates for Eretria, Mantineia, and Tegea from the entries in Hansen and Nielsen (­2004), for Tenos from Ruschenbusch (­1985); number of smallest subdivisions from Jones (­1987), updated for Eretria from Hansen and Nielsen (­2004). 44 Kellogg (­2013: ­26–​­34); Papadopoulou (­­2016–​­2017: ­151–​­161); n.b. also Humphreys (­2018: ­724–​ 7­ 25, 8­ 01–​­802) on constituent communities, notably in Aphidna, and divided demes, and Ackermann (­2018: 68, 354) for Aixone, with references to other instances, and ­290–​­292 for the possibility of deme subdivisions ( ­pentēkostys at Aixone, triakas at Piraeus). Around 370 BCE, Athenians came to be assigned permanently to tribal sections for allotment purposes: Kroll (­1972: 70, 75, ­96–​­97). 45 Regions without attested subdivisions: Hansen and Nielsen (­2004: ­95–​­96); settlement patterns: Hansen (­2006: 7­ 3–​­81); for the largest poleis, see 76, and for the related question of demography, 7­ 3–​­84. Plataea had something like 750 citizens, a figure which seems to have been around the norm for Boeotia, Thebes excepted: Brock and Hodkinson (­2000: 10). 46 Or her: mention in Isae. 8.19 of demeswomen choosing two of their number to ‘­hold office (­archein)’ at the Thesmophoria suggests a similar potential for female sociability and solidarity in local communities. 47 Both ­multi-​­functional spaces: on deme theatres, see Paga (­2010: es­p. ­366–​­371). 48 The fundamental publication is Dunbar (­1992); n.b. Gladwell (­2000: ­177–​­186) for a popularizing treatment (­w ith a contemporary c­ ase-​­study from Gore Associates, manufacturers of ­Gore-​­Tex); myriandroi poleis: Hansen (­2006: ­73–​­84); dynamics of small communities: Ober (­2008: ­84–​­89). 49 For deme honours, see, e.g., RO no. 46; regulation of ­office-​­holders: OR no. 107 (­ca. 460 BCE), RO no. 63 with Whitehead (­1986: ­111–​­120), Osborne (­1990) (­for Rhamnous in particular); for ­self-​­regulation beyond Athens, e.g., Labyadai of Delphi: RO no. 1. 50 So, Jones (­1999) argues that Athenian subdivisions were an alternative to or substitute for the polis, while for Osborne (­1990) their structures and behaviour were modelled on the polis. However, such development was not automatic or inevitable: Parker (­1996: 103) remarks on the virtual absence of evidence for cult activity, property ownership, or identity for the Athenian Cleisthenic trittyes, perhaps reflecting a perception of them as purely an artificial

236

Civic subdivisions and the citizen community

51

52

53 54 55

56

administrative convenience (­contrast the ­pre-​­Cleisthenic Epakreis: Ismard (­2010: ­215–​­218); OR 355, though n.b. Paga (­2010) for a stimulating if somewhat speculative argument for functional importance). Deme finances: Whitehead (­1986: ­149–​­175); Klytidai on Chios: RO no. 87 (­suggesting they are a gentilicial group rather than a tribe as has often been argued) with Michel (­­1900–​­1927: no. 1359). Note also fines: those threatened by the Labyadai are modest, but penalties for misconduct in office could be much larger. On the interaction of local and polis finances, especially in religion, see Ismard (­2010: ­299–​ ­326). Samian grain distribution: Syll.3 ­976 – ​­one might guess that the large grain donations from Cyrene in the late 320s had stimulated the development of appropriate processes for distribution. Athenian citizen review: Philoch. FGrH 328 F119, Plut. Per. 37.4; Rhodes (­1981: ­331–​­333); theōrikon: [Dem.] 44.37; Little Panathenaia: RO no. 81 ­B24–​­27 with p­p. ­401–​­402; cf. the annual tribal feast (­hestiasis): Jones (­1987: 49). Jones (­1987): Index II I 2b (­choruses), 5b (­athletic events including ­torch-​­races [vi]). By contrast, at deme level, drama competition is between individuals, not units. Deme religion: Whitehead (­1986: 1­ 76–​­222) with OR nos. 146, 159. Cos: RO no. 62. Labyadai: n.48 above. Demarch and burial: Whitehead (­1986: ­137–​­138 and cf. 234) for burial by a ­fellow-​­demesman; deme particularity: Papadopoulou (­­2015–​­2016: ­106–​­107); (­­2016–​­2017); n.b. also the mention of homotaphoi in the supposed Solonian law on associations: Dig. 47.22.4; Ismard (­2010: ­52–​ ­54). Labyadai: n.48 above. Iulis: OR no. 194. Cf. ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2015). Deme knowledge of funerary rites: Isae. 6.­64–​­65; tribal myths: Dem. 60.­27–​­31; tribal memory: n.b. the tribal dedication OR no. 130 and Agora XVI 114, in which Akamantis decrees a sacrifice for the safe return of its soldiers, and on communities of memory in general, Steinbock (­2017); deme personalities: Whitehead (­1986: ­328–​­342).

Bibliography Ackermann, D. (­2018) Une microhistoire d’Athènes: le dème d’Aixônè dans l’Antiquité (­Athens) Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Retracing steps: finding ways into archaic Greek citizenship’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­79–​­101 Bourriot, F. (­1976) Recherches sur la nature du genos: étude d’histoire sociale ­Athénienne – ​­périodes archaique et classique (­Lille) Brock, R. (­2015) ‘­Law and citizenship in the Greek poleis’, in E.M. Harris and M. Canevaro (­eds) The Oxford handbook of ancient Greek law (­Oxford) [online DOI: 10.1093/­oxfordhb/­978019959 9257.013.15] ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Conclusion: taking stock and looking backward’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­295–​­304 Brock, R. and Hodkinson, S. (­2000) ‘­Introduction: alternatives to the democratic polis’, in R. Brock and S. Hodkinson (­eds) Alternatives to Athens: varieties of political organization and community in ancient Greece (­Oxford) ­1–​­31 Cecchet, L. (­2017) ‘­­Re-​­shaping and ­re-​­founding citizen bodies: the case of Athens, Cyrene and Camarina’, in L. Cecchet and A. Busetto (­eds) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world (­Leiden) ­50–​­77 Christ, M.R. (­2001) ‘­Conscription of hoplites in classical Athens’, CQ 51.2, ­398–​­422 Connor, W.R. (­1971) The new politicians of ­fi fth-​­century Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Davies, J.K. (­1996) ‘­Struttura e suddivisioni delle poleis archaiche. Le repartizioni minori’, in S. Settis (­ed.) I Greci (­Torino) 2.I, ­599–​­652 Dunbar, R. (­1992) ‘­Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates’, Journal of Human Evolution 22.6, ­469–​­493 Duplouy, A. and Brock, R. (­eds) (­2018) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford and New York) Ferraioli, F. (­2012) L’hekatostys: analisi della documentazione (­Rome) Gehrke, H.-​­J. (­2000) ‘­Ethnos, phyle, polis: gemässigt unorthodoxe Vermutungen’, in P. ­Flensted-​ ­Jensen, T.H. Nielsen, and L. Rubinstein (­eds) Polis and politics (­Copenhagen) ­159–​­176

237

Roger Brock Gladwell, M. (­2000) The tipping point (­London) Hansen, M.H. (­ 1998) Polis and c­ity-​­ state: an ancient concept and its modern equivalent (­Copenhagen) ——— ​­(­2006) Polis: an introduction to the ancient Greek ­city-​­state (­Oxford) Hansen, M.H. and Nielsen, T.H. (­eds) (­2004) An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (­Oxford) Hornblower, S. (­2013) Herodotus, Book 5 (­Cambridge) Humphreys, S.C. (­2018) Kinship in ancient Athens: an anthropological analysis (­Oxford) Ismard, P. (­2010) La cité des réseaux (­Paris) Jones, N.F. (­1987) Public organization in ancient Greece (­Philadelphia) ——— ​­(­1991) ‘­Enrolment clauses in Greek citizenship decrees’, ZPE 87, ­79–​­102 ——— ​­(­1999) The associations of classical Athens: the response to democracy (­New York) ——— ​­(­2004) Rural Athens under the democracy (­Philadelphia) Kellogg, D.L. (­2013) Marathon fighters and men of maple: ancient Acharnai (­Oxford) Kierstead, J. (­2017) ‘­Associations and institutions in Athenian citizenship procedures’, CQ 67, ­444– ​­459 Kroll, J.H. (­1972) Athenian bronze allotment plates (­Cambridge, MA) ——— ​­(­1977) ‘­A n archive of the Athenian cavalry’, Hesperia 46.2, ­83–​­140 Lambert, S.D. (­1993) The phratries of Attica (­A nn Arbor, MI) Low, P. (­2003) ‘­Remembering war in ­fi fth-​­century Greece: ideologies, societies, and commemoration beyond democratic Athens’, World Archaeology 35.1, ­98–​­111 Lupi, M. (­2018) ‘­Citizenship and civic subdivisions: the case of Sparta’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­161–​­178 McHugh, M. (­2019) ‘­Going the extra mile: travel, time and distance in classical Attica’, ABSA 114, ­207–​­240 Michel, C. (­­1900–​­1927) Recueil d’inscriptions grecques (­Brussels) Murray, O. (­1986) ‘­Life and society in classical Greece’, in J. Boardman, J. Griffin, and O. Murray (­eds) The Oxford history of the classical world (­Oxford) ­198–​­227 ——— ​­(­1997) ‘­Rationality and the Greek city: the evidence from Kamarina’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) The polis as an urban centre and as a political community (­Copenhagen) ­493–​­504 Ober, J. (­2008) Democracy and knowledge: innovation and learning in classical Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Osborne, R. (­1985) Demos: the discovery of classical Attica (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­1990) ‘­The demos and its divisions in classical Athens’, in O. Murray and S. Price (­eds) The Greek city from Homer to Alexander (­Oxford) ­265–​­293 Paga, J. (­2010) ‘­Deme theaters in Attica and the trittys system’, Hesperia 79.3, ­351–​­384 Papadopoulou, C. (­­2015–​­2016) ‘­A ixone: insights into an Athenian deme’, AR 62, ­103–​­110 ——— ​­(­­2016–​­2017) ‘­The living and the dead in classical Athens: new evidence from Acharnai, Halai Aixonidai and Phaleron’, AR 63, ­151–​­166 Parker, R. (­1987) ‘­Festivals of the Attic demes’, in T. Linders and G. Nordquist (­eds) Gifts to the gods (­Uppsala) ­137–​­147 ——— ​­(­1996) Athenian religion: a history (­Oxford) Piérart, M. (­1983) ‘­Athènes et Milet I: tribus et dèmes milésiens’, MH 40, ­1–​­18 Rhodes, P.J. (­1981) A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (­Oxford) Robinson, E. (­2011) Democracy beyond Athens (­Cambridge) Roussel, D. (­1976) Tribu et cité (­Paris) Ruschenbusch, E. (­1985) ‘­Die Zahl der griechischen Staaten und Arealgrösse und Burgerzahl der “­Normalpolis”’, ZPE 59, ­253–​­263 Salmon, J.B. (­1984) Wealthy Corinth (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2003) ‘­Cleisthenes (­of Athens) and Corinth’, in P. Derow and R. Parker (­eds) Herodotus and his world (­Oxford) ­219–​­234 Scafuro, A. (­1994) ‘­Witnessing and false witnessing: proving citizenship and kin identity in ­fourth-​­century Athens’, in A.L. Boegehold and A.C. Scafuro (­eds) Athenian identity and civic ideology (­Baltimore, MD) ­156–​­98 Siewert, P. (­1982) Die Trittyen Attikas und die Heeresreform des Kleisthenes (­Munich) Singor, H.W. (­1999) ‘­Admission to the syssitia in fi ­ fth-​­century Sparta’, in S. Hodkinson and A. Powell (­eds) Sparta: new perspectives (­London) ­67–​­89

238

Civic subdivisions and the citizen community Steinbock, B. (­2017) ‘­The multipolarity of Athenian social memory: polis, tribes and demes as interdependent memory communities’, in K. Hofmann, R. Bernbeck, and U. Sommer (­eds) Between memory sites and memory networks: new archaeological and historical perspectives (­Berlin) ­97–​­125 Taylor, C. (­2007) ‘­From the whole citizen body? The sociology of election and lot in Athenian democracy’, Hesperia 76.2, ­323–​­346 Whitehead, D. (­1986) The demes of Attica 508/­­7 – ​­ca. 250 B.C. (­Princeton, NJ) Whitley, J. (­2018) ‘­Citizenship and commensality in archaic Crete: searching for the andreion’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­227–​­248 ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz, R. (­2015) ‘­W hose grave is this? The status of grave plots in ancient Greece’, Dike 18, ­51–​­95

239

17 THE LANGUAGE OF CITIZENSHIP IN HERODOTUS AND THUCYDIDES Stefano Frullini

The aim of this chapter is to explore the usage patterns of the two main Greek words indicating ‘­citizens’ (­astos and politēs) by Herodotus and Thucydides, the two fi ­ fth-​ ­c entury Greek historians whose works have survived in their entirety.1 I analyze and investigate the role played by the terms designating ‘­citizens’ and ‘­citizenship’ in early ­h istory-​­writing, and aim to reach some tentative conclusions as to how the institution of citizenship is articulated in connection with its effects, such as the coordination of collective action and the creation of a bond between people and place. I should start with a disclaimer. This chapter is not strictly about the institutional aspects of citizenship in classical Greece, as it rather seeks to describe the ways in which Herodotus and Thucydides thought about citizenship and wove it into their historical narratives. While the analysis underpinning this research included all occurrences of ­ assages – a​­ lbeit astos and politēs in Herodotus and Thucydides, only a selection of those p a relatively large and representative ­one – is ​­ discussed here. The interest of studying Herodotus and Thucydides’ attitude towards the terms for ‘­citizen’ is that the vocabulary they used antedated ­them – ​­astos and politēs were already attested in archaic texts ​­ they had to adapt old words to new contexts.2 This tension was partly (­see below) – but due to the broader evolution of the discourse around what ‘­being a citizen’ meant over time, and more specifically the transition towards a more strictly political conceptualization of the prerogatives associated to citizenship (­Blok 2018: 83). But it was also associated with the specific needs of an emerging literary genre, historiography, which raised the question as to how to apply the ‘­standard’ Greek vocabulary of citizenship to widely differing social contexts and ensure that these uses be still meaningful with a view to describing historical processes. What role did the mechanisms of word selection play in this much larger endeavour, in the specific case of astos and politēs? As Edward Cohen (­2000: 50) has noted, many modern scholars have tended to treat astos and politēs as effective synonyms. However, their lasting coexistence suggests that they were not entirely interchangeable, at least until after the classical period. That Hesychius glossed astos with politēs (­α 7880) does not in itself necessarily mean that the two words had the same meaning, but rather that (­a) they were perceived as semantically related, and (­b) by the time the gloss was composed, politēs was more comprehensible than astos. Therefore, as a framework to investigate the connection between astos 240

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-21

The language of citizenship in Herodotus and Thucydides

and politēs, I will be adopting the concept of associative relation first defined by Ferdinand de Saussure (­1955: 171) as the connection between a given ‘­word’ (­mot) effectively used in a sentence and the other words potentially having some commonality with it, whether in form or meaning. It is, therefore, a relation in absentia, between an existing word and all the hypothetical alternatives to it. Importantly, the perception and awareness of these relations in a given language is said to be a key part of a speaker’s command of the language. This concept was further developed by Roman Jakobson, who preferred paradigmatic to associative and argued that a word and its ‘­substitution set’ are bound together by the linguistic code, ideally mastered by all the parties involved in the communication process (­Jakobson 1956: 7­ 2–​­76). Jakobson emphasized the speaker’s active role in choosing from the substitution set, an act that he called ‘­selection’. But for the communicative act to be successful, the addressee also needs to be (­a) aware that a selection has occurred, (­b) familiar with the substitution set, and consequently (­c) aware of what has not been selected.3 On this basis, I will assume that astos and politēs can be read as part of a substitution set and their usage can therefore be investigated according to the principles of the paradigmatic model. Consequently, the key question becomes the following: In the absence of language regulators and in the formative years of a new literary genre, how did Herodotus and Thucydides redefine the rules of selection regulating the ­astos– ​­politēs substitution set? Can we understand the principles behind their use of those words? As a starting point, I shall briefly analyze the use of astos and politēs in two textual contexts that may illuminate the way in which Herodotus and Thucydides conceived them: the Homeric poems and the text of Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/450 as passed down by Aristotle.4 The importance of Homer lies in his being a linguistic and stylistic model for all subsequent ancient literature, historiography included.5 Conversely, the importance of looking at the legal discourse on citizenship in classical Athens lies primarily in the fact that the use of astos and politēs in legal settings can illuminate how these terms were used in contexts where precision was of the essence. The main problem with Homer is that there are very few attestations of both astos and politēs (­all in the plural) throughout the poems, which makes it difficult to extrapolate real patterns of usage. However, the only two passages containing astos appear particularly interesting. The Trojan hero Iphidamas is said to be aiding his astoi in war (­Il. 11.242); the term implies an opposition between Iphidamas’ fellow countrymen and the Greek invaders, while also actively creating a bond between Iphidamas and the men he is fighting with. Similarly, in the Odyssey, Athena is said to have made Odysseus unrecognizable to his wife, friends, and astoi (­Od. 13.192). The relationship between Odysseus and his astoi is both vertical and horizontal. He is effectively framed as a primus inter pares, a king whose kingship relies on close, personal interaction with his subjects. In both cases, astos seems a flexible and highly expressive term that Homer could use to highlight the multidimensional nature of human relationships within defined groups. By contrast, politēs is used in a vaguer and weaker sense, whose key defining element is not the existence of relationships but a sense of local belonging. Hector tells Melanippos that, if the Greeks take Troy, the politai will be slaughtered (­Il. 15.558); clearly what he has in mind is the people present in the polis broadly defined, with no reference to their social standing or mutual relations. By the same token, when Priam laments the death of Hector, the politai – ​­effectively his ‘­audience’ – ​­join him in weeping (­Il. 22.429). Politēs is thus used simply to refer to those present in a place qualified as polis. Importantly, Homer could apply the ‘­generic’ politai to men and women 241

Stefano Frullini

equally (­Blok 2005: 11, 2018: 84), in contrast with the aforementioned occurrences of astoi which are more likely to refer exclusively to men. A particularly informative example is represented by a h ­ alf-​­verse formula involving politai that occurs twice in the Odyssey: in both cases, something (­respectively a spring and a fountain) is described as a source of water for the politai (­ὅθεν ὑδρεύοντο πολῖται: Od. 7.131, 17.206). The same formula appears in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (­99), with reference to a well. In these cases, since fetching water was largely a woman’s job, it is likely that these politai were mostly female (­Blok 2005: 11). In conclusion, while astos and politēs seem to have somewhat different semantic values in Homeric literature, nonetheless their meanings were not yet strictly defined. While astos appears productive and flexible in evoking interpersonal relationships, politēs is largely associated with a spatial sense of ‘­p eople from a certain place’ – ​­effectively ‘­denizens’. Quite a different picture emerges from the text of the law on Athenian citizenship enacted by Pericles in 451/450 and reaffirmed in 403/402 after lapsing for a while during the Peloponnesian War: Aristotle reports that, under Pericles’ law, only those born from two astoi would become Athenian citizens.6 The expression used by Aristotle to designate the possession of citizenship rights is actually ‘­having a share in the polis’ (­26.4) or ‘­in the politeia’ (­42.1): the root is the same as politēs, but the word itself is absent.7 However, other formulations of the same legal principle explicitly contrast astos and politēs: in a passage of Demosthenes’ Against Eubulides, the speaker’s father is said to have been a politēs even though he was an astos on one side only, by virtue of having been born before the citizenship law was reinstated (­57.30). These sources show that astos and politēs were by then perceived as related concepts, not only because both had to do with ‘­citizenship’ in its strictly legal and political sense, but also because they could effectively be used to refer to the same person: a politēs would be described as an astos for the purpose of begetting new politai. Both had to do with having access to a set of prerogatives, which is what Aristotle calls ‘­sharing in the polis’ and that Josine ­Blok – ​­rejecting a narrowly political interpretation of c­ itizenship – ​­has defined as being recognized as an heir to a share of the original covenant between the polis and the gods (­Blok 2018: 93; cf. Joyce in this volume). However, while astos emphasizes the aspect of being able to pass down those prerogatives through generations, politēs refers to the active, personal performance of them. This semantic distribution is very different from that retraceable in Homer’s use of astos and politēs and reflects the intervening evolution of the concept of citizenship, which by the fifth century had, indeed, become much more closely linked to access to political institutions. Herodotus’ use of politēs lends itself particularly well to a contrastive reading with Homer’s. Throughout the Histories, politēs seems inextricably linked to the concept of collective agency; his politai are groups of people systematically doing things together. These ‘­things’ can be political decisions, in which case the politai will have been the set of the city’s male citizens traditionally defined; indeed, Herodotus is certainly ‘­the earliest author who uses politai to mean those able to engage in political life’ (­Osborne 2011: 94). In the early 480s, when the Spartans voted to surrender their king Leutychides to Aegina, a Spartan man accused the Aeginetans of being willing to have the Spartan king handed over to them by the politai (­6.85.2). The politai of Naxos had originally sent four ships to aid the Persians, but the crews of those ships ignored those orders and went over to the Greek side (­8.46.3). In both cases, we can imagine groups of politically empowered (­male) politai coming together, holding votes and committing to acting accordingly. 242

The language of citizenship in Herodotus and Thucydides

There are, however, several instances of politai involved in collective processes that are not quite political. This suggests that, for Herodotus, the word did not necessarily designate those empowered with political decisions. For example, the Babylonian queen Nitocris built a bridge that was used by the politai (­1.186.4). Just as in the case of Homer’s water resources, here a local community is primarily defined by shared access to a public resource.8 In other words, this particular instance of politēs identity is primarily localized.9 In one particularly instructive example, a group of Paeonian ­lake-​­dwellers are said to have built their town on stilt houses, with the politai being credited with the endeavour (­5.16.2). The community of the politai becomes therefore associated with, and responsible for, the creation of a communal space, lending it a local ­identity – ​­even when that space is not necessarily a polis strictly defined, and even when it is (­plausibly) not just the holders of full citizenship who contribute to the effort. This bond, arising from a shared place, seems to have engendered a sense of solidarity and mutual obligation. In 494, the Spartan king Cleomenes attempted a land invasion of the Argolid, but since the omens were not favourable for a crossing of the river Erasinos, he decided to ship his army across the Argolic Gulf; in so doing, he praised the river’s loyalty towards its politai, the Argives (­6.76.2). The fact that a river could so readily be made a member of a group of politai showcases the profound expressive and ideological value of the bond of solidarity between the members of a community thus defined. More broadly, it then becomes unsurprising that politēs can mean not only ‘­citizen’ but also ‘­fellow citizen’, that is, ‘­someone who is a member of the same community of politai as someone else’, in keeping with the term’s focus on the relational, performative, dynamic aspects of communal life. Apparently as a direct consequence of this, politēs is the term associated with naturalization. A man could become a politēs of a community he was previously not a member of; in other words, the community of the politai is construed as permeable. Examples of this abound in Herodotus’ text: after the dioikismos of Smyrna, its inhabitants were divided among the surrounding cities and became politai of them (­1.150.2); the same process occurred when Gelon brought the citizens of several former Sicilian cities into Syracuse and made them politai of the latter (­7.156.2); the seer Teisamenus requested and obtained that he and his brother be made politai of the Spartans (­9.33.4, 9.35.1).10 In all these cases, the construction systematically used is ποιέω (­τινὰ) πολίτην, first attested in Herodotus. The fact that politēs was the word chosen to create the expression designating the concept of naturalization further shows that politēs was perceived as conveying the idea of a dynamic group made up of individuals placed on a roughly equal footing. In light of these considerations, Herodotus’ frequent use of politēs as ‘­subject of a sole ruler’ (­particularly in the plural) may seem puzzling.11 For example, in Book 2, the Egyptian pharaoh Mycerinus is described as ‘­m ild towards his politai’ (­2.129.3). In Book 3, similar formulae are used with reference to ­Cambyses – ​­whom Croesus advised against killing his own politai (­3.36.1) – ​­and ­Polycrates – ​­who took hostage the children and wives of the politai who were ‘­under him’ (­ὑπ᾽ ἑωυτῷ: 3.45.4). Even in the context of the ­so-​­called Constitutional Debate, Otanes’ argument in favour of democracy includes the remark that, in a monarchic constitution, the ruler tends to become envious of his own politai (­3.80.4).12 All these passages are built upon oppositions between the ruler and (­h is) politai. How to explain Herodotus’ choice of politēs within the framework constructed above? Two (­not mutually exclusive) explanations appear particularly convincing. One is that politai, due to its strong connotation of collective action, 243

Stefano Frullini

lends itself well to being contrasted with the figure of a sole ruler (­as in ‘­the one vs. the many’). The other is that politai identifies the community of the ruler’s ‘­fellow citizens’ as the space within which his political actions play out. From this point of view, Herodotus’ politai plays a similar role to Homer’s astoi in the case of Odysseus’ relationship with his subjects and peers (­Od. 13.192, mentioned above). The foregoing observations on Herodotus’ use of politēs make it easier to appreciate how different his use of astos is. I have argued that politēs emphasizes (­in one word) the horizontal nature of interpersonal relations within a defined community. By contrast, Herodotus seems to use astos with a view to emphasizing the vertical ties within a group (­such as descent), dynamics of class and hierarchy, and its closed and exclusionary nature ­vis- ­​­­à -​­vis the outside world. Herodotus’ description of the Aethiopian Table of the Sun (­3.18) is in two stages. First, the astoi ‘­in charge’ (­ἐ ν τέλεϊ) lay out the boiled meat on a meadow; then, ‘­whoever wants’ (­τὸν βουλόμενον) can feast on it. Here, no ‘­horizontal’ interaction is involved and the description is built upon a contrast between the few individuals in control of the ritual and the larger crowd that simply takes part in it. Moreover, according to Herodotus, the locals believe that the earth itself yields the meat, marking an even starker distance from the astoi in the know. In another passage, the Athenians choose a number of astoi to serve as Peisistratos’ personal bodyguard, which helped him protect his growing personal power (­1.59.5). In one particularly interesting case, the Samian politician ­Maeandrius – ​­Polycrates’ ­lieutenant – ​­summoned the assembly of all the astoi following the latter’s death (­3.142.2). It could seem natural to use politai with regard to an assembly meeting, but the passage makes clear that the essential element of ‘­horizontal’ collective action has no place here: Maeandrius claimed to have the right to succeed to Polycrates and wield absolute power over the Samians, rejected their demands for a financial audit, and eventually imprisoned his opponents. The best way of understanding Herodotus’ use of astos is to examine the word’s collocational range, that is, ‘­the set of contexts in which it can occur’ (­Lyons 1995: 62). The single most frequent context in which Herodotus appears to have used astos (­as opposed to politēs) is with reference to the construction of individual status and reputation among the citizen ­body  – ​­which in this case appears regularly composed of astoi. In the most common form, one anēr (­man) is stated to be dokimos (­reputable) among the astoi of his hometown.13 The same construction appears in slightly different versions throughout the text, always with the aim of marking someone’s excellence within a group of astoi. Aristeas is said to be no less well born than any of the astoi (­4.14.1); in another passage, the Thracian leaders addressed by Salmoxis are called ‘­the first (­πρώτους) of the astoi’ (­4.95.3). In all of these cases, the community of the astoi is framed as the space within which a man acquires and performs his social status (­Lévy 1985: ­58–​­59). However, the sheer frequency of these occurrences raises the question as to whether the association of astos with the semantic field of excellence and social standing was consciously perceived (­or even elaborated) by Herodotus, or he employed it as little more than a formula. Herodotus also tends to use astos in textual contexts intended to mark opposition from other individuals framed as ‘­outsiders’. In some passages, astos is contrasted with xeinos, ‘­stranger’; one passage in Book 1, for instance, outlines the different ways in which the Persians treated whoever fell sick with leprosy, according to whether he was an astos or a xeinos (­1.138.2; cf. 3.8.2). Herodotus’ description of Lycian marriage laws includes the provision that if an astē married a doulos, ‘­slave’, she would give birth to honourable children, but if an astos married a xeinē or took a concubine, their offspring 244

The language of citizenship in Herodotus and Thucydides

would be ‘­without honour’ (­1.173.5). In this case, astos (­regardless of gender) is contrasted with slaves and f­oreigners  – ​­two groups that lay unmistakably outside of the citizen body. By the same token, there are instances of astos creating an implied dichotomy, whereby the second term of the opposition is not as explicit as in the examples cited above but can still be gleaned from the context. In one of these cases, the use of astos appears to emphasize that the people in question are native members of the community, as opposed to outsiders of any form: in a Spartan setting, the wives of a group of Minyan prisoners are called astai since they were themselves daughters of Spartans, which led the Lacedaemonians to trust them (­4.146.3). Similarly, the Spartan king is said to have the right to appoint whatever astos he wishes to the office of proxenos, with the juxtaposition of the two terms arguably emphasizing the distance between Spartan citizens and foreigners (­6.57.3). Other cases further exemplify the value of astos as ‘­member of a narrow elite’ seen above, but arguably with a particular emphasis on the (­implicit) exclusion of individuals who were not part of it. A man called Mys, from Europos, once visited the sanctuary of Apollo of Ptoos, followed by three Theban astoi chosen by the Theban state who were to write down the oracles to be delivered (­8.135.2); in this case, the use of astoi seems aimed at stressing that the three Thebans were ‘­at home’ – the ​­ sanctuary is ­ hebans – ​­as opposed to Mys, who happened to arrive in Boeotia said to belong to the T ‘­during his visits to all places of divination’ (­περιστρωφώμενον πάντα τὰ χρηστήρια). Not too dissimilarly, in another case the people of Apollonia, having received an oracle and having decided to keep it secret, appointed some of their astoi to carry out what was prescribed (­9.94.1); the use of astoi clearly adds nuance to the opposition between those who knew the content of the oracle and the outsiders who did not. This may recall one passage discussed above (­3.18), about the astoi (­unlike the mere epichōrioi) knowing the secret of the ritual illustrated; in the case of Apollonia, however, the entire citizen body ­ racle – ​­and bent on keeping it s­ ecret – ​­which makes them seems united in knowing the o all astoi in that respect. This reading may explain the prima facie puzzling use of astoi in a context where it would be fair to expect politai. Ultimately, in Herodotus, astos seems most productive in dichotomies where the ‘­insider’ is defined by way of alterity, in contrast with social ‘­outsiders’ of various types. From this angle, the passages in which Herodotus juxtaposes astos and politēs are potentially illuminating. Two examples are particularly valuable. At first blush, Xerxes’ reflections on jealousy between citizens (­7.237.2) use politēs and astos almost interchangeably (­Osborne 2011: 95; Blok 2017: 154). But it is probably relevant to note that the focus of the argument is actually the politēs, while astos only comes up to identify the politēs’ fellow citizen: ‘­when an astos asks him for counsel’, the politēs will not give the best possible advice. Astos is used here in the ­r un-​­up to (­and in opposition with) the following sentence which is centred on the different behaviour visible between xeinoi. In other words, the lexical choices made in this passage by Herodotus appear to be further evidence that astos, unlike politēs, was particularly effective for showcasing specific differences between insiders and outsiders. The same impression is given by a passage in Book 2 where the Egyptians asked the Eleians whether their politai participated in the Olympic Games; when the Eleians responded in the affirmative, the Egyptians commented that it was unlikely for them not to favour their astos and wrong the xeinos (­2.160.­3 –​­4). Here, too, both terms are used virtually in the same context and ­ eaning – ​­and yet, astos is preferred where a contrast may seem to convey the same m with xeinos is being articulated. 245

Stefano Frullini

The same pattern appears to regulate Thucydides’ use of astos, to an even greater extent. Whereas Herodotus did occasionally use astos on its own, outside of dichotomies, almost all the occurrences of astos in Thucydides’ work feature a direct opposition with xenos. The first example belongs to the description of the funeral of the casualties of the first year of the Peloponnesian War: the funeral is said to have been accompanied by ‘­whoever wanted’ (­ὁ βουλόμενος), whether astoi or xenoi (­2.34.4). The ­astos–​­xenos opposition appears in several other passages, always with the aim to distinguish between insiders and outsiders (­2.36.4, 4.94.1, 6.16.3, 6.27.2, 6.30.2). There is reason to believe that, by this point, the ­astos–​­xenos polarity had become something of a fixed formula and that Thucydides was simply adopting it as part of his narrative language.14 As Cohen (­2000: ­52–​­53) has noted, ­fourth-​­c entury marriage laws ‘­are couched in ­local-​­foreign polarity’ expressed through the use of astos and xenos (­cf., e.g., [Dem.] 46.22, 59.16). One major exception to this general trend is 6.15.3: Alcibiades is said to be held in esteem (­ἐ ν ἀξιώματι) by the astoi, marking one rare appearance of astos outside of a contrast with xenos. Even in this case, however, astos appears in the specific context of the expression of reputation within a citizen body, as was typical in Herodotus (­see above). While Thucydides’ use of astos seems overall residual and formulaic, on the contrary politēs (­as opposed to the plain ethnonym, such as, e.g., Athēnaios) appears to be his default choice in all cases in which some key aspect of the nature of the bond between citizens is at stake. As such, politēs occurs far more often than astos, and I shall focus here on some particularly representative passages. At 1.91.6, the beginning of the excursus on the ­so-​­called pentekontaetia and in the context of the discussion on whether Athens should be allowed to have walls, Themistocles informed the Spartans that the Athenians judged that their city having walls would be advantageous both for the politai ‘­privately’ (­ἰδίᾳ) and for all the allies (­ἐς τοὺς πάντας ξυμμάχους). At first blush, this passage seems intended to create an opposition between the politai inside the walls and the allies outside of them, thus marking a rare ‘­oppositional’ use of politēs.15 But there are some good deeper reasons that may explain Thucydides’ word choice. First, even if astos were part of Thucydides’ productive ­vocabulary – ​­which, as seen above, was probably not entirely the ­case – ​­it would probably be inappropriate in this context due to the social connotation it carries: it was not only the astoi that would enjoy the protection of city walls. Conversely, politai could maintain its fundamental connection with a particular place (­­those-­​­­in-­​­­the-​­polis) and therefore convey the sense of l­ocally-​­based access to a common r­ esource – ​­in which case, Athens’ city walls are the equivalent of Homer’s water resources and the bridge of Queen Nitocris in Herodotus, 1.186.4. But the broader context in which Thucydides’ passage is situated raises the question of its relationship with the Leitmotiv of power and hegemony that informs the narrative of the pentekontaetia. The point of Thucydides’ Themistocles is to argue that there was, in fact, no opposition between the Athenian politai and the xymmachoi, as they both shared an interest in keeping Athens free from external threats. At the same time, however, the spatial aspect of the semantics of politēs underscores that there was, in fact, a difference between the Athenians who enjoyed the actual protection of the walls and the ‘­allies’ who were protected only figuratively. By the same token, if we choose to focus on the strictly political meaning of politēs as ‘­holder of [Athenian] citizenship rights’, then ­ on-​­citizen allies the exclusionary nature of Athenian citizenship, contrasted with the n labouring under Athens’ archē, becomes immediately apparent. At the risk of ­over-​ ­reading, it might be concluded that the semantics of this passage aim to symbolize and articulate the burgeoning tensions within Athens’ hegemonic organization. 246

The language of citizenship in Herodotus and Thucydides

Violence represents the betrayal of the bond between politai. From this angle, it is unsurprising that Thucydides so often resorted to politēs when talking about episodes of internal strife. On the battlefield at Syracuse, the disorder is such that politai end up fighting other politai (­7.44.7): while the use of politēs as ‘­fellow citizen’ is very typical, what is striking is the role played by this statement (­and therefore, by the word choice it contains) in the broader depiction of a chaotic battle. Not too dissimilarly, the takeover of the Four Hundred at Athens is significantly marked by the acquiescence of the politai (­8.70.1). This means that Thucydides viewed politēs as a role characterized by certain obligations and expectations, and that therefore can be performed more or less well. The speech delivered by Diodotos in the context of the Athenian metanoia (‘­change of heart’) regarding Mytilene contains the observation that the ‘­good’ (­ἀγαθός) politēs should be capable of arguing successfully against his opponents. Similarly, before the Athenian expedition against Syracuse, Nicias reminded the assembly that the politēs who cared about his own physical integrity and that of his estate was still ‘­good’ (­6.9.2). Later on in the same speech, Nicias told the prytanis (­magistrate) in charge that, if he wanted to be a good politēs, he had better put the question of Athens’ expedition to a second vote (­6.14). Being a politēs becomes, therefore, a matter of performance; in Robin Osborne’s (­2011: 96) words, the role of the politēs is something that ‘­admits of further qualification’.16 Thucydides’ description of Aristogeiton (­6.54.2) deserves a final mention as the only Thucydidean passage in which astos is directly contrasted with politēs. In introducing the murderers of Hipparchos, son of Peisistratos, Thucydides described Aristogeiton as ‘­one man of the astoi, a ­m id-​­ranking politēs’ (­ἀνὴρ τῶν ἀστῶν, μέσος πολίτης). First, the ­two-​­step qualification suggests that in Thucydides’ view, one could be a politēs without necessarily being one of the astoi. In Edmond Lévy’s (­1985: 60) reading, what Thucydides means is that Aristogeiton was a member of the ancient Athenian elite, but his genos was not particularly prestigious by then; this had already been suggested by Chapot (­1929: 12), who read mesos politēs as ‘­un homme de condition moyenne’. Whether this interpretation is correct or not, it rightly pinpoints the difference between citizenship as belonging and citizenship as ­real-​­life performance. This not only means that politai were a large and varied group, and the astoi only part thereof; it also seems compatible with the language of the citizenship laws examined above in which being astos (­in terms of descent) is a prerequisite for being politēs (­in terms of being legitimately acknowledged as ‘­sharing in the polis’). Further, the addition of mesos to Aristogeiton’s quality as politēs further shows that Thucydides saw politēs as a role that could be performed more or less well. The flexibility of politēs lent it an expressive value that astos lacked due to its binary nature; this may help explain why politēs eventually prevailed over astos, which from the fourth century onwards appears to have fallen out of the productive vocabulary and became limited to (­a) the regulation of the transmission of citizenship, and (­b) binary oppositions with xenos. The existence of this l­ong-​­term drift away from astos brings us onto some tentative conclusions. Retracing an ‘­evolution’ from Herodotus to Thucydides concerning the semantics of citizenship would be risky not least because it would assume that Thucydides’ text is later than Herodotus’, in addition to the intrinsic dangers of a teleological interpretation. On a more cautious reading, Herodotus and Thucydides simply had different attitudes towards the astos–​­politēs relationship. Thucydides largely confined his use of astos to some fixed contexts, mainly the opposition with xenos, and seems to have viewed politēs as the more productive option to convey all the different aspects associated with the concept of ‘­citizen’; in this respect, he undoubtedly reflected a wider 247

Stefano Frullini

trend attested in later Greek literature. Conversely, for Herodotus, astos and politēs were still arguably part of a substitution set and could be used equally productively to convey different aspects of the same c­ oncept – ​­‘­citizenship’ not only as exclusionary, but also as a mode of structuring social interactions and collective action. More generally, however, the difference in usage between Herodotus and Thucydides has a primarily methodological interest, as it shows how different authors reemployed ­pre-​ ­existing terms in narrative contexts that were essentially new. Jakobson (­1956: 73) believed that ‘­the speaker, as a rule, is only a ­word-​­user, not a ­word-​­coiner’. In reality, the ­fi fth-​­century historians had to be a little bit of both.

Notes 1 All ­in-​­text dates are BCE. For the sake of uniformity, I use the Attic form politēs (­πολίτης) with regard to all authors, but Herodotus systematically uses the Ionic form πολιήτης ( ­poliētēs) and both forms are attested in Homer. 2 From this perspective, my guiding principles recall the aim expressed by Adam Parry in his study of Thucydides’ use of abstract language (­Parry 1970). 3 In Cruse’s (­1986: 86) definition, ‘­paradigmatic relations . . . represent systems of choices a speaker faces when encoding his message’. For a reading of Jakobson’s theories in connection with the Saussurian model, see Albertelli (­1985). 4 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 26.4, 42.1. See also the chapters by Rhodes, Joyce, and Filonik in this volume. 5 On the relationship between Homer and the historiographical genre, see Marincola (­2011) with bibliography. On the few attestations of astos and politai in ­post-​­Homeric archaic poetry, see Osborne (­2011: 93). 6 For an extensive commentary of these provisions as attested by Aristotle, see Rhodes (­1981: ­391–​­396). See also the chapter by ­Griffith-​­Williams in this volume. 7 On Aristotle’s lexicon of citizenship, see chapters by Filonik and Joyce in this volume; see also the introductory chapter. 8 This passage could also be taken as an example of politai designating the subject of a sole ruler; for further examples of this, see below (­w ith note 12). 9 Interestingly, in his brief treatment of what citizenship is not, Aristotle explicitly rules out that one becomes politēs ‘­by virtue of living somewhere’ (­τῷ οἰκεῖν που) because slaves and metics live in the same place as well but are not considered citizens (­Pol. ­1275a7–​­8). This further proves his focus on citizenship as access to political rights, which is a misleading way of reading earlier sources; but his rebuke also suggests that there was a strand in contemporary political thought more strongly linking the qualification of politēs to local belonging. 10 At 9.34.1, the story of Teisamenus contains the earliest surviving attestation of politeia as ‘­citizenship’ (­Blok 2018: 83). 11 According to Lévy (­1985: 62), 18 out of 29 attestations of politēs in Herodotus are in relation with kings and other rulers. However, Powell (­1960: 312) identified only 11 passages in which politai meant ‘­subjects of king, tyrant’, suggesting that in some cases categorization can be problematic. 12 6.85.2, examined above, in which the Spartan politai resolve to hand over Leutychides to the Aeginetans, may also be seen as part of this group of passages. 13 Hdt. 1.158.2, 2.181.2, 3.143.1, 5.63.2, 5.97.3, 5.126.1, 6.101.2, 7.118, 8.46.3. In some cases, the superlative form dokimōtatos is used instead: 4.161.2, 9.17.2, 9.93.1. 14 This is also the context of the only appearance of astos in the Constitution of the Athenians attributed to Xenophon: as slaves are contrasted with free men, astoi are contrasted with metics ([Xen.] Ath. pol. 1.12). 15 The same opposition of xymmachoi and politai is also attested at 3.63.2. ­ seudo-​­Xenophon’ Constitution of the 16 A possible comparand for these passages is again in p Athenians, where it is stated that the Athenians can tell the good politai from the bad ones (­2.19: χρηστοί … πονηροί).

248

The language of citizenship in Herodotus and Thucydides

Bibliography Albertelli, P. (­1985) ‘­On metaphor and metonymy in Jakobson’, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 39, ­111–​­120 Blok, J.H. (­2005) ‘­Becoming citizens. Some notes on the semantics of “­citizen” in archaic Greece and classical Athens’, Klio 87.1, ­7–​­40 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Retracing steps: finding ways into archaic citizenship’, in A. Duplouy and R. Brock (­eds) Defining citizenship in Archaic Greece (­Oxford) ­79–​­101 Chapot, V. (­1929) ‘­Astos’, REA 31, ­7–​­12 Cohen, E.E. (­2000) The Athenian nation (­Princeton, NJ) Cruse, D.A. (­1986) Lexical semantics, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (­Cambridge) de Saussure, F. (­1955) Cours de linguistique générale (­Paris) Jakobson, R. (­1956) ‘­Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances’, in R. Jakobson and M. Halle (­eds) Fundamentals of language (­The Hague) ­67–​­96 Lévy, E. (­1985) ‘­Astos et politès d’Homère à Hérodote’, Ktema 10, ­53–​­66 Lyons, J. (­1995) Linguistic semantics: an introduction (­Cambridge) Marincola, J. (­2011) ‘­Historians and Homer’, in M. Finkelberg (­ed.) The Homer encyclopedia (­Chichester) Osborne, R. (­2011) The history written on the classical Greek body (­Cambridge) Parry, A. (­1970) ‘­Thucydides’ use of abstract language’, Yale French Studies 45, ­3 –​­20 Powell, J.E. (­1960) A lexicon to Herodotus (­Hildesheim) Rhodes, P.J. (­1981) A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (­Oxford)

249

18 PERFORMING THE CITY Religious aspects of Greek citizenship1 Bartłomiej Bednarek

The relationship between religion and citizenship in ancient Greece is a thorny issue that results from the nature of our sources, as well as from the troubled history of research on Greek religion. As recently as the 1990s, the term ‘­citizen religion’ would have seemed almost a tautology given that scholars concentrated on what came to be called ‘­polis religion’.2 Within such a conceptual framework, much emphasis was given to the fact that polis authorities were also considered the highest religious authorities. They established and modified forms of religious cult, controlled the finances, organized festivals, administered sacred places, and appointed religious personnel. They did all this because religion served poleis. ­City-​­states sought divine protection, built their prestige by organizing spectacular festivals and by engaging in monumental building programmes, and cemented their internal solidarity and hierarchy by allowing members of their communities to participate and assume various roles in cult activities. Very much of this is certainly true; however, research conducted more recently has shown that polis religion, especially when conceived of so narrowly, is only one of the facets of religious life in ancient Greece. It is not a revolutionary observation that, on the ­supra-​­polis level, Greeks engaged in various Panhellenic cults, for instance, at Delphi and Olympia. They also engaged in n ­ on-​­Hellenic cults when travelling, living in diaspora, or bringing foreign divinities to their cities.3 Various ­sub-​­polis units, such as demes or phratries, had their own cults, and so did individual clans and families (­e.g., Whitehead 1986: ­176–​­222; Lambert 1993: ­205–​­235). At the furthest extreme of the scale, the possibility of individual religious experience should also not be underestimated (­s ee Kindt 2015). We know of some individuals who seem to have profoundly engaged in ­non-​­institutional cult forms, sometimes leaving all of society behind. A particularly vivid example of this is provided by Archedamos of Thera, who spent several years in a cave dedicated to the Nymphs at Vari in Attica. From the five inscriptions, which Archedamus carved in the rocks, one may deduce that he believed he had been abducted by these divinities and turned into their servant.4 To add to this confusion, there were some cults (­chiefly the mystery cults) that seem to have crossed all of the relatively ­easy-­​­­to-​­pinpoint social and political boundaries. Because they exceeded the polis boundaries, scholars once thought of them as of a form of protest, ­anti-​­polis movements (­e.g., Detienne 1989; contra Bremmer 2010: ­22–​­29). 250

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-22

Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship

However, given that the neat opposition between polis religion and ‘­alternative forms of religion’ does not seem to apply to ancient Greek ways of thinking it is also possible to think of mystery cults as simply apolitical. Finally, there is a very wide area of religious beliefs and practices that were characteristic of the groups that were somehow marginal to the exclusive ‘­club of male citizens’. Of these, female cults have attracted much scholarly attention, which is not surprising, given the richness of relevant sources (­e.g., Brulé 1987; Dillon 2002; Goff 2004). Research on the religion of slaves, subordinate populations (­e.g., helots), and resident aliens, however, is much more difficult to conduct since, in these cases, our sources are often quite reticent (­see Wijma 2014). What is more, it would sometimes be a mistake to think of the other religious subsystems as falling into the categories provided by a ­citizen-​­centred perspective. Some of these subsystems might have developed in stark contrast or in close relationship to ‘­citizen religion’, whereas others could have been quite autonomous and immune to such influences. Even though ancient writers either tended to ignore the existence of slaves or describe them in stereotypical terms, the slaves (­and members of other subordinate groups) did not necessarily lack their own perspective, agency, or sense of identity. This is why the ways in which they interacted with their divinities (­sometimes foreign in Greek poleis, as slaves were usually foreigners) were not always predetermined by or did not always reflect their social status.5 All this means that what we may call ‘­citizen religion’ is just the tip of an iceberg. It is particularly conspicuous due to the nature of our sources that usually ignore or ­ on-​­citizens. Another, w ­ ell-​­recognized, but d ­ ifficult-­​ misrepresent the points of view of n ­­to-​­tackle problem that is characteristic of the traditional approach to Greek religion, in general, and to polis religion, in particular, is related to the Athenocentrism of our sources and our particular interest in the classical period (­e.g., de Polignac 1995: 1­ –​­3; Cole 1995: ­293–​­295). Unfortunately, even though we are perfectly aware of the fact that religion was subject to historical changes and that each city and geographical area developed its own traditions, it is often difficult to go beyond narrow case studies, which may illustrate certain phenomena but do not suffice to provide a wider picture. In what follows, I offer several glimpses of the religious experiences of a citizen. Due to the limits of space, this is not meant to be exhaustive, nor is it meant to be ­g round-​­breaking. My goal here is to underline the interconnectedness of religion and citizenship by indicating some of the ways in which this relationship can be analyzed and signalling some potential pitfalls of reductionist approaches to this complex issue.

A bird’s eye view According to the classical model developed by François de Polignac (­1995: es­p. ­45–​­60), a typical ­late-​­geometric and ­early-​­archaic polis consisted of a more or less urbanized, inhabited centre with a gradually developing public space and urban sanctuaries close to the Agora and/­or on the Acropolis. This would be the place where the s­ o-​­called poliadic divinity was worshipped.6 Such a centre would be surrounded by arable land in its vicinity and, a little further away, by mountainous peripheries that were suitable for activities such as pasturing and hunting (­criticism of this approach: Polinskaya 2006). From an economic and symbolic point of view, control over the arable land was vital for the polis and was exercised by members of the warrior class, who, by the same token, monopolized the political power. Looking at a territory of such a polis from a bird’s eye view, several kilometres from the city, right on the border between the arable 251

Bartłomiej Bednarek

land and the ‘­w ilderness’ of the mountains, its main ­extra-​­urban sanctuary would be distinguishable. A quintessential example is that of Argos, with its famous Heraion positioned on top of a foothill, some ten kilometres from the city.7 From a purely practical point of view, this may seem a much more cumbersome arrangement than that known from Athens, where the most important sanctuary was, at the same time, that of the main poliadic divinity, and was situated on the Acropolis, in the heart of the city. This provided it better protection and allowed the population easier access to divinity on a daily basis.8 Yet in this respect, Athens represents an exception rather than a norm (­one may wonder to what degree this atypical spatial arrangement was the key factor that allowed Athenians to defend themselves against the Peloponnesians from behind the long walls. Had their most precious sanctuary been located outside the city, they might have been more reluctant to abandon the land that surrounded it). According to de Polignac, in a more typical polis, such as Argos, the maintenance of control over the e­ xtra-​­urban sanctuary as regards its finances, personnel, and cult details was not only a heavy burden, but also a clear token of the control that the politically active class of Argos, the citizens, exercised over the land in their possession. Its most spectacular manifestation took the form of processions that connected the city with the sanctuary and permitted the involvement of all members of the community, including the n ­ on-​­combatant ones, thereby enabling mass participation.

Who is who in a sanctuary? The question of who was allowed to perform rituals in a given place, and under what circumstances, could become a matter of delicate diplomacy, whereas a violation of existing or imagined consensus could be taken as a serious threat to ­inter-​­state relations. Some minute details of these religious norms have been codified in extant inscriptions that show the full spectrum of possibilities regarding the inclusion or exclusion of political outsiders in the sphere of a polis-​­regulated cult. Thus, for example, a sacrificial calendar from Mykonos (­CGRN 156: ­25–​­26)­9 provides that no stranger is allowed to take part in a certain sacrifice: For the sake of crops, to Zeus Chthonios and Ge Chthonie, black yearlings, flayed; not religiously allowed for strangers (­ξένωι οὐ θέμις); let them consume (­the meat) on the spot. On the other hand, an early Hellenistic inscription regulating the priesthood of Apollo in Miletus (­CGRN 100: ­5 –​­7) allows strangers (­ξένοι) to sacrifice to this divinity, provided that they were represented by one of the citizens (­προϊερᾶσθαι τῶ[ν] ἀστῶν):10 If the city sacrifices an animal whose skin has been singed, he [i.e., the priest] will receive the tongue, the continuous sacrum, the foreleg (­or tail?). If a foreigner offers a sacrifice to Apollo, whichever citizen the foreigner wishes, is to serve as ­deputy-​ ­priest, and he is to give all the same perquisites to the priest as when the city sacrifices, [except] the skin. A similar inscriptional contract for the priesthood of Zeus Megistos at Iasos from the classical period (­CGRN 42) provides a list of the priestly perquisites in the case of a ‘­typical’, 252

Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship

‘­unmarked’ sacrifice, apparently performed by a citizen or in the name of the city. It subsequently adds (­­4 –​­5): According to the same (­g uidelines), (­let him [the priest] take perquisites) from the metics. From strangers, the other (­p erquisites) just as [from] the citizens, and he shall also receive the skins. We may thus see a tripartite model applied in this particular case: there are citizens, metics (­who happen to enjoy the same rights as citizens), and strangers. Finally, an inscription from the Amphiaraeon at Oropos from the fourth century BCE (­CGRN 75: ­9 –​­11) contains a reference to punishment for offences committed in the sanctuary: If anyone commits an injustice in the sanctuary, whether he’s a stranger or a ­fellow-​ ­citizen, the priest should have the authority to punish him with a fine of up to five drachmae. This inscription is worth quoting because even though it stipulates that the citizens and strangers should be treated in the same manner by the religious authorities, the fact that it had to be spelled out explicitly indicates that it was not taken for granted. As the examples cited above show, the opposite was clearly often the case. In this way, the cult regulations made a truly political matter of religion by making a distinction between ­ on-​­citizen stavarious categories of people along the lines provided by their citizen or n tus. Different rules could apply for total strangers, for metics, for slaves, and for various categories of women, children, etc.

A ­large-​­scale performance of cult activities The distinctions between various components of ancient societies were articulated in a particularly conspicuous way during most spectacular festivals. A classical example ­ ell-​­documented and very w ­ ell-​ is provided by the Great Panathenaea, a relatively w ­ ibliography). ­studied Athenian festival (­from van Meurs 1619 to Shear 2021, with b Although our evidence may, to a certain degree, be problematic, given that it refers to various periods of the development of the Panathenaea, which, in many respects, changed over time, we may be quite confident about reconstructing its general outline in the classical period. The quintessence of the festival consisted of offering to Athena a peplos woven by (­or at least with the assistance of) Athenian girls, as well as of a l­ arge-​­scale sacrifice and other offerings. Although various divinities and ­heroes seem to have been commemorated or worshipped during the festival,11 the bulk of the sacrifice was offered to Athena Polias, the most sacred poliadic divinity par excellence.12 The procession that escorted the sacrificial animals and the peplos would take a particularly spectacular form, which reflected the internal structure and external connections of the Athenian state. The procession would be led by a kanēphoros, or kanēphoroi, girls who carried baskets with sacrificial implements (­Roccos 1995; Dillon 2002: 3­ 7–​­42; Gebauer 2002: ­169–​­171). From the Life of the Attic Orators spuriously ascribed to Plutarch (­852b), we learn that, at least at some point in the late fourth century BCE, there were one hundred of them. Regardless of whether such an extensive 253

Bartłomiej Bednarek

number was a matter of a relatively late development, it was seen as commonplace in ­fi fth-​­century comedy that acting as a kanēphoros was one of the rare opportunities for teenage girls of citizen status to publicly display their beauty and for their families to demonstrate their prestige (­e.g., Ar. Ach. ­253–​­254, Eccl. ­730–​­733, Lys. ­1192–​­1193). As can be deduced from the Parthenon frieze, apart from baskets, some maidens would carry various ritual implements, such as incense burners and libations bowls. It is likely (­however this part of our dossier is quite ambiguous) that the girls responsible for weaving Athena’s garments were somewhere near the head of the procession.13 One of the reasons why this does not seem perfectly clear is that, at least as early as the fourth century BCE, the peplos (­or possibly one of the peploi) was attached to a pole and carried in the procession, which, at some point, became (­unless it was from the beginning) the mast of the processional ship.14 The group of maidens and civic officials, including the Prytaneis,15 would be followed by sacrificial animals. Then, various other groups of citizens would follow, including some chosen elderly men with olive sprigs, hoplites, horsemen, and ephebes. There were also metics dressed in purple, who carried trays with offerings. According to Photius (­s.v. μετοίκιον), this ritual role assigned to the resident aliens was so conspicuous that they were even referred to by the word skapheus, which derives from skaphē (­a tray). As can be deduced from Deinarchus’ fragment 16.5 (­Conomis), this denomination had clearly pejorative connotations (­Parker 2005: 258). The metic women16 would carry water jugs (­used in the sacrifice) and, possibly, parasols, whose function would be that of providing shade to the citizen womenfolk. Aelian (­VH 6.1) speaks of this latter regulation as a hubristic act committed by Athenians in the period of prosperity. This allows us to appreciate that ancient writers were perfectly aware of the symbolic value of such provisions, which served as a visual sign of the social hierarchy. Further down in rank, and probably also less conspicuously visible in the procession, were ‘­the freed slaves and other barbarians’, who, according to Anecdota Graeca (­Bekk. 1.242.­3 –​­6), would carry oak twigs in the Panathenaic procession. We also know that, at least in certain periods of prosperity, Athens required its colonies and allies to send a sacrificial cow and a set of panoply at the Panathenaea.17 It is a natural guess that some representatives of these communities would participate in the procession and that their particular status was somehow signalled. Perhaps they were allowed or required to lead their heifers and carry their panoplies to the Acropolis in the procession. Finally, there would be the vast assembly of those participants, to whom Aristophanes (­Eccl. 745), in his parody of the Panathenaic procession, simply refers as a crowd (­ὄχλος). This would certainly be composed of locals and strangers of various status, to whom no particular role was assigned. Another Aristophanic passage (­R a. ­1093–​­1098) mentions the inhabitants of Kerameikos, who laughed at the poor performance of a hyperbolically unfit participant in the torch race, which brought the fire from the Academia to the Acropolis before the Panathenaic procession began. This directs our attention to yet another way in which ​­ a mere onlooker (­cf. Men. fr. 384). Most likely, one could participate in the e­ vent – as many would combine the two roles ( ­pace Shear 2021: ­94–​­95). We may imagine that a crowd would gather along the sacred road, which connected the Pompeion at Kerameikos to the Acropolis through the Agora. Having enjoyed the show provided by the more structured head of the procession, many of the onlookers could join in the crowd and follow them to the Acropolis. In this way, the city literally performed its structure, hierarchy, and its connections in front of itself. 254

Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship

The already cited inscriptional regulations of the Little Panathenaea (­CGRN 92: ­ 4–​­28) state that when the meat of the sacrificial animals was distributed among the 2 population of Athens at Kerameikos, ‘­portions [would be allocated] to each deme according to the number of participants in the procession that each deme provided’. This regulation might have served a primarily pragmatic purpose by providing a basis of equal allotment of meat and by delegating the task of its further distribution to demes’ leaders or representatives. At the same time, however, such a policy might have promoted local patriotism, among other factors, by encouraging individuals to feast with their demesmen. We also hear that the demarchoi ‘­marshalled the Panathenaea festival’ (­διεκόσμουν τὴν ἑορτὴν τῶν Παναθηναίων, in Suda s.v. δήμαρχοι), which suggests that the citizens could have also taken part in the procession divided on the basis of their deme (­Shear 2021: 119, with n. 11). From the inscriptional calendar of the deme Skambonidai (­CGRN 19: ­15–​­20), we learn that some demes would sacrifice their own animals during the festival. Conversely, the particularly ­well-​­preserved and very detailed sacrificial calendar of the deme Erchia (­CGRN 52) does not mention such provisions. This suggests that, at least in some periods, not all demes sent their contributions to the sacrifice at the Panathenaea. To complicate things a little further, we know that some, but not necessarily all, Attic clans ( ­genē) also made sacrifices during the festival (­CGRN 84: 8­ 8–​­89). This is complementary to yet another, even more clearly emphasized policy of promoting ­sub-​­polis identities, namely the tribal ones. The already mentioned torch race was by no means the only sporting event held during the Great Panathenaea. Some of them, as was also the case during various Panhellenic festivals, were open to competitors from Attica and other poleis alike. To this category belonged a footrace, pentathlon, wrestling, boxing, and pankration, as well as performances of the Homeric poems. Both athletic and rhapsodic competitions seem to have attracted much attention and spurred famous foreigners to take part in the Panathenaea. What may seem unique is that there were also some disciplines in which only Athenian citizens (­adults, youths, and boys of citizen status), who were divided on tribal basis, could take part. These were the torch race, an equestrian competition, rowing regatta, euandria (­whose exact nature is obscure), and an apobatēs competition (­combined chariot and running race). Probably also reserved for the citizens were pyrrhic dances and cyclic choruses. In a way that is typical of sporting events, the division of athletes and, one may expect, their supporters on a tribal basis must have been a particularly effective means of emphasizing and cementing their group identity.18 The logic behind this mixed policy of inclusion and exclusion, as one may judge from Aristophanes’ Acharnians (­­502–​­508), was quite ­self-​­consciously applied in order to project a certain image of Athenian society abroad.19 Hence, the mass participation of foreigners was most welcome. At the same time, the partial inclusion of the others seems to be a way of performing the idealized self of Athenian society for its own sake.

An illusion of conservatism One could expect the Panathenaea, a poliadic, political, and civic festival par excellence, to be subject to changes that reflected the twists and turns of the political system. Indeed, as Julia Shear argues (­2021: ­214–​­252), the shifts in the model of the good citizen (­which encompassed the full spectrum, from extreme democrat to a loyal subject of 255

Bartłomiej Bednarek

tyrants and external rulers) can be mapped onto the development of the festival. Hence, for example, the involvement of the cavalry in the procession and variations in the emphasis put on the hippic contests can reflect various attitudes towards the role of the elites in Athenian society. Even clearer is the meaning of a s­ hort-​­lived innovation that consisted of depicting Antigonos and Demetrius of Phaleron on Athena’s peplos, obviously, by way of flattery (­Plut. Demetr. 12). Yet, in spite of these changes, in its essence, the Panathenaea in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods seems to have been similar to what it was like in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.20 A similar, but much more evident, phenomenon of hyperbolic conservatism that, paradoxically, led to innovation in the field of ritual and, to a certain degree, to its folk­ ell-​­recognized in p ­ ost-​­classical Sparta. As Nigel Kennell (­1995: lorization, has been w ­83–​­84) wrote in his ­g round-​­breaking book about the agōgē: Archaism [ . . . ] can best be defined as a ­self-​­conscious attempt to live the present in terms of the past. Sometimes societies bring this about by reviving obsolete traditions or by adopting o ­ ut-­​­­of-​­date modes of behavior and dress; architecture and even governmental institutions can be pressed into service as media of this phenomenon. Whereas p ­ ost-​­classical Athens tended to emphasize its close relationship with the spectacular achievements of the fifth century BCE, the Spartans celebrated the archaism, or, one may say, primitivism of their perceived traditions. This is why authors such as Cicero, Plutarch, and Pausanias (­Tusc. 2.34, Plut. Arist. 17.10, Lyc. 18.2, Paus. 3.16.­9 –​­11), who were active in the Roman period, could witness the gruesome rituals that consisted of flogging Spartan ephebes in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. All writers agree that this was an extremely tough endurance test, rather than just a symbolic whipping. Some youths are reported to have been killed in the process; however, quite remarkably, no eyewitness claims to have seen their death.21 This performance of the idealized self, as Kennell observes, would have taken place in front of international audiences, given that Spartan habits attracted much attention from tourists from all over the Roman Empire. Even though the ritual does not seem to predate the Hellenistic period at the earliest,22 it was so perfectly in line with what was thought of Sparta and the savage origins of human civilizations that virtually no one questioned its ‘­authenticity’ until the late twentieth century. Instead, it became one of the more commonly cited exemplifications of an archaic rite of passage. Thus, it was once believed that in order to become a f­ ull-​­fledged member of the community of citizens (­rather than fall down to the rank of a perioikos or even a helot), a youth had to go through the ordeals of the initiation rituals. According to Henri Jeanmaire (­1939), for example, this pertained not only to Spartans, but also to all ancestors of the Greeks as we know them.23 As a matter of fact, once we dismiss the testimonies related to the Spartan agōgē in the Roman times as being irrelevant to the study of much more remote periods, as well as the bulk of similar material regarding the s­elf-​­conscious folklore of various Greek communities provided by relatively late authors, such as Pausanias,24 it becomes impossible to draw a general picture of what becoming an adult meant in those early times. Instead, there are numerous sources that allow a glimpse into some specific rituals that contributed to becoming a f­ ull-​­fledged citizen in various periods and places in ancient Greece. 256

Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship

Religious cursus honorum It may seem a paradox that when students of ancient religion think of citizens’ maturation in ancient Greece, their thoughts inevitably drift towards women’s rituals, whose brief catalogue is provided by a famous passage in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (­­641– ​­647, trans. A. Sommerstein): As soon as I was seven years old, I was Arrephoros; Then I was a Grinder; when I was ten, at the Brauronia, I shed my saffron gown as one of the Foundress’s Bears; and I was also once a b ­ asket-​­bearer, a beautiful girl, wearing a string of dried figs. Much scholarly effort has been directed to show that this list does not represent a curriculum of an average Athenian girl but that it is rather a cursus honorum to which only a few could aspire, especially given that only two or four girls at a time could serve as arrēphoroi.25 As I have already mentioned, at least at some point in Athenian history, no fewer than one hundred ­basket-​­bearers (­kanēphoroi) served during the Panathenaea, and, given that there were various other occasions on which this could be done, such as the Dionysia, it is clear that a large segment of the f­emale-​­citizen population could have expected to enjoy this privilege. Yet, it is no less clear that it was reserved for a (­relatively large) minority. Similarly, there can be little doubt that the rite of passage that little girls underwent in Brauron, where they served as Artemis’ ­she-​­bears, was not available for every individual; if not for other reasons, then this was at least due to the modest capacity of the sanctuary. Finally, the scholia (­ad loc.) explain that the somewhat obscure ritual function of sacred grinder was reserved only for certain ­well-​­born girls. The Aristophanic passage seems to be symptomatic of the status of women in Athenian religion (­and elsewhere in Greece). The system distinguished between citizen and ­non-​­citizen women. As we learn from p ­ seudo-​­Demosthenes’ speech Against Neaera (­73, ­110–​­111), an appropriation of a role reserved for a ­citizen-​­woman by a ­non-​­citizen individual was considered an outrageous transgression. Yet, there are no traces of rituals that marked inclusion in this exclusive group. There seem to have been no civic rites of passage for women. What counted was being born and brought up in an Athenian family, marrying an Athenian, and producing children (­Taraskiewicz 2012). Each part of this sequence was surrounded by various religious rituals, but none of them, including marriage, was a religious ritual in its own right. ­ ost-​­natal rituals that marked the inAn exception to this rule can be made for the p clusion of a n ­ ew-​­born infant in the world of humans. Unfortunately, although classical and Byzantine sources abound in laconic, yet sometimes contradictory, references to various rites that belonged to this category (­such as amphidromia and dekatai), little is known with any certainty about their details (­Hamilton 1984; Parker 2005: ­13–​­14; Garland 2013: ­208–​­210). We do not know how these habits developed over time. We also do not know how they differed from community to community (­although one may take for granted that there were some differences between various traditions, which is typical of ancient Greece). Finally, we cannot be sure whether there was anything intrinsically civic in these rituals among the citizen families. It is clear, however, that during these ceremonies, the child’s fitness for being brought up was established (­exposure was 257

Bartłomiej Bednarek

always perceived as an alternative; Evans Grubbs 2013, with further bibliography). It was also then that the father would officially recognize the child as his, which was essential for obtaining citizen status. Finally, during these festivities, the child was given a name, became recognized as a member of the family and society, and, perhaps, began socializing with members of its extended family. As can be deduced from a passage in Philostratus’ Heroicus (­720) and the Iobakchoi inscription (­IG II2 1368.­127–​­136), the next step in the process of becoming a ­full-​­fledged Athenian seems to have taken place during the Anthesteria.26 This was a ­three-​­day festival held in honour of Dionysus (­and some other deities, most notably Hermes Chthonios), during which various fascinating rituals took place, most of which seem to have little or nothing to do with children. To this category belongs the famous marriage between Dionysus and the wife of the Archon Basileus, in addition to a notorious drinking contest in which each adult male participant was supposed to drink a large jug (­chous) of unmixed wine. Miniature copies of such jugs, often with figurative decorations depicting children, have been found in large quantities, often in the context of c­ hild-​­burials. It seems clear that these vessels were not simply toys (­or not only toys), but rather they played a ritual role (­esp. Hamilton 1992; Ham 1999; Parker 2005: ­290–​­316; Beaumont 2012: ­69–​­84). It is possible that children were, for the first time, acquainted with wine served in these miniature jugs when their fathers drank from the ­full-​­scale vessels. This is, unfortunately, only a matter of speculation. It remains equally obscure whether girls participated in these rites on an equal footing with boys. Their representations on miniature jugs are much less common, but not exceptional, which may suggest that the Anthesteria was not an exclusively male festival (­Beaumont 2012: ­75–​­76). We also do not know whether it was open to ­non-​­citizens, such as metics. No less mysterious in many respects remains the festival of Apatouria, which, unlike the Anthesteria, seems to have been primarily concerned with group identity on a ­sub-​­polis level. Robert Parker (­2005: 458) refers to it as ‘­the main festival of Phratries’ and, indeed, this is when boys, and, probably in some particular cases girls,27 were introduced into their fathers’ phratries. The exact details of the festival are, to a large degree, obscured by the contradictions in our sources, which may result from the fact that each phratry could have developed its own tradition. What remains clear is that, among other divinities worshipped during the festival, of special importance were Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria.28 The introduction of a new member into the phratry took place during a sacrifice at which his (­or, perhaps sometimes, her) father would swear that the child was legitimate. The meat of sacrificial animals would subsequently be shared between the phratores (­phratry members). Some of it would be consumed during the festival, but it became a comic topos that much of it would be subsequently carried home (­e.g., Ar. Ach. ­145–​­146, Thesm. ­558–​­559). This notion of abundance of food concurs with the general image of the Apatouria as a somewhat rustic festivity celebrated in a jovial atmosphere, perhaps typical of encounters of members of ­sub-​­polis groups. This is not how we tend to imagine the ‘­ethnographic’ rites of passage, which are usually associated with ‘­the ordeals that transform a human being from Boy to Man’, as Murray (­1940: 155) put it. Our sources, however, are reticent about the actual experience of the youths introduced to phratries. The only element in our dossier that may reflect the rites they underwent is the name of the third day of the Apatouria, Koureion, which seems to be related to the verb ἀποκείρεσθαι (‘­to cut off one’s hair’). It is tempting to think that the youths were supposed to cut 258

Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship

off and, perhaps, offer their hair to some divinity. There is, however, no direct evidence to support this. At any rate, the forensic speeches attest to the importance of the Apatouria as a means of becoming a member of the phratry, which, although not tantamount to citizenship, was clearly a prerequisite (­e.g., Dem. 57.46, Isae. 3.37; Lambert 1993: ­31– ​­43). The subsequent step on the way to becoming a citizen was the ephēbeia, a period of military training in which many (­p erhaps in some periods all) capable Athenian youths of ­18–​­20 years of age participated.29 As with everything in antiquity, this institution was imbued with religious ceremonies, ideas, and narrations.30 Nevertheless, the concept of the ephēbeia as such being a religious ritual is a modern construct.31 We may certainly analyze it in terms of a rite of passage; however, it is important to keep in mind that this entails the metaphorical use of anthropological terminology, as much as, for example, an experience of a boarding school student, though not a tribal initiation, can be often thought of as parallel to one (­esp. Polinskaya 2003). Athenian ephebes would spend a long time away from their homes, learning the skills necessary for becoming ­full-​­fledged citizens. Apart from the military training, this included participation in various rituals and festivals. We hear, for example, of the escort that the ephebes provided to such events as the Panathenaic procession, which seems perfectly natural from an ideological and aesthetic point of view (­Friend 2019: ­161–​­162). Ephebes were as important for the future of the society and as pleasant to look at as their female counterparts, the kanēphoroi.

Conclusions Due to the limits of space, this brief survey of the intersection between religion and civic identity in ancient Greece only touches upon some of the most conspicuous manifestations of this phenomenon. In conclusion, I believe that two observations should be made, one of which concerns us, the moderns, and the other concerns the ancient Greeks. To begin with the former, the scholarly tradition often tends to exaggerate the ­non-​­religious aspect of ancient religion, analysing some primarily religious modes of behaviour in sociological or psychological terms. At the same time, conversely, scholars often tend to label as religious (­and, especially in the past, as magic) what Greeks did not necessarily think of as such. To a certain degree, both inclinations are easier to criticize than to avoid, given the omnipresence of religion and its embeddedness in ancient culture, as well as the polyvalence of each form of behaviour (­no act of profound piety is uncontaminated by ­non-​­religious meanings). As for ancient Greeks, it would be a serious mistake to try to reduce their modes of experiencing religion into any universally valid formula. As the material briefly discussed above indicates, religion contributed to their becoming a citizen and to defining who a citizen was and what a citizen was supposed to be like, both on an individual and collective level. However, each of these categories presents more intriguing exceptions than there seem to be rules. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. What rests beyond our grasp is the way in which this relationship developed over time, especially in certain periods. What is even worse is that the little that we know concerns very few, mostly exceptionally large, poleis. About the majority of ancient Greek communities, we know next to nothing. In these cases, as a rule of thumb, one may assume that they must have developed their own (­at least slightly) idiosyncratic religious and political systems, and that one was somehow related to the other. 259

Bartłomiej Bednarek

Abbreviation CGRN = Collection of Greek Ritual Norms, available online: http://­cgrn.ulg.ac.be/

Notes 1 This research was possible thanks to the generous support of the National Centre of Science in Poland, grant number 2018/­31/­D/­HS3/­0 0128 and de Brzezie Lanckoroński scholarship for the year 2021. 2 See especially ­Sourvinou-​­Inwood (­1988, 1990); Burkert (­1995). For a critical approach: Bremmer (­2010); Kindt (­2012: ­12–​­35) with further bibliography. 3 There seems to be no comprehensive study of foreign divinities ‘­imported’ to Greece; however, there are numerous case studies devoted to such goddesses as Bendis or Isis in Attica (­Simms 1988, 1988/­1989). There is also a book on Greek deities ‘­exported’ abroad (­Parker 2017). 4 For the inscriptions (­CIA I ­423–​­427), see especially Dunham (­1903: ­297–​­300). On the Vari cave, see the most recent article by Laferrière (­2019) with further references. 5 Particularly stimulating is a brief article by ­Vidal-​­Naquet (­1968a), in which the scholar deconstructs the concept of the class of slaves. 6 It should be borne in mind that such divine epithets as polias or polieus could have originally referred to the place of worship (­i n the city as opposed to outside it) rather than to a particular sphere of deity’s influence. See Cole (­1995: ­297–​­305); Burkert (­1995: 208). 7 Another good example is provided by the sanctuary of Artemis at Amarynthos near Eretria. See Cole (­1995: ­297–​­298). 8 An interesting illustration of this practice seems to be provided by Aristophanes, Lys. ­177–​ ­179. The passage may be taken as an example of the cult activities that some members of the Athenian society undertook quite spontaneously on a daily basis. 9 CGRN (­Collection of Greek Ritual Norms) is a browsable collection of ancient Greek inscriptions that have been edited and translated into English and French and are followed by an essential commentary developed by Vinciane P ­ irenne-​­Delforge, Jan Mathieu Carbon, and Saskia Peels. All translations of Attic inscriptions I quote in this chapter come from the CGRN website (­accessed 22.03.2021). 10 It seems that also during the Panathenaea, those foreigners, including foreign kings, who wanted to make an offering to Athena, had to act through intermediaries among the Athenian citizens. See Shear (­2021: 162). 11 See especially Shear (­2021: ­85–​­94, ­147–​­156). Apart from Athena with various epithets, animals were sacrificed to Pandrosos and possibly to Apollo Prostaterios and other divinities and heroes. 12 See, e.g., Herington (­1955: ­6 –​­15). It seems beyond reasonable doubt that Athena Polias would also receive the peplos; however, as Mansfield (­1989: ­2 –​­50) argued, it does not exclude the possibility that a similar gift was offered to Athena with another epiclesis, perhaps to Athena Parthenos. For further references, see Parker (­2005: 265) and Brøns (­2017: ­365–​­392). 13 Apart from the procession, young females (­parthenoi) took part in the pannychis, at least nominally an ­all-​­night revel, which, judging from a laconic reference in Euripides’ Heraclidae (­­777–​ 7­ 83) was supposed to take place on the Acropolis. Unfortunately, very little is known about this part of the festival. 14 It is unclear when the ship was introduced. E.g., Reuthner (­2006: ­312–​­313) claims that it was a relatively late invention. Shear (­2021: ­131–​­134) argues that it was introduced as late as the ­second-​­century CE; however, her strongest argument is based on the lack of explicit references in earlier sources. 15 This can be deduced from the privileges the Prytaneis enjoyed when the portions of victims’ flesh were allotted. See, e.g., CGRN 92.12. 16 Metics’ daughters, according to Pollux 3.55; metics’ wives, according to Demetrius of Phaleron FGrH 228 fr. 5. 17 A dossier of inscriptional sources is provided by Parker (­1996: 142n80). 18 On the Panathenaic Games, see Neils and Tracy (­2003), Miller (­2004: ­132–​­145), Parker (­2005: ­256–​­257), and Shear (­2021: ­171–​­211).

260

Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship 19 In that passage, Aristophanes contrasts the Lenaea with the City Dionysia. At the former, only resident aliens were present, whereas the latter attracted people from various poleis. It needs some emphasis that the City Dionysia was, in many respects, similar to the Great ­Panathenaea – ​­among others, it featured tribal dithyrambic competitions. The seats in the theatre seem to have been allotted on a tribal basis (­see Winkler 1990: ­38–​­41). At the times of the first Delian League, the allied c­ ity-​­states were expected to send their embassies with phalli for Dionysus. Again, it is clear that through the festival, Athens performed its structure and connections. 20 What can be particularly meaningful from a longue durée perspective is that the tribal sport competitions seem to have disappeared by the Roman period (­see especially Shear 2021: ­207–​­211). What does not seem compelling is Shear’s (­2021: 127, 168) statement that the role attributed to metics ceased to exist in the year 229/228 BCE. It is true that the institution of metoikia was probably abolished, but there were still resident aliens in Athens, whom Niku (­2004: 90) aptly calls ‘­foreigners but no longer μέτοικοι’. There is no reason to think that this juridical and fiscal change had an impact on the Panathenaea. 21 On the problematic nature of ἀποθνήισκοντας in Plut. Lyc. 18.2, see Kennell (­1995: 73). 22 The chronology of these innovations is a matter of scholarly dispute. For its summary and bibliography, see Spawforth (­2012: ­92–​­95) (­who argues for the Roman period). 23 On the presence of the Spartan paradigm in the anthropological literature, including surprisingly recent publications, see Franchi (­2010). 24 For the reassessment of Pausanias as a source on early Greek traditions, see especially ­Pirenne-​­Delforge (­2008). 25 Although many details of arrēphoroi’s (‘­b earers of unnamed objects’) service remain unknown to us, it is clear that they were expected to live on the Athenian Acropolis for one year and to perform various tasks related to the cult of Athena and, possibly, some other divinities. Burkert (­1966) and Brelich (­1969: ­229–​­311) were among those scholars, who argued that the rituals in question, at least at some point of their development, involved many, or even all the Athenian females. This, however, is not corroborated by ancient sources. See, e.g., Robertson (­1983: 280), Dillon (­2002: 60), and Garland (­2013: 212). 26 Anthesteria was not exclusively an Athenian festival, as may be deduced, among other factors, from the wide diffusion of the name of the month Anthesterion among the Ionians. It seems reasonable to think that in these various places it had an essentially similar character, but its details differed widely. 27 From Isae. 3.73, it can be deduced that epiklēroi took part in the Apatouria. 28 Thus: Parker (­1996: 106); (­2005: 460). On the Apatouria, see Lambert (­1993: ­143–​­189), Parker (­2005: ­458–​­461), and Garland (­2013: 213). 29 Aristotle (­or his pupil) in the Constitution of the Athenians (­42.­1–​­43.1) seems to suggest that, at least in the late fourth century BCE, completing the ephēbeia was required to obtain citizen status. For an overview of the number of ephebes, which ranged from 30 to more than 500 at a time, see Casey (­2013: ­428–​­429); Friend (­2019: ­95–​­135). 30 For instance, the famous ephebic oath had a religious character, which is a usual feature of all Greek oaths in general. This does not mean, however, that the ephēbeia as such was primarily concerned with religion. Many contemporary functionaries (­i ncluding the president of the United States) use the Bible while taking their oath of office, which does not turn them into religious officials. The ephebes, among other things, swore to protect the places of cult and to honour the religion of their ancestors, which is symptomatic of the embeddedness of the Greek religion, and indicates that the political sphere was inseparable from the religious one. On the involvement of the ephebes in the religious life of Attica, see Casey (­2013: ­424–​ ­425) and Friend (­2019: ­157–​­164) with further references. 31 On ephēbeia as a rite of passage, see especially ­Vidal-​­Naquet (­1968b, 1986). For criticism, see especially Ma (­1994), Dodd (­2003), and Friend (­2019: ­164–​­171).

Bibliography Beaumont, L. (­2012) Childhood in ancient Athens: iconography and social history (­London and New York) Brelich, A. (­1969) Paides e parthenoi (­Rome)

261

Bartłomiej Bednarek Bremmer, J.N. (­2010) ‘­Manteis, magic, mysteries and mythography: messy margins of polis religion?’, Kernos 23, ­13–​­35 Brøns, C. (­2017) Gods and garments: textiles in Greek sanctuaries in the 7th to the 1st centuries BC (­Oxford) Brulé, P. (­1987) La Fille d’Athènes: La Religion des filles à Athènes à l’époque classique. Mythes, cultes et société (­Paris) Burkert, W. (­1966) ‘­Kekropidensage und Arrhephoria’, Hermes 94, ­1–​­25 ——— ​­(­1995) ‘­Greek poleis and civic cults: some further thoughts’, in M.H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub (­eds) Studies in the ancient Greek polis (­Stuttgart) ­201–​­210 Casey, E. (­2013) ‘­Educating the youth: the Athenian Ephebeia in the early Hellenistic era’, in J. Evans Grubbs, T. Parkin, and R. Bell (­eds) The Oxford handbook of childhood and education in the classical world (­Oxford) ­418–​­443 Cole, S. (­1995) ‘­Civic cult and civic identity’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) Sources for the ancient Greek ­city-​­state (­Copenhagen) ­292–​­325 de Polignac, F. (­1995) Cults, territory and the origin of the Greek city state (­Chicago) Detienne, M. (­1989) ‘­Culinary practices and the spirit of sacrifice’, in M. Detienne, and J.-​­P. Vernant (­eds) The cuisine of sacrifice among the Greeks (­Chicago, London) ­1–​­20 Dillon, M. (­2002) Girls and women in classical Greek religion (­London) Dodd, D.B. (­2003) ‘­Adolescent initiation in myth and tragedy: rethinking the Black Hunter’, in D.B. Dodd, C.A. Faraone (­eds) Initiation in ancient Greek rituals and narratives: new critical perspectives (­London) ­71– ​­84 Dunham, M.E. (­1903) ‘­The cave at Vari: inscriptions’, AJA 7.3, ­289–​­300 Evans Grubbs, J. (­2013) ‘­Infant exposure and infanticide’, in J. Evans Grubbs, T. Parkin, and R. Bell (­eds) The Oxford handbook of childhood and education in the classical world (­Oxford) ­83–​­107 Franchi, E. (­2010) ‘­Guerra e iniziazioni a Sparta e a Yulami: il miraggio spartano nell’antropologia oceanistica’, I Quaderni del Ramo d’Oro ­on-​­line 3, ­193–​­227 Friend, J.L. (­2019) The Athenian ephebeia in the fourth century BCE (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Garland, R. (­2013) ‘­Children in Athenian religion’, in J. Evans Grubbs, T. Parkin, and R. Bell (­eds) The Oxford handbook of childhood and education in the classical world (­Oxford) ­207–​­226 Gebauer, J. (­2002) Pompe und Thysia: attische Tieropferdarstellungen auf ­schwartz-​­und rotfigurigen Vasen (­Münster) Goff, B. (­2004) Citizen Bacchae: women’s ritual in ancient Greece (­Berkeley, CA) Ham, G.L. (­1999) ‘­The Choes and Anthesteria reconsidered: male maturation rites and the Peloponnesian Wars’, in M.W. Padilla (­ed.) Rites of passage in ancient Greece: literature, religion, society (­London and Toronto) ­201–​­218 Hamilton, R. (­1984) ‘­Sources for the Athenian Amphidromia’, GRBS 25.3, ­243–​­251 ——— ​­(­1992) Choes and Anthesteria: Athenian iconography and ritual (­A nn Arbor, MI) Herington, C.J. (­1955) Athena Parthenos and Athena Polias: study in the religion of Periclean Athens (­Manchester) Jeanmaire, H. (­1939) Couroi et Courètes: essai sur l’éducation spartiate et sur les rites d’adolescence dans l’antiquité hellénique (­Lille) Kennell, N.M. (­1995) The gymnasium of virtue: education  & culture in ancient Sparta (­Chapel Hill, NC and London) Kindt, J. (­2012) Rethinking Greek religion (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Personal religion: a productive category for the study of ancient Greek religion?’, JHS 135, ­35–​­50 Laferrière, C.M. (­2019) ‘­Sacred sounds: the cult of Pan and the Nymphs in the Vari cave’, CA 38.2, ­185–​­216 Lambert, S.D. (­1993) The phratries of Attica (­A nn Arbor, MI) Ma, J. (­1994) ‘­Black hunter variations’ PCPhS 40, ­49–​­80 Mansfield, J.M. (­1989) The robe of Athena and the Panathenaic “­peplos” (­PhD dissertation, Ann Arbor, University Microfilms International) Miller, S.G. (­2004) Ancient Greek athletics (­New Haven, CT and London) Murray, G. (­1940) Aeschylus: the creator of tragedy (­Oxford) Neils, J., Tracy, S.V. (­2003) ΤΟΝ ΑΘΕΝΕΘΕΝ ΑΘΛΟΝ: the games at Athens (­Princeton, NJ)

262

Performing the city: religious aspects of Greek citizenship Niku, M. (­2004) ‘­W hen and why did the Athenian μετοικία system disappear? The evidence of inscriptions’, Arctos 38, ­75–​­93 Parker, R. (­1996) Athenian religion: a history (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2005) Polytheism and society at Athens (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2017) Greek gods abroad: names, natures, and transformations (­Oakland, CA) ­Pirenne-​­Delforge, V. (­2008) Retour à la source: Pausanias et la religion grecque (­Liège) Polinskaya, I. (­2003) ‘­Liminality as metaphor: initiation and the frontiers of ancient Athens’, in D.B. Dodd, C.A. Faraone (­eds) Initiation in ancient Greek rituals and narratives: new critical perspectives (­London) ­85–​­106. ——— ​­(­2006) ‘­Lack of boundaries, absence of oppositions: the c­ ity-​­countryside continuum of a Greek pantheon’, in R.M. Rosen, I. Sluiter (­eds) City, countryside, and the spatial organization of value in classical antiquity (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­61–​­92 Reuthner, R. (­2006) Wer webte Athenes Gewänder? Die Arbeit von Frauen im antiken Griechenland (­Frankfurt and New York) Robertson, N. (­1983) ‘­The riddle of the Arrhephoria at Athens’, HSCP 87, ­241–​­288 Roccos, L.J. (­1995) ‘­The kanephoros and her festival mantle in Greek art’, AJA 99, ­641– ​­666 Shear, J.L. (­2021) Serving Athena: the festival of the Panathenaia and the construction of Athenian identities (­Cambridge) Simms, R.R. (­1988) ‘­The cult of the Thracian goddess Bendis in Athens and Attica’, AncW 18 ­59–​­76 ——— ​­(­1988/­1989) ‘­Isis in classical Athens’, CJ 84, ­216–​­221. ­Sourvinou-​­Inwood, C. (­1988) ‘­Further aspects of polis religion’ AION(­archeol) 10, ­259–​­274 ——— ​­(­1990) ‘­W hat is polis religion?’, in O. Murray and S. Price (­eds) The Greek city: from Homer to Alexander (­Oxford) ­295–​­322 Spawforth, A.J.S. (­2012) Greece and the Augustan cultural revolution (­Cambridge) Taraskiewicz, A. (­2012) ‘­Motherhood as teleia: rituals of incorporation at the kourotrophic shrine’, in L. Hackworth Petersen and P. ­Saltzman-​­Mitchell (­eds) Mothering and motherhood in ancient Greece and Rome (­Austin) ­43–​­69 van Meurs, J. (­1619) Panathenaea. Sive, de Minervae illo gemino festo, liber singularis (­Leiden) ­Vidal-​­Naquet, P. (­1968a) ‘­Les esclaves grecs ­ètaient-​­i ls une classe?’, Raison prèsente 6, ­103–​­112 ——— ​­(­1968b) ‘­T he black hunter and the origin of the Athenian ephebia’, PCPhS 14, ­49–​­64 ——— ​­(­1986) ‘­T he black hunter revisited’, PCPhS 42, ­126–​­144 Whitehead, D. (­1986) The demes of Attica, 508/­­7  – ​­ca. 250 B.C.: a political and social study (­Princeton, NJ) Wijma, S.M. (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­­5th–​­4th Century BC) (­Stuttgart) Winkler, J.J. (­1990) ‘­The ephebes’ song: tragōidia and polis’, in J.J. Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin (­eds) Nothing to do with Dionysos? (­Princeton, NJ) ­20–​­62

263

19 SHARING IN THE POLIS Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship Jakub Filonik

This chapter discusses the language of belonging to the polis community present in the surviving political discourse of classical Greece, with a particular focus on the metaphorical conceptualizations of ‘­being a citizen’.1 It attempts to ­trace – ​­with some leeway in academic ­imagination – ​­both the possible roots and the possible effects of that language in Greek political culture, aided by methods of cognitive semantics.2

‘­Being a citizen’ in Greek The four fairly straightforward ways of referring to ‘­citizenship’ in ancient Greek are: ­1 verbs such as politeuein and the middle or passive politeuesthai, when the focus is on the institutional and participatory aspects of citizenship; ­2 nouns such as politēs and astos, ‘­citizen’ (­or more seldom female forms politis/­ astē), when the focus is on the person’s citizen status itself or on issues of descent (­sometimes also with participatory undertones);3 ­3 adjectives such as Athēnaios or Lakedaimonios, when ethnic or territorial belonging is of main concern (­or terms expressing belonging to a local unit, such as a deme, on which see Brock in this volume); but in this ethnic or territorial terminology, ancient Greek did not always distinguish between citizens and inhabitants of any status, or those forming part of a wider community in a given ­location – ​­a distinction also relevant to the metaphorical language of belonging, which I will get back to later in the chapter; ­4 a technical noun politeia, mostly in expressions such as ‘­having (­or receiving) the politeia’,4 a somewhat less straightforward, metonymic way of specifically referring to the honours given in grants of citizenship, rather than a generic term for enjoying the political status that we are often used to in our languages today (­and which is probably still the closest one can get to such a concept, otherwise absent from ancient Greek).5 The fifth particularly important but not equally direct category of referring to c­ itizenship –​ ­and the one that interests me the most in this ­chapter – ​­is that of ‘­having a share in the 264

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-23

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship

polis’ (­μετέχειν τῆς πόλεως [metechein tēs poleōs] and μετεῖναι τῆς πόλεως [meteinai tēs poleōs]), with its many variants appearing in Greek political discourse. In the classical period, we first and foremost meet it either in Athens or used in relation to Athens,6 but by the late classical and early Hellenistic period the concept was not exclusively Athenian, and as I discuss below, its origins were quite likely also not specific to a single polis. As is often the case, the first pronounced theoretical framework comes from Aristotle. In Book 3 of the Politics, when looking for a stricter definition of citizenship than whatever citizens have in common with other inhabitants of Greek poleis, he uses an inventive variant of the expression in question by explicitly defining the male citizen through his ‘­sharing’ (­metechein) in courts and magistracies (­1275a.­22–​­23, trans. R. Robinson): ‘­The citizen proper is distinguished by nothing else so much as having a share in giving judgment and exercising office’ (­πολίτης δ’ ἁπλῶς οὐδενὶ τῶν ἄλλων ὁρίζεται μᾶλλον ἢ τῷ μετέχειν κρίσεως καὶ ἀρχῆς).7 He uses that core idea of ‘­sharing in the polis’ in an even more palpable sense in Book V, when discussing regime change (­1316a.­39–​­b.3, trans. D. Keyt, my emphasis; cf. III, 1280a.­25–​­31; Pl. Leg. IV, ­715a–​­b): a constitution changes . . . into oligarchy . . . because those who are greatly superior in property think it is not just for those possessing nothing to have an equal share in the city [ison metechein tēs poleōs] with those having possessions. This material facet of sharing in the polis is an important anchor for the possible roots of this idea, as argued below. So far, one may be inclined to think that this concept had a place in political philosophy with its clever definitions but was not well rooted in Greek legal thinking. However, the first surviving Athenian citizenship ­law  – ​­the ­so-​­called Pericles citizenship law of 451/­4508 – ​­preserved in a visibly archaic9 quotation in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians uses exactly the same expression (­Ath. Pol. 26.4 Chambers = 26.3 Oppermann): Under [the archonship of] Antidotus, the large majority of citizens voted on the proposal of Pericles and passed the law saying that a man should not have a share in the city [mē metechein tēs poleōs] if he had not been born from both citizen parents.10 Variants of this language also appear in legal inscriptions, not least in grants of citizenship, and clearly go beyond the classical period and Attica (­Brock 2015). For example, when in the early third century the people of Bargylia in Caria honoured a citizen of Ionian Teos as their benefactor, they said: ‘­he shall be granted citizenship ( ­politeia, from πολ[ιτεί]αν) ̣ and have a stake in all the affairs in which the p ­ eople of Bargylia have a share (­μ ετουσίαν πάντων ὧν καὶ Βαργυλιῆτ[αι] [μ]ετέχουσιν)’ (­SIG [Syll.3] 426 = McCabe, Teos 29, ll. 2­ 2–​­25, trans. mine). Similarly, in the treaty of ­isopoliteia (‘­­co-​­citizenship’, cf. Gawantka 1975; Saba 2020) between Miletus and ­Heraclea from the second century, we read: ‘­A nd if some people were previously enrolled as citizens in either Miletus or Heraclea, it shall be permitted for them to take part in citizenship in both cities (­μ ετεῖναι τῆς παρ’ ἑκατέροις πολιτείας), if they have previously resided in the city in which they were enrolled for at least ten years’, while those ‘­having a share in the constitution not in accordance with the agreement’ (­παρὰ τήνδε συνθήκην μετέχωσι τῆς πολιτείας) should be liable to a trial for impersonating a citizen 265

Jakub Filonik

(­dikē xenias) (­SIG [Syll.3] 633 = McCabe, Miletos 39 = I.Milet. 3.150, ll. ­63–​­67, trans. mine). Many other uses of metechein (­and Doric pedechein) appear in such contexts in inscriptions.

Metaphorical conceptualizations of citizenship and belonging In their Conceptual Metaphor Theory (­CMT), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (­1980) define metaphor as a mapping between conceptual domains, leading to the understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another (­for example, ‘­h is claims are indefensible, she will demolish them in the debate’ relies on a conceptual metaphor argument is war11). CMT assumes that much metaphorical thinking derives from human bodily experience (­embodiment), and argues that to operate effectively, metaphors need to highlight certain aspects of concepts while downplaying others. The latter aspect is important in discourse analysis, but proper significance of metaphors in discourse, as opposed to their more universal aspects rooted in human biology, has been extensively explored only in various later studies. Linguists and political scientists have now developed new methods of studying metaphorical discourse, including ‘­critical metaphor analysis’ (­­Charteris-​­Black 2018) and ‘­metaphor scenarios’ (­Musolff 2016),12 which are helpful to this chapter’s aims. In conceptual terms, the Greek preposition meta carries the elementary meaning of being ‘­between’ (­two) or ‘­among’ (­many) entities, and in classical Greek frequently expresses accompaniment (­Luraghi 2003: ­244–​­255). Remnants of this understanding can still be seen in prepositional compounds, including those formed using most basic verbs such as ‘­to be’, ‘­to have’, or ‘­to give’, resulting in the forms met-​­einai (­lit. ‘­be among’, but also the impersonal construction metesti moi, meaning ‘­I have a share of, part in, claim to’), ­meta-​­didonai (‘­make part of’, ‘­g ive a share’, ‘­distribute’), and met-​ ­echein (‘­take part’, ‘­share in’, hence ‘­be a member of’, the most frequently used of the three; NB a ­basic-​­level metaphor in English too).13 Etymologically, ­met-​­echein and ­met-​­einai seem light years away from each o ­ ther – as ​­ ‘­to have’ and ‘­to be’ appear to the common ­sense – ​­but in the surviving Greek texts both are primarily used to express ‘­having a share in something’, without much differentiation between them. In fact, they are often used synonymously together within a single passage, as in the Hellenistic inscriptions quoted above and in many classical texts.14 The third verb important for this analysis, ­meta-​­didonai (‘­to give a share (­of/­in)’),15 is normally used to describe the granting of certain ‘­shares’ (­not least s­ocio-​­economic privileges, presented metaphorically as material ‘­parts’, divisible and shareable between the entitled). ‘­Giving a share’ (­in the polis, constitution, offices) is well represented in many contexts depicting relations between the state and its citizens.16 One may recall the famous metaphor from Plato’s Crito (­­51c–​­d, trans. H.N. Fowler): ‘­Observe then, Socrates,’ perhaps the laws would say, ‘­that if what we say is true, what you are now undertaking to do to us is not right. For we brought you into the world, nurtured you, and gave a share of all the good things we could to you and all the citizens [­μεταδόντες ἁπάντων ὧν οἷοί τ’ ἦμεν καλῶν σοὶ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις πᾶσιν πολίταις]. . .’. Conceptualizing citizenship as ‘­having a share in a communal entity’ is quite distinct from the modern idea of ‘­citizen rights’ or ‘­citizen status’, even though both arguably had 266

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship

a place in Greek political discourse.17 It sometimes seems ­closer – ​­yet not ­equal – ​­to the idea of ‘­participation’ (­as metechein is indeed sometimes rendered today). However, this notion is phrased through the idea of ownership (­lit. ‘­having something among/­together with [others]’), and in conceptual terms rests on the idea that citizenship is owning a part of a larger entity (­which depends on a more basic one: polis is a divisible possession), since one shares in something that can be split and shared between those entitled to receive their allotted piece. This, in turn, implies that citizens are shareholders or, if we resort to another contemporary concept, that citizens are part-​­owners. We do not necessarily find much direct parallelism between such ideas in ancient and modern economy, but we can turn our eyes to other cultural domains from which such ­ideas – ​­by necessity imperfectly expressed through modern ­terms – ​­could have emerged, a problem to which I return later in this chapter.

The discourse of ‘­sharing’ Before anything can be said about the roots of such concepts, one should take notice of how they appear in public discourse, especially in publicly delivered Athenian speeches. It seems that the Attic orators fruitfully employed such conceptualizations to evoke the normative aspects of relations between an individual and the c­ ity-​­state, sometimes with respect to their specifically political features, at other times to more broadly ‘­communal’ ones. Josine Blok (­2017) in her recent book made a case against the Aristotelian definition of citizenship, arguing that classical Greek texts about citizens instead of public administration often discuss sharing in cult and ‘­sacred matters’, including the sacrificial rites, open to both male and female citizens, and that the Greek concept of citizenship should be redefined accordingly. While important to the full understanding of the ‘­sharing’ phraseology and its ancient contexts, this seems to be a very limited use of the concepts that could otherwise be concerned with political participation and belonging, and as such it is far from acceptable as a Greek definition of ‘­citizenship’, especially in classical Athens (­cf. Joyce in this volume). In the discussion that follows, this chapter attempts to introduce some distinctions regarding the use of these notions in Athenian public discourse, particularly in court rhetoric, not least when the orators were striving to provoke their audience’s emotional response to transgressions of social norms.18 One such case from the very end of the classical period is Lycurgus’ court speech Against Leocrates,19 written for a case against a citizen who left Athens when the Macedonian army was expected to invade the city. The concept of metechein is used there to provoke indignation against the citizens who ‘­had a share’ in something they did not deserve, not being rightful or exemplary members of the community according to the speaker (­L eoc. 142): It would be terrible and vile if Leocrates thought that as a deserter he should have an equal share in the city of those who remained [ἴσον ἔχειν . . . ἐν τῇ τῶν μεινάντων πόλει]; as someone who did not face ­danger – ​­in the city of those who maintained the b ­ attle-​­line; and one who failed to keep his ­watch – ​­in the city of its own rescuers. And he might come to share in the sacred matters [hiera: usu. rites or temples], sacrifices, market, laws, and the privilege of citizenship [ἥκῃ ἱερῶν θυσιῶν ἀγορᾶς νόμων πολιτείας μεθέξων], for the preservation of which a thousand of your fellow citizens gave their lives at Chaeronea and whom the polis buried at a public funeral. 267

Jakub Filonik

Here, the metaphorical ‘­share’ (­ison echein; methexōn) in the polis includes both the spheres of activity not exclusive to citizens, such as religion and law, and the actual privilege of ­having – ​­or indeed ‘­sharing in’ – ​­citizenship (­politeia, ‘­government’ but also ‘­constitution’). The latter commonly included being able to take part in certain political activities, such as meeting at the Assembly, holding magistracies, and serving as a judge, as well as the prerogative to own land in Athens (­by purchase or inheritance) and to enter into formal marriage with an Athenian (­by engyē, ‘­betrothal’).20 Even though Lycurgus, unlike Aristotle (­quoted above), does not discuss any material aspect of an ‘­equal share’ in the polis, he focuses on an imagined pool, from which only ­some – ​­the i­ n-​­group of the e­ ntitled – can ​­ take what is rightfully theirs. Such framing was quite likely aimed to appeal to people’s more primary instincts about distributing limited resources, where each portion needed to be carefully allotted and claimed. It also helped to channel such instincts into thinking about one’s political status and privileges as something precious that should not be easily shared with others. As seen in the quoted passage, this ‘­share’ involved participating in certain social and political activities and privileges. These often ­included – ​­but were not limited ­to – ​­religious rites, which the speaker claims should be enjoyed only by the good citizens dedicated to their city, and thus certainly not the defendant in the current trial, earlier described as virtually rushing in to receive an undeserved piece of sacrificial meat (­L eoc. 5: ‘­I reckoned it was disgraceful to watch this man rushing into the agora and sharing in communal sacrifices’, trans. mine; cf. Leoc. 127; Lys. 24.25, [6].­48–​­49). The role of the agora on this list is less straightforward, since citizens might seem more entitled than metics and foreigners to trade there, but in the fourth century the space was generally open to metics if they paid a fee (­Dem. 57.34). The speaker of Demo­ sthenes’ Against Eubulides explicitly refers to this sentiment (­57.31: ‘­it is not allowed for foreigners to work in the agora’, trans. mine; perhaps focusing on foreign guests, not the paying metics).21 In the same speech, the orator uses another ‘­political’ antithesis to expound on the issue of descent, crucial to Athenian citizens (­57.51, trans. V. Bers): So if you rightly take it as a sign of people being aliens that they are exposed as hiding the identity of their true parents and pretending they are someone else’s children, then surely the opposite should show that I am a citizen [ὡς εἰμὶ πολίτης]. I would not, after all, claim to have a share in the city, while inscribing myself as the son of an alien woman and man [οὐ γὰρ ἂν ξένην καὶ ξένον τοὺς ἐμαυτοῦ γονέας ἐπιγραψάμενος μετέχειν ἠξίουν τῆς πόλεως]. Instead, if I knew this was the case, I would have searched for people to claim as my parents. But I did not know any such thing, and so, sticking with my real parents, I claim my rightful share in the city [διόπερ μένων ἐπὶ τοῖς οὖσιν δικαίως γονεῦσιν ἐμαυτῷ τῆς πόλεως μετέχειν ἀξιῶ]. Having a share in the polis is simply equated here with being a citizen ( ­politēs), meaning that only citizens could truly enjoy sharing in various privileges in the polis, directly deriving from their status. Incidentally, ‘­having a share’ in the apparently civic rites is mentioned earlier in the speech as an important activity limited to citizens (§3, trans. Bers, modified): I think you should be angry at those who are exposed as aliens if they have secretly and against your will shared in your sacred rites and public affairs [τῶν ὑμετέρων

268

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship

ἱερῶν καὶ κοινῶν μετεῖχον] without having asked you or persuaded you to grant them the privilege; but you should help and save those unlucky people who demonstrate that they are citizens . . . Yet as the speech refers to a legal charge of falsely entering the citizen list in an Athenian deme (­cf. Fröhlich 2016), its language often resonates with proving citizen descent at a dokimasia (‘­scrutiny’) procedure, such as having the household’s altars and family graves in the Attic soil (­Feyel 2009; cf. Ath. Pol. 55.3; Carey in this volume),22 and is directed against someone trying to benefit from the citizen privileges he could not enjoy according to the law (­cf. [Dem.] 44.35). Additionally, the term politis (‘­female citizen’) in this speech refers not to a ‘­share in the polis’ through religion but rather to being able to take part in the Athenian economy through trade in the agora.23 A similar attempt to provoke an emotional response to this concept appears in Apollodorus’ speech Against Neaira ([Dem.] 59.28, 111, trans. Bers, modified): Now, don’t you think this is scandalous, that this Stephanus has robbed men of their right to speak in public, men who are citizens by birth and have had a legitimate share in the polis [τοὺς μὲν φύσει πολίτας καὶ γνησίως μετέχοντας τῆς πόλεως], while he thrusts men who are not part of the city into being Athenians [τοὺς δὲ μηδὲν προσήκοντας βιάζεται Ἀθηναίους εἶναι]—​­in violation of all the laws? … And you will say, ‘­We acquitted her.’ At once, the most upright of the women will be angry with you for having thought it proper that this woman share in the polis affairs and in the sacred rites on an equal basis with them [ὁμοίως αὐταῖς ταύτην κατηξιοῦτε μετέχειν τῶν τῆς πόλεως καὶ τῶν ἱερῶν]. Religion has a prominent place in this passage, but the reason the orator focuses on this aspect is that Phano was married to a high religious official, the archōn basileus, and as his wife she had certain sacrificial honours and performed important public rites,24 so the speaker’s argument is focused on showing how she transgressed Athenian legal ­ on-​­citizen and social norms by entering these functions a­ s – ­​­­allegedly – ​­a woman of n descent, without the right to marry an Athenian. Not least importantly, Apollodorus and Demosthenes mention ‘­having a share’ in both ‘­the affairs of the polis’ and ‘­the rites’ (­metechein tōn tēs poleōs kai tōn hierōn) as distinct categories, with the two connected and distinguished from each other by the telling particle kai (‘­and’, cf. Dem. 23.65). It is also worth noting that the language of metechein is used in Apollodorus’ speech for both men and women, with the former sharing in the polis itself, the latter in the ‘­matters of the polis and its religion’, an important distinction that does not seem accidental. Moreover, the language of ‘­having a share in the polis’ is specifically used as a technical metaphor for ‘­being (­or remaining) a citizen’ in both public and private speeches, as well as in Isocratean discourses.25 A more specific share often mentioned by the orators was literally ‘­the common things’, or rather ‘­the public affairs’ (­ta koina), often meaning participation in the political institutions of the polis. In the speech Against Timarchus from 345, Aeschines attacks the lifestyle of a citizen who prostituted himself and thus should not have been a public speaker according to an old Solonian law, in order to incite indignation at his political career as a frequent public speaker (­1.160, trans. C. Carey, modified):

269

Jakub Filonik

If they try to argue that a man has not prostituted himself if he did not make a contract to hire himself out, and demand that I provide documentation and witnesses to this effect, firstly remember the laws concerning prostitution; nowhere does the legislator mention contracts. He did not ask whether anyone had disgraced himself under a written contract, but, however the activity takes place, he absolutely bars the man who has engaged in it from the public affairs of the polis [τὸν πράξαντα κελεύει μὴ μετέχειν τῶν τῆς πόλεως κοινῶν]. And rightly so. If any man in his youth abandoned noble ambitions for the sake of shameful pleasure, he believed that this man should not in later years fully enjoy political privileges [τοῦτον οὐκ ᾠήθη δεῖν πρεσβύτερον γενόμενον ἐπίτιμον εἶναι]. There is an important conceptual distinction to note between these expressions. The understanding of ‘­sharing in the polis’ could derive from a more l­iteral – ​­perhaps ­primary –​ ­meaning of a share in the land and the fruit it bears (­see next section), even though in classical times it already seems to refer to the polis as an abstraction and to the political statuses linked to it (­status is ­property). Expressions such as ‘­sharing in the common affairs of the polis’, however, seem to be metaphorical already on a very basic level and refer to the activities in the polis, as if these were objects that could be shared among their participants. This was probably a more inventive elaboration of the former concept that could serve different roles in rhetoric by presenting not just citizen status itself but also various social and political behaviours as a threat to the limited shareable resources available in the polis that should be safeguarded from any given external threat. What is equally important is that it may be more useful to read these phrases with reference to the concepts of atimia and epitimia specifically, as hinted by Aeschines’ use of the term epitimos in the passage quoted above (­cf. Dem. 21.96). Similarly, in his Assembly speech On the freedom of the Rhodians from ca. 350, Demosthenes urges the Athenians (­15.­32–​­33, trans. J. Trevett, modified): Although perhaps the main reason why many men get away with such behaviour [sc. treason] is the help that they receive from their pay masters, you too deserve some of the blame. For, men of Athens, you should have the same attitude towards constitutional discipline as you have towards military discipline. What is this discipline? You think that a man who deserts the position assigned to him by the general should be deprived of his civic rights and allowed no share in public affairs [ἄτιμον οἴεσθε προσήκειν εἶναι καὶ μηδενὸς τῶν κοινῶν μετέχειν]. In the same way, those who desert the constitutional position handed down to them by their ancestors, and whose political conduct is oligarchic, should be deprived of the civic right to offer you advice [χρῆν . . . ἀτίμους τοῦ συμβουλεύειν ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς ποιεῖσθαι]. As it is, you consider those of your allies who have sworn to have the same enemies and friends as you to be best disposed to you, but of the politicians it is those whom you know to have committed themselves to the enemies of our city in whom you put the greatest trust. No share in ta koina must mean in this context not having the right to address the Athenian dēmos in public, similarly to the wording of the Aeschines passage above. Incidentally, the more succinct variant, ‘­having no share in the polis’, could also be used metonymically as a technical term for atimia, as apparent from Demosthenes’ public

270

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship

speech Against Timocrates from 353, concerned with a newly introduced law on public debtors, which has the speaker say (­24.201, trans. E.M. Harris, modified): The man who is about to inherit his disenfranchisement [ὅστις μέλλων κληρονομήσειν τῆς ἀτιμίας], should anything happen to his father, does not think that he has to pay the debt; rather, he counts the time his father continues to live as profit for himself. Where do you think he would stop? Don’t you pity your father and think he suffers terribly? While you do business and make money from the war tax you were collecting, from the decrees you propose, from the laws you introduce, ­because of a tiny sum your father should have no share in the polis [διὰ μικρὸν ἀργύριον μὴ μετέχει τῆς πόλεως], and you claim that you pity others? Since not having a share in the polis clearly refers here to a citizen about to lose his civic rights after becoming a public debtor (­cf. [Dem.] 58.15), which is different from not having been a citizen at all, we must each time contextualize the use of such metaphorical phrases when studying them in order to understand their particular significance. More importantly, atimia, indeed, seems to have been the loss, and epitimia the restoration of a very tangible ‘­share’ in the polis (­cf. Rocchi; Joyce in this volume), since becoming an atimos would not be equal to losing citizenship proper, ­and – ​­on the one ­hand – ​­would let such a ‘­disenfranchised’ male Athenian citizen at least formally retain some of his civic rights, namely the potential ownership of landed property and household and the ability to formally marry an Athenian woman, ­but – ​­on the other ­hand – ​­it would ­ on-​­citizens, such deprive him of some communal privileges normally available also to n as entering the agora and the temples (­on top of the specifically civic privileges of active and passive political participation).26 This list thus includes both the political and the religious dimension of ‘­sharing in the ­city-​­state’, with only the former being specific to citizens. ‘­Having a share in the polis’ and more commonly ‘­in the public affairs’ in oratory would thus be much closer to enjoying a full ‘­franchise’ in the ­city-​­state (­epitimia), rather than simply denoting citizen status or citizen descent itself. Furthermore, this variance shows a developing specialization in the ways the language drawn from the concept of sharing in (­the matters of) the polis was being used in rhetoric, with apparently conscious focus on different expressions by the orators wishing each time to draw attention to a different aspect of engagement with what we might today call political, public, and social affairs. I, therefore, suggest that the meaning of these phrases should be more clearly distinguished in our attempts to discover the true nature of ‘­Greek citizenship’, given their importance in the surviving sources and the points that their authors were trying to make. The language of sharing in the polis was thus often used in rhetoric to provoke an emotional reaction on the part of the citizen audience, while such concepts were each time placed in a particular context relevant to the case. As briefly discussed above, this could appeal to people’s more primary instincts about distributing limited resources and shape their thinking about their political status and privileges as something they ‘(­­co-​­)­own’ or ‘­partake in’. This is something we may recognize from various periods of ancient and modern history, including many heated discussions about immigration and access to resources in contemporary states, as part of the incentive to conceptualize one’s political status as property in danger of being taken away by others, who thus ought to be excluded.27

271

Jakub Filonik

Cultural roots and undertones In the Laws, Plato sets out the rules for his imagined politeia of Magnesia, partly in line with the Greek tradition of instituting a thorough set of laws for newly founded colonies.28 In Book V, he describes a desired state of affairs in which there is nothing ‘­private’ (­idion) and all things are ‘­shared’ (­koina),29 while the laws that guarantee this make the state as unified as possible (­­739c-​­d). However, he proposes that the Magnetes, with all 5,040 of them having an equal share of easily divisible land (­737e: klēros, meros, nomē ‘­portion’), ‘­shall begin by allocating land and houses, and not hold their farms in common, since that is asking too much of the birth, upbringing, and education we can take for granted’ and that ‘­anyone given this portion of land is to regard it as the common property of the city ( ­polis) as a whole . . . ideal-ly, each individual is to enter the colony (­apoikia) with an equal share of all other property as well’ (­­739e–​­740a, 744a, trans. T. Griffith; cf. ­740b–​­741d, 7­ 45b–​­d), even though some inequalities and property classes will inevitably need to exist from the very outset (­­744a–​­c). In addition to that, there will be a limit on how much private property one can have in each property class (­VI, ­754d–​­e), and anyone who wishes will be able to initiate a case against a person who breaches this limitation, with dire consequences (­­754e-​­755a, trans. Griffith, modified): … if the defendant is found guilty, he shall not share in the city’s common resources [τῶν κοινῶν κτημάτων μὴ μετεχέτω]; when the city makes some general distribution [διανομή, cf. 744b], he shall have no share in it, apart from his original allocation of land [ἄμοιρος ἔστω πλήν γε τοῦ κλήρου]. While Plato’s proposal may be more radical than anything the Greeks knew from their social life, his regulations were based on many experiences of actual cohabitation in a polis, as the Laws often seem to be drawing on existing Athenian legal resolutions (­Saunders 1994). They may be taken as the extreme form of an otherwise common pattern of inclusion and exclusion. And indeed, an ‘­equal share’ in the polis in the passages quoted from Aristotle and Lycurgus was sometimes an object of attention itself in classical Athenian public discourse, with the focus on ‘­equality’ as much as on ‘­sharing’, with many expressions linked to this concept showing more inventive variety in their framing. This could take a ­constitution-​­oriented approach, as in Lysias’ remarks on equal sharing in the Athenian polity by peaceful citizens after the democratic restoration of 403/­402 (­a catchphrase echoed in Isocrates),30 or resonate with the slogans of Athenian imperial ideology promoting democracy among allies (­Lys. 2.56, Thuc. 7.63, Dem. 10.­45–​­48), or be part of a reflection on equality, justice, and the legal order in democracy, linked to the violation of these principles by the opposing party in court (­Dem. 21.67, 112, 188; 23.86). The ‘­share’ conceived in such a way helped conceptualize one’s legal status metonymically through the social and political activities one could enjoy without hindrance on a par with other citizens in the polis owing to that status. This idea thus follows the already mentioned actions are objects metaphor, since all those things done by Athenian citizens are part of the posited ‘­equal share’, as if the problem in question was an actual equal allotment of scarce food or land (­cf. Isoc. 12.179), rather than being allowed to act in certain ways in the society one lives in, together with an indefinite number of others who could get the same ‘­share’ without the risk of running 272

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship

out of resources. Such framing could be helpful in presenting the opposing party as a risk to one’s ‘­share’, and privileges as something scarce that should only be granted to those conforming to certain social norms. On the other hand, in the wider democratic ideology, especially in the period following the civil war in Athens, a more egalitarian approach towards ‘­political participation’ seems to have been promoted to establish the rules of democracy as opposed to the recent oligarchic regime,31 with an ‘­equal share’ available to all those willing to take part in the newly formed constitution. Of course, this concept and this rhetoric had some very concrete grounds in the relations between citizens and ­non-​­citizens, drawing on more culturally specific ideas such as property ownership.32 In Athens, as in various other poleis, only citizens could ­own  – ​­rather than just ­rent  – ​­land and houses, and metics and foreigners were only rarely granted the privilege of enktēsis, which required a special decree of the Assembly (­Osborne 1­ 981–​­1983; Henry 1983). Paul Millett (­1991: ­224–​­229) discussed how wealthy metics could just use citizens as their middlemen, but this is almost unheard of in our sources and we can easily imagine how such individuals, trying to circumvent the legal order and social distinctions, would be seen by the society.33 And although foreigners and resident aliens lacked a very tangible ‘­share’ in the territory of the state because ​­ they could not own land in Athens, various classical ­authors – including the ­orators –​ ­use the terminology of ‘­sharing’ by naming abstract concepts and actions that could play the role of the ‘­shared’ object. The citizen status so conceived is thus seen as having one’s part in a larger, divisible material entity. One may speculate that being an ‘­owner’ of land could be a social status itself, even in classical Athens, from which a form of social identity followed (­cf. Ando in this volume on Rome), which on top of elitist claims to limiting the citizen body to land owners would often have somewhat more egalitarian undertones, drawn from the strong links to the soil in Athenian myths and communal identity, such as autochthony (­Barbato 2020; yet unwelcoming to ‘­new citizens’, cf. Lycurg. Leoc. 48, Dem. 23.­23–​­24, 60.4), and customs, such as the ephebic oath (­Friend 2019). We also know that access to arable ­ istribution – ​­or proposland was a real problem in many Greek poleis, and its partial d ­ istribution – ​­sometimes followed in response to social tensions, with an ‘­equal als for d share’ or ‘­equal klēros’ becoming a promise in much of Greek colonization (­echoed in Plato’s Magnesia), even if distributed unequally and only among some in the end (­Pl. Leg. V, 7­ 44a–​­c; Davies 2004; Foxhall 2005; cf. Malkin and Kostecka in this volume), not to mention the Spartan social myth of equal distribution (­cf. Isoc. 12.­178–​­179; Seelentag 2013; chs. by Kulesza in this volume). An ‘­equal klēros’ was also at the root of Athenian inheritance law with the principle of equal distribution among the heirs ­ riffith-​­Williams in this volume and 2022 ad loc.). There (­Isae. 6.25; cf. Asheri 1963; G may have been, then, a more tangible economic interest at stake at the core of such concepts of ‘­sharing in the city’ that kept shaping the ideas of political entitlement and ­co-​­existence of individuals and groups in the polis. It may also not be irrelevant that loss of property was a civic punishment in many poleis, as opposed to corporal punishment often used for slaves (­see Carey in this volume; Kucharski 2021), as is often emphasized in Greek legal documents and in Athenian rhetoric, or that in various politeiai land ownership as a prerequisite for citizenship was either in force or proposed by elitist groups (­cf. Lys. 34.­3 –​­4, Xen. Hell. 2.4.1, [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 39.6; opp. Xen. Poroi 2.6; chs. by Kulesza in this volume). But not all citizens owned land in the Greek world and virtually no polis allowed a fully equal redistribution of land among its enfranchised members (­sometimes even proposals to do so 273

Jakub Filonik

were penalized), so a more important linking point in such ideas could have been the antithesis between the right to own land and houses and the limited property rights of ­non-​­citizens, however actualized in practice. And as discussed by scholars, despite there being various origins of wealth in classical Athens, in public discourse owning inherited ‘­ancestral’ land was promoted as a form of ‘­good wealth’ and a source of civic pride (­Davies 1981; Cecchet 2015). One should also note that concepts of ‘­sharing’ could be initially drawn from other, related areas of ­socio-​­political experience. Rules of political inclusion and of civic divisions, or sometimes even citizenship itself, were strongly linked to c­ ommensality –​ ­initially through public ­feasting – ​­in such different places of the ancient Mediterranean as Sparta, Crete, and Punic Carthage (­see Kulesza, Seelentag, and Hoyos in this volume respectively; cf. van den Eijnde et  al. 2018), with parallels in the Hittite world (­Barsacchi 2019). Remnants ­of – ​­or responses ­to – ​­these essentially civic traditions were still present in classical and later times in public sacrifices (­followed by public feasting, partly open to ­non-​­citizens), communal feasts in local units (­cf. Dem. 21.156; IG I3 244 = AIUK 4.1.3), and honorary meals, such as the sitēsis in a public building called the Prytaneion in Athens,34 each preserving a different element of this heritage. And despite its very different social principles and rules of inclusion, the Greek elite banquet, or symposion, was even more closely predicated on the idea of the equal ‘­share’ of the entitled (­Wecowski 2014: ­65–​­73). Among all that is not revealed by our sources, at the very least we know that a share in actual meals at public feasts was an important marker of status or distinction in various archaic and early classical poleis, including more formalized norms such as participating in the Spartan syssitia or Cretan andreia conceived as an actual requirement for maintaining citizen status by bringing what one could contribute not least from one’s land and cattle (­also wild animals).35 Interestingly, it seems that in Sparta, an equal contribution from one’s klēros (­Doric klaros) – ​­despite their growing ­inequalities – ​­was required from each feasting citizen to maintain his citizen status (­Arist. Pol. II, 1271a.­ 26–​­37; Singor 1999; Kulesza in this volume), while in Crete the amounts were relative to one’s wealth but possibly resulted in informal status distinctions (­W hitley 2018; Seelentag in this volume). Legal regulations of feasts in political contexts are not un­ elnick-​­Abramovitz 2021), which suggests heard of in the Hellenistic period (­LSCG 98; Z that such categories were not as far from the thinking of classical Greeks as one might presume and that social stratification linked to public feasting continued for longer. Where religious practices underlie or complement such ideas may be seen in animal sacrifice and sharing in sacrificial meat at the subsequent feasts (­IG II2 334; Schmitt Pantel 1992; cf. above on Lycurg. Leoc. 5, 142), at various Greek festivals given only to those groups in the polis that were allowed to participate in both the festival and the sacrifice, thus including only some in sharing a meal with the gods (­Jim 2014; Wijma 2014; Larson 2016; Bednarek in this volume). It is possible that the actual ‘­communion’ in the share of sacrificial meat quickly became symbolic, especially in large communities, without actually feeding the whole citizen population (­Naiden 2012, 2013: ­185–​ ­209), and thus helping with the next steps in the abstraction of the ‘­share’ from purely physical to figurative. But however fleshly by classical times, it is in sacrifices and feasting that the language of ‘­having one’s share’ seems most natural in its earlier, material sense that could shape the later concepts;36 yet these spheres of activity also reveal their own modes of stratification and exclusion, as shown not least by the strict rules of a syssitia and the telling name of ta andreia (‘­the manly [banquet]’), quite far from 274

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship

women’s participation in public feasts proposed by Plato in the Laws (­VI, ­780e–​­781d). And while Greek women had a crucial role in many cultic obligations (‘­As to the matters of the gods, we [women] have the greatest share’, Eur. fr. 494.­12–​­13 TrGF, trans. and expl. mine), in the classical poleis this did not result in any actual share in political ­decision-​­making.

‘­Citizenship’ and ‘­belonging’ We are right to question ancient normative definitions to find better ones, but neither the Aristotelian vision of citizenship based solely on political participation nor some recent models based on just a single aspect of what we could now call citizens’ social activities can explain, in ‘­emic’ terms, what constituted both citizenship and being fully ‘­part of the polis’ to classical Greeks, rather than just proposing what a citizen ought to be and how a citizen should act. The ‘­share in the polis’ of citizens and metics on the one hand, and of women and men on the other, both material and abstract, was very different (­cf. Rocchi; Joyce in this volume). We see a clear awareness of this difference in the Greek political discourse, even if some ­aspects – ​­such as religion, marriage and parenthood, or ­trade – ​­sometimes became a common ‘­share’ of different groups in the polis. This was an aspect Aristotle was well aware of when looking in his Politics for a more proper definition specific only to citizens, but in which he might have sailed too far away from the everyday understanding of these categories. Yet while often idealized, concepts of political participation were also part of the common normative discourse of what a male, fully enfranchised citizen should do and how he should behave in the state, as seen in the examples cited from oratory. We should consider the language of ‘­being an enfranchised member’ of Athenian society and ‘­having a share in the polis’ as something different from our language of ‘­having citizen status’ or ‘­citizenship’. Greek ideas about ‘­having a share in the c­ ity-​ ­state’ most likely reflect both a more primary experience and more deeply rooted cultural ways of conceptualizing property, community, and distribution of material and symbolic resources than we often allow ourselves to believe. It is our task now to unpack such ideas hiding in common language, so that we can properly understand the thinking behind them that kept shaping ideas of belonging and status. This includes the patterns of describing the normative ‘­share’ of fully enfranchised male citizens on the one hand and other members of the community, sharing ‘­in the matters of the polis’, on the other (­cf. [Dem.] 59.111 above). The notions of ‘­sharing in the polis’ and ‘­sharing in the affairs of the polis’ could at times be limited to particular aspects of being a citizen or living in a ­city-​­state, such as political participation or religious rites, but in the way they appear in Athenian political discourse, they resonate with a much broader, ­multi-​­dimensional understanding of what a citizen’s ‘­share’ would normally entail (­necessarily different for male and female citizens of an ancient Greek polis). The normative focus on the reciprocity underlying being a citizen often evokes a more active form of participation than just enjoying one’s privileges resulting from the status itself (­the Thucydidean Pericles in the famous funeral oration says: ‘­we alone consider the man who fails to share in public affairs not as quietist but as useless’, Thuc. 2.40.2, trans. mine).37 In addition to other research methods, citizenship can thus also be studied as a set of ideas, expectations, and conceptual connections linked to one’s legal and social status, as they came into being in the political institutions of the c­ ity-​­state, or perhaps ‘­­citizen-​­state’, as it has sometimes been ­re-​­labelled (­cf. Filonik, Plastow, and 275

Jakub Filonik

­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz in this volume). Cognitive theories, focusing on the way people think about themselves and their ­socio-​­political surroundings, may thus supplement our knowledge of the Greek political experience and thinking, similar to how they keep informing us on our own. We should be asking, then, in what ways the Greeks constructed and interpreted their political world through different dimensions of their life as something closer, more tangible, and real, and how this shaped their political thinking and realities, so important to their lives as citizens of each particular polis, defined by their civic participation and status. The fact that the polis is often portrayed in Greek literature using the imagery of relations in the oikos, and the oikos – ​­in ­turn – ​­as a microcosm of the polis only makes this task more fulfilling.38 In dealing with a world of citizen societies that lived, voted, and fought much more closely together than citizens of most contemporary states, we have to assume that they shared significantly more than we do in a very concrete, even corporeal sense, and thus arrived at the concepts of ‘­sharing’ in their ­socio-​­political life much more naturally. At the same time, these concepts were often used to win them over as voters in political institutions through public rhetoric and kept developing together with the development of abstract (­not least political) language and shaping people’s attitudes. Looking at these developments may reveal something about the political concepts that we still use nowadays or it may help us contrast with that reality those modern ones that are so different from the shared world of the Greek polis.

Notes 1 Research ­co-​­financed by funds granted under the Research Excellence Initiative of the University of Silesia in Katowice. 2 On the use of cognitive linguistics in discourse analysis, see n. 12 below. 3 See Davies (­2004); Blok (­2005); and (­2017), with Joyce in this volume. See also Müller in this volume on female citizens in the Hellenistic period, and Schipani and Ferraioli on Epirus. 4 LSJ s.v.: ‘­condition and rights of a citizen, “­citizenship”, Hdt. 9.34, Th. 6.104, etc.; π. δοῦναί τινι X. HG 1.2.10: pl., grants of citizenship, Arist. Ath. 54.3’. On Athenian grants of citizenship, see Osborne (­­1981–​­1983). 5 This multifaceted term was used since the late fifth century BCE primarily with reference to the character of the polity (­i n such contexts, it is often translated as ‘­constitution’, for the lack of a better equivalent), cf. Blok (­2013: 163). 6 These phrases start appearing in literary sources in the second half of the fifth century BCE and shortly after: (­1) meteinai tēs poleōs: Soph. OT 630, Lys. 18.1, Isoc. 16.46; (­2) metechein tēs poleōs (­quoted/­paraphrased): Ath. Pol. 26 with the law of 451/­450, cf. Thuc. 2.40.2 (­see below); (­3) metechein in a political context: Lys. 34.2, 31.5; (­4) metadidonai tes politeias: Lys. 25.3, 16.5, Isoc. 16.17; (­5) many uses of metechein ( ­pedechein), meteinai, and metadidonai in Hesiod, lyric poetry, historiography, and drama by the fifth century BCE, showing a developing discourse of ‘­sharing’ (­in various material and abstract entities); see Malkin in this volume on the concepts of equal sharing in archaic Greece, not least in establishing colonies (­cf. Thuc. 1.27 and the section ‘­Cultural roots’ below). 7 For similar conceptualizations, see Arist. Pol. III 1, 1275a.­22–​­23, 1275a.­32–​­33, 1278a.­36–​­38, III 9, 1280a.­25–​­31, V 12, 1316b.­2 –​­3, VII 9, 1329a.­19–​­20 (­in the Bekker passage 1275a alone, Aristotle uses the verb metechein six times). All visual emphasis in the text is mine, unless otherwise noted. 8 All dates are BCE unless otherwise noted. 9 Dual forms such as the one used in the quotation from the law (­ex amphoin astoin) were not at all common by the time of Aristotle but still in use in the time of Pericles, so the language here is either relatively archaic in the times of the Ath. Pol. (­a genuine ­fi fth-​­century law) or archaizing (­a conscious later attempt to style it to sound older). 10 Translations and emphases in block quotations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

276

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship 11 The capitalized words (­or small caps) for individual conceptual metaphors are a common stylistic feature in cognitive linguistics (­i ncluding the CMT), hence their use in this chapter. 12 On metaphor in discourse, see, e.g., Steen (­2006); Semino (­2008). On Athenian political discourse, see Wohl (­2009) on civic metaphors in court speeches; Cook (­2012) on Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ rival use of metaphorical concepts; Brock (­2013) on Greek political imagery, including selected metaphors in oratory; Filonik (­2017) on the role of civic metaphors in Lycurgus; (­2022a) on theories of metaphor and on political metaphors in rhetoric generally. See Ando (­2015) for a related conceptual study of Roman ideas of citizenship and belonging. 13 For the semantics and contexts of these three verbs, see comprehensive entries in recent Greek dictionaries (­LSJ; Montanari; Diggle et al.). The frequency data are based on my own corpus queries. 14 Cf. Xen. Hier. 2.­6 –​­7, Pl. Prt. 322d, 323c, Ti. 77b, Arist. Pol. IV, ­1291b-​­1292a, Dem. 23.86, 24.59. 15 Diggle et al. s.v. notes in the lexicon entry: ‘­g ive a share (­of or in sth., to someone); share … food, land, power, money, one’s happiness, thoughts, or sim’. 16 Giving a share (­1) in the politeia: Lys. 16.5, 25.3, Isoc. 16.17, Pl. Resp. VIII, 557a, Arist. Pol. V, 1306a, [Ath. Pol.] 36.2; (­2) in the polis: Isoc. 14.13, Dem. 23.214; (­3) in the offices: Hdt. 7.150, Xen. Hell. 3.5.12, Pl. Resp. VI, 503d, VIII, 557a, Leg. IV, 715a, VI, 768a, Arist. Pol. III, 1281b, IV, 1290a. 17 Scholars have often claimed that the category of rights, specifically subjective rights, should be considered a purely modern phenomenon (­Ostwald 1996, Schofield 1996, more recently Cartledge and Edge 2009), but recent scholarship has persuasively argued that rights may also be considered a category of classical Greek legal discourse (­Miller 2006, 2009; see now esp. Canevaro and Rocchi forthcom. on subjective rights, with a review of scholarship). 18 This section derives from a more ­rhetoric-​­oriented discussion of the ‘­sharing’ metaphors in oratory, focused on style in rhetoric (­Filonik 2022b). 19 See Filonik (­2017) for a detailed analysis of various conceptual metaphors of citizenship in this speech. 20 See Davies (­­1977–​­1978: ­106–​­107) for these and other citizen privileges in Athens. 21 See Kamen (­2013: chs. 4 and 5) on metics’ economic rights and duties, and legal status more generally. Such boundaries often were not set in stone, cf. Vlassopoulos (­2007); see also Plastow in this volume. Otherwise, metics might prefer Piraeus and Kerameikos for their craft and trade. 22 Not a citizen privilege per se (­see ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz 2015: ­84–​­85), but a marker of prior attachment to Athens, and a sign of citizen status in combination with (­family) deme membership appearing in the ‘­questionnaire’. 23 As rightly argued by Brenda ­Griffith-​­Williams in her paper at the CA/­FIEC 2019 conference in London. See Dem. 57.­30–​­31. 24 See Kapparis (­1999: ­38–​­39, ­324–​­331, 358). 25 For examples from public cases, see Dem. 57.23, cf. §§1, 55; Aeschin. 1.78. For its use in private speeches, see Isae. 3.37, cf. Isoc. 16.46. See also Isoc. 14.13, cf. §52. 26 See Kamen (­2013: 74, 77) and Joyce (­2018: 58) on total atimia; see also Rocchi in this volume. On the inclusion of the agora on the list of banned spaces, see Andoc. 1.76, Dem. 24.103, and Aeschin. 3.176, cf. [Lys.] 6.9, 24; alluded to in Dem. 22.77, 24.126, and Aeschin. 1.164 (­all the speeches mention this ban with respect to particular but different categories of atimoi, so the rule was probably broader). Not being able to enter courts to defend one’s remaining citizen privileges could have made them impossible to retain in practice, cf. Harrison (­1968: 236). 27 See Ando (­1999) for a study of continuity in Greek thinking under the Roman Empire of this approach to citizen status in poleis, as opposed to the Roman model, cf. Gauthier (­1974), with Harris and Zanovello in this volume; see also Neveu in this volume on modern ­cross-​ ­cultural perspectives. 28 On lawgivers in archaic colonization, see Hölkeskamp (­1992), Lewis (­2007); cf. Malkin in this volume. 29 Cf. Pl. Resp. III, ­416d-​­417b, V, ­464b-​­c; Ar. Eccl. ­590–​­610. 30 Lys. 25.3: τοῖς μηδὲν ἀδικοῦσιν ἐξ ἴσου τῆς πολιτείας μεταδιδόναι, cf. Lys. 26.­2 –​­3, Isoc. 18.23, 16.­36–​­39, 7.69, see also Lys. 18.1. 31 See Canevaro (­2017) on the idea of popular participation in Athens. 32 On Greek concepts of ownership and property, see Harris (­2021).

277

Jakub Filonik 33 Cf. Lys. fr. 286 Carey on refugees living together with Athenians thanks to a p ­ re-​­existing bond (­Lene Rubinstein at the CA/­FIEC 2019 conference suggested that this may have been a more common practice). 34 Cf. IG I3 131; Andoc. 1.45, Isae. 5.47, Dem. 19.­31–​­32, 330, 23.130, Aeschin. 2.80, 3.178, 196, Din. 1.43, 101, Lycurg. Leoc. 87. See also Schmitt Pantel (­1992: ­147–​­177), Blok and van ‘­t wout (­2018). 35 See Schmitt Pantel (­1992: ­59–​­105) for the links with citizenship; cf. Seaford (­2004: ­39–​­47) on the sacrificial distribution in the Homeric society. See also individual discussions in van den Eijnde et al. (­2018). 36 Examples of ‘­sharing’ given by Blok (­2017) mostly concern sharing in the cult, including sacrifices (­hiera, metonymically for thysia); but metechein phraseology was inclusive, as seen in Lycurg. Leoc. 142, quoted above. 37 See also Lys. 31.5, 33, Lycurg. Leoc. 133, [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 8.5. On reciprocity in Greek culture, see Gill et al. (­1998). 38 See Brock (­2013: ­25–​­42) and Filonik (­forthcom.) on the metaphorical portrayal of political bonds in Athens. See ­Griffith-​­Williams in this volume on both these categories in Athenian law.

Bibliography Ando, C. (­1999) ‘­Was Rome a polis?’, ClAnt 18.1, ­5 –​­34 ——— ​­(­2015) Roman social imaginaries: language and thought in contexts of empire (­Chicago) Asheri, D. (­1963) ‘­Laws of inheritance, distribution of land and political constitutions in ancient Greece’, Historia 12.1, ­1–​­21 Barbato, M. (­2020) The ideology of democratic Athens: institutions, orators and the mythical past (­Edinburgh) Barsacchi, F.G. (­2019) ‘­Distribution and consumption of food in Hittite festivals: the social and economic role of religious commensality as reflected by Hittite sources’, in M. Hutter and S. ­Hutter-​­Braunsar (­eds) Economy of religions in Anatolia: from the early second to the middle of the first millennium BCE (­Münster) ­5 –​­19 Blok, J.H. (­2005) ‘­Becoming citizens. Some notes on the semantics of “­citizen” in archaic Greece and classical Athens’, Klio 87.1, ­7–​­40 ——— ​­(­2013) ‘­Citizenship, the citizen body, and its assemblies’, in H. Beck (­ed.) A companion to ancient Greek government (­Chichester) ­161–​­175 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge and New York) Blok, J.H. and van ‘­t wout, E. (­2018) ‘­Table arrangements: sitêsis as a polis institution (­IG I3 131)’, in van den Eijnde et al. (­2018) ­181–​­204 Brock, R.W. (­2013) Greek political imagery: from Homer to Aristotle (­London) ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Law and citizenship in the Greek poleis’, in E.M. Harris and M. Canevaro (­eds) The Oxford handbook of ancient Greek law, online DOI: 10.1093/­oxfordhb/­9780199599257.01 3.15 (­Oxford) Canevaro, M. (­2017) ‘­The popular culture of the Athenian institutions: “­authorized” popular culture and “­u nauthorized” elite culture in classical Athens’, in L. Grig (­ed.) Popular culture in the ancient world (­Cambridge and New York) ­39–​­65 Canevaro, M. and Rocchi, L. (­forthcom.) ‘­Greek subjective rights? Legal discourse and legal insti­tutions’, in C. Ando, M. Canevaro, and B. Straumann (­eds) The Cambridge History of Rights, vol. 1: Antiquity (­Cambridge) Cartledge, P. and Edge, M. (­2009) ‘“­Rights”, individuals, and communities in ancient Greece’, in K. Balot (­ed.) A companion to Greek and Roman political thought (­Chichester and Malden, MA) ­149–​­163 Cecchet, L. (­2015) Poverty in Athenian public discourse: from the eve of the Peloponnesian War to the rise of Macedonia (­Stuttgart) ­Charteris-​­Black, J. (­2018) Analysing political speeches: rhetoric, discourse and metaphor, 2nd edn (­London) Cook, B. (­2012) ‘­­Swift-​­boating in antiquity: rhetorical framing of the good citizen in ­fourth-​ ­c entury Athens’, Rhetorica 30.3, ­219–​­251

278

Sharing in the polis: Conceptualizing classical Greek citizenship Davies, J.K. (­­1977–​­1978) ‘­Athenian citizenship: the descent group and the alternatives’, CJ 73.2, ­105–​­121 ——— ​­(­1981) Wealth and the power of wealth in classical Athens (­New York) ——— (­ ​­2004) ‘­T he concept of the “­citizen”’, in S. Cataldi (­ed.) Poleis e politeiai: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Storia Greca. Torino, 29 ­maggio – ​­31 maggio 2002 (­A lessandria) ­19–​­30 Feyel, Ch. (­2009) ΔΟΚΙΜΑΣΙΑ: la place et le rôle de l’examen préliminaire dans les institutions des cités grecques (­Nancy) Filonik, J. (­2017) ‘­Metaphorical appeals to civic ethos in Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates’, in L. Cecchet and A. Busetto (­eds) Citizens in the G ­ raeco-​­Roman world (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­223–​­258 ——— ​­(­2022a) ‘­Metaphors in rhetoric: from ancient Greek to ­21st-​­century politics’, in S. Papaioannou, A. Serafim, and M. Edwards (­eds) Brill’s companion to the reception of ancient rhetoric (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­454–​­485 ——— (­ ​­ 2022b) ‘­A civic style: the use of μετέχειν metaphors in Athenian oratory’, Trends in Classics 14.2, ­255–​­270 ——— (­ ​­ forthcom.) ‘­Civic friendships and filial duties: representations of political bonds in classical Athens’, in A. Efstathiou, J. Filonik, Ch. Kremmydas, and E. Volonaki (­eds) Friendship in ancient Greek thought and literature: essays in honour of Chris Carey and Michael Edwards (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Foxhall, L. (­2005) ‘­Cultures, landscapes, and identities in the Mediterranean world’, in I. Malkin (­ed.) Mediterranean paradigms and classical antiquity (­London and New York) ­75–​­92 Friend, J.L. (­2019) The Athenian ephebeia in the fourth century BCE (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Fröhlich, P. (­2016) ‘­La citoyenneté grecque entre Aristote et les modernes’, CCG 27, ­91–​­136 Gauthier, Ph. (­1974) ‘“­Générosité” romaine et “­avarice” grecque: sur l’octroi du droit de cite’, in Mélanges d’histoire ancienne offerts à William Seston (­Paris) ­207–​­215 Gawantka, W. (­1975) Isopolitie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der zwischenstaatlichen Beziehungen in der griechischen Antike (­München) Gill, Ch., Postlethwaite, N., and Seaford, R. (­eds) (­1998) Reciprocity in ancient Greece (­Oxford and New York) ­Griffith-​­Williams, B. (­2022) Isaeus: orations 1, 2, 4 and 6, Greek Orators VIII (­Liverpool) Harris, E.M. (­2021) ‘­Ownership and property, Greek’, Oxford Classical Dictionary, online publication: https://­oxfordre.com/­classics/­v iew/­10.1093/­acrefore/­9780199381135.001.0001/­­acrefore-­​ 9­­ 780199381135-­​­­e -​­8594 (­published 25 March 2021) Harrison, A.R.W. (­1968) The law of Athens: the family and property (­Oxford) Henry, A.S. (­1983) Honours and privileges in Athenian decrees (­Hildesheim) Hölkeskamp, K.-​­J. (­1992) ‘­A rbitrators, lawgivers and the “­codification of law” in archaic Greece: problems and perspectives’, Mètis 7.­1–​­2, ­49–​­81 Jim, Th.S.F. (­2014) Sharing with the gods: aparchai and dekatai in ancient Greece (­Oxford and New York) Joyce, C. (­2018) ‘­Atimia and outlawry in archaic and classical Greece’, Polis: the journal for ancient Greek political thought 35, ­33–​­60 Kamen, D. (­2013) Status in classical Athens (­Princeton, NJ and Oxford) Kapparis, K.A. (­1999) Apollodoros: ‘­Against Neaira’ [D. 59] (­Berlin and New York) Kucharski, J. (­2021) ‘­P unishment, stigma and social identities in classical Athens’, Polis 38.1, ­21–​­46 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (­1980) Metaphors we live by (­Chicago and London) Larson, J. (­2016) Understanding Greek religion: a cognitive approach (­London and New York) Lewis, J.D. (­2007) Early Greek lawgivers (­London and New York) Luraghi, S. (­2003) On the meaning of prepositions and cases (­A msterdam and Philadelphia) Miller, F.D. (­2006) ‘­Legal and political rights in Demosthenes and Aristotle’, Philosophical Inquiry 27.­1–​­2, ­27–​­60 ——— (­ ​­2009) ‘­Origins of rights in ancient political theory’, in S. Salkever (­ed.) The Cambridge companion to ancient political thought (­Cambridge and New York) ­301–​­330 Millett, P. (­1991) Lending and borrowing in ancient Athens (­Cambridge and New York) Musolff, A. (­2016) Political metaphor analysis: discourse and scenarios (­London and New York) Naiden, F.S. (­2012) ‘­Blessèd are the parasites’, in Ch.A. Faraone and F.S. Naiden (­eds) Greek and Roman animal sacrifice: ancient victims, modern observers (­Cambridge and New York) ­55–​­83

279

Jakub Filonik ——— ​­(­2013) Smoke signals for the gods: ancient Greek sacrifice from the archaic through Roman periods (­Oxford and New York) Osborne, M. (­­1981–​­1983) Naturalization in Athens, 4 vols. (­Brussels) Ostwald, M. (­1996) ‘­Shares and rights: “­citizenship” Greek style and American style’, in J. Ober and Ch. Hedrick (­eds) Dēmokratia: a conversation on democracies, ancient and modern (­Princeton, NJ) ­49–​­61 (= repr. in M. Ostwald, Language and history in ancient Greek culture [Philadelphia, PA] ­7-​­21) Saba, S. (­2020) Isopoliteia in Hellenistic times (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Saunders, T.J. (­1994) Plato’s penal code: tradition, controversy, and reform in Greek penology (­Oxford and New York) Schmitt Pantel, P. (­1992) La cité au banquet: histoire des repas publics dans les cités grecques (­Paris and Rome) Schofield, M. (­1996) ‘­Sharing in the constitution’, The Review of Metaphysics 49.4, ­831–​­858 Seaford, R. (­2004) Money and the early Greek mind: Homer, philosophy, tragedy (­Cambridge and New York) Seelentag, G. (­2013) ‘­Die Ungleichheit der Homoioi. Bedingungen politischer Partizipation im ­archaisch-​­k lassischen Kreta’, HZ 297.2, ­320–​­353 Semino, E. (­2008) Metaphor in discourse (­Cambridge and New York) Singor, H.W. (­1999) ‘­Admission to the syssitia in ­fi fth-​­century Sparta’, in S. Hodkinson and A. Powell (­eds) Sparta: new perspectives (­Swansea) ­67–​­89 Steen, G. (­2006) ‘­Metaphor: stylistic approaches’, in: K. Brown (­ed.) Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2nd edn (­A msterdam) ­51–​­57 van den Eijnde, F., Blok, J.H., and Strootman, R. (­eds) (­2018) Feasting and polis institutions (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Vlassopoulos, K. (­2007) ‘­Free spaces: identity, experience and democracy in classical Athens’, CQ 57.1, ­33–​­52 Wecowski, M. (­2014) The rise of the Greek aristocratic banquet (­Oxford and New York) Whitley, J. (­2018) ‘­Citizenship and commensality in archaic Crete: searching for the andreion’, in A. Duplouy and R.W. Brock (­eds) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford and New York) Wijma, S.M. (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­­5th–​­4th century BC) (­Stuttgart) Wohl, V. (­2009) ‘­Rhetoric of the Athenian citizen’, in: E. Gunderson (­ed.) The Cambridge companion to ancient Rhetoric (­Cambridge and New York) ­162–­​­­177 Zelnick-​­Abramovitz, R. (­2015) ‘­W hose grave is this? The status of grave plots in ancient Greece’, Dike 18, ­51–​­95 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Mapping inequality in ancient Greece’, in O. Cerasuolo (­ed.), The archaeology of inequality: tracing the archaeological record (­A lbany, NY) ­235–​­247

280

SECTION II

Classical Athens

20 THE CITIZEN BODY Chris Carey

The title is something of a misnomer. The term ‘­citizen body’ in the modern era is a metaphor. And for most of us in most contexts, the term ‘­citizen body’ is to all intents and purposes a dead metaphor. Like ‘­governing body’ and ‘­student body’, it connotes a degree of coherence and designates a category or a group without necessarily indicating anything about the dynamics potentially inherent in the term. It no more indicates an organism than the term ‘­body of water’. My title should really be ‘­the citizen’s body’, since I am interested here in a very physical aspect of Athenian citizenship, the relationship between the citizen’s body and status boundaries. In an article in the ­International feminist journal of politics in 2000, which addresses citizenship from a corporeal perspective, Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi (­2000: 33) begin with the observation that ‘­bodies give substance to citizenship and that citizenship matters for bodies’.1 This is essentially the perspective of this chapter, though my concern is with classical Athens and with both sexes, while they are interested in the female body. I also differ in that in this and a subsequent article, Bacchi and Beasley (­2002) are interested in regulating the body or in corporeal rights. My approach in contrast is largely descriptive and analytical. Through a process both incremental and probably serendipitous, by the sec­ond ­ on-​­citizen in Athens half of the fifth century the status boundary between citizen and n was marked in physiological terms from the cradle to the grave; it is this corporeal and experiential relationship between citizen and city that I wish to chart. Inevitably, when we try to impose a conceptual order on phenomena which are lived experience rather than abstract structures, we risk distortion. At the very least, we reify what for those involved are lived and sometimes dimly perceived experiences and encounters embedded within the texture of daily living, and in the process we risk turning subtle and shifting phenomena into rigid categories. At worst, we superimpose modern concepts on societies which would not recognize and might actively repudiate those concepts. But I should add by way of exculpation that I am not imposing exclusively modern categories on classical Athens. Though the metaphor of the citizen group as body seems not to be current in Athens (­they prefer the notion of the body politic, that is the polis in its entirety as an organism, subject to convulsion, infection, illness, and decay; Brock 2013: ch. 5), the linguistic link between the citizen’s body and citizen status is part of Athenian civic discourse (­cf. Filonik in this volume). DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-25

283

Chris Carey

In Lysias’ speech Against Pancleon (­23.­9 –​­12), the speaker narrates how Pancleon (­whose status is the subject of the current trial) was seized as a slave. The seizure was blocked by ­third-​­party intervention in a procedure which required guarantees from the intervening parties pending a formal hearing (­cf. Harrison 1968: ­178–​­180, MacDowell 1978: 80 for the procedure). Pancleon failed to show at the hearing. The speaker concludes that he was so aware that he had no right to the privileges of Athenian citizens that he refused ‘­to go to court/­face trial for his body’ (­Lys. 23.12 περὶ τοῦ σώματος ἀγωνίσασθαι). In his speech On the Mysteries (­A ndoc. 1.74), in enumerating formal limitations on status incurred by citizens, Andocides speaks of people who ‘­were without honour/­r ights in relation to their person but retained their property’ (­ἄτιμοι ἦσαν τὰ σώματα, τὰ δὲ χρήματα εἶχον), that is, people who lost the active rights of a citizen but retained the property rights exclusive to those of citizen status (­on atimia, see Rocchi in this volume). And in a near identical formulation, the speaker (­possibly Apollodoros son of Pasion) in the speech On the trierarchic crown which survives in the Demosthnic corpus ([Dem.] 51.12) speaks of ‘­being partially deprived of honour/­r ights in relation to their person’ (­μέρος ἠτιμῶσθαι τοῦ σώματος). Andocides certainly and Apollodoros possibly is contrasting pecuniary with ­non-​­pecuniary penalty. But both represent the possession and exercise of timai not in abstract terms but as physical experience. More broadly, when Demosthenes wishes to distinguish between free and slave, he emphasizes the fact that slaves are subject to physical punishment, free men only to financial penalties (­Against Androtion, 22.55; cf. 24.­166–​­168): Indeed, if you wish to consider what differentiates being a slave and being a free man, you would find that the most important difference is that slaves are respon­ ody – ​­τὸ ­σῶμα – is ​­ liable] for all offences, while free sible in person [lit., that the b men, even in the worst misfortunes, can at least protect their persons. For in the majority of cases satisfaction must be obtained from them in the form of money; but he on the contrary inflicted the punishment on their persons [εἰς τὰ σώματα], as if they were slaves. Demosthenes returns to this point in his attempts to persuade the Athenians to respond to aggression with the pride of free men (­O n the Chersonese, 8.51; cf. 10.27; all translations are my own): What are we waiting for, men of Athens? When will we agree to do what’s needed? Oh yes, ‘­W hen we’re compelled’. But what one might call ‘­compulsion’ for free men is not just here right now, but has long since passed, and we must pray to avoid the kind of compulsion that constrains slaves. What is the difference? The strongest compulsion for a free man is shame for his situation, and I can’t think of a greater one than this; but for a slave compulsion means blows and bodily abuse. I pray it never comes to this! It is not fit even to mention. The distinction Demosthenes draws here is real enough; slaves were exposed to corporal punishment, both formal and informal, to a degree and in ways which draw a sharp line between slave and free (­Hunter 1992: 8­ 0–​­84). The distinction is not quite as rigid as he presents it, since he elides an awkward fact, half hinted at in περὶ τῶν πλείστων (‘­in the majority of cases’) in the passage from Against Androtion, that in certain circumstances a free individual might be confined in prison,2 while anyone convicted of 284

The citizen body

theft might be sentenced to several days in the stocks.3 For his rhetorical purpose, in both contexts what he needs is a neat binary antithesis between slave and free, in the forensic cases to portray his opponent as someone who treats citizens as slaves, in the Assembly speeches to present the response of Athens to Macedonian aggression as verging on the servile in its sense of what is and is not tolerable. In fact, the boundary needs to be shifted to give a fault line between citizen and other, or more accurately a series of category distinctions of which the most important is that between citizen and other. The key point, however, remains the importance of the body as the locus for status distinctions. The corporeality of citizenship in Athens, the sense of the physical relationship between the Athenian citizen and the territory, has a long history. In terms of practical politics, it finds a place in Solon’s claim (­fr. 36.­3 –​­12 West), as part of his justification of his reforms, that he restored to Athens many of its people who had been sold abroad (­cf. Lape 2010: ­12–​­13): My best witness to this in the judgment of Time is the ­all-​­great mother of the Olympian gods, dark Earth, from whom I in past time pulled up boundary stones (­horoi) fixed hard far and wide, who before was slave, now free. And many to Athena’s godbuilt city I restored, who had been sold, one unjustly, another rightly, and others from force of debt in exile, no longer speaking Attic from wandering far and wide. The claim that some had been abroad so long that they had lost their native tongue looks hyperbolic; but it does suggest (­whatever we make of the ­pre-​­Solonian crisis and the sei­ oussia-​­Fantuzzi 2010: 2­ 9–​­41) a long period of festering injustice and dissachtheia; cf. N content and a substantial number of people sold abroad. The claim comes immediately after and is closely linked to the assertion (­in an exquisite metaphor) that he set Earth herself free when he removed the horoi driven into the soil. But Solon, in turn, is responding to a belief already embedded in Athenian myth. The rootedness of the citizen in the soil, implied in the repatriation of lost citizens, is a Greek and not just an Athenian concept. But it is nurtured in Athens to an unusual degree. The notion of autochthony, the idea that the Athenians were always there, a claim shared with very few other Greek ethnic subgroups, most notably the Arcadians, provided a ready base, ethical, political, and ideological, for Solon’s policy.4 The close tie between citizen and soil is embedded at the level of (­literally) everyday language in the system of naming, which firmly demarcates citizen from foreigner. The full designation of the citizen was, by name, patronymic and demotic (­that is, the title of his deme, his local unit) – ​­‘­Demosthenes son of Demosthenes of Paiania’; the foreigner living in Athens had a patronymic but not a demotic; he or she was always designated as ‘­living in’ (­οἰκῶν ἐν) the deme, never belonging.5 There is another way in which Solon’s measures fed into a physical sense of the difference between citizen and other. According to the traditional account, Solon forbade enslavement for debt. Since the alien presence in Athens will have been nugatory at the time, this is more a slave/­free distinction than a citizen and other distinction. But the notion of freedom as the inalienable right of the citizen may have its roots in this 285

Chris Carey

legislation. In the classical period, enslavement was a potential punishment for certain offences, but never for citizens, even for the most serious offences. It is important not to overstate. Resident aliens (­metics) too were largely free from the risk of enslavement. But unlike citizens, there were circumstances (­however rare) in which a metic might find himself or herself at risk of enslavement. Any alien who was convicted of usurping citizen rights faced enslavement as a penalty (­Harrison 1968: 165; MacDowell 1978: 70). One of the distinctions between the citizen and the metic was the requirement for the latter to have a citizen patron (­prostatēs). Just what the patron was meant to do is unclear and it may be that the most significant effect (­as distinct from the theory) of the patron was to serve as a status marker. A metic who had no patron was liable to a public action (­graphē aprostasiou) and there is some reason to believe that the penalty for conviction was enslavement.6 And if he or she had begun life as a slave and been manumitted, the previous owner could sue by the private dikē apostasiou, in the event of failure by the freedman or freed woman to fulfil any conditions in the manumission, in which case they face the prospect of return to slavery.7 The sense of the distinctiveness of the Athenian citizen and the physical expression of that distinctiveness increased over time. The most significant step was taken in the s­ o-​ ­called Skamandrios decree (­quoted below). We know that there was a legal barrier to the use of torture against Athenian citizens. It is here, in particular, that Demosthenes’ binary division between free and slave most obviously breaks down. The speeches we have from lawcourt trials are full of challenges to submit slaves for torture (­basanos) to extract evidence.8 The challenges are based on the principle that slave evidence is only formally admissible in court if it is extracted under torture. This is a fundamental difference be­ on-​­citizens could depose freely. But ­non-​­citizens too could be tween slave and free, since n put to the torture where evidence was needed on matters of national security (­Lys. 13.54, Aeschin. 3.­223–​­224, Plut. Nic. 30.2, De garr. 13). Citizens could not. And this was a legal restriction, not just a cultural bar. But laws can and could be changed and the cases where torture of citizens is contemplated or alleged reinforce the impression that there is a strong taboo at work. The most important piece of evidence comes from Andocides On the Mysteries (­1.43), immediately after the scandal of the mutilation of the Herms, which rocked the community to its foundations. Some of the members in the Council actually in session were listed as implicated and one leading figure, Peisandros, proposed that they rescind the ‘­decree passed under Skamandrios’ and put these men to the wheel: Such was the impeachment, gentlemen. Diokleides gave a list of the men he claimed to have recognized, ­forty-​­two of them, first among them Mantitheos and Apsephion, who were Council members and were sitting in the chamber, then the rest. Peisander stood up and said they must repeal the decree passed in the archonship of Skamandrios and put on the wheel the men whose names were on the list, so that all the men involved would be known by nightfall. The Council shouted its approval of his proposal. The threat in the end comes to nothing; the accused take refuge at the sacred hearth situated in the Council chamber and are allowed to give surety for themselves. And the threat is not repeated. This is a moment when the polis is believed to be under existential threat from within, and the threat to put citizens to the torture indicates the extremity of the perceived danger and the ensuing panic. But it also tests and reinforces the boundary demarcating the citizens as a group and protecting the citizen’s body. 286

The citizen body

The boundary holds. Again, in the second oligarchic coup to hit Athens at the end of the fifth century, the regime of the Thirty, when the attacks on the champions of democracy begin as the oligarchs come to power, there is a proposal to torture one of the democrats ‘­as not pure Athenian’; what is meant is not explained. But the threatened torture is related to a potential trial for xenia (­Lys. Against Agoratos 13.­58–​­60), that is, for enjoying the rights of an Athenian citizen when actually an alien. Whatever the facts were, the threat suggests that there was some room for question about his citizen status. In contrast, the speaker asserts that the Athenian citizens targeted (­i.e., those whose claim to the status could not be impugned) were not at risk of torture (­Lys. 13.27: ‘­Firstly, they were Athenians and had no fear of being tortured’). Finally, at Dem. 18.132 the judges are reminded of an incident in which an Athenian disfranchised under the general scrutiny of the citizen lists in 346/345 was subsequently seized as a saboteur, tortured, and executed: Who among you doesn’t know of Antiphon, the man who was struck off the register, who came back to Athens after promising Philip that he would set fire to the dockyard. When I caught him hiding in the Peiraeus, and brought him before the Assembly, this malevolent man shouted and yelled that my behaviour was unacceptable in a democracy, maltreating citizens in distress and entering houses without a decree, and got him set free. And if the Areopagos had not noticed the business, seen your untimely foolishness, made further inquiries about the man, seized him and brought him back before you, the criminal would have been snatched away, evaded justice and been spirited away by this s­ elf-​­important man. As it was, you put him on the rack and executed him, as you ought to have done to Aeschines. Whatever other rights a citizen might lose, freedom from torture is irrevocable. Even complete atimia does not remove the right. For torture to take place, citizenship itself has to be rescinded, which can only happen if an individual is falsely enrolled in and formally removed from the deme register. In Graham Greene’s Our man in Havana, the central figure, James Wormold, asks Captain Segura: ‘­Did you torture him?’ Captain Segura laughed. ‘­No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.’ In Graham Greene’s p ­ re-​­revolutionary Cuba, exposure to torture comes down to s­ ocio-​ e­ conomic class and is subject to a tacit understanding. In Athens, the demarcation was by status, not class, and the distinction was both explicit and determined by law. The enactment which protects the citizen is called by Andocides ‘­the decree under Skamandrios’, or ‘­the decree in Skamandrios’ day’ (­τὸ ἐπὶ Σκαμανδρίου ψήφισμα), not ‘­the decree of Skamandrios’ (­τὸ Σκαμανδρίου ψήφισμα), which ought to mean that Skamandrios was not author of the decree but eponymous archon at the time. Unfortunately, our list of archon years leaks like a sieve and we have no date for him. The decree was old enough for its provision to be common knowledge in 415, as we can see from the cursory mention in Andocides. But that does not take us very far. The attempt to date Skamandrios on the etymology of his name (­as relating to Athenian interest in Sigeion in the Troad under Peisistratos)­9 may offer a broad clue. More precisely, the archon year 510/­509 has been suggested. The decree would fit neatly into 287

Chris Carey

a period of radical reconceptualization of the political structures of the city such as Kleisthenes’ reforms after the civil unrest which followed the fall of the sixth century tyrannis, dictatorship. It would also make sense in the context of the fall of the tyranny, since one of the abiding memories was that Aristogeiton, who assassinated Hipparchos, brother of the tyrant Hippias, had been tortured ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 18.4): Of the two, Harmodios was killed at once by the bodyguards, while Aristogeiton died later, after being arrested and tortured for a long time. Under pressure he informed against a number of men who actually belonged by birth to distinguished families and were loyal to the tyrants. The connection is no more than conjecture. And some of the details even in this spare account may be a later invention. Though courage under torture is not unknown, Aristogeiton’s use of his confession to undermine the regime by inculpating loyal supporters may be part of the tissue of myth which was spun around the ‘­tyrannicides’ from very early on. But the torture itself is plausible in a regime shaken by an attack on a member of the ruling family; and it obviously stayed in the collective memory. There may have been other conspirators who were tortured. But regardless of the number of victims, a measure protecting the individual citizen from being tortured into confession or incrimination of self or others would make sense in this context, not merely in reaction to the brutality of Aristogeiton’s death but also as a prophylactic against the use of torture to sustain any future attempt at oppression. More generally, it would fit perfectly within a schedule of constitutional reforms which elevated the status of the citizen group as a whole. We cannot, however, rule out the possibility that the decree was older and that the torture of Aristogeiton was contrary to law. Modern history is awash with examples of torture inflicted by or in states which formally ban it. Another major watershed occurs in the middle of the fifth century. It relates to the creation of the citizen in the ­literal – ​­rather than the administrative or ­social – ​­sense. Prior to the year 451/­450 BC, the definition of a citizen hinges on one parent; we are not told explicitly but everything we know points to the conclusion that prior to this year a man was a citizen (­and a woman the carrier of citizen status) if the father was Athenian and the mother was free, irrespective of her o ­ rigin – ​­we are never told that she has to be Greek. From that year, under legislation proposed by Pericles, the definition became more restrictive, in that for citizen status Athenian birth on both sides was now required ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 26.4). This is not a law regulating sex or even reproduction. It was never illegal for a citizen to have a foreign mistress or use foreign prostitutes or to have foreign offspring. It is specifically about the production of citizen children. Citizen birth on both sides became one of the two questions asked at the examination (­dokimasia) when an Athenian offered himself to his local citizen group, the deme, for admission at the age of 18, the other being age ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42.1). Anyone whose birth qualifications were regarded as suspect could be rejected by the deme without any penalty falling on the individual. The rejected candidate had the option of appeal to the courts; but the price of failure was (­or at least could be) enslavement.10 Enslavement seems also to have been the price of unsuccessful appeal against ejection from the deme under the extraordinary scrutinies of the deme lists in the fifth and fourth centuries.11 The equal emphasis now placed on the female as transmitter of citizen status is most clearly reflected in complementary questions about birth in the dokimasia to which successful candidates for civic office were subjected: ‘­W ho is your father and what is his 288

The citizen body

deme, and who is your father’s father; and who is your mother, and who is your mother’s father and what is his deme?’ ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 55.3). The only difference is the transference to the maternal grandfather of the detail about deme membership, reflecting the fact that only males were admitted to the deme. The reasons for the new restriction have been argued endlessly and since we lack an authoritative explanation contemporary with the legislation or even soon after, only guess or inference can provide an answer (­discussion in Blok 2009). However, if we shift the perspective from cause to effect, we can be a little more confident. One, possibly the most important, consequence is to make the citizens a closed group in terms of status within the city (­Davies 1993: ­60–​­61, 221), a ­self-​­perpetuating and hermetically sealed elite, with the rare exceptions of grants of citizenship to aliens for outstanding service. And even then, there were restrictions on fi ­ rst-​­generation entrants to the exclusive group ([Dem.] 59.92, 1­ 04–​­106). Furthermore, since only detection of fraudulent enrolment in the deme register could nullify citizen status, reproductive rights, like immunity from torture, were inalienable, even when a citizen was subject to atimia. The inalienability of status, as distinct from participatory rights, applies to women as well as to men. We are told that a woman taken with a seducer was subject to severe restrictions on her religious activity, the only area of public life where a woman could play an active role. And if she was married, her husband had to divorce her. But we are never told that she lost the right to (­re)­marry or bear a citizen ([Dem.] 59.87, Aeschin. 1.183). Common sense suggests that her future prospects of marriage, and likewise those of a man subject to total atimia, were vanishingly small; but that is a separate matter. There is, however, more to the ­fifth-​­century legislation, though here, as so often, our evidence is patchy at best. Herakles is told firmly by Peisetairos in Aristophanes’ Birds (­­1649–​­1670) that he is a bastard (­nothos) because his mother was a foreigner. Since the context is one where Peisetairos is playing fast and loose with the Athenian laws, this is not the ­slam-​­dunk one could wish for. And given the strong evidence that the changes in fi ­ fth-​­century marriage law were not retroactive, at least to the extent that they did not affect existing issue of marriages between citizen and alien,12 Peisetairos is certainly hoodwinking the adult Herakles in applying the law to him. But the passage does suggest that it was by the 420s no longer possible for such a marriage to produce legitimate issue. Either the Periclean legislation was understood to nullify marriages between citizens and aliens for the future not merely for the procreation of citizens but also for the production of legitimate offspring, or there was an additional clause in the law,13 or indeed other legislation at about the same time which supplemented the citizenship law.14 We are never told whether there was any penalty in the fifth century for marriages contracted in breach of the law;15 but we do know that in the ­m id-​­fourth century an alien contracting a marriage with a citizen in defiance of the law was regarded as usurping citizen rights and liable on conviction to the same penalty, enslavement with confiscation of property ([Dem.] 59.16, 52); it is possible, given the seriousness with which attempts to usurp citizen rights were treated, that this was the penalty from the start, but there is no solid evidence either way. The increasing restrictions on marriage set the citizens apart as a reproductive group and this exclusivity was mirrored in the sexual boundaries surrounding the citizen male. Athens like many cities had a large number of sex workers, both prostitutes in brothels and streetwalkers. And since there was a widespread (­though not unanimous) acceptance of homosexual relations between males (­usually, at least in the idealizing form in which we meet it in aristocratic circles, a grown man and an adolescent boy), 289

Chris Carey

prostitutes could be of either sex. None of this was discouraged by the state. Quite the reverse. The polis treated this as a business and taxed the income from prostitution (­Cohen 2015: ­116–​­118). But for the Athenian male, there were special restrictions. An Athenian male who prostituted himself automatically lost the exercise of his active rights as a citizen;16 if he persisted in exercising them, he was liable to a legal action, the graphē hetairēseōs, which (­as always with public actions) could be brought by any citizen.17 Restrictions seem to have increased with time. In the fourth century, there was additional legislation created to control speakers addressing the Assembly.18 An action called dokimasia rhētorōn, ‘­scrutiny of public speakers’ could be brought, again by any Athenian, on the ground of certain behaviours which rendered the speaker either ineligible or unsuitable to address the people. One of these was the charge of prostituting himself. Anyone convicted was subject to atimia. In contrast, there was never a law preventing alien males from acting as prostitutes. There is an interesting detail in the legislation which is especially relevant to my theme here. The free adult who prostitutes himself can be seen as making a free choice (­irrespective of whether he is driven by poverty). But Athenian law also prescribed automatic atimia for anyone of citizen birth who had been prostituted as a minor by his parents. The laws recognized the fact that he bore no responsibility for his actions; the boy himself was not subject to prosecution, even on reaching adulthood, only the individual who hired him out.19 There seems to be an underlying feeling that the mere fact that a male citizen’s body has been put to this use renders him unfit to participate in the public life of the city, whether or not he is legally empowered to make the choice. The harshness of legislation which punishes the son for the misdeeds of the father (­unusual in Athenian penology) was evidently felt by the Athenians, but the injustice is laid at the door of the guilty father; hence the concession made by the law; anyone prostituted as a minor was obligated to bury his parents on their death but not to feed them in life, which was normally a legally enforceable obligation of an adult male (­Aeschin. 1.­13–​­14). Death is perhaps the most interesting example of the physical link between citizen and city. Under Athenian law, only citizens could own land. This right could also be granted to resident aliens as a special privilege for services to the state.20 But the number of these must always have been few, which means that a resident foreigner who wanted a roof over his head, or who wanted to farm, had to lease. This raises an interesting question. What do we do with dead foreigners? They have to be buried. But they have no land. I know of no ancient source which raises the issue. Often, silence in our sources means that the question we wish to ask is of no interest or that the answer is too obvious to those who might otherwise tell us. Here again, it may be that our sources are uninterested. And we cannot rule out the possibility that our evidence is simply lacunose, that if we had more texts, they might cast some light on the question. But death and burial do appear relatively often in the orators; so their silence on the subject suggests that there was no perceived problem. The link between land, status, and burial is, however, attested in our sources. There is an interesting detail in the account we have of the dokimasia of successful candidates for office. They were asked about their mother and their father and their paternal and maternal grandfather, about their family cults, their tax payment, their treatment of their parents, and their military record ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 55.3). One question asked was ‘­whether there were family tombs and where they were’ (­εἶτα ἤρια εἰ ἔστιν καὶ ποῦ ταῦτα). Citizen graves in Athens are (­as far as we know) privately owned, whether on the family property or on a separate plot (­Faraguna 2012: 171; ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz 2015: ­53–​­56). The possession of an identifiable family tomb is thus a visible sign of citizen 290

The citizen body

status. Over and above the issue of land ownership, the ability to point to family tombs must be significant for citizen status, since it was one way of demonstrating membership of a hereditary group,21 something which would automatically exclude ­first-​ ­generation metic settlers, freedmen, and freedwomen. But we cannot assume that no metic could point to a collective family tomb. And since not all Athenians possessed land,22 the ability to point to family tombs may not indicate ownership of the plot. And we do have metic grave markers unambiguously identified as such from the archaic period onward in Athens. So there, in practice, was no bar to burial. But we are still left with the question of where foreigners (­both metics and visiting foreigners who just happened to die in Athens) were buried. Some of the metic graves we meet may have been occupied by metics who had the right of enktēsis. But there is no good reason to assume that this would account for all our evidence; and it is far from certain that the grant of individual enktēsis would include the right to a grave plot (­Faraguna 2012: ­173–​­175). The obvious solution would be for aliens to be buried in someone else’s land, either in privately owned cemeteries (­not uncommon in the modern era) or in the deme koinon (­see Faraguna 2012: 1­ 76–​­180). Another possibility is that some at least of the aliens buried in Attica were de facto owners of their burial land and an Athenian citizen was the nominal owner by a legal fiction of some kind. This issue was almost certainly not restricted to Athens. Greek states were universally jealous of status markers such as land ownership. But again, the sensitivity on this subject may have been especially strong in Athens with its myth that unlike other Greeks, who wandered into the peninsula, the Athenians were always there. Although this may not be the most significant discriminator in practical terms, it is yet another physical distinction between the citizen and the ­non-​­citizen. Only citizens could own their grave. The physical link between the citizen and the soil survived death in another respect. The Athenians made annual offerings at the graves of their dead ancestors. So like the baby in his mother’s womb, the Athenian as corpse is physically and in this case perpetually set apart from the ­non-​­Athenian.23 There were many aspects of citizenship, both rights and responsibilities, which cannot be reduced to the physical. And for most Athenians, the more visible and more significant aspects of citizenship were probably not those I have described but the active and public rights: the right to attend the Assembly or the deme Agora and to speak and vote, to put oneself forward to serve at deme or at polis level, to serve on a jury. But it remains a fact that in some key respects Athenian citizenship was physically inscribed in the person of the citizen. The practical distinction may sometimes be considerably more limited than a glance at the laws would suggest. One can never write the history of a society from its laws, since law and life exist in a shifting and irregular symbiosis. Though all citizen males were barred from prostituting themselves, the risk of prosecution for any breach of the restrictions arising from automatic atimia was probably (see n.17) concentrated at the upper end of the ­socio-​­economic scale; the risks and burdens inherent in public prosecutions were less likely to deter enemies from taking action and the ambiguous status of expensive gifts (­hovering between expression of esteem and inducement or payment) more likely to generate unanticipated problems in retrospect. For those lower down the scale and especially the poor, the potential for social stigma (­w ith its own practical effects) was probably a more effective disincentive; but even social stigma will not deter the needy or the determined, especially given the difficulty of proof. Anyone out of the elite or out of the limelight could probably serve on a jury or attend the Assembly with little or no fear of any consequences.24 291

Chris Carey

For the treatment of the mortal remains, the status distinction may again have limited practical implications. Whether citizen or alien, you end up in the same Attic soil, often cheek by jowl in adjacent tombs (­­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz 2015: ­84–​­85), eaten by the same Attic worms. And provided your kin can access your remains, posthumous offerings can continue each year, as they do for citizens. Even the protection of the citizen from torture, though it perpetuates a real distinction between citizens and aliens, would be felt only in times of crisis, and even then only in extreme and unusual circumstances. But even so the different rules still had important implications for individual and collective psychology, as we can see from the persistence of the questions about parents and grandparents and family tombs in the dokimasia. The institutionalized demarcation of the citizenry as a racial group gave a sense of importance, identity, and belonging to those on the inside.25 In this sense, although the perpetuation of a sense of Athenian group superiority by birth bears only a limited resemblance to the systematic and brutal oppression created by Apartheid in South Africa or the Jim Crow legislation in parts of the USA from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond, this reassuring sense of importance within the privileged group, uniting the ­socio-​­economic elite with the poorest member, is a significant shared feature. That sense of shared exclusivity probably did much to sustain the remarkable stability which Athens enjoyed over the fifth and fourth centuries despite very visible inequalities in wealth, income, influence, and opportunity.26 The barriers surrounding the citizen body contributed to that reassurance.

Notes 1 Closer to my present purpose is the discussion of Hunter (­1992), though hers differs from mine both in being more focused on penal issues and having a degree of theoretical sophistication absent from this chapter, which is essentially heuristic in approach. 2 The evidence for imprisonment is discussed in Allen (­1997) and Hunter (­1997), who differ on the question of imprisonment as a penalty in its own right. Though there is no evidence for extended incarceration along the modern lines as a punishment, the extent of the role played by imprisonment remains obscure. But what both studies make abundantly clear is that there were a range of contexts in which a free resident of Attica might find themselves in prison, despite Demosthenes’ insistence that punishment inflicted on the person is exclusively servile. 3 Lys. 10.16, Dem. 24.105, 114; see further Hunter (­1994: ­178–​­181). For the stigmatizing role of corporal punishment (­i ncluding capital punishment in the case of kakourgoi), see Kucharski (­2021). 4 For autochthony and Athenian identity, see Rosivach (­1987), Loraux (­1993: ­37–​­71), Lape (­2010: ­17–​­28), Roy (­2014: ­244–​­246), Beck (­2020: ch.2). Rosivach and others rightly insist that the myth in its developed form as civic ideology is a ­fi fth-​­century construct, but the idea may predate the ideology. ­ p. 290–291 and cf. n.23 5 Even this link, explicitly temporary, ceases with death; see above, p below. 6 Souda s.v. pōlētai (­π 2159 Adler; cf. Phot. π 1588 Theodorides): ‘­A lso subject to the pōlētai (‘­sellers’) were . . . people convicted of xenia [sc. masquerading as a citizen] and a metic who had no patron (­prostatēs)’. Harpokration s.v. metoikion (­μ 27 Keaney): ‘­A metic is someone who comes from one city and settles in another, and not for a short period as a visiting alien but establishing his residence there. Twelve drachmas per year were paid by them, called the metoikion (‘­metic tax’), as Euboulos makes clear in his Plangon. ... Those however who did not pay the metoikion were subject to summary arrest before the Sellers and if they were convicted they were sold, as Demosthenes says in Against Aristogeiton ([Dem.] 25.57)’. 7 Harpokration s.v. apostasiou (­α 204 Keaney): ‘­A private suit allowed against people who had been set free to those who have manumitted them, if they abandon them (­sc. as patron) or inscribe themselves under another patron and do not do what the law prescribes, and those

292

The citizen body

8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

who are convicted are to be slaves, those who win their case are to be completely free from that moment’. The precise role of basanos (­as distinct from the procedures associated with it) has been much debated; see, in particular, Thür (­1977), Mirhady (­1996), Gagarin (­1996), Thür (­1996), Johnstone (­1999: ch. 3) (­the last on the larger issue of the role of challenges, including challenge to basanos). The subject is too large to treat here. And for my present purposes, it is enough that the prospect of evidentiary torture of a slave was real. We have no instance in surviving oratory of a challenge to torture which was both accepted and then carried out. But we do meet instances of the torture of slaves or serious threats of torture, even if the resultant evidence extracted under torture fails the test of admissibility in court. Discussion and scholarship in Cadoux (­1948: 113), followed by MacDowell (­1962: 93). The evidence is unfortunately ambiguous. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42.1 says: ‘­Citizenship belongs to persons born of citizen on both sides, and they are registered in their demes at eighteen years of age. When they are being registered, the demesmen vote on them under oath, first whether they believe they have reached the age prescribed by law, and if they do not believe it, they go back again to the boys; and secondly whether the candidate is free and their birth conforms to the laws; after this, if the demesmen vote that he is not free, he appeals to the ­jury-​­court, and the demesmen elect five accusers from among themselves, and if it is decided that he has no claim to be registered, the state sells him, but if he wins, it is compulsory for the demesmen to register him’. Whether all unsuccessful appellants are sold is unclear. Taken absolutely literally, the text indicates that a slave who appeals is sold but the view of Rhodes (­1981: ­501–​­502) that this would apply to ­non-​­citizens in general who appealed after rejection is attractive. This would be in harmony with Athenian legislation on attempts to infiltrate the citizen group. That is not a conclusive argument, given the fact that the Athenians themselves were aware of inconsistencies in the collective body of law and also suspicious of the efficacy of the gatekeeping at deme level, as the scrutinies of 445/­444 and 346/­345 show (­cf. Souda s.v. Δραχαρνεῦ, δ 1515, Dem. 57.57); but this was a key moment for deme, citizen, and polis and so severe legislation would not surprise, however unevenly implemented in practice. For recent discussion of the implications of the clause in Ath. Pol. in relation to slaves in Athens, see Forsdyke (­2019). So Libanios in the hypothesis to the speech; Blok (­2017: 6) accepts, MacDowell (­2009: 288) is sceptical. We do not know the authority for Libanios’ claim. I am unconvinced that Isae. 12 is connected to the diapsēphisis; see Carey (­2012: ­231–​­232). See Hignett (­1952: ­346–​­347), Harrison (­1968: 25). This is also suggested by the later tightening of the citizenship laws in the archonship of Eukleides, which was explicitly not retroactive. All that was needed in practice was to deny anchisteia hierōn kai hosiōn to the offspring of a relationship in which only one party was Athenian. So MacDowell (­1978: 87). Harrison (­1968: 26) suggests only that the Periclean legislation effectively discouraged marriages between citizen and alien by imposing political disabilities on the offspring. Harrison (­1968: 26) supposes that the law banning and punishing marriages between citizen and alien postdates the Periclean law and may be fourth century; in this, he is followed by Blok (­2009: 150). For automatic atimia consequent on certain actions, see Wallace (­1998) and in this specific context MacDowell (­2018: 121). Modern scholars frequently assert that prostitution by male citizens was not an offence in itself; see, however, Gagliardi (­2005: ­91–​­92). The fact that, in principle, no judicial sentence is needed to impose atimia should not confuse us into viewing the selling of one’s body for sex as no more a lifestyle choice with unpleasant collateral implications, any more than, e.g., throwing away one’s shield in battle or beating one’s parents. The law seeks to forbid and penalize, not licence with conditions. Dem. 22.­21–​­23 need indicate only that anyone who prostituted himself lost the right to address the Assembly. However, Andoc. 1.100 makes clear that male prostitution also disqualified the practitioner from addressing a court. This looks like total atimia (­as does Aeschin. 1.164), which tells against the view, e.g., of Fisher (­2001: ­39–​­40) that the graphē hetairēseōs was available only against someone who chose to enter active politics despite having prostituted himself. Though the law applies to all Athenians and prosecution was open to ho boulomenos, as with other graphai the risks attending (­at least spectacular) failure and the

293

Chris Carey demanding nature of the prosecution mean that in practice (­cf. Osborne 1985) prosecutors would be personal or political enemies of the target, which would concentrate them at the top end of the ­socio-​­economic scale. Actual prosecutions may have been very rare but accusations were probably frequent in political contexts, since they could be used to bolster prosecution cases on other charges (­as with both Dem. 22 and Andoc. 1). 18 For date and context, see Carey (­2018: 91), Cohen (­2015: ­88–​­89). Kapparis (­2018: 193) may be right to see the use of the prosecution of Timarchos by dokimasia rhetorōn in 346 as a unique occurrence, though our evidence is limited and it would be an overoptimistic reading of our sources to suppose that what we have is what there was. As with the graphē hetairēseōs, accusations and threats may have been much more frequent than prosecutions, if any, to judge from Aeschin. 1.64. 19 Aeschin. 1.­13–​­14. Again, it may be that actual prosecutions were rare; cf. MacDowell (­1978: 126). 20 For the evidence, see Osborne ­1981–​­1983; for recent treatments, see Lape (­2010: ch. 6), Kamen (­2013: ch. 8). 21 How much this matters is brought out especially by Dem. 57.28, where it forms part of Euxitheos’ claim to family membership in the context of the scrutinies under the decree of Demophilos. The importance of the grave for group membership is underlined by the prominence given to demotics on tomb markers; see Meyer (­1993: ­109–​­110). For the possibility that the new emphasis on the female role in citizenship from 451/450 is also reflected in Athenian fifth century funereal iconography, see Osborne (­1997). 22 Perhaps as many as 20%, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus Lys. 31, though his evidence came from an Assembly speech which survives in fragmentary form as Lys. 34 and may have been inflated for rhetorical purposes. 23 There is another sense in which the link between citizen and land survives death. Citizen epitaphs commonly display the demotic, while the metic, who no longer ‘­resides’ anywhere, loses the οἰκῶν/­οἰκοῦσα ἐν formula, which in life gave them, if not membership, at least an acknowledged place in a deme; see ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2015: 72); Meyer (­1993: 111). 24 For the evidence for prostitution by poor male citizens, see Kapparis (­2018: 205), though the social status of those involved is not always clear. 25 The terminology and the perspective are borrowed from Lape (­2010: esp. ch. 1). 26 For Athenian group solidarity, cf. Dover (­1974: 39) and for the sense of group solidarity among the free generated by the existence of chattel slavery in the Greek world more generally, Finley (­1959: 1­ 54–​­156). Data on inequality in Attica in Ober (­2018: ­19–​­24). The most striking evidence for social stability in democratic Athens is a detail mentioned in passing at [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56.2, that at the beginning of his year of office the eponymous Archon declared publicly that property which an individual possessed at the beginning of his term would still be theirs at the e­ nd – ​­no mass appropriations or radical redistribution; wholesale plunder of private property was a feature of the elitist régime of the Thirty, not the democracy.

Bibliography Allen, D. (­1997) ‘­Imprisonment in classical Athens’, CQ 47, ­121–​­135 Bacchi, C. and Beasley, C. (­2002) ‘­Citizen bodies: is embodied citizenship a contradiction in terms’, Critical Social Policy 22, ­324–​­352 Beasley, C. and Bacchi, C. (­2000) ‘­Citizen bodies: embodying c­ itizens  – ​­a feminist analysis’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2.3, ­337–​­358 Beck, H. (­2020) Localism and the ancient Greek c­ ity-​­state (­Chicago and London) Blok, J. (­2009) ‘­Perikles’ citizenship law: a new perspective’, Historia 58, ­141–​­170 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Brock, R.W. (­2013) Greek political imagery from Homer to Aristotle (­London) Cadoux, T.J. (­1948) ‘­The Athenian archons from Kreon to Hypsichides’, JHS 68, ­70–​­123 Carey, C. (­2012) Trials from classical Athens (­London and New York) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Bridging the divide between public and private: dikē exoulēs and other hybrids’, in C. Carey, I. Giannadaki, and B. ­Griffith-​­Williams (­eds) Use and abuse of law in the Athenian courts (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­75–​­92

294

The citizen body Cohen, E.E. (­2015) Athenian prostitution: the business of sex (­Oxford) Davies, J.K. (­1993) Democracy and classical Greece, 2nd ed. (­Cambridge, MA) Dover, K.J. (­1974) Greek popular morality in the time of Plato and Aristotle (­Oxford) Faraguna, M. (­2012) ‘­Società, amministrazione, diritto: lo statuto giuridico di tombe e periboloi nell’Atene classica’, in B. Legras and G. Thür (­eds) Symposion 2011. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Paris, ­7–​­10 September 2011) (­Vienna) ­165–​­185 Finley, M.I. (­1959) ‘­Was Greek civilization based on slave labour?’, Historia 8, ­145–​­164 Fisher, N.R.E. (­2001) Aeschines, Against Timarchos (­Oxford) Forsdyke, S. (­2019) ‘­Slave agency and citizenship in classical Athens’, in G. Thür, U. Yiftach, and R. ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­eds) Symposion 2017. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Tel Aviv, 20.–​­23. August 2017) (­Vienna) ­345–​­366 Gagarin, M. (­1996) ‘­The torture of slaves in Athenian law’, CP 91, ­1–​­18 Gagliardi, L. (­2005) ‘­The Athenian procedure of dokimasia of orators’, in R.W. Wallace and M. Gagarin (­eds) Symposion 2001. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Evanston, Illinois, 5.–​­8. September 2001) (­Vienna) ­89–​­97 Harrison, A.R.W. (­1968) The law of Athens, vol. 1: The family and property (­Oxford) Hignett, C. (­1952) A history of the Athenian constitution to the end of the fifth century B.C. (­Oxford) Hunter, V. (­1992) ‘­Constructing the body of the citizen: corporal punishment in classical Athens’, EMC 3, ­271–​­291 ——— ​­(­1994), Policing Athens: social control in the Attic lawsuits, ­420–​­320 B.C. (­Princeton, NJ) ——— ​­(­1997) ‘­T he prison of Athens: a comparative perspective’, Phoenix 51, ­296–​­326 Johnstone, S. (­1999) Disputes and democracy: the consequences of litigation in ancient Athens (­Austin, TX) Kamen, D. (­2013) Status in classical Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Kapparis, K. (­2018) Prostitution in the ancient Greek world (­Berlin and Boston, MA) Kucharski, J. (­2021) ‘­P unishment, stigma and social identities in classical Athens’, Polis 38, ­21–​­46 Lape, S. (­2010) Race and citizen identity in the classical Athenian democracy (­Cambridge) Loraux, N. (­1993) The children of Athena: Athenian ideas about citizenship and the division between the sexes (­Princeton, NJ) MacDowell, D.M. (­1962) Andocides, on the mysteries (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­1978) The law in classical Athens (­London) ——— ​­(­2009) Demosthenes the orator (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­T he Athenian procedure of dokimasia of orators’, in D.M. MacDowell (­ed.) Studies in Greek law, oratory and comedy, ­116–​­124 (­originally published in R.W. Wallace and M. Gagarin (­eds) (­2005) Symposion 2001. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte [Vienna], ­79–​­87) Meyer, E.A. (­1993) ‘­Epitaphs and citizenship in classical Athens’, JHS 113, ­99–​­121 Mirhady, D.C. (­1996) ‘­Torture and rhetoric in Athens’, JHS 116, ­119–​­131 ­Noussia-​­Fantuzzi, M. (­2010) Solon the Athenian, the poetic fragments (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Ober, J. (­2018) ‘­Institutions, growth and inequality in ancient Greece’, in G. Anagnostopoulos and G. Santas (­eds) Democracy, justice and equality in ancient Greece (­Cham) ­15–​­38 Osborne, M.J. (­­1981–​­1983) Naturalization in Athens, 4 vols. (­Brussels) Osborne, R. (­1985) ‘­Law in action in classical Athens’, JHS 105, ­40–​­58 ——— ​­(­1997) ‘­Law, the democratic citizen and the representation of women in classical Athens’, P&P 155, ­3 –​­33 Rosivach, V.J. (­1987) ‘­Autochthony and the Athenians’, CQ 37, ­294–​­306 Rhodes, P.J. (­1981) A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (­Oxford) Roy, J. (­2014) ‘­Autochthony in ancient Greece’, in J. McInerney (­ed.) A companion to ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean (­Oxford) ­241–​­255 Thür, G. (­1977) Beweisführung vor den Schwurgerichtshöfen Athens: die Proklesis zur Basanos (­Vienna) ——— ​­(­1996) ‘­Reply to D.C. Mirhady: torture and rhetoric in Athens’, JHS 116, ­132–​­134 Wallace, R.W. (­1998) ‘­Unconvicted or potential “­átimoi” in ancient Athens’, Dike 1, ­63–​­78 ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz, R. (­2015) ‘­W hose grave is this? The status of grave plots in ancient Greece’, Dike 18, ­51–​­95

295

21 SMUGGLING INFANTS Citizenship fraud in classical Athens Fayah Haussker

Introduction In his ­law-​­court speech Against Midias, which was delivered around 347/­346 BCE, Demosthenes attempts to convince the jury that his personal and political rival, Midias, is a shady person with a criminal profile.1 To prove his point, Demosthenes refers to Midias as being ‘­a mere nobody and son of nobody’ (­μηδένα μηδαμόθεν, 21.148), thus referring to Midias’ dubious and dishonourable origin. In the following sections, Demosthenes expands on this statement in greater detail (­149): … And as for the sake of p ­ arentage – ​­who of you does not know the mystery of his birth that is unfit to be ­spoken – ​­quite like a tragedy? . . . His real mother who bore him was the wisest of humans, while his alleged mother, who smuggled him was the silliest woman. And this is a proof of it: the one sold him as soon as he was born; the other bought him, and although she could have bought a better product at the price she paid, she purchased him.2 Demosthenes declares that soon after Midias’ birth the infant was secretly purchased from an anonymous woman, his biological mother, by his adoptive mother, an Athenian citizen, who bought him in order to raise him as her natural child.3 Thus, the orator denigrates his opponent as a child unclaimed by his father, who, in contradiction to the law, was reared as a legitimate child to be a citizen, although he was, in fact, a foundling. Given the obscure circumstances of his birth, Demosthenes argues that from the Athenian legal perspective of the fourth century BCE, Midias should not be entitled to be enrolled as a member of the citizen body (­150, trans. A.T. Murray): And yet, though he has thus become the possessor of privileges (­τῶν . . . ἀγαθῶν) to which he has no claim, and has found a fatherland (­πατρίδος τετυχηκὼς) which is reputed to be of all states the most firmly based upon its laws, he seems utterly unable to submit to those laws or abide by them. His true, native barbarism and hatred of religion drive him on by force and betray the fact that he treats his present rights as if they were not his ­own—​­as indeed they are not. 296

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-26

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens

Midias was certainly not a supposititious child of barbaric origin, as Demosthenes insinuates,4 yet this passage is of interest because it states explicitly that foundlings or smuggled infants were not legally entitled to enjoy civic status and privileges. They were not part of the collective of citizens, but merely morally inferior outsiders who had somehow penetrated the inner circle of the citizen body. The smuggling of babies, hypobolē (­ὑποβολή), that is, the process by which a woman passes off someone else’s child as her own, is referred to in diverse sources of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, in mythological narratives, historiography, dramatic discourse, philosophy, and rhetoric.5 The evidence, therefore, comes from various genres that represent diverse agendas and include narratives, fictive scenarios, and short comments (­mostly parodic or offensive), with varying levels of detail. However, as regards the right to citizenship, all the cases indicate, explicitly or implicitly, what could be understood as illegal adoption, that is, a fraudulent means of providing citizenship to an individual (­male baby) who by birth had no right to claim it. In all cases, the interest, role, and collaboration of women are prominent and crucial. This phenomenon has been mentioned only sporadically and relatively briefly in modern scholarship, mainly with reference to the status of the citizen woman in the oikos and lack of trust between spouses (­Powell 2001: 3­ 65–​­368). Others have attempted to explain representations of smuggling as a comic device (­Hanson 1994: ­178–​­180) and its sarcastic use for rhetorical purposes (­Wilson 1991: 1­ 85–​­186). This chapter seeks to provide a fuller and more accurate picture of the substitution of children and to estimate its feasibility in classical Athenian reality by examining the representations of ­baby-​­smuggling accounts in the context of children’s legal status, contemporary s­ ocio-​ ­gender perspectives, and in relation to more general aspects of Athenian citizenship (­see also ­Griffith-​­Williams in this volume). Beginning with a diachronic presentation of the principal evidence, the discussion will then consider the range of adult figures involved in the process and identify the infants who comprised the category of ‘­foundling’, taking into account the social norms, legal conditions, and perceptions of reproduction and parenting. The chapter will also investigate the needs, requisite conditions, and limitations of the phenomenon, along with the nature of the sources and their misrepresentations and biases. The conclusions indicate that, first, although it is difficult to establish the scope and frequency of occurrence of baby smuggling (­or substitution) in classical Athens per se, literary representations of the topic suggest the existence of alternative and indeed complicated and dangerous means of carrying out the unofficial, illegal, adoption of male infants, thus making them eligible for citizenship; and second, in order to accomplish such a venture, which was ­primarily – ​­though not ­exclusively – ​­based on female social and emotional interests, active female involvement and collaboration were essential.

Representations of hypobolē The earliest surviving evidence appears in Herodotus (­5.41.­1–​­2) and concerns the first wife of the Spartan king Anaxandrides II, mother of Dorieus, who became pregnant, unexpectedly, following years of infertility. She was suspected of feigning the pregnancy, which occurred after the king’s second wife had already given birth to Cleomenes I as successor (­in a bigamous union that was unique in Sparta, cf. Hdt. 5.­39–​­40, Paus. 3.3.9): 297

Fayah Haussker

. . . the first wife, who had previously been childless (­ἄτοκος), by good fortune conceived at that very time. [2] When the family of the second wife learned that, although she truly was pregnant, they began to harass her, saying that she was bragging vainly, so that she might substitute a child (­βουλομένην ὑποβαλέσθαι). The Ephors, when the time of the delivery arrived, because of distrust, sat around the parturient to watch her in childbirth. Although these suspicions, which did not originate with the husband, were unjustified, based more on gossip than on facts (­Hornblower 2013: 152 on Hdt. 5.41.2), the motivation for the alleged attempt to smuggle an infant is clearly defined as the previous inability of the king’s first wife to conceive. The identity or origin of the allegedly smuggled baby is not recorded, and indeed is not pertinent here, but it is implied that such a child could not be a legitimate heir to the king’s dynasty. Moreover, the Spartan authorities, the Ephors, as well as Herodotus himself evidently believed that such a practice existed in cases when the woman failed to give birth to a male successor. The next piece of evidence is found in ­fifth-​­century dramatic discourse, and it supports and expands on the information given in Herodotus’ account. In Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, produced at the City Dionysia in 411 BCE, there are four parodic references to counterfeited pregnancy and substitution of newborns (­­339–​­340, ­407–​­409, ­502–​­516, ­564–​­565), listed with other immoral and criminal deeds that married citizen women allegedly used to practise. Alongside laconic references to the specific practice of smuggling babies, some comments, pointing unequivocally to the female’s failure to procreate, are more detailed. There are also references to the husbands’ suspicion of the ruse and descriptions of their attempts to prevent the deception, like the Ephors in Herodotus’ narrative (­Thesm. ­407– ​­408): When a woman wants to smuggle a baby (­ὑποβαλέσθαι βούλεται), because of her difficulty to give birth to a child (­ἀποροῦσα παίδων), it is impossible to hide this. For husbands are seated close by (­ἅνδρες γὰρ ἤδη παρακάθηνται πλησίον) [i.e., behind the door of the delivery room]. A more vivid picture is provided by a detailed comic description (­that was not staged) depicting a woman who pretends to have excruciating labour pains until a baby can be found whom she can display as her own offspring, while her unsuspecting husband runs around looking for medication and other aids to help speed her delivery (­Thesm. ­502–​­516, in contrast to Hdt. 5.41.­1–​­2 and Thesm. ­407– ​­408): (­Mnesilochus) I know another (­woman), who for ten whole days pretended / to experience labour pains, until she had bought a child (’φασκεν ὠδίνειν . . . δέχ’ ἡμέρας, ἕως ἐπρίατο παιδίον·); / And her husband was running around to purchase expedients for delivery. / Meanwhile, the old woman had brought the child in a pot (­τὸ δ’ εἰσέφερε γραῦς ἐν χύτρᾳ, τὸ παιδίον), / and to prevent him crying she stuffed his mouth with honey. / And after beckoning as a sign [to the bogus mother], the parturient (­ἡ φέρουσ’) immediately cried / ‘­go away, go away, man, I think / I’m going to give birth’. For the baby kicked the abdomen of the pot with his feet. / And he rejoiced and ran [out], but she [the old woman] / drew the cover off the pot, and the baby started crying. / Then, the wretched old woman (­ἡ μιαρὰ γραῦς), who had brought the 298

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens

baby, / ran smiling toward the husband and said: / ‘­a lion is born to you, just like you, / every bit of him, organ and all. / Look at it, bent like a bow!’. In his portrayal of a clearly bogus pregnancy and delivery, Aristophanes provides a plethora of details about the process of deception. Here is unique evidence about the duration of time needed to organize a baby (­the feigned labour lasted ten days), and the vessel, chytra (­χ ύτρα [cf. Σ Ar. Thesm. 509]), in which the child was smuggled ­in – ​­an item that was in daily use in the household. In addition, in this text we encounter the individual who aids and supervises the process, an ‘­old woman’, graus (­γραῦς), who appears twice (­505 and 512). The old woman’s status and relationship to the mother are unclear: is she a midwife, an old nurse, a family member, a neighbour, or a friend? The text also states that the smuggled baby was bought (­ἕως ἐπρίατο παιδίον 503). In one of the two references existing to the ­long-​­term risk in raising supposititious children as citizens’ legitimate offspring, Teleclides, a fi ­ fth-​­century BCE comedian, indicates that an appreciable sum of money had to be given in bribes in order to prevent political slander involving a male child allegedly purchased by his presumed mother (­PCG fr. 44.­1–​­2): Did Charicles not pay a mina (­ἔδωκε μνᾶν), so that he [the informer] would not say that he [Charicles] was the ­first-​­born child of his mother who was bought by money (­from her purse, ἐκ βαλλαντίου)? The purchase of a baby (­as in the case of Midias’ mother according to Demosthenes’ accusation in 21.149) may lead to the supposition that the child’s origin was that of a ­non-​­Greek or a slave, which indicates that a supposititious child was equivalent in status to a slave, as Colin Austin and Douglas Olson (­2004: 204) observe with reference to Thesm. ­502–​­503: ‘­That supposititious children are purchased rather than got for free . . . whether this represents social reality or not, the effect is to make the child indistinguishable from a slave and thus an even less satisfactory heir’. In the Third Philippic (­9.31), delivered in 341 BCE, Demosthenes called Philip a ‘­slave or supposititious child’ (­δοῦλος ἢ ὑποβολιμαῖος).6 In later evidence, which also attests to the risk of bringing up a substituted child as a descendant of citizen parents, the term hypobolēs graphē (­ὑπoβολῆς γραφή, Anecd. Bekk. I.­311–​­312) is used to refer to the public prosecution against such a child, who if convicted will lose his freeborn status by being sold into slavery. The question of the slave origin of the babies appears in two other examples of women’s presumed deception. In Euripides’ Alcestis (­­636–​­641), Admetus denies his parentage by proclaiming a baseless suspicion that he is the offspring of slaves who was smuggled in infancy to the breast of Pheres’ wife, his adoptive mother: You were not, as it now seems clear, truly my father, / nor did she who claims to have borne me/ and is called my mother really give birth to me, but I was born of some slave (­δουλίου δ’ ἀφ’ αἵματος) / and secretly put to your wife’s breast (­μαστῶι γυναικὸς σῆς ὑπεβλήθην λάθραι) . . . / and I don’t believe I am your son. The hint of illegitimacy in these verses is most probably a sarcastic, rhetorical device,7 and not an actual challenge to Admetus’ legal status, but the very mention of such a practice not only points to the belief in its possibility, but also provides information about the assumed source from which the smuggled baby was obtained and that baby’s ancestry. 299

Fayah Haussker

In Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (­­564–​­565), the substitution of babies of slave origin features not only in connection to infertility but also as a result of the desire for a male child rather than the naturally born biological daughter. In this case, a woman replaces her baby girl with the son of her maid (­a maid from the woman’s own household): (­Mnesilochus) (­I have not told) how you have smuggled to yourself the male infant whom your slave (­δούλη) had just borne and gave her instead your own baby daughter. This motif recurs in Middle and New Comedy. There are a few lost comic plays whose titles are derived from the adjective ὑποβολιμαῖος, but since only the titles and tiny fragments have remained, it is impossible to determine the contents and plots.8 According to Satyrus, a Greek Peripatetic philosopher and biographer from the late third to early second centuries BCE, the theme of the substitution of small children (­ὑποβολὰς παιδίων) is one of the topics that New Comedy inherited from Euripides (­Satyr. Vit. Eur. fr. 39.7: ­10–​­11),9 of which only two short references survive: Admetus’ ­above-​­mentioned unjustified suspicion in Alcestis and Jocasta’s claim in the Phoenissae (­­28–​­31) that Polibus, king of Corinth, was cheated by his infertile wife who fraudulently smuggled Oedipus, pretending that the baby was their mutual child. In any event, the evidence from ­post-​­classical comedy, which might be understood as testifying to the continuity of the literary motif, should be viewed with great caution before drawing conclusions about the use of this practice in the classical period and especially its ­socio-​­political consequences.10 This survey of the sources leads to certain conclusions. The practice is presented as being in the interest of married citizen women and conducted on their ­i nitiative –​ ­men were either cheated by their wives or, out of suspicion, tried to prevent the procedure. The infants might have been acquired from within or without the household, sometimes for free, sometimes purchased for money. Information about the smuggled infants’ origin is inconsistent, though, when available, it points to either slave origin or lower origin than that required to fulfil the criteria for citizenship. The motivation for baby smuggling is not always specified, but in those cases where a reason is given it is the desperate need for a male baby, who cannot be conceived either because of fertility problems or because the mother has borne only female offspring. A striking feature of all these cases is the centrality and exclusivity of women’s involvement and collaboration. All these points call for analysis and clarification. Assuming that the authors based their representations on concepts that were familiar to their target audiences in order to win popular belief or support, it can be deduced that the ancient authors of the surviving evidence, as well as their audiences, believed that the smuggling of infants was, or at least could be, viable, though it is, indeed, impossible to evaluate its frequency of incidence, as Anton Powell has shown very persuasively (­2001: ­365–​­368). This belief indicates an anxiety, mainly on the part of Athenian men, about women’s infidelity and its possible consequences, for such a procedure meant rearing an heir who was neither the man’s biological child nor a successor chosen by him by formal legal procedure.11 In the absence of paternity tests, which were clearly impossible at that time, suspicions of this kind were difficult to confirm or completely refute, even though the woman could give an oath confirming paternity of the child in cases that might arouse suspicion (­esp. regarding citizenship and inheritance).12 300

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens

The evidence, however, depicts a more complex reality, arising from human distress and lack of institutional response. To contextualize the components of the practice of smuggling infants presented above, it is therefore necessary to examine this risky act more closely, including all those involved (­bogus and real parturient, a baby, a midwife, and probably a female aid network), by taking into consideration ­socio-​­gender perceptions and attitudes to parenthood and procreation and their interrelations with family laws, the legal status of the child, and the criteria of eligibility for citizenship in classical Athens. This approach can shed light on such questions as what needs were met by baby smuggling, under what circumstances and by whom it could be carried out, and what attitudes, beliefs, and anxieties the act of smuggling embodied.

Demand and supply The accounts of the smuggling of newborns clearly demonstrate that this practice was primarily in the interest of women. Who were these putative mothers who wanted to ‘­adopt’ in this deceitful way? Athenian couples were expected to produce offspring, for both emotional and practical reasons (­Raepsaet 1971; Golden 2015: ­28–​­31, 79, ­116–​ ­117).13 While a son was critical for transmission of property and continuing the oikos and the family line into future generations, children were also needed to care for their parents in old age (­gērotrophia [γηροτροφία]), as well as to honour them with funeral rites and to tend their graves. Since the oikos was regarded both as the basic ­socio-​ ­ olitical unit (­Arist. Pol. 1253b.­1–​­3) and as the fundamental religious and economic p entity, procreation of legitimate heirs as future citizens was expected. A woman’s main private and civil purpose in such a patriarchal society as ancient Athens, which did not grant citizen women political rights, and also restricted their economic activity,14 was to give birth to legitimate and healthy heirs for the oikos, and future citizens for the state, and fulfilment of that purpose also influenced her position in her husband’s oikos (­e.g., Lys. 1.6; Demand 1994: ­17–​­18, Piccinini 2015: 146, ­148–​ 1­ 49).15 Hence, motherhood was perceived as obvious and essential to the female citizen experience (­e.g., Wickramasinghe 2014; Hong 2016: ­673–​­675), while the inability to produce a male heir meant that women failed to meet their social and gender requirements and has been interpreted in modern research as a reasonable cause for divorce (­e.g., Gardner 1989: 56; Powell 2001: 3­ 64–​­365; Golden 2015: 1­ 37–​­138). Perhaps the recurring question in Dodona’s lead tablets, as to whether the enquirer will have a (­male) child from his present wife, whose name is also mentioned, can testify to the plausibility of separation in case of reproductive failure (­e.g., I.Dodone Evangelidi 2493A, I.Dodone Lhôte 45, 46A, 47; Laes 2020: 185).16 We cannot estimate the prevalence of infertility in antiquity, and we do not know how long a woman might remain childless in marriage before being suspected of infertility so as to be defined as ‘­unproductive’, literally ‘­one that does not bear’ or ‘­does not give birth’, aphoros or atokos (­ἄφορος and ἄτοκος; Barone 1987: ­62–​­64), but difficulties in procreation were commonly perceived more as a woman’s affair than a man’s. Even though one may occasionally identify an awareness among ancient authors that both sexes could be responsible for procreation failure (­Jouanna 1999: 174, 271, Senkova 2015),17 the sources tend to regard infertility as a woman’s problem which requires a curative approach (­Flemming 2013: 5­ 70–​­588), and to which the Hippocratic corpus and the extant Greek medical writings devoted extensive and elaborate discussions, along with suggested medication and remedies. Nonetheless, longing for a child is expressed 301

Fayah Haussker

by both sexes,18 and we also have examples where both parents collaborate to organize a baby. Herodotus, for example, mentions the substitution of Cyrus the Elder for the dead baby of the shepherd Mytradates and Cyno, which was carried out with the consent of both parents, who raised him as their own son until his true identity was revealed (­1.­112–​­113). In Menander’s Epitrepontes (­­266–​­269), where features of the story of the adoption of Charissius and Phampile’s exposed baby resemble those of Cyrus in Herodotus’ version, Syriskos (­or Syros) is eager to raise the baby, for he and his wife have but recently lost their own newborn child. As Froma Zeitlin convincingly shows (­2008: ­322–​­324), Euripides was the first to transfer the theme of infertility to the dramatic arena, in particular, and the literary/­poetic arena, in general, giving expression to both women’s and men’s longing for a child and thus demonstrating that both parents share this emotional need.19 Whereas one of the main goals of adoption in the Western world today is to provide homes for children whose biological parents, for different reasons, are unable to raise them and to provide childless couples or individuals with social progeny and an heir, in classical Athens the goal of adoption, the entitlement to adoption, and the child’s legal status did not relate to the needs of parentless children, nor to those of childless women and couples. Adoption, of which nothing is known from the viewpoint of the adoptee, took place between freeborn citizens, one of whom was an adult male with no biological sons (­e.g., Isae. 2.­13–​­14, 10.9, [Dem.] 46.14, 24), and was undertaken for practical purposes rather than purely emotional or humanitarian considerations relating to child welfare (­Leduc 1998: ­191–​­193). Hence, the adoption of very young children, which involved nurturing, was not common, and unwanted children, as well as childless individuals or couples who wanted to experience parenthood, faced rigid legal obstacles. The legal practice of adoption was primarily intended to benefit the adopter, an adult male citizen, in his life and after his death. The adopter needed an heir to regulate the transfer of his property and to maintain him in old age (­e.g., Isae. 2.13, 7. ­14–​­15; Rubinstein 1993: ­64–​­68), to preserve his oikos from extinction,20 and chiefly to assume responsibility for the commemorative funeral rites and attendance of his tombs, which was not an obligation for collateral relatives (­Eur. Danae fr. 318.­3 –​­4, Isae. 2.10, 6.5; Rubinstein 1993: 6­ 8–​­76, 1999). This fact, together with the high child mortality rate which made the adoption of a child risky (­Arist. Hist. an. ­588a8–​­10; Laes 2020: ­188–​­189),21 explains the preference for adopting adult males, whose mature age enabled them to fulfil the needs of the adoptive father (­e.g., Leduc 1998: 190, Phillips 2013: 220).22 There are very few attested cases of a son who was adopted (­only by will or posthumously) when he was probably under the age of manhood, and none of those cases indicate responsibility for nurturing.23 Within the framework of these Athenian adoption norms, the issue of legitimacy occupied a central place. A prerequisite for eligibility for adoption was first of all that an adoptee, a poiētos (­ποιητός) or a thetos huios (­θετὸς υἱός),24 had to be freeborn as the legitimate offspring, gnēsios (­γ νήσιος), of citizen parents. Only such children, after being recognized by the biological father (­if he decided to rear him) in specific ritual proceedings, were given a name and registered as legitimate offspring in their father’s phratria. These registrations entitled the individual to have, in a due time, a share in the anchisteia (­ἀγχιστεῖα) and the politeia (­πολιτεία) (­Blok 2017: ­100–​­146).25 The phrase gegonota orthōs (­γεγονότα ὀρθῶς, ‘­straight born’), as evidenced in Isaeus (­7.16; Sealey 1990: 34), was included in the oath that members of the phratria were required to take when introducing their natural or adopted sons. In other words, the adoptee had to 302

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens

be the legitimate offspring of an Athenian citizen as his acknowledged paternal kyrios (­κ ύριος), and, after the reforms of Pericles in 451/­450 BCE, of a married female citizen, in order to be entitled to enrolment in the phratria of the adoptive father ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 26.3, 42.1; Patterson 1990). While legal adoptions were transparent and executed by the male citizen network and under supervision of civic institutions, since adoption had to be announced before the phratry and deme, who were required to consent to the adoption,26 illegal adoptions, as in the narratives of smuggling infants, were stealthy and performed by women, who legally were not allowed to adopt a legitimate child (­cf. Isae. 10.10 with G ­ riffith-​ ­ illiams 2013: ­227–​­228 and in this volume).27 W The origin of the smuggled infants is not consistently indicated in the sources, nor is the place from which they were taken (­esp. if outside the oikos), but when these details are mentioned, they point, as previously noted, to slave origin. What is clear is that all such children, born of doubtful origins and in obscure circumstances, had no citizen ­father-​­figure to acknowledge paternity, raise them, and provide them with legitimate status, which would allow them to be registered and raised as citizens according to the concurrent Athenian legal perspective. They were most probably infants who, if healthy, were doomed to exposure for reasons of slave origin, poverty, or illegitimacy (­Eyben ­1980–​­1981; Patterson 1985; Ogden 1996: ­106–​­110),28 such as the offspring of an unmarried Athenian female, a parthenos (­παρθένος), who lacked a man who would take on the responsibility of kyrios. Such a child, inappropriately born out of wedlock, was termed nothos (­νόθος, ‘­bastard’).29 Like the descendants of slaves, illegitimate children were bereft of any chance of integrating into the civil community of the polis.30 Disposal of the child was performed either by means of actual exposure or by other arrangements that were made before or close to the time of his birth, thereby allowing the possibility of the infant’s survival and rescue by a third party.31 We do not have demographic data concerning exposed infants, but the fact that in Aristophanes’ Thes­ ays – ​­shows, even if we mophoriazusae the feigned labour lasted such a long t­ ime – ​­ten d take into account comic exaggeration, that it was not so easy to find a baby, especially a male one, and that disposing of an infant was not a daily incident. In sum, the concept of classical Athenian adoption, along with an exclusive concept of citizenship linked with social anxiety over legitimacy, constituted almost insurmountable legal obstacles to obtaining and raising a legitimate heir from outside the nuclear family. Thus, acquiring the baby in secret, stealthily, so that the child would ​­ grow up as if he had been born to the married woman who smuggled him, ­seemed – at least in the imagination of the Athenian men who generated the surviving ­evidence –​ ­the only solution.

A cooperative female network Such an illegal and risky arrangement required both appropriate timing and cooperation with other parties. In order to mediate between supply and demand, it is reasonable to suppose that unofficial persons were involved, and the practice was only feasible if conducted by women, and impossible without close cooperation among them. Cynthia Patterson (­1985: 116) has suggested the possibility of something of a “­feminine network” which could place an unwanted infant in the hands of a woman wanting to be a mother . . . Women might know both those 303

Fayah Haussker

about to have an unwanted child and those who wanted a child but did not (­or could not) have one. It is worth noting that since the earliest times the sources testify to the hegemony of female knowledge in all matters relating to obstetrics. Moreover, pregnancy, childbirth, and the ­post-​­partum period, along with their practical aspects, were perceived as mainly belonging to the women’s domain (­Demand 1994: 6­ 3–​­70). The main information on these topics that authors of classical medical texts, the male physicians, provide about women came from women themselves, from both the midwives and the women who experienced pregnancy and delivery (­Hanson 1996: 1­ 66–​ ­167). Although patients’ knowledge was not always deemed credible by Hippocratic writers, by default they had to rely on women’s reporting or at least take it into account in the framework of medical considerations.32 Pregnancy, which Hippocratic healers could usually detect by means of tests and observation of physical signs, was perceived (­or imagined) to be something that women recognized from their own feelings and prior orally transmitted knowledge (­e.g., Hippoc. Nat. puer. 13.­6 –​­10; King 1998: ­31–​ ­32, ­135–​­136). As in many modern cultures, the midwife in ancient Greece, frequently called maia (­μαῖα)­33 – ​­although the word is not found in the Hippocratic corpus, which mentions midwives only ­tangentially – ​­was perceived and practised as an exclusively female role. In addition, we have evidence that there were other female professionals, with more advanced medical training, who assisted and supervised women in gynaecological matters and obstetrics.34 The first professional woman for whom there is evidence in the sources is Phanostratē (­Φανοστράτη), whose epitaph in the ­m id-​­fourth century identified her as maia and iatros (­μαῖα καὶ ἰατρὸς, ‘­m idwife and physician’, IG II² 6873, SEG 33.214; Totelin 2020: ­129–​­133). Male physicians, at least according to the Hippocratic corpus, were summoned mainly (­but not exclusively) when difficulties arose (­Hippoc. Morb. 1 5.­3 –​­7, 8.­ 20–​­21),35 although according to Plato’s Theaetetus (­­149c–​­e), in which Socrates presents himself as a midwife of the soul, the professional authority and expertise of the midwife could be sufficient in bringing about the successful completion of a difficult birth. In any event, male doctors, when they did arrive, were necessarily assisted by female staff (­Demand 1994: 66; 1995: ­286–​­287), since female patients, out of modesty and a degree of shame, were oftentimes reluctant to rely on male physicians and disinclined to collaborate with them.36 The traditional process of conventional childbirth was considered mainly as a matter for women and took place in a space to which the pregnant woman, midwives and assistants (­from the circle of family and friends), all female, were admitted.37 Husbands’ assistance, as indicated by the scenario of fake delivery in Thesmophoriazusae 504, ­508–​­509 (­where the husband was sent to obtain medicaments to hasten the delivery), was mainly outside the delivery chamber (­Hanson 1994: ­159–​­160).38 In Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (­­528–​­529, 531, 5­ 33–​­534, 549), Praxagora explains her absence from home early in the morning by claiming that she was helping her friend to give birth. The use of this argument suggests that friends assisting a woman in childbirth was a necessary and reasonable occurrence. The old woman referred to in Thesmophoriazusae was probably part of the birthing team, perhaps even a midwife, who brought the ­child –​ ​­ a fraudulent parturient.39 ­who might have been an exposed ­child – to In Plato’s Theaetetus, the midwife’s skills include, among others, p ­ ost-​­partum treatment and the ability to evaluate a newborn’s w ­ ell-​­being (­149e, 157d; cf. Hippoc. De 304

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens

carnibus 19.­44–​­47). According to Soranus (­Gyn. 2.10), the midwives’ opinion was also relied upon when assessing the newborn’s viability and fitness to be reared. Although there is slim textual evidence for the ­post-​­partum period in the accounts of smuggled infants, it is reasonable to suppose that the midwife, who was the first to see the baby when it was born, might be expected to be the central figure for mediating the demands of childless couples and individuals and supplying them with newborns whose own parents refused to rear them for various reasons. The scenario depicted in Thesmophoriazusae is a prominent example of the female cooperation required in such a complex process. According to that scenario, men imagined midwives as having an important role in helping women to introduce supposititious children into the family and the home. It included organizing a fake pregnancy and delivery, the acquisition of a baby and its transmission to the fake parturient, and most probably arrangements for the provision of breast milk, which, in popular belief, was considered proof that the mother had experienced a real birth, as can be discerned from Plato’s Menexenus: ‘­and by this sign it is evident whether a woman truly gave birth or smuggled a baby, if she possesses (­or not) sources to nourish her offspring’ (­237e; Powell 2001: 368). But most importantly, it required the utmost secrecy on the part of all those involved, which made it difficult to detect the fraud, and even if such incidents occurred, it was almost impossible to prove them (­cf. Pl. Alc. 121d.­1–​­2). Although the complex procedure of baby smuggling may seem cumbersome to us and mainly hypothetical, it may, indeed, have been possible under certain conditions, with proper planning and a lot of luck. This is especially true if we take into consideration such phenomena as the diversity in the physical characteristics of pregnancy that vary from woman to woman, the possibility of pregnancy without signs (­Hippoc. Epid. 4.24), or even deceptive signs such as in false pregnancy (­e.g., Hippoc. Mul. 1.61, 71; King 1998: 26), and variations in the duration of pregnancy. While recognizing that this is not the place for an analysis of pregnancy and obstetrics, I would like to dwell on the last point, which may best illustrate the option for staging a fictitious birth schedule. Ancient Greeks did not have a clear notion of the duration of pregnancy and the common gestational age of pregnancy for giving birth to a fully formed child, which in the evidence varied from seven to the optimal ten lunar months (­­Dean-​­Jones 1994: ­209–​­211, Parker 1999). Hippocratic writers introduced a period of between 210 and 280 days (­e.g., Nat. puer. 30, Oct. part. 4.9–10, 10.6–10), while Aristotle suggested an interval of seven up to more than ten months (­G en. an. 772b.­7–​­11, Hist. an. 584a35– b1). According to Damastes, a Greek author probably from the second century BCE or earlier (Laur. 74.2, fol. 381v, ll. 3–26, ed. Parker 1999), for example, delivery was possible between 210 and 300 days. In Herodotus’ narrative about Demaratus’ birth (­6.­63–​­69), his mother, the third wife of Ariston the Spartan king (­who did not have children from his two previous wives, and therefore his paternity over Demaratus was questionable due to his premature birth), says to her son (­6.69.5): ‘­Some women give birth after nine months or seven months; not all complete the ten months. I gave birth to you, my son, after seven months’.40 It may, therefore, be cautiously concluded that the diversity of ancient medical and theoretical opinions, as well as popular perceptions concerning conception and pregnancy, left a woman latitude to manoeuvre, if indeed she had the courage to implement such a complicated and risky venture. 305

Fayah Haussker

Conclusion Demosthenes’ fabricated accusation of Midias and the picturesque fictive scene in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae faithfully represent a recurring motif in the sources that points to a concern, whether real or imagined, about the possibility of obtaining fraudulent citizenship for a baby, which would be difficult to prove. The paucity of evidence, the sporadic and unsubstantiated nature of the references, and the absence of objective and unbiased descriptions make it difficult to assess whether fake pregnancy and delivery and the smuggling of infants were widespread or, at least to some extent, part of the historical reality of classical ­Athens – ​­phenomena that contemporary Athenians could not verify because they required secrecy. There is, of course, no evidence of an actual historical figure from classical Greece who was adopted by smuggling and prosecuted in the Athenian court for fraudulent citizenship. In the lack of more substantial indications, our evidence can only shed light on what could have been done in cases of infertility, or what methods might have been used to circumvent the existing adoption laws. Nonetheless, there seems no compelling reason to reject outright the existence of such phenomena, given the demand, supply, medical knowledge, and popular perceptions regarding gestation and pregnancy, as well as female hegemony in the physical sphere of normal delivery. To conclude, it is clear that there was a need and demand for legitimate male babies, which the law did not address in the form of legal adoption, and that in the absence of efficient fertility treatment and advanced and legal surrogacy services, the acquisition of a ­ready-​­made baby seemed the only option for an infertile woman or couple. It also seems reasonable to assume the possible existence of alternative, creative, and indeed risky means of regulating the unofficial adoption of infants, of granting them eligibility for citizenship to which they were not entitled by virtue of their status at birth. Such a practice would have been primarily, but not exclusively, in the interest of women, and could not have been carried out without active female collaboration. The secrecy that such a process required reduced the risk of disclosure and prosecution, but certainly aroused suspicion, doubt, and gossip. The fact that our sources were produced by men and for men prima facie attests to the anxiety of male citizens that a substitute child might be smuggled in at the birth, with the result that a supposititious heir would receive the family estate and become a citizen in the future. This anxiety expresses the citizens’ broader fear of potential misdemeanours in an area in which they lacked sufficient knowledge and direct experience and were consequently deprived of the possibility of detecting the fraud.

Notes 1 Since the nineteenth century, scholars have extensively debated the procedural category of this speech, whether it was probolē (­προβολή, a preliminary indictment, submitted to the Assembly, for an offence related to the festival after its completion) or graphē (­γραφή, a ‘­public’ prosecution on issues of importance to the state), and what kind of charge Demosthenes brought. See esp. Harris (­1989: 125; 2008: 79), who believes that the action is a graphē hubreōs (­γραφὴ ὕβρεως), whereas MacDowell (­1990: 16) argues that the probolē covered also the subsequent trial in court. See Rowe (­1994) for a comprehensive discussion and possible solution to the disagreements. 2 Unless otherwise stated, all translations and highlights are mine; ancient authors and texts are cited according to the editions of TLG and OLD.

306

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens 3 For the affinity between tragedy and oratory concerning the use of such kind of narratives, see Wilson (­1991: ­185–​­186), Powell (­2001: ­365–​­366). 4 Davies (­1971: ­386–​­387), MacDowell (­1990: ­365–​­366), and Harris (­2008: 75, 140 n.217). 5 In addition to the noun ὑποβολή, the verb hypoballō (­ὑποβάλλω), mostly in middle and passive voice (­LSJ s.v., II.1), is used to describe the process of smuggling, and the adjective hypobolimaios (­ὑποβολιμαῖος), ‘­brought in by stealth’, indicates an individual who has been smuggled (­e.g., Hdt. 1.137.2, Diod. Sic. 20.14.4, Phot. s.v. Ὑποβολιμαῖοι). 6 Cf. Suda s.v. Κάρανος; and see below pp.­0 000–​­0000. 7 Griffith (­1978: ­85–​­86), Conacher (­2007: 182), and Parker (­2007: ­181–​­182). 8 Alexis, Philemon, Menander, Eudoxus (­Ὑποβολιμαῖος), Cratinus the younger, and Crobylus (­Ψευδυποβολιμαῖος); for the motif, cf., e.g., Men. Pk. ­121–​­123 with Traill (­2008: ­135–​­136), Sam. ­77–​­78, ­130–​­136, ­265–​­68, ­649–​­651, Hiereia with Gomme and Sandbach (­1973: ­694–​­695). As a common issue in Roman comedy, see, e.g., Plaut. Capt. 1031, Truculentus ­402–​­414, ­762–​ ­763 and Ter. Eun. 39. 9 Despite Satyrus’ lack of credibility in reconstructing historical features of Euripides’ Vita (­Schorn 2004: ­46–​­49, Lefkowitz 2012: ­87–​­103), his proficiency in the poet’s works, and access to extensive later literary material, most probably enabled him to identify continuously recurring motifs. 10 See Traill (­2008: 254): ‘­In Menander, however, women’s reproductive role is depoliticized. There is no language of civic service. In fact, interests of the polis are not even mentioned when children’s status is disputed’; and see the discussion on ­252–​­254, 259. 11 Cf. Gardner (­1989: ­55–​­56), Hall (­1997:110): ‘­One of the ancient Athenian’s worst nightmares was that his household would be extinguished by his heirlessness. Even worse was the idea that his household might be extinguished without his even knowing ­it – ​­that is, by the infiltration of an heir he had not fathered himself. . . . ’ 12 See, e.g., Eur. Ion ­1528–​­1531, Hdt. 6.­68–​­69, Dem. 39.­3 –​­4, 40.­10–​­11, Arist. Rh. 1398a.­33–​­b.5; Scafuro (­2011: 36, ­43–​­44), Fletcher (­2014: ­172–​­175). For women’s ability to know that the child is indeed theirs, as opposed to men, see, e.g., Od. 1.­215–​­16, Eur. fr. 1015. 13 See, e.g., Eur. Andr. ­418–​­420, Tro. 371, Danae fr. 316.­5 –​­8, and the comprehensive summary in Ion ­472–​­484 with Zeitlin (­2008: 326); cf. Hes. O­p. ­376–​­378 for an earlier ­non-​­Athenian concept. 14 E.g., Isae. 10.10, 14 (­w ith ­Griffith-​­Williams 2013: 227, 232), 11.­41–​­42, [Dem.] 41.9, 21. For a comprehensive discussion, see esp. Schaps (­1979), Foxhall (­1989: ­32–​­39), Sealey (­1990: ­26–​­28, ­36–​­48), and Johnstone (­2003: ­267–​­271). 15 Cf. Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.­286–​­89. For children’s contribution to parents’ mutual affection, see, e.g., Arist. Eth. Nic. 1162a.­26–​­27, Pol. 1252a.­26–​­30. 16 For procreative failure on the grounds of an infertile union of the specific spouses, see Senkova (­2015: ­126–​­127); cf. Pl. Leg. 784b. The evidence for actual divorce in the sources is rare, and the single case of divorce due to infertility which appeared in Isaeus (­2.­6 –​­9) points more to the husband’s fault. 17 Hippoc. Aer. 21 and Aphorismi 5.63, Arist. Gen.an. 747a.­33–​­36, Hist.an. 633b.­12–​­14, Diocles (­Medicus) frs. 43b.­6 –​­10, 43c.­4 –​­8; I.Dodone Evangelidi 2552A, 2609A with Laes (­2020: ­185–​­186). 18 See, e.g., Eur. Med. ­717–​­718, Sup­p.  ­1087–​­1089, Ion ­64–​­67, 1227, Phoen. ­13–​­16; Wickramasinghe (­2014: 72). 19 On Euripides’ semantics of childlessness, apaidia (­ἀπαιδία), in the broadest sense, incorporating biological and ­socio-​­legal aspects of the term, see Barone (­1987). 20 E.g., Eur. Alc. ­655–​­656, Ion ­472–​­480, IT ­697–​­698, Isae. 7.­30–​­31, 42, [Dem.] 44.43; Dmitriev (­2014: ­71–​­75). 21 Cf. also SEG 57.536.4 (­cf. Dosuna 2016: 1­ 23–​­124 no. 313A), I.Dodone Evangelidi 2493A). Hansen (­2006: 55, 59, 86) estimated that ancient Greek married women would have needed to give birth five or six times in order simply to maintain the population at a stable level, which means an average of two to three surviving children per family; see also Demand (­1994: ­20–​ ­21), Parkin (­2013: ­40–​­50, ­57–​­58). 22 For preference for the collateral family circle, taking into consideration the regulation of property and with an affinity to marriage strategy, see esp. Cox (­1998: ­125–​­128; 2011: ­241–​­243).

307

Fayah Haussker 23 See, e.g., [Dem.] 43.­11–​­12 with Dmitriev (­2014: ­69–​­70); maybe Theozotides’ proposal (­Lys. frs. 64.­128–​­150 Carey) can point to posthumous adoption (­on behalf of fallen warriors without heirs) of minors under the legal majority (­Slater 1993). 24 For lexical terms, see, e.g., Hdt. 6.57, Eur. fr. 359, Pl. Leg. 878e, 923e, Isae. 3. 69; Harrison (­1968, ­83–​­84), Ghiggia (­1999: ­63–​­70). 25 For the connection between citizenship and paternity, see also the comprehensive discussion with sources and bibliography in Scafuro (­1994: ­158–​­164; 2011: ­18–​­21). 26 E.g., Isae. 6.­22–​­24, 7.28, [Dem.] 44.39, [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42.1; Harrison (­1968: ­89–​­93), Rubinstein (­1993: ­36–​­45), Ghiggia (­1999: ­71–​­110), Huebner (­2013: ­514–​­515). 27 If it could be proven that the act was performed under the influence of a woman, the procedure was deemed invalid, see, e.g., Isae. 2.1, 6. 2­ 1–​­22 (­w ith ­Griffith-​­Williams 2017: 51), [Dem.] 46.14. 28 The bibliography of infant exposure in ancient Greece, often termed ekthesis (­ἔκθεσις) and less frequently apothesis (­ἀπόθεσις) and ekbolē (­ἐκβολή) (­Golden 1981: 330, Huys 1989), is too huge to be included as part of this paper. For the pattern of the exposed hero in Greek myth and a full record of the mythological and historical characters claimed to be exposed, see Huys (­1995: ­27–​­48, ­377–​­400). 29 For the same legal category of hypobolimaios and nothos (­as opposed to gnēsios) see, e.g., Hesych. s.v. ὑποβολιμαῖον: ὑποβολιμαῖον οὐ γνήσιον, ἀλλὰ νόθον, … (‘­Substituted [means] not legitimate, but illegitimate, . . . ’); cf. Herodotus (­1.137), who mentions smuggling infants together with those born as a result of adultery, moicheia (­μοιχεία). For the affinity between a supposititious child and a slave, see above p. 299. 30 For the problematic legal status of Athenian ‘­bastards’, see, among others, Patterson (­1990), Ogden (­1996: ­32–​­81, ­151–​­165; 2009: ­107–​­114), and Phillips (­2013: ­175–​­177, ­179–​­189); cf. Ogden (­1996: 2­ 03–​­205) for the association between ‘­bastardy’ and slavery in Menandrian comedy. 31 E.g., Soph. OT ­1020–​­1024, Eur. Ion, Isoc. Phil. 66 with Haussker (­2017: 1­ 06–​­107, 113); for the ­post-​­classical period, cf., e.g., Men. Pk. ­121–​­123, ­785–​­786, Ael. VH 2.7 with discussion on threptoi (­θρεπτοί, fosterlings) in Cameron (­1939: ­50–​­51, ­54–​­56, ­61–​­62), ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2005: ­173–​­174), Ricl (­2009). 32 For Hippocratic healers’ inability, in some cases, to verify the information received from the female patient, see, e.g., Hippoc. Epid. 4.6. 33 E.g., Ar. Lys. 746, Pl. Tht. 149a.2, b.4, c.6. See also akestris (­ἀκεστρίς, Hippoc. De carnibus 19.47), and omphalētomos (­ὀμφαλητόμος, ‘(­u mbilical)­­cord–​­cutter’, Hippoc. Mul. 1 46.12). These terms were most probably used as synonyms rather than indicating specific areas or degrees of skill in obstetrics; see, e.g., Hipponax fr. 19, Arist. Hist. an. 587a.­9 –​­24, Phot. s.v. μαῖαν, ὀμφαλητομία, Hsch. s.v. ὀμφαλητόμος. 34 For female doctors/­practitioners, see Hippoc. Mul. 1 68.­31–​­33, Pl. Res­p. 454d.2 with Pomeroy (­1978); ­Dean-​­Jones (­1994: ­31–​­33), Demand (­1994: ­67–​­68), Hanson (­1994: ­174–​­175, 1996: 169), Parker (­1997: ­131–​­134, 140), King (­1998: 167, ­177–​­178). 35 For breaching of traditional female domination on childbirth care in late fi ­ fth-​­century BCE Athens, see Demand (­1995: ­285–​­286). It is not possible to estimate the frequency with which male physicians were called upon to treat unproblematic births (­K ing 1998: ­179–​­180); cf. ­Dean-​­Jones, who argues ex silentio for its routine occurrence (1994: ­33–​­35, ­212–​­213), while Hanson believes that it was a matter of taste (­1994: 158, 1­ 71–​­174). 36 Hippoc. Mul 1 62.­9 –​­11, Hyg. Fab. 274. ­10–​­13; cf. Eur. Hip­p. ­293–​­296; Lloyd (­1983: 70, ­78–​­79). 37 E.g., Eur. Alc. ­318–​­319. Iconographic representations of mortal women during childbirth are extremely rare in classical Greek art; see, e.g., the scene on a funerary monument of Plangōn found in Oropus, dated to 320 BCE (­Athens, National Archaeological Museum 749; Demand 1994: 124, 161 pl. 6), where a parturient appears surrounded by female attendants. 38 According to Hippocratic writings, the role of men of the parturient’s household generally amounted to providing supplies and adapting of equipment for the delivery, while their assistance during the delivery process itself was employed mainly in complicated cases (­Hanson 1994: ­160–​­170; cf. 1996: ­171–​­172). 39 Cf. Terentius (­An. ­514–​­515), whose comedies, to a large extent, followed Greek models (­see above n.8). 40 For the inconclusiveness of her oath regarding Demaratus’ paternity, see Fletcher (­2014: ­174–​­175) and cf. above n.12.

308

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens

Bibliography Austin, C. and Olson, S.D. (­2004) Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae (­Oxford) Barone, C. (­1987) ‘­L’ἀπαιδíα in Euripide: terminologia specifica’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 18, ­57–​­67 Blok, J.H. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Cameron, A. (­1939) ‘­ΘΡΕΠΤΟΣ and related terms in the inscriptions of Asia Minor’, in W.M. Calder and J. Keil (­eds) Anatolian studies presented to W.H. Buckler (­Manchester) ­27– ​­62 Conacher, D.J. (­2007) Euripides, Alcestis (­Warminster) Cox, C.A. (­1998) Household interests: property, marriage strategies and family dynamics in ancient Athens (­Princeton, NJ) ——— ​­(­2011) ‘­Marriage in ancient Athens’, in B. Rawson (­ed.) A companion to families in the Greek and Roman worlds (­Oxford) ­231–​­244 Davies, J.K. (­1971) Athenian propertied families, ­6 00–​­300 BC (­Oxford) ­Dean-​­Jones, L. (­1994) Women’s bodies in classical Greek science (­Oxford) Demand, N. (­1994) Birth, death, and motherhood in classical Greece (­Baltimore, MD) ——— ​­(­1995) ‘­Monuments, midwives, and gynecology’, in Ph.J. van der Eijk, H. Horstmanshoff, and P. Schrijvers (­eds) Ancient medicine in its ­socio-​­cultural context: papers read at the congress held at Leiden University ­13–​­15 April 1992, vol. 1 (­A msterdam and Atlanta) ­275–​­290 Dmitriev, S. (­2014) ‘­Posthumous adoption in classical Athens’, Chiron 44, ­67–​­85 Dosuna, J.M. (­2016) ‘­Some critical notes on the new Dodona lead plates’, ZPE 197, ­119–​­139 Eyben, E. (­1980) ‘­Family planning in ­Graeco-​­Roman antiquity’, AncSoc 11, ­5 –​­82 Flemming, R. (­2013) ‘­The invention of infertility in the classical Greek world: medicine, divinity, and gender’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87.4, ­565–​­590 Fletcher, J. (­2014) ‘­Oaths, gender and status’, in A.H. Sommerstein and I.C. Torrance (­eds) Oaths and swearing in ancient Greece (­Berlin and Boston, MA) ­156–​­179 Foxhall, L. (­1989) ‘­Household, gender and property in classical Athens’, CQ, 39.1, ­22–​­44 Gardner, J.F. (­1989) ‘­A ristophanes and male a­ nxiety  – ​­the defence of the “­oikos”’, G&R 36.1, ­51–​­62 Ghiggia, P.C. (­1999) L’adozione ad Atene in epoca classica (­A lessandria) Golden, M. (­1981) ‘­Demography and the exposure of girls at Athens’, Phoenix 35.4, ­316–​­331 ——— ​­(­2015) Children and childhood in classical Athens (­Baltimore, MD) Gomme, A.W. and Sandbach, F.H. (­1973) Menander: a commentary (­Oxford) Griffith, M. (­1978) ‘­Euripides Alkestis ­636–​­641’, HSCP 82, ­83–​­86 ­Griffith-​­Williams, B. (­2013) A commentary on selected speeches of Isaios (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­Would I lie to you? Narrative and performance in Isaios 6’, in S. Papaioannou, A. Serafim, and B. da Vela (­eds) The theatre of justice: aspects of performance in ­G reco-​­Roman oratory and rhetoric (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­42–​­56 Hall, E. (­1997) ‘­T he sociology of Athenian tragedy’, in P.E. Easterling (­ed.) The Cambridge companion to Greek tragedy (­Cambridge) ­93–​­126 Hansen, M.H. (­2006) The shotgun method: the demography of the ancient Greek ­city-​­state culture (­Columbia and London) Hanson, A.E. (­1994) ‘­A division of labor: roles for men in Greek and Roman births’, Thamyris 1.2, ­157–​­202 ——— (­ ​­ 1996) ‘­Phaenarete: mother and maia’, in R. Wittern and P. Pellegrin (­eds) Hippokratische Medizin und antike Philosophie. Verhandlung des VIII. Internationalen H ­ ippokrates-​ ­Kolloquiums, ­23–​­28 Sept. 1995 (­Hildesheim) ­159–​­182 Harris, E.M. (­1989) ‘­Demosthenes’ speech against Meidias’, HSCP 92, ­117–​­136 ——— ​­(­2008) Demosthenes, speeches ­2 0–​­22 (­Austin, TX) Harrison, A.R.W. (­1968) The law of Athens (­Oxford) Haussker, F. (­2017) ‘­The ekthesis of Cyrus the Great: a case study of heroicity versus bastardy in classical Athens’, PCPhS 63, ­103–​­117 Hong, Y. (­2016) ‘­Mothering in ancient Athens: class, identity and experience’, in S.L. Budin and J.M. Turfa (­eds) Women in antiquity: real women across the ancient world (­London and New York) ­673–​­682 Hornblower, S. (­2013) Herodotus, Histories Book V (­Cambridge)

309

Fayah Haussker Huebner, S.R. (­2013) ‘­Adoption and fosterage in the ancient eastern Mediterranean’, in J. Evans Grubbs, T. Parkin, and R. Bell (­eds) The Oxford handbook of childhood and education in the classical world (­Oxford) ­510–​­531 Huys, M. (­1989) ‘­Έκθεσις and ἀπόθεσις: the terminology of infant exposure in Greek Antiquity’, AC 58, ­190–​­197 ——— ​­(­1995) The tale of the hero who was exposed at birth in Euripidean tragedy: a study of motifs (­Leuven) Johnstone, S. (­2003) ‘­Women, property, and surveillance in classical Athens’, ClAnt 22.2, ­247–​­274 Jouanna, J. (­1999) Hippocrates, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (­Baltimore, MD and London) King, H. (­1998) Hippocrates’ woman: reading the female body in ancient Greece (­London and New York) Laes, C. (­2020) ‘­Children, life course and families on the lead tablets of Dodona’, LEC 88.­1–​­4, ­181–​­199 Leduc, C. (­1998) ‘­L’adoption dans la cité des Athéniens, VIe s­ iècle-​­IVe siècle av. J.-​­C.’, Pallas 48, ­175–​­202 Lefkowitz, M.R. (­2012) Lives of the Greek poets (­Baltimore, MD) Lloyd, G.E.R. (­1983) Science, folklore and ideology: studies in the life sciences in ancient Greece (­Cambridge) MacDowell, D.M. (­1990) Demosthenes, Against Meidias (­Oration 21) (­Oxford) Murray, A.T. (­1939) Demosthenes with an English translation (­Cambridge, MA and London) Ogden, D. (­1996) Greek bastardy in the classical and Hellenistic periods (­Oxford) ——— (­ ​­ 2009) ‘­Bastardy and fatherlessness in the ancient Greek world’, in S.R. Hübner and D.M. Ratzan (­eds) Growing up fatherless in antiquity (­Cambridge and New York) 1­ 05–​­119 Parker, H.N. (­1997) ‘­Women doctors in Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire’, in L.R. Furst (­ed.) Women healers and physicians: climbing a long hill (­Lexington) ­131–​­150 ——— ​­(­1999) ‘­Greek embryological calendars and a fragment from the Lost work of Damastes, on the care of pregnant women and of infants’, CQ 49.2, ­515–​­534 Parker, L.P. (­2007) Euripides, Alcestis (­Oxford) Parkin, T. (­2013) ‘­The demography of infancy and early childhood’, in J. Evans Grubbs, T. Parkin, and R. Bell (­eds) The Oxford handbook of childhood and education in the classical world (­Oxford) ­40–​­61 Patterson, C. (­1985) ‘­Not worth the rearing: the causes of infant exposure in ancient Greece’, TAPhA 115, ­103–​­123 ——— ​­(­1990) ‘­Those Athenian bastards’, ClAnt 9.1, ­40–​­73 Phillips, D.D. (­2013) The law of ancient Athens (­A nn Arbor, MI) Piccinini, J. (­2015) ‘­Longing for children in Dodona: considerations of the epigraphic evidence’, PP 70.1, ­93–​­109 Pomeroy, S.B. (­1978) ‘­Plato and the female physician (­Republic 454d2)’, AJPh 99.4, ­496–​­500 Powell, A. (­2001) Athens and Sparta: constructing Greek political and social history from 478 B.C. (­London and New York) Raepsaet, G. (­1971) ‘­Les motivations de la natalité à Athènes aux Ve et IVe siècles avant notre ère’, AC 40.1, ­80–​­110 Ricl, M. (­2009) ‘­L egal and social status of threptoi and related categories in narrative and documentary sources’, in H.M. Cotton, R.G. Hoyland, J.J. Price, and D.J. Wasserstein (­e ds) From Hellenism to Islam: cultural and linguistic change in the Roman Near East (­Cambridge) ­93–​­114 Rowe, G.O. (­1994) ‘­The charge against Meidias’, Hermes 122.1, ­55–​­63 Rubinstein, L. (­1993) Adoption in IV. century Athens (­Copenhagen) ——— ​­(­1999) ‘­Adoption in classical Athens’, in M. Corbier (­ed.) Adoption et fosterage (­Paris) ­45–​­62 Scafuro, A.C. (­1994) ‘­Witnessing and false witnessing: proving citizenship and kin identity in ­fourth-​­century Athens’, in A.L. Boegehold and A.C. Scafuro (­eds) Athenian identity and civic ideology (­Baltimore, MD) ­156–​­198 ——— ​­(­2011) Demosthenes, Speeches ­39– ​­49 (­Austin, TX) Schaps, D.M. (­1979) The economic rights of women in ancient Greece (­Edinburgh) Schorn, S. (­2004) Satyros aus Kallatis. Sammlung der Fragmente mit Kommentar (­Basel) Sealey, R. (­1990) Women and law in classical Greece (­Chapel Hill, NC)

310

Smuggling infants: citizenship fraud in classical Athens Senkova, M. (­2015) ‘­Male infertility in classical Greece: some observations’, ­G raeco-​­L atina Brunensia 20.1, ­121–​­131 Slater, N.W. (­1993) ‘­Theozotides on adopted sons: (­Lysias fr. 6)’, Scholia 2, ­81–​­85 Totelin, L. (­2020) ‘­Do no harm: Phanostrate’s midwifery practice’, Technai: An International Journal for Ancient Science and Technology 11, ­129–​­144 Traill, A. (­2008) Women and the comic plot in Menander (­Cambridge) Wickramasinghe, C. (­2014) ‘­Marriage, the ­fi rst-​­born child and its significance in the social status of women in classical Athens’, SriLanka Journal of Humanities 39.­1–​­2, ­65–​­80 Wilson, P.J. (­1991) ‘­Demosthenes 21 (­Against Meidias): democratic abuse’, PCPhS 37, ­164–​­195 Zeitlin, F.I. (­2008) ‘­Intimate relations: children, childbearing, and parentage on the Euripidean stage’, in M. Revermann and P. Wilson (­eds) Performance, iconography, reception: studies in honour of Oliver Taplin (­Oxford) ­318–​­332 ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz, R. (­2005) Not wholly free: the concept of manumission and the status of manumitted slaves in the ancient Greek world (­Leiden and Boston, MA)

311

22 POLIS AND OIKOS Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens Brenda ­Griffith-​­Williams

Citizenship, like membership of a family, confers rights and obligations, and in ­doing so creates a sense of identity based on inclusion in a group from which others are excluded as ‘­foreigners’, ‘­outsiders’, or ‘­not one of us’. It is clear from their laws about legitimacy and citizenship that the Athenians were concerned to preserve both their civic identity and the integrity of individual families’ bloodlines. An Athenian without natural legitimate sons could adopt a son and heir, and Athenian citizenship was sometimes conferred on foreigners as a privilege. But the primary qualification for citizen status in classical Athens, as for membership of an Athenian family (­oikos), was descent. Citizenship was passed down from father to children, with the additional proviso, while Pericles’s law of 451/450 BCE was in force, that only those with an Athenian mother, as well as an Athenian father, were citizens. In the domestic sphere, only legitimate children were members of their father’s oikos with the right to inherit a share of his estate after his death. Membership of a deme, compulsory for all male citizens, was passed down from father to son, while metics (­resident aliens), although registered in the demes in which they lived, were not full members. Membership of the phratries (­traditional kinship groups which admitted only legitimate sons of their members) was also hereditary, though probably not compulsory after the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes in the sixth century. Many scholars would agree with Sally Humphreys (­1974: 90) that ‘­Marriage, legitimacy and citizenship were tied together in the law of Athens’. Yet, as Josine Blok (­2017: 105 n.15) has observed more recently, ‘­Legal scholars . . . have long recognised the connection between claims to inheritance and claims to citizenship based on legitimate birth in classical Athens, but it seems that this insight has had little impact on the debate about citizenship . . . ’. In another recent contribution to the debate, Christopher Joyce (­2019: 483) argues that eligibility for inheritance and for citizenship was established by different criteria and through separate systems: ‘­legitimacy as far as the right to inherit was one matter, but legitimacy as a participant in democracy was another’ (­cf. Joyce in this volume). This chapter offers an inevitably selective review of the sources and the issues in the debate.

312

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-27

Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens

The concept of legitimate birth The dictionary definition of a legitimate child is one who is ‘­lawfully born’, a full member of a family with all the rights of a son or daughter in relation to his or her parents and enjoying a full legal relationship with other members of the ­family – ​­including, in particular, rights of inheritance. So, although a child is either legitimate or illegitimate at birth, legitimacy is not a natural condition but a legal status. Precise definitions of legitimacy vary in different legal systems, and some jurisdictions do not recognize the distinction at all. In those that do, a legitimate child is typically one whose parents were married to each other at the time of the child’s conception or birth (­or both) while a child of unmarried parents is illegitimate (­cf. Haussker in this volume). So the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate birth depends on the existence of marriage, or of some comparable institution that privileges certain forms of relationship and their offspring to the disadvantage or exclusion of others (­for a modern perspective, see, e.g., Teichman 1982: ­172–​­173). In Athens, the link between marriage and legitimacy was established by a law cited in several f­ ourth-​­century lawcourt speeches and attributed to the s­ ixth-​­century legislator, Solon ([Dem.] 46.18; cf. Hyp. Against Athenogenes 16 and [Dem.] 44.49, trans. Leão and Rhodes 2016: fr. 48b): The woman who is betrothed for a lawful marriage, by her father or brother born of the same father or by her grandfather on her father’s side, shall have her children as gnēsioi. No extant Athenian law explicitly defines the inheritance rights of legitimate (­gnēsioi) children or their status as family members, but we know from various sources that a legitimate child was a recognized member of his or her father’s oikos, with full inheritance rights. That position may be inferred from the Solonian law on wills, which, subject to certain conditions, permits an Athenian to ‘­dispose of his property as he wishes, provided he has no legitimate (­gnēsioi) male children’ (­cited at [Dem.] 46.14; Leão and Rhodes 2016: fr. 49a). It is implicit in this that legitimate sons had priority over other family members in terms of inheritance, and the law explicitly gave all legitimate sons an equal share in their father’s estate (­Isae. 6.25). In the fourth century, Solon’s ‘­law on wills’ was interpreted as conferring on Athenians without natural legitimate sons the right to adopt a son and heir, either inter vivos or by will. An adoptive father literally ‘­made a son for himself’, using the verb poiein or eispoiein in the middle voice. So, for example, Menecles tells the sons of his friend Eponymus, ‘­I wish to adopt (­poiēsasthai) one of you’ (­Isae. 2.11).1 Knemon says to his wife’s son Gorgias, ‘­I adopt ( ­pooumai) you as my son’ (­Men. Dys. 731). Our sources do not include the original text of a testamentary adoption, but the wording is reflected in forensic speeches about contested adoptions; for example, the speaker of Isaeus 9 asserts that Astyphilus ‘­did not adopt a son (­oute epoiēsato huon heautō), bequeath his property, or leave a will’ (­Isae. 9.1). An adopted son was thus (­eis)­poiētos, literally ‘­made’, as distinct from ‘­born’ or ‘­of the blood’ (­gnēsios), but there is a further and more significant distinction between ‘­legitimate’ (­gnēsios) and ‘­illegitimate’ (­nothos). The text of the Solonian law dealing with the inheritance rights of a nothos is transmitted in Aristophanes’s Birds, where

313

Brenda ­G riffith-­Williams

it has evidently been distorted for comic effect (­Ar. Av. ­1660–​­1664, trans. Leão and Rhodes 2016: fr. 50a): I will then cite for you the law of Solon: ‘­A n illegitimate child shall not have right of inheritance, if there are legitimate children; and if there are no legitimate children, the property shall pass to those most closely related’. Despite the ambiguity of this text, there is some evidence that an Athenian father, even if he had legitimate children, could make a bequest of limited value (­k nown as notheia) to a nothos (­cf. Harrison 1968: 67). But whatever the position was at the time of Aristophanes’s play (­414 BCE), a review of the law in 403/­402 excluded nothoi completely. Solon’s law on intestate succession, as cited in ­fourth-​­century legal cases, includes an additional sentence ([Dem.] 43.51, trans. Leão and Rhodes 2016: fr. 50b): Neither an illegitimate son nor an illegitimate daughter shall have rights of kinship, either in sacred or in secular affairs.2 (­Effective from the archonship of Eucleides.) The term nothos, unlike gnēsios, is not defined by the law, and its precise meaning is open to debate. According to Alick R.W. Harrison (­1968: 61), for example, ‘­Though it may sometimes have been used loosely, the term nothos must have denoted a strictly identifiable class of persons . . . since there was at least one law, attributed to Solon, defining or limiting the rights of such persons’. Cynthia Patterson (­1990: 52) has argued that nothos was not exactly equivalent to English ‘­illegitimate’ or ‘­born out of wedlock’, but applied only to ‘­the paternally recognized bastard’: the offspring of an unequal union (­typically between a male citizen and a prostitute) but of known paternity and recognized by his or her father, though not acknowledged as his legitimate child. As discussed by Rosalia Hatzilambrou (­2018: ­168–​­169), Patterson’s definition has not been widely accepted by later scholars, but it is worth remembering that in any litigation involving issues of legitimate status, whatever terminology is used, what matters is the (­allegedly) illegitimate child’s relationship to his or her father.

Pericles’s citizenship law and its implications for families In Solon’s definition of legitimacy it was the formal nature of the relationship between husband and wife, not the identity of the wife, that determined the status of their children. So, when Solon’s law was first introduced, legitimacy and citizenship were transmitted solely through the paternal line, and it was open to a male Athenian citizen to marry any free woman, whether or not she was also Athenian. That was fundamentally changed in the year 451/­450 BCE by Pericles’s citizenship law. The earliest extant reference to this law, the original text of which does not survive, is in the ­pseudo-​ ­Aristotelean Athēnaiōn Politeia (­26.3): And in the third year after [the archonship of] Lysicrates, in the archonship of Antidotus, because of the large number of citizens (­dia to plēthos tōn politōn) [the Athenian Assembly] passed a law proposed by Pericles that only those of citizen birth on both sides had citizenship (­mē Athēnaion einai hos an mē ex amphoin astoin ē gegonōs). 314

Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens

While the requirement for ‘­citizen birth on both sides’ probably reflects the wording of the law, it is unclear whether the phrase ‘­because of the large number of citizens’ was part of the original decree or rather part of a f­ ourth-​­century paraphrase (­see Blok 2009: ­142–​­146 for a detailed survey of the ancient sources). Some modern scholars, such as Vincent Azoulay (­2014: 82), have taken the explanation ‘­because of the large number of citizens’ more or less at face value, and offered a socio-economic interpretation of the law. Others, including Peter J. Rhodes (­1981: ­333–​­334), have recognized that the redefinition of citizenship probably had more to do with the preservation of civic identity than with the simple control of numbers. Josine Blok (­2009; 2017) offers a new interpretation, placing the emphasis on shared religious identity as the defining feature of Athenian citizenship. The law paraphrased at Ath. Pol. 26.3 is conveniently labelled ‘­Pericles’s citizenship law’, but it was not by accident or mistake that Plutarch referred to it as ‘­the law about nothoi’ (­Plut. Per. 37, 2­ –​­5). Although primarily concerned with eligibility for Athenian citizenship, the law inevitably had a profound impact on marriage, family structures, and inheritance rights, reflecting the close connection between an Athenian’s public status as a citizen within the polis and his private status within the domestic sphere of the oikos or family.3 By the late fourth century the law imposed severe penalties on foreigners living with Athenian citizens as husband or wife ([Dem.] 59.16) and on anyone who gave a foreign woman in marriage to an Athenian citizen as being his relative ([Dem.] 59.52). But these laws, clearly intended to deter fraudulent claims to citizenship, were later developments (­cf. Arnaoutoglou 1998: 18). Pericles’s law did not explicitly prohibit ‘­m ixed’ marriages between Athenians and ­non-​­Athenians, but it did, in effect, discourage such marriages ­ on-​­Athenian by delegitimizing their offspring: the son of an Athenian father and n mother4 would no longer be eligible for membership of a phratry or deme, and could not inherit his Athenian father’s land (­cf. Todd 1993: 178).

Recognition of paternity The concept of legitimacy and illegitimacy is closely associated with the integrity of the male bloodline, which is clearly of paramount importance in patrilineal societies such as classical Athens. If property and citizenship are to pass from father to child, then it must be possible for a man’s children to be identified with a reasonable degree of certainty. Until relatively recently, however, proof of paternity was notoriously difficult to establish: ‘­at the beginning of the twentieth century only the most rudimentary scientific evidence was available to resolve a dispute about parentage; and it was often said (­only ­half-​­jokingly) that paternity was a matter of opinion rather than fact’ (­Cretney 2003: 529). In a society such as classical Athens, the enforcement of the rules required a wife to be sexually faithful to her husband, and the law imposed harsh punishments for adultery by or with a married woman. There was, on the other hand, no legal or moral constraint on a male Athenian’s freedom to have sexual relationships with mistresses or prostitutes, either before, during or after marriage, and some of those relationships inevitably led to the birth of children. As we see from the cases of Mantias and Euctemon (­discussed below, p­p. 316, 321–322), there could be conflict and rivalry between children of the same father by different mothers, sometimes involving allegations by the children of one mother that those of the other were illegitimate. So, in practice 315

Brenda ­G riffith-­Williams

though not in law, the recognition of an Athenian child as legitimate depended strongly on the father’s willingness to acknowledge paternity. Neither the man’s wife nor the mother of his illegitimate child had any formal role in the public recognition process, although they could be expected to exercise their influence in private. The formal recognition of a legitimate Athenian son was a process carried out in several stages, over a period of years. It is important to note that the recognition process described here relates only to male Athenians. There is some evidence (Isae. 3.73–76) that a father might in certain circumstances introduce a daughter to his phratry, but no positive statement in any extant source that this ever actually happened, or that Athenian women or girls were ever registered as full members of a phratry or deme.5 The first step was a private family celebration held on the tenth day after a baby’s birth (­the dekatē), at which the father formally acknowledged and named his child. Then, at the annual autumn festival of Apatouria, the young boy was introduced to his father’s phratry and, if the father belonged to one, his genos, a ­sub-​­group of a phratry whose members performed certain religious cults for which they provided the priest or priestess (membership of a genos was not universal, and had no specific legal significance, but it was sometimes used as supporting evidence of legitimate birth or citizenship.) The introducer, normally the father himself, was required to swear an oath on the sacrificial victims that the child he was introducing was the legitimate offspring of an Athenian mother.6 The assembled members then took a vote, and, if they all agreed, the new member’s name was inscribed on the phratry’s register; but if anyone objected, the victim was withdrawn from the altar and the candidate was rejected (­Isae. 6.22).7 There was probably a second introduction ceremony in the phratry while the boy was an adolescent,8 then, at the final stage of the recognition process, when the young man reached the age of 18, he was registered as a member of his father’s deme. When the formalities in the phratry and deme were completed, the young man became a full member of his father’s oikos, and registration in the deme also confirmed his status as an Athenian citizen. Following Cleisthenes’s constitutional reforms in the sixth century, membership of a deme was compulsory for all Athenian citizens. The question whether phratry membership was also a legal requirement under the ­Cleisthenic constitution is a matter of scholarly debate (­for a detailed and nuanced discussion, see Lambert 1998: ­25–​­57). Even if (­as I am inclined to believe) membership was not required, it seems likely that most (­p erhaps all) Athenians did belong to a phratry, even in the fourth century, not least because evidence of phratry membership was likely to be useful in the event of a legal dispute about either inheritance or citizenship.

The significance of legitimacy in legal disputes Evidence of phratry membership was clearly essential in a disputed inheritance case where a claimant’s legitimate birth was in question. The speaker of Isaeus 8, On the estate of Ciron, confirms that he and his brother were introduced by their father to his phratry (­8.19) as one of his proofs that his mother was her father’s legitimate daughter. ­He does not mention that they were registered in their father’s deme, presumably because membership of a phratry was accepted as sufficient evidence of legitimate birth. In Isaeus 6, On the estate of Philoctemon, where the speaker seeks to prove that his opponents were not legitimate sons of Euctemon, he is faced with the embarrassing and undeniable fact that Euctemon introduced one of them to his phratry (­6.­21–​­24). 316

Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens

Evidence of phratry membership (­as well as deme registration) is also used in the two surviving speeches from cases of disputed citizenship. Euxitheus, the speaker of ­Demosthenes 57, brings witnesses to testify that he was introduced to his father’s ­phratry and deme, adding (­Dem. 57.54): Indeed, my father himself, when alive, swore the customary oath and introduced me to the members of his phratry, knowing that I was an Athenian, born of a citizen woman who was legally married to him (­ἀστὸν ἐξ ἀστῆς ἐγγυητῆς αὑτῷ γεγενημένον), and these matters have been the subject of testimony. Similarly, the speaker of Isaeus 12, On behalf of Euphiletus (­whose brother, Euphiletus, is threatened with ejection from his deme as a n ­ on-​­citizen) refers to evidence that his father introduced Euphiletus to the phratry (­12.3) and adds that his father ‘­was ready then and is ready now to swear that Euphiletus here really is his own son by a mother who is an Athenian and a wedded wife (­ex astēs kai gametēs gynaikos)’ (­Isae. 12.9). These texts do not, of course, prove that membership of a phratry was compulsory for all citizens (­and neither do they show conclusively that legitimate birth was a sine qua non of citizenship); the evidentiary significance of phratry membership is simply that it provided strong proof of Athenian parentage. An Athenian who adopted a son inter vivos would be expected to introduce him to his phratry and deme on the same terms as a natural legitimate son, and evidence of deme registration, as well as phratry membership, was crucial if the validity of the adoption was challenged after the adoptive father’s death (in a case of testamentary adoption, the formalities of phratry introduction and deme enrolment would be carried out only after the will had been approved by a court). Two of Isaeus’s surviving speeches, 2 and 7, were delivered by claimants to an estate on the basis of an adoption inter vivos. The speaker of Isaeus 2, On the estate of Menecles, supported by witness testimony from phratry members and demesmen, simply records the fact that his adoptive father, Menecles, introduced him to his phratry and enrolled him in his deme. Isaeus 7, On the estate of Apollodorus (­in which the speaker, Thrasyllus, claims to have been adopted inter vivos by his maternal uncle, Apollodorus) is more informative about the procedure. According to Joyce (­2019: 486), the evidence of Isaeus 7 ‘­shows that adoptees could gain access to the phratry of their adopted father regardless of the question of whether the natural parents had been joined by engyē’. In fact, it shows precisely the opposite (­Isae. 7.16): They [the genos and phratry] share the same rule, that when a man introduces his son, whether natural or adopted, he swears an oath with his hand on the sacrificial victims that he is introducing the child of an Athenian mother (­astē) and born in wedlock, whether it’s his natural son or an adopted one. In the unusual circumstances of this case, Apollodorus himself introduced Thrasyllus to his phratry and genos, but died while Thrasyllus was away from Athens at a festival, before the deme meeting at which he had been planning to enrol him. Apollodorus had anticipated this eventuality by making his wishes known to his fellow demesmen, who duly enrolled Thrasyllus despite the objections of Apollodorus’s cousin, a rival claimant to the estate (­Isae. 7.­27–​­28): 317

Brenda ­G riffith-­Williams

Before I returned from the Pythaid festival, Apollodorus told his demesmen that he had adopted me as his son, had registered me among the members of his genos and phratry, and had entrusted his property to me; and he urged them, if anything should happen to him before I returned, to enter me in the deme register as Thrasyllus son of Apollodorus and not to fail in this. The demesmen listened to this, and, even though our opponents complained at the deme elections that he had not adopted me as his son, based on what they heard and what they knew, they swore the oath with hands on the victims and registered me, just as he had asked them to do, so well known amongst them was my adoption. This contested deme registration, not mentioned by Joyce (­2019), undermines his assertion (­based on the evidence of the Athēnaiōn Politeia) that ‘­W hereas the purpose of phratries was to establish kinship, the deme established membership in the body politic’ (­Joyce 2019: 478; and in this volume). In fact, it is clear from this passage that the demes were not solely concerned with citizenship to the exclusion of family matters; an adoptive father’s deme had the power to veto an adoption if the demesmen were not satisfied of its validity. If, however, the adopted son was (­as in most cases) an adult, such a rejection would not deprive him of citizenship, since he would already be a member of his natural father’s deme.

Could nothoi be citizens? We have seen that a child’s legal relationship to his (­or her) father could be gnēsios (­natural, legitimate) or nothos (­natural but illegitimate) or poiētos (­adopted, with rights equivalent to those of a gnēsios). Similar terminology arises in the context of citizenship, suggesting parallels between the domestic and civic spheres, albeit sometimes with different shades of meaning. A gnēsios citizen was ‘­of the blood’, one who held the status as of right from birth, as distinct from a foreigner who ‘­became Athenian’ or was ‘­made a citizen’ by decree of the polis. Citizens by decree are sometimes described in the literary sources as poiētoi, inviting comparisons between the status of a naturalized citizen in the polis and an adopted son in the oikos (­see, e.g., [Dem.] 60.4, Lyc. 1.48, Lys. 13. 70, 13.91; cf. Blok 2017: 253 on the parallel between citizenship by decree and adoption). As to the civic status of nothoi, two passages from Aristotle’s Politics show that this could vary according to the different constitutions of the ancient Greek poleis. First, in Book 3 (­Arist. Pol. 1278a, trans. Barker): There are, for example, some democracies where someone who has only a citizen mother (­πολίτιδος) is admitted; and there are many cities where the same privilege is granted to those of illegitimate birth (­νόθους). But the policy of extending citizenship so widely is [generally] due to a dearth of citizens by birth (­τῶν γνησίων πολιτῶν); and it is only shortage of population which produces such legislation. When they have sufficient numbers they gradually disqualify such people: first sons of a slave father or slave mother are disqualified; then those who are born of a citizen mother but alien father; and in the end they only make those people citizens who are of citizen parentage on both sides (­ἐξ ἀμφοῖν ἀστῶν). Like Ath. Pol. 26.3 (­discussed above, ­p. 315), Aristotle here assumes a link between the adoption of different eligibility criteria for citizenship and the perceived need either to 318

Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens

expand or to decrease the size of the citizen body. The reference to ‘­citizen parentage on both sides’ (­ἐξ ἀμφοῖν ἀστῶν) also echoes Ath. Pol. 26.3, and it may have been a direct citation from Pericles’s law (­cf. Blok 2009: 142). In this context the phrase ‘­citizens by birth’ (­γ νησίων πολιτῶν) seems to imply that the only true citizens by birth (­in other words, those who are universally recognized as citizens) are those born of two citizen parents. (­Joyce 2019: 477 rightly observes that the adjective gnēsiōn, which qualifies the noun politōn, does not necessarily refer to the marital status of the citizen’s parents.) Other categories, such as nothoi and those with only one citizen parent, can be ‘­made’ citizens by law (­like foreigners who are ‘­made’ citizens by decree) if the number of ­gnēsioi falls too low.9 Aristotle reverts to the qualifications for citizenship in Book 6 of the Politics, in a discussion of various forms of democracy. An inferior variety is characterized by the sheer size of the citizen body, based on inclusive criteria (­Arist. Pol. 1319b, trans. Barker): In order to construct such a democracy and to strengthen the populace, the leaders usually increase its numbers to the greatest possible extent, making citizens not only those of legitimate birth (­τοὺς γνησίους) but also the illegitimate (­τοὺς νόθους) and those who have only one citizen parent, whether father or mother. In this second text, unlike 1278a, there is a clear opposition between gnēsioi and nothoi, implying that legitimate birth in the ordinary (­domestic) sense might also be a criterion for citizenship. In both texts, however (­implicitly in the first and explicitly in the second) nothoi are identified as a separate category from those with a citizen father but ­non-​­citizen mother, who, in the specifically Athenian context, were excluded from citizenship by Pericles’s law. It is also generally accepted that the majority of nothoi borne to an Athenian father by a mistress or prostitute were disqualified from citizenship, because the mother was most likely to be a metic or slave. That, however, leaves an unresolved issue about the status of nothoi whose parents were both Athenian citizens, but not legally married to each other. The scholarly debate on that question began in the nineteenth century, and still continues. William Wyse (­1904: 280) described the debate as ‘­a long, confused, and unimportant controversy’, adding that the evidence of the Athēnaiōn Politeia was ‘­a very insecure foundation’ for the belief that the child of unmarried Athenian parents was a citizen and could be admitted to his father’s deme. For those who maintain that nothoi with two Athenian parents did have citizen status,10 two passages from the Athēnaiōn Politeia provide the main evidence. First, as we have seen (­at p ­ p. 314–315 above), the paraphrase of Pericles’s citizenship law at Ath. Pol. 26.3 establishes descent from two Athenian parents as the new criterion for citizenship, but it does not specify that the parents must be legally married. Secondly, according to the Athēnaiōn Politeia’s account of the procedure (­Ath. Pol. 42.1): Citizenship belongs to those of citizen parentage on both sides (­ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων γεγονότες ἀστῶν), and they are registered on the rolls of their demes at the age of 18. And at the time of registration the demesmen decide by voting on oath, first whether they have reached the legal age, and secondly whether the candidate is free and was born in accordance with the laws (­κατὰ τοὺς νόμους). The phrase ex amphoterōn astōn (­although the wording is slightly different from that at 26.3) confirms the requirement for Athenian citizens to be of citizen parentage on both 319

Brenda ­G riffith-­Williams

sides, and, again, there is no explicit reference to the parents’ marital status. According to Rhodes (­1981: 500), the question on which the demesmen are required to vote, whether the candidate was ‘­born in accordance with the laws’ (­kata tous nomous) ‘­refers not to being born in wedlock . . . but generally to being born in accordance with the laws which state the requirements for Athenian citizenship’. Nevertheless, the absence from the Athēnaiōn Politeia of a further requirement for birth from legally married parents does not suffice to prove that no such requirement existed.11 As noted by, for example, Wyse (­1904: 2­ 81–​­282), the birth of a child to an Athenian man and woman who were not legally married to each other, in circumstances where the father was prepared to acknowledge paternity, is likely to have been an extremely rare event. Nevertheless, as Humphreys (­1974: 89) points out, if such a child was eligible for citizenship, there must have been a formal procedure for recognition by the father and registration by the polis. We know that nothoi were not admitted to phratries, but it remains possible that they might have been accepted by the demes (­provided the marital status of their parents really was irrelevant to deme membership). How, in practice, would this work? Wyse (­1904: 282) poured scorn on the very idea that an Athenian father might even contemplate such a step: Was a man likely to come before a public body, intensely jealous of foreign intrusion, and attempt to demonstrate that he himself, and no one else, particularly no foreigner and no slave, was the father of a child of an Athenian woman born out of wedlock eighteen years ago? It would have been safer and easier and kinder to the woman and her family to trump up evidence of marriage. Wyse’s argument is, in my view, persuasive, despite his characteristically polemical tone, and one might add that it would have been just as difficult (­if not more so) to prove that the mother of an 1­ 8-­​­­year-​­old was an Athenian citizen not married to the father. Was there, then, an alternative route to citizenship for those who were ex amphoin astoin but not ex astēs kai gamētēs gynaikos? An obscure reference to ‘­the nothoi at Kynosarges here in Athens, in the old days’ (­Dem. 23.213, probably 351 BCE) hints at such a possibility, at some earlier time in Athens’s history. That, like most of our other sources, is open to different interpretations, of which Humphreys (­1974) provides a full discussion.

Disputed cases: law and rhetoric It remains to consider whether the forensic speeches of the Attic orators offer any evidence for the civic status of nothoi. A key source is Isaeus 3, On the estate of Pyrrhus, which according to Harrison (­1968: 66) ‘­proves that the illegitimate daughter of Athenian parents could be married by engyē’. Joyce (­2019: 481) agrees that on the evidence of Isaeus 3 we have a conclusive reason to think that nothoi could be citizens in a political sense even if their legal status with respect to inheritance law was not the same as gnēsioi. Isae. 3 shows conclusively that legitimacy as far as the right to inherit was one matter, but legitimacy as a participant in democracy was another. But the evidence from this highly rhetorical speech, where argumentation from probability predominates over narrative and hypothetical (­often ironic) questions abound, 320

Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens

needs to be treated with extreme caution. Hatzilambrou (­2018: 33) rightly observes that ‘­the case of Phile in Isaeus’s third speech cannot be used as evidence (­especially as principal or sole evidence)’ for the view that an illegitimate child of two Athenian parents had the right to citizenship. The issue at the heart of the dispute in Isaeus 3 is the conflict between the inheritance rights of an epiklēros (­a daughter who is left as her father’s only natural legitimate offspring at his death) and those of an adopted son. Pyrrhus died leaving a daughter, Phile, who was apparently still too young to marry, and a will in which he nominated Endius, his nephew (­sister’s son) as his adopted son. Pyrrhus’s will was apparently uncontested, and Endius took over the estate. Once Phile was of marriageable age, he did not marry her himself (­as the speaker argues that he ought to have done, if she had been Pyrrhus’s legitimate daughter) but gave her in marriage to Xenocles. When Endius died, about 20 years later, the estate was contested between Phile (­claiming as Pyrrhus’s legitimate daughter, represented by her husband, Xenocles) and the mother of Endius (­claiming as Pyrrhus’s sister and next of kin). Isaeus 3 is the prosecution speech from a dikē pseudomartyriōn (­action for false testimony) against Phile’s maternal uncle Nicodemus, who was one of Xenocles’s witnesses at the original trial. It was delivered on behalf of Pyrrhus’s sister by her surviving son (­the brother of Endius). The speaker never directly says that Phile was illegitimate, although he uses the word nothē twice.12 First, in a rhetorical question addressed sarcastically to the defendant, Nicodemus, he asks whether the latter did not realize he was making his niece, Phile, a nothē by allowing Endius to claim the estate without respecting her position as an epiklēros (­3.41) Secondly, he accuses Pyrrhus himself of disinheriting Phile and making her a nothē by adopting Endius without introducing Phile to his phratry (­3.75; on the limited significance of this text for the introduction ­ . 316, above). He also repeatedly of a legitimate daughter to her father’s phratry, see p insinuates that Phile was given in marriage by engyē to Xenocles ‘­as the daughter of a hetaira’ (­hōs ex hetairas) (­3.6, 24, 45, 48, 52, 55, 70, 71). What he does not say is that such a marriage, if it happened, would have been legally valid; indeed, he strongly implies that it would not, in his denunciation of Nicodemus (­Isae. 3.52): Endius, then, married off the woman Nicodemus says is his niece as if she were the child of a hetaira, and the defendant did not dispute the claim to Pyrrhus’ estate with Endius or, when Endius betrothed his niece as if she were the child of a hetaira, impeach him before the Archon, nor was he at all upset at the dowry bestowed on her, but he let all these things happen. But the laws are precise on all these points. A full analysis of the complex argumentation and obscure ‘­facts’ in Isaeus 3 would be beyond the scope of this chapter, but it should be clear that this speech cannot be treated as a reliable source of factual information about the civic status of Athenian nothoi. The evidence from other speeches of the Attic orators is equally inconclusive, because they offer no unequivocal examples of that situation. These sources are, nevertheless, worth examining, since they provide many indications of a broader link between family membership and citizenship. The link between legitimate birth and Athenian citizenship is clearly illustrated in the dispute between Mantitheus, son of Mantias of Thoricus (­the speaker of Demosthenes 39 and [Demosthenes] 40) and his (­probable) h ­ alf-​­brothers, Boeotus and Pamphilus (­for a fuller account of the case, wrongly described by Joyce 2019: 484 as one 321

Brenda ­G riffith-­Williams

of adoption, see G ­ riffith-​­Williams 2020). Mantitheus’s mother was the daughter of Polyaratus of Cholargus, married by engyē to Mantias. The mother of Boeotus and Pamphilus was Plangon, daughter of the disgraced Athenian general Pamphilus, with whom, according to Mantitheus, Mantias ‘­had some sort of relationship’ (­eplēsiazen, [Dem.] 40.8). The wording here is significant: cf. Isae. 3.10 and [Dem.] 59.19, 20, 41, 67, where the verb plēsiazein refers to relations between a hetaira and her clients. Mantias, reluctant to recognize Boeotus and Pamphilus as his legitimate sons, refused to introduce them to his phratry and enrol them in his deme until he was threatened with legal action by the adult Boeotus and tricked by Plangon into acknowledging them. Boeotus, allegedly, complained that Mantias, by refusing to acknowledge him as his legitimate son, ‘­deprived him of Athenian citizenship’ (­τ ῆς πατρίδος ἀποστερεῖσθαι, 39.3); and in the second speech, Mantitheus says that Plangon wanted to have Boeotos and Pamphilus adopted by her brothers, if Mantias would not acknowledge them, so that ‘­they would not be deprived of citizenship’ (­οὔτε τούτους ἀποστερήσεσθαι τῆς πόλεως, 40.10). Mantitheus also says that Boeotus ‘­became a citizen’ (­πολίτης γεγενημένος, 40.42) through the decision of an a­ rbitrator – not ​­ (­it is clearly implied) through birth as the son of two Athenian citizens. Furthermore, Boeotus should stop making trouble and be satisfied with having acquired citizenship, as well as a father and an inheritance (­39.34). There can be no doubt that Plangon, the daughter of Pamphilus, was an Athenian citizen, but the nature of her relationship with Mantias (­and hence the reason for Mantias’s refusal to acknowledge her sons) is not made clear. Mantitheus strives to create the impression that she was a hetaira, so that Boeotus and Pamphilus were either illegitimate sons of Mantias or not his sons at all (­cf. ­Griffith-​­Williams 2020: ­42–​­43). But Mantitheus never explicitly denies that she was at some time married to Mantias, leaving open the possibility that Mantias refused to acknowledge her sons because he suspected her of an adulterous affair. There is also a third possibility: that they really were his legitimate sons after all. These speeches, then, do not provide unequivocal evidence of the status of ‘­citizen nothoi’. But Mantitheus’s portrayal of Plangon, whether or not it was true, does hint at the possibiity (­however unusual) that a citizen woman could be a hetaira and bear the children of an Athenian man to whom she was not married. Athenian citizenship was a desirable status, so it is not surprising to find evidence (­or at least allegations) of fraudulent attempts to acquire it. In some cases, the motive might be financial; according to one forensic speaker, some Athenians ‘­are forced by poverty to adopt (­eispoieisthai) foreigners, in order to receive some assistance from them because through them they have become Athenian citizens’ (­Isae. 12.2). In [Demosthenes] 59, Apollodorus’s prosecution speech against Neaera, the formal accusation is that Stephanus and Neaera violated the law by living together as husband and wife, because Neaera was not an Athenian citizen. Apollodorus cites a law forbidding an Athenian (­astos or astē)­13 to live in marriage with an alien (­xenos or xenē) ([Dem.] 59.16, trans. Carey 1992): If an alien (­ξένος) lives in marriage with an Athenian woman (­ἀστῇ) by any manner or means, any Athenian at all who possesses the right may indict him before the Thesmothetai. If he is convicted, both he and his property are to be sold, and one third is to go to his successful prosecutor. The same is to apply if an alien woman (­ξένη) lives in marriage with an Athenian man (­ἀστῷ), and the man who lives with the alien woman (­ξένῃ) so convicted is to be fined one thousand drachmas. 322

Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens

Specifically, Apollodorus alleges that Stephanus gave Neaera’s daughter Phano in marriage as if she were his legitimate daughter and an Athenian citizen, first to Phrastor and secondly to Theogenes. Phano became pregnant while she was married to Phrastor, who divorced her when he discovered Stephanus’s deception. Later, weakened by illness, Phrastor was persuaded by Neaera and Phano to take back Phano’s child and acknowledge him as his legitimate son. But when he tried to introduce the child to his phratry and genos, the members of the genos refused to register him. When Phrastor took legal action against them, they challenged him to swear on oath that Phano’s child was his own son, ‘­lawfully born of a citizen wife married by engyē’ (­ἐξ ἀστῆς γυναικὸς καὶ ἐγγυητῆς κατὰ τὸν νόμον, [Dem.] 59.60). He declined to take the oath, knowing (­according to Apollodorus) that Phano, as Neaera’s daughter, was not an Athenian citizen.14 Allegations of fraud relating to citizenship sometimes arise in the context of a disputed inheritance claim, reminding us that such disputes could have a public as well as a private dimension. When Chariades first claimed the estate of Nicostratus, his aim was to have his son by his hetaira recognized as a citizen (­astos) (­Isae. 4.10). Isaeus does not say what procedure Chariades followed: perhaps he claimed that Nicostratus had adopted the child inter vivos, or in a will, or perhaps this was an attempt at a posthumous adoption. In any event, an attempt to legitimize a hetaira’s child by way of adoption would have been illegal, but if it had been successful the child would have been recognized not only as the legitimate son of Nicostratus but also as an astos – ​­a citizen by birth. This passage, unfortunately, provides no help with the question of ‘­citizen nothoi’, because Isaeus does not specify the civic status of Chariades’ hetaira. We cannot be sure whether he expected his audience to infer that she was a metic or slave (­as would have been most likely) or whether it made no difference because her illegitimate child would have been excluded from citizenship even if she was herself a citizen. The speaker of Isaeus 8 claims the estate of his maternal grandfather Ciron, but faces the allegation that his mother was not ‘­Ciron’s legitimate daughter’ (­Κίρωνος θυγάτηρ γνησία, 8.6). Lacking direct proof of her status, he seeks to persuade the judges with a combination of circumstantial evidence and argumentation from probability. Ciron, he says, married a cousin, the daughter of his mother’s sister. She bore him a daughter (­the speaker’s mother) but died about four years later. Ciron then brought up this daughter with his second wife (­the sister of Diocles of Phlya) and their two sons. He twice gave the daughter in marriage by engyē: first to Nausimenes of Cholargus, who died after a few years without leaving children, and then to the speaker’s father. The latter celebrated the marriage by inviting his relatives and three friends to a ­wedding-​ f­east and then giving the customary ­marriage-​­banquet (­gamēlia) for his phratry (­on the significance of the gamēlia as evidence of a woman’s legitimate birth, cf. Isae. 3. 76 with Hatzilambrou 2018: ­218–​­219). Later, the speaker’s mother was chosen by the wives of the demesmen to preside at the Thesmophoria and conduct the ceremonies jointly with the wife of Diocles of Pithus. When the speaker and his brother were born, their father introduced them to his phratry, swearing that they were the children ‘­of a legally married Athenian mother’ (­ἐξ ἀστῆς καὶ ἐγγυητῆς γυναικός, 8.19). None of the phratry members raised any objection, despite careful scrutiny. None of this would have happened, the speaker insists, if his mother had been ‘­the kind of woman our opponents allege’ (­8.20), and not Ciron’s legitimate daughter; in fact, he says, her status was so well known that no one ever questioned it. In a speech concerned with inheritance, it is hardly surprising that the speaker focuses on his 323

Brenda ­G riffith-­Williams

mother’s status within the family, referring to her no fewer than seven times as ‘­Ciron’s legitimate daughter’. But towards the end of the speech, he seeks to elevate the significance of his case from the domestic to the public sphere, warning the judges of the grave consequences if they are deceived by his opponent: ‘­For if you are misled into believing that our mother was not a citizen woman ( ­politis), then neither are we citizens, since we were born after the archonship of Eucleides’ (­8.43). In referring to the archonship of Eucleides, the speaker of Isaeus 8 alludes to the law excluding illegitimate children from inheritance rights (­see pp. 313–314 above), which is also partially cited at Isaeus 6.47. In that speech, in sharp contrast to the idealized portrayal of the speaker’s mother in Isaeus 8, the villain of the piece is Alce, a former slave who allegedly persuaded the senile and gullible Euctemon to introduce one of her sons (­possibly Euctemon’s nothos, although that is not made explicit) into his phratry. As in Isaeus 8, Isaeus again raises the issues in the case from the domestic to the civic sphere in his condemnation of Alce not only for trying to pass off her son as an Athenian citizen, but also for illegally infiltrating the Thesmophoria, a festival strictly reserved for women of citizen status (­Isae. 6.­48–​­50). Joyce (­2019: 484) insists that the phratry introduction was concerned purely with inheritance, not citizenship: ‘­Nothing in the speech … indicates that rejection [by] the phratry meant rejection from the citizen body’. He is right to point out that Alce’s actions are not explicitly presented as an attempted usurpation of citizenship, but the implication is perfectly clear and would not have needed to be spelt out to an audience of Athenian judges. From contrasting perspectives, then, both Isaeus 8 and Isaeus 6 reveal the importance of religious observance as a defining feature of the female Athenian citizen, differentiating her from metics and slaves.

Conclusion Unless some decisive new evidence is found, the debate about legitimate birth and Athenian citizenship will inevitably remain unresolved. Athenian law was never systematically codified, and Athenian legislators, unlike their modern counterparts, did not make clear distinctions between categories such as ‘­family law’ and ‘­constitutional law’. The wording of legislation was often vague, and a law dating from Solon’s time would not necessarily be repealed or amended in the fifth or fourth century; it might simply be reinterpreted to suit the changing circumstances. Evidence from rhetorical sources is particularly difficult to interpret because nuances that would have been easily understood by an Athenian audience are often obscure to the modern reader. Given the nature of the sources, then, there is still scope for scholarly debate and disagreement, but problems of interpretation are exacerbated by a scholarly tendency to extract relevant passages from these sources without regard to their legal and rhetorical context. The insistence of some modern scholars on narrow semantic or functional distinctions would not have made sense to a f­ ourth-​­century Athenian, and it does nothing to enhance our understanding of Athenian law and society. In my (­inevitably subjective) judgement, the overall weight of the evidence points to an indissoluble link between membership of an Athenian oikos and membership of the polis. The Athenians shared in their city, not only through their participation in its democratic processes and religious observances, but also in a less abstract and more literal sense through their ownership of the land itself. Only legitimate Athenian citizens were permitted to own land in Attica, and when an Athenian inherited his family’s ancestral 324

Citizenship and family membership in classical Athens

plot from his father, he was, quite literally, inheriting his share in the city. In the words of Patterson (­2005: 281): ‘­By the ­m idcentury – ​­and Pericles’ proposal of 451–450 – ​­Athenians thought of their city as a public family, in which they all shared as heirs’.

Notes 1 Translations from the speeches of Isaeus are based on those of Edwards (­2007). Except as otherwise indicated, translations of other Greek texts are my own. 2 Leão and Rhodes follow the traditional interpretation of hiera kai hosia as ‘­sacred and secular’. Blok (­2017: 106) challenges the scholarly consensus, arguing that the phrase does not express an antithesis between religious and secular aspects of polis or family life, but, rather, different aspects of polis religion. 3 On Pericles’s personal dilemma after the death of his legitimate sons left him with only a nothos by the Miletan Aspasia, see, especially, Carawan (­2008). Cf. Ogden (­1996: ­61–​­62) and Azoulay (­2014: 244 n.59) on Aspasia’s status as the mistress (­or possibly wife) of Pericles. 4 Sometimes described as a mētroxenos (­Pollux 3.21, cited by Harrison 1968: 61), but the term is not found in classical sources. 5 For discussion, see Lambert (­1998: ­36–​­37) (­whose conclusions are o ­ ver-​­simplified by Joyce 2019: 482), and cf. p. 323 on the gamēlia as signalling a wife’s acceptance by the members of her husband’s phratry. 6 The precise wording of the oath varies in the sources, probably reflecting differences between individual phratries: ‘­lawfully born of a citizen mother’ (­ἐξ ἀστῆς . . . καὶ γεγονότα ὀρθῶς, Isae. 7.16); ‘­of a citizen mother married by engyē’ (­ἐξ ἀστῆς καὶ ἐγγυητῆς γυναικός, Isae. 8.19); ‘­of a married citizen wife’ (­ἐξ ἀστῆς καὶ γαμετῆς γυναικός. Isae. 12.9); ‘­of a citizen mother married to [the father] by engyē’ (­ἐξ ἀστῆς ἐγγυητῆς αὑτῷ, Dem. 57.54). 7 For a fuller account of the phratry procedure, including the oath, see Lambert (­1998: 1­ 70–​ ­171), and cf. the decree of the Demontionidai/­Dekeleis, lines ­110–​­111 (­Lambert 1998: 288). 8 On the two sacrifices associated with phratry introduction (­meion and koureion), and the probability that a son was introduced first in infancy then for a second time as an adolescent, see Lambert (­1998: ­161–​­163). 9 On the relaxation of the ‘­dual citizen parentage’ rule in Hellenistic cities, notably Miletus, see Ogden (­1996: ­289–​­317). 10 These include MacDowell (­1976), Carey (­1999), and, recently, Joyce (­2019). The opposing view is represented by, e.g., Humphreys (­1974), Rhodes (­1978), Patterson (­1990), Ogden (­1996), and Blok (­2017). Hatzilambrou (­2018: ­30–​­35) summarizes the debate with reference to Isae. 3, finding the evidence inconclusive. 11 There is, as Joyce (­2019: 481) points out, ‘­no authority which positively asserts that to be a citizen it was necessary to demonstrate descent from an engyetic marriage’. But cf. Rhodes (­1981: 496): ‘­MacDowell bases one of his arguments on A.P.’s failure to mention a requirement of legitimate birth; but there are many omissions in the second part of A.P., and I do not believe that a strong case can be based on this’. 12 As Hatzilambrou (­2018: 163) points out, Isaeus 3 sheds no light on the precise meaning of the term nothos, because ‘­while the more general meaning certainly applies, so does the meaning advocated by Patterson’ (­cf. ­p. 314 on Patterson’s interpretation of nothos). 13 Both politēs (­fem. politis) and astos (­fem. astē) are correctly translated as ‘­citizen’, but the Greek terms were not completely synonymous (­cf. Frullini in this volume). Astos tends to emphasize the status of citizenship by descent, while politēs rather denotes participation in the civic community (­a naturalized Athenian became a politēs, but could not become an astos). For a detailed, diachronic overview of the classical Greek words for ‘­citizen’, see Blok (­2017: ­147–​­186). 14 Joyce (­2019: 487) gives a garbled account of this incident, in which Phrastor ‘­had an affair with his ­mother-­​­­in-​­law, produced a child, tried to introduce it to the phratry, and had it rejected because it was feared that the biological mother was not the wife of Phrastor but her mother’. There is, in fact, no suggestion in the speech that Neaera (­who was probably beyond childbearing age at the time of Phano’s marriage to Phrastor) had sexual relations with Phrastor.

325

Brenda ­G riffith-­Williams

Bibliography Arnaoutoglou, I. (­1998) Ancient Greek laws (­London) Azoulay, V. (­2014) Pericles of Athens (­Princeton, NJ) (­originally published 2010 as Périclès: la démocratie athénienne à l’épreuve du grand homme) Barker, E., (­trans.) (­1995) Aristotle, Politics (­Oxford) Blok, J. (­2009) ‘­Perikles’ citizenship law: a new perspective’, Historia 58, ­141–​­170 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Carawan, E. (­2008) ‘­Pericles the younger and the citizenship law’, CJ 103, ­383–​­406 Carey, C. (­1992, repr. 2007) Greek orators VI: Apollodoros against Neaira [Demosthenes] 59 (­A ris & Phillips Classical Texts) (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­1999) ‘­Rape and adultery in Athenian law’, CQ 45, ­407–​­417 Cretney, S. (­2003) Family law in the twentieth century (­Oxford) Edwards, M. (­trans.) (­2007) Isaeus (­Austin, TX) ­Griffith-​­Williams, B. (­2020) ‘­The two Mantitheuses in Demosthenes 39 and [Demosthenes] 40: a case of Athenian identity theft?’, in J. Filonik, B. G ­ riffith-​­Williams, and J. Kucharski (­eds) The making of identities in Athenian oratory (­London) ­32– ​­46 Harrison, A.R.W. (­1968) The law of Athens, vol. 1: The family and property (­London) Hatzilambrou, R. (­2018) Isaeus’ On the estate of Pyrrhus (­Oration 3) (­Cambridge) Humphreys, S.C. (­1974) ‘­The Nothoi of Kynosarges’, JHS 94, ­88–​­95 Joyce, C. (­2019) ‘­Citizenship or inheritance? The phratry in classical Athens’, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 36, ­466–​­487 Lambert, S.D. (­1998) The phratries of Attica, 2nd edn (­A nn Arbor, MI) Leão, D.F. and Rhodes, P.J. (­2016) The laws of Solon, a new edition with introduction, translation and commentary (­London and New York) MacDowell, D.M. (­1976) ‘­Bastards as Athenian citizens’, CQ 26, ­88–​­91 Ogden, D. (­1996) Greek bastardy (­Oxford) Patterson, C. (­1990) ‘­Those Athenian bastards’, ClAnt 9, ­40–​­73 ——— ​­(­2005) ‘­Athenian citizenship law’, in M. Gagarin and D. Cohen (­eds) The Cambridge companion to ancient Greek law (­Cambridge) ­267–​­289 Rhodes, P.J. (­1978) ‘­Bastards as Athenian citizens’, CQ 28, ­89–​­92 ——— ​­(­1981) A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (­Oxford) Teichman, J. (­1982) Illegitimacy: a philosophical examination (­Oxford) Todd, S.C. (­1993) The shape of Athenian law (­Oxford) Wyse, W. (­ed.) (­1904) The speeches of Isaeus (­Cambridge)

326

23 IDENTITY, STATUS, AND ‘­DISHONOUR’ Was atimia relevant only to citizens? Linda Rocchi

The topic of this chapter is the concept of atimia in its Athenian institutional dimension. This term, in f­ourth-​­century legal discourse, designated a specific legal penalty, normally translated as ‘­deprivation of civic rights’, which, since at least the nineteenth century, has been thought by scholars to be available as a punishment only against male citizens. What I hope to illustrate are two main points.1 First, I aim to show that, in the fourth century, the t­ echnical-​­legal sense of the word atimia was still never completely divorced from its n ­ on-​­technical ­sense – ​­on the contrary, both meanings fed into each other, clarified each other, and were normally used without arousing confusion. Second, on this basis, I shall try to challenge the widely shared assumption, mentioned above, that atimia in the institutional setting of classical Athens invariably meant ‘­deprivation of civic rights’ and, as such, was relevant only to male citizens. I shall then attempt to provide a broader and more nuanced perspective on this concept, one that takes into account the relationship between Athenian legal discourse and everyday language, which, as Douglas Cairns (­2015: 665) put it, ‘­is not transformed by its use in legal contexts, but still its use in such contexts gives it a distinctively legal shape’.2 This will demonstrate that atimia, alongside timē, had a wider scope than we normally a­ ssume –​ ­these were the basic categories through which Athenians conceptualized and negotiated any kind of identity and interpersonal relation, not only (­male) civic identity.

Technical and ­non-​­technical meanings of atimia in ­fourth-​­century Athens From a strictly linguistic point of view, the meaning of the term atimia seems fairly ­straightforward – ​­a compound of alpha privative and timē, ­a -​­timia literally means ‘­­dis-​ ­honour’. But, if we take a closer look, this translation becomes less unproblematic than it first seems: what do we mean by ‘­honour’ and ‘­dishonour’? What kind of dynamics are in play? Although these questions are fundamental to the analysis of atimia in its institutional and legal dimension, scholars have largely failed to address them and have often combined exclusively legalistic approaches with rather outdated preconceptions of the nature of honour. By reference to a (­m istaken) understanding of timē as an ­ on-​­material commodity, pursued mostly by males and gained exclusive and scarce n DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-28

327

Linda Rocchi

competitively at the expense of others,3 atimia has been conceptualized in a more and more n ­ arrow  – ​­and ­reductive  – ​­way. In particular, since Heinrich Swoboda’s (­1893) article on the atimos Arthmius of Zelea, scholarship on this subject has tended to present a markedly developmental account of the concept, according to which a gradual change in the meaning of atimia  – ​­from ‘­outlawry’ to ‘­disfranchisement’,4 or from a moral concept (‘­dishonour’) to a legal one (‘­deprivation of civic rights’) – was ​­ linked to the evolution of citizenship.5 The understanding of citizenship as the highest timē, or honour (­as status), within the polis (­relative to ­non-​­citizen status) has translated into the understanding of atimia solely as ‘­deprivation of civic rights’. As a result, atimia has been generally regarded as a penalty that applied exclusively to (­male) citizens, and whatever instance did not fit into this general picture has been explained away as insignificant, or residual, or incorrect. When we look at the ancient sources, however, we immediately perceive that the actual usage of the term was much more complex than that, and that, although the term is certainly used in relation to male citizens, its area of application is far more extensive than previously thought. First, and against any alleged ‘­progressive shift’ in the meaning of the term, we should note that, in ­fourth-​­century oratory, the two ­senses  – ​­technical and supposedly ‘­newer’, on the one hand, and ­non-​­technical and ­ ther  – ​­normally coexisted, even in the same text. A case supposedly ‘­older’, on the o in point is Demosthenes’ speech Against Meidias. For instance, when discussing the law punishing contempt towards magistrates (­Dem. 21.­32–​­33), for which the penalty was permanent atimia (§ 32: ἄτιμος ἔσται καθάπαξ), Demosthenes is clearly referring to the strict legal meaning of atimia as a specific penalty codified by law. This kind of atimia targeted very precise rights, defined in Greek as timai:6 entering the agora and the temples, addressing the people (­in the Assembly, the Council, and the law courts), serving as a judge, holding any kind of office, receiving crowns.7 Some of these rights are very clearly related to male citizenship: for example, speaking in the Assembly or the Council, sitting in a panel of judges, and being a magistrate are things that only male citizens could do; but entering the agora and the temples, being honoured with a crown, and accessing the law courts are rights that pertained also to other categories of people. It is clear then that atimia, as a legal remedy, was the revocation of one or more specific rights (­timai) which an individual had enjoyed up to that point by virtue of his or her status (­timē) within the polis. In other instances, however, Demosthenes is clearly not referring to the legal penalty, but rather to what we normally translate as ‘­dishonour’ or ‘­disrespect’ – ​­the negation of timē as the respect due to someone by virtue of his or her status as a free person. A clear example is the story of the killing of Boeotus at the hands of Euaeon after the former had punched the latter (­Dem. 21.­72–​­74). According to Demosthenes, it is not the blow that made Euaeon angry (§ 72: οὐ γὰρ ἡ πληγὴ παρέστησε τὴν ὀργήν), but the atimia (­ἀλλ’ ἡ ἀτιμία) – ​­and Demosthenes fully sympathizes with whoever defends himself when suffering atimia (§ 74: ἀτιμαζόμενος).8 We should note, however, with Canevaro (­2018: ­111–​­114), that with these words Demosthenes does not mean to suggest that Euaeon, in being struck by Boeotus, had effectively lost any honour, let alone that he had actually lost specific citizenship rights as a result of the punch: he simply means to say that Euaeon felt angry because Boeotus, by punching him, had disrespected h ­ im –​ ­he had disregarded his claim to timē as a free person.9 The key to understand this is the bidirectionality of both timē and atimia: as timē can be both a quality of the individual (­based on previous recognition and constituting 328

Identity, status, ‘dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens?

a claim to ongoing recognition) and others’ recognition of that quality, so atimia can be both a position in which the individual finds himself or herself relative to others and the attitude of others towards that individual. Here, atimia means ‘­unwarranted disrespect’ – it ​­ defines the disregard for someone’s legitimate claim, which, however, does not translate into an actual shift in status or loss of legal rights: atimia lies in the other’s attitude, not in the condition of the person who is the focus of that attitude. In this case, ­ unch – ​­it is rather the primary cause of anger, even then, atimia is not the result of the p more than the punch, because, as Demosthenes clarifies, Boeotus’ attack is offensive not so much in itself, but rather in that it shows that he did not take Euaeon’s claim to timē seriously, and treated him in a way that did not match his actual worth. Indeed, Aristotle, in his account of anger, maintains that atimia is an element of hybris, which in its turn is a kind of belittlement (­oligōria) that arouses the anger (­orgē) of the victim:10 belittling is precisely treating someone as if he or she has no value, thus neglecting his or her claim to respect (­Cairns 1996: es­p. ­2 –​­3). Earlier in the speech (­Dem. 21.23), atimia is employed in a similar, ­non-​­technical fashion, as ‘­disrespect’: Demosthenes describes Meidias’ appalling behaviour, and claims to have a substantial list of people who have been mistreated by Meidias and are very eager to recollect ‘­all his acts of insolence [ὕβρεις] and dishonour [ἀτιμίας]’ (­trans. MacDowell). Here, Meidias’ actions are labelled with the plural ἀτιμίας: since, typically, plural forms of abstract nouns refer to concrete examples of the notion expressed by those nouns, the word is here used to describe a disposition that manifests itself in acts, much in the same way as the previous plural ὕβρεις,11 which, however, do not result in states of affairs (­i.e., a diminished status for the targets of the act: see also ­pp. 331–332 below) – ​­if the victims had actually lost honour through Meidias’ attempts to deprive them of it, it is highly unlikely that they would be as eager to testify about Meidias’ acts as Demosthenes describes them to be. Indeed, the mention of hybris in close proximity to atimia is very important in this respect, because flagging a certain type of behaviour as hybristic is a way of construing the disrespectful treatment as unwarranted and, as such, unlikely to bring about any real diminution of honour for the victim. The text, then, does not imply that atimia, as a loss of status or prerogatives, was the result of the ­act – ​­it was indeed the motive, a lack of respect which had led Meidias to trample upon other people’s legitimate claims as a consequence of overestimating his own claim to timē.12 And not only are the two meanings of atimia, technical and ­non-​­technical, used seamlessly within the same speech, but sometimes both ends of the spectrum are implied in the same context. One example is the penalty meted out to Strato of Phalerum (­Dem. 21.­83–​­96), an Athenian citizen who had served as arbitrator in a previous dispute between Demosthenes and Meidias; he had subsequently been accused by Meidias of misdemeanour while in office, convicted, and made atimos.13 Demosthenes describes the penalty Strato is subject to as ‘­atimia, that is, loss of legal rights and everything else’ (§ 92: ἀτιμία καὶ νόμων καὶ δικῶν καὶ πάντων στέρησις). It seems likely that, in this context, Demosthenes is using atimia to refer to the specific legal penalty, translating into actual legal disabilities, and not simply to generic ‘­dishonour’: we know that this was the penalty that was imposed on Strato by his ­fellow-​­arbitrators at the end of his term of office due to the alleged irregularities he committed in this capacity, and we have seen above that the penalty entailed precisely a comprehensive loss of legal rights. And yet, the language clearly shows that the ‘­loss’ (­στέρησις) that Strato suffered entailed both opportunities to act in certain ways (­r ights) and the recognition of the 329

Linda Rocchi

community, because, ultimately, one’s status (­and the rights attached to it) depended upon both the individual’s behaviour, which needed to conform to the expectations of the community, and the assessment of that behaviour by the very community. As such, status and rights were never a g­ iven – ​­they were dependent on performance, and subjected to some degree of negotiation and r­ e-​­negotiation among social agents. Of course, in this instance, Demosthenes is subtly implying that Meidias, by lying about the arbitration, has caused a misinterpretation of Strato’s actual conduct, which has led to his conviction. More often than not, however, the penalty of atimia is presented by the prosecutor as the defendant’s fault, as a direct consequence of his or her own blameworthy b ­ ehaviour – ​­as something one can do to oneself because of one’s failure to live up to the standards prescribed for one’s specific status. A very clear example of this is provided by Lysias’ speech Against Philon, delivered in the context of a dokimasia of a prospective member of the Council. While explaining why Philon could not qualify as a member of the Council (­Lys. 31.33), Lysias’ client maintains that preventing Philon from serving in its ranks would not represent had no claim in the first place. And we can the denial of a legitimate c­ laim – Philon ​­ see here that the possibility of serving as a member of the Council is construed by Lysias in terms of timē and atimia: it is not the Council who is unjustly disrespecting ​­ has deprived himself of the prePhilon (­οὐ γὰρ ὑμεῖς νῦν αὐτὸν ἀτιμάζετε)­14  – Philon rogative of serving in the Council with the dishonourable behaviour that made him unsuitable for the task (­ἀλλ’ αὐτὸς αὑτὸν τότε ἀπεστέρησεν) and is now suffering the just consequences of his own actions. This aspect is also highlighted in Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus, a ‘­scrutiny of public speakers’ (­dokimasia rhētorōn): the fact that Timarchus could not address the people as a result of his shameful behaviour is consistently framed as something he did to himself (­e.g., Aeschin. 1.3). The dokimasia rhētorōn, as a procedure, can tell us a great deal about the interplay between technical and ­non-​­technical meanings of atimia. The procedure itself could be ­ arent-​­abusers, cowards, wastrels, and male prostitutes (­i.e., atimoi) employed against p who tried to address the people as if they were still epitimoi, that is, in possession of their full rights (­see Aeschin. 1.­28–​­30): as Canevaro (­2010: 353; 2013: 203) has shown, the notion of epitimia is usually employed in a restorative sense, to describe the enjoyment of full rights as opposed to a condition of atimia. There existed also specific types of public charges (­graphai) against each of the categories of offenders mentioned by the law,15 and the relevant legislation implies that the acts themselves were dishonourable, prior ­to – ​­and even regardless o ­ f – ​­conviction. First, the law on the dokimasia rhētorōn itself never mentions conviction in one of the relevant graphai as a necessary precondition for prosecution. Second, it is clear that, even though maltreating one’s parents or not reporting for duty were outright criminal offences (­for which the penalty upon conviction was atimia), there was also an element of shame attached to these actions that existed independently of actual conviction in court.16 Similarly, the accusation of being a ­squanderer  – ​­which, if linked to the law on idleness (­nomos argias, see Cecchet 2016), automatically triggered atimia after the third ­conviction – ​­suggested that one was living above one’s means through some kind of criminal activity, but what was actually dishonourable and called for atimia in that case was recidivism: persisting in a blameworthy line of conduct even after two previous convictions. The law on male prostitution, however, is even more instructive in this respect, because it shows very clearly how the performance of a disgraceful act automatically translated into an actual loss of legal rights even when no conviction 330

Identity, status, ‘dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens?

was involved. From Aeschines’ citation of the law (­Aeschin. 1.­19–​­20), we learn that the disabilities imposed on a male once he had prostituted h ­ imself – ​­and, evidently, prior to conviction in a graphē hetairēseōs – ​­amounted to atimia.17 That the act i­ tself – ​­of having subjected oneself to sexual intercourse in exchange for ­money – ​­was regarded as dishonourable prior to conviction, and even if the encounter had happened without the consent of the prostitute, is clear also from Aeschines’ commentary on a law on procuring that applied specifically to cases in which the procurer was either the father or in any case the legal guardian of the person who was being hired out.18 According to this law, it was not possible to prosecute the boy himself, but only the panderer and the client, and ­the  – ­​­­unspecified  – ​­penalty was the same for both.19 This, however, does not mean that there were no consequences for the boy: Aeschines explains that, by hiring him out as a prostitute, his father (­or legal guardian) had deprived the boy of his parrhēsia, that is, the right of free speech. It is apparent, then, that neither consent nor conviction played any part in the assessment of the act. Having engaged in prostitution, whether willingly or unwillingly, was incompatible with performing an active role in the polis: the prostitute was to be regarded as atimos by the community, and should behave as such. However, even though procuring a free boy or woman was certainly illegal, it is important to stress that prostitution itself was not (­Kapparis 2017: 155): what was illegal was for the male prostitute, who was atimos according to the law on prostitution, to try and behave like one of the f­ ull-​­right individuals, the epitimoi. If the male prostitute (­or e­ x-​­prostitute), as an unconvicted atimos, voluntarily respected the terms of his atimia, no one could legitimately prosecute him, because he would be behaving according to his worth as a disqualified person. Thus, as long as the male prostitute minded his own business, no one could bring an indictment against him. Of course, engaging in public life was illegal also for those atimoi who had maltreated their parents or committed a military offence, and for atimoi in general, regardless of conviction:20 the only difference from the case of male prostitutes was that, since cowardice and maltreatment of parents were both dishonourable and illegal (­as opposed to prostitution, which was only dishonourable), withdrawing from public life, aside from being required by law, might not in practice be enough for the perpetrator to avoid prosecution. There were, then, types of behaviour which were deemed to be incompatible with public life, because participation was, in itself, an honour: most aspects of public life were available as rights (­timai) tied to one’s status (­timē), and needed to be exercised honourably, that is, following standards of behaviour rooted in honour and controlled by social and legal sanctions of dishonour. Some of these dishonourable acts involved actual criminal offences, whereas others were simply regarded as unworthy of one’s status (­of citizen and/­or free person) without necessarily being illegal. All of them, however, were perceived and understood as bringing disgrace and diminishing one’s standing in the community (­and the legal rights attached to it) prior to and irrespective of conviction. In other words, one became legally atimos because one had behaved like an atimos in the first place. This is the crux of the whole matter: both the technical and the ­non-​­technical meanings of atimia existed on a continuum, and the former made sense because every native speaker of Greek understood the latter. It is a matter of function in context: once timē and atimia were subsumed into Athenian legal ter­ on-​­technical meaning informed their legal minology, the basic denotations of their n substance. 331

Linda Rocchi

What seems to complicate matters further is that, as we have seen above, when the notion of atimia is used in its n ­ on-​­technical sense, it can also mean ‘(­unwarranted) disrespect’ – ​­that is, it implies a misalignment between the way a person is treated and his or her actual status, which is not, however, diminished or damaged as a result of the interaction. But this complication is easily overcome if we appreciate that atimia, like timē, is bidirectional: one’s status and the claims that come with it do not exist in a ­vacuum – ​­they are continuously enacted in social interaction. To borrow the terminology introduced by Erving Goffman (­1967) in his description of the ‘­interaction ritual’, honour is about both deference and demeanour, it is about you and about me. Although the mechanism of honour provides social agents with the guidelines for smooth interactions where everyone’s timē is given its due,21 things can always go wrong: there is always the possibility that someone might fail to recognize or choose to ignore another’s legitimate claims. It is then up to the disrespected person to select the most appropriate response to the disrespect (­atimia), and he or she will need to take into consideration also the assessment of the act by the community (­i.e., the audience, real or internalized): in some cases, if there is no reaction whatsoever to the disrespect, the understanding might be that he or she deserved ­it – ​­that he or she is, indeed, atimos. Simply put, then, atimia could describe either an action or a condition: as an action, it is imperfective (­and thus conative) in ­aspect – ​­it represents an attempt to bring about a condition of atimia that can however fail; as a condition, on the contrary, its aspect is ­p erfective – ​­it constitutes the present result of a successful action performed in the past. It was from this second ­sense – ​­from the notion of atimia as the result of a process in which the individual’s timē is denied by the individual’s peers22 – ​­that atimia developed its features as a legal penalty: failure to abide by the standards of behaviour expected by the community resulted either in a loss of status altogether, or in the forfeiture of (­all or some of) the prerogatives attached to that status.23 What this meant in practice, however, depended, first, on the relevant statute regulating each offence; and, second (­and perhaps more importantly), on the status of the person involved, that is, the timē he or she had to begin with. This will be the topic of my next section.

Atimia: only for (­male) citizens? We have seen that the legal penalty of atimia (‘­loss of timē’) was meted out for offences that were considered ‘­dishonourable’ in the first place: once ­anti-​­social behaviour had been codified by law, behaving like an atimos resulted in becoming also legally atimos. We have also briefly mentioned above that this ‘­loss of timē’, in the legal sphere, could concern either one’s status (­timē) as a whole, and all the rights (­timai) attached to it, or one specific right (­timē) among ­many – ​­what is normally referred to as ‘­partial atimia’.24 A few examples of this latter case are given by Andocides, in his survey on atimoi,25 when he discusses the disabilities of those who were atimoi ‘­by virtue of special injunctions’ (§ 75: κατὰ προστάξεις) (­Novotný 2014): alongside the prohibition against entering the agora and a few more particular cases (­such as the revocation of the right to speak in the Assembly or be members of the Council for the soldiers who stayed in Athens during the oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants, or the ­travel-​­ban in the Hellespont or Ionia), Andocides mentions also the atimia resulting from frivolous prosecution. As Edward M. Harris (­2006: ­405–​­422) has demonstrated, those prosecutors who failed ­ ne-​­fifth of the either to ‘­follow through’ (­epexelthein)­26 with their case or to obtain o votes in public suits had to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmae,27 and were punished with 332

Identity, status, ‘dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens?

what Theophrastus calls ‘­a kind of atimia’,28 which consisted in the prohibition against bringing any public suit in the future,29 in addition (­ἔτι) to the fine. Another e­ xample –​ ­ ot mentioned by ­Andocides – ​­is that of the third conviction in a graphē paranomōn n (‘­public prosecution for illegalities’).30 The evidence from classical Athens suggests that, for this ­charge – ​­just as with the dikē pseudomartyriōn (‘­private suit for false testimony’), the graphē pseudoklēteias (‘­private suit for falsely testifying to a summons’), and the graphē argias (‘­public suit for idleness’)­31 – a​­ sort of ‘­­three-​­strike’ rule applied, with an automatic additional penalty after the third conviction: Hyperides (­2.­11–​­12) implies it when he compares the third conviction in a graphē paranomōn with the third conviction in a dikē pseudomartyriōn, and the ­fourth-​­century comic poet Antiphanes spells this out explicitly when he says that a public speaker (­ῥήτωρ) becomes ‘­voiceless’ (­ἄφωνος) if he is convicted three times in graphai paranomōn (­ἢν ἁλῷ τρὶς παρανόμων) (­A ntiphanes fr. 194.­14–​­15 K.-​­A. = 196.­ 14–​­15 Kock). Another passage in Demosthenes (­51.12) appears to confirm the existence of the ‘­­three-​­strike’ rule for the graphē paranomōn, and it also adds the further detail that, after the third conviction (­ἐὰν ἁλῷ τὸ τρίτον), the orator would be punished with partial atimia and, accordingly, lose part of his rights (­μέρος ἠτιμῶσθαι τοῦ σώματος).32 The rationale, then, seems to have been the same as with the penalty for frivolous prosecution: abusing one specific right (­be it bringing public prosecutions or making proposals in the Assembly), either egregiously or one time too many, resulted in the permanent loss of that right. Another differentiation in the administration of the penalty can be seen in the case of public debtors: their atimia was total,33 and the punish​­ ments for breaking its terms were severe (­Dem. 21.182), but it was only ­temporary – it would be automatically annulled upon repayment of the debt. Thus, it seems clear that atimia, as a legal penalty, allowed for nuances and modulations, depending on the crime: the speaker. at Lys. 31.29, suggests this when, in asking the members of the outgoing Council to prevent Philon from serving in the following year, he invites them to punish him with the atimia available at the moment (­τ ῇ γε παρούσῃ ἀτιμίᾳ), that is, rejection at the dokimasia and debarment from office. And room for modulation was not specific to atimia in Athens, but it was rather an intrinsic feature of the penalty itself: Aristotle suggests this when, while discussing the penalties for ­extra-​­marital relationships for men in his ideal state,34 he proposes that, in each case, the man should be punished with an atimia suited (­πρεπούσῃ) to the crime (­πρὸς τὴν ἁμαρτίαν). But our sources also show that atimia had that same level of flexibility in relation not only to types of offence, but also to the status of the offender, and, although the evidence we possess is mainly concerned with male citizens, we can still gather some information on the experiences of other social agents within the polis. For instance, our sources mention atimia also regarding citizen women. As early as 1835, van Lelyveld argued that atimia was something which concerned men and men only, and this same opinion was reiterated by Mogens H. Hansen (­1976: 56), who maintains that ‘­Atimia was, of course, a penalty incurred by men only’. According to recent studies, however, especially Josine Blok’s (­2017) book on citizenship, the fact that, in Athens, women born from two Athenian parents were conceptualized as citizens ( ­politis, astē) as much as their male counterparts ( ­politēs, astos) was much more than a matter of nomenclature: women, too, had an active role to play in the polis. It is clear, however, that women’s and men’s citizenships were not identical, as they obviously entailed different prerogatives and different standards to live up to. Once again, Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus is particularly helpful in this respect. 333

Linda Rocchi

Towards the end of the speech (­Aeschin. 1.183), Aeschines is paraphrasing a law on ‘­the good order of women’ and states that the legislator, purportedly Solon, by preventing a woman caught with a seducer (­τ ὴν . . . γυναῖκα ἐφ᾽ ᾗ ἂν ἁλῷ μοιχός) from adorning herself and attending public cults, and by allowing anyone ‘­to tear off her clothes, strip off her adornment, and beat her’ if she does, is ‘­punishing her with atimia’ (­ἀτιμῶν).35 The substance of this ἀτιμῶν is precisely the loss of specific f­emale  – ​­and especially citizen ­female  – ​­prerogatives: wearing nice clothes and jewellery and going to cultic ­c eremonies  – ​­not to mention the right to respect that a good citizen woman should expect when being outside the household. Similar provisions are described also by Apollodorus ([Dem.] 59.­85–​­86): women who were caught in moicheia were to be excluded by law both from the house of their husbands and from public religious ceremonies. Although within the passage the term atimia and its cognates are never overtly mentioned, it is very clear that atimia is what Apollodorus has in mind here,36 because the language of exclusion is the same as we find in other instances in which atimia is at issue:37 we are looking at dynamics of honour and dishonour that entail the misguided ­self-​­assessment of one’s own worth and the communal effort to restore a balance in terms of timē. Thus, we really seem to be dealing with a kind of feminine atimia that functions according to the same mechanism as the penalty applied to men, and is marked by the same technical verb (­atimoō/­atimaō): it is a loss of specific timai attached to women’s ­status – ​­and obviously different from ​­ the result of dishonourable behaviour.38 those of a male ­citizen – as Another very interesting case is that of metics. It is clear from our sources that their status, as resident aliens, was significantly different from that of citizens: to name just a few of their limitations, they could not own land unless this right (­enktēsis) was granted to them, often as a reward, through an honorific decree (­i.e., as an award of timē); they had to pay a special tax, the metoikion; and they had to be under the protection of a prostatēs. These limitations are normally conceptualized, in ­fourth-​­century sources, in terms of timē and atimia. For instance, in Demosthenes’ speech Against Aristocrates (­23.­23–​­24), Euthycles, while discussing Aristocrates’ proposal to grant special protection to the general Charidemus, a naturalized Athenian citizen, considers different categories of individuals: foreigners, metics, and citizens. He makes a great show of graciously inscribing Charidemus among the citizens and, by doing so, he claims to be ‘­plac[ing] him in this rank in which he would obtain the most honour’ (­trans. Harris). This expression, ‘­the most honour’ (§ 24: πλείστης . . . τιμῆς), is important, because it evidently implies that foreigners and metics, too, have a share of ­honour – ​­it is just less than that of a citizen. We see, then, how the citizen is conceptualized as the standard against which other expressions of honour are measured and modulated according to the status of each social agent. Similarly, the disadvantages to which metics were subjected in classical Athens are clearly labelled as atimiai in Xenophon’ Ways and Means (­2.­2 –​­5). Taking the citizen as benchmark, Xenophon sees the additional duties imposed on metics as unnecessary diminutions in their share of timē, because they further widen the gap between them and Athenian citizens without actually benefiting the polis. We should note, however, that Xenophon here is not actually advocating equalization between metics and c­ itizens – ​­on the contrary, he stands for a much clearer differentiation. He seems to be proposing that two separate spheres of honour should be created, one for metics and one for citizens, and the main sphere he treats is that of the hoplites. Xenophon does not approve of the fact that citizens and metics serve together in the same 334

Identity, status, ‘dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens?

ranks and, in the same passage of the Ways and Means, he suggests that metics should serve in the cavalry ­instead – ​­an opinion which he reiterates also in the Hipparchicus (­9.6), using once again the language of timē. Xenophon’s discussion of metics in the army brings out another very important point in relation to resident aliens and atimia: we know, not only from Xenophon but also from Thucydides (­e.g., 2.31.1, 3.16.1, 4.90.1), that citizens and metics served together in the Athenian army, and we also know that, for any military offence,39 the prescribed penalty was atimia.40 Unfortunately, we have only a handful of graphai deilias (‘public suits for cowardice’), and none of them is connected to metics. This has led Hansen (­1976: 56) to conclude that ‘­a metic convicted of the same crime’ would not suffer atimia, because, in his view, it was ‘­a penalty only pertinent to Athenian citizens’ and thus ‘­the same forfeiture of rights’ could not apply to metics as well. We should make two points here. First, the fact that none of the speeches we possess is against metics does not mean much per se: this argumentum e silentio is particularly dangerous in such a small sample of graphai deilias, and especially for the corpus of the orators, which tends to represent mainly the experience of (­wealthy) male Athenian citizens, who could pay to have their speech written by a successful logographer. Other documents, however, such as the ­so-​­called phialai inscriptions,41 present a more nuanced and varied image of the demographics of ­court-​­users in classical Athens, where metics, both male and female, are widely represented. Second, as we have seen above, atimia was, by its very nature, a flexible penalty: the rights (­timai) it targeted always depended both on the nature of the crime and on the status of the offender, and, as such, the ‘­forfeiture of rights’ it entailed was not invariably the same for everyone. If atimia was really meted out to whoever failed to perform his military duty, whether citizen or ­metic – ​­and there is nothing in our sources which specifically suggests ­otherwise –​­, it is clear that the rights they could lose would have overlapped only partially: for instance, the right to address the people (­in the Council or the Assembly) pertained to citizens only, and so it was a prerogative (­timē) that only citizens could lose, but prohibition against entering the agora and the temples, or against appearing in court, are disabilities, routinely dispensed through atimia, that might apply both to citizens and to resident aliens. Finally, some remarks on foreigners. The classic (­and ­much-​­debated) example is that of Arthmius of Zelea, the Persian spy who, according to ­fourth-​­century orators, tried to bribe the Greeks in general (­or the Peloponnesians in particular) and was consequently declared atimos by the Athenians with a special decree, inscribed on a bronze pillar displayed on the acropolis.42 The other example is that of Euthycrates of Olynthus, on whose historical vicissitudes we are slightly better informed: we learn from Demosthenes and, much later, from Diodorus that, apparently, he betrayed the Olynthians along with Lasthenes, virtually handing the city over to Philip II.43 Two very interesting remarks in the Suda, which derive from a speech by Demades written in response to Demosthenes’ speech in support of the Olynthians,44 provide additional information: first, we learn that Euthycrates was a proxenos of the Athenians and, as such, was entitled to specific rights (­timai) in relation to the Athenians. Incidentally, we know from Aeschines (­Aeschin. 3.258) that Arthmius had b ­ een – or ​­ ­ een – ​­a proxenos, too. Second, the Suda reports that, after the was believed to have b Athenians had imposed atimia on Euthycrates, Demades proposed that he be epitimos again. The word epitimos is extremely important, because, as was seen above, in Greek legal discourse it appears to be used primarily in a restorative sense:45 it takes one back 335

Linda Rocchi

to where one is supposed to be according to one’s timē.46 In this case, then, Euthycrates, a citizen of Olynthus, was declared atimos by the Athenians. But, paraphrasing what we (­now)­47 read in Demosthenes, ‘­what would it matter to an Olynthian to be forbidden to participate in Athenian public life’? We can get an idea of precisely why it would matter from the very wording of the Suda, which is realistically close to that of Demades’ speech:48 the timē that the Athenians had taken away from Euthycrates was that of a proxenos,49 and Demades was proposing to give it back. We also possess some epigraphical evidence of atimia being used as a penalty against foreigners: for instance, in IG I3 40 (­es­p. ­3 –​­10; ­32–​­36; ­71–​­76), a provision relating to p ­ ost-​­revolution regulations in Chalcis, and in IG I3 1453 (­es­p.  ­3 – ​­4), the famous decree enforcing the use of Athenian coins, weights, and measures in allied cities. Both these documents have to do with international politics connected with the Delian League and, as such, relate to those ­city-​­states that, by virtue of their relationship with Athens, had both claims upon and obligations towards her. This is the reason why, as stated at IG I3 1453.3,50 it was possible, under that statute, to impose atimia on citizens and foreigners alike (­ἢ τῶν [πολι]τῶν ἢ τῶν ξένων). We should note that it is not clear what the word xenos means in this context: on the one hand, the term might refer to ­ on-​­citizen of the perspective of the polis in which the decree was displayed, that is, a n that specific polis. On the other, the word xenos might be used here from the Athenian perspective, that is, to refer to a n ­ on-​­Athenian who might, nevertheless, be a citizen of the polis in question. This would mean that Athens was able to intervene in the internal politics of the other members of the League to such an extent that she could deprive, say, a Chalcidean citizen of his rights as a Chalcidean. This seems to be the case at IG I3 40.­71–​­76, where it is stated that matters relating to exile, execution, and atimia have to be referred to an Athenian court. In any event, it is obvious that, as we have seen above, citizens and foreigners (­whether resident or not) could be punished with atimia – ​­the penalty was formally the same for both, but the actual disabilities entailed in each case depended on the status of the offender and on the nature of his or her relationship with the polis.

Conclusions From the evidence examined above, we have seen that atimia was regularly used, in ­fourth-​­century legal discourse, in both its technical and its ­non-​­technical sense. Far from generating confusion in the audience, these two senses were complementary: from its basic ­non-​­technical sense of ‘­loss of timē’, the meaning of atimia varied depending on the context and on the status of the people involved. Both timē and atimia are, indeed, fundamentally ­context-​­specific: this means that, when translating these words into English, we have to pay special attention to the situation and the person to which they refer. Thus, it is clear that atimia was, indeed, relevant to male Athenian citizens, but it was not something which pertained exclusively to them: for instance, we have good reasons to believe that atimia as a penalty might have been inflicted upon female citizens, metics, and foreigners ­too – ​­but, of course, the rights at stake in each case were necessarily different from those of male citizens. In other words, the laws of the polis guaranteed the enactment, endorsement, and protection of the rights (­timai) attached to the status (­timē) of each individual who enjoyed a relationship with the polis, on the condition of honourable behaviour for both parties: the entitlement to timē was

336

Identity, status, ‘dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens?

subjected to some degree of negotiations and required the participants to abide by a shared set of values and demands. Citizen men, citizen women, metics, foreigners: all these people had a part to play in the Athenian honour system, a part whose outlines were defined by the relative timē they could carry with them on this stage. Failure to ​­ each their own. act in accordance with the demands of their timē resulted in atimia – to

Notes 1 These are the preliminary results of my doctoral research as part of the E ­ dinburgh-​­based ERC project ‘­Honour in Classical Greece’. I here wish to thank my supervisors, Douglas Cairns and Mirko Canevaro, for their invaluable feedback on this essay. I am also grateful to Jakub Filonik, Christine Plastow, and Rachel Z ­ elnick-​­Abramovitz for inviting me to take part in this edited volume, to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful remarks, and to the audience of the 2019 ‘­Citizenship in classical antiquity: current perspectives and challenges’ conference for lively discussions and useful suggestions. 2 See also Novotný (­2014: 79): ‘­there could hardly exist a technical term without any logical link to ­non-​­technical usage’. 3 This view is summarized and challenged by Cairns (­2011). 4 The relationship between atimia and outlawry, first outlined by Swoboda (­1893), has been definitively disproved by Youni (­1998, 2001, 2018, 2019) and Joyce (­2018). 5 Swoboda’s interpretation has dominated throughout the twentieth century and found its way into handbooks, most notably Paoli (­1930) and Harrison (­1971), from which it passed through to successive studies. The exclusivity of the link between atimia and (­male) citizenship has been reiterated by Hansen (­1976), who, for example, maintains that atimoi ‘­often belonged to the Athenian elite’ (­­p. 54). See also Manville (­1980), Sealey (­1983), Todd (­1993: ­142–​­143), Scafuro (­2013: 923), and Kamen (­2013: ­71–​­78). 6 For timē as the most suitable Greek term to convey the modern idea of ‘­r ight’, see Canevaro (­2020: es­p. ­161–​­167). As he explains (­166), the term timē accounts for most of the meanings and nuances of the modern notion of ‘­r ight’, but the two concepts are not entirely overlapping: while modern rights are firmly grounded in the individual and his or her autonomy, and have nothing to do with social interaction, the Greek notion of timē only makes sense on the societal level, because it always entails some level of negotiation and ­re-​­negotiation of claims between the individual and his or her community. 7 For the ban from agora and temples, see [Lys.] 6.9, 24, 52 (­A ndoc. 1.8, 71, 132 mentions only temples); Andoc. 1.76.; Dem. 24.103. Aeschines (­3.176) specifies that atimoi were excluded from the agora and the temples, and could not wear crowns. For the prohibition against speaking in court, either as litigants or as witnesses, see Andoc. 1.100; Dem. 21.­83–​­87 (­w ith further remarks at §§ ­88–​­92); [Dem.] 59.­26–​­27. That atimoi could not speak in the Assembly is clear from the law regulating the dokimasia rhētorōn: see Aeschin. 1.­28–​­32; cf. Lys. 10.1. The story of Pyrrhus (­Dem. 21.182) is evidence of the fact that atimoi could not serve as judges, and Dem. 20.156 implies that the penalty for holding an office while atimoi was death. The law on male prostitution (­Aeschin. 1.­19–​­20) shows also that male prostitutes, qua atimoi, could not become archons, hold a priesthood, be syndikoi for the state, hold an office of any kind (­either at home or abroad), or address the Council or the Assembly. 8 MacDowell (­1990: ­131–​­133) translates ἀτιμία as ‘­dishonour’ (­at § 72), and ἀτιμαζόμενος as ‘­when dishonoured’ (­at §74); Harris (­2008: 112) has ‘­humiliation’ for ἀτιμία and ‘[being] the victim of outrage’ for ἀτιμαζόμενος. 9 Cf., e.g., Isoc. 20.­5 –​­6, where it is said that free people should be especially angry and seek the greatest retribution (­προσήκει τοῖς ἐλευθέροις μάλιστ᾽ ὀργίζεσθαι καὶ μεγίστης τυγχάνειν τιμωρίας) when they are victims of assault and atimia (­ὑπὲρ τῆς αἰκίας καὶ τῆς ἀτιμίας). 10 See Arist. Rh. 1378b.­29–​­30: ‘­atimia [as disrespect] is an element of hybris, and one who disrespects others [ὁ δ’ἀτιμάζων] treats them as if they have no worth [ὀλιγωρεῖ]’. 11 Harris (­2008: 95) translates ὕβρεις . . . καὶ ἀτιμίας as ‘­outrages and insults’. In Cairns’s (­1996: 2) paraphrase of Arist. Rh. 1378b.­13–​­15, hybris is primarily ‘­a kind of attitude’, but it is ‘­necessarily manifested in word and deed’.

337

Linda Rocchi 12 See Canevaro (­2018: ­109–​­110), who rightly points out that ἀτιμίαις ‘­is used in a way that stresses not the status of the victims as a result of Meidias’ actions, but Meidias’ disrespectful behaviour, which fails to respect the timē they lay claim to’. For the importance of the disposition and motives of the hybristic agent, see Cairns (­1996). 13 From Dem. 21.­83–​­87 and [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 53. 5­ –​­6, we know that atimia was the penalty for citizens over 60 who failed to serve as arbitrators without official dispensation, or who mishandled their power as arbitrators. 14 I will discuss the use of the two families of denominative verbs stemming from atimia (­atimoō/­atimaō and atimazō) elsewhere. 15 The graphē kakōseōs goneōn for ­parent-​­abusers and the graphē deilias for cowards (­broadly defined) – ​­for both, the penalty upon conviction was atimia. Wastrels probably fell under the scope of the graphē argias, for which the penalty was generally a fine, with automatic atimia after the third conviction, while male prostitutes were dealt with through the graphē hetairēseōs (­which I will discuss in more detail below), for which the penalty seems to have been death: cf. Aeschin. 1.20. The existence of these procedures in tandem with the dokimasia rhētorōn should not be seen as a duplication: while the graphai could be brought in any ­ n-­​­­the-​­spot measure, used to prevent anyone to moment, the dokimasia was an emergency, o whom dishonourable behaviour could be ascribed from addressing the Assembly in the very moment he was trying to do so. Moreover, the dokimasia was concerned specifically with public speaking, whereas the other graphai mentioned had a broader scope. 16 See, e.g., Isae. 1.39, where failure to provide for one’s parents is presented as both shameful and illegal. Cowardice is obviously perceived as shameful, too: Aeschines says it multiple times in his attacks on Demosthenes (­cf., e.g., Aeschin. 3.­211–​­212, 247). As I will show elsewhere, this had to do with the fact that whoever performed these actions was disregarding the principle of reciprocity (­charis) that governed relationships within the polis, which ultimately had to do with timē. 17 Cf. Aeschin. 1.160, where Aeschines essentially confirms that (­u nconvicted) male prostitutes were to be regarded as atimoi. The term ‘­unconvicted’ was first used by Wallace (­1998). 18 Aeschin. 1.­13–​­14. As is clear from the wording in § 14, there existed a separate law on procuring (­proagōgeia) in general. See also the next note. 19 As noted by MacDowell (­2000: ­17–​­18), the wording in Aeschin. 1.13 suggests that this penalty was not death, because it is specified that the boy, once he got older, was under no obligation to take care of his father (­although he was still required to look after his father’s grave after his death). If the penalty were death, this remark would make no sense. There existed also a more general law on procuring (­proagōgeia), according to which the convicted procurer or procuress was to be sentenced to death: cf. Aeschin. 1.14, 184. However, MacDowell (­2000: 18) is mistaken in thinking that this law is ‘­hardly consistent’ with the one quoted at Aeschin. 1.­13–​­14. In fact, pace also Kapparis (­2017: 156), it makes perfect sense to have two different penalties for what were perceived as two different crimes: to the Athenian lawgiver, one thing was to be a professional ­brothel-​­keeper who was trying to make a profit by exploiting a vulnerable free person, another was to be a (­potentially struggling) father who might have decided to prostitute his son in an attempt to support his family (­as suggested, albeit sceptically, also by MacDowell). Evidently, in the second case, extenuating circumstances might have been considered. 20 This is true also for public debtors: for instance, Diodorus in Dem. 22 makes clear that Androtion was atimos both because he had been a male prostitute and because he was a public debtor, so he was not entitled to make proposals on both grounds. See also the case of Pyrrhus, who was indicted (­and condemned to death) because he served as a judge while he was in debt to the treasury (­Dem. 21.182): evidently, it was illegal for atimoi to fulfil this kind of public role. 21 Truly honourable behaviour is never ­anti-​­social behaviour: see Appiah (­2010). 22 As I will discuss in more detail elsewhere, both in the legal and in the ­non-​­legal sphere, the enforcement of atimia was a communal effort, which involved both the atimos individual (­who was supposed to be the first enforcer of his or her own exclusion) and his or her community and was based upon a shared standard of behaviour (­see also Cairns 2011). This aspect was particularly evident for cases of atimia in Sparta: see Ducat (­2006). 23 We should note, however, that atimia as a legal penalty was not meted out for every single departure from Athenian popular morality: it was available only for certain legal offences.

338

Identity, status, ‘dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens? 24 The label of ‘­partial atimia’ is convenient, but it can be misleading. One key point is that, while timai are countable, timē is not simply the singular of timai – ​­it is also often used as a mass noun which can sometimes indicate one specific timē, but often indicates more than just the sum of all the timai. Thus, atimia can indicate the loss of timē per se (­as mass), or the loss of a specific timē (­or a group of timai). The notion of ‘­partial atimia’, however, implies a primary configuration of timai that the loss of timē involved in atimia would normally target, by reference to which atimia targeting more limited configurations of timai would be partial. Yet we have seen that atimia can, in fact, target any number of timai as well as timē as one’s worth or status ­overall – ​­there is no point in labelling one version as ‘­partial’. The concept of atimia as loss of timē does not change. What changes are the prerogatives targeted, whether it is one, a few, or all of them. 25 Andoc. 1.­73–​­76. I purposefully leave out the purported text of Patroclides’ decree (§§ 7­ 7–​­79), which is a late forgery (­see Canevaro and Harris 2012, with Novotný 2014 for additional arguments, and, in more detail, Canevaro and Harris 2017) and, as such, is not helpful in reconstructing the functioning of atimia as a penalty in the classical period. 26 ‘­Either by bringing the case to court or by formally withdrawing the charge at the anakrisis’ (­Harris 2006: 413). 27 Harris (­2006: 407 n.13) quotes [Andoc.] 4.18; Dem. 23.80; 24.7; [Dem.] 58.6. 28 Theophr. fr. 4b ­Szegedy-​­Maszak (= schol. ad Dem. 22.3 [13b Dilts]): ‘­at Athens in public ­ ne-​­fifth [of the votes], he owes a fine of 1,000 cases, if someone does not gain a share of o drachmas and in addition he loses certain rights [καὶ ἔτι πρόσεστί τις ἀτιμία] such as the ability to bring a graphē or a phasis or an ephēgesis against an illegal action’ (­trans. Harris). 29 The most relevant passages (­Dem. 18.266; 21.103; 26.9; [Dem.] 53.1; 58.6; Hyp. Eux. 34) are discussed by Harris (­2006: 408). See also, more recently, Harris (­2019). 30 See Harris (­2018: 22): ‘­Someone who was convicted three times on this charge suffered a form of disenfranchisement and lost his right to propose measures in the future’. 31 For which the penalty was normally a fine and, after the third conviction, total atimia. 32 There have been some issues with the interpretation of this passage: see, for instance, in Harrison (­1971: 176 n.2), However, as I will show in more detail elsewhere, this is the most logical interpretation of the passage. 33 See, e.g., Din. 2.13 for the prohibition against speaking in the Assembly for state debtors, and Din. 2.2 and [Dem.] 58.2 for the prohibition against initiating judicial procedures. In Dem. 24.123, alongside the impossibility for state debtors to attend the Assembly, Demosthenes mentions the fact that such people were debarred also from serving as judges, and we know of at least one case in which the death penalty was imposed on a public debtor who served as a judge (­Dem. 21.182), cf. above. 34 See Arist. Pol. 1336a.­1–​­2 and Canevaro’s commentary ad loc. in Bertelli and Canevaro (­2022: ­496–​­498). 35 Note that the verb used is the technical verb atimoō. 36 A similar case is Aeschin. 1, a speech where atimia is, quite literally, the elephant in the room, almost never mentioned but ­ever-​­present in the background of the legal proceedings: the only faint reference to it is at § 134. And yet it is clear that atimia is, to all intents and purposes, the main issue: it is the penalty which Timarchus was going to face (­and did face: cf. Dem. 19.284) upon conviction, and the speech itself is a detailed argumentation of precisely why Timarchus ‘­should not share in the common affairs of the city’ (§ 160). 37 Cf. § 85: προσῆκεν . . . ἀπέχεσθαι; οὐκ ἔξεστιν; § 86: ἀπαγορεύουσιν; ἐκβεβλημένη ἔσται. 38 The case of Harmodius’ sister, described at Thuc. 6.56.1, is another example of female atimia in the ­non-​­technical sense: the young girl had been invited by Hipparchus to be one of the ­basket-​­bearers at a procession, and then rejected with the aim of insulting her brother (­προυπηλάκισεν). It is obviously not a penalty imposed by a law court, but it does describe the loss of a specific prerogatives on grounds of ‘­not being worthy’ (­λ έγοντες οὐδὲ ἐπαγγεῖλαι τὴν ἀρχὴν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἀξίαν εἶναι), and indeed ps.-​­Plato in the Hipparchus (­­229b–​­c) specifically mentions atimia (­διὰ τὴν τῆς ἀδελφῆς ἀτιμίαν τῆς κανηφορίας): see also Keim (­2016). 39 As Harris (­2013: 217) has demonstrated, under the general rubric of ‘­cowardice’ (­deilia), anyone who wished to do so could bring a public prosecution (­graphē) against a soldier who had either abandoned his post in battle (­lipotaxion), or deserted from the army (­lipostration) or from the fleet (­anaumachiou), or failed to show up for duty when drafted (­astrateia), or threw away his shield (­tēn aspida apobeblēkenai).

339

Linda Rocchi 40 Cf., e.g., Andoc. 1.74; Dem. 15.32, 24.103; [59].21; Aeschin. 1.­28–​­29. 41 On which, see Meyer (­2010) and especially a talk by Harris (­forthcom.): these are dedicatory bowls, dated to the late ­fourth-​­century BCE, offered by acquitted defendants. 42 See especially Dem. 9.­41–​­45 (­with Harp. α 258 K. s.v. ἄτιμος) and Aeschin. 3.­257–​­259. Cf. Dem. 19.271; Din. 5.­24–​­25; Plut. Them. 6.­1–​­5; Aristid. Or. vol. I 190 (­with schol. 14 Dindorf), 218, 303 Jebb; schol. ad Aeschyl. Pers. hy­p. 2.21. 43 See Dem. 8.­39–​­40; 19.265, 342; Diod. Sic. 16.53.2. 44 Sud. δ 415 A. (­s.v. Δημάδης); π 2539 A. (­s.v. πρόξενος). 45 And evidently not exclusively in relation to Athenian citizens, pace Hansen (­1976: 55). 46 See, e.g., Andoc. 1.73; Dem. 21.99; 24.90; Aeschin. 1.160. 47 Dindorf (­1849: ­192–​­193) expunges § 44, followed by Canfora (­1974: ­306–​­307): see also Canfora (­1968). I will discuss this passage, and its significance for the legal penalty of atimia, elsewhere. 48 See, e.g., Sud. α 2184 A (­s.v. ἀνδροληψία), where the paraphrasis is quite close to Demosthenes’ actual text at 23.­82–​­83. 49 Dindorf (­1849: ­192–​­193) already expresses this idea. 50 The word ἄτιμος is partially restored on the stele, but the supplement is virtually inevitable.

Bibliography Appiah, K.A. (­2010) The honor code: how moral revolutions happen (­New York) Bertelli, L. and Canevaro, M. (­2022) Aristotele, La politica. Libri ­VII-​­VIII. Introduzione, traduzione e commento (­Rome) Blok, J.H. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Cairns, D.L. (­1996) ‘­Hybris, dishonour, and thinking big’, JHS 116, ­1–​­32 ——— (­ ​­ 2011) ‘­Honour and shame: modern controversies and ancient values’, CQ 53, ­23–​­41 ​­2015) ‘­Revenge, punishment, and justice in Athenian homicide law’, The Journal of ——— (­ Value Inquiry 49, ­645–​­665 Canevaro, M. (­2010) ‘­The decree awarding citizenship to the Plataeans ([Dem.] 59.104)’, GRBS 50, ­337–​­369 ——— ​­(­2013) The documents in the Attic orators: laws and decrees in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­The graphê hybreôs against slaves: the timê of the victim and that of the hybristês’, JHS 138, ­100–​­126 ​­2020) ‘­I diritti come spazio di socialità: la timē tra diritto e dovere’, Classici Contro 15, ——— (­ ­157–​­177 Canevaro, M. and Harris, E.M. (­2012) ‘­The documents in Andocides’ On the Mysteries’, CQ 62.1, ­98–​­129 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­The authenticity of the documents at Andocides’ On the Mysteries ­77–​­79 and ­83–​­84’, Dike 19, ­9 –​­49 Canfora, L. (­1968) ‘­Per il testo della Terza Filippica di Demostene’, RhM 111.3, ­193–​­197 ——— ​­(­1974) Demostene. Discorsi e lettere, vol. 1 (­Turin) Cecchet, L. (­2016) ‘­The Athenian nomos argias. Notes for a possible interpretation’, IncidAntico 14.2, ­117–​­142 Dindorf, W. (­1849) Demosthenes. Annotationes Interpretum Ad I.–​­XIX., vol. 5 (­Oxford) Ducat, J. (­2006) ‘­The Spartan tremblers’, in S. Hodkinson and A. Powell (­eds) Sparta and war (­Swansea) ­1–​­55 Goffman, E. (­1967) Interaction ritual (­New York) Hansen, M.H. (­1976) Apagoge, endeixis and ephegesis against kakourgoi, atimoi and pheugontes: a study in the Athenian administration of justice in the fourth century B.C. (­Odense) Harris, E.M. (­2006) Democracy and the rule of law in classical Athens (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2008) Demosthenes, speeches ­2 0–​­22 (­Austin, TX) ——— ​­(­2013) The rule of law in action in democratic Athens (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2018) Demosthenes, speeches ­23–​­26 (­Austin, TX) ——— (­ ​­2019) ‘­The crown trial and Athenian legal procedure in public cases against illegal decrees’, Dike 22, ­88–​­111

340

Identity, status, ‘dishonour’: was atimia relevant only to citizens? ——— ​­(­u npubl.) ‘­The dedication of phialai by metics and citizens, or applying Ockham’s razor to the interpretation of some Attic inscriptions’ Harrison, A.R.W. (­1971) The law of Athens, vol. 2 (­Oxford) Joyce, C.J. (­2018) ‘­Atimia and outlawry in archaic and classical Greece’, Polis 35, ­33–​­60 Kamen, D. (­2013) Status in classical Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Kapparis, K.A. (­2017) Prostitution in the ancient Greek world (­Berlin) Keim, B. (­2016) ‘­Harmodius’ sister, or, rethinking women and honor in classical Greece’, Politica Antica 6, ­9 –​­32 MacDowell, D.M. (­1990) Demosthenes, Against Meidias (­Oration 21) (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2000) ‘­Athenian laws about homosexuality’, RDA 42, ­13–​­27 Manville, B. (­1980) ‘­Solon’s law of stasis and atimia in archaic Athens’, TAPhA 110, ­213–​­221 Meyer, E.A. (­2010) Metics and the Athenian phialai-​­inscriptions: a study in Athenian epigraphy and law (­Stuttgart) Novotný, M. (­2014) ‘­A ndocides on ἀτιμία and the term πρόσταξις’, Eirene 50, ­61–​­88 Paoli, U.E. (­1930) Studi di diritto attico (­Florence) Scafuro, A.C. (­2013) ‘­Ἀτιμία’, in R.S. Bagnall, K. Brodersen, C.B. Champion, A. Erskine, and S.R. Huebner (­eds) The encyclopedia of ancient history (­Oxford) 923 Sealey, R. (­1983) ‘­How citizenship and the city began in Athens’, AJAH 8, ­97–​­129 Swoboda, H. (­1893) ‘­A rthmios von Zeleia’, ­Archäologisch- ​­epigraphische Mitteilungen 16, ­49–​­68 Todd, S.C. (­1993) The shape of Athenian law (­Oxford) van Lelyveld, P. (­1835) De infamia: jure Attico commentatio (­A msterdam) Youni, M.S. (­1998) Ἄτιμος ἔστω, ἄτιμος τεθνάτω: Συμβολή στη μελέτη της ποινής ατιμίας και της θέσης εκτός νόμου στο αττικό δίκαιο (­T hessaloniki) ——— ​­(­2001) ‘­T he different categories of unpunished killing and the term ἄτιμος in ancient Greek law’, in E. Cantarella and G. Thür (­eds) Symposion 1997. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Wien) ­117–​­137 ​­ 2018) ‘­Outlawry in classical Athens: nothing to do with atimia’, in G. Thür, U. Yiftach, ——— (­ and R. ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­eds) Symposion 2017. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Wien) ­137–​­155 ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­Atimia in classical Athens: what the sources say’, in L. Pepe and L. Gagliardi (­eds) Dike: essays in Greek law in honor of Alberto Maffi (­Milan) ­361–​­378 Wallace, R.W. (­1998) ‘­Unconvicted or potential atimoi in ancient Athens’, Dike 1, ­63–​­78

341

24 COULD ATHENIAN WOMEN BE COUNTED AS CITIZENS IN DEMOCRATIC ATHENS? Christopher Joyce

The last 30 years or more have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the role which Athenian women played in ancient society. Whereas, in the past, studies of democratic Athens were for the most part male focused, there has been in recent decades increased interest in the important and vital role of women in the functioning of the democratic polis. Yet, traditional definitions of citizenship at Athens in modern scholarship remain, for the most part, male focused. Mogens H. Hansen (­1991), for example, defines citizenship at Athens in terms of political rights, which were the prerogative of free adult males. Raphael Sealey (­1983) pointed out that women were citizens to the extent that they had the potential to produce citizen offspring, but in that sense the notion of female citizenship was at best functional and subservient (­cf. Rhodes 2009: ­61–​­63). Philip Brook Manville (­1990: ­6 –​­7) not only embraced a more elastic conception of citizenship in that he argued that the concept of a citizen was never static and, even until the fourth century and beyond was still under construction, but also understood the relationship between the sexes in the concept of what it meant to be a citizen to have been unequal.1 Taking the notion of a conceptual evolution of citizenship even further, Josine Blok (­2017: ­36–​­41) characterizes traditional approaches to citizenship as being ‘­under the influence of a paradigm in which citizenship at classical Athens is conceived as a male status characterized by holding political office’ and locates their origin in p ­ ost-​ ­Enlightenment trends which place political participation at the forefront of a definition of citizenship, thereby rejecting the claim that religion and worship of gods belong to an irrational past which should not interfere with how citizens of modern, democratic, enlightened societies operated. Blok’s analysis, which places religion instead of politics at the forefront, is indebted to Christiane S ­ ourvinou-​­Inwood (­1990), who drew attention to the connection between the polis and its religious institutions (­cf. Parker 2011: ­57–​­61; Kindt 2012: 1­ 2–​­35). The aim of this chapter is to evaluate how far the revisionist approach holds up to the evidence.

To share in the city (­metechein / meteinai tēs poleōs) From the fifth century onward, it became standard to express the idea of being a citizen in terms of ‘­sharing in the city’.2 Sometimes, the idea of sharing extends to areas of civic 342

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-29

Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens?

life beyond the realm of the politeia, as is clear from the reconstructed lines of Draco’s homicide law (­ap. Dem. 23.41) and the grant of citizenship to the Plataeans ([Dem.] 59.104). The first of these documents, the earliest Athenian law on record, proclaims liable anyone who kills a convicted killer who has honoured the terms of his banishment by staying away from the Agora, frontier markets, and Amphictyonic contests and rites. It might here be argued that the sense of belonging to the community, or ‘­partaking in the city’, was expressed in access to social and religious activities which applied both to women and to men, but it is important not to overstate the case, as the purpose of these provisions (­as far as they can be reconstructed) was to guarantee against religious pollution, not to exclude someone from sharing in the city in other respects. The second, if genuine, dates from the second half of the fifth century and proclaims that Plataeans shall share in rights and privileges available to Athenians, καὶ ἱερῶν καὶ ὁσίων (­and in the things that are hiera and hosia). Since women were bound by the hiera kai hosia, a phrase notoriously difficult to translate, but rendered very loosely and inadequately as ‘­sacred and moral duties’, in the same way as men were, a case could be made here that citizenship in its earliest definition was understood to embrace both sexes, in that it laid priority on the social, legal, and religious functions of the city, and emphasized less the matter of share in government ( politeia). The decree represented in the Demosthenic speech is a forgery (­Canevaro 2010). Even if it were real, Hippocrates makes an exception, so that Plataeans could not be eligible to hold office among the nine annual archons, though that was possible for their descendants. The rider lays out a specification applicable only to men, thereby ruling out the conceptual symmetry. If ‘­sharing in the city’ meant simultaneously ‘­to be a citizen’ and ‘­to partake of society’, then a plausible inference could be made that the phrase was as applicable to women as to men. Caution, however, must be taken. Just because the phrase could, in some circumstances, apply to women, this should not be taken to mean that its nuance was the same as when applied to men. If relationship to the gods through religious cult and other similar civic duties and obligations was a sufficient condition of citizenship, some explanation is needed for why n ­ on-​­citizens, such as metics, were bound also by the hiera and the hosia, but were nevertheless not classed as citizens in the full sense (­cf. Ar. Byz. fr. 38 Nauck; Harpocr. s.v. μετοίκιον). The first known vocabulary relating to metics dates from around 500 and comes from a grave inscription dedicated to one Anaxilas of Naxos (­IG I3 1357 = SEG 12.388; Baba 1984), who is praised for his prudence (­sōphrosynē) and excellence (­aretē). The inscription shows that Anaxilas was a respected member of the community who partook of activities associated with the polis. Even nothoi were permitted to express an identity via cult (­Humphreys 1974; Patterson 1990). If, as was the case, metics were often valued members of society who were even registered in demes, it is unsatisfactory to define a citizen merely as a social participant (­IG I3 421.33, with Whitehead 1977: 152). Some additional criterion was needed. The evidence shows that women, metics, children, and even slaves belonged to the legal and cultic patchwork of the ancient civic community, but nobody would conclude from this that metics and slaves could ever have been considered citizens. An inscribed law regulating the Eleusinian Mysteries (­ca. ­380-​­350) refers to ‘­anyone who wants’ (­τὸμ βολόμενο[ν]) empowering the person to make a declaration ( ­phasis) against any who knowingly introduced an initiand before the Eumolpidai or Kerykes not being a member (­Clinton 1980, 2008: 119, see l. 28). It is open to question whether the law restricted the legal process of phasis to citizens (­Filonik 2021). A comparison of this to other 343

Christopher Joyce

inscriptions reveals that the common formulation ho boulomenos is not always followed by an ethnic or a variant of the phrase hois exesti, and in the case of the Eleusinian rites, as well as in other areas of Athenian religion, we know that metics and slaves were involved (­Parker 2005: ­169–​­171; Kamen 2013: 16, 30; Wijma 2014). The denunciation was open to all, citizens and ­non-​­citizens alike, and Demosthenes’ speech Against Meidias (­21.175) shows that a man from Caria accused another from Thespiae of an offence which took place during the Mysteries via a probolē before the assembly at a meeting after the festival. The availability of phasis and endeixis to ­non-​­citizens is in evidence in a decree dating from the end of the fourth century on the island of Ceos where both free and slaves were encouraged to inform on the export of red ochre (­IG II2 1128 = RO 40; cf. Lytle 2013). During the scandals of 415, an invitation was made to everyone, men and women, citizens, and ­non-​­citizens, free and slaves, to inform on the violation of the Mysteries (­Thuc. 6.27.2; Lys. 5.­3 –​­5; 7.16). This shows that ­non-​­citizens, as well as citizens, were bound by the religious and moral norms of society. The hiera and hosia were necessary, not sufficient, conditions of citizenship. This is clear from the observable fact that ­non-​­citizens played a central role in religion and cult. A decree from the Attic deme Skambonidai dating probably from the first half of the fifth century refers to the apportioning of sacrificial meat among the deme members and the metoikoi, in which case metics were not excluded from religious cult (­IG I3 244). Aeschylus suggests in the Eumenides that the Erinyes who have been invited from abroad to live in Athens are to be honoured with purple garments in the civic procession (­Aesch. Eum. ­1028–​­1031; cf. Suppl. ­609–​­614). Attention has been drawn to the similarities with the participation of metics in the Panathenaic festival (­Bakewell 1997; Wijma 2014: 53). Metics participated in many of the major religious cults of the city, including the Panathenaea and Dionysia.3 They partook of festivals at the level of the deme (­Wijma 2014: 1­ 03–​­116; Wilson 2015). Even if true that they got their meat raw rather than cooked, this is only a nuanced distinction (­Blok 2017: 271; contrast Wijma 2014: ­88–​­94), further problematized by the fact that it was only the officials who would typically partake in feasting immediately (­Bednarek 2017). This provides an important caveat when efforts are made to equate women with men in Athenian citizenship on the grounds that they were bound equally by the hiera and hosia. Though there are some observable instances where ‘sharing in the city’ meant no more than possession of a legal status which, by implication, could apply to women as much as to men, such as at [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 26.4, nevertheless in the vocabulary of ­fifth-​­and f­ ourth-​ ­century Athens, to ‘­share in the city’ was to be a member of the politeia which, by definition, excluded women. When Creon quarrels with Oedipus over who should rule the city, he protests κἀμοὶ πόλεως μέτεστιν, οὐχί σοι μόνῳ (‘­I have a share in the city, not you alone’), where the emphasis is specifically on government (­Soph. OT 630), not, in a wider sense, membership in the community. In the speech On the Team of Horses (­16.48), Isocrates refers to the effect of atimia which is to lose rights once enjoyed, encapsulated in the phrase τῆς πατρίδος στερηθέντα (‘­deprived of the fatherland’). A couple of sections earlier, the speaker refers to being driven out under the Thirty and then being restored, to regain possession of his former estate, and talks about recovery of citizenship as μετεῖναί μοι τῆς πόλεως (­16.46), where again the implication is decidedly political. The same implication is in evidence in other oratorical contexts (­Lys. 18.1; Dem. 57.1, 23, 55; Aeschin. 2.78; [Lys.] 6.48; Dem. 57.51; Isae. 3.37). Aristotle in the Politics differentiates ‘­living together’ from ‘­participation in the city’ (­metechein tēs poleōs) (­Pol. III. 1281a.­1–​­9). This is decisive in showing that in its technical sense, to have a share in the city meant something rather different from merely 344

Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens?

‘­being a participating member of society’. If it meant the latter, then there would be no reason to exclude women, children, metics, slaves, or foreign visitors. However, Aristotle’s definition stands in accordance with usage not only in oratory but also in the historians (­Xen. Hell. 2.3.48; 4.4.6). Cleisthenes at the close of the sixth century enrolled only men in the political ­decision-​­making body of the city ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 21.4). Though the passage does not explicitly say that only men could be enrolled in demes, unlike the phratry, of which we have incontrovertible evidence for female membership in the classical period (­Isae. 3.73, 76), comparable evidence for female membership in the deme is not forthcoming, and without evidence of female enrolment in the deme, this cannot be assumed on faith (­see Lambert 1998: ­36–​­37 on phratries). David Whitehead (­1986: 77) states: In the strictest sense women were simply ignored in the deme system and, through it, by the polis itself. . . . Women belonged to a deme in the same vicarious sense that they belonged to an oikos – ​­through their relationship with a demesman, their father or their husband (­or, failing them, some other man), who was their kyrios. The point is illustrated by the fact that women rarely, if ever, acquired a demotic of their own before the Roman period. The tiny handful of examples where a deme origin is assigned to a woman from the fourth century occurs with the s­ uffix -​­θεν, never with the preposition ἐξ or ἐκ (‘­from’) which was reserved for official usage with male demotics (­e.g., IG II2 7831; 7680; 6285, with Whitehead 1986: 78). From the time of Cleisthenes, ­ uilding-​­block upon which the Athenian the deme was the social, legal, and political b politeia was constructed. The witness of the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (­Ath. Pol.) is now confirmed by newly published ostraca hordes which show beyond any reasonable doubt that the demotic was in use as far back as the archaeology goes.4 Cleisthenes did not subvert older structures as far as their usefulness to the matter of inheritance was concerned. We know from orators that the phratries were of vital importance in private lawsuits over inheritance and adoption in the classical age, but what is equally clear is that their importance was relegated to private law. As a public institution, the deme, not the phratry, was the most important subdivision of the citizen body in the classical age (­Joyce 2019). The claim that metechein / meteinai tēs poleōs means the same as societal participation is vulnerable to more serious objection. The evidence from the archaic and classical periods shows that legal verdicts of atimia deprived citizens of specific rights, such as the right to move decrees (­Dem. 22.­29–​­34; 24.50, ­201–​­203; 25.94), to vote in the assembly (­Aeschin 1.88; Plut. Phoc. 26; Din. 2.2), to prosecute private lawsuits ([Lys.] 6.­24–​­5; Dem. 21.92; 53.14), to give evidence in court (­Dem. 21.95; [Dem.] 59.26–27), to hold city magistracies (­Andoc. 1.132; Xen. Mem. 2.2.13; Aeschin. 1.­19–​­20), and to enter sanctuaries (­Lys. 6.9, 24; Dem. 22.77; 24.60, 103, 126; Aeschin. 1.164; 2.148; 3.176) (­Joyce 2018; contra Dmitriev 2015). Of these limitations, the only loss of citizen rights which could reasonably be said to be symmetrical in terms of gender application is the last, to enter temples and sacred places. Every other conception of what is meant to lose one’s rights and prerogatives as a citizen frames the matter in relation to the politeia and is thus applicable only to men. We know that some decrees of atimia applied to women, such as the adulteress at [Dem.] 59.86 and Aeschin. 1.183, who was banned from public worship. Those forms of atimia which did restrict religious interaction (­Aeschin. 3.176; [Lys.] 6.9, 24) could, by implication, affect women just as they could men, but 345

Christopher Joyce

the overwhelming preponderance of attested cases of atimia applies to areas of public life which, by their political nature, only men could occupy. This point is brought into relief if consideration is taken of the circumstances under which a citizen of Athens became atimos. These could include treason (­SEG 12.87), unlawful change in or abolition of city laws (­Dem. 23.62), theft of state property (­A ndoc. 1.74), and bribery (­Aeschin. 1.­30–​­32, ­94–​­105, 154). None of those categories can be interpreted to apply to women. When used in the phrase ἄτιμος τεθνάτω (‘­let him die dishonoured’), the sense of atimia did incorporate death or banishment and could be applied to ­non-​­citizens, with the most notorious example being Arthmius of Zeleia (­Youni 2001: 1­ 28–​­132). But when applied to citizens, atimia involved a defined limitation on the right to exercise participation in the legal and political institutions of the city (­Youni 2001, 2018, 2019; Joyce 2018). None of this either can apply to Athenian women. If ‘­to be a citizen’ meant ‘­to be a social participant’, then we would have expected to observe the converse, which we never do, whereby the deprivation of civic rights is tantamount to total exclusion from society (see also Filonik 2022: 266). It might be objected that the idea of citizenship which is well attested in the fifth and fourth centuries belongs to a mature stage in the evolution of the term, at a time when the political conception had trumped an older societal conception rooted in religion and worship. The evidence supporting this is very tenuous. The citizenship laws of 451/­450 or 403/­402 made no reference to matters of property or inheritance, since these were private, not public, matters.5 More questionable still is the assertion that Solon set out formal requirements for the rules of citizenship which were to persist well into the classical age. The four known Solonian laws on inheritance are (­Leão and Rhodes): (­1) fr. 47b (­prohibitions against marrying descendants of the same mother); (­2) fr. 48a, b (­definition of legitimate children as descended from engyetic unions); (­3) fr. ­49a–​­h (­inheritance down the male line); and (­4) provisions for female heiresses, or epiklēroi (­fr. 47a, ­50a–​­c). Plutarch alludes to a law on citizenship grants (­fr. 75 ap. Plut. Sol. 24.2). Solon is not known to have laid out legal provisions for citizenship (­Blok 2017: ­107–​­108). The phratry established a member’s relationship to a kinship network and was essential to belong to if one wanted to claim legitimacy.6 Some have claimed that citizenship and legitimacy were one and the same concept, but the evidence does not support that proposition, and it is crucial to differentiate the various ways in which ‘­legitimacy’ as a concept was used in legal vocabulary.7 All phratry members, male and female, were citizens of Athens, but it is far from clear that all citizens were members of phratries. Even if it could be argued that the archaic polis was an aggregate of kinship organizations such as phratries, for which the evidence is tenuous, the idea that this was the case in the classical age is much harder to demonstrate, not least since both Herodotus and the Ath. Pol. clarify that the basis of the Cleisthenic structure was not the phratry but the deme (­Hdt. 5.66.2, 69.2; [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 21). Significantly, when formal reference was made to a citizen, the patronymic and demotic are stated, but there is seldom, if ever, mention of the phratry to which a citizen belonged. Famously, the decree of naturalization of 405/­404, where citizenship was granted to the inhabitants of Samos (­IG II2 1.­33–​­34), reads καὶ νε͂ μαι [αὐτὸς αὐτίκα μάλα τὸς ἄρχοντας ἐς τὰ]ς φυλὰς δέκαχα (‘­and they shall be distributed immediately by the archons among the tribes in ten groups’), without referring to phratries. According to Xenophon, Cleocritus in his account of citizenship referred to schooling, festivals, and fighting collectively but said nothing about kinship associations (­Xen. Hell. 2.4.­ 20–​­21). If membership in kinship groups was the primary criterion of what it meant to 346

Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens?

be a citizen of Athens, a stronger case for gender symmetry could be made as women, no less than men, belonged to those groupings. But Cleocritus’ emphasis was upon activities which, by their nature, were male oriented. The recent approach which stresses kinship as the sole criterion for citizenship is problematic and tends to conflate three areas of concern, which the three lawgivers addressed in response to completely different historical circumstances. Solon’s was the definition of legitimacy as a legal concept as far as it affected matters of inheritance, and there is no evidence that any of his reforms or legislation were connected to the matter of citizenship. Cleisthenes devised a new understanding of the political community at Athens which was not dependent on birth, lineage, or social status. Within that new demographic structure, predicated as it was not on geography, the purpose was to foster a sense of community that cut across topographical and familial divides. That is not to deny that kinship was important in the Cleisthenic system insofar as having at least one Athenian parent was required from 508/­507 to be a citizen, as the use of the patronymic shows, but the full force of kinship requirements did not become evident until 451/­450. Pericles, in turn, brought citizenship and kinship together by specifying that Athenian citizens needed to demonstrate two native parents, but there is no evidence that ­ id-​­fifth century, citizenship Pericles had anything to say about engyēsis.8 From the m started to define itself according to kinship. But if Aristotle’s discussion of citizenship is taken seriously, then kinship is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. Aristotle is clear that in the fullest sense, not even children born of two Athenian parents can properly qualify as citizens until such time that they are old enough to participate in the body politic, or politeia. Once old enough, if male, they were entitled to participate in the politeia. To do so, they needed two Athenian parents. A woman was, therefore, a citizen insofar as she had the potential to produce male offspring who could enter the politeia, but her citizenship was not thereby equal to male citizenship.

Society and the politeia The foregoing discussion has shown that to ‘­partake of the city’ meant, in Greek, to exercise the rights and prerogatives held by male citizens. Women, of course, partook of important societal activities, with the most important being the cultic and religious life of the city, but if the expression metechein / meteinai tēs poleōs applied symmetrically to women as well as to men, we would need positive evidence that ‘­to partake of the city’ included the sense of partaking in cult which was open to women, metics, and slaves. Cultic groupings, such as phratries, went back to the dawn of the city and from the archaic age provided an important expression of community.9 The democracy, which did not emerge until the end of the sixth century, superimposed itself on older structures which continued as the most important criterion of civic identity.10 The recent effort to recognize the importance of women in society, which traditional studies have downplayed or overlooked entirely, turns on the idea that kinship was essential to the most ancient conception of citizenship. On that understanding, to be a citizen was not necessarily to be eligible for political office and service on the lawcourts, from which women were excluded, but to exercise all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities that came about from legitimate descent, in which category women were included. Four ancient texts have been adduced in support: Isaeus 6.47 (­O n the Estate of Philoctemon), Demosthenes 43.51 (­Against Macartatus), a scholion 347

Christopher Joyce

to Aeschines 1.39 (­Against Timarchus), and Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 13.577b. Isaeus and Demosthenes cite a law dating from the time of the democratic restoration in 403/­ 402 excluding illegitimate children (­nothoi) from inheritance (­anchisteia) and access to the hiera kai hosia. Athenaeus and the scholiast cite a law of the same period declaring that those who could not demonstrate Athenian parentage on both sides were nothoi and therefore could not share in the city (­μέτεχειν τῆς πόλεως). The problem here is that we have two distinct and separate concepts of illegitimacy at play, one which invokes the nature of the parental union, the other the ethnic identity of the parents. The first is about inheritance entitlements from which those who could not show that they were born from unions cemented by engyē were excluded, whereas the second was about citizenship (­Joyce 2019). At face value, there is no reason to believe that the same law was being cited across all four sources. The first two sources mentioned cited a law which affected inheritance and cult, the second two a law which defined citizenship from 403/­ 402 in terms of the ethnicity of a claimant’s parents. Assuming, however, that all four sources referred to one law, the claim has been made that at the heart of citizenship law was the understanding that a citizen, by definition, had access to the hiera kai hosia. This is a very serious misinterpretation. On closer analysis, these crucial texts show that participation in the hiera kai hosia was strictly a matter of private law which affected the bequest of property and the right to belong to cultic organizations, most importantly phratries.11 This was unrelated to citizenship. The law which excluded nothoi from the right to partake in the city (­μέτεχειν τῆς πόλεως) was a separate law which invoked not the marital union of the parents, but whether a claimant had two citizen parents. The difficulty here lies in the semantic range of nothos, which could refer either to someone without two citizen parents or to someone whose parents had not been legally united (­see Ar. Byz. fr. ­231–​­232 Slater; Poll. 3.21). The implications of Isaeus 3 (­O n the Estate of Pyrrhus) are that nothoi were citizens, and his point has never been satisfactorily refuted.12 The common claim that only children of wedlock could be citizens depends on a misreading of Aristotle’s Politics 1278a, which refers to ‘­genuine’ (­gnēsioi) citizens, where the implied contrast is not with those born in wedlock but those of mixed ethnic background, one Athenian and one ­non-​­Athenian parent. The matter of citizenship at Athens had little to do with the hiera kai hosia. Women had access to the hiera kai hosia if, like men, they could demonstrate that their parents had been legally united, but this was a private matter which ultimately affected inheritance and cult, not whether they (­or their offspring) could exercise a full conception of Athenian citizenship. The most complete and important theoretical discussion of citizenship we have from antiquity is Aristotle’s Politics (­III, 1281a.­1–​­8, trans. W.D. Ross), which reads: This in our view constitutes a happy and noble life; the political fellowship must therefore be deemed to exist for the sake of noble actions, not merely for living in common. Hence those who contribute most to such fellowship have a larger part in the government (­τ ῆς πόλεως μέτεστι πλεῖον) than those who are their equals or superiors in freedom and birth but not their equals in civic virtue, or than those who surpass them in wealth but are surpassed by them in virtue. The most important exercise of citizenship according to Aristotle was the right to share in judicial office (­krisis) and political office (­archē) (­Pol. 1275a.­22–​­4). Such a definition is going to incorporate men but disqualify women. The Aristotelian definition 348

Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens?

has come under recent attack on the grounds that it focuses not on the polis but on the politeia and thereby confuses the different philosophical and political categories which it seeks to describe (­Blok 2017: 17). Yet it is far from clear that Aristotle commits any of the errors attributed to him, but constructs a cogent line of argument that in order to understand what a politeia is, we need to go back a stage to what a polis (­the whole) is, and to do that we need to go back one stage further to what a politēs (­the constituent part) is. To be a politēs is to be able to share in krisis (­court service) and archai (­public magistracies). For this reason, Aristotle excludes children too young to partake in office and men old enough to be excused from duty but acknowledges that, in one sense, young and old may be called ‘­citizens’ in the potential to exercise those functions under different circumstances (­being older or younger). The arguments are wholly consistent with themselves and internally logical. Aristotle is also clear on the point that sharing in civic rights and duties, such as lawsuits, is an insufficient criterion, as resident aliens (­metics) possessed that right but were not counted as citizens. Thus, to be a member of the politeia involves much more than to be a member of the polis. Specifically, it entails the right to govern the polis for which only politai are qualified. There are, indeed, no good internal grounds upon which to doubt the authority of Aristotle, and the passage is therefore to be respected.13 The allegation that Aristotle uses terminology incompatibly with other Greek usage is not to be taken lightly, and it is worth surveying some attested usages of politēs and its cognates to determine whether Aristotle distorts reality to suit his own philosophical ends.14 It is certainly true that the verb πολιτεύειν, or its middle form πολιτεύεσθαι, can in some circumstances mean ‘­to live in a polis’, usually as a free citizen as distinct from a slave or a metic.15 But in the majority of attestations, the verb implies the exercise of political power, in the sense of ‘­to take part in government’16 or ‘­to take part in politics’,17 or ‘­to govern’,18 or to ‘­possess a certain form of government’,19 or in the passive form ‘­to be governed’.20 The preponderant emphasis on political power and its exercise in government cuts right the way across Greek literature and should discourage the argument that Aristotle construes politēs in a unique, biased, or idiosyncratic way within his own philosophical system. The evidence referred to above is but a small representative sample of numerous attestations where the sense of πολιτεύειν and its cognates comports the idea of exercising government.21 It is worth noting that the passive πολιτεύεσθαι can be used in the sense of a middle but with the active meaning ‘­to be a citizen’ (­Thuc. 6.92.4) or ‘­to be involved in politics’ (­Dem. E­p. 2.14; Arist. Pol. 1273b.­30–​­32), and in the passive (­Lys. 26.5) but can also have the passive sense of ‘­to be governed’ (­Isoc. 7.15; [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 23.2, 33.2; Pl. Leg. 3. 693e; Xen. Mem. 4.4.16). When used as a middle sensu stricto, the verb πολιτεύεσθαι tends to mean to govern oneself (­Lys. 2.19) or ‘­to act as a citizen’ (­Lys. 12.21). There are attestations where it is unclear if it means ‘­to be a citizen’ or ‘­to take a part in government’ (­Lys. 24.25; 26.5), but other passages (­e.g., Lys. 25.10 and 27) attest little difference between the sense of πολιτεύεσθαι as ‘­to act as a citizen’ and ‘­to be actively engaged in politics’. Though the terms politēs and astos by the fifth century could often be used interchangeably,22 etymology indicates that, in origin, they came from different parts of the physical city, the politēs from that originally termed ‘­the ptolis’, which in later times acquired the name ‘­acropolis’, and the astos from the outer parts where those of lesser social rank dwelt. The social sense of astoi as distinct from agathoi, the latter of which refers to 349

Christopher Joyce

the nobility or leading citizens, is attested in Pindar and Isocrates, and though by the classical age the social distinction between astos and politēs had completely vanished in legal vocabulary, colloquially it lingered on (­Pind. Pyth. 3.71; Isoc. 3.21). On one definition, the politai are ‘­those who belong to the polis’, but as a definition this is woefully inadequate, as ‘­belonging to the polis’ can apply in various ways to slaves and metics, as well as to women and children. Without a doubt, citizens in archaic poetry can be represented in multifarious ways, cheering victors (­Pind. Nem. 2.24), mourning the dead (­Hom. Il. 2.­803–​­6), and gossiping (­Pind. Pyth. 11.28). In various passages of Homer, the politai (­or poliētai) are often depicted as being close both politically and geographically to the main locus of power (­see Iliad 15.­557–​­558; 22.­429–​­430; Od. 7.131; 17.206; Hymn Dem. 99). The meaning of the feminine equivalent, politis, is less easy to discern as it is harder to connect it with empowerment in a political sense. In Aristophanes, who was writing farce, there is no problem about imagining that the term links with power, since the playwright toys with parallel realities in which women rule the city. This is less obvious with tragedy, but when used, it is notable that the politides are not merely ‘­city dwellers’ but, like the poliētai in Homer, those close to the locus of power (­Eur. El. 1137, ­1198–​­1205). This is particularly the case in Euripides’ Electra, where the heroine in an address to a chorus of Argive women calls them politides. The point is that now that Orestes has come back from the dead, justice can at last be served, a tyrant slain, and the people of Argos will again be free. The understanding of the term as ‘­h ighlighting piety and filial duty towards the dead’ underestimates what Electra is saying and imports the assumption that vengeance in tragedy was seen as morally desirable.23 Filial duty itself is discharged not by the women, but by Orestes; the act of vengeance is not a civic ­duty  – ​­indeed, it is morally ­questionable  – ​­but a private matter, though with widespread political consequences for Argos. The feminine politis appears not only in poetic texts but also in Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher deals with the question of legitimate claims to citizenship (­Pol. 1278a.­26–​­33). When speaking of bastards (­nothoi), Aristotle specifically means this in the second of the two senses noted by Pollux, which is ‘­born of a union between a citizen and a n ­ on-​­citizen’. Here, the term politis is used to refer to a native woman, and there is no implication that its meaning is different from astē. Here, Aristotle uses the term as an ethnic, rather than a political, expression whose sense, mutatis mutandis, is comparable to politēs at Hdt. 7.237. Aristotle speaks of citizenship in a legal sense, and when speaking in a legal application only, it makes good sense to speak of a symmetrical concept of citizenship between men and women. But this does not furnish good reason to infer that the nouns politēs and politis were symmetrical in all applications. The question is less what the two nouns mean in the concrete, but what politeia in the abstract denotes. Noteworthy is that there is no abstract noun ‘­asteia’ derived from astos or astē. When politeia enters the Greek political vocabulary in the fifth century, it can refer to citizen rights,24 the citizen body (­Arist. Pol. 1292a.34), government,25 tenure of office (­IG IV 716.6), constitution,26 and in some very specialized contexts, a specifically democratic type of constitution (­Arist. Nic. Eth. 1160a.34; Pol. 1293b.22). Only on very rare occasions can the abstraction refer to daily life in the city, where it could be argued that those who partake of it are politai and politides symmetrically (­A ndoc. 2.10; Dem. 19.184; 20.122). Women were citizens of Athens in the important legal sense that it was necessary to have an Athenian mother for a free adult male to be a citizen. It is also true that women were members of kinship groups, held priesthoods, performed religious functions, and 350

Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens?

were an indispensable human component of society without which Athens could not have functioned. The need to shed light on the immeasurable contribution of women has never been more keenly felt, and much more work is to be done in exploring this fascinating, and still underexplored, branch of the discipline. Yet when the theoretical categories of ‘­citizenship’ and ‘­societal participation’ are confused in scholarship, there looms a danger that an accurate description of the contribution of Athenian women to the history of Athens comes under threat. There was much more to Athenian society than citizenship, which occupies one corner of the puzzle. To do the other parts of the puzzle justice, it is also necessary that we respect our ancient authorities and seek to understand them on their own terms.

Notes 1 See also Vernant (­1985); ­Vidal-​­Naquet (­1986); Detienne (­1989); Loraux (­1986, 1993); and Fröhlich (­2016). 2 Soph. OT 630; Isoc. 16.48; Lys. 18.1; Dem. 57.1, 23, 55; Aeschin. 2.78; Arist. Pol. 1281a.5; Xen. Hell. 2.3.48; 4.4.6; [Lys.] 6.48; Dem. 57.51; Isae. 3.37; Pl. Leg. 745c6; Arist. Pol. 1316b.2, 1329a.20. See also Filonik in this volume. 3 For the role of metics in the Panathenaic festival, see Parker (­1996: 91); Brulé (­1996); Maurizio (­1998); Shear (­2001: ­120–​­230); Niels (­2001: ­146–​­50); and Connelly (­2007). 4 For its appearance on ostraca and votive offerings, see Winters (­1993); Lambert (­1998: 264); and Siewert (­2002). For a more recent publication of ostraca sherds which show that the demotic certainly was used in the period leading up to 480, see Sickinger (­2017). The evidence as it stands is too fragmentary to assert, with Blok and some others, that the use of the demotic becomes regular in official contexts only from the 430s onward, since the quantity of surviving public inscriptions predating the ­m id-​­fifth century are so sparse in any case. 5 For modern discussions, see Gomme (­1937: 75); MacDowell (­1976); Rhodes (­1978); Dmitriev (­2018: 24, with appendix 1); and Joyce (­2019: ­473–​­474 and 481). 6 Lambert (­1998: ­178–​­189 and 347). On the necessity to introduce daughters, see Wilgaux (­2000, 2009). 7 For the claim that citizenship and legitimacy were one and the same, see, most recently, Blok (­2017); Dmitriev (­2018); and Humphreys (­2018). Against that tendency, see Joyce (­2019: 477), with a discussion of Ar. Byz. fr. 2­ 31–​­232 Slater; Poll. 3.21; and, most recently, Rocchi (­2021: 101). The clearest indication from the fourth century that citizenship and legitimacy of parentage were different matters decided by different bodies holding different jurisdictions comes from IG II2 1237.­116–​­121, which show that admission to the phratry operated independently from deme admission; see Joyce (­2021: 1­ 21–​­123). 8 Our two principal sources for the Periclean law are Ath. Pol. 26.4 and Plut. Per. 37.­2 –​­5, both of which lay sole emphasis upon the ethnicity of the parents, not the legal status of their union. Despite the complete absence of evidence that Pericles had anything to say about engyēsis, the blanket assumption that union by engyē was a necessary condition of citizenship in the Classical Age is present in the work of Rhodes (­1978), Blok (­2017), Dmitriev (­2018), and Humphreys (­2018), none of whom can point to satisfactory evidence to support this assertion. 9 For the view that the ‘­k inship’ structure of these groupings was, in origin, fictive, see Bourriot (­1976) and Roussel (­1976). Blok cites these works extensively yet fails to reflect upon their full implications. According to Bourriot, the genos was never empowered in a political sense, in which case it is false to imagine that the polis, as a political entity, displaced the genē. According to Roussel, the tribe was a creation of the polis, rather than its forebear, in which case in a chronological and causal sense, the polis precedes the tribe and phratry as an institutional body. 10 For varying modern views of how citizenship is to be understood in a wider societal and religious background, see Walter (­1993); Ostwald (­1996); Cartledge (­2000); Carter (­2004); Hall (­2007); Liddel (­2007); Mann (­2008); and Hammer (­2009).

351

Christopher Joyce 11 That gnēsioi alone could belong to phratries is clear from IG II2 1237.­110–​­112, which show that at the induction of candidates the introducer had to swear that the inductee was born of a legitimate union. What the same inscription shows, however, is that the matter of the ethnicity of the parents was a separate matter already been decided by the time the matter of the parental union was brought before the phratry. For further discussion, see Joyce (­2021: ­121–​­123). 12 MacDowell (­1976). See, more recently, Hatzilambrou (­2010); Joyce (­2019); contra Rhodes (­1978), who sought a route around this passage by assuming, without adducing evidence, that girls could not enter phratries. 13 Fröhlich (­2016), also critiquing the work of Müller (­2014, 2015) and Sebillotte Cuchet (­2016). 14 See Blok (­2005), which surveys some of these attestations, but which nevertheless presents the matter from a slanted and incomplete perspective, as the sources in their totality show that to be a citizen involves much more than merely living in a geographical location. 15 Thuc. 2.46, 3.34, 4.114; Xen. An. 3.2.26; Hell. 1.5.19; Cyr. 1.1.1; Polyb. 4.76.2; Ar. Eq. 1365; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3.9; Andoc. 2.10; Dem. 10.4, 18.207; Lys. 12.20. 16 Thuc. 2.15; Dem. 18.18; Pl. Cri. 45d. 17 Pl. Res­p. 561d; Aeschin. 1.195. 18 Ar. Lys. 573, Eq. 1365; Lys. 25.27; Dem. 2.29, 10.74, 18.4; Aeschin. 2.177. 19 Thuc. 1.19, 2.65, 3.62, 4.130; Xen. Hell. 2.3.2; Isoc. 3.24; Pl. Res­p. 8, 568b; Aeschin. 1.5. 20 Isoc. 6.35; Pl. Res­p. 44, 27a; Xen. Mem. 4.4.16. 21 See, in addition, Thuc. 2.15.1; Dem. 18.18; Pl. Res­p.  561d; Aeschin. 1.195; Lys. 25.27; Xen. Hell. 2.3.2; Mem. 4.4.16; Isoc. 3.­23–​­4. 22 The frequently interchangeable nature of their usage, a point which Blok accurately and astutely makes, indeed, speaks strongly against the recent attempt by Dmitriev (­2018) to partition one off from the other as if they refer to two legally distinct groups defined as the ‘­k inship’ and ‘­political’ communities. In line with Dmitriev’s view that politēs and astos were not synonymous, see E. Cohen (­2000: ­50–​­63). 23 Blok (­2017: 161). Some have claimed that vengeance was a licenced moral norm in Greek ethics, for example, Chaniotis (­2013: ­55–​­60), where the argument is based on a questionable reading of Lysias 13. Yet there are many passages across a range of Greek literary texts which give the opposite impression, e.g., Soph. Aj. ­678–​­82; Arist. Rhet. 1389b.­23–​­25; Diog. Laert. 1.87; see T ­ ziatzi-​­Papagianni (­1994: ­404–​­405). For a more recent demonstration that the Greek tragedians saw vengeance as an undesirable motive, see Harris (­2018). 24 Hdt. 9.34; Thuc. 6.104; Xen. Hell. 1.2.10; [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 54.3. 25 Ar. Eq. 219; Thuc. 1.127; Xen. Mem. 3.9.15; Dem. 18.87. 26 Ant. 3.2.1; Thuc. 2.37; Dem. 18.65; Pl. Res­p. 562a; Aeschin. 1.4; Arist. Pol. 1293a.37.

Bibliography Baba, K. (­1984) ‘­On Kerameikos inv. I 388 (­SEG XXII, 79): a note on the formation of the Athenian ­metic-​­status’, ABSA 79, ­1–​­5 Bakewell, G.W. (­1997) ‘­Metoikia in the Supplices of Aeschylus’, CA 16, ­209–​­228 Bednarek, B. (­2017) ‘­Aesop victimised: the sale of sacrificial and ­non-​­sacrificial meat’, Mnemosyne 70, ­58–​­78 Blok, J.H. (­2005) ‘­Becoming citizens: Some notes on the semantics of “­citizen” in archaic and classical Athens’, Klio 87, ­7–​­40 ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­Deme accounts and the meaning of hosios money’, Memnosyne 63, ­61–​­93 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Bourriot, F. (­1976) Recherches sur la nature du génos: étude d’histoire sociale a­ thénienne – ​­periodes archaique et classique (­Lille) Brulé, P. (­1996) ‘­La cité en ses composantes: remarques sur les sacrifices et la procession des Panathénées’, Kernos 6, ­37–​­63 Canevaro, M. (­2010) ‘­The decree awarding citizenship to the Plataeans ([Dem.] 59.104’, GRBS 50, ­337–​­369 Carter, D.M. (­2004) ‘­Citizen attribute, negative right: a conceptual difference between ancient and modern ideas of freedom of speech’, in I. Sluiter and R.M. Rosen (­eds) Free speech in classical break as anti-quity, Memnosyne Suppl. 254 (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­197–​­220

352

Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens? Cartledge, P. (­2000) ‘­Greek political thought: the historical context’, in C.J. Rowe and M. Schofield (­eds) The Cambridge history of Greek and Roman political thought (­Cambridge) ­11–​­22 Chaniotis, A. (­2013) ‘­Normen stärker als Emotionen? Der Kulturhistorische Kontext der griechischen Amnestie’, in K. Harter Uibopuu and F. Mitthof (­eds) Vergeben und Vergessen? Amnestie in der Antike (­Vienna) ­47–​­70 Clinton, K. (­1980) ‘­A Law in the city Eleusinion concerning the Mysteries’, Hesperia 49, ­258–​­288 ——— ​­(­2008) Eleusis: the inscriptions on stone: documents of the sanctuary of the two goddesses and public documents of the deme, Volume II: commentary (­Athens) Cohen, E.E. (­2000) The Athenian nation (­Princeton, NJ) Connelly, J.B. (­2007) Portrait of a priestess: women and ritual in ancient Greece (­Princeton, NJ and Oxford) Detienne, M. (­1989) ‘­The violence of wellborn ladies: women at the “­Thesmophoria”’, in M. Detienne and J.-​­P. Vernant (­eds) The cuisine of sacrifice among the Greeks (­Chicago and London) ­129–​­147 Dmitriev, S. (­2015) ‘­Athenian atimia and legislation against tyranny and subversion’, CQ 65.1, ­35–​­50 ——— ​­(­2018) The birth of the Athenian community: from Solon to Cleisthenes (­Abingdon and New York) Filonik, J. (­2021) ‘­Speaking for the gods: Greek cultic regulations and their silent informants’, in S. Papaioannou, A. Serafim, and K. Demetriou (­eds) Rhetoric and religion in ancient Greece and Rome (­Berlin) ­37–​­58 ——— (2022) ‘A civic style: the use of μετέχειν metaphors in Athenian oratory’, Trends in Classics 14.2, 255–270 Fröhlich, P. (­2016) ‘­La citoyenneté grècque entre Aristote et les modernes’, CCG 27, ­91–​­136 Gomme, A.W. (­1937) Essays in Greek history and literature (­Oxford) Hall, J. (­2007) ‘­Polis, community, and ethnic identity’, in H.A. Shapiro (­ed.) The Cambridge Companion to archaic Greece (­Cambridge) ­40– ​­60 Hammer, D. (­2009) ‘­W hat is politics in the ancient world?’ in R.K. Balot (­ed.) A companion to Greek and Roman political thought (­Malden, MA and Oxford) ­20–​­36 Hansen, M.H. (­1991) The Athenian democracy in age of Demosthenes: structure, principles and ideology (­Oxford) Harris, E.M. (­2018) ‘­Pollution and purification in Athenian law and in Attic tragedy: parallels or divergences’, in S. Bigliazzi, F. Lupi, Gh. Ugolini (­eds) Συναγωνίζεσθαι: studies in honour of Guido Avezzù (­Verona) ­419– ​­454 Hatzilambrou, R. (­2010) ‘­Isaius’ art of persuasion: the case of his third speech’, WS 123, ­19–​­35 Humphreys, S.C. (­1974) ‘­The nothoi of Kynosarges’, JHS 94, ­88–​­95 ——— ​­(­2018) Kinship in ancient Athens: an anthropological perspective (­Oxford and New York) Joyce, C.J. (­2018) ‘­Atimia and outlawry in archaic and classical Greece’, Polis 35, ­33–​­60 ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­Citizenship of inheritance? The phratry in classical Athens’, Polis 37, ­466–​­487 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­A new solution to the Demotionid inscription’, RDE 12, ­121–​­179 Kamen, D. (­2013) Status in classical Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Kindt, J. (­2012) Rethinking Greek religion (­Cambridge) Lambert, S.D. (­1998) The phratries of Attica, 2nd edn (­A nn Arbor) Liddel, P. (­2007) Civic obligation and individual liberty in ancient Athens (­Oxford) Loraux, N. (­1986) The invention of Athens: the funeral oration in the classical city (­Cambridge, MA) ——— ​­(­1993) The children of Athena: Athenian ideas about citizenship and the division between the sexes (­P rinceton, NJ) Lytle, E. (­2013) ‘­Farmers into sailors: ship maintenance, Greek agriculture, and the Athenian monopoly on Kean ruddle (­IG II2 1128)’, GRBS 53, ­520–​­550 MacDowell, D.M. (­1976) ‘­Bastards as Athenian citizens’, CQ 26, ­88–​­91 Mann, C. (­ 2008) ‘­ Politische Gleichheit und gesellschaftliche Stratifikation: die athenische Demokratie aus der Perspektive der Systemtheorie’, HZ 286, ­1–​­35 Manville, P.B. (­1990) The origins of citizenship in ancient Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Maurizio, L. (­1998) ‘­The Panathenaic procession: Athens’ participatory democracy on display?’, in D. Boedeker and K.A. Raaflaub (­eds) Democracy, empire and the arts in fifth century Athens (­Cambridge, MA and London) ­297–​­317

353

Christopher Joyce Müller, C. (­2014) ‘­La (­dé)­construction de la politeia: citoyenneté et octroi de privilèges aux étrangers dans les démocraties hellénistiques’, Annales (­HSS) 69.3, ­753–​­775 ——— ​­(­2 015) ‘­D e l’époque classique à l’époque hellénistique: la citoyenneté des Grecs, une citoyenneté en mutation? Réflexions sur la question de l’appartenance multiple’, Studi Ellenistici, 29, ­355–​­369 Niels, J. (­2001) The Parthenon frieze (­Cambridge) Ostwald, M. (­1996) ‘­Shares and rights: “­citizenship” Greek style and American style’, in E.W. Robinson (­ed.) Ancient Greek democracy: readings and sources (­Malden, MA), ­159–​­170 Parker, R.T.C. (­1996) Athenian religion: a history (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2005) Polytheism and society at Athens (­Oxford and New York) ——— ​­(­2011) On Greek religion (­Ithaca, NY and London) Patterson, C. (­1990) ‘­Those Athenian bastards’, ClAnt 9, ­40–​­73 Rhodes, P.J. (­1978) ‘­Bastards as Athenian citizens’, CQ 28, ­89–​­92 ——— ​­(­2009) ‘­Civic ideology and citizenship’, in R.K. Balot (­ed.) A companion to Greek and Roman political thought (­Malden, MA and Oxford) ­57–​­69 Rocchi, L. (­2021) Studies on P. Oxy XXXI 2537 (­Berlin and Boston, MA) Roussel, D. (­1976) Tribu et cité (­Paris) Sealey, R. (­1983) ‘­How citizenship and the city began in Athens’, AJAH 8, ­92–​­129 Sebillotte Cuchet, V. (­2016) ‘­Ces citoyennes qui reconfigurent le politique. Trente ans de travaux sur les femmes et la citoyenneté dans l’Antiquité classique’, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 43, ­185–​­215 Shear, J.L. (­2001) Polis and Panathenaea: the History and development of Athena’s festival, diss. University of Pennsylvania (­UMI 3015371) Sickinger, J.P. (­2017) ‘­New ostraka from the Athenian agora’, Hesperia 86, ­443–​­508 Siewert, P. (­2002) ­Ostrakismus-​­Testimonien, vol. 1. Die Zeugnisse antiker Autoren, der Inschriften und Ostraka über das athenische Scherbengericht aus vorhellenistischen Zeit (­­487-​­322 v. Chr.) (­Stuttgart) ­Sourvinou-​­Inwood, C. (­1990) ‘­W hat is polis religion?’, in O. Murray and S. Price (­eds) The Greek city: from Homer to Alexander (­Oxford) ­295–​­322 ­Tziatzi-​­Papagianni, M. (­1994) Die Sprüche der sieben Weisen: zwei byzantinische Sammlungen. Einleitung, Text, Testimonien und Kommentar (­Berlin) Walter, U. (­1993) An der Polis teilhaben: Bürgerstaat und Zuhörigkeit im archaischen Griechenland (­Stuttgart) Vernant, J.P. (­1985) Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (­Paris) ­Vidal-​­Naquet, P. (­1986) The black hunter: forms of thought and forms of society in the Greek world, trans. A. ­Szegedy-​­Maszak, orig. Paris 1981 (­Baltimore, MD) Whitehead, D.M. (­1977) The ideology of the Athenian metic (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­1986) The demes of Attica (­Princeton, NJ) Wijma, S.M. (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­5th and 4th BC) (­Stuttgart) Wilgaux, J. (­2000) ‘­Entre inceste et échange: réflexions sur le modèle matrimonial athénien’, L’homme 154/­155, ­659–​­676 ​­2009) ‘­De l’exil au partage: la transmission feminine des appartenances parentales et ——— (­ religieuses’, in L. Bodioi and V. Mehl (­eds) La religion des femmes en Grèce ancienne: mythes, cultes et société (­Rennes) ­225–​­237 Wilson, P. (­2015) ‘­The festival of Dionysios in Ikarion. A new study of IG I3 254’, Hesperia 84, ­97–​­147 Winters, T.F. (­1993) ‘­K leisthenes and Athenian nomenclature’, JHS 133, ­162–​­165 Youni, M. (­2001) ‘­The different categories of unpunished killing and the term ΑΤΙΜΟΣ in ancient Greek law’, in E. Cantarella (­ed.) Symposion 1997. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Cologne) ­117–​­137 ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Outlawry in classical Athens: nothing to do with atimia’, in G. Thür, U. Yiftach, and R. ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­eds) Symposion 2017. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Vienna) ­137–​­156 ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­Atimia in classical Athens: what the sources say’ in L. Gagliardi and L. Pepe (­eds) Dike: essays on Greek law in honor of Alberto Maffi (­Milan) ­361–​­378

354

25 PLACES OF CITIZENSHIP IN ATHENIAN FORENSIC ORATORY Christine Plastow

There is a strong relationship among citizenship, place, and social practice.1 If one has citizenship, it must be citizenship of somewhere; people without citizenship are sometimes described as ‘­d isplaced’. Even the modern concept of being a ‘­g lobal citizen’ relies on a notion of transcending national boundaries. Citizenship can be conceived of as both a vertical relationship with the state connected with a set of political rights and duties, and a horizontal sense of social belonging; both conceptions ‘­are intricately related to space, territory, borders and boundaries, subjectivity, and social practices’ (­Ehrkamp and Jacobsen 2015: 153). In addition, citizenship, like many other identities, is not simply something a person has, but something they can enact through their behaviour. Enacting citizenship does not simply refer to engagement with citizen rights and responsibilities, but also ‘­c itizenship as lived experience in daily life, and as social practice’ (­Ehrkamp and Jacobsen 2015: 154). This idea, too, has important connections to place, particularly what Tim Cresswell calls place as a ‘­material practice’: the concept that places become places as a result of human behaviour and action, that ‘­places are performed on a daily basis through people living their everyday life’ (­2004: 34). In other words, it is the ­often-​­repeated performance of certain human behaviours in specific locations that transforms those locations into places from undifferentiated spaces. When those behaviours include elements of citizenship, the places they create become imbued with specifically citizen connotations. These connections between citizenship and place are not limited to the modern world, and indeed in ancient Greece the association was perhaps particularly strong due to the predominance of state organization into poleis, meaning that one’s citizenship was tied to a relatively small area (­Hansen 2004: ­70–​­72; see also Rhodes in this volume). In the Politics, Aristotle’s conception of successful citizenship is closely tied to space, particularly the ideal size of the polis (­­1326a–​­1327a). He notes that the population should be neither too large nor too small, but the right size ‘­for the citizens to know each other’s personal characters’ (­1326b; trans. Rackham 1932), which implies a certain spread of population across space that would allow for such a ­face-­​­­to-​­face society. The land itself, according to Aristotle, should be ‘­of a size that will enable the inhabitants

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-30

355

Christine Plastow

to live a life of liberal and at the same time temperate leisure’ (­1326b; trans. Rackham 1932) – ​­once again, neither too large nor too small, with enough but not excessive space for each ­citizen – ​­and that it must ‘­be well able to be taken in at one view’ (­1327a; trans. Rackham 1932), for the purposes of effective military defence and easy distribution of produce and raw materials. Aristotle also relates the connections between population and place made by Hippodamus of Miletus, who he says divided both the population and the land each into three parts in order to achieve the necessary purposes of the state (­Pol. 1267b). Place can also be a useful lens through which to read Athenian forensic oratory.2 The genre is intrinsically associated with Athenian citizenship: speakers in the courts of Athens aimed to persuade a citizen jury, and often did so by invoking and exploring citizen ideals and paradigms. For many of the participants in a trial, the courtroom may not have been an everyday space, and it would have held powerful ideological meaning even for those frequent litigants or jurors who did attend more often. The broader spaces of the city of Athens, including both public spaces such as the Assembly and private homes, also held ideological power which could be exploited rhetorically (­e.g., Shear 2011: ­263–​­285; Lehmann 2019; n.2 above). Even spaces on the boundaries of Attica as well as further abroad could hold rhetorical meaning for Athenian audiences, as, for example, Phyle and Sparta do in Lysias, Macedon in Aeschines, the Chersonese in Demosthenes, and Lesbos in Antiphon.3 This chapter focuses on the rhetoric of citizenship through two forms of placemaking. The first I call ideological placemaking: places given specific meaning with regard to citizenship by their monumental, memorializing construction, which was often ascribed to prominent ancestors whose behaviour could be held up as a paradigm of citizenship, and the meaning of which is then solidified over time by the repeated connection of the place to citizen ideals embodied by the ancestors and emulated by later citizens.4 The second I call procedural placemaking: places whose connection to citizenship comes from their everyday use in the procedures of ­citizenship – ​­the enactment ­ uties – ​­which then accretes until the place becomes emblematic of citizen rights and d of good, engaged citizen behaviour. In both types, the place becomes associated with the institutions of citizenship and democracy and ‘­takes on a rulelike status in social thought and action’, dictating the norms to which future citizens should adhere (­DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 9). In this way, citizen places both are formed by citizen behaviour and serve to reinforce its correct enactment. In this chapter, I examine the use of two Athenian places related to citizenship in the forensic speeches: the Propylaia and the Bouleuterion. The Propylaia is an example of a space connected with ideology: it is not used so much as experienced as part of a number of civic rituals and activities associated both with citizenship and with Athenian victory and superiority. As a result, it holds rhetorical power as a reminder of the lineage and heritage of Athenian citizenship. The Bouleuterion, by contrast, is associated with procedure as the site of a large amount of everyday citizen activity necessary to the running of the city. In rhetorical terms, then, it can be useful as a synecdoche for the democracy and holds particular potency as a site for the potential corruption of the city if the judges fail to do their job. I end with an examination of two passages from Aeschines that employ the concept of the removal of the Propylaia and the Bouleuterion to Thebes, which solidifies the ideological power and association with Athens and Athenian citizenship of these two sites, and inverts other rhetorical uses to make a particularly powerful political argument. 356

Places of citizenship in Athenian forensic oratory

The Propylaia The Propylaia is mentioned by name seven times in the surviving forensic speeches and fragments, roughly equalling mentions of the Parthenon.5 This may seem surprising: in ritual terms, the monumental gateway is far from the most important structure on the Acropolis, and the precinct beyond it not only held the temple to the city’s patron goddess and formed the centre point for the most important Athenian festival, the Panathenaia, but was also an emblem of Athens’ victory over the Persians and hegemony within Greece, at least in the classical period (­schol. 121 Dilts ad Dem. 3.25; Westwood 2020: 256).6 But visually, at least, the Propylaia was very significant: it was designed to ‘­overwhelm’ visitors to the temples and provide a suitably magnificent entryway into this important area (­Hurwit 2004: 162; Shear, Jr 2016: ­283–​­284). The central halls stood around 14.5m tall, only slightly shorter than the Parthenon itself.7 Viewed from a distance, and particularly from the Pnyx, the Propylaia was highly visible, designed to complement rather than obstruct sight of the Parthenon, and must have been seen as an intrinsic part of the whole, both aesthetically and ritually, in forming an important threshold between space inside and outside of the Acropolis.8 In this way, it is easy to see how the monumental entranceway may have become a synecdoche for the Acropolis more broadly, and indeed for everything the Acropolis stood for in the Athenian imagination (­Kostopoulos 2019: 94).9 References to the Propylaia appear in the surviving works of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lycurgus; this is perhaps unsurprising, given the ­often-​­political content of speeches by those orators and the rhetorical potential of the gateway to evoke matters related to the polis. Most of the references mention the Propylaia as part of a list of structures, alongside others both on the Acropolis and elsewhere in Athens. Only one of these instances, however, refers explicitly to the man who Plutarch and others considered largely responsible for the Propylaia’s construction: Pericles (­Plut. Per. 13). It appears in a fragment of Lycurgus (­speech 14 fr. 2 Loeb): Pericles, having captured Samos and Euboea and Aigina, and built the Propylaea and the Odeion and the Hecatompedon, and placed countless talents of silver in the Acropolis, was crowned with an olive wreath. The fragmentary nature of the text means it cannot properly be contextualized, though it does appear to be a forensic oration and is associated with the titles Against Demades or Against Cephisodotus on the Honours to Demades. Although, as we shall see, the other references to the Propylaia in the orators make clearer connections between the gateway and citizen values, what we can confirm from Lycurgus is the status of the Propylaia’s construction as something praiseworthy. Pericles’ building project is placed alongside his military achievements and financial gain for the city as reasons for his ­crowning – ​­a sign of his successful (­indeed, exceptional) fulfilment of his citizen duty towards Athens. Although Pericles was certainly no ordinary citizen, this reference to the Propylaia gives a foundation for understanding the more complex rhetorical uses of the structure that appear in Demosthenes and Aeschines as ways of evoking citizen values. More frequently, these lists of buildings are associated by the orators with collective groups of Athenian ancestors. An indicative passage is from Demosthenes Against Androtion, during Demosthenes’ argument about the necessity of taking a council’s 357

Christine Plastow

shipbuilding activity into account when awarding crowns for successful service (­Dem. 22.13, trans. Harris 2008): For instance, anyone could give many examples, both from the past and from recent events, but among those that are familiar to everyone from hearing about them, if you wish, there are the men who built the Propylaia and the Parthenon and decorated the rest of the temples with the spoils taken from the barbarians, achievements that rightly give us all a sense of pride. You certainly know this from hearing about it that after leaving the city and being shut off on Salamis, they saved all their own possessions and the city by winning the victory at sea because they had triremes. They were also responsible for bringing the rest of the Greeks many great benefits, the memory of which not even time can erase. This is the earliest surviving explicit reference we have to the temple on the Acropolis as ‘­the Parthenon’ (­Giannadaki 2020: 166). The rhetorical effect is compounded by rolling together the construction project with the battle at Salamis, despite these events happening a generation apart.10 The Propylaia and other structures are strongly associated with noble and, crucially, victorious ancestors at a key turning point in the ­Greco-​­Persian war, and they are thus identified as a source of great pride for the Athenians. The reference to the buildings is designed to remind the audience of the Athenians who came before them and the values they embodied, grounding their legacy in a physical memorial with which the jurors would have been very familiar, and which some of them may have even seen on their way to the courtroom.11 The context of the speech, a debate over the award of a crown for acceptable service to the democracy, makes it clear that the values being espoused here are not solely those of victory and honour, but specifically that the citizen men who built these structures served their city well. Although Demosthenes does not explicitly identify ‘­those who built the Propylaia and the Parthenon’ as Athenian citizens, his reference to the ‘­barbarians’ defines them against their opposite and makes their identity implicitly clear. The invocation of these past generations of men as paradigmatic Athenian citizens would have been apparent to his audience. This is what I have called ideological placemaking: the ideology of Athenian citizenship is connected to the structure of the Propylaia, turning it into a place with specific connotations for the citizen audience. This makes it a valuable signifier of citizen values for rhetorical purposes. In this case, Demosthenes seeks to encourage the jury to approve the awarding of crowns only to men who have embodied the same values as these generations of ancestors, thus setting a high standard for Athenian citizen duty. Another passage with more direct connections to citizen values, and which makes more explicit the idea of collective production and ownership of the Propylaia and other civic structures, appears later in the Against Androtion, and it is also replicated exactly in the Against Timocrates (­Dem. 22.­75–​­76 = Dem. 24.­183–​­184, trans. Harris 2008): He did not understand that the dēmos have never been eager to acquire wealth but rather to acquire fame above anything else. Here is a proof: when the dēmos had the most money of the Greeks, they spent it all on the pursuit of honour. When they paid the tax from their private property, they shunned no danger in their pursuit of fame. What they acquired from this effort is everlasting, both the memory of their 358

Places of citizenship in Athenian forensic oratory

deeds and the beauty of the dedications set up to commemorate them: the Propylaia, the Parthenon, the stoas, the shipsheds. Not two little jars, or even three or four gold ones, each weighing a few pounds, which you will propose to melt down whenever you see fit! Here, the creator of the Propylaia and other monumental structures is not a particular group of ancestors, but rather the dēmos at large, the collective citizen body. In this instance, the Propylaia is presented explicitly as emblematic of all past citizens’ love of honour and willingness to spend civic funds on building projects, rather than hoarding their wealth. These building achievements, which earlier in the speech gave ‘­us all a sense of pride’ despite being the work of a limited group, are now reconfigured as the production of the dēmos as a cohesive entity. What was achieved by Pericles was achieved by the whole citizen body, and as a result was imbued with the values of that body (­Blanshard 2014: ­261–​­265). It is also notable that Demosthenes refers to προπύλαια ταῦτα, ‘­the Propylaia here’, as he will also do in the passage from his Against Aristocrates discussed below, making the audience’s familiarity with the structure even more explicit. As Ifigeneia Giannadaki notes, this moment of deixis may have been accompanied by a gesture towards the structure, which could plausibly have been seen from certain locations in the agora hypothesized to be the site of the law courts (­Boegehold 1995: 97, ­104–​­113; Giannadaki 2020: ­383–​­384).12 In any case, the presentation of the Propylaia alongside historical anecdotes, as in the earlier passage from the same speech, creates a ‘­rhetorical employment of geography interwoven with memory and commemoration of the past [that] relates especially to the Akropolis monuments as symbols of great civic and religious display’ (­Giannadaki 2020: 383). The desire for glory rather than riches is clearly established as a citizen value, a rhetorical strategy designed to attack both Androtion and Timocrates by connecting them with the baser value of obsession with money and thus ­uncitizen-​­like behaviour. This connection between the Propylaia (­and associated structures) and Athenian citizen values, and the subsequent disassociation of the speaker’s opponent from those values, is also employed as a strategy in Demosthenes Against Aristocrates (­Dem. 23.­ 206–​­207, trans. Harris 2018, adjusted): Yet certainly in the past the city was wealthy and famous in public, but no one in private rose above the many. Here is the proof: the house of Themistocles, that of Miltiades, and those belonging to famous men at that time, if any of you knows what they are like, he sees that there is nothing more arrogant than the average about them, but the buildings of the city and the adornments were so great and of such a type that no possibility was left for succeeding generations to surpass them, the Propylaia, the shipsheds, the stoas, the Piraeus, and all the other buildings that adorn the city. In this case, the modesty of the houses of the individual prominent citizens of the Athenian past contrasts with the grand nature of their public construction work; the comparison is presented as representative of the democratic equality of all citizens. The public buildings are figured as belonging to the city and to the citizens, and they demonstrate the polis’ wealth and success rather than that of individual ‘­g reat men’. This passage comes at the end of a rather lengthy and stern rebuke of the jury, who Demosthenes accuses of letting wrongdoers get away with anything as long as they 359

Christine Plastow

flatter their judges (­Papillon 1998: 7­ 3–​­75). The reference to the Propylaia, situated firmly in Athenian space once again, is clearly designed to remind the jurors of their citizen duty and the glory that can be achieved by pursuing it, rather than letting themselves be won over by criminals who would rather prioritize their own advancement. An interesting counterpoint to Demosthenes’ rhetorical use of the Propylaia appears in Aeschines On the Embassy, as Aeschines recalls the debates around the peace with Philip (­Aeschin. 2.­74–​­75, trans. Carey 2000): This was the city’s situation at the time we were discussing the peace. And the public speakers acting in unison stood up and made no attempt to offer measures for the city’s rescue but urged you to look to the Propylaia of the Acropolis and remember the naval battle against the Persians at Salamis and the tombs and trophies of our ancestors. For my part, I said that, while you should remember all this, you should imitate our ancestors’ wisdom but avoid their errors and their i­ ll-​­timed ambition. . . . Aeschines does not name his opponent Demosthenes here, and there is no mention of the Propylaia in Demosthenes On the Dishonest Embassy, but the similarity between Demosthenes’ forensic (­and deliberative) strategies elsewhere and Aeschines’ description of the tactics of rhetors makes his target clear (­Kostopoulos 2019: ­91–​­92). Aeschines may be being hyperbolic in the suggestion that this was a strategy used by multiple speakers in the Assembly; we cannot know for sure, as no instances are recorded beyond one in Demosthenes (­13.28). What is apparent is that Aeschines is attempting to deconstruct the trope of encouraging excessive reverence for the ancestors by associating them with the great monuments of Athens. He makes explicit the rhetorical connection between (­i magining) seeing the Propylaia and thinking about historical events, highlighting the persuasive matrix among sight (­as in ‘­this Propylaia here’), memory, and citizen honour employed by Demosthenes (­Westwood 2020: ­255–​­256; cf. Lycurg. Leoc. 17). His argument implies that references to monuments such as the Propylaia, which held such significance for the Athenian audience, may blind the Athenians to reality and encourage them to focus on the reputation of their forefathers over the needs of the moment at hand. His counterpoint to such an argument is to moderate the audience’s pride by reminding them of the failures that accompanied such visible successes and urge caution in the face of such flattering rhetoric. For his part, Demosthenes strikes back against Aeschines’ rhetoric here at Dem. 19.16, 307, and ­312–​­313 (­cf. Greaney 2005: 40); in the latter passage, he says that one such as Aeschines who deprives the ancestors of their deserved glory should himself be deprived of his epitimia, his enjoyment of citizen rights, reaffirming his own strong rhetorical connections among the praise of the ancestors, the glory of the monuments of Athens, and the proper citizen ideology.

The Bouleuterion At the time of the orators, Athens had two Bouleuteria, or c­ ouncil-​­houses, in the agora: the Old Bouleuterion, which had previously been used as the meeting place of the Boule but by that time was used as a record store and also housed the Metroon, which often gives its name to the whole building in modern scholarship; and the New Bouleuterion, constructed in the late fifth century, which served as the current council house.13 The buildings stood beside each other on the western side of the agora, and together with the tholos building where the prytaneis worked they formed a small precinct where the 360

Places of citizenship in Athenian forensic oratory

everyday operation of Athens was managed. The very word bouleutērion, a place for the boulē, connects it intrinsically to citizenship, at least in the Athenian context (­Miller 1995: ­143–​­144). One had to be a citizen to serve on the Boule, and though others such as enslaved people must have had access to the building, it seems certain that it was most frequently occupied and used by citizen councillors in the process of conducting the democratic business of the city. References to the Bouleuterion in the forensic speeches are rather more common than references to the structures on the Acropolis. The Bouleuterion is, unsurprisingly, regularly associated in the speeches with the Boule, and it often becomes representative of that institution of the Athenian democracy. In forensic oratory, the Bouleuterion acts as a powerful signifier of citizenship and the dēmos of Athens, both as a building itself and as a site of citizen behaviour and activity. A number of the references to the Bouleuterion in the forensic speeches simply describe various uses of the building: as well as the seat of the Boule, it is identified as a treasury, record store, and the site of announcements of the awards of crowns by the Boule.14 The most obvious effect of these references is to provide a setting for the speaker’s narratives: the grounding of events in the reality of time and space increases the persuasiveness of a speaker’s story. But the resonance of the Bouleuterion in the Athenian mind may also have led to additional, more subtle rhetorical effects. These specific uses of the building serve to connect the Bouleuterion with technical features of the Athenian democracy, processes that would only have been open to citizens and may have reminded the audience of their distinctive status (­cf. the descriptions of Boule meetings in, e.g., Dem. 21.116 and ­161–​­162). Such a connection has also been argued by Simon Hornblower (­2009) with regard to Thucydides, in that the historian avoids descriptions of the Boule in action in order to downplay the technical deliberative processes of democracy and emphasize his narrative of the Athenians’ impulsiveness. Thus, this specific spatial grounding in forensic oratory also serves to identify the jury as an ­in-​­group and aims to create unity among them, which could contribute to a more decisive verdict. Two mentions of inscriptions that appeared within or near to the Bouleuterion would have had similar effects, heightened by the fact that the inscriptions were connected particularly to civic ideals. The two inscriptions refer to the illegality of obviously undemocratic acts: tyranny in Lycurgus, and serving on the Boule under the oligarchic regime of the Thirty in 404/­403 BCE in Andocides (­Lycurg. Leoc. 124, 126; Andoc. 1.95). The invocation of these inscriptions in the speeches, like the uses of the Propylaia in other examples, will have served to remind the jurors how to do their duty in a ­citizen-​­like way; indeed, the inscription of laws protecting the democracy in and around a building that housed some of its most important ­day-­​­­to-​­day activity must have had a powerful effect on citizens using the Bouleuterion. Still other, somewhat metonymic, references make explicit the Boule’s role as a smaller counterpart to the dēmos and a s­ ub-​­group and proxy of the Athenian citizenry (­Dem. 18.169; Aeschin. 3.250). The most effective rhetorical uses of the Bouleuterion, though, describe the c­ itizen-​ ­like or ­un-­​­­citizen-​­like behaviour that occurred within it. Lysias On the Property of Aristophanes equates being seen in the Bouleuterion with being present in public citizen life (­Lys. 19.55, trans. Todd 2000): I have now reached the age of thirty, and I have never in any way spoken against my father. Nor has any citizen prosecuted me, and although I live close to the 361

Christine Plastow

Agora, never until this misfortune occurred was I seen either in court or in the Bouleuterion. The speaker suggests that, by keeping out of the Bouleuterion and law courts, he has been keeping out of trouble, though not, as he goes on to highlight, neglecting his financial obligations as a citizen. Indeed, in the forensic speeches, the act of going into the Bouleuterion can pose a danger to the democracy and to citizen ideals if done at the wrong time. In the Against Androtion Demosthenes populates the Bouleuterion with unscrupulous or unreliable characters, from the conspirators who hold the Boule for themselves and the ‘­talkers’ who will rule the Boule if Androtion is acquitted, to Androtion’s own poor attendance at the Boule, a further indicator of his inability to do his citizen duty well.15 Aeschines, too, demonstrates the potential for corruption of democratic processes in the Bouleuterion by describing a vignette of Demosthenes’ conspiratorial machinations in apparently taking advantage of an inexperienced councillor (­Aeschin. 3.125). In several speeches of Lysias, coming into the Bouleuterion means coming into contact with the Thirty, either to be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for being a loyal democrat; to try and fail to remain loyal to the city while they ruled; or to be actively complicit in their plans.16 One forensic discussion of behaviour in the Bouleuterion is particularly powerful for its demonstration of the potential for inappropriate citizen behaviour to endanger not just the democracy but also the fabric of the city itself. The speaker in Antiphon On the Chorus Boy, a chorēgos accused of homicide, alleges that his opponents’ charge is false because they did not do everything possible to prevent him from fulfilling his duty as a member of the Boule (­Antiph. 6.45, trans. Gagarin 1998, adjusted; Gagarin 1997: 245): But these men knew the law well and saw me entering the Bouleuterion as a member of the ­Boule—​­and in the Bouleuterion there stands a shrine to Zeus of the Boule and Athena of the Boule, and the bouleutai go and pray in it, and I was one of the ones who did this, and I entered all the other shrines with the Boule, and I sacrificed and prayed on behalf of this city… Accusations of homicide at Athens came with a restriction on movement, which included a ban on entry to certain public buildings and spaces, including the Bouleuterion.17 Similar restrictions applied to impiety charges (­e.g., [Lys.] 6.­24–​­25). What is crucial in this passage from Antiphon is that the speaker went about his normal Boule duties in the Bouleuterion, including praying at the relevant shrines. The restriction existed in part to prevent the pollution of public and religious places by a killer with blood on his hands, and this passage would have been designed to persuade the jury that the prosecutors cannot have been serious about the charges if they were willing to allow such an obvious offence against the purity of Athenian space (­Plastow 2020: ­66–​­71). Antiphon’s strategy is an inversion of those outlined above: the true offence against Athens is not the chorēgos’ behaviour in the Bouleuterion, but his prosecutors’ failure to prevent it. It is crucial that, when expressing these fears of corruption, the orators use the language of the Bouleuterion rather than simply the Boule. It is clear that, despite law and expectation, some councillors and other citizens will not discharge their duties in the correct way. But if human behaviour is what creates a place, human misbehaviour along socially agreed lines endangers the integrity of that place, and thus could cause 362

Places of citizenship in Athenian forensic oratory

the original expectations of correct action to disintegrate. The grounding of the wrong action in a physical space makes it a more real and insidious threat, not only to the individuals involved, but also to the institutions of Boule, dēmos, and democracy to which that place has become intrinsically connected through repeated use in their service. This serves rhetorically to elicit from the jurors increased alarm and anger at the purported misbehaviour, and to activate their sense of citizen duty and feeling of protectiveness towards the democratic process. The implication is clear that a good citizen is someone who respects democratic processes through behaving properly with regard to democratic space (­and vice versa), though what ‘­behaving properly’ entailed could vary depending on the political circumstances. Alongside the rhetorical construction of the Bouleuterion as a site of good or bad citizen behaviour, it is also presented as a place to police that behaviour. The Bouleuterion was the location of the first stage of the dokimasia, an automatic procedure that assessed a potential archon or councillor’s right to serve in the role before he took it up; it was also the site of certain eisangelia procedures, a form of impeachment that could be brought at any time during a public official’s career if he were suspected of ­ seudo-​­Demosthenes gives us a clear account of misbehaviour relating to the office. P the latter ([Dem.] 47.­41–​­42, trans. Scafuro 2011, adjusted): Well then, after I had been robbed of the security and then beaten by Theophemus, I went to the Boule; I showed the members my bruises and described what I had suffered and said that it had happened while I was trying to recover equipment for the city. The Boule was angered at the treatment I had received and, seeing my condition, believed the outrage was directed not against me but against themselves and the dēmos who had voted for the decree and the law that had made it obligatory to recover the equipment. The Boule therefore ordered me to denounce [eisangellein] the man… he was convicted in the Bouleuterion and judged to be acting against the law. The logographer emphasizes the Bouleuterion as the location of judgement, and also explicitly ties the behaviour that the eisangelia is seeking to redress as a crime not just against the individual but also against the Boule, the dēmos, and the law itself: the three branches of the Athenian democracy. By failing to facilitate the smooth transition of the trierarchy, an institution closely related to citizenship, Theophemus was standing against the whole democratic system.18 Elsewhere, Lysias clearly illustrates the role of the Boule in maintaining standards for public officials through these procedures (­Lys. 31.­1–​­2, trans. Todd 2000, adjusted): I would never have expected Philon to reach such a level of audacity, members of the Boule, that he would be willing to appear before you to face his dokimasia. However, since he is audacious not just in one respect but in many, and since I took an oath when I came into the Bouleuterion that I would offer the best advice for the city, and since moreover it is required by that oath to make known if one is aware that any of those selected by lot is not suitable to serve on the ­Boule – ​­for all these reasons I shall deliver the accusation against Philon here. Here, entering the Bouleuterion to take up a role as a councillor becomes a signifier for the act of protecting the city and its citizens from those who are not qualified to serve 363

Christine Plastow

it well.19 Aeschines also emphasizes this role to highlight where a previous Boule failed in this task, leaving the law court, another citizen group, to take up the job (­Aeschin. 1.112). In these extracts, the Boule appears more s­ elf-​­reflexive, offering up an ideal of casting out those who behave unacceptably from within the citizen space, albeit one that they cannot always live up to. But condemnation of poor citizen behaviour in the Bouleuterion does not require a formal procedure to occur. Aeschines relates an incident during which Demosthenes gave a mocking account of Alexander in the Boule, and Aeschines had to censure him (­Aeschin. 1.169, trans. Carey 2000, adjusted): I criticized Demosthenes in the Bouleuterion not out of a desire to curry favour with [Alexander] but because I felt that if you listened to such things, the city would appear to share the speaker’s lack of decency. Aeschines is clear that the Boule is the city’s representative, and that their treatment of a speaker could be taken to indicate the collective view of the citizens towards that person. The Bouleuterion almost becomes a microcosm of the city itself, and the danger of allowing bad citizen behaviour to proliferate there is an indicator of the far greater damage that could be caused if it proliferates throughout the city at large.

Removal to Thebes In the speeches On the Embassy and Against Ctesiphon, Aeschines twice makes use of the image of the removal of an important Athenian structure from Athens to the Cadmea in Thebes, the city’s citadel and equivalent to Athens’ Acropolis. These two passages appear in narratives from Aeschines that occur during the period of Athens’ conflict and negotiations with Philip of Macedon, albeit over ten years apart. Since the battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE, Athens had been wary of Thebes’ fluctuating but steadily growing power in central Greece, and the issue of whether to ally with Thebes against Philip or with Philip against Thebes was a point of contention between Demosthenes and Aeschines (­Worthington 2012: ­186–​­187).20 The removal of the Propylaia is presented as an indirect quotation of the Theban general Epaminondas and appears as part of Aeschines’ quotation of his own speech during a meeting of the envoys to Macedon (­Aeschin. 2.105, trans. Carey 2000): Men who are concerned for the public good should not take on the role of other representatives whom the Athenians could have sent instead of us, while they personally avoid the hostility of Thebes. Epaminondas was a Theban; he did not cower before the prestige of Athens but stated frankly in the Theban Assembly that they should transfer the Propylaia of the Athenian Acropolis to the front of the Cadmea.21 Aeschines relates that he was arguing both for Philip to sanction Thebes’ destruction of other cities in Boeotia, and for his ability to speak freely against Thebes as part of the embassy on the basis of the decree of the Athenian Assembly, which provided that the envoys should ‘­negotiate any other advantage they can’ (­Aeschin. 2.104, trans. Carey 2000). Whether Epaminondas ever actually said this cannot be known:

364

Places of citizenship in Athenian forensic oratory

presumably it would have had to have been reported to Aeschines, who would not have been present in the Theban Assembly, and Aeschines is already reporting his own speech, so we are at minimum three levels removed from the original statement. In the light of the statement below in Against Ctesiphon, it is tempting to believe the formulation is, in fact, an invention of Aeschines. In any case, the meaning is the same. The transferral of the Athenian Propylaia to the Theban Cadmea would not only be a source of humiliation for Athens and a usurpation of their prominent position in Greece as a whole (­Paulsen 1999: 365; Kostopoulos 2019: ­97–​­98). It would also demon­ thens – ​­and might suggest that, in such a situation, Athestrate Theban power over A nian citizenship becomes worthless. In the later speech Against Ctesiphon, the removal of the Bouleuterion is imagined by Aeschines to have already happened, a metaphor for the concessions Demosthenes pressed the Athenians to make to the Thebans in the course of their alliance, which Aeschines characterizes as a surreptitious act of betrayal (­Aeschin. 3.145, trans. Carey 2000): A second crime he committed, much worse than this, was that at a stroke he surreptitiously spirited away our city’s Bouleuterion and the democracy and transferred them to Thebes, to the Cadmea, when he agreed to give the Boeotarchs joint control of our policy. The moving of the council house to Thebes is a potent representation of the concept of handing over control of Athens to the Boeotarchs, the annually elected governors of Boeotia, several of whom came from Thebes. The pairing of the Bouleuterion and the democracy in Aeschines’ image is particularly telling: the building is a clear symbol of the operation of the democracy and the everyday running of the city. In Aeschines formulation, Demosthenes has given Thebes control not only over Boeotian territories but also over Athens itself, invalidating the ability of Athenian citizens to run their own polis. The fact that Aeschines employs the same image twice with different prominent Athenian structures is striking. It emphasizes the conceptual power that these buildings must have had for the Athenian citizen judges, and their deep connection to Athenian identity. The idea of removing the Propylaia or the Bouleuterion from Athens to Thebes activates the audience’s associations with these buildings in a similar way to their previously mentioned rhetorical uses, though now not to glorify Athens or demonstrate the importance of its daily operations but to show the danger that the city’s reputation was in. These images were intended to strike fear into the hearts of the Athenian citizen judges by grounding the concept of the city’s overthrow in physical monuments and forcing them to imagine Athens without the accustomed presence of the Propylaia or the Bouleuterion. The rhetoric is also intended to provoke feelings of humiliation: Aeschines presents the structures as if they were gifts or trophies captured by the enemy. This angle is particularly potent in the case of the Propylaia, where a structure that frames the Acropolis, a site emblematic of Athenian victory, is transformed to a symbol of potential defeat. By forcing citizens to imagine their city without two buildings representative of intrinsic aspects of their identity, Aeschines can more forcefully make his ­anti-​­Theban point and encourage the jurors to be protective of their city and their citizenship.

365

Christine Plastow

Conclusion While places may be used rhetorically to achieve a variety of effects, specific Athenian locations can evoke a sense of citizen pride and duty that would have been particularly persuasive to the Athenian citizen jury. Citizen behaviour and spatial knowledge gave these places their rhetorical power: we may assume that Athenian citizens would have known the Propylaia and what it represented historically and ideologically and would have seen it regularly, perhaps even on their way to the law courts. It is likely that many of them would have served as councillors and thus would also be very familiar with the Bouleuterion, and even those who had not served would almost certainly have been aware of the building’s use. This short study suggests that speaking about monuments invokes grand civic ideals designed to spur the jurors to act out of honour and the desire to live up to the name of their ancestors. Speaking about more quotidian buildings, on the other hand, often demonstrates the fragility of democratic procedure, and it encourages the jury to seek to protect the dēmos and the city through their vote. In both cases, it is the citizen status of the audience that makes such rhetoric particularly persuasive.

Notes 1 For an overview of modern approaches to these relationships, see, e.g., Painter and Philo (­1995) (­and the other contributions to the special edition of Political Geography), Isin and Nielsen (­2008), and Ehrkamp and Jacobsen (­2015). 2 See recent spatial approaches to Athenian oratory, e.g., Fredal (­2006); Bakker (­2012a); Bakker (­2012b); Osborne (­2018); ­Schmidt-​­Hofner (­2018); Wohl (­2018); Webb (­2019); and Plastow (­2019). 3 Phyle: e.g., Lys. 13.­77–​­82. Sparta: e.g., Lys. 12.58, 13.­11–​­12. Macedonia: Aeschin. 2.­22–​­23, 2.58. Chersonese: Dem. 23.­8 –​­15. Lesbos: Antiph. 5.­20–​­29. 4 See, e.g., Shear (­2011); Westwood (­2020); Kostopoulos (­2019); Steinbock (­2013a: es­p. ­84–​­94). 5 Propylaia: Dem. 22.13, 22.76, 23.207, 24.184, Aeschin. 2.74, 2.105, Lycurg. speech 14 fr. 2 Loeb. Parthenon: mentioned by name in Dem. 22.13, 22.76, 24.184; referred to as the ‘­temple of Athena’ in Dem. 36.16; two mentions to ‘­the temple’ with reference to the Acropolis in Isoc. 17.17 and Isae. 5.42 also probably imply the Parthenon. Lycurg. speech 14 fr. 2 Loeb also mentions the ‘­Hekatompedon’, ‘­­hundred-​­foot temple’, which Harpokration identifies as a reference to the Parthenon. On the naming of the Parthenon, including Demosthenes as the earliest attribution of this name to the great temple of Athena on the Acropolis, see van Rookhuijzen (­2020: ­4 –​­9). 6 On the actual timing of the building programme, some 3­ 0–​­50 years after the Persian wars ended, see Shear, Jr (­2016: 5­ –​­11). 7 For a detailed study of the dimensions of the Propylaia, see Waele (­1990). The other major work on the architecture of the classical structure is Dinsmoor and Dinsmoor Jr (­2004). 8 On s­ ight-​­lines from the Pnyx, see Fredal (­2006: ­121–​­123). 9 On the power of Athenian monuments in this regard more broadly, see Hobden (­2007: ­497–​ 4­ 98) and Liddel (­2007: ­156–​­158). 10 On the chronology of these events, and on this passage and its ancient commentary more broadly, see Gibson (­2002: ­181–​­185). On the importance of the collapsed chronology for the argument about ships, see Giannadaki (­2020: 166). On the changing associations and meaning of these structures over time, see Steinbock (­2013b: ­80–​­81). 11 An even more powerful visual effect along these lines would have been achieved by Demosthenes’ mention of the Propylaia in the Assembly at 13.28; see Westwood (­2020: 18); Kostopoulos (­2019: 91). 12 On the value of seeing for rhetoric, see O’Connell (­2017). 13 The original excavations and identifications are recorded in Thompson (­1937: ­127–​­160). For a reinterpretation of the Old Bouleuterion that argues it was, in fact, a Metroon from its inception, see Miller (­1995); against this see Shear, Jr (­1995). The word bouleutērion was

366

Places of citizenship in Athenian forensic oratory

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

also sometimes used to refer to other m ­ eeting-​­places of councils, such as the Areopagus: see Miller (­1995: 144). Bouleuterion as treasury: Dem. 24.96, 40.20, 59.27; as record store: Aeschin. 2.59, 92; as the site of awards of crowns: Aeschin. 3.32, 45, Dem. 18.55. The conspirators hold the Bouleuterion for themselves: Dem. 22.38; the ‘­t alkers’ will rule in the Bouleuterion: Dem. 22.37; Androtion does not attend the Bouleuterion: Dem. 22.36. Loyal democrats tried by the Thirty in the Bouleuterion: Lys. 13.38; loyal councillors entering the Bouleuterion under the Thirty: Lys. 20.1; presence in the Bouleuterion indicates complicity with the Thirty: Lys. 12.25. E.g., Dem. 20.158, Antiph. 3.3.11, 6.36, Pl. Leg. 9.871a; see also Plastow (­2020: ­57–​­58). While it seems certain that the trierarchy was intended to be limited to citizens, for the evidence and complexities of the potential involvement of metics in the trierarchy, see Rutishauser (­2019: ­235–​­239). On the rhetorical distancing from personal involvement in the situation here, see Carey (­1989: 185). On the changing relationships between the two states throughout the fourth century, see Buckler and Beck (­2008: es­p. ­233–​­253). Greaney (­2005) makes no comment on this passage, except to note that the Cadmea was named after Cadmus, the ­mytho-​­historical founder of Thebes.

Bibliography Bakker, M.P. de (­2012a) ‘­Lysias’, in I.J.F. de Jong (­ed.) Space in ancient Greek literature (­Leiden) ­375–​­392 ——— ​­(­2012b) ‘­Demosthenes’, in I.J.F. de Jong (­ed.) Space in ancient Greek literature (­Leiden) ­393–​­412 Blanshard, A. (­2014) ‘­The permeable spaces of the Athenian ­law-​­court’, in N. Worman and K. Gilhuly (­eds) Space, place, and landscape in ancient Greek literature and culture (­Cambridge) ­240–​­275 Boegehold, A.L. (­1995) The Athenian agora, vol. XXVIII: The lawcourts at Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Buckler, J. and Beck, H. (­2008) Central Greece and the politics of power in the fourth century BC (­Cambridge) Carey, C. (­1989) Lysias, selected speeches (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2000) Aeschines (­Austin, TX) Cresswell, T. (­2004) Place: a short introduction (­Oxford) DiMaggio, P. and Powell, W.W. (­ 1991) The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (­Chicago) Dinsmoor, W.B. and Dinsmoor Jr, W.B. (­2004) The Propylaia to the Athenian Akropolis II: the classical building (­Princeton, NJ) Ehrkamp, P. and Jacobsen, M.H. (­2015) ‘­Citizenship’, in J. Agnew, V. Mamadouh, A.J. Secor, and J. Sharp (­eds) The W ­ iley-​­Blackwell companion to political geography (­Chichester) ­152–​­164 Fredal, J. (­2006) Rhetorical action in ancient Athens: persuasive artistry from Solon to Demosthenes (­Carbondale, IL) Gagarin, M. (­1997) Antiphon, the speeches (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­1998) ‘­A ntiphon’, in id. and MacDowell, D.M. (­1998) Antiphon and Andocides (­Austin, TX) Giannadaki, I. (­2020) A commentary on Demosthenes’ Against Androtion, introduction, text, and translation (­Oxford) Gibson, C.A. (­2002) Interpreting a classic: Demosthenes and his ancient commentators (­Berkeley, CA) Greaney, G.L. (­2005) Aeschines, De falsa legatione/­On the false embassy (­Lewiston, NY) Hansen, M.H. (­2004) ‘­Introduction’, in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen (­eds) An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (­Oxford) ­1–​­154 Harris, E. M. (­2008) Demosthenes, speeches ­2 0–​­22 (­Austin, TX) ——— ​­(­2018) Demosthenes, speeches ­23–​­26 (­Austin, TX)

367

Christine Plastow Hobden, F. (­2007) ‘­Imagining past and present: a rhetorical strategy in Aeschines 3, Against Ctesiphon’, CQ 57, ­490–​­501 Hornblower, S. (­2009) ‘­Thucydides and the Athenian Boulē (­council of five hundred)’, in L. Mitchell and L. Rubinstein (­eds) Greek history and epigraphy: essays in honour of P.J. Rhodes (­Swansea) ­251–​­264 Hurwit, J.M. (­2004) The Acropolis in the age of Pericles (­Cambridge) Isin, E.F. and Nielsen, G.M. (­eds) (­2008) Acts of citizenship (­London) Kostopoulos, K. (­2019) Die Vergangenheit vor Augen (­Stuttgart) Lehmann, H.J.C. (­2019) ‘­The rhetoric of home and homeland in Demosthenes 19 “­On the false embassy”’, AJPh 140, ­643–​­670 Liddel, P. (­2007) Civic obligation and individual liberty in ancient Athens (­Oxford) Miller, S.G. (­1995) ‘­Old Metroon and Old Bouleuterion in the classical agora of Athens’, in M.H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub (­eds) Studies in the ancient Greek polis (­Stuttgart) ­133–​­156 O’Connell, P.A. (­2017) The rhetoric of seeing in Attic forensic oratory (­Austin, TX) Osborne, R. (­2018) ‘­City and countryside’, in G. Martin (­ed.) The Oxford handbook of Demosthenes (­Oxford) ­283–​­294 Painter, J. and Philo, C. (­1995) ‘­Spaces of citizenship: an introduction’, Political Geography 14, ­107–​­120 Papillon, T.L. (­1998) Rhetorical studies in the Aristocratea of Demosthenes, Lang classical studies v. 11 (­New York) Paulsen, T. (­1999) Die ­Parapresbeia-​­Reden des Demosthenes und des Aischines. Kommentar und Interpretationen zu Demosthenes, or. XIX, und Aischines, or. II (­Trier) Plastow, C. (­2019) ‘­Space, place, and identity in Antiphon “­On the murder of Herodes”’, in J. Filonik, B. ­Griffith-​­Williams, and J. Kucharski (­eds) The making of identities in Athenian oratory (­London) ­191–​­205 ——— ​­(­2020) Homicide in the Attic orators (­London) Rackham, H. (­trans.) (­1932) Aristotle: Politics, Aristotle Vol. XXI; Loeb Classical Library 264 (­Cambridge, MA) Rutishauser, B. (­2019) ‘­The wealth of metics and Athenian naval power’, in T.J. Figueira and S.R. Jensen (­eds) Hegemonic finances: funding Athenian domination in the 5th and 4th centuries BC (­London) ­233–​­258 Scafuro, A. C. (­2011) Demosthenes, speeches ­39– ​­49 (­Austin, TX) ­Schmidt-​­Hofner, S. (­2018) ‘­Visions of Attica’, in G. Martin (­ed.) The Oxford handbook of Demosthenes (­Oxford) ­191–​­206 Shear, J.L. (­2011) Polis and revolution: responding to oligarchy in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Shear, Jr, T.L. (­1995) ‘­Bouleuterion, Metroon, and the archives at Athens’, in M.H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub (­eds) Studies in the ancient Greek polis (­Stuttgart) ­157–​­190 ——— ​­(­2016) Trophies of victory: public building in Periklean Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Steinbock, B. (­2013a) Social memory in Athenian public discourse (­A nn Arbor, MI) ——— ​­(­2013b) ‘­Contesting the lessons from the past: Aeschines’ use of social memory’, TAPhA 143, ­65–​­103 Thompson, H.A. (­1937) ‘­Buildings on the west side of the agora’, Hesperia 6, ­1–​­226 Todd, S. C. (­2000) Lysias (­Austin, TX) van Rookhuijzen, J.Z. (­2020) ‘­The Parthenon treasury on the Acropolis of Athens’, AJA 124, ­3 –​­35 Waele, J. de (­1990) The Propylaia of the Akropolis in Athens: the project of Mnesikles (­A msterdam) Webb, R. (­2019) ‘­As if you were there: enargeia and spatiality in Lysias 1’, in M.J. Edwards and D. Spatharas (­eds) Forensic narratives in Athenian courts (­London) ­151–​­170 Westwood, G. (­2020) The rhetoric of the past in Demosthenes and Aeschines: oratory, history, and politics in classical Athens (­Oxford) Wohl, V. (­2018) ‘­Jurisdiction and jurisprudence: the topography of law in Demosthenes 23 Against Aristokrates’, in I. Giannadaki, C. Carey, and B. ­Griffith-​­Williams (­eds) Use and abuse of law in the Athenian courts (­Leiden) ­234–​­248 Worthington, I. (­2012) Demosthenes of Athens and the fall of classical Greece (­Oxford)

368

26 CITIZENSHIP ANXIETIES The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/­345 BCE Nick Fisher

Introduction In 346/­345 BC, the Athenians passed a measure proposed by Demophilos to conduct a review (­diapsēphisis) of all the written lists of male citizens held by the ‘­demes’, the local units which regulated citizenship (­numbering about 139 across Attica).1 The process was complex and proved divisive. It produced many expulsions from the lists, and subsequent appeals which were heard in Athens’ law courts, causing much litigation and i­ ll-​­will. The aim of this chapter is to situate this measure in its political and social contexts: it will consider what may have induced Demophilos to propose the bill, and the assembly to approve it and carry out the review. Whatever problems it may have been designed to solve, it is likely to have exacerbated rather than assuaged tensions; democratic votes designed to solve complex social problems often have unforeseen and regrettable consequences. One may start by considering the political context of its date and the politics of the proposer, before exploring the rhetoric of the speeches surviving from the period, those from cases produced by the law and other contemporary speeches. At the time of Aeschines’ successful prosecution of Timarchos, the procedures in the demes had recently been completed (­Aeschin. 1.77); that prosecution took place sometime between autumn 346 and spring 345. Operating the procedures through all the demes and hearing appeals will probably have taken some months (­cf. Fisher 2001: 6­ –​­8). Hence, the law was passed sometime early in that archon year. The Athenians and Philip II of Macedon had agreed a peace treaty (‘­Peace of Philocrates’) at the end of the previous year, and already by the last Attic month, Skirophorion, late summer 346, it had become apparent that the peace left many unresolved problems and dangers. By 25 Skirophorion, Philip II had concluded the long running ‘­Third Sacred War’ for the control of Delphi, and compelled surrender of the Phocians, Athens’ allies. In Athens, the ten ambassadors who had negotiated the peace immediately threw themselves into fierce disputes, soon followed up with lawsuits; Demosthenes and Timarchos laid charges against Aeschines for malpractice on the embassies, and Aeschines responded with a ­counter-​­charge against Timarchos for ineligibility to engage in public life, on the basis of previous sexual and political immorality. DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-31

369

Nick Fisher

One other political activity is attributed to Demophilos; according to Aeschines, he had previously made accusations that people (­unnamed) had engaged in bribery in the assembly and the law courts, as had Nikostratos more recently, and charges were pending (­Aeschin. 1.­86–​­87). This suggests that both measures formed part of a ­corruption-​ ­fighting programme. We cannot know whether Demophilos was acting from conviction or was exploiting current hostility to established politicians, in the manner of populist calls to the people to ‘­take back control’ or ‘­drain the swamp’. Some specific events have been proposed as stimuli leading to Demophilos’ proposal. Konstantinos Kapparis (­2005: ­94–​­95) suggested that the signing of the Peace of Philokrates, at a time of relative economic recovery, would have given Athenians renewed ­self-​­confidence and hope; he compared the situation in 446/­445, 100 years previously, when Athens conducted the only other attested general review of citizenship.2 Similarly Esther Eidinow (­2016: ­283–​­284) stated that ‘­the Peace of Philokrates led Athenians to believe that they were again attaining a position of ­superiority – ​­so must reinforce the boundaries between themselves and everyone else’. But any time for optimism seems extraordinarily short in the beginning of the archon year 346/­345 for any such feelings of confidence and superiority to inspire the review. The mood after the peace seems rather filled with anxiety, which was soon strengthened by Philip’s immediate exploitation of his opportunities (­cf. Humphreys 2018: ­780–​­781). A second suggestion proposed a material benefit, parallel with the circumstances ­ id-­​­­fifth-​­c entury review, connecting Pericles’ citizenship which may have provoked the m law of 451/­450, which restricted membership to those who were Athenian on both sides, to a handout to citizens of 40,000 medimnoi of corn donated by King Psammetichus of Egypt, as twin causes of the demand for a citizenship review.3 Some have plausibly added the distributions of overseas land allotments (­clerouchies) for poorer citizens, especially in Euboea after its revolt from the Athenian Empire in 446/­445 (­Moreno 2007: ­300–​­303; Lape 2010: 201, 277). Mogens H. Hansen (­1991: 95, cf. 53) suggested that one reason for the 346/­345 review was the return to Attica of Athenian cleruchs from Potidaea in Thrace who had been expelled by Philip in 356 (­Dem. 6.20); in many cases, their right to be readmitted might be challenged.4 A t­ en-​­year delay, however, seems too long, and problems associated with these cleruchs do not feature in any speeches of the 340s. More helpful is to develop a combination of various elements operating on different timescales. Josine Blok (­2017: 5) offered a balanced formulation in relation to the immediate political situation, suggesting that pressure of the military conflicts with Philip of Macedon played an important role since in Athens itself tensions ran high, even if the Peace of Philocrates in 346 gave a temporary relief. Susan Lape (­2010: ­203–​­216) suggested that the immediate setbacks following the Peace of Philocrates increased an awareness of failures in foreign policy which led the Athenians to blame the impact of many false citizens, and to see the review as a strategy for renewal. In the longer term, John Davies (­1977/­1978: ­111–​­113) suggested the proposal suited a context of repeated tensions and challenges to the primary criterion for citizenship of a ‘­descent group’, reflecting deep ‘­anxieties’ over status; it reinstated the status quo in preference to possible alternative modes.5 My aim here is to suggest that some ­medium-​­term anxieties were brought to a head by the immediate political threats. In 2001, I sought to explain the success of Aeschines’ prosecution, despite his lack of evidence for Timarchos’ immorality, by adducing a number of contemporary initiatives reflecting a broader sense of a moral and political crisis.6 In addition to the citizenship review and accusations of corruption, I 370

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE

cited Apollodoros’ prosecution of Neaira (­see below, pp. 374–375), reorganization of procedures in the law courts (­Boegehold 1995: ­36–​­41, ­110–​­113), new rules for keeping order in assemblies (­Aeschin. 1.­33–​­34), the start of a rebuilding programme for the area of the Pnyx (­Aeschin. 1.­79–​­85) (­Wallace 1985: 120; Hansen 1996), new powers and duties for the Areopagos (­Wallace 1985: 1­ 76–​­184; 2000), and anticipations of the major ephebeia law of 335/­334, designed to transform the military, civic, religious, and moral education of young citizens.7 I saw Demophilos’ review as one of the earlier manifestations of ­w ide-​­ranging anxieties about civic identity producing ‘­reforms’ designed to stimulate civic pride (‘­make Athens great again’). Here, I develop the argument by focusing on some areas of changing social and economic practices which may have heightened these anxieties.

The rhetoric of citizenship breaches Two broad themes emerge from the speeches of the 340s: first, the problems caused by deviant women, whether wives engaging in illicit relationships or concubines challenging ­property-​­rights by being presented as legitimate wives; second, the growth in economic and social interactions between citizens and ­non-​­citizens. Davies remarked that some demes ‘­were certainly corrupt’ and ‘­it may be than that several scandals had broken simultaneously’ (­1977/­1978: 112). Such a perception was certainly widespread. In Demosthenes’ speech for Euxitheos (­57), his client challenging his expulsion from the deme Halimous, there are the assertions that his enemy Euboulides launched his plot ‘­when the whole city was angered and stirred up against those who had disgracefully jumped into the demes’ and that ‘­many have been justly expelled from every deme including his own’ (­Dem. 57.49, 2­ –​­3, cf. 5­ 8–​­59, see also Dem. 13.­23–​­24).8 Aeschines invited the members of the jury (‘­dikasts’) to agree that general opinion at appeals against expulsions trusted the decisions taken by demesmen based on their personal knowledge (­Aeschin. 1.77).9 Three years later (­343), Aeschines concluded his ­error-​ ­strewn historical narrative, designed to show how ­over-​­enthusiasm for aggressive foreign policies had repeatedly ruined Athens, with this list of allegations against current politicians which harps on the theme of illegitimate citizenship: And then, when the demos grew back and recovered its original strength (­i.e., after 403 BCE), certain men, illegally registered as citizens, and constantly drawing to themselves the unhealthy element of the polis, kept pursuing policies of war after war: in peace they anticipated troubles ahead in their speeches, stirring up the ambitious and ­over-​­keen spirits, while in wartime they did not pick up any weapons, but got themselves appointed ­troop-​­inspectors and naval commissioners, producing citizen sons from their mistresses, and getting disenfranchised from their sykophantic acts. These men bring the polis into the most extreme dangers, cherishing the name of democracy not in their characters but in their flattering speeches, trying to destroy peace, by which democracy is preserved, and working together for the wars by which the demos is destroyed. (­Aeschin. 2.177, my translation) In this wild account, crooked politicians, themselves with no claims to citizenship, attracted support from other ‘­unhealthy’ characters, doubtless including false citizens, and got their own bastard sons by their mistresses (­hetairai) illegally registered 371

Nick Fisher

as citizens.10 This broad abuse can be seen neatly to combine the main categories of threats to the deme lists perceived.11 Some scandals and allusions to corrupt demes are mentioned in speeches or are the subject of jokes in comedy (­W hitehead 1986: 1­ 06–​­109, 2­ 91–​­301). In Halimous, the notorious small deme which expelled Euxitheos, sometime before 346/­345, the citizen list went missing according to Euboulides’ father Antiphilos, acting as demarch (­Dem. 57.­26-​­22, ­60–​­62);12 later, Euboulides and his gang arranged for the illegal admission of Anaximenes and Nikostratos in exchange for five drachmai each and persuaded the deme to confirm their membership at the review (­Dem. 57.59) (­W hitehead 1986: ­296–​­297). In the same deme, a decade after the review, Agasikles, a ‘­man of the Peiraeus’, was impeached for having bribed his way in. Dinarchos wrote a speech for the prosecution (­Din. fr. 16, ­1–​­5); Hypereides 4.3 cites it among cases of the inappropriate use of the ­over-​­severe impeachment procedure (­eisangelia). Fragments from Dinarchos’ speech claim that Agasikles had been a public slave, like his ‘­Scythian’ father, working in the Peiraeus as a weights and measures official (­prometrētēs); they express alarm that Agasikles’ sons might participate in the Panathenaia procession as citizen ‘­ephebes’ rather than as metic ‘­­tray-​­bearers’ (­skaphēphoroi), ‘­owing their citizenship not to you (­the dikasts) but to this man’s money’, and might compete in the ‘­manhood contest’ (­euandria) restricted to young citizens.13 The story presumably was that Agasikles acquired metic status and wealth and then bribed influential citizens in Halimous to admit him to their list.14 Other small demes mocked for similar slackness included Sounion: ‘­Many are now not free, but tomorrow are Sounians, and then the next day entitled to use the agora’ (­Anaxandides PCG fr. 4); and the three coastal demes called Potamos: ‘­Potamians were ridiculed for accepting illegals readily, as many indicate, including Menander in Twins’ (­Harpokration s.v.). From the two surviving speeches delivered at appeals against expulsion, Demosthenes 57 (­Halimous) and Isaeus 12 (­Erchia), and from passing comments in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus, one can learn the standard motives for deme infiltration. All that survives of Euphiletos’ case against the demesmen of Erchia (­Isae. 12) is the argumen­ alf-​­brother, which was quoted by Dionysius of Halitation section, presented by his h carnassus as a model of Isaeus’ speechwriting skill (­O n Isaeus ­16–​­17).15 It starts with the generalization that those who testify falsely to a child’s legitimacy do so either because they have no children, or because they are poor and accept financial help for lying about his parentage. Neither incentive, it is said, applied with their father Hegesippos, who was wealthy and had produced two sons and two daughters, now married, by an earlier marriage (­Isae. 12.­1–​­5). The ­half-​­brothers and the sisters’ husbands would never have lied in favour of Euphiletos, as it would significantly reduce their inheritances. The prosecution seems to have alleged that Euphiletos’ mother, a citizen woman (­astē, Isae. 12.9), had conceived Euphiletos not with Hegesippos, but with a rich foreigner (­Isae. 12.­5 –​­7, 11), and persuaded Hegesippos to enrol the child. The basis of the charge may have been hostile gossip in the deme about the adultery of the mother, and consequential illegitimacy of the youngest son; the case presented by Euphiletos’ enemies had been supported by the demarch of that year (­who had since died).16 In Demosthenes 57, the case made by Euboulides and his supporters against Euxitheos is obscured by his obfuscatory attempts at rebuttal. According to Euxitheos, his opponents alleged, first, that Euxitheos was well enough off to be able to bribe some of his supposed relatives to support his case (­Dem. 57.­24–​­25, 52); second, that his father Thoukritos had aroused suspicion as he had a ­non-​­Attic accent; according 372

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE

to Euxitheos, he had been captured during the Dekelean War and spent time as a slave on Leukas before being ransomed (­Dem. 57.­18–​­19); and third, that the family had been very poor and his mother had been forced to work as a wetnurse for Kleinias, the baby son of Kleidikos, and as a ­r ibbon-​­seller in the market.17 He does not deny charges of poverty, but explains them by claiming his father was again away fighting, this time with the general Thrasyboulos,18 and that his mother had indeed done ‘­an act which in view of my present danger was, by Zeus, unfortunate, since all the slander about us resulted from this nursing’ (­Dem. 57. ­40–​­44). Many scenarios seem possible, and more than one approach may have been deployed.19 His enemies may have focused their narrative on an allegation that his citizen mother had an illegitimate child by Kleidikos or a relative of his, and one of them gave money to get around the rest of the poor family whose man was away, who then accepted him when he returned (­Humphreys 1986: ­60–​­62, 2018: ­243–​­245, ­925–​­928); alternatively, that she, having already got pregnant by a rich ­non-​­citizen, was put to work as a wetnurse to Kleidikos and then sold ribbons (­Eidinow 2016: 3­ 20–​­321). Perhaps the claim was that the man who supposedly came back from the war was unrelated, a slave who acquired some means (­e.g., by trading) and then infiltrated a poor family to get himself, his wife and child accepted as citizens (­V lassopoulos 2007: 35; 2009: ­357–​­359). Whatever line they took, what emerges is that here too important parts were played by gossip about sexual delinquency of a female citizen and by the notion of a richer alien (­possibly an ­ex-​­slave) infiltrating a poorer family (­cf. Carey 1994: 105). In this case too, political feuding among powerful local cliques in a small deme was the basis for the prosecution, making accusations out of rumours of an earlier period when Euxitheos’ ‘­parents’ had been poor.20 In the prosecution of Timarchos, Aeschines makes an obscure accusation concerning Timarchos’ intervention in the review not in his own deme (­Sphettos), but in the city deme Kudathenaion. Allegedly he played a leading part in the denunciation of one Philotades, testifying under oath that he was an ­ex-​­slave of his, and thereby achieved his expulsion from the deme. Then, he somehow lost the case and was convicted of having accepted a bribe of 2,000 drachmai from Philotades’ relation by marriage, Leukonides (­Aeschin. 1.­114–​­115).21 Whatever the details, the case reveals another common type of identity uncertainty, whether an adult was a slave, a freedman, a metic immigrant, or a citizen. In view of the uncertainties of this case, and the equally ambiguous status of the victim Pittalakos discussed elsewhere in the speech (­Aeschin. 1.­54), it is remarkably disingenuous of Aeschines to state that whenever a representative of a deme asserted in an appeal that the decision to exclude was based on the demesmen’s personal knowledge, he won universal approval (­1.­77–​­78).22 These speeches, and the other contemporary speech primarily concerned with the citizenship and marriage laws, Apollodoros’ Against Neaira,23 elaborate on the harm done to the demes and the polis if aliens were illegally registered. Josine Blok and her colleagues have drawn attention to two contrasting conceptions of Athenian citizenship and argued that the balance between them needs to be revised (­Wijma 2014; Blok 2017). On the one hand, the idea which was central to Aristotle’s analysis in the Politics, and is still influential, is that what counted for citizenship was participation in civic ­decision-​­making and ­office-​­holding in deme, tribe and city, which depended on the enrolment of males, who may be called politai and astoi.24 On the other hand, more neglected, is the conception expressed in phraseology focused on individuals’ relations with the city and the divine, such as ‘­belonging to’, or ‘­sharing (­meteinai, metechein) in the polis’ or ‘­in sacred and appropriate things’ (­hiera and hosia),25 or ‘­in sacred and 373

Nick Fisher

common things’ (­hiera and koina). In this perspective, both ritual and civic, women can be called ‘­citizens’, and the feminine forms of the two terms, politides and astai, are often used. One public office might be reserved to women, that of priestess, as the cults of many female deities required the appointment of women, either elected or selected by lot by the whole polis or appointed by smaller units of the descent groups called gene (­Parker 2005: ­89–​­99; Blok: 2017: 217). As Blok observes, there is in Demosthenes 57 a strong emphasis on how Euxitheos and his family, both males and females, shared in the polis or in the ‘­sacred and common things’ (­e.g., 57.3, 23, 26, 47, 51, ­54–​­55). On her account, civic offices (­archai) are given less importance: Euxitheos’ holding of the annual deme office of demarch is not held up as an example of his civic pride and popularity in the male community, but it is mentioned only to explain the disputes resulting from this attention to duty; his attempt to recover debts explains his enemies’ attack (­Blok 2017: ­5 –​­13). In redressing the balance, however, this account fails to represent the weight given to the family’s civic performances. Euxitheos states that his father was chosen by lot for offices (­archai) and passed the dokimasia (­57.25, 26, and cf. 67), and that he himself had been a phratriarch (­57.23), been nominated for the priesthood for Herakles, and passed his dokimasia (­57.46) (­see Humphreys 2018: 619). At the end of the speech (­57.­63–​­65), Euxitheos’ casts his demarchy as a defence of deme finances and its relations with its deities: by chasing up ­rent-​­arrears on sacred temenē and depredations from the public funds, he provoked a devious and elaborate plot against him. This sequence enhances the picture of the deme beset by gangs of enemies plotting to gain dominance (­cf. Whitehead 1986: ­296–​ ­301), but it clearly displays Euxitheos as a staunch protector of justice whom the deme rewarded with an honorific decree.26 It seems best to place equal emphasis on the concern for the deme’s rituals and its civic activities; often, they were inextricably linked together (­e.g., at 57.­46–​­48).27 Though no prosecution speech in a diapsēphisis appeal survives, the contemporary prosecution of Neaira by Apollodoros, son of Pasion ([Dem.] 59), provides many relevant arguments. Seeking revenge on his political opponent Stephanos, Apollodoros argues that Neaira, an ­ex-​­slave prostitute, had broken the marriage and citizenship laws by living as Stephanos’ wife, enrolling their sons in his deme Eroiadai and marrying their daughter Phano twice as a citizen to Athenian husbands. Throughout, immense emphasis is placed on the breaches of cult perpetrated by the promiscuous mother and daughter; their performance of rituals restricted to legitimate and chaste wives is alleged to have endangered the polis, especially when Phano, the wife of the archon basileus, performed her role at the ‘­sacred marriage’ with Dionysos at the Anthesteria; this scandal had apparently been investigated by the Areopagos (­Blok 2017: ­216–​­217). The chronological relation of this trial to the diapsēphisis is uncertain, as is the result. The usual view places it after the review, between 344/­343 and ca. 340 (­e.g., Carey 1992: ­99–​­101; Kapparis 1999: 28, ­222–​­225), but the possibility remains that it happened shortly before, as suggested by Robert W. Wallace (­2000). If it took place before, it might have been one of the ‘­scandalous cases’ which inspired Demophilos, either to build on a conviction the argument that this sort of illicit behaviour was common, or to respond to an acquittal by proposing a general scrutiny. If it was later, Stephanos’ sons would not only have been registered at the appropriate age as members of the deme, but would also have passed the scrutiny in 346/­345; so it would not have helped Apollodoros’ case that damage was being done to their deme community.28 Even so, with the support of Demosthenes, who was aggrieved at Aeschines’ successful appeal 374

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE

in the trial of Timarchos for a revival of decency (­sōphrosynē) (­Dem. 19.­283–​­285), Apollodoros may have been encouraged by the climate of moral outrage over the diapsēphisis to pursue Stephanos through his l­ong-​­term mistress (­cf. Carey 1992: 12). Whatever the date, the intensity of the rhetoric of impiety in this speech outdoes the suggestions in Demosthenes 57 and Isaeus 12 of the damage done to the religious life of the polis, the phratries, and the demes.

Dangerous women It is no surprise then that in many disputes cases for illegitimate infiltration focus on transgressive women in the household, whether legitimate wives like the mothers of Euxitheos and Euphiletos operating as traders or taking lovers, or hetairai like Neaira and her daughter seeking to live respectably as wives and legitimize their children. Other such cases involve the alleged hetaira and ­brothel-​­manager, Alke and her ‘­husband’ Euktemon (­Isaeus 6, ca. 364) and the hetaira Phyle in Isaeus 3 (­­mid-​­fourth century). Given the lack of reliable documentation, the claimed legitimacy of a marriage or of children must often have been hard for d ­ eme-​­members and juries to determine (­cf. Scafuro 1994; Eidinow 2016: ­312–​­325). At the time of the review, many Athenians might reasonably suppose that attempts to legitimize the children of hetairai or errant wives were on the increase; facile rhetoric such as Aeschines’ tirade (­2.187) would encourage this, even while citizens’ own practices over their relationships with hetairai or prostitutes might incline them to be contradictorily more forgiving.29 Such a contradiction is suggested at the conclusion of the Neaira speech. As Apollodoros calls on the dikasts not to weaken in their defence of the moral superiority of the wife over other sexual partners, he adopts the tone of a man of the world in this notoriously oversimplified generalization: We have hetairai for the sake of pleasure, concubines ( ­pallakai) for the daily care of our bodies, but wives for the legitimate creation of children and to have a loyal guardian of what is inside. ([Dem.] 59.122, my translation) Apollodoros might have had difficulties maintaining a hostile attitude to the enjoyment of hetairai, as he was often attacked for his own lax practices. Demosthenes’ defence of Phormion had told him a few years earlier: ‘­You wear a soft woollen cloak, have had one hetaira freed and given away another in marriage, although you have a wife, and you take three attendant slaves around with you’ (­Dem. 36.45, ca. 350/­349).30 The point of the tripartite classification is that it is the wife who matters as the source of legitimate children and the safeguard of respectability, so that the distinction between her and the others must be maintained (­Kapparis 1999: ­4 –​­8; Lape 2010: 2­ 27–​­229). But the sentence combines heavy moralizing with the flattering suggestion that the dikasts, like the speaker, might enjoy, of course in moderation, the company of hetairai or concubines in appropriate contexts. Apollodoros’ reductive terminology ignores prostitutes working in brothels or on the streets, or ‘­entertainers’ at symposia like the ­g irl-​­pipers (­aulētrides),31 with whom many dikasts were perhaps more likely to have contacts than they were to engage in maintenance of a more expensive hetaira. They may even so have responded positively to an assumption that they might so indulge, while simultaneously agreeing that the wife was of far greater moral and emotional value. 375

Nick Fisher

The frequency of allegations of associations with hetairai may have strengthened further suppositions among many Athenians. They may have believed, first, that relationships with hetairai were common, and not exclusively among the wealthy elites; second, that they might involve affection as well as sex; and third, that in consequence such women might often persuade their lovers to make them respectable and economically more secure, especially as they aged or if there were children. Kapparis’ statement that ‘­almost every important man in the ancient world has been linked with some notorious hetaira’ (­1999: 6) does not seem much of an exaggeration for classical Athens, if one looks at the list of dozens of Athenians who were so associated in oratory and comedy; they include generals, politicians, rhetors and speechwriters, sophists, poets, artists, actors, and philosophers. Of these a large number were active in the period (­admittedly a ­well-​­documented one) ca. 350s to the ca. 330s.32 Our evidence for such relationships is dominated by the gossipy allegations and anecdotes collected in Book 13 (‘­On women’) of Athenaeus’ Sophists at Dinner (­ca. 200 CE). He mentions a list compiled by the Hellenistic scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium of 135 famous hetairai who operated in Athens; others such as Apollodoros and Gorgias added more names (­McClure 2003a: 44 and Appendix III). Athenaeus himself mentions over 150 (­­583d–​­e, cf. ­585f–​­593a). Many Athenians who listened to forensic allegations of their opponents’ excesses will also have regularly attended comedies at the City and Rural Dionysia. This period is at the heart of what we call Middle Comedy, ca. 3­ 80–​­ca. 320, and this genre evidently abounded with jokes and gossip about hetairai (­many identified by nicknames) and their lovers; their scenarios regularly showed domestic life complicated by the involvement of hetairai or pallakai, often resulting in illegitimate children or the establishment of a legitimate marriage after the convenient discovery of a respectable parentage.33 Many comic hetairai were subjected to stereotypical denigrations as greedy, scheming, or monstrous;34 more positive portrayals could be presented in plots in which a ­good-​­hearted hetaira ended up in a position of security and respectability.35 An awareness of a persistent ambivalence among ordinary Athenians towards an extravagant lifestyle involving hetairai can be found in the criticisms of the rhetorician Isocrates (­Antid. 15.287, Areo­p. 7.48) and the historian Theopompos. The latter explained the decisions made by Chabrias and other generals such as Iphicrates, Conon, Timotheos, and Chares to avoid living in Athens because of their licentiousness and extravagance: ‘­for [the Athenians] were harsh on all such men’ (­Ath. ­532a–​­b = FGH 115 fr. 105); on the other hand, in the next passage selected by Athenaeus, he commented sardonically that the Athenians liked Chares all the more for his excesses, taking with him on campaign ­g irl-​­pipers, harpists, and ‘­­foot-​­workers’ ( ­pezai hetairai),36 spending public funds on this ‘­outrage’, ‘­because they themselves lived in that style, the young spending time with hetairai and aulētrides and those a little older in drinking and gambling’ (­Ath. ­532b–​­d = FGH 115 fr. 213).37 There is much literary and archaeological support for the view that some participation in symposia (­likely to involve sex with such ­non-​­respectable women) became part of the lifestyles of middling Athenians during the fifth and fourth centuries (­Fisher 2000; Lynch 2007; Corner 2010). In the citizenship speeches, as already stated, the dangers posed by errant wives or hetairai were often viewed as the effects on the sanctity of civic cults. Other speeches play on this theme. Thus, the wife of Euphiletos, the speaker of Lysias 1, supposedly attended the Thesmophoria, an exclusive festival for citizen wives, with the mother of her adulterous lover, performing secret rituals with her (­Lys. 1.20, cf. Isae. 6.­48–​­50). In a 376

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE

case cited by Apollodoros in the Neaira speech, Archias the hierophant at the Eleusinian mysteries impiously assisted his hetaira (­the famous Sinope) in the wrong sort of sacrifice at another ­women-​­only festival, the Haloa ([Dem.] 59.­116–​­117).38 Most intemperate are Apollodoros’ claims of the sacrilege which occurred when Neaira’s daughter Phano engaged in the ritual enactment of the sacred marriage with Dionysos at the Anthesteria. The last third of the speech (­­72–​­126) is devoted to the offences of Neaira and Phano, and abounds in the language of outrage and impiety, portraying them as women famous for adultery and hybris against the city, shamelessness (­anaideia), disgustingness (­aselgeia), contempt (­kataphronēsis), and impiety against the gods (­e.g., ­72–​­7, ­107–​­110).39 The description of sexual excess approaches the lurid, culminating in the description of Neiara as one who was ‘­k nown by all to have worked across the map of the world’ (­108) (­cf. Müller 2018: ­255–​­256 on this language). Solemn warnings are given to the dikasts that if they acquit they will implicate themselves in comparable shame and impiety, which will impact their domestic lives, either by angering ‘­respectable’ wives or by encouraging the ‘­senseless’ ones to follow their own desires (­­110–​­112). Comparable rhetoric of deviance in opposition to the decency (­sōphrosynē) of proper youths is found equally forcibly in Aeschines’ Against Timarchos, and it is likely that much other populist advocacy occurred in the 340s, calling for a renewal of civic morality (­along the lines of ‘­drain the swamp’ or ‘­return to family values’) (­Spatharas 2011: ­115–​­119).

Networks and open spaces In many settings, citizens might mingle together with metics, freed people, foreigners, and slaves, participating in cult, making purchases, doing deals, and creating friendships and enmities (­Vlassopoulos 2007; Taylor and Vlassopoulos 2015). Already in the 420s, the ‘­Old Oligarch’ complained that slaves and metics had too much freedom in Athens, and an Athenian could not beat another man’s slave (­sc. as a Spartan could); many lived in luxury and were indistinguishable in appearance from citizens, as the crafts and ­sea-​­borne economy depended on their contributions ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.­10–​­12; cf. Pl. Res­p. 563b; Müller 2018: 253). A century or so later, Aristotle observed: ‘­in an excessively large city it is easy for foreigners (­xenoi) and metics to share the citizenship, as it is not difficult to avoid detection because of the size of the population’ (­Pol. 1326b.­21–​­23). It is consequently not surprising that well over 20 instances in forensic speeches can be identified where the status of a man or woman was disputed in the court (­see Vlassopoulos 2007, 2009). In addition to those arising from the diapsēphisis, status is at the centre of the case in Lysias 23 (­early fourth century), where Pankleon, said to be originally a Plataian, is treated variously as slave, metic, or citizen. Many instances come from inheritance cases, for example, Isaeus 3.37 and Isaeus 6. Some involve sexual liaisons, for example, Lysias 3, where the youth who is the object of l­ove-​­rivalry is not only said to be a ‘­Plataian’ but also implied to be a slave. Some examples involve violence: Demosthenes 53.16, where Apollodoros claims he was tempted by his enemies to assault a free youth on the assumption he was a slave (­similarly Dem. 47. 61), and Aeschin. 1.­54–​­64 (­the brutal assault of Pittalakos as if he were a slave). Finally, many cases focus on whether witnesses, being slaves, should only provide evidence under torture, for example, Isocr. 17.­13–​­14 (­K ittos, slave, or by now Pasion’s freedman), Dem. 29.­31–​­2 (­Milyas), Dem. 49.55 (­A ischrion, Timotheos’ freedman), and Dem. 59.­9 –​­10 (­possible witnesses to a homicide, slaves, or free men from Cyrene). 377

Nick Fisher

Developments in some networks in the years shortly before the citizenship review are likely to have heightened such uncertainties. State encouragement of economic interactions conducted regardless of status is attested by a reform to the procedures for settling commercial disputes. In line with recommendations made in Xenophon’s pamphlet of the 350s (­Vect. 3.3), specialized commercial courts (­dikai emporikai) were introduced for the speedy resolution of disputes, early in the 340s:40 cases had to be completed within a month, and were restricted to the winter months, when little ­sea-​ ­trading would be going on.41 To minimize prejudice against ­non-​­Athenians, traders of all statuses were permitted to operate as litigants and witnesses, and slaves could give evidence without having been tortured. Two consequences emerge. First, the status of certain characters in the disputes is often not clear from our texts, and it may have been unclear to the dikasts; second, where one of those involved is presented by an opponent as both a crook and a slave, no great rhetorical mileage is made of his slave status or foreign origin. Thus, Chrysippos, the speaker of Demosthenes 34, describes an opponent Lampas as a slave (­oiketēs)­42 and one of the ‘­boys’ ( ­paides) belonging to his apparent superior Dion, but also calls him a shipowner (­nauklēros), working closely with Dion, and arranging sizeable deals on his own;43 a similar picture is found with Zenothemis, the alleged crook in Demosthenes 32.44 This adoption of special measures recognized that this was a complex interactive world, one vital to Athens’ material interests, where values of trust and observance of contracts were paramount. Moreno (­2007) and Gabrielsen (­2015) have identified widespread networking connections between leading politicians, many of whom also operated overseas as trierarchs, and ­large-​­scale traders, investors, shipowners, and foreign rulers, especially in the ­g rain-​­exporting regions of the Black Sea; their interests and activities conveniently combined political aims and individual profit, for example, from ­g rain-​­dealing or bribes. These connections might operate through more or less formal associations such as societies of ‘­comrades’ (­hetaireiai) and financial associations (­eranoi), or looser groups described as ‘­those around’ or ‘­those with’ so and so (­hoi peri/­meta x). Closely linked to such associations were bankers, many of n ­ on-​­Athenian origins; several of the most successful, if they also made generous gifts to the polis, were awarded citizenship (­see Dem. 36.­29–​­30). They include the ­best-​­known Pasion (­the father of Apollodoros) and his e­ x-​­slave and partner Phormion (­Trevett 1992; Skipton 1997: ­409–​­412; Deene 2011: ­164–​­165); Sokles and his son Blepaios, who appears as a rich and powerful figure in the ‘­comrade group’ (­hetaireia) of Demosthenes’ enemy, Meidias (­Dem. 21.­215–​­216);45 and Epigenes and Konon, whose citizenship Demosthenes allegedly took bribes to arrange (­Din. 1.43) (­cf. Cohen 1992: 128). Bankers formed complex relationships with clients whose deposits they received or to whom they lent money, and they combined a professional approach to repayment times and interest charges with professions of loyalty and friendship (­Cohen 1992; Skipton 1997). Xenophon also recommended that deserving shipowners and traders be considered as benefactors to the city and given honours such as front seats at the theatre and entertainment at the state’s expense (­Ways and Means 3.4). Changes in the nature, recipients, and language of the awards of honorary decrees in the later 340s, and much more intensely after the defeat at Chaironea, have been explored, above all by Stephen Lambert (­2011a, 2011b). His edition of state decrees in the period 352/­351 to 322/­321 (­IG II3 2) includes about 60 decrees granting various honours to foreigners, occasionally including full citizenship; around half reward those helpful to Athens’ military or political needs, 12 honour grain traders, significant for Athens’ need to assure its 378

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE

vital g­ rain-​­imports especially at times of shortages, and ten people involved with the Athenian theatre. The substantial increase in honours for traders falls essentially in the Lycurgan period after the law of Demophilos, and it is often related to problems in grain harvests and supplies. An example of an award of citizenship to a wealthy trading family, also supposedly engineered for a consideration by Demosthenes, is that of the s­ alt-​­fish dealer Chairephilos (­Din. 1.43) and his three sons, two of whom then performed liturgies and were known for associations with the famous hetaira Pythionike (­later the mistress of Alexander’s treasurer Harpalos).46 Two intriguing pieces of less formal testimony suggest networks of people of diverse statuses engaged in legal or violent conflict. In a lead letter of ca. 370, the banker Pasion urges an associate menacingly to pursue revenge (­whether by legal prosecution or more direct action) against their enemies who include the brothers Nikostratos, Deinon, and Arethousios, against whom Pasion’s son Apollodoros would later litigate (­see Jordan 2003; Sosin 2008). A lead curse tablet of 3­ 40s–​­320s, recently ­re-​­edited with additional names, reveals a disgruntled individual expressing his anger and frustration at nearly 100 people, apparently members of various networks with whom he was in conflict, probably both legal and ­extra-​­legal. They include politicians and liturgists (­e.g., Xenokles of Sphettos), frequent litigants or sykophants (­e.g., Aristogeiton), others attested as manumitters of slaves, ­g rain-​­dealers and traders, a scribe, and four female prostitutes and one male (­identified as ‘­cocksuckers’, laikastriai / laikastrēs).47 In ­non-​­commercial courts, hostile exploitation of opponents’ low and barbarian origins evidently appealed to the ideology of the Athenians, whose carefully crafted myth of autochthony remained strong. In Ways and Means (­2.­1–​­4), despite his suggestion that incentives be offered to successful traders, Xenophon somewhat contradictorily advocated the establishment of a barrier between citizens and metics in the army, arguing that citizens should serve in their own units, not with the ‘­Lydians, Phrygians, Syrians and other barbarians of all types’ who ‘­provided many of the metics’; he may have been thinking of both freed slaves and traders from the east. Even more demeaning references to ­non-​­Greeks in ­fourth-​­century speeches include sneers at one ‘­Melas the Egyptian’, as Isaeus’ client repeatedly describes the evil advisor of Dikaiogenes in an inheritance dispute (­Isae. 5.7, 8.40, ca. 389); Apollodoros’ bitter attack on his father’s ­ex-​­slave and business heir Phormion (­Dem. 45.30, ca. ­350–​­349); a gratuitous description Pamphilos as ‘­the Egyptian’, a metic whom Meidias employed as a replacement trierarch in 348 (­Dem. 21.163);48 and the abuse of Athenogenes, a metic ­p erfume-​­seller, and the collaborator with the scheming hetaira and bawd Antigona, who is described as ‘­a speechwriter, a man of the market and, most important, an Egyptian’ (­Hy­p. 3.­3 –​­4, ca. ­330–​­324).49 Thus, the greater openness of the dikai emporikai and increasing grants of honours to n ­ on-​­Greeks, however necessary to encourage foreign or slave traders to operate in Athens, did not lessen speakers’ recourse, outside these courts, to casual racist prejudice. Perhaps by 346/­345 Demophilos felt encouraged to tap into these fears that closer associations between citizens and ­non-​­citizen traders might too easily lead to deme infiltration. Beyond the world of the traders, networking groups in varied social contexts increased the opportunities for closer contacts and relationships between citizens and metics, ­ex-​­slaves, and slaves. Much epigraphic evidence reveals different types of ‘­voluntary’ or ‘­private’ associations, cultic and social groups, distinct from those groupings which mediated citizenship and were part of the structures of tribes and demes, genē and phratries, and from other ancient regional groups like the Marathonian 379

Nick Fisher

Tetrapolis (­Ismard 2015). Terminology here is varied: members may be called orgeones,50 thiasōtai, or eranistai (­see also Brock in this volume). Typically, their organization followed comparable patterns to those used by the groups exclusive to citizens; they appointed officials, managed funds and lent out money, and engaged in rituals and commensality displayed at sanctuaries or in private houses. The most common term here, eranos, originally a term for a meal or symposion where expenses were shared by group members, came to be used for a single friendly loan collected from friends by an individual faced with a sudden emergency; usually repayable, but ­interest-​­free (­see Thomsen 2015).51 Examples include the loan gathered by Nikostratos from Apollodoros and others to repay his ransom money ([Dem. 53.­8 –​­11), and that gathered by Neaira to buy her freedom from her former clients ([Dem.] 59.­30–​ ­32) (­cf. Kapparis 1999: ­229–​­235; Müller 2018: 246). Eranos could then also designate a collection of more formal loans to meet needs or business opportunities and negotiated by a ­third-​­party manager (­often called the plerōtēs) from a wider group; such loans might be seen more as investments than as friendly support, ­interest-​­bearing and repaid in instalments; for example, the set of debts accumulated by Midas (­Hy­p. 3.9; Thomsen 2015: ­159–​­162). Finally, developing slightly differently from the sense of ‘­shared meal’, were more formal associations called eranoi, koina eranistōn, or thiasoi: their members (­eranistai or thiasōtai) organized their activities, ‘­for sacrifices and social exchanges’ (­Arist. Eth. Nic. 1160a.­19–​­20); but they might also engage in ­money-​­lending, using an organizer (­archeranistēs or plerōtēs), or combine to help individual members in need of support; or operate as burial clubs (­e.g., IG II2 1275 = AIUK 4.3A no. 4). As Thomsen demonstrates, these types were becoming well established at the latest by the 320s. What matters here is the general absence of restrictive rules for membership. Many inscriptions list members without adding an indication of citizen, metic, or slave status; some include women. Onomastic analysis suggests that some groups consisted mostly of ­non-​­citizens, while others were mixed (­on naming patterns, see Lewis 2011; Humphreys 2018: ­263–​­269). Examples include a group of a dozen or so mostly slaves or e­ x-​­slaves who set up a relief to the Nymphs in the cave of Pan at Vari (­SEG 4.318), and groups linked by shared occupations (­IG II2 2934 = IG II3 4 635 ‘­launderers’; IG II2 2941 = IG II3 4 650 ‘­male workers’).52 A set of connected ­m id-­​­­fourth-​­c entury dedications from Sounion apparently indicate that such slaves and others (­including women), probably working on their own, were able to negotiate their place in rituals at significant sanctuaries and attain thereby some (­small) degree of identity, status, and social mobility.53 Overall, this complex of networking associations provided increasing opportunities for closer social, cultic, or financial ties between citizens and others, especially in the demes in or around the city, Peiraeus and Eleusis.

Conclusion Those voting for the diapsephisis, then, may have had many reasons: their awareness of cases in their own demes, especially if they felt political manipulations by cliques had skewed decisions; awareness of scandalous acquittals in law courts; a more general sense, evident also in the Timarchos and Neaira cases, that contempt for marriage, inheritance, and enrolment rules was rife amidst many who engaged in irregular sexual liaisons; and a sense that a growth in memberships of voluntary networks and associations of mixed statuses, economic, social, and cultic, might be encouraging illicit deals. Finally, some may just have felt that in dangerous times it would be no bad idea 380

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE

to scrutinize the deme lists. Whichever problem each voter felt counted most, there was perhaps here, as in many other initiatives of the period, an ­ill-​­formed sense (­amid contradictions) that ‘­conservative’ measures would be beneficial at this tense period in Athenian politics and culture. The general aim was to foster a pride in civic identity, responsibility and education, military preparedness, and more secure relations with the g­ ods – in ​­ brief ‘­to make Athens great again’. Whether it did any good (­as in more recent cases) may be doubted (­cf. Humphreys 2018: ­780–​­781).

Notes 1 See Harpokration s.v. diapsēphisis, citing Androtion (­FGH 324 fr. 52 and Philochorus (­FGH 328 fr. 52) for the date (­the archonship of Archias), mentioned also by Dionysius Dinarchos 11. See Osborne (­1971: ­329–​­330). The phratries seem not to have been directly involved: Humphreys (­2018: 602). 2 This was probably a review in all the demes, as in 346/­345, cf. Whitehead (­1986: ­99–​­109), Lape (­2010: ­200–​­201). 3 Plut. Per. 37, Philoch. FGrH 328 fr. 119, cf. Arist. Ath. Pol. 26.4. On this law, see Davies (­1977/­1978: 111), Patterson (­2005), Blok (­2009), and Humphreys (­2018: ­776–​­778). 4 Followed by Bers (­2003: 108); doubts in Fantasia and Carusi (­2004: ­196–​­197). 5 See also Fantasia and Carusi (­2004), and Blok (­2017: passim, esp. Ch. 3). 6 Fisher (­2001: ­53–​­67), generally approved by Fantasia and Carusi (­2004: ­199–​­200), Lambert (­2011a: ­176–​­178; 2011b: 198), Spatharas (­2011: ­115–​­119; 2017: ­35–​­39), and Blok (­2017: 244). 7 On the ephebeia reform, see Humphreys (­2004: ­88–​­92, ­114–​­118), Chankowski (­2010: ­45–​­142), and Steinbock (­2011). 8 Euboulides was a member of the council of 500 (­bouleutēs) this year, but he seems to be performing the chairing duties of the demarch throughout this meeting (­Dem. 57.­8 –​­14). It is unclear whether he was also demarch that year, or for some reason acting as chair of the meeting qua bouleutēs (­and de facto a powerful figure in the deme): See Develin (­1991), Humphreys (­2018: 925). 9 Cf. Blok (­2017: 5, 2­ 66–​­267). This emotional enthusiasm for the review might suggest that the measure was passed comfortably, or that its supporters expressed themselves particularly passionately. Humphreys (­2018: 780 n. 30) commented that if scandals were cited ‘­someone must have worked them up into a case for reform’; suspicion falls in the first place on Demophilos. 10 On this passage, see also Lape (­2010: ­143–​­148, 2­ 14–​­215), who observes that the Athenian rhetoric does not usually blame defeats or failures on the consequences of mixing of Athenian and alien bloodlines, but focuses on treating those individuals whose citizen birth is challenged as wholly foreign and therefore dangerous. 11 Earlier Aeschines contrasted the infiltration of the ‘­Thracian’ politician Cleophon and Demosthenes’ ‘­Scythian’ mother, with a defence of his own father’s legitimacy and democratic loyalty (­Aeschin. 2.­76–​­78). On such frequent allegations of foreign birth thrown about in comedy, and between competing politicians, with no serious intent to prosecute, see Lape (­2010: ­64–​­88), Kamen (­2009, 2020). 12 On such lists and why they did not play more decisive roles in disputed citizenship cases, see Scafuro (­1994: 161, ­164–​­70), Lape (­2010: ­193–​­8), and Humphreys (­2018: ­780–​­90, ­926–​­927), who dates the loss of the list to the 380s. Halimous had slightly over 80 members in 346/­345 (­Dem. 57.­10–​­15). 13 Cf. Whitehead (­1986: ­293–​­295; 2000: ­179–​­180), Wijma (­2014: 37), Blok (­2017: 205), and Humphreys (­2018: 927). 14 Ismard (­2017: 67) suggests (­but cites no evidence) that he had acquired citizenship legally and become a ‘­­second-​­rate orator and politician’. 15 There is a slight possibility that this case resulted from an earlier local review (­which would make it easier chronologically to account for Isaeus’ involvement); see Wyse (­1904) ad loc., Develin (­1991), and Humphreys (­2018: ­870–​­874). 16 On the details of the case, including an earlier case brought by the speaker against the deme as a whole and the then demarch, see Kapparis (­2005: ­84–​­87, ­89–​­92), finding Euphiletos’

381

Nick Fisher case convincing, and Humphreys (­2018: ­245–​­246, 8­ 70–​­871) emphasizing factional rivalry and offering a reason for supposing Euphiletos won his case. 17 On Kleidikos’ wealthy family, see Davies (­1971: ­13–​­15). 18 Presumably Thrasyboulos son of Lykos of the deme Steiria, and his final campaigns ca. ­390–​­389. 19 Cf. Carey (­1994: ­104–​­106), Scafuro (­1994: ­165–​­168), and Lape (­2010: ­204–​­210), emphasizing that allegations of ­non-​­citizen status were apparently made against both parents. 20 Cf. Eidinow (­2016: 3­ 22–​­323); Humphreys (­1986: 6­ 2–​­63); and Carey (­1994: 105) suggest the lack of witnesses is suspicious, especially from the phratry, Kapparis (­2005: ­83–​­88) finds Euxitheos’ defence convincing. 21 It is not clear whether the bribe from Leukonides was for the original (­false) testimony, revealing a dispute inside the family, or money paid to Timarchos somehow to lose the case on appeal in a court. Cf. Whitehead (­1986: ­295–​­296), Fisher (­2001: 2­ 53–​­256), and Humphreys (­2018: ­251–​­252, ­781–​­782). 22 Cf. Lape (­2010: ­210–​­213). Contrastingly, in his speech on the Embassy (­Aeschin. 2.­181–​­182), Aeschines claims credit, as a moderate politician who joined no cabals, for ‘­not having deprived any one of his country when the diapsēphiseis took place’, thus accepting that many abuses resulting from political enmities had taken place. Another probable case from this diapsēphisis is attested in the small city deme Keiriadai by Harpokration s.v. Keiriades, citing a speech of Isaeus ‘­Against Boiotos in the ephesis from the demesmen’. See Davies (­1971: 365), Humphreys (­2018: 870, 1109). 23 On these laws ([Dem.] 59.­16–​­17); cf. above all Kapparis (­1999: ­198–​­206, 2005: ­76–​­82). 24 Cf. Patterson (­1994). On the limitations in Aristotle’s ‘­formalist’ approach more generally, see, e.g., Davies (­2000), Patterson (­2005: ­267–​­270), and Duplouy (­2018). 25 In this frequently found phrase, hiera indicates essentially objects and places belonging to the gods and the rituals through which humans interact with them; while the wider term hosia covers types of social behaviour directed towards or likely to be approved by the gods. See Blok (­2011, 2017: ­58–​­80). 26 Osborne (­1985: ­150–​­151) suggested there may well have been aspects of the deme’s politics which Euxitheos preferred to avoid. 27 Nor is there in my view a prevalence of the sacred in the surviving extract of Isae. 12, despite Blok (­2017: 12). 28 Cf. Carey (­1992: ­105–​­106), Kapparis (­1999: ­31–​­43, ­421–​­422), and Spatharas (­2011: 102). 29 On such contradictions in Athenian society, see also Cohen (­2006: ­95–​­96). Glazebrook (­2006) documents the hostile representation of hetairai in the forensic speeches. 30 On the date, see Trevett (­1992: 48). The allegation that he had ‘­had a hetaira freed’ may have been that he had engaged in a paramon­ē-​­type agreement that when freed from her master she would show ‘­g ratitude’ to him, as allegedly had Olympiodoros ([Dem.] 48.55), and Phrynion and Stephanos did with Neaira ([Dem.] 59.­29–​­31, ­37–​­39); see Kamen (­2014: ­299–​­300). 31 On g­ irl-​­pipers, see McClure (­2003a: ­21–​­22), Goldman (­2015), who attempts, perhaps somewhat too vigorously, to reduce their necessary involvement in prostitution. 32 See McClure (­2003a, esp. Appendices III and IV). On the wit and spirit of such hetairai, see McClure (­2003b). 33 Cf. the supposed riposte (­w ith which Athenaeus opens Book 13) made by the comic poet Antiphanes to an unamused Alexander the Great that to enjoy his plays one needs to have often eaten at ­club-​­dinners and received and given blows over a hetaira (­Ath. 555a). Cf. Konstantakos (­2002: 147), McClure (­2003b: ­259–​­262). 34 See the denunciation in Anaxilas’ Neottis (­fr. 22 ­K-​­A = Ath. ­558a–​­e, dated ca. ­340s–​­330s), which matches mythical female monsters or beasts (­the Chimaira, Charybdis, Scylla, the Sphinx, the Hydra, the Harpies), with their contemporary named equivalents, hetairai such as Plangon, Sinope, Gnathaina, Nannion, Phryne, and Theano. See Konstantakos (­2002: ­145–​­146). 35 See, e.g., Antiphanes Hydria fr. ­40K-​­A = Ath. 5­ 72a–​­c, and Konstantakos (­2002: 147); and for an ingenious reconstruction of a comedy of the late 340s featuring a happy outcome of a young man’s love for a hetaira (­A lexis’ Agonis or Hippiskos), see Green and Konstantakos (­2020).

382

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE 36 On ­foot-​­workers as a term for s­ treet-​­walkers, see Davidson (­1997: 7­ 8–​­83), McClure (­2003a: 21). 37 Cf. Flower (­1994: ­90–​­91,­125–​­130, ­151–​­152) on Theopompos’ tendency to moralize. 38 See Kapparis (­1999: ­410–​­417), Eidinow (­2016: ­319–​­320); cf. the unsuccessful case allegedly brought by Euboulides against the sister of Lakedaimonios for impiety, from which his hostility to Euxitheos stemmed (­Dem. 57.8). Cf. Humphreys (­2018: 1185). 39 On the language of asebeia cf. Eidinow (­2015: ­71–​­72), Spatharas (­2011: ­116–​­119). Cf. Isae. 6.48 on Alke’s impiety, hybris and contempt towards the city. 40 Certainly before 342 (­they are mentioned in that year by Hegesippos ([Dem.] 7.12), perhaps before ­347–​­346 if the dikē emporikē mentioned at Dem. 21.176, which Euandros of Thespiai won against Menippos a Karian fell under the new procedure (­so Moreno 2007: ­285–​­286), but see MacDowell (­1990: ­393–​­394). 41 See Cohen (­1973), Harris (­2015: ­32–​­33). For the debate on the range of symbolaia; see Bresson (­2016: 323). 42 On the meaning of oiketēs (­a general term for slave, not a slave or free person restricted to domestic life), cf. Harper (­2011: ­513–​­518), Lewis (­2018: ­295–​­305). 43 Cf. Fisher (­2008: 1­ 30–​­132); Lewis (­2018: 300) suggests Lampis was probably now a freedman, liberated by Dion, and the designation was designed to ‘­hammer home his lowly origins’, but the opportunity to emphasize this is scarcely taken up. 44 Zenothemis was the ‘­underling’ (­hypēretēs) or ‘­partner’ (­koinōnos) of Hegestratos. 45 Blepaios ‘­the banker’ is mentioned as lending money for an investment in the silver mines at Demosthenes 40.52, and Agora 19 H 94 reveals a loan by ‘­the eranistai with Blepaios’ (­A rnaoutoglou 2003: 80; Thomsen 2015: 162). 46 Ath. ­339c–​­e, see Davies (­1971: ­566–​­567), Humphreys (­2018: 904). 47 Jordan and Curbera (­2008: ­135–​­150), Humphreys (­2010: ­85–​­86) and on curse tablets generally, Humphreys (­2018: ­471–​­478). 48 He may have been the shipbuilder mentioned at IG II2 1612, 1­ 56–​­185, cf. MacDowell (­1990: ­382–​­383). 49 Hypereides’ case rested on the contrast between his client as a naïve farmer, hopelessly in love with a slave boy, and this pair of villains: cf. Whitehead (­2000: 2­ 66–​­271). 50 On such orgeones, especially those of Thracians and Athenians associated with the cult of Bendis, see Wijma (­2014: ­126–​­155, ­169–​­171). 51 See also Arnaoutoglou (­2003), Gabrielsen and Thomsen (­2010), and Humphreys (­2018: ­396–​­405). 52 See Taylor (­2015), Lambert in AIO IG II3 4 650. 53 See Taylor (­2015: ­46–​­9); further with more examples Taylor (­2017: ­221–​­226).

Bibliography Arnaoutoglou, I. (­2003) Thusias heneka kai synousias: private religious associations in Hellenistic Athens (­Athens) Bers, V. (­2003) Demosthenes speeches ­50–​­59: the oratory of classical Greece (­Austin, TX) Blok, J. (­2009) ‘­Pericles’ citizenship law: a new perspective’, Historia, 59, ­141–​­170 ——— ​­(­2011) ‘­Hosie and Athenian law from Solon to Lycourgus’, in V. Azoulay and P. Ismard (­eds) Clisthène et Lycurge d’Athènes (­Paris) ­233–​­254 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Boegehold, A.L. (­1995) The lawcourts at Athens: sites, buildings, equipment, procedure, and testimonia, The Athenian Agora XXVIII (­Princeton, NJ) Bresson, A. (­2016) The making of the ancient Greek economy (­Princeton, NJ) Carey, C. (­1992) Apollodoros, Against Neaira [Demosthenes] 59 (­Warminster) ——— ​­(­1994) ‘­A rtless proofs in Aristotle and the orators’, BICS 39, ­95–​­106 Chankowski, A.S. (­2010) L’Éphébie hellénistique: étude d’une institution civique dans les cités grecques des îles de la Mer Égée et de l’Asie Mineure (­Paris) Cohen, E.E. (­1973) Ancient Athenian maritime courts (­Princeton, NJ) ——— ​­(­1992) Economy and society (­Princeton, NJ)

383

Nick Fisher ——— ​­(­2006) ‘­Free and unfree sexual work: an economic analysis of Athenian prostitution’, in C.A. Faraone and L.K. McClure (­eds) Prostitutes and courtesans in the ancient world (­Madison, WI) ­95–​­124 Corner, S. (­2010) ‘­Transcendent drinking: the symposium at sea reconsidered’, CQ 60, ­352–​­380 Davidson, J. (­1997) Courtesans and fishcakes: the consuming passions of classical Athens (­London) Davies, J.K. (­1971) Athenian propertied families (­Oxford) ——— (​­ ­1977/­1978) ‘­Athenian citizenship: the descent group and the alternatives’, CJ 73.2, ­105–​­121 ——— (­ ​­2000) ‘­A wholly ­non-​­Aristotelian universe: the Molossians as ethnos, state and monarchy’, in R. Brock and S. Hodkinson (­eds) Alternatives to Athens: varieties of political organization and community in ancient Greece (­Oxford) ­234–​­258 Deene, M. (­2011) ‘­Naturalized citizens and social mobility in classical Athens: the case of Apollodorus’, G&R 58, ­159–​­175 Develin, R. (­1991) ‘­Euboulides’ office and the diapsephisis of 346/­5 B.C.’, C&M 42, ­75–​­79 Duplouy, A. (­2018) ‘­Pathways to archaic citizenship’, in A. Duplouy and R. Brock (­eds) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) ­1–​­50 Eidinow, E. (­2015) ‘­A ncient Greek religion’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (­eds) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) ­54–​­79 ——— ​­(­2016) Envy, poison and death: women on trial in Classical Athens (­Oxford) Fantasia, U. and C. Carusi (­2004) ‘­Revisioni e controlli delle liste dei cittadini: la diapsephisis ateniese del 346/­5 a.C.’, in S. Cataldi (­ed.) Poleis e politeiai (­A lessandria) ­187–​­216 Fisher, N. (­2000) ‘­Symposiasts, ­fish-​­eaters and flatterers: social mobility and moral concerns’, in D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (­eds) The rivals of Aristophanes: studies in Athenian old comedy (­London and Swansea) ­355–​­396 ——— ​­(­2001) Aeschines, against Timarchos (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2008) ‘­Independent’ slaves in classical Athens and the ideology of slavery’, in C. Katsari and E. Dal Lago (­eds) From captivity to freedom: themes in ancient and modern slavery (­Leicester) ­121–​­146 Flower, M.A. (­1994) Theopompos of Chios: history and rhetoric in the fourth century BC (­Oxford) ­177–​­211 Gabrielsen, V. (­2015) ‘­Naval and grain networks and associations in f­ ourth-​­century Athens’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (­eds) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) ­177–​­213 eds) (­ 2010) Private associations and the public sphere Gabrielsen, V. and Thomsen, C.A. (­ (­Copenhagen) Glazebrook, A. (­2006) ‘­The bad girls of Athens: the image and function of hetairai in judicial oratory’, in C.A. Faraone and L.K. McClure (­eds) Prostitutes and courtesans in the ancient World (­Madison, WI) ­125–​­138 Goldman, M.L. (­2015) ‘­Associating the aulêtris: flute girls and prostitutes in the classical Greek symposium’, Helios 42, ­29–​­60 Green, J.R and Konstantakos, I.M. (­2020) ‘­A c­ alyx-​­krater by the Varrese Painter and a glimpse of Alexis’ Agonis or Hippiskos’, Logeion 10, ­286–​­327 Hansen, M.H. (­1991) The Athenian democracy in the age of Demosthenes (­Oxford) ​­ 1996) ‘­Reflections on the number of citizens accommodated in the assembly place on the ——— (­ Pnyx’, in B. Forsén and G. Stanton (­eds) The Pnyx in the history of Athens (­Helsinki) ­23–​­33 Harper, K. (­2011) Slavery in the later Greek world, AD ­275–​­425 (­Cambridge) Harris, E.M. (­2015) ‘­The meaning of the legal term symbolaion, the law about dikai emporikai, and the role of the paragraphe procedure’, Dike 18, ­7–​­36 Humphreys, S.C. (­1986) ‘­K inship patterns in the Athenian courts’, GRBS 27, ­57–​­91 ——— ​­(­2004) The strangeness of gods (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­A paranoid sycophant? The curse tablet NM14470’, ZPE 172, ­85–​­86 ——— ​­(­2018) Kinship in ancient Athens (­Oxford) Ismard, P. (­2015) ‘“­Playing with scales” in the classical city: the case of the Marathonian Tetrapolis’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (­eds) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) ­80–​­100 ——— ​­(­2017) Democracy’s slaves: a political history of ancient Greece (­Cambridge, MA) Jordan, D.R. (­2003) ‘­A letter from the banker Pasion’, in D. Jordan and J.S. Traill (­eds) Lettered Attica: a day of Attic epigraphy (­Toronto) ­22– ​­40

384

The Athenian diapsēphisis of 346/345 BCE Jordan, D.R., and Curbera, J. (­2008) ‘­A lead curse tablet in the National Museum, Athens’, ZPE 166, ­135–​­150 Kamen, D. (­2009) ‘­Servile invective in classical Athens’, SCI 28, ­43–​­56 ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­Sale for the purpose of freedom: s­ lave-​­prostitutes and manumission in ancient Greece’, CJ 109, ­281–​­307 ——— ​­(­2020) Insults in classical Athens (­Madison, WI) Kapparis, K. (­1999) Apollodoros against Neaira [D.59] (­Berlin and New York) ——— ​­(­2005) ‘­Immigration and citizenship procedures in Athenian law’, RIDA 52, ­71–​­113 Konstantakos, I. (­2002) ‘­Towards a literary history of comic love’, C&M 53 (­2002) ­141–​­171 Lambert, S.D. (­2011a) ‘­Some political shifts in Lycurgan Athens’, in V. Azoulay and P. Ismard (­eds) Clisthène et Lycurge d’Athènes (­Paris) ­175–​­190 ——— ​­(­2011b) ‘­W hat was the point of inscribed honorific decrees in classical Athens’, in S.D. Lambert (­ed.) Sociable man: essays on ancient Greek social behaviour in honour of Nick Fisher (­Swansea) ­193–​­214 Lape, S. (­2010) Race and citizen identity in the classical Athenian democracy (­Cambridge) Lewis, D.M. (­2011) ‘­Near Eastern slaves in classical Attica and the slave trade with Persian territories’, CQ 61, ­91–​­113 ——— ​­(­2018) Greek slave systems in their Eastern Mediterranean context, c.­8 00-​­146 BC (­Oxford) Lynch, K.M. (­2007) ‘­More thoughts on the space of the symposium’, in R. Westgate, N. Fisher, and J. Whitley (­eds) Building communities: house, settlement and society in the Aegean and beyond (­London) ­243–​­250 MacDowell, D.M. (­1990) Demosthenes, against Meidias (­Oration 21) (­Oxford) McClure, L.K. (­2003a) Courtesans at table: gender and literary culture in Athenaeus (­New York and London) ——— ​­(­2003b) ‘­Subversive laughter: the sayings of courtesans in book 13 of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae’, AJPh 124, ­259–​­294 Moreno, A. (­2007) Feeding the democracy: the Athenian grain supply in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (­Oxford) Müller, C. (­2018) ‘­Itinéraires d’une prostituée: Néaira et les espaces de la cité’, in C. Moatti and C. Müller (­eds) Statuts personnels et espaces sociaux: questions grecques et romaines (­Paris) ­243–​­269 Osborne, M.J. (­1971) ‘­Notes on Attic inscriptions’, ABSA 66, ­323-​­323 Osborne, R. (­1985) Demos: the discovery of classical Attika (­Cambridge) Parker, R. (­2005) Polytheism and society at Athens (­Oxford) Patterson, C. (­1994) ‘­The case against Neaira’, in A.L. Boegehold and A.C. Scafuro (­eds) Athenian identity and civic ideology (­Baltimore, MD and London) 1­ 99–​­216 ——— ​­(­2005) ‘­T he Athenian citizenship law’, in M. Gagarin and D. Cohen (­eds) The Cambridge companion to ancient Greek law (­Cambridge) ­267–​­289 Scafuro, A. (­1994) ‘­Witnessing and false witnessing: proving citizenship and kin identity in ­fourth-​­century Athens’, in A.L. Boegehold and A.C. Scafuro (­eds) Athenian identity and civic ideology (­Baltimore, MD and London) 1­ 56–​­198 Skipton, K.M.W. (­1997) ‘­The private banks in ­fourth-​­century B.C. Athens: a reappraisal’, CQ 47, ­396–​­422 Sosin, J.D. (­2008) ‘­The new letter from Pasion’, ZPE 165, ­105–​­108 Spatharas, D. (­2011) ‘­K inky tales from the rostrum; storytelling in Apollodorus’ Against Neaira’, AncNarr 9, ­99–​­129 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­Sex, politics and disgust in Aeschines’ Against Timarchos’, in D. Spatharas and D. Lateiner (­eds) The ancient emotion of disgust (­Oxford) ­125–​­140 Steinbock, B. (­2011) ‘­A lesson in patriotism: Lycurgus’ against Leocrates, the ideology of the Ephebeia, and Athenian social memory’, ClAnt 30, ­279–​­317 Taylor, C. (­2015) ‘­Social networks and social mobility in Athens’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (­eds) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) ­35–​­53 ——— ​­(­2017) Poverty, wealth and ­well-​­being: experiencing penia in democratic Athens (­Oxford) Taylor, C. and Vlassopoulos, K. (­eds) (­2015) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) Thomsen, C.A. (­2015) ‘­T he eranistai of classical Athens’, GRBS 55, ­154–​­175 Trevett, J. (­1992) Apollodoros, son of Pasion (­Oxford)

385

Nick Fisher Vlassopoulos, K. (­2007) ‘­Free spaces: identity, experience and democracy in classical Athens’, CQ 57, ­33–​­52 (­ 2009) ‘­ Slavery, freedom and citizenship in classical Athens’, European Review of ——— ​­ History/­Revue européene d’histoire 16, ­347–​­363 Wallace, R.W. (­1985). The Areopagos council, to 307 B.C. (­Baltimore, MD and London) ——— ​­(­2000) ‘­Investigations and reports by the Areopagos council, and Demosthenes’ Areopagos decree,’ in P. ­Flensted-​­Jensen, Th. Heine Nielsen, L. Rubinstein, M.H. Hansen (­e ds) Polis and politics, studies in ancient Greek History presented to M. H. Hansen (­Copenhagen) ­581–​­595 Whitehead, D. (­1986) The demes of Attica (­Princeton, NJ) ——— ​­(­2000) Hypereides, the forensic speeches (­Oxford) Wijma, S.M (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­­5th–​­4th century BC) (­Stuttgart) Wyse, W. (­1904) The speeches of Isaeus (­Cambridge)

386

27 APPEALS TO ASSOCIATIONS AND CLAIMS TO CITIZENSHIP IN ATHENIAN ORATORY1 James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri The relationship between Athens’ associations (­used here to refer broadly to ­sub-​ ­g roups of the polis) and Athenian citizenship is a topic that has interested scholars for some time now (­see esp. Lambert 1993: ­25–​­58, Ismard 2010: 4­ 4–​­145). That the demes, for one, had a very direct hand in in making young Athenians citizens has long been clear: after all, it was the deme assembly that held the decisive vote on whether or not a young man would be inscribed on the official citizen registers, the lēxiarchika grammateia, themselves held in the demes (­K ierstead 2017). Membership in phratries, too, has been seen as tightly bound up with Athenian citizenship. Full citizenship sometimes seems to be associated with both demes and phratries (­see also Brock in this volume), and virtually all known grants of citizenship to foreigners call for the new Athenian to be inducted into both of these sorts of association.2 In the decades following the publication of Stephen Lambert’s book The Phratries of Attica (­1993), a number of scholars have followed his suggestion that all Athenian citizens in the classical period were members of phratries.3 When it comes to other ­associations – ​­particularly genē and orgeōnes – ​­the picture is much less clear. A fragment of the work of local historian Philochorus preserves a law which states that phratries must admit members of orgeōnes and genē into their ranks; and speakers in the extant corpus of oratory often include claims of belonging in genē and orgeōnes alongside appeals to demes and phratries.4 James Kierstead has argued that genē and orgeōnes, in particular, could bolster a man’s claims to citizenship (­and, as the Law of Philochoros suggests, to membership in a phratry) to such an extent that it makes sense to view these associations too as linked, in the context of citizenship, in a larger procedural ordering (­see ­Figure  27.1 below) (­K ierstead 2019: 28). Kierstead has further suggested that the different groups played different roles in certifying a man for citizenship. As he puts it, the associations in the three different ranks of F ­ igure  27.1 ‘­sought to verify a young man’s inclusion in the citizen community in terms of three different kinds of belonging: civic, familial, and religious’ (­K ierstead 2019: 39). So, demes were primarily concerned with certifying a man for his role as a citizen in the polis; the essential function of phratries in a citizenship context was to verify that he came from an Athenian family; and membership in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-32

387

James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri

genē and orgeōnes (­and perhaps also thiasoi) served mainly to signal his commitment to local religious traditions.

­Figure 27.1 The interconnections of the three ranks of associations.

In this chapter, we look at a related hypothesis that should help us to see to what extent Kierstead’s theory is true. The hypothesis is that when individual Athenians appeal to associations, they will refer more often to demes when it is their participation in political institutions that is most at issue; to phratries when it is their kinship that is being disputed; and to genē and orgeōnes when religious belonging is most salient. To test this hypothesis, we searched through the surviving corpus of Athenian oratory for appeals to associations, categorizing the appeals by group and purpose. In the central two sections of this chapter, we will consider the extent to which our results uphold Kierstead’s theory. We will close with some additional conclusions we think can be drawn from our results and with some suggestions for some further research. But we will begin, in the next section, with a slightly fuller account of our sources and methodology, together with some preliminary remarks on the results we obtained.

Sources Sofia Letteri searched through the extant texts of the ten canonical Athenian orators (­w ith one addition, Demades) for appeals to membership in demes, phratries, genē, orgeōnes, and thiasoi.5 This was done first and foremost by using the online Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (­TLG) to search for key terms relating to these groups in the relevant authors; and then by looking through Kierstead’s annotated ­hard-​­copy versions of the texts as a way of ­double-​­checking that no important appeals had been missed.6 We will discuss what we found below; for now, though, we want to remark upon two features of the evidence that, while not completely surprising, we thought were worth noting. First of all, about half of the direct appeals to associations as a way of backing up claims to citizenship status (­as opposed to related claims such as to Athenian descent) occur in only one text: Demosthenes 57, Against Eubulides.7 That this particular speech had a significant presence among our results was not very surprising: after all, it consists of a man called Euxitheus’ arguments that his deme wrongfully expelled him from the official citizen registers during the diapsēphisis (­the scrutiny of the citizen rolls of ­346/​­345 BC), and it is one of the relatively few speeches in the corpus that deals primarily with citizenship. Also unsurprisingly, it has been discussed several times by scholars interested in Athenian citizenship.8 But we did not expect it to loom quite so large. So, it might be useful to comment briefly on its remarkable predominance as a source of appeals to associations in direct support of a citizenship claim. 388

Appeals to associations and claims to citizenship in oratory

This predominance does not seem to be explained by length: Against Theocrines, which follows it in the corpus, has the same number of sections (­70), and Against Neaera, which follows Against Theocrines and which is centrally concerned with descent, is significantly longer (­at 126 sections). The unusual number of appeals to associations in this speech may, then, ultimately be, in large part, a matter of the argumentative strategy that Euxitheus (­and Demosthenes) has decided to take in it. In order to prove that both his parents were of Athenian citizen status, Euxitheus not only appeals to his own belonging in a deme, phratry, and genos, but also discusses his relatives’ membership in these associations.9 Thus, claims of group belonging are made on behalf of a number of people. These are also often backed up with witnesses from these groups, with appeals to some of this testimony being reiterated in a summary at the end of the speech. This, in itself, is not unexpected; more unusual is the move Euxitheus makes in his peroration. Here, he questions himself as if he were undergoing a dokimasia, or scrutiny for public office; and during this, he again mentions his relatives, and backs up his claims about this with testimony from members of their phratries, demes, and genē.10 This, in itself, accounts for a ­non-​­trivial number of the appeals to groups.11 That the number of appeals to groups in Against Eubulides is partly a product of the argumentative strategy adopted there may be further supported by the other speech which features a citizen attempting to vindicate his own status as an Athenian citizen, Isaeus 12, On Behalf of Euphiletus. The case is very similar to Euxitheus’, involving a defendant who has been expelled from his deme during the diapsēphisis of ­346/​­345, and so must prove his descent from two parents of citizen status. Despite these similarities, though, the speaker of On Behalf of Euphiletus (­Euphiletus’ older ­half-​­brother) only appeals to the group belonging twice (­Isae. 12.3 and 8, both of which are appeals to a phratry). (­Though as the speech has not survived in full, it is possible that there were more appeals of this sort later on in the speech; after all, we only found one appeal to associations before section 12 in Demosthenes 57, the point at which our text of Isaeus 12 comes to an end.) Isaeus himself provides the second peculiarity of the evidence we wanted to mention here. Isaeus’ speeches provide virtually all of the appeals to groups to support claims of inheritance (­although some are also found in Demosthenes 43 and 44). This should not be too surprising to classicists. More interesting, perhaps, is that the majority of appeals to phratries to support claims other than to citizenship also occur in Isaeus’ inheritance speeches, and in the slightly broader set of speeches concerned with inheritance more generally.12 Finally, in a first blow to Kierstead’s hypothesis, it is only in Isaeus’ speeches, and only in his speeches that focus on inheritance, that appeals to belonging in thiasoi and orgēones appear (­Isae. 9.30; Isae. 2.14, 2.­16–​­17, and 2.­44–​­45). But this brings us past preliminary peculiarities of our sources and into the evidence against Kierstead’s hypothesis. This is what we will now turn to reviewing, before considering in the following section what evidence might tell in favour of Kierstead’s view.

Against the hypothesis A first point to make here is that we found relatively few appeals to associations to back up claims to citizenship directly: some 51 instances as against 79 which had a different primary purpose. These other purposes included proving one’s name;13 demonstrating one had reached a certain age;14 claiming particular cultic prerogatives (­Lycurg. fr. 7); and supporting claims about individuals’ ­anti-​­(­or ­pro-​­)­social character.15 Most 389

James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri

of the appeals that are not directly concerned with citizenship, though (­65 out of 79 to be exact), are made in order to back up claims to legitimate descent (­the lion’s share of these, 58 out of those 79 instances, being found in disputes to do with inheritance) (­­Figure 27.2).

Appeals to associations by primary purpose

Citizenship (direct claims)

Other primary concerns

Descent (inheritance)

Descent (other)

­Figure 27.2 Appeals to associations by primary purpose.

The preponderance of claims to Athenian descent as opposed to citizenship per se is something we also find in the s­ ub-​­set of appeals to genē. In fact, it is kinship that is the predominant issue in appeals to genē; in speeches not directly concerned with citizenship, we find membership in a genos being used (­on several occasions) to prove that one has been duly adopted, and (­on one occasion) that a son is legitimate; on another occasion, that two individuals are not members of the same genos is used to show that they are not as close to the rest of the family as they claim.16 In all of seven cases in which genos-​­membership was used to support citizenship claims specifically, these appeals also focus not (­as Kierstead’s hypothesis might seem to suggest) on belonging or participation in Athenian religious practices, but on descent.17 As for orgeōnes and thiasoi, we found no examples of them being appealed to in the context of disputed citizenship. In fact, we found only three appeals to orgeōnes in any context, all in one speech, Isaeus 2, On the Estate of Menekles. In this speech, the defendant is trying to prove that he was legally adopted by Menekles; but what is at issue here is not whether the adoptee fulfilled the criteria for Athenian citizenship, but whether the adoption was duly ­made – ​­and not that it was forced through while Menekles was ‘­out of his mind, or under the influence of a woman’, as a means of gaining access to his estate (­Isae. 2.1, παρανοῶν ἢ γυναικὶ πειθόμενος). Each of the three times the defendant appeals to his orgeōnes, he also appeals to the members of his deme and phratry, twice asking them to bear witness to his adoption, but once simply noting that Menekles inscribed him among the members or his deme, his phratry, and among his orgeōnes (­Isae. 2.14, ­16–​­17, ­44–​­45). It is not clear why he feels the need to appeal to the orgeōnes as well here; it may be that showing that he participated in Menekles’ religious life will demonstrate that his relationship with the man was a genuine one, and that he is not simply claiming to be his adopted son for inheritance purposes (­cf. Arnaoutoglou 2003: 36). Something similar seems to be going on in the single appeal 390

Appeals to associations and claims to citizenship in oratory

to a thiasos, from Isaeus 9, in which the speaker is attempting to prove the closeness of his relationship to his ­half-​­brother, the deceased Astyphilus; he claims that his father introduced Astyphilus into the thiasos of Herakles, which would prove that he grew up in the same household (­Isae. 9.30). In any case, though these orgeōnes and thiasoi are clearly religious associations, there is no explicit appeal to them as a way of demonstrating fealty to local gods or belonging in the local religious community.

In defence of the hypothesis A first point to make here is that, though a minority (­albeit a significant minority: about a third) of the appeals we found were made directly to back up claims to citizenship, a large majority (­113 out of 130) focused on descent, and descent from two parents of Athenian citizen status is the essential criterion for Athenian citizenship. That means that even in cases in which inheritance was the main issue (­of which we found 58), appealing to associations to prove a man’s legitimate descent would have also had the effect, as an inevitable ­by-​­product, of demonstrating his citizen status. This probably includes cases of adoption, where a claim to be duly adopted also seemed to assume that the essential criterion for Athenian citizenship has been met.18 When it comes to the appeals that we found to genē, although it is true that none of them explicitly appeal to religious belonging as a way of demonstrating citizenship, more than ­four-​­fifths of them (­13 out of 16) were used to show Athenian descent, and in almost half of these cases (­7 out of 16) descent was used to back up a citizenship claim. Genē are not simply, or even commonly, appealed to in support of religious prerogatives, as might have been expected (­we found only one such case) (­Lycurg. fr. 7.­2 –​­4). Moreover, when men appeal to genē to prove descent (­including for citizenship purposes), they are very likely also to appeal to phratries and demes, with Euxitheus, the speaker of Demosthenes 57, Against Eubulides appealing to both of these groups every ­ igure 27.1, time he appeals to his genos.19 This lends support to the idea illustrated in F that the demes, phratries, and genē could form a kind of chain of associations that could be used to anchor citizenship claims. Admittedly, 6 of the 7 appeals to genē for citizenship purposes come from Demosthenes 57, and why exactly Euxitheus appeals so frequently to his genos as well his phratry and deme when others do not is an open question. It may be that appealing to a genos (­as, perhaps, and to a lesser extent, appealing to a group of orgeōnes or a thiasos) alongside a phratry and deme was something men did if they could, in order to boost their claim to legitimate Athenian descent. This is an issue we will return to. There is one other pattern that emerges from our findings that we want to mention here. Kierstead suggested that demes were more focused on political participation than other associations. We did not find that demes were appealed to more often in citizenship cases; in fact, we found very similar numbers of appeals to phratries (­22 appeals) and demes (­21) in such contexts. That, in itself, was probably to be expected, since belonging in both demes and phratries was strongly associated with citizenship, so much so that foreigners who were granted Athenian citizenship were officially enrolled in both a deme and a phratry.20 What is more interesting is that while phratries are appealed to overwhelmingly in order to prove descent (­even in cases that are ultimately concerned with citizenship), demes are appealed to for a somewhat broader array of reasons. In particular, demes are slightly more commonly appealed to in order to back up claims about free status 391

James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri

(­as opposed to legitimate or Athenian descent); and demes are occasionally appealed to in order to show that someone is a good (­or a bad) citizen, while phratries are never appealed to for that purpose.21 This situates demes close to tribes, which are also sometimes appealed to in order to demonstrate services rendered to the people of Athens (­Dem. 21.156; Isae. 5.36; Lys. 13.79). This is largely because tribes served as the basis for liturgies (­a form of compulsory public service for the s­ uper-​­rich),22 but it is interesting, nevertheless, that it is these more public groups that are used to bolster claims of being a good Athenian in a specifically civic sense. These claims of being a good citizen are not used to argue directly for citizen status, but they may further support the idea that demes were seen as having a more civic and political orientation. We add in closing this section that, on both the occasions that demes are appealed to in order to show how good (­or bad) a citizen someone is, participation in politics is directly at stake: in Lysias 16, In Defence of Mantitheus, Mantitheus is hoping to take the seat that has been allotted to him on the Council of 500; and in Lysias 31, Against Philon, a sitting member of the Council is trying to prevent Philon from taking up his allotted seat.

Discussion Before we discuss what conclusions can be drawn about the hypothesis and about appeals in the orators, we should return briefly to our sources and methodology, since these, of course, may have skewed our results. One issue is that the appeals we looked at include both appeals to associations to bear witness to certain facts (­usually descent and/­or belonging in the group) and ‘­appeals’ to groups in a looser sense (­for example, mentions of past activity in a particular group in order to show that someone has been a good or bad citizen). Another issue is the effect that individual decisions we made while categorizing the evidence may have had on our numbers; for instance, our decision to code each mention of an association as a different appeal, even when these mentions were in close proximity.23 Finally, there are questions about how the sources we surveyed impacted things. Should we have been more attentive to differences between individual authors and types of speech? And what are the limitations of the evidence of the orators as a way of getting at the truth about Athenian citizenship? It is true that decisions we made in counting passages will have had an effect on our numbers.24 But we think our decisions were reasonable ones and are not biased towards some groups rather than others in a way that would have significantly skewed our results; it is not the case, say, that some groups were a priori more likely to be appealed to several times in short order than others, and, in any case, we think that counting several appeals as one would probably have had more of a distorting effect than otherwise.25 As for what we counted as ‘­appeals’, we thought taking the term in a broad sense would be helpful, since men mentioning groups to support a claim constitute an appeal to these groups’ authority (­epistemic, moral, or cultural) just as much as men calling on groups as witnesses. In any case, we looked at the set of passages that we considered, and we drew our conclusions (­which are, we hope, cogent ones) from this body of evidence. Similarly, though these passages from the corpus of oratory can only tell us so much (­a point we will return to), we thought it would be useful to see precisely what they do happen to tell us when examined together. Finally, though there may be interesting differences in how appeals to groups function in speeches by different ­speech-​ ­w riters, this is not an issue we had time to go into at any length here;26 as for differences between different types of speech, all the appeals to associations we found came from 392

Appeals to associations and claims to citizenship in oratory

forensic speeches (­made in a courtroom), where issues of citizenship and inheritance were most likely to be at play.27 One point that might well be made (­and made with some justification) is that our decision to survey the whole corpus of oratory must have played some role in giving descent the predominance it has in our results (­w ith, we recall, 113 of a total of 130 of the appeals we found made to prove descent), because of the number of speeches that have to do with inheritance. As we saw, almost all of the appeals to groups in inheritance cases occur in Isaeus, whose extant speeches are overwhelmingly concerned with inheritance. At the same time, that appeals to associations are made most frequently for inheritance purposes and (­next most frequently) to back up citizenship claims is interesting in itself, and lends support to Blok’s way of looking at Athenian citizenship as a kind of inheritance passed down through lines of descent (­Blok 2017: ­100–​­146); associations are also appealed to in order to support citizenship claims reasonably ­frequently – ​­in 51 of the 130 passages we covered, in fact. Moreover, even in cases that are directly concerned with citizenship, there is an overwhelming focus on descent, with appeals to genē and phratries being particularly frequent in that context. Even if we look elsewhere than at inheritance cases, then, descent emerges as the key reason that Athenians appeal to associations in courtrooms. If we bring in the inheritance cases as well, appeals to associations emerge even more clearly as, first and foremost, a way to prove descent. It may also be worth noting in this connection that we found no appeals to associations in deliberative and epideictic speeches. Demosthenes might have appealed to associations to add a note of local solidarity, say, to give a ‘­shout out’ to his own local ‘­constituencies’, or for any number of different reasons; in fact, though, as we noted above, we found appeals to associations only in legal contexts.28 Proving descent is thus the main thing associations are appealed to for in extant oratory, both in cases directly related to citizenship and in other contexts. This, as we have seen, looks bad for Kierstead’s claim that different associations ‘­sought to verify a young man’s inclusion in the citizen community in terms of three different kinds of belonging: civic, familial, and religious’ (­K ierstead 2019: 39). As far as we can see from the passages we found in the orators, there was one, master form of belonging, and this was descent; and descent plays such a large role that associations of different types are almost always called on to confirm it rather than participation in religious cult or political ­institutions – ​­or, indeed, anything else. Another way of describing this situation might be that there was one essential criterion for citizenship (­descent from two Athenian parents), and this is why appeals to associations almost always aim to prove descent in cases relating to citizenship.29 To be fair to Kierstead, he does make clear that there is only one essential qualification for Athenian citizenship, which the various associations all help to confirm (­K ierstead 2019: 38). His account thus has an epistemic aspect to it: the associations, he thinks, function partly as gatherers and conduits of information about the relatedness of men claiming citizenship (­K ierstead 2019: es­p. ­42–​­44). At the same time, he does also claim that by confirming members, different associations are also sending a signal that the men they have confirmed are part of Athens’ religious, genetic, and civic communities (­K ierstead 2019: es­p. 46). This part of his account is more focused on belonging than on information.30 Is there any way of rehabilitating the idea that associations served to signal belonging in Athens’ religious and civic communities as well as its genetic community? As we 393

James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri

have seen, the set of appeals to demes might well be said to have a slightly more civic bent, being more likely to be made to support free status and claims that a man has been a good or bad citizen; on both of the occasions where demes are appealed to for the latter reason, moreover, participation in public institutions is directly at stake.31 We might also add that the kind of signalling of belonging and virtue that Kierstead had in mind can be implicit, and, in other societies, quite often is.32 That is, even if nobody in our extant sources explicitly says ‘­I’m one of an active number of orgeōnes who worship Dexion, so please look kindly on my claims to be a citizen’,33 it may be that dropping a mention of membership in a thiasos or genos had the effect of increasing the audience’s goodwill towards the speaker anyway. Having said that, though we think it is not unlikely that this kind of implicit ‘­­virtue-​­signalling’ was going on, we have to accept that there are no explicit indications in the corpus of oratory that cult groups were being used as a rhetorical resource in this way. It may be, for example, that the defendant in Isaeus 2 mentions the fact that Menekles inscribed him among his orgeōnes as well as in his deme and phratry partly as an extra ­v irtue-​­signal to his audience; but he hardly does so explicitly.34 The epistemic side of Kierstead’s theory finds much more support in our analysis, with associations being appealed to in citizenship cases overwhelmingly for the purpose of backing up the crucial claim of descent: that is, of providing information that makes it seem more certain that the defendant does, in fact, fulfil the essential criterion of Athenian citizenship. This can happen in several ways, most of which are present in Demosthenes 57, Against Eubulides. The defendant can call members of associations as witnesses, to give direct testimony that he is also a member of those associations.35 He can call them to witness that nobody in these associations ever accused him (­or his father) of not really being an Athenian.36 He can call on them to testify that they witnessed certain important ceremonies (­for example, his father’s presentation of his mother to the phratry) which are themselves probative of his descent and legitimacy.37 He can simply state or mention himself that he is a member of one or several associations.38 The reasoning, often implicit, is usually that the associations mentioned would not have admitted him if he was not a real Athenian.39 Sometimes, it is argued, further, that membership in several groups means that a man must be ­well-​­known by a good number of Athenians; so many, in fact, that the idea they were all bribed or manipulated into telling lies on his behalf is simply not credible (­Dem. 57.24). In all these cases, the epistemic nature of the appeals to associations is quite plain. When Euxitheus says that it is ‘­appropriate’ for the jurors to have heard the testimony of members of his deme, phratry, and genos (­as well as his relatives) the implication is probably that it is the business of these groups to know who their members are.40 It was certainly part of the business of both demes and phratries to know who their members were, and who they were related to. Demesmen swore oaths and voted on whether candidates for membership (­who were also candidates for Athenian citizenship) were free and descended from two Athenian parents; and phratries kept track of who their members’ wives and sons were at the ceremonies of the Meion, Koureion, and Gamelia.41 When we come to genē, however (­not to mention orgeōnes and thiasoi), it is less clear that one of their central concerns was to gather information about their members’ family background and relationships. Membership in genē was hereditary, but members of genē were not actually all related, despite the claims that genē themselves usually made that their members were descended from mythological figures.42 394

Appeals to associations and claims to citizenship in oratory

Why mention these other groups, then, in citizenship claims, given their far lesser claims to h ­ igh-​­quality information about their members’ relatedness? We suggest the most likely explanation is that these groups served as optional, extra ‘­­add-​­ons’ to claims about citizenship. It is membership in demes and phratries that is really decisive; but in cases where men were members of these other groups, they sometimes felt it might help to mention them as well.43 This might explain the fact that these other groups are not appealed to very frequently; and when they are mentioned in cases that have to do with descent, they are usually mentioned alongside other groups (­especially demes and phratries). The Law of Philochorus, which seems to have mandated acceptance of members of orgeōnes and genē into phratries, may have given a boost to the capacity of these groups to act as supplements to claims to citizenship (­since, if phratries had to accept members of orgeōnes and genē, having been accepted into a genos or among orgeōnes would further strengthen an independent claim to be part of a phratry). Mostly, though, these groups appear to have been added as an extra something to help persuade the jurors to accept a man’s claims of proper descent. They were an extra signal, either of belonging in certain groups (­g roups that Athenian jurors tended to think signalled a kind of goodness) and/­or of descent. We might suspect, in fact, that orgeōnes and thiasoi may actually have been appealed to more to signal virtue or belonging, since they had very little standing when it came to descent. Appeals to genē, meanwhile, also probably mostly served to s­ ignal-​­boost on the moral level, since they too lacked phratries’ claims to direct, verified knowledge about a man’s immediate family.44 There is, though, a possibility that appeals to genē may have had some additional capacity to persuade jurors that a man had the right kind of family background. How so? To see how this may have worked, it is important to bear in mind that the ancient Athenians drew a much weaker line between myth and history than we tend to nowadays; myth, as Barbato puts it, ‘­was mostly envisioned as very ancient history’ (­Barbato 2020: 18). So, though we may now see the claims of genē to be descended from a common mythical ancestor (­Erysichthon the son of Cecrops, for example, in the case of the genos of the Erysichthonidai) as nothing more than ‘­fictive’, this is not necessarily how many Athenians would have seen it.45 Instead, they may well have seen membership in a genos as evidence of the right kind of ­ancestry – ​­not necessarily aristocratic ancestry, as not all genē were aristocratic, but ancestry with some ancient presence in Attica, the ideal form of which was provided by literally autochthonous ancestors like Cecrops.46 This may open up some space for a revised version of Kierstead’s hypothesis when it comes to the genē. When genē are appealed to in the orators, this is overwhelmingly to certify descent, not religious belonging. At the same time, appeals to genē may represent an attempt to burnish claims of descent by more traditional, religious, or mythological means. Blok has suggested that Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451/­450, which set the essential criterion for citizenship as descent from two Athenian parents, opened a path for Athenians outside of genē to participate in the city’s communal life; henceforth, all Athenians (­not just members of genē) would be able to claim the right descent, the sort of pure Athenian descent on both sides that would allow them to enjoy the fullest dignity in public life, including holding the kind of priesthoods that had previously been the purview of the genē (­Blok 2009, 2017: ­100–​­146). But the Periclean Citizenship Law can also be seen as a rationalizing reform, in that it made the essential criterion for citizenship clear and explicit in a way which opened it up to (­indeed, invited) empirical ­verification – ​­verification which was carried out mainly by the demes 395

James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri

and phratries. This relegated the genē’s more remote claims about ancestry to a secondary status, which may explain why it is overwhelmingly demes and phratries, with their ability to track actual, p ­ resent-​­day lines of descent directly, that are appealed to in court when descent is at stake. As Barbato has shown, myths play a relatively minor role in forensic oratory,47 probably because the events they referred to seemed too remote to have much probative value. Through the genē, though, which were composed of living, breathing Athenians, claims about the mythical past (­or, as contemporaries might have put it, about lines of ancestry stretching into the very remote past) could be smuggled into the courtroom.

Conclusions To sum up, our findings suggest that, though there is some variety, appeals are made to associations in extant oratory overwhelmingly with the purpose of demonstrating descent, both in cases that are directly concerned with citizenship and in those which are not. In some cases, appeals to associations may also have the benefit of signalling a kind of virtue, but this is almost never done explicitly. Men do, on the other hand, explicitly claim that associations are good sources of information, usually about their descent;48 and it seems to be as sources of information that associations are most often appealed to. Blok has suggested that being an Athenian citizen was really about partaking in the city’s hiera and ­hosia – ​­the ‘­cult and human practices pleasing to the gods or sanctioned by divine law’, in her interpretation of that phrase (­Blok 2009: ­158–​­162). Blok is clear that descent from two Athenian parents is ‘­the fundamental qualification for citizenship’, but she uses a range of expressions in discussing the role that participation in cult and other practices played. At the beginning of the opening chapter of her book, for example, she says that ‘­participation in religious and other fields are typical ways of acting like a citizen’; later on in the same chapter, she refers to ‘­legitimate descent’ as ‘­confirmed by participation in hiera’ (­our emphasis) (­Blok 2017: 1 and 30). We think the first formulation is more accurate. As our survey shows, individuals who had their descent questioned in court tended to appeal to associations not so much to showcase their participation in cult or other communal activities, but as a way of demonstrating the basic facts about their descent, facts which the social groups they were involved with were assumed to have a good hold on. This does seem to present something of a blow to the emphasis that both Kierstead and Blok have placed on group belonging as an aspect of Athenian citizenship. It is worth bearing in mind that the associations were able to function as trustworthy sources of information about individuals precisely because of the communal activities they engaged in; and that there were many activities of this sort, many of them quite ­well-​­documented outside the corpus of oratory. At the same time, the fact that we found relatively few appeals to associations as a way of showcasing religious involvement moves the Athenian system even further from the abstract view of citizenship that North, Wallis, and Weingast see as characteristic of modern ‘­open access’ polities (­North et al. 2009). Athenian citizenship, it would seem, was founded on blood and s­ oil – that ​­ is, on membership in the greater Athenian d ­ escent-​­group, and the link which this afforded with the community’s autochthonous ancestors, who were envisaged as having literally risen out of the sacred earth of Attica. Associations like demes, phratries, genē, orgeōnes, and thiasoi undoubtedly played a number of different 396

Appeals to associations and claims to citizenship in oratory

social roles, and involvement with them may well have helped signal a man’s bona fides. In terms of how they are appealed to in extant oratory, though, these associations appear as not a great deal more than means of backing up a man’s claim to be a true part of an Athenian community, a community that was ultimately conceived of in fundamentally nativist terms.

Notes 1 We thank the editors of their volume for their helpful feedback. Letteri’s work for this article was made possible by a Victoria University of Wellington Summer Research Scholarship. 2 E.g., Aesch. Eum. ­655–​­656; Kratinos, Cheiron fr. 9; Isocr. 8.88. Citizenship grants: see Lambert (­1993: 32). 3 Lambert (­1993: ­31–​­43), accepted by, e.g., Ismard (­2010: 102). 4 Law: FGrH 328 Philochoros fr. 35a. Claims of belonging: And. 1.127; Dem. 57.24; [Dem.] 59.­ 59–​­63; Isae. 2.14; 7.13, ­15–​­17, 27, 43. 5 The full list of the authors searched is as follows: Aeschines, Andocides, Antiphon, Demades, Demosthenes, Dinarchus, Hyperides, Isaeus, Isocrates, Lycurgus, and Lysias. 6 The terms searched for in the TLG corpus were γένος, γεννητής, θίασος, ὀργεών, φράτηρ, φράτριον, δῆμος, and δημότης. ­Hard-​­copy texts used were from the Loeb Classical Library. 7 The other speeches that appeal to groups to back up claims of citizenship directly are Isae. 3, 12; Lys. 13, 23, 30; Dem. 39, 40, 59; Isoc. 8; and Aeschin. 1, 2. 8 See most recently Lape (­2010: ­203–​­215); Kasimis (­2018: ­145–​­167); Kierstead (­2019: ­34–​­35). 9 Phratry belonging is discussed 11 times (­57.19, 23, 24, 40, ­43–​­44, 46, 54, 67, ­68–​­69, 69); deme belonging 14 times (­57.­9 –​­13, 14, ­15–​­16, 19, 23, 24, ­25–​­27, 40, 46, ­46–​­49, ­55–​­56, ­61–​­62, 67, ­68–​ 6­ 9); and genos belonging 6 times (­57.23, 24, 25, 28, 40, 67). 10 Dem. 57.66 identifies this use of the dokimasia format with the words ὥσπερ γὰρ τοὺς θεσμοθέτας ἀνακρίνετε, ἐγὼ τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ἐμαυτὸν ὑμῖν ἀνακρινῶ, ‘­just as you examine the Thesmothetae, I will examine myself before you in the same manner’. His s­ elf-​­examination then continues through 57.­67–​­70. See Scafuro (­1994: ­165–​­170) for further discussion of the dokimasia. The claims made at 57.­67–​­69 echo those made at 57.­23–​­26 and 57.­40–​­43. 11 See again n. 12. 12 20 occur in Isaeus and 10 elsewhere; 4 of these occur in Dem. 43 and 44. 13 These four appeals (­Dem. 39.­4 –​­6, 5, ­20–​­21, 29) all come from the curious case of Mantitheus, who brought a suit against his h ­ alf-​­brother Boeotus to stop him from also using the name Mantitheus (­which he had apparently adopted, causing considerable confusion). 14 Hyp. fr. 192; the speaker notes that his registration has allowed him to access the money left to his mother, in line with a law that allows sons of heiresses to take over an estate as soon as they have completed their second year after puberty. 15 Isae. 5.36; Lys. 13.79, 16.14, 31.­15–​­16; Dem. 21.156. 16 Adoption: Isae. 7.13, 7.­15–​­17, 7.26, 7.43, 9.­12–​­13. Legitimacy: Andoc. 1.127. Not as close: Dem. 43.­79–​­80. 17 Dem. 57.23, 24, 25, 28, 40, 67, [Dem.] 59. ­55–​­63. 18 On adoption and legitimacy, see Blok (­2017: 137); Humphreys (­2018: ­63–​­94). Note that, in most instances, adoption took place within a man’s extended family. 19 All four of the appeals to genē to support claims of descent outside of a citizenship context were from a single speech, Isaeus 7, On the Estate of Apollodorus. On each of these occasions (­7.13, 1­ 5–​­17, 7.26, 7.43), the speaker Thrasyllus appeals to his phratry as well as his genos (­though not his ­deme – ​­perhaps because citizen rights are not directly at issue). 20 For this fact, and for an explanation for why some Greek ­non-​­Athenians (­as opposed to ­non-​ ­Greek foreigners) were not inducted into phratries, see Kierstead (­2019: 27 with n. 9, drawing on Lambert 1993: ­51–​­52). 21 Appeals to demes to prove free status: Dem. 18.261; Lys. 23.­2 –​­4. Appeals to phratries: Lys. 30.2. Appeals to demes to demonstrate someone is a good or bad citizen: Lys. 16.14; Lys. 31.­15–​­16. 22 On liturgies, see ‘­liturgy, Greek’ in the online Oxford Classical Dictionary; and Kierstead and Klapaukh (­2018: 378 with n. 12 and the literature cited there).

397

James Kierstead and Sofia Letteri 23 See, e.g., Dem. 57.­23–​­28, where we found five discrete appeals. 24 Though probably not on the broad patterns we found; decisions we made about individual passages are unlikely to have created the huge preponderance of appeals concerned with descent on their own. 25 Note also that our full list of passages, ­sub-​­divided and categorized in several different ways, is available on Letteri’s academia.edu page. Other scholars are free to make use of it to check our statements, see how decisions we made affected our analysis, or to draw their own conclusions. 26 Though we do note differences in argumentative strategy in speeches by Demosthenes and Isaeus in the ‘­Sources’ section above. 27 For the three traditional types of oration (­deliberative, forensic, and epideictic), see Arist. Rh. 1358b.­3 –​­5. For a division of the whole corpus into different types (­different from Aristotle’s types, but consistent with them), see Ober (­1989: ­341–​­348). 28 Granted, there are more forensic than deliberative and epideictic speeches in the corpus; but the apparent absence of appeals to associations in the last two types of speech is striking. 29 Though occasionally they support the related claim of free status (­Lys. 23.­2 –​­4, Lys. 30.2, Dem. 18.261). 30 Even if (­K ierstead 2019: ­44–​­45) belonging and solidarity can also be seen partly in epistemic terms (­trust, for example, can be viewed as a kind of knowledge), they are also significantly arational, to an extent that makes a division between ‘­i nformation’ and ‘­b elonging’ a useable one here. 31 Recall also that on four occasions in Isaeus 7, Thrasyllus appeals to his phratry and genos without mentioning his deme, in a context where citizen participation is not at issue; see again Section 2.2 above. 32 See Shaver et al. (­2018), who find that simple, ­non-​­verbal cues of religious devotion in Mauritius increase perceptions of trustworthiness even across religious boundaries. 33 For orgeōnes of Dexion (­that is, the poet Sophocles in his aspect as the ‘­Receiver’ or ‘­Host’ of the sacred snake of Asclepius), see Parker (­1996: ­184–​­185). 34 Isae. 2.14. Unlike at 2.­16–​­17 and ­44–​­45, the speaker is not calling his fellow orgeōnes to witness he was duly adopted; instead, he is using the fact Menekles inscribed him among his orgeōnes as proof that they had a real relationship and Menekles was not manipulated into adopting him. This probably has more to do with signalling belonging than with information, since orgeōnes lacked the ability of genē to claim they were preserving a kind of knowledge about r­ elatedness – ​­for which see below. Note, however, that if the Law of Philochorus can be believed, phratries had to admit orgeōnes into their ranks, meaning that being in a group of orgeōnes may have strengthened claims to be a member of a phratry in an epistemic way. 35 Dem. 57.23; strictly speaking, Euxitheus calls on his fellow p ­ hratry-​­members here to witness that they elected him head of the phratry (­φρατρίαρχος). 36 Dem. 57.19: Euxitheus says that none of his father’s peers in either his deme or his phratry every accused him of not being Athenian. 37 Dem. 57.43: Euxitheus calls the ­phratry-​­members to bear witness that his father literally ‘­i ntroduced a Gamelia [a ceremony, including a feast] on his mother’s behalf for the ­phratry-​ ­ embers’. For this wording, the standard way of describing the Gamelia ceremony, cf. Isae. m 3.76, 79; 8.18, 20; and see also Lambert (­1993: 182). 38 Or that his father was, which is effectively what Euxitheus does at Dem. 57.67. 39 Though sometimes the reasoning is more explicit. At 57.46, Euxitheus calls on witnesses ‘­to establish all the circumstances that befit’ him being a citizen (­τὰ προσήκοντα πάντ᾽[α]), among which he lists being inducted into a phratry, registered with a deme, allotted as a priest of Heracles, and the fact that ‘­I served as a magistrate having passed through a scrutiny’ (­ἦρχον ἀρχὰς δοκιμασθείς). 40 Dem. 57.24: τὰ μὲν τοίνυν ὑπὸ τῶν συγγενῶν καὶ φρατέρων καὶ δημοτῶν καὶ γεννητῶν, ὧν προσήκει, μαρτυρούμεν᾽ ἀκηκόατε. 41 Demes: [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42.­ 1–​­ 2 with Kierstead (­ 2017). The ceremonies of the Meion, Koureion, and Gamelia: Lambert (­1993: ­35–​­37) and Kierstead (­2019: 14). 42 See Kierstead (­2013: ­101–​­102); Lambert (­1999, 2015). 43 On the decisiveness of deme membership, see again Kierstead (­2017).

398

Appeals to associations and claims to citizenship in oratory 44 Genē may have had some knowledge of lines of descent through common burial grounds (­on which see Bourriot (­1976: ­831–​­1042)); at Dem. 57.28, Euxitheus appeals to the fact that the members of his genos allowed his brother to be buried in their πατρῷα μνήματα without objecting. But genē did not have the phratries’ procedures for verifying ­father-​­son and ­husband-​­w ife relationships. 45 For the Erysichthonidai, see Parker (­1996: 289). 46 Not all genē were aristocratic: Lambert (­1993: ­484–​­485; 2015). Groups that claimed descent from literally autochthonous ancestors included the Erysichthonidai and the (­­Eteo-​­)­Boutadai (­supposedly descended from Boutes, son of Pandion and grandson of Erichthonius). We write, ‘­ancient presence in Attica’ because the Gephyraeans, for one, claimed only to be descended from ancient immigrants to Attica; see, e.g., Parker (­1996: 288). 47 Esp. relative to the private speeches of Isocrates and to epitaphic (­funerary) oration and to drama: Barbato (­2020: ­24–​­56). 48 Cf. again Dem. 57.24; and Isae. 9.13, where the speaker says he cannot believe that a man who adopted a son would want to summon any witnesses except those οἷς περ καὶ ἱερῶν καὶ ὁσίων κοινωνὸν ἀνθ᾽ αὑτοῦ εἰς τὸν ἔπειτα χρόνον ἔμελλε καταλιπεῖν ‘­to whom he was about to leave that son, to stand in for him in the future as an associate in sacred and communal activities’. Even before the speaker has died, it would seem, his son’s future associates know about him and his descent.

Bibliography Arnaoutoglou, I. (2003) Thusias heneka kai sunousias: private religious associations in Hellenistic Athens (Athens) Barbato, M. (­2020) The ideology of democratic Athens: institutions, orators, and the mythical past (­Edinburgh) Blok, J.H. (­2009) ‘­Perikles’ citizenship law: a new perspective’, Historia 58, ­141–​­170 ——— ​­(­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Bourriot, F. (­1976) Recherches sur la nature du Genos: étude d’histoire sociale athénienne, périodes archaïque et classique, 2 vols. (­Lille) Humphreys, S. (­2018) Kinship in ancient Athens: an anthropological analysis (­Oxford) Ismard, P. (­2010) La cité des réseaux: Athènes et ses associations, VIe-​­Ie siècle av. JC (­Paris) Kasimis, D. (­2018) The perpetual immigrant and the limits of Athenian democracy (­Cambridge) Kierstead, J.C. (­2013) A community of communities: associations and democracy in classical Athens, diss. Stanford (­unpublished) ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­Associations and institutions in Athenian citizenship procedures’, CQ 68, 1–​­16 ——— (­ ​­2019) ‘­Incentives and information in Athenian citizenship procedures’, Historia 68, ­26–​­49 Kierstead, J.C. and Klapaukh, R. (­2018) ‘­The distribution of wealthy Athenians in the Attic demes’, in M. Canevaro, A. Erskine, B. Gray, and J. Ober (­eds) Ancient Greek history and contemporary social science (­Edinburgh) ­376–​­401 Lambert, S. (­1993) The phratries of Attica (­Michigan) ——— ​­(­1999) ‘­T he Attic “­genos”’, CQ 49, ­484– ​­489 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­A ristocracy and the Attic gene: a mythological perspective’, in N. Fisher and H. van Wees (­eds) Aristocracy in antiquity: redefining Greek and Roman elites (­Swansea) ­168–​­202 Lape, S. (­2010) Race and citizen identity in the classical Athenian democracy (­New York) North, D.C., Wallis, J.J., and Weingast, B.R. (­2009) Violence and social orders: a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history (­New York) Ober, J. (­1989) Mass and elite in democratic Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Parker, R. (­1996) Athenian religion: a history (­Oxford) Scafuro, A. (­1994) ‘­Witnessing and false witnessing: proving citizenship and kin identity in ­fourth-​­century Athens’, in A. Boegehold and A. Scafuro (­eds) Athenian identity and civic ideology (­Baltimore, MD) ­156–​­198 Shaver, J.H., Lang, M., Krátký, J., Klocová, E., Kundtová, K.R., and Xygalatas, D. (­2018) ‘­The boundaries of trust: ­cross-​­religious and ­cross-​­ethnic field experiments in Mauritius’, Evolutionary Psychology 16, ­1–​­15

399

28 ‘­HE’S A SCYTHIAN!’ The ‘­birther’ attack in classical Athens1 Brad L. Cook

­ hetorically-​­inflated rumours about a person’s origins were, as still today, turned into R ­socio-​­political weapons in classical Athens. Theophrastus, Aristotle’s m ­ ulti-​­talented successor as head of the Lyceum, shows us in his amusing Characters, a set of satirical sketches of typical Athenians, that the way to slander someone was to start by attacking the person’s parents, labelling them as foreigners as a way to raise suspicion about the citizenship of the person in question. There were laws in Athens to address questions about citizen status, but a broad array of ­fourth-​­century BCE texts reveal a pervasive use of slander about citizenship. Scholars regularly trace this slander back to ­fi fth-​­c entury comic theatre,2 but Theophrastus’ prototypical Slanderer as well as his contemporary, ­real-​­life embodiments who are the focus of this chapter, Aeschines and Demosthenes, two prominent and ­stridently-​­opposed Athenian politicians, did not stir suspicions about their opponent’s citizenship to be funny but rather to destroy the other’s political career.3 While Theophrastus’ Slanderer may simply be a parochial grouch, Aeschines attacked Demosthenes and his policies through a ­multi-​­pronged assault on his citizenship by invoking the power of ‘­a shared perceptual cultural conglomerate’ about the good citizen, which Demosthenes successfully turned against Aeschines and reframed in his own favour.4 One prong of this attack is comparable to the ‘­birther’ attack in current political life, which I invoke as an introductory foil to better grasp the role that slander about foreignness played in the conflict between Aeschines and Demosthenes. How and why Aeschines integrated the slander of foreign ancestry in his case against Demosthenes in 330 BCE will become clearer in the context of his earlier cases, and Demosthenes’ counterattack, seemingly outrageous and angry,5 will be seen as an artful and coherent tactic in his rejection of Aeschines’ definition of the good citizen and his replacement of it with the narrative of his many deeds performed as a loyal Athenian citizen (­on goodwill/­loyalty/­eunoia, see Cook 2009). Though not new in US politics, it has recently become common for some to raise suspicions about the citizen status of those seeking the office of president in the United States.6 Consider the most notorious use by Donald Trump of the ‘­birther’ attack against Barack Obama, before it was evident that Trump was aiming at public office. The degree to which this attack has no legal relevance was even more evident 400

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-33

‘He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘birther’ attack in classical Athens

in the attempt to use the ‘­birther’ attack against a Republican senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, in the contest to become the Republican candidate for president in 2016, and, in the presidential election of 2020, in the attack on a senator from California, Kamala Harris, once she became the Democratic candidate for vice president. Such attacks arise from a false invocation of a clause in the US Constitution: ‘­No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; . . . ’.7 Tying questions about someone’s birth and ancestry to a clause in the most fundamental documents of a civic body, whether the US Constitution or the body of laws ascribed to Solon, however legally inapplicable, raises suspicions that are difficult to dispel.8 Aspects of the timeless tenacity of this particular slander can be seen in my trio of ancient examples, in the obsessive nature of Theophrastus’ Slanderer, in the earlier, highly politicized venue of the Athenian comic stage, and in the combination of personal animosity and political motive on the part of both Aeschines and Demosthenes.9 Aeschines and Demosthenes met for their final dispute in 330 BCE, arising from Aeschines’ indictment of a motion to publicly thank Demosthenes for his service to Athens in 337/336 BCE, following the loss to Philip II at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, when the kingdom of Macedon established effective control over mainland Greece. As the most pronounced leader of the opposition to Macedon, Demosthenes found himself defending his entire public career,10 and his very status as an Athenian citizen was being questioned in Aeschines’ long speech through slander about him as tainted with traitorous and foreign ancestry. Earlier, in 343 BCE, Aeschines had employed this tactic, though less systematically, when Demosthenes had charged Aeschines with malfeasance during his service as one of the ambassadors in the peace negotiations with Philip II of Macedon in 346 BCE. Was this merely some personal, pathological tick on the part of Aeschines? Herein lies the disturbing relevance of the modern ‘­birther’ attack, which in antiquity as today can be found in the culture at large. Suspicions about citizen status are the heart and soul of the string of attacks made by ­T heophrastus – ​­a writer who was himself not an Athenian, an outsider who lived there as a resident ­alien  – ​­in his Slanderer. He imagines the Slanderer starting his verbal assault on some unnamed ­so-­​­­and-​­so by insulting his parents: ‘­His father was ​­ actual name but one marked, at least in Old and New originally called Sosias’ – an Comedy (­Diggle 2004: 488), as that of a s­ lave – ​­‘­but among the soldiery he became Sosistratos’ – ​­stratos being ‘­army’ in ­Greek – ​­‘­and when he was enrolled as a member of a deme, Sosidemos’ – ​­dēmos refers to the ‘­p eople’, of course, but also to the local neighbourhood where citizenship was assessed and recorded. Theophrastus has assembled for the Slanderer a trio of real names that amusingly illustrate the supposed mutation of a slave, perhaps Thracian, into a soldier, and, then, into a citizen. ‘­His mother, however’, the Slanderer continues, ‘­is a ­well-​­born ­T hracian – ​­at least . . . they speak of such women as “­­well-​­born”, in her country’ – ​­the sarcasm is ­palpable – ​­‘­T his man, then, born of such as these, is a lowlife and has the tattoos to prove it’ (­T heophr. Char. 28.2).11 All this sounds so similar to what appears in comedy, but none of this is funny to the Slanderer. In addition, these same attacks will appear in the political courtroom speeches below, but the Slanderer has no ideological or political motive. He is a pathological slanderer who finds slandering ‘­the most pleasant thing to do in life’ (­T heophr. Char. 28.6). 401

Brad L. Cook

As if borrowing the Slanderer’s script, although it was written some decade or more after the final fight between Aeschines and Demosthenes, it could seem as if Kenneth J. Dover, in his invaluable Greek Popular Morality, is following Theophrastus’ list in his section on ‘­Vilification and Ridicule of Individuals’ (­1974: ­30–​­33). In fact, Dover looks back to the fifth century, to Athenian comedy, where contemporary ­socio-​­political issues were on stage, where he rightly sees the antecedents of these same slanderous claims. Dover starts his list of illustrative passages, though, not with ­fi fth-​­century comedy but with Demosthenes and his vilification of Aeschines’ family in 343 and 330 BCE, in his two long speeches, On the False Embassy and On the Crown. He quotes a half dozen passages at length, illustrating the same or similar points of attack as Theophrastus’ Slanderer: (­1) the insulted person has parents of ‘­foreign and/­or servile’ birth, which puts his citizenship in question; (­2) he descends from and was himself a craftsperson or labourer of some sort; and (­3) he has engaged in, as also perhaps other family members, sexual activities that are legally or socially unacceptable, at least for politically active citizens. He then incorporates in his discussion examples from Aristophanes’ plays to substantiate the long tradition of such slander about citizenship, adding citations also from Aeschines’ speeches. Dover’s arrangement of the ­fourth-​­century sources can, like my introductory use of Theophrastus, give the wrong impression about who is responding to whom, attributing to Demosthenes credit that really belongs to Aeschines. From the courtroom speeches that survive, it is Aeschines who started this slanderous sequence, and Demosthenes who counteracted it. And, since Aeschines employs a particular motif that can be traced back to Aristophanes, it is useful to look closely at that parallel between Aristophanes and Aeschines in method and motive. ­ fth-​­century Athenian comedy Accusations about foreign and slavish ancestry in fi may have produced a variety of results, such as pleasure at the mocking of the powerful, encouragement at the reinforcement of norms, comfort at the scapegoating of a threat to the community, but to what extent these reflect a playwright’s, such as Aristophanes, political views remains a much discussed question.12 At the Dionysiac Lenaea festival of 405 (­Jan.–​­Feb.), for example, the t­ hen-​­prominent Athenian politician Cleophon was said to have a Thracian mother not just by Aristophanes, in his Frogs, but also in the eponymous Cleophon of the comic playwright, Plato.13 He was also regularly referred to as Cleophon the lyre maker, a moniker intending to mark him as slavish or of slavish descent. Yet Cleophon was sufficiently well known to receive some votes in the ostracism of 416 BCE, from which we learn that his father was a certain Cleïppides of Acharnae, generally identified as one of the Athenian generals of 428 BCE (­Thuc. 3.3.2), making Cleophon certainly Athenian and likely aristocratic. The purpose, then, of saying anything about someone’s supposed or actual ­non-​­Athenian and ­non-​­Greek ancestry was one of those sorts of underhanded slanders that poisonously invoked prejudices that are connected to the nature of citizen status but have no legal bearing. When the chorus of the Frogs closes the play with a prayer to be rid of troubles and of armed conflict, with the final line, ‘­and let Cleophon, and any other of those who want, go make war on their ancestral soil’ (­Ar. Ran. ­1532–​­1533), the fault for their suffering is put upon false Athenians, foreigners who have invaded the heart of the Athenian civic structure. Ominously, a few lines earlier, the dead playwright Aeschylus, as he is sent back to the living with the commandment by Pluto himself to ‘­save our city’, is given an armful of items customarily used to commit suicide that he is to deliver to a string of the living whom Pluto names, the first of whom is Cleophon (­Ar. Ran. ­1504–​­1514). 402

‘He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘birther’ attack in classical Athens

Laughable, certainly, but in the following spring, 404 BCE, Cleophon was tried for military malfeasance, condemned, and executed (­Lys. 13.12). We can only wonder what Cleophon said in his defence at that trial of 404, and whether he, like Socrates in 399, said anything about the slander of comic playwrights (­Pl. Apol. ­18c–​­d, 19c). Aeschines, over 60 years later, in his defence of 343 BCE, compared Demosthenes with both Socrates and Cleophon, hoping that the Athenians would deal with Demosthenes in a like manner. He introduced him as ‘­Cleophon the lyre maker, remembered by many bound in shackles’, in advance, presumably, of his execution, a punishment that Aeschines clearly thinks all such warmongers deserved, one who ‘­threatened to cut with a sword the neck of anyone who should even mention peace’ (­Aeschin. 2.76). In 330 BCE, Aeschines makes the comparison bluntly explicit, claiming that Demosthenes swore by Athena that: if anyone should say that it was necessary to make peace with Philip, he would seize him by the hair and drag him off to the prison, imitating thereby the policy of Cleophon, who, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, as is said, ruined the city. (­Aeschin. 3.150) Aeschines does not, it is true, utter the word ‘­Thracian’ in either of these two passages, but in On the False Embassy, along with ‘­lyre maker’ and the remembrance of his being shackled, he declares that Cleophon ‘­had been shamelessly registered (­parengrapheis)’ –​ ­falsely, is implied by the verbal ­prefix – ​­‘­as a citizen’ (­Aeschin. 2.76). This combination of claims may have seemed as odd in 343 BCE as it did 60 years earlier. How could someone acquire access to the bēma in the Assembly, not merely once but for years, without being a legitimate citizen? In Cleophon’s case, the charge that officially led to his condemnation was military misconduct, but questions about his devotion to Athens, as well as about his citizenship, could be roused by suspicions about his ancestry. Aeschines’ attacks on Demosthenes, at least in On the Crown, stem from specific legal ­v iolations – ​­technically committed by ­Ctesiphon – ​­but the majority of that speech is spent on weaving together legally tangential claims and slander in support of Aeschines’ definition of a good citizen, which Demosthenes violates, like Cleophon, by the supposedly foreign blood of his mother. We would, most certainly, like to know about the real lives of these slandered mothers. Were they, in their respective ­eras – ​­Cleophon’s mother born perhaps in the 470s and Demosthenes’ mother in the ­400s – slanderously suspected of ­non-​­Greek origins ​­ merely because they married into wealthy families? Was Aristophanes, at least, and possibly Aeschines, trying to invoke an a­ nti-​­elite bias? It remains a question what legal reality was behind any such claims,14 but the slander by a comic playwright or a political opponent that ­so-­​­­and-​­so was a foreigner, not an Athenian, need have no basis in fact, as Frank W. Walbank observed in his classic discussion of Greek nationality: ‘­The point is not whether such expressions were sincere or even true: it is that they would not have been uttered had they not been calculated to have some effect’ (­Walbank 1951: 53). Similar slander against another mother, and a father, in the 340s BCE, illustrates how this ‘­effect’ equated to the actual loss of citizenship, at least temporarily though possibly permanently, for a ­long-​­standing, and civically active, Athenian citizen. In 346/­345 BCE, a decree was passed calling for the scrutiny of the official, ­deme-​ ­based citizenship rolls in Athens. In Against Eubulides (­Dem. 57), we meet an Athenian 403

Brad L. Cook

stripped of his citizen status, a certain Euxitheus, who had lived many decades as a citizen, having held, moreover, various local offices (­Dem. 57.23, 46, ­63–​­64). He had been removed from the citizen lists by a (­questionable) vote in his deme because, firstly, his father had ‘­seemed foreign’, by which it is meant that he sounded foreign, that is, ­non-​ ­Athenian (­Dem. 57.­18–​­19), and, secondly, his mother had earned money selling ribbons in the Agora and also worked as a wet nurse, possibly suggesting slavish status as well (­Dem. 57.­30–​­31, 35).15 Those trying to justify their revocation of Euxitheus’ citizenship were attempting to invoke certain frames: all Athenians sound like Athenians, that is, speak Attic Greek without any accent, and they do not ‘­work’ in the Agora nor hire themselves out as wet nurses, both employments being presented as if beneath bona fide Athenians. Instead of denying that his father spoke in a ­less-­​­­than-​­local manner, Euxitheus explains that his father had been taken captive during the Decelean War, the last phase of the Peloponnesian War, from 413 to 404 BCE, and had been sold into slavery, ending up on the island of Leucas, off the west coast of Greece, where Doric was spoken. However long he was there, it was long enough and of such a nature that his accent or diction had become sufficiently peculiar to be noticed. In response to the claims about his mother, Euxitheus likewise makes no effort to deny them but rather turns them, as with his father, into proofs of her suffering and surviving through the hardships of war: for both his parents, Euxitheus turned the supposed marks of false citizenship into badges of ­hard-​­earned honour (­Lacey 1980: 59). In Euxitheus’ case, we would surely not speak of these accusations of foreign or servile ancestry as comic: if Euboulides intended to rouse any laughter out of the jurors, it must surely have been sardonic. The threat to Euxitheus was based precisely on the question of his ancestry. With Aeschines’ slander about Demosthenes’ supposed foreign ancestry in 343 and 330, although such claims did not legally threaten Demosthenes’ citizen status, Aeschines was, like Euboulides, not looking for laughs but attempting to rouse the same suspicions about Demosthenes’ legitimacy as a citizen. Comparisons in scholarship to comic attacks of foreign or servile ancestry, however linguistically germane, are utterly different in motive. A similarly complicating type of comment in scholarship is the expression of surprise or even shock at Demosthenes’ counter to this slander in his attacks on Aeschines’ family background. Dover says that ‘­it is remarkable’ that Demosthenes adopts ‘­so supercilious an attitude to schoolmasters, clerks and decorators’ – ​­by the last he must have Aeschines’ mother in mind (­Dover 1974: 34). Pat Easterling (­1999: 155) speaks of Demosthenes’ ‘­startling abusive account of Aeschines’ life story’, and Georges Mathieu (­1947: 15) of ‘­une violence’. I argue, rather, that the adjectives ‘­remarkable’, ‘­supercilious’, and ‘­startling abusive’ should be qualified in light of the original function of Demosthenes’ attacks, which first and foremost were to counteract Aeschines’ attack on Demosthenes’ family. The note by Rufus Richardson, in his commentary on Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon 3.171, is to the point: ‘­It was much easier for Demosthenes, as well as more palatable to an Athenian jury, to match this thrust by an ugly retort (­cf. XVIII.129 ff.), than to refute it elaborately’.16 In 346 BCE, Aeschines had successfully destroyed the public career of Timarchus, and, although the legal particulars differ, he deploys a very similar rhetorical strategy in his attack on Demosthenes in 330 BCE. Timarchus, a political ally of Demosthenes, had joined him in charging Aeschines over his conduct on the negotiations that led to peace with Philip of Macedon in 346 BCE (­Fisher 2001: ­2 –​­24). In that case, in which 404

‘He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘birther’ attack in classical Athens

Demosthenes spoke as a supporting speaker for Timarchus, Aeschines called Demosthenes many negative things: a hired speechwriter (­logographos, Aeschin. 1.94), one who promises to train youths such skills (­1.117), a practiced wordsmith (­1.119), a sophist (­1.125, 175), ‘­uncultured and uneducated’ (­1.166); and throughout he invoked Demosthenes’ nickname since childhood, ‘­Batalus’, presented repeatedly as a mark of sexual deviancy and, at a key point, expanded into a lurid account of how Demosthenes corrupted a young man, now in exile for murder and, worse yet, stripped by Demosthenes of any financial support.17 Throughout these attacks, Aeschines says nothing about foreign ancestry as the source of Demosthenes supposedly u ­ n-­​­­citizen-​­like behaviour: his sexual deviancy, and fiscal corruption, is all that Aeschines wants here since it supports his ingenious framing of Timarchus, the main target of this speech, who was disfranchised as a result.18 In 343 BCE, when Demosthenes went through with the case against Aeschines that Timarchus and he had initiated back in 346, charging him with misconduct as an ambassador in the peace negotiations, Aeschines attacked Demosthenes’ citizen status, calling him a Scythian, a foreigner, not of this land, unconnected to the sacred rites and ancestral tombs, u ­ n-​­Athenian in habits and ways, a bastard of an illegal marriage. Aeschines must have expected that this sort of character attack, comparable to modern identity politics, would resonate with the jurors, in much the same way, I suggest, as modern ‘­birther’ attacks, not as a viable legal charge, but as fueling suspicion to any valid charges. Early in that speech, Aeschines begins his attack on Demosthenes as ­ on-​­Athenian, a ­non-​­Greek who vaunts that he puts the city’s interests a foreigner, a n above personal interests (­as Dem. 19.­189–​­191). Aeschines claims that Demosthenes has violated the g­ uest-​­host relationship, a crime that Demosthenes can commit because he is ‘­not of this land (­epichōrios) – ​­someone has to say ­it – ​­nor kin to us (­engenēs)’ (­Aeschin. 2.22). He explains to the jurors (­2.23): But we, who have the shrines and the tombs of our ancestors here in our homeland, and participate with you in the customary activities of freeborn people, and have legal marriages, ­in-​­laws, and children, we, while here in Athens, were considered ­trustworthy – you ​­ would not have chosen us o ­ therwise – but ​­ on arriving in Macedonia suddenly we became traitors. But a person who has no part of his body off of which he has not made money, not even that part out of which his voice comes forth, as if he were Aristides, is disgusted and spits on us as guilty for taking bribes. This outburst has its obvious implication: Demosthenes does not have ancestral shrines and tombs since this is not his homeland; he is not freeborn nor the result of a legal marriage, thus not worthy of your trust. What Aeschines implies here he makes explicit, some ­three-​­quarters of an hour further into the speech, resuming his slander about Demosthenes’ foreignness and honouring his own father, thus himself, in the process. In the history lesson in which he warns the jurors to learn from the evils of ­ partan-​­supported Cleophon, and when he describes the subsequent evils under the S oligarchs, Aeschines includes the fact that his own father had gone, ‘­into exile at the time of the Thirty and participated in restoring the People (­dēmos)’ (­Aeschin. 2.78). His insertion of this personal detail into his monitory history lesson is triggered by Demosthenes’ passing comment in his prosecution speech about Aeschines’ father, ‘­a school teacher, as I hear from older folks’ (­Dem. 19.249). Aeschines responded by introducing the a­ bove-​­quoted deed of his father with an outburst against Demosthenes uttering a 405

Brad L. Cook

word about his father ‘­when you, Demosthenes, are descended through your mother from homeless Scythians’ (­Aeschin. 2.78). A few minutes later, Aeschines recalls a bit of legal history that offers another way to recognize Demosthenes’ civic illegitimacy, by both birth and action. He mentions Demosthenes’ ­long-​­ago, and l­ong-​­patched up, quarrel with his cousin Demomeles, supposedly for assault, and Aeschines slips in one of those omniscient references to those present ‘­as if they don’t know that you are the bastard son of Demosthenes the ­ nife-​­smith jab responds to the legal basis of the dis­k nife-​­smith’ (­Aeschin. 2.93).19 The k pute with Demomeles, but why add the slander of being illegitimate? A simple answer would point to his mother’s supposed illegitimacy, and so Demosthenes’, making him the child of his parents, but not a true Athenian, thus a suppositious citizen. It is unthinkable, Aeschines implies, for someone to bring their own cousin before the Areopagus on a charge of wounding, a most serious procedure, unless they were illegitimate, to the family and thus to Athens. As he nears the conclusion of his defence speech, Aeschines reviews, as is custom, his own service to Athens over the years (­Aeschin. 2.­167–​­171), and he finds an opportunity to weave into the account Demosthenes’ supposed foreignness. He first summarizes his military service, from his two years of guarding the border as an ephebe (­ca. 370 BCE), through various campaigns down to 348 BCE when he marched out to Euboea (­in 348 BCE) with Phocion, who happens to be present to vouch, unofficially, for Aeschines. His military service reviewed, he asks the jurors to spare his life (­Aeschin. 2.171): since it is not that I hate the People (­dēmos), as my accuser says, but that I hate evil, and it is not that I give you leave to imitate Demosthenes’ ancestors (­they don’t exist), but I exhort you to be staunch supporters of policies that are noble and keep the city safe. To remind them of those policies, he now conducts a much larger historical survey, reviewing over a century and a half of Athenian history to reveal that the trouble plaguing Athens, and Aeschines personally, has arisen from the infiltration of the city by foreigners and their illegitimate offspring (­Aeschin. 2.­172–​­178). Twice in this historical review, the glorious peace that Athens has won has been violated by suppositious citizens. Ι n the 450s, when ‘­p eople who were not freeborn and were not moderate in their ways had crept into our polity’, Athens went to war with Sparta over Aegina, which, Aeschines claims, ‘­harmed us not a little’ (­Aeschin. 2.173). Then, after the restoration of the democracy in 403, ‘­p eople who had become citizens by invalid enrolment were always drawing together the corrupt part of the city and promoting a policy of war after war’ (­Aeschin. 2.177). Now, in their day, some Athenians have shirked their duty by fallacious service while fathering children with concubines and getting them enrolled as citizens. These are the men, Aeschines concludes, ‘­destroying the peace by which the city is kept safe’, the ones now attacking him (­Aeschin. 2.­177–​ ­178). With this history lesson, Aeschines attempts to blame some hundred years of conflict and misery on supposedly false citizens, foreigners who yet plague Athens, like Demosthenes. In the last minutes of his speech, two more cries are uttered by Aeschines against the ‘­foreigner’. The first is a direct appeal to the jurors to ‘­save me and not hand me over to this speechwriter and Scythian’ (­Aeschin. 2.180). The combining of ‘­speechwriter’ and ‘­Scythian’ is an attempted smear by association since only a ­much-​­trained orator could 406

‘He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘birther’ attack in classical Athens

write, much less deliver Demosthenes’ speech. So too the jurors could ask in what sense they could possibly ‘­hand over’ Aeschines to Demosthenes. This trial, resulting from a charge raised at his official audit (­euthynē) as an ambassador, would have called for the proposal of a penalty, presumably monetary. It is true that in the politically related case against Philocrates, he went into exile before the trial and was then condemned to death, but Philocrates had been charged through an indictment (­eisangelia), which frequently brought such a penalty. Nevertheless, Aeschines’ choice of verbs is overwrought, and the use of either ‘­speechwriter’ or ‘­Scythian’, much less the yoking of the two, is not developed into anything. Within minutes, though, he calls Demosthenes a ‘­barbarian’ and thus the image of ‘­a ­quill-​­wielding Scythian’ can be said to be merely preparatory for his finale. He insists before the jurors that the thing in life that he could control, ‘­not to commit any injustice against them’, he has done, but it was fate, ‘­who cast me by lot in with a barbarian slanderer (­sukophantēs), who has no scruples with regard to sacred rites, libations, and the communal table’ (­Aeschin. 2.183). This is the warning, the suggestive image that Aeschines chose to conclude with. For himself, so for Athens, Aeschines fears the threat of the barbaric, ­un-​­Athenian violation of the good old ways, unless the assembled jurors vote to save those ‘­who fight for peace and your security’ (­Aeschin. 2.183). Such argumentation had brought about the conviction of Timarchus some two years earlier. This time, Aeschines was acquitted by only 30 votes, we are told, in a jury of 500, or some multiple thereof (­Plut. Dem. 15.5; see MacDowell 2000a: 22). In 330 BCE, Aeschines is far more systematic about foreignness, building it into the heart of his speech Against Ctesiphon. After his sufficiently plausible but, in truth, ­trumped-​­up legal charges, and his review of Demosthenes’ public career, the heart of Aeschines’ attack on Demosthenes is his definition of the good citizen, which begins with his listing of five characteristics that mark a ‘­man of the people’ (­Aeschin. 3.­168–​­170):20 Indeed! But he is ‘­a man of the people’. If, then, you pay attention to the fine sound of his words, you will be deceived, as even in the past, but if to his nature and the truth, you will not be. Conduct an assessment (­logos) of him in the following way. I will make with you a list (­logioumai) of what characteristics a man of the people, a decent man, must have by birth, and I will also set in contrast what sort of man, quite, an oligarchic and base man is. Compare these characteristics and see which of the two he is, but not from his words, from his life. All of you, I think, would agree that it is necessary for a man of the people to have the following characteristics: first, that he be of free birth on both his father’s and his mother’s side, so that he not, because of the misfortune of his birth, be hostile toward the laws, which preserve the democracy; second, that he inherit from his forefathers a tradition of doing good for the people, or, at the very least, no hostility, so that he not, by harboring the misfortunes of his ancestors, attempt to harm the city; third, it is necessary that he be decent and moderate by nature in the things of daily life, so that he not, on account of the gross excesses of his extravagance, take bribes at the people’s expense; fourth, that he have good judgment and be able to speak well, for it is good that the public speaker has the understanding to choose what is best and that his training and eloquence persuade his listeners, but if not, good judgment is always to be put ahead of eloquence; fifth, that he be brave of soul so that, faced with terrifying dangers, he not desert the people. The oligarchic man by necessity has all the opposite of 407

Brad L. Cook

these characteristics. Why need I go through them again? Consider, then, which of these characteristics Demosthenes has, and let the assessment (­logismos) be wholly in accordance with justice. The language of official assessment here is the continuation, the culmination, of the language with which Aeschines framed his long ­four-​­phase survey of Demosthenes’ career (­Aeschin. 3.­59–​­167). He set the tone with the metaphor at the start: ‘­Just as when we assemble to conduct an audit’, with the word ‘­audit’ used three times (­Aeschin. 3.59). And this legalistic frame parallels Aeschines’ first legal charge where he frames Ctesiphon’s violation in terms of the official audit of a magistrate (­Aeschin. 3.­9 –​­31). ­ fficial-​­sounding Throughout, then, Aeschines makes it sound like he is conducting an o ‘­accounting’, an ‘­assessment’ of Demosthenes, summed up in his fi ­ ve-​­point definition. For all five characteristics of his definition, Aeschines tells the jurors to ‘­conduct an assessment of him’ ‘­not from this words (­logos) but from his life (­bios)’ (­Aeschin. 3.168). The ­bios-​­logos contrast served Aeschines devastatingly well against Timarchus: it was the facts versus the falsehoods, what everyone knew versus what Demosthenes said (­Fisher 2001: 5­ 3–​­67). In the speech against Demosthenes, that tactic applies particularly to the first two of Aeschines’ five characteristics, that the man of the people be of free birth, in fact, not just in words, paternally and maternally, and that he inherit a habit of serving the city. Both these characteristics stand in the shadows of the past before Demosthenes’ political ­career – ​­and birth. In both cases, once the artful narrator has spoken, erasing or overwriting Aeschines’ slander is a challenge that consumes a great deal of Demosthenes’ time, and of the jurors’ patience, as well as endurance (­cases of this sort were heard at one sitting, lasting the entire day, as long as daylight permitted).21 How Demosthenes tried to counter Aeschines’ creativity in Timarchus’ trial is wholly unknown, but his failure is obvious, and it obviously annoyed him, as his words prosecuting Aeschines in 343 show. In 330, since Aeschines is the one prosecuting this time, we have Demosthenes’ response. But what are Aeschines’ claims that Demosthenes must counter? This man’s father was Demosthenes of Paeania, a freeborn ­man – ​­for there is to be no lying. But what he gets from his mother, and from his mother’s father, his grandfather, I will say. Gylon was his name, of the deme Cerameis. This fellow betrayed Nymphaeum in the Black Sea to the enemy, a place that the city then possessed, and, when he was indicted, he left the city and went into exile, not waiting for his trial, and was condemned to death. He went to the Bosporus (­mod. Crimea) and received from the rulers there the place called The Gardens as a gift, and he married a woman, a rich one, by Zeus, and dowered with a lot of gold but a Scythian by race, from whom were born two daughters. That fellow sent them here with a lot of money and married the one to someone or another, I’ll say, so that I not become hateful to a great many people, and the other one, Demosthenes of Paeania married, in disregard of the city’s laws. From her you have gotten this g­ ood-­​­­for-​­nothing, schemer, Demosthenes. From his grandfather, then, it would be the case that he is hostile to ­ eople – ​­you condemned his ancestors to d ­ eath – ​­and from his mother, a Scyththe p ian, a barbarian speaking ­Greek – ​­even in his baseness he is not native to this land (­epichōrios). (­Aeschin. 3.­171–​­172)­22 408

‘He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘birther’ attack in classical Athens

Is there any legal significance to these statements? The citizen status of Demosthenes, or any of Gylon’s other descendants, was never legally challenged, and Gylon’s sentence, if it ever was, in fact, deadly, had become a fine, which had been paid, as both Demosthenes’ claim and logic showed over 30 years prior (­Dem. 28.­1–​­4).23 The only thing violated is Aeschines’ definition of the ‘­man of the people’, on two of his five ­official-​­sounding requirements, that he be of free birth ‘­on both his father’s and his mother’s side’ and, second, that he ‘­inherit from his forefathers a tradition of doing good for the people, or, at the very least, no hostility’ (­Aeschin. 3.169). Since Aeschines’ definition employs formal language, it sounds official, thereby reaching into the minds and hearts of the jurors and latching onto their foundational impressions of civic identity and of their oath to protect the laws. Demosthenes, over a third of the way into his long speech, begins his response to Aeschines’ definition of the good citizen with a string of leading questions: ‘­W hy, you wretch, do you instigate illegitimate lawsuits? Why do you falsify texts? Why don’t you give yourself a dose of hellebore for these things?’ (­Dem. 18.121). Demosthenes implies that Aeschines is sick, mentally so, with a madness that needs to be treated (­cf. Ar. Ves­p. 1489). He invokes this illness frame again, later in the speech, comparing Aeschines with ‘­a fracture or an old strain’ (­Dem. 18.198), the latter a discomfort, but the former, an annoyance that is wasting the time of the jurors. To this first metaphoric questioning of Aeschines’ sanity, Demosthenes briskly adds two more metaphoric blows to knock down Aeschines’ definition of the good citizen and, absenting detailed proof, to sweep the five features of this definition from the jurors’ minds. His second blow is the famous simile of the statue customer. On top of being deranged over legal issues, inventing charges in the absence of anything illegal (­Dem. 18.121), Aeschines is like a deranged statue shopper. ‘­Then’, he says (­18.122): while carrying on like that, you list off what characteristics a man of the people must have, like one who had ordered a statue according to a list, then, on receiving it, found it lacking what was called for in your ­list – ​­as though men of the people are identified by some text but not by their deeds and policies. This sentence, simply by this simile, is Demosthenes’ dismissal of Aeschines’ definition of the good citizen. His replacement of it, on the other hand, is carried out through his ‘­I have stood my post’ motif, repeated through the rest of the speech.24 Here, his rejection is quick and simple. Strangely, the rare scholarly comment on the statue simile has not always recognized Demosthenes’ point. Yunis has strikingly called it the ‘­only weak passage in the speech’ (­Yunis 2001: 181), and Usher initially labels it an ‘­absurd analogy’, but concludes his note: ‘­A human being is complex and fallible, and his actions are to be judged by opinion and reason, not according to the ­cut-­​­­and-​­dried measurements which Aeschines (­l ike the commissioner of the statue) has supplied for his “­model politician”’ (­Usher 1993: 212). That is precisely what Demosthenes argues. Any absurdity in the analogy serves to ‘­mock the pedantic exactitude’ of Aeschines’ definition of the good citizen, as Weil so effectively noted.25 For his third metaphoric blow against Aeschines’ definition, Demosthenes invokes ritual. Without pause, he follows the ­statue-​­customer simile with: ‘­A nd you shout as if you were “­on the wagon”, mouthing utterable and unutterable things, which apply to you and your ilk but not to me’ (­Dem. 18.122). Lexicographers and scholiasts report that scurrilous insults were hurled from people on wagons at various festivals 409

Brad L. Cook

(­Kamen 2020: 2­ 6–​­29). Whatever the cultic power or purpose behind these activities, Demosthenes bundles up all Aeschines’ attacks on him, on his person, on his identity, or the identity that Aeschines has tried to plaster him with, and throws it out of the courtroom, into the street, shouting back at Aeschines something, I imagine, like: ‘­This is a courtroom, not bedlam! Real citizens aren’t ­paint-­​­­by-​­number portraits! Save your jeering for the parade stands!’ These three succinct metaphoric frames, of questionable mental health, of t­ ailor-​­made shopping, of peculiar, probably apotropaic, cult ritual serve to dispel, without argument, Aeschines’ ever so carefully crafted legal and ­official-​­sounding assessment of Demosthenes. As he insisted, a true assessment of a ­public-​­minded Athenian is not to be found in a ­made-­​­­to-​­order list of features but in a record of actual ‘­deeds and policies’ (­Dem. 18.122), a record that Demosthenes will delineate in great detail for much of the remaining hour and a half, or so, of his speech, but only after striking back at Aeschines with the infamous but ritually required counterattack on Aeschines’ family background (­Dem. 18.­129–​­131). This is the point in Demosthenes’ speech where one might expect a word or two refuting Aeschines’ slander about being a Scythian, but Demosthenes, as so often, surpasses rhetorical convention. Not one word is said by Demosthenes about his mother’s father, or about his mother’s mother, not one word about a death sentence, disfranchisement, original or inherited, not one word about any purported Scythian ancestry. Instead, Demosthenes fashions an image of Aeschines’ father and his mother as slaves, his father wearing heavy shackles on his feet and the wooden collar used to punish slaves, his mother performing daytime ‘­m arriages’ in a shack while raising her ‘­charming manikin and superb ­third-​­rate actor’ (­D em. 18.129). These claims are outrageous and absurd, and Demosthenes intends them to sound that way. He had just assured the jurors that ‘­our ancestors’ had not created the courts for the sort of abusive parade put on by Aeschines (­the metaphor made explicit by repeating the verb pompeuein, Dem. 18.124). The scurrilousness of his claims about Aeschines’ parents and upbringing, however much it may be a show of verbal daring, and however much of it can be traced to the comic stage, in the context that Demosthenes has developed, as Jon Hesk observes, ‘­suggests that Aeschines abandons the sort of speech appropriate to the courtroom in favour of unsuitable invective due to his descent from slaves and foreigners’ (­Hesk 2014: 154). Demosthenes has, most importantly, dismissed Aeschines’ definition through metaphoric reframing, but he has also managed to wipe away the slander of servile foreignness aimed at him by pouring forth a far more outrageous version of the same against Aeschines. Whether wholly metaphoric or entirely heartfelt, it is hard to doubt what stuck in the jurors’ minds. By refuting and attacking Aeschines in this way, Demosthenes does not bother to say a word about his own ancestry, just as he never directly responds to Aeschines’ ­oft-​ ­repeated charge of cowardice and the slander that Demosthenes deserted from the battle at Chaeronea. That was the fifth and final characteristic of his definition of the good citizen, a charge that Demosthenes handled by brushing aside the entire definition and reframing Aeschines’ slander of flight from the battlefield with repeated proof of how he stood his post steadfastly, speaking for Athens in the Assembly and throughout Greece (­Cook 2012). Here as well, with Aeschines’ ‘­birther’ attack on Demosthenes, a ­two-​­part response is required: first, reject the slander with a n ­ o-​­holds barred response, and then list your actual accomplishments and policies (­Dem. 18.11, 122). Demosthenes ­ ne-​­fifth of the votes. Such a low vote for was acquitted, Aeschines failing to win even o 410

‘He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘birther’ attack in classical Athens

the prosecutor in this type of case imposed a penalty for frivolous litigation. Rather than pay the 1000 drachma fine, Aeschines left Athens and lived out his life in Rhodes as a teacher of rhetoric.26 Demosthenes, on the other hand, remained in Athens, a genuine citizen loyal in word and deed.27

Notes 1 I wish to express thanks to the organizers of the conference out of which this paper developed, to the editors for their helpful advice in improving the final version, and especially to Kerri J. Hame for her input from start to finish. 2 Harding (­1994: es­p.  ­214–​­216), Worman (­2008: ­213–​­274), Lape (­2010: ­82–​­88, ­264–​­265), and Kamen (­2020: ­69–​­74). 3 Previous scholars have stressed the comic background of this slander about citizen identity; my goal is rather to examine the contemporary ­socio-​­political frames that Aeschines and Demosthenes were endeavouring to invoke. 4 On the quoted concept, see Carey (­2017: 67); cf. Christ (­2006) on the ‘­bad’ citizen in ancient Athens; on Demosthenes’ success in reframing Aeschines’ attack on his military service, see Cook (­2012). 5 Dover (­1974: 34), Easterling (­1999: 155), Usher (­1999: ­273–​­274), and Yunis (­2001: 184). 6 See Parlett (­2014: ­44–​­48) on earlier use of ‘­birther’ attack in US politics; on the ‘­birther’ attacks of the 2010s, e.g., Olds (­2011), Kumar (­2013), Pham (­2015), Jardina and Traugott (­2019), and, at length, Parlett (­2014). 7 US Const., Art. 2, Sec. 1; see Parlett (­2014: ­54–​­64), Shaw (­2020: ­103–​­110). 8 On Athenian citizenship and particularly what can, and cannot, be said of the motive, nature, and effects of Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451/450 BCE, see Blok (­2009b: ­146–​­154), on prior scholarship see MacDowell (­1993), Osborne (­1997: ­4 –​­11); on autochthony, see Blok (­2009a), Hall (­2015: 22).fv 9 See Giannadaki (­2018: es­p. ­35–​­40) and her discussion of Demosthenes’ ‘­construction of the outsider’. 10 Briefly, Cook (­2012: ­227–​­232); on the historical context and the whole of the speech, see MacDowell (­2009: ­386–​­397). 11 Diggle (­2004: 491). Translations throughout are those of the author. 12 On these accusations in comedy, see Kamen (­2020: 4­ 2–​­48); on Aristophanes’ politics, see Sommerstein (­2014: es­p.  ­294–​­298, ­304–​­305), Kamen (­2020: ­57–​­59, 179 n.112), and Griffith (­2013: ­37–​­54 specifically on Frogs). 13 Ar., Ran. ­678–​­681, ­1532–​­1533, and schol. to Ar., Ran. 679, 681 about Plato’s Cleophon; see MacDowell (­1993: es­p. 370), Sommerstein (­1996: 214); cf. Lape (­2010: ­64–​­71), Kamen (­2020: ­42–​­45). 14 See the review of scholarship in Osborne (­1997: ­6 –​­11), Blok (­2009b: ­146–​­154). 15 It should be noted that his mother’s occupation as a wet nurse does not prove anything about the date of Euxitheus’ birth (­as MacDowell 2009: 290, Lacey 1980): on induced lactation, see ­Cazorla-​­Ortiz et al. (­2020). 16 Richardson (­1889: 176), who notes his use of Weidner’s German commentary of 1878 on his own title page, but such comments as quoted above are all Richardson’s own and distinguish his edition. 17 Aeschin. 1.126, 131, 164, cf. 181, with the account of his supposed involvement with Aristarchus at 1.­170–​­173. 18 On Aeschines’ rhetorical strategy, see Fisher (­2001: ­53–​­67), Roisman (­2005: ­165–​­166), and Cook (­2012: ­223–​­226). 19 On the less than clear legal status of bastards, see MacDowell (­1993), Ogden (­1995). 20 Cook (­2012: ­230–​­232) on the role of this definition and 244 and n.56 on scholarly assessment of the legal charges. 21 For a brief account of the ancient evidence and the scholarly discussion, see MacDowell (­2000b). 22 An ancient or Byzantine reader commented on ‘­native’ in the margin as meaning: ‘­He does not have the manner of an Athenian, and he does not have Athenian baseness but a foreign

411

Brad L. Cook baseness; this means that he is exceedingly base, as if he weren’t Athenian, as if his baseness is worse than the baseness had by Athenians’ (­schol. to Aeschin. 3.171, Dilts 397). 23 See Hunter (­2000: ­29–​­30), MacDowell (­2009: ­14–​­18). 24 Dem. 18.62, 138, 173, 192, 221, 236, 3­ 04–​­305; see Cook (­2012: ­248–​­251). 25 Weil (­18832: 480). I suspect that Demosthenes also had in mind Aeschines’ use against Timarchus, 13 years earlier, of the statue of Solon on Salamis (­Aeschin. 1.25), which Demosthenes had mocked then (­Dem. 19.­251–​­252). 26 On the outcome of the trial, see Plut., Dem. 24.2 and also Kindstrand (­1982: ­75–​­84) on Aeschines’ subsequent life and reputation. 27 Dem. 18.321, ‘­The duties of the truly responsible ­citizen – ​­to speak of myself in a way least likely to rouse e­ nvy – ​­are twofold: when in a position of power to guard the city’s pursuit of nobility and preeminence and at every moment, in every action, to guard his own loyalty’.

Bibliography Blok, J.H. (­2009a) ‘­Gentrifying genealogy: on the genesis of the Athenian autochthony myth’, in U. Dill and C. Walde (­eds) Antike Mythen. Medien, Transformationen, Konstruktionen. Festschrift für Fritz Graf (­Berlin) ­251–​­275 ——— ​­(­2009b) ‘­Perikles’ citizenship law: a new perspective’, Historia 58, ­141–​­170. Carey, C. (­2017) ‘­Style, persona and performance in Aeschines’ prosecution of Timarchus’, in S. Papaioannou, A. Serafim, and B. da Vela (­eds) The theatre of justice: aspects of performance in ­G reco-​­Roman oratory and rhetoric (­Leiden) ­265–​­282 ­Cazorla-​­Ortiz, G., ­Obregón-​­Guitérrez, N. ­Rozas-​­Garcia, M.R., and ­Goberna-​­Tricas, J. (­2020) ‘­Method and success factors of induced lactation: a scoping review’, Journal of Human Lactation 36, ­739–​­749 Christ, M.R. (­2006) The bad citizen in classical Athens (­Oxford) Cook, B.L. (­2009) ‘­Athenian terms of civic praise in the 330s: Aeschines vs. Demosthenes’, GRBS 49, ­31–​­52 ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­­Swift-​­boating in antiquity: rhetorical framing of the good citizen in ­fourth-​ ­c entury Athens’, Rhetorica 30, ­219–​­251 Diggle, J. (­2004) Theophrastus, Characters (­Cambridge) Dover, K.J. (­1974) Greek popular morality in the time of Plato and Aristotle (­Oxford) Easterling, P. (­1999) ‘­Actors and voices: reading between the lines in Aeschines and Demosthenes’, in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (­eds) Performance culture and Athenian democracy (­Cambridge) ­154–​­166 Fisher, N. (­2001) Aeschines, against Timarchos (­Oxford) Giannadaki, I. (­2018) ‘­The citizen and the “­outsider”: reconstructing civic identity and ideology in Demosthenes’ political (­forensic) speeches’, Dike 21, ­19–​­47 Griffith, M. (­2013) Aristophanes’ Frogs (­Oxford) Hall, J.M. (­2015) ‘­A ncient Greek ethnicities: towards a reassessment’, BICS 58, ­15–​­29 Harding, P. (­1994) ‘­Comedy and rhetoric’, in I. Worthington (­ed.) Persuasion: Greek rhetoric in action (­London) ­196–​­221 Hesk, J. (­2014) ‘­La construction de l’“­autre” et la contestation du “­soi”. L’invective et l’elenchos dans l’art oratoire athénien’, in A.Q. Bottineau (­ed.) La représentation négative de l’autre dans l’antiquité: hostilité, réprobation, dépréciation (­Dijon) ­143–​­160 Hunter, V. (­2000) ‘­Policing debtors in classical Athens’, Phoenix 54, ­21–​­28 Jardina, A., and Traugott, M. (­2019) ‘­The genesis of the birther rumor: partisanship, racial attitudes, and political knowledge’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 4, ­60–​­80 Kamen, D. (­2020) Insults in classical Athens (­Madison, WI) Kindstrand, J.F. (­1982) The stylistic evaluation of Aeschines in antiquity (­Uppsala) Kumar, H.S. (­2013) ‘“­I was born …” (­no you were not!): birtherism and political challenges to personal ­self-​­authorization’, Qualitative Inquiry 19, ­621–​­633 Lacey, W.K. (­1980) ‘­The family of Euxitheus (­Demosthenes LVII)’, CQ 30, ­57–​­61 Lape, S. (­2010) Race and citizen identity in the classical Athenian democracy (­Cambridge) MacDowell, D.M. (­1993) ‘­Foreign birth and Athenian citizenship in Aristophanes’, in A.H. Sommerstein, J. Henderson, and B. Zimmermann (­eds) Tragedy, comedy, and the polis (­London) ­359–​­371

412

‘He’s a Scythian!’: the ‘birther’ attack in classical Athens ——— ​­(­2000a) Demosthenes, On the false embassy (­Oration 19) (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2000b) ‘­The length of trials for public offences in Athens’, in P. ­Flensted-​­Jansen et al. (­eds) Polis and politics: studies in ancient Greek history presented to M.H. Hansen on his sixtieth birthday (­Copenhagen) ­563–​­568 ——— ​­(­2009) Demosthenes the orator (­Oxford) Mathieu, G. (­1947) Démosthène, plaidoyers politique, vol. 4 (­Paris) Ogden, D. (­1995) ‘­Women and bastardy in ancient Greece and the Hellenistic world’, in A. Powell (­ed.) The Greek world (­London) ­219–​­244 Olds, T. (­2011) ‘­Marginalizing the president. “­The concerted effort to ‘­other’ Obama”’, Race, Gender & Class 18.3/­4, ­100–​­109 Osborne, R. (­1997) ‘­Law, the democratic citizen, and the representation of women’, P&P 155, ­3 –​­33 Parlett, M.A. (­2014) Demonizing a president: the ‘ ­foreignization’ of Barack Obama (­Santa Barbara, CA) Pham, V.N. (­2015) ‘­Our foreign President Barack Obama: the racial logic of birther discourses’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, ­86–​­107 Richardson, R.B. (­1889) Aeschines, against Ctesiphon (­Boston, MA) Roisman, J. (­2005) The rhetoric of manhood: masculinity in the Attic orators (­Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA) Shaw, J. (­2020) People in question: citizens and constitutions in uncertain times (­Bristol) Sommerstein, A. (­1996) Aristophanes, Frogs (­Warminster) ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­T he politics of Greek comedy’, in M. Revermann (­ed.) The Cambridge companion to Greek comedy (­Cambridge) ­291–​­305 Usher, S. (­1993) Greek Orators V: Demosthenes, On the Crown (­De Corona) (­Warminster) ——— ​­(­1999) Greek oratory: tradition and originality (­Oxford) Walbank, F.W. (­1951) ‘­The problem of Greek nationality’, Phoenix 5, ­41–​­60 Weil, R. (­1883). Les plaidoyers politique de Démosthène, vol. 1, 2nd edn (­Paris) Worman, N. (­2008) Abusive mouths in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Yunis, H. (­2001) Demosthenes, On the crown (­Cambridge)

413

29 DARKEST HOUR Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea Janek Kucharski

Although never throughout its history had classical Athens suffered a fate similar to that of Thebes or Olynthus, both razed to the ground with its population slaughtered or enslaved, it did have its due share of existential crises, when the fate of the city and its people seemed to hang on a thread. Such desperate times usually called for desperate measures, which not infrequently contravened the existing laws established with more peaceful circumstances in mind. The subject of this chapter is one such case: the emergency measures introduced by Hyperides in the wake of the debacle at Chaeronea (­338 BCE), which included mass enfranchisement as well as mass manumission, and which were subsequently attacked by Aristogeiton in court on the charge of introducing an illegal decree (­graphē paranomōn).1 The problem of its legality and of its ideological underpinning has already attracted some scholarly attention in the past.2 In this chapter, I offer yet another understanding of these issues, based on a r­ e-​­examination of the available evidence, now including the newly discovered fragments of Hyperides’ Against Diondas (­Carey et al. 2008). Since the questions of citizenship and freedom were at the core of the controversial decree, this discussion may provide a fitting addition to the present volume.

Calamity and commotion It is a platitude to state that every decision, statement, or action should be interpreted through its historical context and not judged in isolation. The emergency measures proposed by Hyperides are no exception here. Taking into account their context not only provides the necessary nuance to an otherwise controversial motion, but also emphasizes its controversiality itself, since the decree concerned the fundamental tenets of the ancient Athenian identity. Instead of directly taking on the big ideological issues, however, I begin with the more immediate and tangible circumstances surrounding this contentious decision: the situation in Athens right after the news of Chaeronea has arrived. It is in these circumstances that the possible legal foothold of Hyperides’ prosecution, about which we know very little, will be sought. The most vivid and suspenseful description of a sudden crisis befalling Athens and of the commotion gradually rising in the city comes from Demosthenes, as he narrates 414

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-34

Darkest hour: Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea

the events immediately preceding the Chaeronean campaign: Philip’s seizure of Elateia in Phocis which paved the road for his invasion of Boeotia, and the disastrous battle which followed (­Dem. 18.169): It was evening when somebody came to the presiding officers (­prytaneis) with the news that Elateia has been taken. Some of them, although in the middle of their dinner, immediately got on their feet, cleared the agora from all businesses, and set fire to the wicker beacons. Others sent for the generals and called the trumpeter. The city was in full commotion. The next day, early in the morning, the presiding officers have convened the council (­boulē) into its meeting place (­bouleutērion), while you went to the Assembly. And even before the council began deliberation and set the programme, all of the people were already sitting on the hill.3 To the Athenians the capture of Elateia was an alarming event, but still far from the existential crisis they faced later when the news of Chaeronea arrived. This moment is said to have been painted in similarly vivid colours by Hyperides in his speech; unfortunately, the speech in question is lost, and we do not even have the relevant fragment, but only the testimony of Aelius Theon, a later orator and rhetorician (­fi rst century CE), who compares it with Demosthenes’ account of the news of Elateia and claims that the latter was rhetorically superior.4 The only actual quotation from Hyperides which may have been part of his depiction of Athens in distress is a brief phrase quoted by Photius: ‘­when the city was upright (­ὀρθῆς) at these events’, to which the lexicographer adds a gloss on the epithet ‘­upright’, explaining ­it – ​­somewhat ­c ounterintuitively – ​­as ‘­in commotion and anxiety’ (­κεκινημένης καὶ πεφοβημένης) (­Phot. Lex. ο 464 = fr. 39 Jensen). A few years later, Lycurgus too used the same expression to describe the tumult which followed the news of the Chaeronean disaster: ‘­t he city was upright’ (­ὀρθὴ δ’ ἦν ἡ πόλις) (­Lycurg. Leoc. 39; but see Aeschin. 2.163). It is also to Lycurgus that we owe the most detailed rhetorical account of the situation in Athens after the battle. The picture he paints in various scattered remarks is that of desperate urgency: women anxiously awaiting news at the doorsteps of their houses, the Council normally exempt from military service now under arms, the people’s hopes now hanging on the veterans left behind to guard the city (­1.­37–​­41). Elsewhere, he also mentions a meeting of the Assembly, convoked almost spontaneously, along with a handful of decrees passed on the spur of the moment (­Lycurg. Leoc. 16): When the battle of Chaeronea had taken place, and all of you had run (­σ υνδραμόντων) to the Assembly meeting, the people have decided that the women and children should be moved from the country within the walls, and that the generals should assign to guard duty those whom they saw fit from among the Athenians and other residents in Athens. Lycurgus may have been guilty of lifting from Hyperides more than just one turn of phrase in his description. Indeed, it was in the best interests of both to present the distress in Athens as vividly as possible (­cf. Roisman and Edwards 2019: 124): for Lycurgus as a contrasting backdrop to Leocrates’ cowardice (­and treason, according to the orator),5 while for Hyperides as an attenuating circumstance for his f­ ar-​­reaching proposals regarding the defence of the city. But the more disinterested testimony of Demosthenes 415

Janek Kucharski

(­18.195),6 who would have clearly preferred to emphasize the fact that the battle took place far away from Athens, gives a similar sense of urgency: And since such great danger and terror befell the city, even though the battle took place a ­three-​­days’ road away from Attica, what would have been our options if this disaster happened somewhere within the country [i.e. Attica]? Are you aware that this one day, and then the second, and the third allowed us to stand firmly, get together, catch our breath, and thus offered the city the necessary means for deliverance? Finally, Aristogeiton, in a fragment attributed to his prosecution speech Against Hyperides, also clearly implies similar distress in Athens at that critical moment: this, in turn, provides him with a negative foil to the period of tranquillity when the laws prevent the enemies of democracy from introducing any f­ ar-​­reaching changes (­fr. III.1 Sauppe): For those who plot against democracy are forced to stay away from any revolutionary actions (­μηδὲν παρακινεῖν) and obey the laws, when the city is in peace, and when the people make their policy in safety and without commotion. If the quotation is authentic, it can hardly refer to anyone else but Hyperides himself. It is he who took advantage of the commotion (­θόρυβος) and danger in which the Athenians found themselves upon learning of the defeat. It is he who did not follow the laws and attempted to introduce revolutionary measures which would have shaken the Athenian democracy. Aristogeiton is obviously at pains to show Hyperides’ motion in the worst light possible, as a subversion of the democracy, and perhaps of the entire social order in Athens.7 Indeed, the naturalization of metics and the liberation of slaves was associated by Aristotle with political revolutions (­μεταβολαί), and David Whitehead labelled such slogans as a ‘­revolutionary cliché’.8 It is highly unlikely, however, that such was the idea behind the decree, especially given its historical precedents (­see below) which did not bring about any radical changes in the functioning of the state.9 Nevertheless, certain elements of it could have been seen by Hyperides’ contemporaries as such, and thus provide his prosecutors with an attentive ear on the part of some of them.

History and illegality Three days is the time Demosthenes granted the Athenians when the news of Chaeronea reached their country. A disciplined army unencumbered by baggage trains and under competent leadership would have been able to reach Athens in such a short period (­p erhaps a day longer).10 In these three days, according to Demosthenes, the Athenians had to make the necessary decisions concerning the defence of their city, among which, most likely, were the emergency measures proposed by Hyperides. These, according to the contemporary testimony of Lycurgus, included the arming of the (­members of the) Boule and its relocation to the Piraeus; according to ­pseudo-​­Plutarch, relocated were also to be women and children, as well as the sacred objects (­X orat. 849a). The most contentious element of Hyperides’ motion, however, concerned its beneficiaries. The orator himself lists them in a fragment of his speech preserved in the Suda (­α 3111 = fr. 29 Jensen): 416

Darkest hour: Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea

So that first, 150,000 slaves from the silver mines and from other parts of the country (­κατὰ τὴν ἄλλην χώραν); next the state debtors, the disenfranchised, those stripped of citizenship, and the metics. Two other sources, one a fragment and one a testimony, mention also the exiles among those privileged by the decree.11 The legal status of each of these groups as well as the benefits conferred to them has already been examined in detail by Elisabetta Podigghe (­2003, 2006). Briefly put, the slaves were to be liberated, the disenfranchised (­including the state debtors) reinstated as fully privileged citizens, the foreigners (­including the metics) naturalized, and the exiles restored. Such a brief and jejune summary does not reveal any points on which Hyperides’ prosecutor could base his case. Quite the contrary: every element of his decree could have been enacted in Athens and frequently was, sometimes even on a regular basis. The manumission of slaves is the most revealing example, as it was a purely private affair, which only for practical reasons could have been brought to public attention (­­Zelnick-​ ­Abramovitz 2005: ­71–​­73, ­184–​­185). Naturalization, ­re-​­enfranchisement, and the restoration of exiles were considerably more problematic and difficult to accomplish, but nevertheless remained a legally sanctioned possibility (­see below on some of the relevant laws), which is attested by numerous relevant decrees.12 Granted, on Hyperides’ motion these acts were to be performed en masse, but such general amnesties and manumissions also had good historical credentials: the decree of Miltiades (­slaves and exiles);13 of Themistocles (­ostracized and disenfranchised?);14 the Arginusae decree (­slaves and foreigners),15 and that of Patrocleides (­the disenfranchised).16 In all these cases, however, we are dealing with motions enacted before the revision and reform of the Athenian laws (­403 BCE), some even before the introduction of graphē paranomōn (­ca. 415 BCE). Their endorsement by their contemporaries, therefore, could have provided Hyperides not with a strictly legal precedent, but more a rhetorical argument drawn from the distant past. Surprisingly enough, however, Hyperides in his defence speech made no attempt to defend the legitimacy of his proposal. Quite the contrary, judging by the extant ­fragments, he was quite happy to concede its illegality. This admission on his part is most explicit in a fragment of the speech quoted in Latin translation by Rutilius Lupus (­1.19 = fr. ­27–​­28 Jensen) in his ‘­Figures of speech’ (­Schemata lexeōs):17 Why do you keep asking me these questions about my service? Have you proposed to give freedom to the slaves? I did, so that the free would not have to suffer servitude. Have you proposed to restore the exiles (­exules)? I did, so that ­no-​­one would be afflicted by exile. And haven’t you neglected the laws which prohibit this. I couldn’t do otherwise, because their letters were in the shadow of the looming Macedonian arms. A similarly candid and explicit admission on Hyperides’ part is preserved in ­pseudo-​ P ­ oted – ​­with a rather surprising distinction. On the ­ lutarch, a­ lthough – ​­it should be n one hand, listed are the charges on which Aristogeiton brought him to court, and on the other, the multiple laws which he was accused of neglecting, and to which he readily admitted ([Plut.] X orat. 849a = fr. ­27–​­28 Jensen): He was acquitted after being put on trial by Aristogeiton for an unlawful decree on account of the motion he proposed after Chaeronea: that the metics should be 417

Janek Kucharski

naturalized, the slaves manumitted, and the sacred objects, the women and the children be moved to Piraeus. When some people were accusing him of neglecting many laws in the decree, he said ‘­the Macedonian arms obscured [them] to me. It is not I who wrote the decree, but the battle of Chaeronea’. Three later rhetoricians mention the accusation of liberating the slaves along with Hyperides’ rhetorically impressive replies about the free avoiding servitude,18 or the personified battle writing the decree,19 which are, of course, based on the tacit premise of their illegality. Two others, in a more pedestrian manner, analyse the orator’s argument about ­re-​­enfranchising the disenfranchised, as one sidestepping the question of narrowly defined lawfulness, and drawing on the idea of expediency instead.20

The broken laws The stance adopted by Hyperides in this trial has been deplored by Demosthenes (­in a completely different case) as a ‘­shameless’ one (­23.99): to argue that the prosecuted decree is beneficial, even if illegal. Historians were usually content to state this fact about the ­post-​­Chaeronea measures, without engaging in a­  – ​­necessarily ­speculative –​ ­discussion on the exact nature of its unlawfulness.21 Only a few ventured to do so. Enrica Malcovati briefly suggested Pericles’ citizenship law as the possible basis of prosecution.22 Podigghe, however, rightly points out that by this token every naturalization decree would be found in breach of law; her proposition is that Hyperides’ prosecutor could have skimmed over the strictly legal questions and instead focused on stock motifs of liberty and autochthony (­on which see below).23 Ideology per se, however, does not bring a case to court: to this end, the prosecutor must first persuade the relevant official (­in this particular case, one of the six thesmothetae) that the accusation has a solid legal basis.24 More plausible in this respect seems therefore the suggestion of Michael Osborne, which strictly speaking concerns the enfranchisement before Arginusae, but the principle remains the same for the present case:25 contrary to standard practice, the beneficiaries of Hyperides’ decree were rewarded with citizenship on account of future and not past benefactions to the city. The regulations in question are discussed at length by Apollodorus in his speech Against Neaera ([Dem.] 59.89): In the first place, there is a law established for the Assembly that it is forbidden to naturalize anyone who is not worthy of becoming a citizen on account of his good deeds (­ἀνδραγαθίαν) towards the Athenian people. Next, if the Assembly is persuaded and awards this privilege, it is still not valid, unless during the next meeting of the assembly at least six thousand Athenians ratify it by secret ballot (­κρύβδην ψηφιζόμενοι). The first law in the quoted passage deals with substance: one is eligible for citizenship for demonstrating andragathia towards the Athenian people.26 The term itself does not feature quite as prominently in the preserved decrees as one would expect, although its near synonym ἀνήρ ἐστιν ἀγαθός is, indeed, found rather frequently.27 As argued by David Whitehead, in its initial usage it conveyed the sense of doing good things (­as opposed to e.g., being of noble parentage), although in the latter half of the fourth century its meaning was circumscribed to bravery and therefore tantamount to the virtue of ἀνδρεία.28 It is at this point, as evident from Osborne’s suggestion, that Hyperides could 418

Darkest hour: Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea

have infringed the law: like the sailors from Arginusae, the beneficiaries of his decree had yet to prove their andragathia towards the Athenian people. The orator, however, could have still persuaded the Assembly that future benefactions are a good enough basis, especially if he skilfully deployed certain key words and phrases strategically placed within the decree itself. This may be suggested by the testimony of ­pseudo-​ ­Demosthenes ([Dem.] 26.11): When Hyperides proposed ( . . . ) that the disenfranchised be ­re-​­enfranchised, so that all would eagerly (­προθύμως) and in unanimity (­ὁμονοοῦντες) fight for the freedom (…) he brought a charge of illegality against the decree and prosecuted it in court. Both ‘­eagerly’ (­προθύμως and the like) and ‘­unanimous’ (­ὁμονοοῦντες and the like) are frequently found in honorific decrees, including those concerning naturalization of foreigners or restoration of the disenfranchised.29 If these phrases were indeed part of Hyperides’ decree, they could be considered as a plausible attempt on the part of the proposer to meet (­or sidestep) the substantive requirement of andragathia and the like displayed towards the Athenian people. My suggestion, on the other hand, is that the procedural aspect of naturalization could have proven an insurmountable obstacle given the tumultuous context of the decree’s enactment outlined above. The law quoted by Apollodorus mandates a ratification of the initially approved grant of citizenship during (­strictly speaking: right before) a second Assembly meeting, this time, however, not by a show of hands, but a secret ballot, with an added stipulation concerning the quorum: no less than 6,000 voters.30 But Hyperides’ decree had to be passed as soon as possible: as a member of the Boule, the orator could have had his proposal ratified by the Council itself (­as a probouleuma, a preliminary decree), but it was highly unlikely that under the circumstances the Athenians had the leisure of convoking two successive Assembly meetings with the added impediment of conducting a secret ballot during the second one, and of securing a quorum of 6,000 attendees. A revealing comparison may be drawn from the Demosthenic prosecution of Timocrates (­24.­27–​­29). According to the orator, the defendant used a much less urgent pretext to sidestep the even more complex proce­ ssembly – ​­though in this case dure of legislation: it too required two meetings of the A ­non-­​­­consecutive – the ​­ first to decide on the need of revising the existing laws, and the second to establish a committee of lawgivers (­who then were to decide on the merits and demerits of the proposed new laws). Timocrates however, or to be more precise one of his political allies, had this lengthy routine warped into only one Assembly meeting, during which both steps were enacted at once, and the new laws introduced the next day. The professed reason for this procedural anomaly was the need to deal with extraordinary expenses for the upcoming Panathenaic festival.31 A similar regulation concerned the disenfranchised and their restoration. The relevant document is quoted by Demosthenes in his speech Against Timocrates; although its authenticity did rouse suspicions in the past, it has been recently defended by Mirko Canevaro (­2013: ­127–​­132). In any case, its subsequent paraphrase by Demosthenes himself repeats all the kernels of the quoted law (­24.45): [It is not allowed to debate] about either the disenfranchised, so that they become ­re-​­enfranchised, or about those who are in debt to the state or to the gods, 419

Janek Kucharski

concerning the relief of the debt or status, unless a permission to do so is first authorized by no less than six thousand Athenians voting by secret ballot (­κρύβδην ψηφιζομένοις). Only then the Council and the people are allowed to debate on their decision. Though less cumbersome in terms of time and organization, since the entire procedure could take place during only one meeting, the vote by secret ballot which preceded it along with the quorum requirement may still have proved unfeasible, given the conditions in which the first assembly after Chaeronea was ‘­convoked’, with everyone, according to Lycurgus, ‘­r unning’ (­σ υνδραμόντων ἁπάντων) to the Assembly place, where the first measures were passed. Even if, indeed, Lycurgus exaggerated the commotion and panic in Athens, one may legitimately question the possibility of reaching the quorum on such short notice, and of determining it through a lengthy count of the ballots which should have preceded the debate in the Assembly. Of course, we cannot be sure if Hyperides did propose his motion during that very first meeting described by Lycurgus (­L eoc. 16, see above); but the motion mentioned by the latter does correspond to the one he refers to later and explicitly assigns to Hyperides (­women and children, generals assigning ­non-​­citizen residents to guard duty).32 It is much more difficult to determine the illegality of the mass manumission in Hyperides’ proposal, despite the fact that the orator himself (­in Rutilius Lupus) happily admits to it. It probably included all ­able-​­bodied slaves, not only those from the public mines (­which were always leased to individuals by the state), but also those ‘­from the other parts of the country’. Since they were privately owned, the question of reimbursing their masters may have been at play here.33 Although no such practice is attested for classical Athens, the parallels from other historical or fictional c­ ity-​­states could suggest this.34 So much for substance. Unlike in the case of naturalization or ­re-​ e­ nfranchisement, there are no strictly procedural rules or obstacles that we know of in this case: most likely the matter could have been decided in one sitting of the Assembly. In the end, therefore, the reasons for attacking this particular motion as illegal are not entirely clear.

Ideology and demographics In strictly legal terms, therefore, the most offensive element of Hyperides’ decree may very well have been the question of naturalization. This much one can gather from the known contemporary laws. What is surprising, however, is the fact that this particular motion is the one least mentioned in the sources dealing with the ­post-​ ­Chaeronea measures: only twice35  – ​­the same as the measure about the exiles.36 By contrast, the proposition to r­ e-​­enfranchise the disenfranchised appears six times,37 while the most notorious of all Hyperides’ measures is the one concerning the slaves, referred to nine times altogether in the available testimonies.38 Granted, the relative frequency with which the constituent elements of the relevant decree are mentioned may very well be an accident of preservation. It may also reflect more on their rhetorical value, or to be more precise, on that of Hyperides’ poignant replies. ‘­So that the free would not have to suffer servitude’, was certainly a turn of phrase attractive to later rhetoricians. But the same can be said about the equally brilliant reply ‘­so that ­no-​­one would be afflicted by exile’, which apparently did not find as much interest among later authors. 420

Darkest hour: Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea

The near contemporary testimony of Lycurgus may seem to corroborate the assumption that later rhetoricians mentioned that which they themselves found the most attractive, and not necessarily what the Athenians considered the most offensive. In his account of Hyperides’ decree, only the exiles are left out, whereas the three remain­ ost-​ ing motions are mentioned without any distinction as revealing symptoms of the p ­ haeronea calamity (­Lycurg. Leoc. 41): C Although many terrible things were happening in the city, and all the citizens were struck by the greatest misfortunes, this one, of all the calamities (­δεινῶν) befalling the city, would have been the most painful and lamentable to anyone: to watch the people vote a decree giving freedom to the slaves, citizenship to the foreigners, and enfranchisement to the disenfranchised. The same people who previously have proudly flaunted their autochthony and liberty. Lycurgus is careful not to denounce the decree, but he does consider it an evil; a necessary one, perhaps, but an evil nonetheless.39 By offering citizenship to foreigners, Hyperides undermined the fundament of Athenian civic identity, the idea of autochthony and of the concomitant exclusivity.40 The citizens of Athens, as they were repeatedly told during state funerals, were different from those of other ­city-​­states precisely because they were not foreigners who happened to settle in the same place (­ἐπήλυδες).41 They were born from the earth, and this alone conferred the sense of nobility on both the rich and the poor, the elites and the (­citizen) masses. This is what set them apart from other people, including those who happened to dwell in Athens as resident aliens. Which is not to say that enrolling foreigners into this exclusive group was impossible to reconcile with the concomitant ideology.42 But even then, naturalization was anything but a simple procedure, and in the end always potentially subject to judicial scrutiny in the form of a graphē paranomōn. Mass grants of citizenship, however, were almost, by definition, at odds with the idea of (­democratic) exclusivity conferred through it. This is why even true benefactors of Athenian democracy, such as those who fought for it during the rebellion against the Thirty, were ultimately denied this privilege,43 and why in other cases, when Athens was forced to swallow its autochthonic pride, such initiatives always generated resentment on the part of the ‘­true’ citizens (­A ndoc. 2.23; Ar. Ran. ­693–​­694), echoes of which are also heard in Lycurgus’ account. Compared to this, the second point made by Lycurgus may seem to have been of relatively minor import. After all, freedom was a privilege enjoyed not only by the citizens, but also by the ­non-​­negligible metic population of ancient Athens. Mass manumission, therefore, should not be expected to generate the same amount of resentment as mass naturalization (­cf. Hunt 1998: 92 on the Arginusae decree). And yet Lycurgus (­quoted above) seems to give the former the pride of place among the political calamities that befell Athens after Chaeronea.44 The recently discovered fragments of Against Diondas corroborate this appraisal: there the eponymous Diondas is said to have mentioned only this argument among the charges thrown against the orator: ‘­and yet he reproaches me for drafting a decree granting freedom to all the slaves who were ready to fight along with the people’ (­Dion. 29). Why did this particular point generate so much resentment among Hyperides’ contemporaries? Freedom was, indeed, a defining feature of democracy, as we are told by Aristotle (­Pol. 1317a). How that freedom was to be understood is a different question.45 Yet the Athenian citizens were as a rule acutely aware that this particular privilege they 421

Janek Kucharski

shared with the metics: the ideological opposition at work here was that between the free (­which not infrequently explicitly included ­non-​­citizens) and the slave (­Dem. 22.54 = 24.­166–​­167; cf. Dem. 29), and not the citizen and the slave. Furthermore, as already noted, individual m ­ anumission – ​­quite unlike individual n ­ aturalization – ​­was in Athens an ordinary, mundane business, depending solely on the private initiative of the manumittor. What seems to have been remarkable, and indeed alarming, about this part of Hyperides’ decree was the figure: 150,000 slaves to be liberated. If this number is not a later blunder, but was indeed part of the motion, subsequently repeated in Hyperides’ defence speech, it may account not only for its inclusion among Lycurgus’ woes, but also for its later notoriety. Briefly put, as a historical estimate, the figure in the decree is certainly wrong. The total number of all slaves living in Attica in the fourth century is nowadays assessed at half that number at most. And Hyperides could not have meant every person of servile status regardless of age and sex, but only ­able-​­bodied men. The problem is that slaves were never properly counted, which led to some gross exaggerations of their numbers. According to the historian Ctesicles, the census ordered by Demetrius of Phalerum yielded a similarly absurd figure of 400,000 belonging to this class in total.46 Hyperides’ 150,000 ­able-​­bodied slaves does seem to correspond well to that outlandish number (­and thus gains support as an authentic estimate produced by the orator himself, and not as a blunder of later copyists or of the Suda). These figures, as Mogens H. Hansen puts it, tell us ‘­nothing about how many slaves there actually were in Attica, but only how many there were presumed to have been’.47 By contrast, the Athenians seem to have had a much more realistic estimate of other social groups living in Attica, that is the metics, and the citizens. Demetrius of Phalerum counted the latter as 21,000, while the former as mere 10,000.48 Not unexpectedly, these figures are dwarfed by the suggested number of slaves who were to benefit from Hyperides’ decree. Thus, one might conclude that never in its history did Athens attempt such a f­ ar-​­reaching measure as that proposed by the orator (­even if the actual numbers were a product of imagination). By contrast, the slaves who manned the ships at Arginusae could have been easily counted and accounted for: according to Osborne, the entire number of crewmen needed was 22,000 men, and only a part of them were the beneficiaries of that motion.49 Thus, while manumission per se was never considered as a threat to the ideological exclusivity of being an Athenian, the sheer number produced by Hyperides was bound to alarm his contemporaries who would have rightly seen in it a revolutionary (­i f unintended) threat to the social order of their polis (­cf. d’Oria 1970/­1971: 38; Lape 2010: 275). This may very well have been the point to which Aristogeiton referred in the quoted fragment of his prosecution speech (­fr. III.1 Sauppe): in a period of crisis, Hyperides plotted against democracy by introducing revolutionary measures.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to look once again at the merits and demerits of Hyperides’ ­post-​­Chaeronea measures, in terms of both law and ideology. It has been argued that the situation in Athens, once the news of the defeat had arrived, precluded a procedurally appropriate ratification of the orator’s proposal to naturalize and enlist the ­non-​­citizens, and to enfranchise the disenfranchised, which, in turn, allowed his ­political  – ​­and probably also ­p ersonal  – ​­enemies to launch a prosecution for an 422

Darkest hour: Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea

unlawful decree. Hyperides emerged from the trial unscathed, but the memory of his ­far-​­reaching and desperate motion persisted, and even his political allies, such as Lycurgus, deplored it. Quite unexpectedly though, it was not the emergency naturalization that was remembered as the worst offender: it was the proposal to liberate the slaves. In later authors, this could have been due to its rhetorical potential. But Hyperides’ contemporaries, friend and foe alike, also seem to have found it the least palatable. In and of itself, liberating a slave hardly impinged on the civic pride of the Athenians. But with the sheer numbers proposed, dwarfing those of the free population in Athens (­citizen and metic alike), this particular motion quickly became notorious enough to be seen as a ­true – ​­if ­unintentional – ​­revolutionary programme.

Notes 1 Some scholars on the basis of the recently discovered fragments of Against Diondas (­29) suggest that it was Diondas himself who took up the prosecution or acted as Aristogeiton’s ­co-​­prosecutor Carey et  al. (­2008: 14); Harris (­2017: 232, n. 145); Liddell (­2020: 1.606); see, however, Muñoz Flórez (­2012: ­69–​­71) with an adventurous reading of the relevant passage; Kucharski (­2017) and more recently Carawan (­2020: 196, 203). 2 D’Oria (­1970/­1971); Engels (­1993: ­99–​­114); Podigghe (­2003, 2006); cf. Welwei (­1974: ­54–​­57); Hansen (­1974: ­36–​­37); and Lape (­2010: ­274–​­280). 3 Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own. 4 Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata ­69–​­70 Spengel (= fr. 33 Jensen). 5 Not much is known about Leocrates apart from the biased information furnished by Lycur­ ronze-​­working business gus; he was a merchant (­which Lycurgus denies) and owned a b (­Lycurg. Leoc. 58); after the battle of Chaeronea, he left Athens for Rhodes and apparently failed to show up for military duty (­Lycurg. Leoc. 57, 147); according to Lycurgus, the reason for his departure was cowardice (­L eoc. 132; Aeschin. 3.252); according to Leocrates himself, it was a ­pre-​­planned business trip (­Lycurg. Leoc. 55); after Rhodes, he went to live in Megara (­Lycurg. Leoc. 21), and returned to Athens in 331 BCE only to be prosecuted by Lycurgus; according to Aeschines (­3.252), he escaped conviction, but only by the slightest margin. 6 Who has also been accused (­w ith the benefit of the doubt) of lifting certain turns of phrase in his speech On the Crown from Hyperides’ Against Diondas; see fr. 95 Jensen. 7 Thus, d’Oria (­1970/­1971); contra: Atkinson (­1981: 44) who acknowledges that the decree could have been seen as such; Engels (­1993: ­107–​­110); cf. also Lape (­2010: 276) who takes the middle position. 8 Arist. Pol. 1275b (­cf. 1315a); Whitehead (­1977: 154, 162; cf. 144). 9 Duly noted by d’Oria (­1970/­1971: 36), who nevertheless claims that Hyperides’ decree was more exceptional than others; this, however, is hardly the case when compared with the far more radical Arginusae decree; cf. Engels (­1993: 107 n. 95). 10 On the assumption that the Macedonian army marched 20 miles per day, cf. Engels (­1978: ­17–​­18, 47, ­153–​­154). 11 Rutilius Lupus 1.9, see below; Anon., in Herm. Stas. 708 Walz (­both cited as fr. ­27–​­28 Jensen). 12 Naturalization decrees: Osborne (­1981/­1983), which is the standard reference work; restoration of an exile: Andoc. 2 (­unsuccessful). 13 Andoc. 1.­106–​­107 (­exiles and the disenfranchised); Paus. 7.15.7 with 1.32.3 (­slaves); cf. Raubitschek (­1955: 259 n.2); MacDowell (­1962: 140); Hansen (­1976: ­78–​­79); others think that Andocides’ remark refers to Xerxes’ invasion (­βασιλεὺς ἐπεστράτησεν); cf. Scheidel (­2002: ­272–​­276). 14 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 22.8; Plu. Them. 11.1, Arist. 8.1; cf. Rhodes (­1993: ­281–​­282); the disenfranchised are attested in the ­so-​­called Themistocles decree: SEG 18.153.­44–​­47 (= ML 23); its authenticity is, however, called into question; see Mayer (­2002); Taeuber (­2002: ­455–​­456). 15 Hellanicus BNJ 4 fr. 171; Diod. Sic. 13.97.1; cf. Andoc. 2.23; Justin also includes exiles and/­or atimoi in this group (­damnati): 5.6.5; cf. Osborne (­1981/­1983: 3.­33–​­34); Hunt (­1998: ­87–​­95). 16 Andoc. 1.73, 80; the decree itself is quoted at 1.­77–​­79, but its authenticity is subject to debate; cf. Hansen (­2015) – ​­pro; Canevaro and Harris (­2012: ­100–​­110; 2016/­2017: ­10–​­33) – ​­contra.

423

Janek Kucharski 17 C. Halm (­ed.), Rhetores latini minores (­Leipzig 1863); Rutilius mentions only Hyperides’ name, and not the speech Against Aristogeiton, but the latter is evident from the many other quotations; Rutilius’ work is a translation of Gorgias, a Greek rhetorician and Cicero’s teacher who lived in the II/­I century BCE. 18 Anon. in Arist. Rhet. 1419a.25 (­­p. 333 Rabe); Greg. Corinth. in [Herm.] Meth. 7.2.1204 Walz (­both cited as fr. ­27–​­28 Jensen). 19 [Longin.] Subl. 15.10 (­Russell) (= fr. ­27–​­28 Jensen). 20 Comm. in Herm. Stat. 4.707 Walz; Anon. in Herm. Inv. 7.2.782 Walz (­both cited as fr. ­27–​­28 Jensen). 21 E.g., Hansen (­1974: 36); Engels (­1993: 126); Lape (­2010: ­274–​­275); Liddell (­2020: ­606–​­607). 22 Malcovati (­1977: ­846–​­847 n.30). 23 Podigghe (­2003: ­50–​­51). 24 On the anakrisis and its preliminary legal examination, see Kremmydas (­2018) with a discussion of other sources. 25 Osborne (­1981/­1983: ­3 –​­4.154). 26 This verbatim provision is rather infrequently attested in the inscriptional record of citizenship grants; cf. IG II2 1.13, 80 (­an indirect association); IG II2 25.­8 –​­9; II2 103.­30–​­32. 27 IG I3 113.­5 –​­10; II2 19.­5 –​­7; II2 207.­5 –​­6 to mention just a few, where the phrase is actually legible and directly connected to the grant of citizenship. 28 Whitehead (­1993: 62; 2009: 54); cf. Blok (­2017: 241, 252). 29 πρόθυμος etc. and naturalization: IG I3 102.­7–​­8; I3 113.­6 –​­7; IG II2 1.9; ὁμονοία etc. and ­re-​ e­nfranchisement: Andoc. 1.73 (­referring to Patrocleides’ decree); SEG 18.153.44 (­the ­so-​ ­called Themistocles’ decree); cf. also Lys. 25.27; on the ‘­Themistocles decree’, see Mayer (­2002: ­357–​­367). 30 The terminus ante quem for the introduction of this law is 369/­8 BCE on the basis of IG II2 103.­33–​­36 (­substantially reconstructed); see Osborne (­1981/­1983: 4.161); Henry (­1983: 74). 31 Which was also the job of the lawgivers; cf. Canevaro (­2013: 106). 32 Durrbach (­1956: 45 n.1); Whitehead (­1977: 162); Filonik (­2021: 337 n.22); by contrast, Roisman and Edwards (­2019: 100) find parallels between this motion and the decrees of Demosthenes (­as in Dem. 18.248); but could he have reached Athens in time for the first assembly right after the battle? 33 On ownership: Xen., Vect. 4.­14–​­18; Laufer (­1979: ­77–​­81); on reimbursement: Cartledge (­2002: 144); cf. Dio Chrys. Or. 15.21 (­οὐχ ὑπὸ τοῦ δεσπότου ἕκαστος ἀφεθείς); on leasing mines by the state, see [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 47.2; Todd (­1993: 249); MacDowell (­2006: ­121–​­122). 34 Fictional: Pl. Leg. 932d and 914a; historical (­Rhodes in 304 BCE): Diod. Sic. 20.84.3; cf. ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2005: 70). Plato’s testimony applies to slaves who initiated a legal procedure by way of ‘­denunciation’ (­μήνυσις); see Andoc. 1.­12–​­18, ­27–​­28; Lys. 7; cf. ­Zelnick-​ ­Abramovitz (­2005: 70 n.13); Kamen (2013: 14); Filonik (2022). 35 Lycurg. Leoc. 41; [Plu.] X Orat. 849a (= fr. 2­ 7–​­28 Jensen). 36 Rutilius Lupus 1.19; Anon., in Herm. Stas. 4.708 Walz (­both cited as fr. 2­ 7–​­28 Jensen). 37 Lycurg. Leoc. 41; [Dem.] 26.11; Comm. Anon. in Herm. Stas. 4.707 Walz; Anon., in Herm. Stas. 4.708 Walz; Anon. in Herm. Inv. 7.2.782 Walz; Apsines 9.481 Walz (­all cited as fr. 2­ 7–​­28 Jensen). 38 Lycurg. Leoc. 41; [Plu.] X Orat. 489a; Rutilius Lupus 1.19; Anon. in Arist. Rhet. 1419a.25 (­­p. 333 Rabe); [Longin.] Subl. 15.10 (­Russell); Greg. Corinth. in [Herm.] Meth. 7.2.1204 Walz (­all cited as fr. 2­ 7–​­28 Jensen); Dio Chrys. Or. 15.21. 39 Cf. Whitehead (­1977: 162); and Lape (­2010: 276); both may, however, slightly overstate Lycurgus’ negative attitude towards the decree. 40 On the ideology of autochthony, see the seminal works of Loraux (­1993: ­37–​­71; 2000: es­p. ­13–​ ­27); for a more recent assessment, see Barbato (­2020: 8­ 2–​­114) with an overview of previous discussion. 41 Eur. Erechtheus fr. 360.­7–​­12 Kannicht ap. Lycurg. Leoc. 100; Pl. Men. 237b; Lys. 2.17; Dem. 60.4; Hyp. Epit. 7; cf. Thuc. 2.36.1; see also Loraux (2000: 20–23); Herrman (2009: 73). 42 For the inscribed grants of citizenship (­altogether 28 for the classical period) and testimonies (­83 for the classical period), see Osborne (­1981/­1983: 1.­28–​­88, 3.­20–​­80). 43 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 40.2; P.Oxy. 15 1800 fr. 6­ –​­7; Aeschin. 3.195; cf. Osborne (1981/1983: 2.29–30); Rhodes (1993: 474–477).

424

Darkest hour: Hyperides and the emergency measures after Chaeronea 44 Unless we take his enumeration as a rhetorical climax, meant to end with the most powerful statement; but ­re-​­enfranchising the disenfranchised (­mostly ­state-​­debtors) does not seem to be one of those. 45 The standard explanation, ‘­to live as one pleases’ (­ζῆν ὡς βούλεταί τις), given by Aristotle (­Pol. 1317b), has recently been questioned by Filonik (­2019), who also provides an overview of an earlier discussion. 46 Ctesicles, BNJ 245 fr. 1; but see van Wees (­2011: ­106–​­107), who argues that the term οἰκέται included all household members; cf. also the equally outlandish estimates for Corinth (­460,000) and Aegina (­470,000): Timaios BNJ 566 fr. 5 and Arist. fr. 472 Rose respectively; see Hansen (­1988: 11). 47 Hansen (­1988: 11); Akrigg (­2019: 91); cf. Hansen (­2006: 56 n.137) where the total number of slaves in ­fourth-​­century Athens is estimated at 70,000; see also the discussion in van Wees (­2011: ­111–​­112) and Akrigg (­2019: ­92–​­120). 48 BNJ 245 fr. 1; cf. Thuc. 2.13.­6 –​­7 with Whitehead (­1977: ­97–​­98) and Hornblower (­1991: ­255–​­256). 49 Osborne (­1981/­1983: 3.34), who suggests that altogether 13,000 ­non-​­citizens would have been involved.

Bibliography Akrigg, B. (­2019) Population and economy in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Atkinson, J.E. (­1981) ‘­Macedon and Athenian politics in the period 338 to 323 BC’, AClass 24, ­37–​­48 Barbato, M. (­2020) The ideology of democratic Athens. Institutions, orators and the mythical past (­Edinburgh) Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Canevaro, M. (­2013) Documents in the Attic orators (­Oxford) Canevaro, M. and E.M. Harris (­2012) ‘­Documents in Andocides’ On the Mysteries’, CQ 62, ­98–​­129 ——— ​­(­2016/­2017) ‘­The authenticity of the documents at Andocides’ On the Mysteries ­77–​­79 and ­83–​­84’, Dike 9, ­9 –​­49 Carawan, E. (­2020) Control of the laws in the ancient democracy at Athens (­Baltimore, MD) Carey, C. et al. (­2008) ‘­Fragments of Hyperides’ Against Diondas from the Archimedes Palimpsest’, ZPE 165, ­1–​­19 Cartledge, P. (­2002) ‘­The political economy of Greek slavery’, in P. Cartledge, E.E. Cohen, and L. Foxhall (­eds) Money, labour and land: approaches to the economies of ancient Greece (­London) ­156–​­166 D’Oria, F. (­1970/­1971) ‘­Il decreto popolare di Iperide’, AFLN 1, ­31–​­46 Durrbach, F. (­1956) Lycurgue, Contre Leocrate, fragments (­Paris) Engels, D. (­1978) Alexander the Great and the logistics of the Macedonian army (­Berkeley, CA) Engels, J. (­1993) Studien zur politischen Biographie des Hyperides (­München) Filonik, J. (­2019) ‘“­Living as one wishes” in Athens: the (­­anti-​­)­democratic polemics’, CPh 114, ­1–​­24 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Likurg’, in M. Bizoń, J. Filonik, and J. Kucharski (­eds) Antyfont, Dejnarchos i Likurg (­Katowice) ­319–​­392 ——— ​­(­2022) ‘­Speaking for the gods: Greek cultic regulations and their silent informants’, in S. Papaioannou, A. Serafim, and K. Demetriou (­eds) Rhetoric and religion in Ancient Greece and Rome (­Berlin) ­37–​­58 Hansen, M.H. (­1974) The sovereignty of the people’s court in Athens in the fourth century B.C. and the public action against unconstitutional proposals (­Odense) ——— ​­(­1976) Apagoge, endeixis, and ephegesis against kakourgoi, atimoi, and pheugontes (­Odense) ——— ​­(­1988) Three studies in Athenian demography (­Copenhagen) ——— ​­(­2006) Studies in the population of Aigina, Athens and Eretria (­Copenhagen) ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Is Patrocleides’ decree (­A ndoc. 1.­77–​­79) a genuine document?’, GRBS 55, ­884–​­901 Harris, E.M. (­2017) Demosthenes, speeches ­23–​­26 (­Austin, TX) Henry, A.S. (­1983) Honours and privileges in Athenian decrees (­Hildesheim)

425

Janek Kucharski Herrman, J. (­2009) Hyperides, Funeral Oration (­Oxford) Hornblower, S. (­1991) A commentary on Thucydides, vol. I: Books ­I–​­III (­Oxford) Hunt, P. (­1998) Slaves, warfare, and ideology in the Greek historians (­Cambridge) Kamen, D. (­2013) Status in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Kremmydas, Ch. (­2018) ‘­Anakrisis and the framing of strategies of argumentation in Athenian public trials’, in C. Carey, I. Giannadaki, and B. ­Griffith-​­Williams (­eds) The use and abuse of law in Athenian courts (­Leiden) ­110–​­131 Kucharski, J. (­2017) ‘­Hyperides’ hypophora. Against Diondas 28 (­174r ­21–​­32): a suggestion’, ZPE 203, ­56–​­64 Lape, S. (­2010) Race and citizen identity in the classical Athenian democracy (­Cambridge) Laufer, S. (­1979) Die Bergwerksklaven von Laureion (­Weisbaden) Liddell, P. (­2020) Decrees of ­fourth-​­century Athens (­403/­­2 –​­322/­1 BC), vol. 1 (­Cambridge) Loraux, N. (­1993) The children of Athena: Athenian ideas about citizenship and the division between the sexes, trans. C. Levine (­Princeton, NJ) ——— ​­(­2000) Born of the earth: myth and politics in Athens, trans. S. Stewart (­Ithaca, NY) MacDowell, D.M. (­1962) Andokides, on the mysteries (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2006) ‘­Mining cases in Athenian law’ in A.H. Rupprecht (­ed.) Symposion 2003. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Wien) ­121–​­131 Malcovati, E. (­1977) ‘­Licurgo’, in M. Marzi, P. Leone, and E. Malcovati (­eds) Oratori attici minori, vol. I (­Torino) ­799–​­929 Mayer, C. (­2002) ‘­Die Rückberufung der Ostrakisierten vor der Schlacht von Artemision (­480 v. Chr.)’, in Siewert (­2002) ­357–​­367 Muñoz Flórez, J. (­2012) ‘­Seis Comentarios al texto tel nuevo “­In Diondam” de Hiperides’, ZPE 180, ­67–​­71 Osborne, M.J. (­1981/­1983) Naturalization in Athens, 4 vols. (­Brussels) Podigghe, E. (­2003) ‘­I termini giuridici del decreto di Iperide sulla concessione di privilegi in cambio della disponibilità a combattere per Atene’, Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’ Università di Cagliari 21, ­43–​­68 ——— ​­(­2006) ‘­Ateniesi infami (­atimoi) ed ex Ateniesi senza i requisti (­apepsephismenoi). Nuove osservazioni in margine al fr. 29 Jensen di Iperide sulle diverse forme di esclusione dal corpo civico di Atene’, AFLC 24, ­5 –​­24 Raubitschek, A.E. (­1955) ‘­Zur attischen Genealogie: Andokides I 106; II 26. Isokrates XVI 25/­ 26’, RhM 98, ­258–​­262 Rhodes, P.J. (­1993) A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (­Oxford) Roisman, J. and Edwards, M. (­2019) Lycurgus, Against Leocrates (­Cambridge) Scheidel, W. (­2002) ‘­Rückruf von Ostrakisierten und vielleicht auch anderen Verbannten zur Zeit der Perserkriege (­481/­0 v. Chr.?)’, in Siewert (­2002) ­271–​­276 Siewert, P., ed. (­2002) ­Ostrakismos-​­Testimonien I (­Stuttgart) Taeuber, H. (­2002) ‘­Einführung und erste Anwendungen des Ostrakismos (­­487-​­480 v. Chr.)’, in Siewert (­2002) ­449–​­458 Todd, S.C. (­1993) The shape of Athenian law (­Oxford) van Wees, H. (­2011) ‘­Demetrius and Draco: Athens’ property classes and population in and before 317 BC’, JHS 131, ­95–​­114 Welwei, K.-​­W. (­1974) Unfreie im antiken Kriegsdienst. Athen und Sparta (­Weisbaden) Whitehead, D. (­1977) The ideology of the Athenian metic (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­1993) ‘­Cardinal virtues: the language of public approbation in democratic Athens’, C&M 44, ­37–​­75 ——— ​­(­2009) ‘­Andragathia and aretē’, in L. Mitchell and L. Rubinstein (­eds) Greek history and epigraphy: essays in honour of P.J. Rhodes (­Swansea) ­48–​­58 ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz, R. (­2005) Not wholly free: the concept of manumission and the status of manumitted slaves in the ancient Greek world (­Leiden)

426

PART IV

The Hellenistic world

30 CITIZENSHIP IN THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD Susanne Carlsson

Introduction Citizenship was a status that was taken seriously, and the notion and practice of citizenship were characterized by exclusivity, which had at least a twofold purpose: (­1) to restrict the body of citizens in order to restrain the polis’ financial obligations to its citizens; and (­2) to create and maintain the privileged status enjoyed by male citizens. As for the exclusion of foreigners from the citizen body, there is another aspect of importance: resident foreigners paid higher taxes than citizens and liturgies were imposed on the wealthier of them. Thus, there was a double economic incentive to have a section of the population confined to metic status: less expenses and higher income. When writing about the Hellenistic period, classical Athens and its abundance of sources constitute a challenge when approaching other geographical areas and periods; the conditions in classical ­Athens – ​­politically, socially, and ­culturally – ​­constitute in many ways the norm for ancient Greece against which other poleis are measured. Moreover, the view of the Hellenistic period, including political life, has until the last decades been negative (­Brock and Hodkinson 2000: ­4 –​­5). The political map was redrawn with Alexander the Great’s campaign and the battles of the Diadochi. New cities were built, but the old c­ ity-​­states remained in parallel and largely fought for and retained their political institutions and autonomy (­Brown 2006: 549; Carlsson 2010). This chapter focuses not only on the purely formal requirements of citizenship in political terms but foremost on religious and social functions that suggest a broader concept of citizenship, including women and resident foreigners (­Blok 2013: 162; cf. Joyce in this volume). Although Aristotle lived at the end of the classical period, I will occasionally mention his theoretical conception of citizenship and population groups within a ­city-​­state.

Who is a citizen? According to Aristotle, the definition of a citizen (­masc. politēs, pl. politai) in a general sense is someone who participates in the judging and governing functions (­Arist. Pol. 1275a.­22–​­23), that is, he has more than just the right to vote. Citizen children are not DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-36

429

Susanne Carlsson

yet full citizens and the same is true of old people who are relieved of political and military civic duties (­Arist. Pol. 1275a.­14–​­16). Citizen women (­fem. politis, pl. politides) are mentioned specifically as mothers of citizens. Thus, we have two groups of citizens: active and passive. As a rule, there was a demand for both a citizen mother and a citizen father for admittance to citizenship (­except for enfranchisement of foreigners), although this rule differed from place to place and from one time to another. Aristotle reports that many democracies include foreigners in the citizen body since the offspring of a citizen mother becomes a citizen and the same happens to bastards (­nothoi), that is, an offspring to a citizen male and a slave or a concubine. This generosity is due to a desire for legitimate children, but he goes on to say that, when the citizen body is sufficient, the privileges are taken away little by little until only those born to citizens on both sides are made citizens (­Arist. Pol. 1278a.­26–​­34). Usually, the demand on citizen parents from both sides is regarded as a recognition of women as indispensable participants in the state. But in those cases where women made up the single part that could provide the polis with legitimate citizens, the role of citizen women may be considered even more prominent.

Extended demands on ancestry Sometimes, the demand on citizen ancestry was extended, which was the case in Hellenistic Kos. In some places, there was a requirement of forebears of two, three, or more generations. To determine whether the third or fourth generation of ancestors were citizens is difficult. One example of a strict application of the notion of citizenship is found in Hellenistic Kos. According to ­Sherwin-​­White, the population was divided into five main groups: citizens with full citizen rights; citizens without full citizen rights; foreigners with some rights (­paroikoi); foreigners without rights (­xenoi); and slaves (­­Sherwin-​­White 1978: 153). In other states, for example, Rhodes, nothoi were included in this category as a separate ­class – ​­matroxenoi. In a tribal decree from Halasarna in Kos in c. 200 BCE, the principle of citizenship for three generations appears. Since the old census list had become illegible, a new census of tribesmen qualified to participate in the cult of Halasarna was decreed (­ASAtene ­25–​­26, 1963, ­183–​­187, 26A). Also, in a contemporary census list from the Koan deme of Isthmos, the demand for legitimate citizen birth for three generations is attested (­ASAtene ­25–​­26, 1963, 1­ 65–​­167). In both cases, the local tribesmen are described by name, patronymic, matronymic, and name of maternal grandfather.

Property requirements Another aspect of limiting citizenship than the genealogical is the exclusion of the lowest economic class/­es. As democracies are more inclusive than, for instance, oligarchies, the right to citizenship depends on the regime of the polis in which the person lives. According to Aristotle, someone who is a citizen in a democracy would not be a citizen in an oligarchy, and moreover, under certain regimes there is no demos at all and no recognized assembly (­Arist. Pol. 1275b.­2 –​­5). Consequently, the question arises as to how the individual, excluded on economic grounds but genealogically approved, regarded himself and was regarded by those around him. Likewise, someone with only one citizen parent (­when two were required) is in a borderland. It is probable that members of a society who did not qualify for citizenship but were born of parent/­s of 430

Citizenship in the Hellenistic period

­ on-​­foreign birth regarded themselves and were regarded by others as citizens. This n must have been the opinion, especially following an oligarchic takeover when ‘­genuine’ citizens became excluded due to deficient financial resources. But also in democracies we have ‘­citizens without full citizen rights’, for example, citizen women, a group of inferior citizens that can be classified among the passive citizens.

Citizenship requirements in Kyrene One rare example of a precise prescription of the criteria for citizenship occurs in the constitution of Kyrene in 3­ 22–​­121. After a long period of stasis, Ptolemaios Soter (­before becoming king) was invited to intervene by a group of aristocrats in exile who were involved in a struggle with Kyrenian democrats (­Diod. Sic. 18:­19–​­21). The conflict was settled, and a new constitution was outlined which stated that those shall be citizens who are born of a Kyrenian father and mother, as shall those who are born of Libyan women and of certain settlers, both within specified geographical areas. These latter categories are regarded as passive citizens, politai. The body of citizens, the politeuma, or the active citizens, shall consist of 10,000 and each member together with his wife shall have a permanent property of 20 Alexander minas (=1/­3 talent) and not be below the age of 30 years. The council of 500 was appointed by lot from men not below the age of 50. Although this constitution had oligarchic features, such as high age limits, the body of active citizens increased from 1,000 to 10,000 and the census rating, including also the property of women, was not very high. A clear distinction is made between active and passive citizens; the latter qualified by birth or ethnic/­geographical origin (­SEG 9, no 1; Austin 1981: no. 264 = Austin 2006: no. 29).1

Hellenistic philosophers’ notions on citizenship The philosophical notion of citizenship changed in the Hellenistic period. The overall focus was extended beyond the limits of the polis and its citizens per se. The Hellenistic schools in general defined the achievement of happiness and good societal life more broadly and extended the focus of interest outside the traditional border of the polis and its citizens (­Laks and Schofield 1995, ­1–​­3; Brown 2006: 557). To the Stoics, local and ‘­national’ membership was of less importance than that of the worldwide community, and the idea of cosmopolitanism. Kosmopolitēs, ‘­world citizen’, in differing forms was present in the Hellenistic schools of philosophy and developed further in Roman Stoicism (­Nussbaum 1996; Konstan 2009). In short, judging from the fragmentary evidence, there seems to have been an indifference to constitutional matters (­Erskine 1990: 70). The early Stoics thought that also ­non-​­citizens should be taken into account and that the polis was the sum of all its inhabitants, not only its citizens, as Aristotle also held to be true. One motive for this reasoning may be that the first three heads of the ­ on-​­Athenians (­Erskine 1990: 51). In contrast to Aristotle who Stoa in Athens were n thought that virtue (­aretē), a necessary quality for a citizen, was dependent on occupation, the Stoics’ fundamental attitude was that everyone, even a slave, could be virtuous (­Erskine 1990: ­71–​­72). Nevertheless, the Stoics made a distinction between citizens and inhabitants of a polis and they regarded the latter to be subordinate to the citizens. Moreover, when the ideal society was examined, the importance of active participation by the politēs was emphasized (­Erskine 1990: 40, 51). Even though their outlook 431

Susanne Carlsson

on people tended to be more democratic and ‘­humane’, the practice of citizenship was essentially similar in the classical and Hellenistic periods.

Politically excluded g­ roups – ​­resident foreigners and citizen women Exclusivity is a feature of ancient Greek democracy which is often emphasized, and sometimes excessively so, by scholars from outside as well as from inside the discipline of ancient history. Occasionally, ‘­ancient democracy’ is dismissed as n ­ on-​­existent since the majority of the ­population – ​­women, metics, and, it goes without saying, ­slaves –​ ­were excluded from political influence and participation. The main purpose of this section is to draw attention to the fact that the dividing lines between being a male citizen and being a citizen woman or a resident foreigner may be less definite than we usually assume. Participation in social life implied far more aspects than the political: social, ­ on-​­citizens economic, and religious matters were also important parts of society and n of both sexes were engaged in these spheres (­Blok 2013: ­162–​­163; Brock 2015).

Resident foreigners Boundaries between citizens and n ­ on-​­citizens were more fluid than is often assumed. Some ­non-​­citizens exercised considerable power. With regard to Athens, it was partly due to its size that it was difficult to identify the exact status of inhabitants, which thus made it easier to cross the limits (­Cohen 2000: 108).2 But most poleis were considerably smaller, which naturally entailed greater social control. In any case, resident aliens constituted an important and acknowledged group, both juridically and socially, within the polis, and there are many examples of metics who held prominent positions outside the sphere of political life. The official status of metics in ancient Greece is comparable to that of resident aliens in Western democracies today. They had no political rights, but their property was legally protected and they could sue in commercial cases and be sued in court, although sometimes a deputy, a prostatēs, was required (­W hitehead 1977: ­7–​­10, ­96–​­97; Kapparis 2003). Even the xenoi (­­non-​­resident foreigners) were not totally without legal protection. The institution of proxenoi served to look after the interest of members of ­ on-​­citizens did not have other states (­W hitehead 1977). As in many countries today, n the right to own real estate, unless they were given this through a special resolution as a reward for good services to the polis (­Kapparis 2003). Accordingly, resident aliens had some rights, but these also implied duties. As for religious matters, the participation in the Athenian state cult was for the ­ on-​­citizens were naturally also excluded from most part restricted to citizens, and n priesthood, but metics had their own cults. There are, however, some known exceptions when foreigners took part in sacrifices and were able to share in the sacrificial meat, and daughters of metics paraded in the annual Panathenaic procession, the most important of them all.3 In cities outside Athens, resident foreigners seem to have been more involved in religious life (­W hitehead 1977: 8­ 6–​­89; Dillon 2002: 205). In Bargylia (­in Karia), for instance, metics are attested to have taken part in public sacrifices (­Ma 2000: 108). Accordingly, resident aliens were less privileged than citizens, but their obligations were considerable. Certainly, in large poleis, it was not easy to distinguish citizens from ­non-​­citizens; furthermore, the check of qualifications, dokimasia, before enrolment 432

Citizenship in the Hellenistic period

in a deme at the age of 18 may not have been as watertight as modern national registration. Consequently, foreigners could possibly get hold of some civil privileges. But this was to expose oneself to danger. In Athens, a person of illegitimate birth who pretended to be a citizen could be prosecuted according to graphē xenias and if convicted sold as a slave (­Diller 1937: 93; Harrison 1968: 65; Thür 2002: 613). Besides the annual inspection of men at the age of 18, revisions of the census register, diapsēphismos, were ­ on-​­citizens had found their way on to made occasionally when it was suspected that n the lists (­Rhodes 1972: 174). The fate of slavery could also strike nothoi and foreigners of different status for reasons of external politics or for the breaking of particular laws such as refusing to pay the tax (­Garlan 1988: 64). The institutions of control and the severe penalties speak against any frequent unmerited appropriation of civic rights. However, the position of metics could take a turn for the better as their status was not entirely unchangeable. In return for excellent service to the polis, resident foreigners could be exempted from various taxes, and privileges such as intermarriage with citizens and citizenship could be bestowed as grants (­l isted by Diller 1937: 136). Over time in Athens, foreigners who were honoured by the citizens, as well as envoys from other states, were frequently given the right of audience to the council and assembly (­Rhodes 1972: ­42–​­43, 54).

Granting of citizenship In the Hellenistic period in general, the notion of exclusive citizenship was relaxed: honorary citizenship was increasingly granted to individuals who became citizens of multiple poleis (­Brock 2015: 1­ 2–​­13). Mutual grants of citizenship between poleis called isopoliteia were decreed with ‘­full and equal rights’. Some examples are Chios conferring the honour of ‘­sharing full and equal rights’ on the Aetolians in 247/­246 (­Syll.3 443; Austin 1981: no. 52), and Samos on the judges from Myndos in c. 280 (­SEG 1, 363; Austin 1981: no. 135). In times of food shortage or famine, the supply of corn, cheap or for free, was an important reason to grant citizenship: Ephesos honoured Agatokles from Rhodes in c. 300 (­Syll.3 354; Austin 1981: no. 112), and Histiaia conferred honours on a Rhodian in c. ­230–​­220 (­Syll.3 493; Austin 1981: no. 115). Other privileges than citizenship were also granted to foreigners. Numerous honorific decrees prove that foreigners were thanked for their good deeds to a particular ­city-​­state by receiving proxenia, the proedria, the isoteleia, the title of euergetes or the granting of a statue (­Müller 2014: 543, 547, ­550–​­551). Judging from the epigraphic material, the granting of citizenship is to be regarded in the context of the growing concern for good interstate diplomatic relations. Generally, when granting citizenship, the merit of the contribution was regarded as momentous to the polis’ security. A remarkable example from Rhodes is reported by Diodoros (­20.100.­1–​­4). In connection with the siege by Demetrios Poliorketes (­305/­304 BCE), the Rhodians honoured those who in the face of danger had shown bravery and conferred freedom and citizenship on slaves who had displayed courage. Normally, freedmen attained the status of resident foreigner, and citizenship was next to unattainable (­Garlan 1988: 83). Another feature of the Hellenistic period which may have contributed to a changed attitude to ­non-​­citizens is the depopulation (­oliganthrōpia) of Greece, which is archaeologically attested (­A lcock 1996: 2­ 5–​­27, ­53–​­55, 8­ 9–​­91, 148, 216). Several ancient authors were concerned with population decline in Greece in the late Hellenistic and early 433

Susanne Carlsson

Roman periods.4 Depopulation was generally equated with civic and moral decline, and an abundance of population, polyandria, was considered a desirable state. According to Polybios (­36.17.­5 –​­10), an excess of deaths over births causes cities to become deserted and land unproductive. Shortage of citizens and the inclusion of new inhabitants are evident also from several Hellenistic inscriptions. In Teos c. 300 new citizens were exempted from certain taxes and liturgies for a period of four years (­PHI Teos no. 39; SEG 2, no. 579; Austin 1981: no. 99), and in ­217–​­214 Philip V called attention to the need for new citizens in Larissa because of the war and urged the polis to vote in accordance with his proposal and include Thessalians and other resident Greeks in the citizen body (­IG IX, 2 517). Since the Larissians did not obey, Philip sent a second letter and the city voted a new decree in accordance with his instructions (­Austin 1981: no. 60). In a ­third-​­century decree from Itanos in Krete, new citizens have to swear a detailed oath of loyalty to the polis. The reasons for the enlargement of the citizen body made by the ruling elite are not obvious (­Syll.3 no. 526; ICret. 3: no. 8; Austin 1981: no. 90). Citizenship was also for sale. The purchase of citizenship was considered as an expedient in crises to improve the finances of the poleis (­­Sherwin-​­W hite 1978: 235).

Metics’ status and activities It is believed that the status of metics disappears in the Hellenistic period. In Athens, the institution evaporates gradually from the historical records from the third century onwards. Evidently, foreigners still lived in Attika but the regulated concessions and obligations ceased to exist (­W hitehead 1977: 1­ 64–​­165; Katz 2004: 302; Niku 2007). Diller, among others, thought that the institution of citizenship was perishing due to the subjugation to the Macedonian power and the subsequent decay of the c­ ity-​­state (­Diller 1937: 100). Consequently, a distinct demarcation between population groups became less important. This view corresponds with the traditional opinion that Greek ­c ity-​­states lost importance and independence in the Hellenistic period. Contrary to the view of Diller, however, Athenian citizenship continued to be worth aiming at well into the Roman period. People of Roman origin occur in inscriptions as Athenian citizens with full citizen rights from the 130s, and by the first century many Romans had become naturalized citizens (­Habicht 1997: ­343–​­345; Ando 1999). Thus, the status of citizenship was still important and implied a demarcation between citizens and other groups. Whitehead adheres to this opinion and maintains that ‘­the political division between citizens and ­non-​­citizens pervades the Hellenistic period no less than the classical’ (­W hitehead 1977: 165). In any case, it seems that the Athenian institution of metics coincides chronologically with that of democracy. As for western Asia Minor and the adjacent islands, a quick browse through the epigraphic record shows that foreigners of different kinds are present throughout the Hellenistic period and beyond. Individual foreigners (­w ith their ethnicity recorded) oc​­ cur on subscription lists and as honorands. Various categories of ­foreigners – metoikoi, paroikoi, perioikoi, katoikoi, and xenoi, at times listed following one a­ nother – ​­are present along with the politai in international alliances of friendship such as sympoliteia, joint citizenship, and in honorary decrees (­e.g., PHI Ionia/­Smyrna no. 14; IK Smyrna no. 573). What status these different groups had within the poleis does not emerge immediately. There is, however, no reason to believe that they, when denominated as foreigners, enjoyed the status of citizenship in the host country. 434

Citizenship in the Hellenistic period

Although they did not enjoy citizenship, resident aliens on the whole made up an important part of the population, not least because of their financial contribution in the form of taxes and liturgies. The protection of aliens by law facilitated everyday life and was in accordance with the diplomatic efforts to maintain good relations with other poleis. Instead of regarding resident aliens as ‘­outsiders within’, it would be more proper to regard them as a group with an elevated status. The host polis made a profit from this group, but as long as the host country paid regard to the statutory rules and did not abuse the rights of resident foreigners, there seems not to have been any serious risk of insurrection or claims for political influence. Even though there was a clear change in the attitudes to citizenship in the Hellenistic period, resident foreigners did not obtain this status without certain qualifications and citizen women never did. Still in Hellenistic decrees, the status of citizenship was described explicitly and resident foreigners were still distinguished from citizens (­and other groups) by their denominations as metoikoi, etc. Citizenship, both in a nominal sense with the right to deliberate and decide in political matters, and with regard to its ­h igh-​­status identity, was also henceforward a privilege which was cherished.

Women’s position Women in general, of course, also belong to the categories of slaves and foreigners, but the focus here is principally set on citizen women politis (­pl. politides), although as members of the community the activity of free foreign women will be considered as well. The last decades’ studies on women in ancient Greece are, among other things, concerned with the relation between oikos and polis (­Katz 2004: 298). Cohen emphasizes women’s primary responsibility for managing the household. He also points out that the denomination of women as politides reflects the importance of women within the household as well as the centrality of the household within the polis. According to him, important areas of the community, such as social, economic, and religious life, were open to women (­Cohen 2000: 37, ­45–​­46). Thus, the traditionally perceived divergence between the private oikos and the political/­public polis is toned down. Katz points out that the difference between women, on the one hand, and metics and slaves, on the other hand, is that all men could potentially acquire political rights. Metics and slaves were legally excluded, but metics might be granted citizenship as a reward for their service to the polis, and slaves when freed could attain the status of metics, and thus theoretically qualify for citizenship. Women, however, were always excluded due to the barrier of gender and could never acquire full political rights. Consequently, according to Katz, ‘­women were the only group excluded both on principle and in practice from political rights’ (­Katz 2004: 302). On the other hand, a strong focus on political institutions might subordinate other aspects of social life which constituted the polis. Certainly, political rights made up an important privilege, but there were probably considerably more citizens participating in religious rituals and festivals or working for a living than there were leisured citizens debating and deliberating on political issues, and the same probably holds true for women and metics, too (­Katz 2004: 3­ 04–​­305).

Control of women by gynaikonomoi When studying the status of women in ancient Greece, the magisterial title of ­gynaikonomos, ‘­supervisor of women’ is worth mentioning (­Wallensten 2003: ­43–​­44). 435

Susanne Carlsson

The office is attested in various poleis in epigraphic and literary sources ranging from the fourth century BCE until the second century CE. The duties sometimes included a wide range of tasks other than those concerning women, but the essence of these duties was policing moral behaviour, especially that of women (­Ogden 1996: 364). Aristotle made some general statements on this office (­Pol. 1299a.22, 1300a.4, 1322b.39). He points out that the office is not democratic but aristocratic, since poor women cannot be prevented from going out and about; the poor have no slaves as attendants, but they have to use wives and children. In Asia Minor, the office is epigraphically attested in Skamandros (­PHI Mysia and Troas/­Skamander no. 171), Kaikos (­Syll.3 no. 1219), Didyma (­Didyma nos. 84, 361), Samos (­Michel Ètudes Anatoliennes, Paris 1937, ­56–​­57, no. 1149), Smyrna, and Magnesia on the Maiander (­IMagnesia no. 98 Syll.3 no. 589). Daniel Ogden recognizes five fields of responsibility for the gynaikonomoi: (­1) supervising the training and performance of women’s festivals, corresponding to that of paidonomoi for boys (­e.g., Syll.3 no. 589); (­2) controlling women’s performance of funeral rites and that the time of grieving was not exceeded (­e.g., LSAM no. 16, Guide no. 730); (­3) control of women’s exit from the house (­Arist. Pol. 1300a.4, 1322b.39); (­4) control of women’s morality and appearance in public regulated by their dress; and (­5), lastly, the curbing of womanish behaviour in men (­Ogden 1996: ­364–​­375). Transgressions by women of some of these regulations are attested to have incurred fines dedicated to the gods (­LSCG no. 65, ­13–​­26; Dillon 2002: 264). Ogden suggests that the surveillance of women was ultimately intended to control legitimacy, and that lists recording the viability of the newborn child were kept by the gynaikonomoi. Other, less common, officials for the surveillance of women and legitimacy were the hierothynai in Rhodes and kosmophylakes in Kyzikos (­Ogden 1996: 363, 3­ 73–​­375). Thus, it is obvious that society institutionalized the control of women, a control that also prevented women from taking part in the male community.

Women’s activities in ancient Greece In the h ­ alf-​­private/­­half-​­public sphere of the labour market, it is well known, although far from acknowledged, that citizen and ­non-​­citizen women in ancient Greece participated actively in domains such as agriculture, stock breeding, and viticulture, handicraft, manufacture, and commerce, and that they served as midwives, physicians and wet nurses, courtesans, and entertainers (­Herfst 1979 [1922]; Cohen 2000: 108; Lefkowitz and Fant 2001: ­208–​­224, ­264–​­272). Reflecting upon the opposites, political ­inclusion-​ e­ xclusion, there is a whole range of states between having no and having full political rights. Despite the lack of outright political rights, citizen women did act in the public arena. In the Hellenistic period, judging foremost from the epigraphic record, there were three public spheres in which women were involved: religion, benefaction, and metic. Today (­in Western culture), religion is mainly assigned to the private sphere. In antiquity, religion was an integrated part of both public and private life. But already in the fifth century, women’s prominent sharing in religious life as worshippers and priestesses is well known. Usually in scholarship on female religious worship, the emphasis is on their role in fertility rites, but Matthew Dillon draws attention to the plays of Euripides in which women have very different roles, for instance, prophetic priests publicly ‘­on show’ at Delphi and Dodona and the most important role in the worship of the Fates and the Nameless Goddesses (­Dillon 2002: 1). Dillon points out that in 436

Citizenship in the Hellenistic period

Aristophanes’ plays women are given an obvious freedom of expression in divine matters (­Dillon 2002: 3). Women also dedicated various items, from small objects to altars, shrines, and marble statues, to the gods in their own right. Society openly acknowledged the major role women played (­van Bremen 1996: 150; Dillon 2002: ­9 –​­10, ­35–​­36). Even though they performed holy rites on behalf of the city, priestesses even in the Hellenistic period could have kyrioi, guardians. Thus, in spite of their undoubtedly important positions in public religious life, they were under male guardianship like most other Greek women (­Dillon 2002: ­79–​­80). Greek public finance relied heavily on individuals’ contributions of gifts or loans. Female dedicators acted in the religious context in the classical period, and in the Hellenistic era they extended this role to the secular area. Especially from the second century onwards, females of propertied families, foremost in western Asia Minor, increasingly appear in the epigraphic record as benefactors, often in the context of an office or liturgy. These women used their private property for civic purposes such as paying for buildings, statues, festivals, food, wine, and for gifts of money (­van Bremen 1996: 1). Conspicuous are two subscription lists from s­ econd-​­century Kos with only female donors. The first concerns the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos and Pontia, the other the temple of Demeter (­ICos. ED no. 178, ED no. 14; Höghammar 1997: 129). In a national emergency during the war against Philip V of Macedonia in 2­ 01–​­200 BCE, female citizens, three in Kos and two in Kalymna (­all without guardians), contributed money for defence purposes in their cities (­Migeotte 1992: nos. 50, 53). In the Koan subscription list, there is a possible fourth woman among the subscribers, Delphis, proposed to be identical with a Koan female poet. The name, however, is the same for both men and women, and since women only appear in the inscriptions by way of exception, it has been taken for granted that this was a man, but Höghammar argues that Delphis was a woman (­1997: 129). From the same years of unrest, two citizen women in Miletos (­one of which was accompanied by her guardian) are recorded among the granters of loan to the city (­Migeotte 1984: no. 97; 1992: no. 71). In return, female benefactors received civic honours similar to those bestowed on male benefactors, honours that were decreed by the demos and published on stelai set up in public space. Thus, benefactresses, whose generosity was necessary in community finance, were visible in public life in the same way as male benefactors. For example, in Augustan Kos, four women were granted by vote marble statues by the demos due to one or more of the virtues: aretē (­excellence), eunoia (­goodwill), and sōphrosynē (­moderation), which they had shown towards the father, the husband, the polis, and the emperor (­Höghammar 1993: 78, nos. 18, 31, 32, 68). It should be observed that the same moral virtues, except for sōphrosynē, are ascribed also to men honoured by the demos. A general objection to the significance of this visible emancipation is that, even if women contributed their own wealth, they were represented by a kyrios, probably also in those cases where the guardian is not mentioned. But there is no proof for the latter assertion, and therefore this view remains an example of our own negative or pessimistic idea of women in ancient Greece. Besides, the Athenocentric outlook does exert an impact on our view of ancient Greece in general. Thomas Beasley, who already in 1906 investigated the j­ uridical-​­economical function of women’s kyrioi outside Athens in the fourth and third centuries, argued in favour of the absence of guardians in some poleis. According to him, women acting as a principal party without the consent of a kyrios were especially prevalent in acts of manumission and in donations to, or foundations of, a religious corporation. With 437

Susanne Carlsson

or without the admission of a kyrios, women acted as agents, not least in significant financial matters, such as dealings in land transactions. Beasley concluded that the role of the guardian in Athens compared with other states differed in favour of women’s liberty of action outside Athens. An additional observation he made was the wide divergence between Athenian and ­non-​­Athenian laws of inheritance. In Athens, women were excluded from any share in the estate, whereas elsewhere daughters had a share in the inheritance (­Beasley 1906: ­249–​­253; Vatin 1970: ­243–​­252; Schaps 1975; on Sparta, see Hodkinson and Powell 1999). Another indication of female emancipation has been shown by Johanna Fabricius. In her study of Hellenistic sepulchral stones on Rhodes, it has become evident that citizen women participated in the symposia, the traditionally male community meetings (­Fabricius 1999). The Hellenistic symposia had a greater focus on food consumption and the power dynamics between the participants than the ritual communal drinking event during the archaic and classical periods (­Wecowski 2014; Lynch 2018: ­233–​­234). Lastly, although on a small scale, women did cross the threshold to a third even more conspicuous area. From the late Hellenistic period, women especially in Asia Minor are known to have held public office. In some instances, in the second and first centuries BCE, women held the eponymous office: as stephanēphoros at Sardis and Priene, and as dēmiourgos at Aspendos. In the Roman imperial period, evidence of female officials is considerably more frequent (­Sherk 1993: ­290–​­291; Kirbihler 1994). The significance of this female office holding has been disputed, but the overall opinion is that the titles were merely honorary in exchange for a fee (­Magie 1950: I, 649, II, ­1518–​­1519 n.50; van Bremen 1996: 33). Generally, in the late Hellenistic period, the holding of a public office involved the funding of public expenditures. Thus, wealth facilitated the way into office holding. Van Bremen points out that if no other rich person was obtainable, Hellenistic kings, deities, or the imperial family held the eponymous office more often than women (­van Bremen 1996: 31). According to her, the eponymous office had a religious character and, moreover, from the second century onwards, the perceived difference between a woman taking on a religious and a civic liturgy was less (­van Bremen 1996: 34). In all three aspects of women’s participation in public life, wealth seems to have been crucial to their ability to act and has to some degree become an argument used to reduce the significance of women’s entrance into public life, as testified by public documents. Wealth, however, facilitated access to offices also for men and the ensuing public honours. The contribution of individuals’ wealth was required for public interest of the poleis. One thing to keep in mind is that in Hellenistic times it became more common for offices to be held by aristocrats who with their wealth could act as benefactors. Poleis became more and more dependent on wealthy citizens (­Wiemer 2013: 6­ 4–​­65). In this context, it may have been necessary for wealthy women to contribute financially by holding office. The epigraphic evidence of women acting politically and appearing in public is not very great, and this sparse presence, which increased over time, may be interpreted in several ways. One is the obvious fact that from the Hellenistic period onwards, in addition to their traditional participation in religious matters, individual women were allowed and maybe even required to contribute to society with their private means, and for this they received public gratitude from the demos. Women could also hold nominally or actually public office. Even in those cases where they were under guardianship, their visibility, both in the acts of benefaction and afterwards in the 438

Citizenship in the Hellenistic period

public documents honouring them, must have been significant and prestigious, just as it was for men. It has been suggested that the boundary between private and public was eased in the Hellenistic period and that the social sphere became a more important arena of action (­Patterson 1998: 223; Wallensten 2003: 127). This presumed shift in focus may constitute an explanation of women’s increased visibility. Another, diverging interpretation is that the sparse occurrence of women in such inscriptions is significant in itself. Whether the crossing of gender borders coincided with or was caused by serious societal crises, such as war, is a matter for further investigation. At least the Koan and Kalymnian subscriptions for defence in the emergence of war, as well as the loan to the polis of Miletos, constitute three examples which support the theory of a reduced dichotomy between the sexes in a time of crisis. However, according to the epigraphic evidence, women occur publicly as donors to a greater extent when there is no danger of war. Obviously, to judge from the epigraphic record, women occur increasingly as benefactresses during the course of the Hellenistic period. This signifies a change in attitudes, but women’s formal actions and visibility were, nevertheless, made possible only by the consent of the male demos.

Concluding remarks The exclusive citizenship limited individuals and societies as well in at least two respects: (­1) excluded groups were prevented from exerting an influence on political decisions; and (­2) the exclusion of these groups deprived society of the very same people’s potential contributions in political deliberation and responsibilities. It is probable that the political agenda, as well as the politics pursued, would have had a somewhat different content if more people and other groups had enjoyed the privilege of political participation. Although referring only to male citizens, Aristotle, in his defence of democracy, was of the opinion that none of the many is individually a man of excellence, but each of the many has part of excellence and intelligence, and when they join together, they are better than those few who are the best. For this reason, a mass can judge many things better than any single man (­Arist. Pol. 1281a.­40–​­1281b.9). Jameson draws attention to ancient sources which express the viewpoint that the principles of democracy lead to the breakdown of status distinctions and distinctions between sections of the population, that is, subordinated women, slaves, and metics ­v is-­​­­à-​­v is privileged citizens (­Jameson 2004: 286; Xen. Hell. 2.3.48; Arist. Pol. 1313b.­32–​­36; Plut. Vit. Phoc. 34). Thus, democratic government, in the context of the subordination and exploitation of the state’s own inhabitants, implied a greater ideological and virtual contradiction than, for instance, oligarchic rule. The scholarly focus on other areas of society than the purely political shows that women and metics played important and indispensable roles in economic and social life, but this did not mean that they were equal with the male citizens, who set the formal limits of participation in political, social, and economic life. It is true that the notion of exclusive citizenship was relaxed in the Hellenistic period and citizenship was increasingly bestowed on praiseworthy individuals, sometimes even on slaves. The coveted status of citizenship, however, survived well into the Roman period, and consequently resident and ­non-​­resident foreigners continued to be demarcated as separate categories in polis decrees. Thus, citizenship was still a privilege. In spite of the increased number of manumissions and the generally 439

Susanne Carlsson

negative attitude to slavery held by the Hellenistic philosophers, the extent of slavery was not reduced in that period; on the contrary, piracy and wars of conquest increased the supply of slaves. As for women, the discernible change between the classical and the Hellenistic and Roman periods is more distinct. Doubtlessly, women increasingly took part in public duties and were officially acknowledged by the demos. This implies some change in attitudes to what a woman was allowed to do in public, but women were still deprived of the privilege of active citizenship. The male norm and the dichotomy, maintained by the exclusivity of citizenship and political participation, persisted. There was no reason for the male citizen to voluntarily relinquish power and privileges to women and other groups. This unwillingness was, I believe, dependent on two interrelated features. Firstly, the ideological notion formalized labour division and the exclusivity of citizenship and maintained a sense of equality. Secondly, on a more pragmatic level, slaves, women, and metics (­of which some also had slaves) bestowed the male citizens with domestic service, manpower, and revenue. All these were integral parts of the private and public economy and the social order. The demand for and existence of justification theories on the subordination of women and the institution of slavery shows that these states of things were at heart not taken for granted. Paul Cartledge summarizes the Greeks’ solution to cultural problems of ethnicity, gender, political and social identity. According to him, they transformed these into binary oppositions: ­men – ​­women; ­Greeks – ​­barbarians; ­citizens – ​­aliens; ­free – ​­slaves. Empirical facts that undermined these polarities were either ignored or excused.5 Biological or cultural differences were constructed as hierarchical relations of domination and subordination (­Cartledge 1993: 169). It goes without saying that, regardless of time period, citizens, in the absolute sense and in the capacity of being superior, identified themselves as men, Greeks, citizens, and free.

Notes 1 For context, comments, and disputes, see Cary (­1928); Larsen (­1929); Fraser (­­1956–​­1958); Kwapong (­1969: ­99–​­109); Bagnall (­1976: ­25–​­37). 2 Aristotle was aware that in too large communities, foreigners and resident aliens could easily share in the government and without difficulty escape detection (­A rist. Pol. 1326b.­ 18–​­20). 3 Wijma (­2014) addresses the acceptance of metics into official festivals in classical Athens and their roles in them. 4 Polyb. 36.17.­5 –​­10; Strabo 8.8.1; Plut. Mor. De def. or. ­413f–​­414a; Dio Chrys. Or. 33.25; Cic. Flac. 16.­62–​­62; Hor. Epist. 2.2.­81–​­86; Ov. Met. 15.430; Sen. E­p. 14.3(­91).10). 5 Although this chapter does not address the slave population and their status, it is worthwhile to mention that there are recent studies focusing on the social integration and social agency of slaves, e.g., Vlassopulos (­2015).

Bibliography Alcock, S.E. (­1996) Graecia capta: the landscapes of Roman Greece (­Cambridge) Ando, C. (­1999) ‘­Was Rome a polis?’, ClAnt 18.1, ­5 –​­34 Austin, M.M. (­1981) The Hellenistic world from Alexander to the Roman conquest: a selection of ancient sources in translation (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2006) The Hellenistic world from Alexander to the Roman conquest: a selection of ancient sources in translation, 2nd augmented edition (­Cambridge) Bagnall, R.S. (­1976) The administration of the Ptolemaic possessions outside Egypt (­Leiden) Beasley, T.W. (­1906) ‘­The kyrios in Greek states other than Athens’, CR 20, ­249–​­253

440

Citizenship in the Hellenistic period Blok, J. (­2013) ‘­Citizenship, the citizen body, and its assemblies’, in H. Beck (­ed.) A companion to ancient Greek government (­London) ­161–​­175 Brock, R. (­2015) ‘­Law and citizenship in the Greek poleis’, in E.M. Harris and M. Canevaro (­eds) The Oxford handbook of ancient Greek law (­Oxford), online publication: https://­w ww.oxfordhandbooks.com/­v iew/­10.1093/­oxfordhb/­9780199599257.001.0001/­­oxfordhb-­​­­9780199599257-­​­­e -​ ­15 (­accessed 10 February 2021) Brock, R. and Hodkinson, S. (­eds) (­2000) Alternatives to Athens: varieties of political organization and community in ancient Greece (­Oxford) Brown, E. (­2006) ‘­Hellenistic cosmopolitanism’, in M.L. Gill and P. Pellegrin (­eds) A companion to ancient philosophy (­Malden, MA and Oxford) ­549–​­558 Carlsson, S. (­2010) Hellenistic democracies: freedom, independence and political procedure in some ­E ast- ​­G reek ­city-​­states (­Stuttgart) Cartledge, P. (­1993) ‘­Like a worm i’the bud? A heterology of classical Greek slavery’, G&R 40.2, ­163–​­180 Cary, M. (­1928) ‘­A constitutional inscription from Cyrene’, JHS 48, ­222–​­238 Cohen, E.E. (­2000) The Athenian nation (­Princeton, NJ) Diller, A. (­1937) Race mixture among the Greeks before Alexander (­Urbana, IL) Dillon, M. (­2002) Girls and women in classical Greek religion (­London and New York) Erskine, A. (­1990) The Hellenistic stoa: political thought and action (­London) Fabricius, J. (­1999) Die hellenistische Totenmahlreliefs. Grabrepresäntation und Wertvorstellungen in ostgriechische Städte, Studien zur antiken Stadt 3 (­Munich) Fraser, P.M. (­­1956–​­1958) ‘­Inscriptions from Cyrene’, Berytus 12, ­120–​­127 Garlan, Y. (­1988) Slavery in ancient Greece (­Ithaca, NY and London) Habicht, C. (­1997) Athens from Alexander to Antony (­Cambridge and London) Harrison, A.R.W. (­1968) The law of Athens (­Oxford) Herfst, P. (­1979 [1922]) Le travail de la femme dans la Grèce ancienne (­New York) Hodkinson, S. and Powell, S. (­eds) (­1999) Sparta: new perspectives (­London) Höghammar, K. (­1993) Sculpture and society: a study of the connection between the f­ ree-​­standing sculpture and society on Kos in the Hellenistic and Augustan Periods, Boreas. Uppsala Studies in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Civilizations (­Uppsala) ——— (­ ​­1997) ‘­Women in public space: Cos c. 200 BC to c. AD 15/­20’, in I. Jenkins and G.B. Waywell (­eds) Sculptors and sculpture of Caria and the Dodecanese (­London) ­127–​­133 Jameson, M.H. (­2004) ‘­Women and democracy in fourth century Athens’, in E.W. Robinson (­ed.) Ancient Greek democracy: readings and sources (­Malden, MA and Oxford) 2­ 81–​­292 Kapparis, K. (­2003) ‘­Women and family in Athenian law’, in A. Lanni (­ed.) Athenian law in its democratic context, Centre for Hellenic Studies ­On-​­Line Discussion Series. Republished in C.W. Blackwell (­ed.) Demos: classical Athenian democracy, online publication: http://­w ww. stoa.org/­projects/­demos/­home (­accessed November 27, 2020) Katz, M. (­2004) ‘­Women and democracy in ancient Greece’, in E.W. Robinson (­ed.) Ancient Greek democracy: readings and sources (­Malden, MA and Oxford) ­292–​­312 Kirbihler, F. (­1994) ‘­Les femmes magistrates et liturges en Asie Mineure (­IIe s. av. J.-​­C.IIIe s. ap. J.-​­C.)’, Ktema 19, ­51–​­75 Konstan, D. (­2009) ’Cosmopolitan traditions’, in R.K. Ballot (­ed.) A companion to ancient Greek and Roman political thought (­Chichester) ­473– ​­484 Kwapong, A.A. (­1969) ‘­Citizenship and democracy in fourth century Cyrene’, in L.-​­A. Thompson and J. Ferguson (­eds) Africa in classical antiquity (­Ibadan) ­99–​­109 Laks, A. and Schofield, M. (­eds) (­1995) Justice and generosity: studies in Hellenistic social and political philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum (­Cambridge) Larsen, J.A.O. (­1929) ‘­Notes on the constitutional inscription from Cyrene’, CPh 24, ­351–​­368 Lefkowitz, M.R. and Fant, M.B. (­2001) Women’s life in Greece and Rome: a source book in translation (­London) Lynch, K. (­2018) ‘­The Hellenistic symposium as feast’, in J. van den Eijnde, J. Blok, and R. Strootman (­eds) Feasting and polis institutions (­Leiden) ­233–​­256 Ma, J. (­2000) ‘­T he epigraphy of Hellenistic Asia Minor: a survey of recent research (­­1992–​­1999)’, AJA 104, ­95–​­121 Magie, D. (­1950). Roman rule in Asia Minor: to the end of the third century after Christ, I. Text, vol. II: Notes (­Princeton, NJ)

441

Susanne Carlsson Migeotte, L. (­1984) L’emprunt public dans les cités grecques: recueil des documents et analyse critique (­Québec and Paris) ——— ​­(­1992) Les souscription publiques dans les cités grecques (­Quebec) Müller, C. (­2014) ‘(­De)­constructing politeia: reflections on citizenship and the bestowal of privileges upon foreigners in hellenisitic democracies’, Annales (­HSS) 69.3, ­533–​­554 Niku, M. (­2007) The official status of the foreign residents in Athens, ­322-​­120 B.C. (­Helsinki) Nussbaum, M.C. (­1996) ‘­political theory’, in OCD 3 (­Oxford) Ogden, D. (­1996) Greek bastardy in the classical and Hellenistic periods (­Oxford) Patterson, C.B. (­1998) The family in Greek history (­Cambridge and London) Rhodes, P.J. (­1972) The Athenian boule (­Oxford) Schaps, D. (­1975) ‘­Women in Greek inheritance law’, CQ 25.1, ­53–​­57 Sherk, R.K. (­1993) ‘­The eponymous officials of Greek cities V’, ZPE 96, ­267–​­295 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, S.M. (­1978). Ancient Cos: an historical study from the Dorian settlement to the imperial period (­Göttingeyn) Thür, G. (­2002) ‘­Xenias graphe’, Der Neue Pauly 12.2, 613 (­Stuttgart) van Bremen, R. (­1996) The limits of participation: women and civic life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman period (­A msterdam) Vatin, C. (­1970) Recherches sur le marriage e la condition de la femme mariée à l’époque hellénistique (­Paris) Vlassopulos, K. (­2015) ‘­Plotting strategies, networks and communities in classical Athens: the evidence of slave names’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (­eds) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) ­101–​­127 Wallensten, J. (­2003) Αφροδίτηι Ανέθηκεν Άρξας: a study of dedications to Aphrodite from Greeks magistrates, diss. Lund (­unpublished) Wiemer, H.-​­U. (­2013) ‘­Hellenistic cities: the end of Greek democracy?’, in H. Beck (­ed.) A companion to ancient Greek government (­London) ­54– ​­69 Wijma, S.M. (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­­5th–​­4th century BC) (­Stuttgart) Whitehead, D. (­1977) The ideology of the Athenian metic (­Cambridge) Wecowski, M. (­2014) The rise of the Greek aristocratic banquet (­Oxford)

442

31 CITIZENSHIP IN THE CLASSICAL AND HELLENISTIC WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN Randall Souza

Introduction This chapter examines the ideologies and practices of citizenship that developed in the communities of the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean.1 Those ideologies and practices constitute a discourse between group and individuals about rights and responsibilities as well as an emotional or affective sense of belonging to a community.2 In this chapter, therefore, I consider both forms of citizenship, legalistic and affective, with the understanding that they produce and affect each other; neither one explains everything on its own (­­Figure 31.1). ‘­Classical’ and ‘­Hellenistic’ are chronological terms created for the study of the Eastern Mediterranean, and they can lack salience in the areas to be discussed here.3 For the sake of convenience, the scope of this chapter will extend as far back as the early fifth century BCE, and as far forward as the very beginning of the second, roughly ­500–​­200. The ‘­Western Mediterranean’ is also a slippery concept; in this chapter, it will refer to the waters, shores, and inland zones running c­ ounter-​­clockwise from the Gulf of Venice to the Gulf of Tunis. The chapter begins with general observations about Greek citizens and citizenship in the Western Mediterranean, and it then proceeds to examine, in turn, three broad regions: the southern Italian peninsula, the island of Sicily, and the coast along the Gulf of Lion. These regional summaries are followed by a concluding section that addresses the phenomena affecting the development of citizenship concepts over the course of the classical and Hellenistic periods.

Citizen bodies, new and old A distinctive feature of Greek citizenship in the Western Mediterranean is the fact that it developed in the absence of any natural basis for a political community. The Greeks living here were well aware that their ancestors had come from somewhere else, if not DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-37

443

Randall Souza

within living memory then within recorded history (­Moggi 2006: 7­ 8–​­79). The oikistai (‘­founders’) could be honoured as heroes, but they remained figures with origins among the Greeks of the Aegean and the Balkan peninsula. The western Greeks could see that their communities were artificial, imagined.

Hatria Felsina

Spina Gulf of Venice

Agathe

Nikaia Antipolis Massalia Olbia Athneˉopolis Taurois

TYRREˉNIA

ILLYRIS

Clusium Emporion

Rhode

Gulf of Lion

Velzna Adrias Kolpos

Corsica

Graviscae Tarquinia Caere Rome

Alalieˉ

Olbia Baleares Tharras

Sardinia

Ebusus Sulcis/Sulki

Iol

Icosium

Dikaiarkheia Capua Kyme Neapolis Pithkeˉoussai Metapontion Taras Poseidoˉnia Siris-Herakleia Hyeleˉ Kallipo Pyxous Laos Sybaris-Thourioi

Carali Nora

Krotoˉn Terina Mesma Hippoˉnion Matauos Lipara Solus Kauloˉnia Lokroi Epizephyrioi Mylai Tyndaris Panormus Drepanon Halaisa Messana Rhegion Eryx Motya-Lilybaion Ietas Himera-Therma Naxos Entella Selinous Makella Kataneˉ Hippo Diarrhytus Heˉraklia Minoˉa Megara Hyblaia Leontinoi Akragas Hippo Regius Gulf of Tunis Menai Utica Syracuse Gela-Phintias Carthage/ Kamarina Cossyra Akrai Kasmenai Qart-hadast

Sicily

Igilgili Cirta

Hadrumetum

Ruspina Thapsus

Gaulum

Melita

­Figure 31.1  Greek and Phoenician settlements in the Western Mediterranean. By the early fifth century, Greek settlements existed along swaths of the coastal Western Mediterranean. The major recorded settlements, the apoikiai (‘­homes away from home’) and the emporia (‘­trading centres’), had contributed via generations of interactions with indigenous populations to a change in urbanization patterns not only on the coasts, but on the inland as well. The numerous villages, forts, sanctuaries, and other smaller sites detected by archaeological surveys had filled in the regional landscapes that were anchored by the poleis themselves. And the growth of these old poleis cannot have been entirely s­ elf-​­generated via childbirth, but must have involved both the arrival of indigenous newcomers by land and the influx of Greek (­and other) newcomers by sea. Significant turnover in population is recorded for some of these cities in earlier periods, and it did not stop now. So while cities like Syracuse, Massalia, and Taras had existed for a century or more at the turn of the fifth century, their citizen bodies had not necessarily been stable in demographic terms nor was the ideological structure of their citizenship likely to be the same as in their earliest years. While the relatively older poleis continued to evolve over the classical and Hellenistic periods, new communities also came into being. Many of the new settlements were established by those older poleis themselves for particular economic or military purposes, for example, Thourioi and Herakleia in southern Italy, or Tyndaris in Sicily. 444

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

Indeed, Greek cities were frequently ‘­­re-​­founded’ throughout the period under consideration, especially in Sicily. One stark example is the tyrant Phintias’ relocation of the people of Gela to a new city that he created nearby and named after himself (­Diod. Sic. 22.2.2). The influx of Greeks to Sicily under the leadership of Timoleon in the middle of the fourth century certainly contributed to the mixing of people even in the citizen bodies of ­pre-​­existing poleis. Still other communities became poleis through the formalization of an existing settlement as a political unit of some kind, a process well known from the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean. Drepanon, for example, was already a port of some kind when it was established as a city by Hamilcar Barca ca. 260 (­Sammartano 2020). Many of the inland hilltop centres of Sicily, such as Monte Iato (­Ietas) and Montagnola di Marineo (­Makella), were not new foundations but rather ­long-​­existing settlements that built up the urban infrastructure of the polis over time, and they emerge in our sources as political communities over the course of the classical and Hellenistic periods.4 The fact that expressions of communal identity based on the Greek polis date to these periods and not before suggests that the operative concept of citizenship was new in some way. Of course, not all Greeks in the Western Mediterranean lived in poleis. Greek traders spent considerable time in ports throughout the region, and Greek mercenaries fought with and against Italian, Iberian, and Libyan mercenaries in armies led by Greek and Carthaginian generals, especially on Sicily. At the beginning of the fourth century, Greeks lived in ­Phoenician-​­descended Motya, and in Carthage itself. Some Greeks may also have lived, or died, in indigenous centres, if at least some of the Greek material culture in burials was the result of migration rather than trade. These Greeks experienced the lack of practical and affective polis-​­citizenship. In addition, while a polis formally included all its citizens in the community, in practice citizens living in the chōra (‘­territory’) were neither practically nor ideologically included to the fullest extent (­Zuchtriegel 2018). Finally, one of the principal contentions of this chapter is that interaction and especially cohabitation of Greeks and ­non-​­Greeks throughout this ­super-​­region conditioned the forms that Greek citizenship could take here.5 The possibility and reality of human mobility is central to citizenship generally, especially when that mobility takes people across political, economic, or social boundaries. In the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean, mobility at various scales and in various modes defined the demographic landscape in which communities articulated their concepts of citizenship (­Purcell 2005). The present author’s doctoral dissertation examined the causes and effects of mobility and citizenship in classical and Hellenistic Sicily, inspired in part by the ‘­mobilities turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (­Urry 2000; Cresswell 2006). For southern Italy, Elena Isayev has developed an extensive and compelling body of work treating historical movement on the peninsula with rigorous theoretical grounding (­Isayev 2017, 2021). Reaching a comprehensive view of political life in such a mobile world can be difficult, but the instability of populations and cities must be addressed in any discussion of community dynamics, that is, of citizenship.

The Italian peninsula Citizenship in the Greek communities of the Italian peninsula (­the Italiōtai), which were concentrated mainly in the southern part, developed over the course of the fifth, fourth, and third centuries in dialogue with both metropolitan poleis and local groups, 445

Randall Souza

and with internal contact among themselves. In this section, I trace the outlines of an ‘­Italiote’ form of citizenship, which often involved a practice of political participation that mixed the Greek inhabitants of poleis with their Italic neighbours. Taras in the classical and Hellenistic periods was a major regional geopolitical actor, governing itself as a democracy for much of that time, and with an apparently stable citizen body. The beginning of democratic governance dates to the aftermath of a major military defeat by the Iapygoi ca. 473, in which many of the (­presumably ­aristocratic-​­oligarchic) leaders of the existing regime died.6 This episode demonstrates the power of demographic change: aside from the loss of any particularly charismatic leaders, the simple reduction in numbers of the ruling elites (­the gnōrimoi, ‘­notables’, in Aristotle) apparently empowered the rest of the citizens to institute a democracy, with the attendant changes in both formal and affective citizenship. During the leadership of Archytas in the early fourth century and in Aristotle’s lifetime, the Tarantinoi had both elected and randomly selected magistrates, and they also had some form of communal property that supported the poor (­Arist. Pol. 1320b.­11–​­14). The city’s democratic institutions, the citizen assembly above all, appear to have been quite strong down to the end of the Second Punic War. The history of the Kymaioi over the classical and Hellenistic periods illustrates the ways in which citizenship, both formal and affective, could change drastically. At the beginning of the fifth century the city of Kyme was ruled by the tyrant Aristodamos, but ca. 490 returned to what was evidently an aristocratic constitution (­Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.4.­4 –​­7.11.4). Around 470, the Kymaioi established Neapolis as a new polis on the site of their own prior settlement Parthenope, turning some Kymaioi into Neapolitai, and inaugurating a complicated relationship between the two poleis that would last for centuries. In 421, Kyme itself was captured by a Campanian (­Samnite) army which took over the city for itself. Diodorus writes of plunder, an exandrapodismos (­the slaughter of any armed resistance and the seizure of all survivors as slaves, see Gaca 2010), and Campanian settlers. Still, both the existence of surviving Kymaioi who fled to Neapolis and the survival of Greek cultural practices at Kyme indicate that the liquidation of the city’s Greek inhabitants was never complete, and perhaps never contemplated.7 Kyme evidently stopped minting its own coins ca. 420, though coins were minted for the new ­Kymaioi – ​­in Neapolis (­see below and Rutter 1979: ­8 –​­41, ­91–​­96). The sexual violence mentioned in passing by Strabo (­καὶ δὴ καὶ ταῖς γυναιξὶν αὐτῶν συνῴκησαν αὐτοί), if accurately recorded, may explain the perseverance of Greek culture, but by Strabo’s time it was also a ­literary-​­historical trope that when Campanians captured a city they killed the men and seized the women as wives (­cf. Diodorus’ narration of similar episodes at Entella in 404, Messana in the 280s, and Rhegion in 270). In the brutal and anarchic ancient Mediterranean, such violence was certainly thinkable, and so it would not be necessarily surprising to find that the women of Kyme did survive, suffering, well after the city’s capture. However, we must recognize that the Campanian takeover may not have been quite so hostile or sudden as it has been recorded. Neapolis represents a fascinating case of a colony serving as a refuge for survivors of its captured mētropolis and also a destination for the descendants or relatives of the mētropolis’ captors. It was, to some extent, both a continuation of the citizen body of Kyme and a Campanian city. The arrivals of other Greeks soon after the foundation (­see above) meant that from the beginning Neapolis had a population with mixed origins (­Strabo 5.4.7). The new settlement also formed a second urban centre in the area, 446

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

which coexisted alongside the older centre Parthenope, now called Palaipolis (­Livy 8.22.5). We have already seen that some survivors from the 421 seizure of Kyme ended up there, but the civic status of these new arrivals is not known. Later, in the second half of the fourth century, as a result of a vaguely defined internal conflict, the Neapolitai evidently absorbed an unknown number of Campanians explicitly as citizens (­Strabo 5.4.7). While the precise nature of the conflict is not known, the fact that its solution was sought in the addition of Campanians as citizens suggests that it was not purely an internal dispute. By the later fourth century, then, Neapolis thus mixed Kymaian, Campanian, and other Greek populations together in a citizen body that was apparently democratic in form. Strabo explicitly notes that the incoming Campanians were eligible to serve as dēmarchoi (­head magistrates, literally ‘­leaders of the people’), indicating that they were full citizens; by the same token if these newcomers had this right, then presumably (­but not necessarily!) so did the various Greek inhabitants of the city, whatever their origin. The Neapolitan conflict with Rome in 327 was actually precipitated by a proposal of the Samnites to help the Neapolitai attack and capture Campanian Kyme in order to restore it to the descendants of the Kymaioi who had fled the city ca. 421 (­Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 15.6.4). This fact suggests that the Neapolitai of Kymaian origins retained a separate sense of attachment to their ancestors’ home city, while simultaneously confirming that the Neapolitai as a whole continued to pay attention to the interests of kindred populations.8 The proposal was not executed, and both cities came under the influence of the Roman state in the Second Samnite War, with the defeated Neapolitai receiving a ­so-​­called foedus aequum (‘­fair treaty’) with Rome that allowed it considerable internal autonomy.9 Citizenship remained formally and officially a Greek one to judge from the persistence of Greek as the epigraphic language of the city well into the Roman period, and from the related ­para-​­polis institutions of gymnasium, ephēbeia (­­pre-​­m ilitary training), and phratriai (­civic subdivisions) attested by Strabo. The Neapolitai of the late fourth and third centuries included individuals with varied ethnic origins, governing themselves as a Greek polis under the overall authority of the Roman Republic. Sybaris and its descendant communities demonstrate the possibilities and dangers of relocation under threat from a neighbouring Greek hegemonic power. The original Sybaris was not entirely annihilated in the 510 war with Kroton, but it survived as an unhappily dependent community. Coinage with ­QRO-​­SY abbreviating the ethnics of both poleis has been dated to the period after 510, and in 467 the Sybaritai appealed to Hieron I of Syracuse when they were under siege by the Krotoniatai (­Diod. Sic. 11.48.4). There was apparently enough of a surviving population several generations after the city’s sack to attempt to resist the domination of Kroton, even if unsuccessfully. An attempted refoundation in some connection with Thessalians ca. 453 led the Krotoniatai to once again expel the population, which now in exile asked Athens and Sparta for help, setting the stage for the creation of Thourioi (­Diod. Sic. 11.90.34, 12.10.­2 –​­4). Settling in Thourioi was another disaster for the Sybaritai, who dominated political life in the new foundation and were thus attacked and partially killed off by their fellow citizens (­Diod. Sic. 12.11.­1–​­2). Finally, survivors of this stasis (­factional civic strife, often violent) resettled at a ­thus-​­far unidentified site on the Traeis river, continuing to live as a polis of Sybaritai through the second half of the fifth century before they were once again expelled, this time by the Brettioi, and the community ceased to exist (­Diod. Sic. 12.22.1; Polybius 2.39.6; Strabo 6.1.14). In the classical period, the Sybaritai 447

Randall Souza

constituted a polis community defined by resistance to the threat of extinction, and not a successful one. Thourioi, as noted above, was founded on the initiative of the Sybaritai in exile, but it seems that the citizen body quickly came to exclude the Sybaritai entirely. Athenians and Peloponnesians (­sent by Sparta) comprised a group of new settlers arriving in Sybaris ca. 446/­445 in response to an appeal by the Sybaritai for demographic reinforcement and aid in resettling their polis (­Diod. Sic. 12.10.4). However, the Sybaritai, a minority of the citizens by that time, excluded the newcomers from equal participation in the socio-economic life of the city, monopolizing the higher public offices, religious duties, and ­closer-​­lying agricultural land (­Diod. Sic. 12.11.1; Arist. Pol. 1303a.­31–​­33). The newcomers clearly resented this political domination and their solution in the following year, 445/­444 was to murder the Sybaritai (­though some must have escaped, see above), take over the city, and bring in additional Greek settlers to inhabit the city and fully exploit its territory (­Diod. Sic. 12.11.2). The year after this, in 444/­443, the resulting community, now calling itself Thourioi, was formally established on democratic principles and with formal and practical equality among the citizens despite their different origins and order of arrival (­Diod. Sic. 12.11.­3 –​­4, cf. 12.12.­1–​­4). In particular, Diodorus’ description of the phylai (‘­tribes’) representing the different Greek ethnicities (­e.g., Arkadian, Achaian, Ionian, Euboian, etc.) suggests explicit attention to the potential problem and an attempt to channel into official processes the kind of conflict that had led the Athenian and Peloponnesian settlers to murder their hosts a few years earlier. While sources consistently refer to the good planning and organization of Thourioi as a polis community, civic life was not universally harmonious. A first stasis came about early on between Thourian citizens of Athenian and Peloponnesian origins and was only resolved by the Delphic Oracle’s declaration that Apollo was the founder (­Diod. Sic. 12.35.­1–​­3, under his rubric for 434). Then, during the Peloponnesian War, ap ­ ro-​­Athenian faction exiled an ­anti-​­Athenian faction after a stasis in 413, and after ­ ro-​­Athenians (­Thuc. 7.33.5; Dion. the war the a­ nti-​­Athenians returned and exiled the p Hal. Lys. 1; Plut. Mor. 835e). Two further references to stasis may coincide with these factional disputes, or they may have occurred later, but in combination they suggest a familiar ­back-­​­­and-​­forth dynamic. In one conflict, the people rose up against an oligarchic regime that had appropriated so much land and set property qualifications so high that they dominated political offices, with the result that the land was redistributed, the qualifications for office were lowered, and more offices were created (­Arist. Pol. 1307a.­ 27–​­33). In another conflict, a group of young military leaders drew on popular support to cement their power by first abolishing a law mandating a ­four-​­year break between holding the office of stratēgos (‘­general’) and then, presumably leveraging the group’s continuous hold on the office, they dominated the whole of civic life (­Arist. Pol. 1307b.­ 6–​­19). It is possible that the two events proceeded in this order, because through the latter part of the fourth century into the third century Thourioi was led by an oligarchy favoured by the Romans. Communities linked to Sybaris and Thourioi consisted of citizens with both Greek and Lucanian origins. Poseidonia famously combined Greek and Italic populations, with the Greek element suppressed in its Lucanian phase. A colony of Sybaris, it became subject to Lucanian rule between the late fifth and early fourth centuries, with the result that Aristoxenos of Taras could write that the Greeks in Poseidonia had ‘­thoroughly barbarized’ (­Aristoxenos fr. 124 Wehrli ap. Ath. 14.632). In fact, Aristoxenos specifies 448

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

that they changed the language and their entire culture from Greek to barbarian (i.e., Lucanian), except for one annual festival at which they mourned the memory of their past. The Greek Poseidoniatai retained a sense of their ­Hellenic collective identity, but otherwise what it meant to be a citizen of the city is also obscure. Herakleia in Lucania was a new settlement established by Thourioi and Taras on the site of Siris, and like both Laos and Poseidonia, but unlike Thourioi itself, the city incorporated Lucanian elements in its citizen body. The origin of the foundation, ca. 433, in the aftermath of a conflict between Thourioi and Taras, suggests joint participation and contribution of settlers.10 By the late fourth century, Herakleia had a polis apparatus of a variety of officials, including ephors (­p erhaps recalling T ­ arantine-​ ­Spartan influence), and during a public investigation of violations against sacred land, they also convened a ‘­specially summoned assembly’ (­IG XIV 645). The results of this investigation were inscribed in the famous Tavole Greche (‘­G reek Tables’) and while most of the individuals recorded have Greek names, some of the officials, certainly citizens, have names based in local Italic and other languages on the margins of Greek (­Lomas 2000: ­178–​­179). From a practical and affective perspective, Gabriel Zuchtriegel has recently evaluated in depth the limits of Greekness and citizenship in Herakleia (­Zuchtriegel 2018). While there was undoubtedly some antagonism between the largely Greek community of Herakleia and the largely ­non-​­Greek communities neighbouring it, there was also interaction across the boundary of formal citizenship. A final case to consider is Rhegion, whose demographic and constitutional history in this period was unsurprisingly entwined with developments in Sicily, especially Syracuse. The city began the fifth century under tyranny (­of Anaxilas and his sons, with an interlude when Mikythos ruled), but these regimes ended ca. 461 with the broader Sicilian movement against tyrants that Diodorus called the koinon dogma (­Diod. Sic. 11.76.­4 –​­6). Diodorus strongly implies that the tyrannies were replaced by democracies, but this is not certain in most cases since he paints with a very broad brush. By 413, Thucydides tells us, the city had ‘­for a long time’ been experiencing stasis, with the result that exiles from Rhegion were living in Lokroi encouraging the Lokrians to attack Rhegion itself (­Thuc. 4.1.3). The remaining Rheginoi were almost entirely wiped out some 20 years later, in 387, by Dionysios I of Syracuse when he captured the city after a devastating siege and took 6,000 captives to Syracuse; those who could pay one mina of silver as ransom could go free and perhaps return home while the rest were sold off as slaves (­Diod. Sic. 14.108, ­110–​­112; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 20.7.­2 –​­3). A generation after that, Dionysios II evidently rebuilt part of the city, but ca. 351 the Syracusans opposed to the tyrant captured the city from Dionysios’ garrison and handed it over to its inhabitants (­Diod. Sic. 16.45.9). Thus, by the second half of the fourth century, there was once again an autonomous Rhegion governed in some way by its own citizens, likely including newcomers supplementing the depleted population. Rhegion experienced another major demographic injury in the early third century that significantly altered its citizen body. Sometime after 282, a garrison of Campanian mercenaries installed by the Romans at the request of the Rheginoi massacred a large part of the Rhegian population, targeting the wealthy and influential citizens, and took control of the city.11 The mercenaries were themselves defeated by a Roman citizen army some years later, and the surviving Rheginoi one again regained their political community.12 Notably, the citizen body now lacked its former elites, and its autonomy was now unambiguously circumscribed by Roman interests. 449

Randall Souza

Sicily Citizenship in Sicily during the classical and Hellenistic periods was conditioned by interactions and mobility among the Greek communities with others on the island, and also between these groups and the Greeks of the southern Italian peninsula. None of the other large Western Mediterranean islands (Corsica, Sardinia, or the Baleares) preserves direct evidence of political organization or formal citizenship before Roman conquest, whether Greek, Punic, or local, though attempts have been made to assess related concepts of local and regional identities.13 In this section, I survey the events and processes in the history of this period that involve citizenship on Sicily. For Syracuse, several important phenomena are attested. The first is linked to the city’s status as the capital or centre of hegemonic tyrannies in the classical period: the forced relocation of Greek populations from elsewhere to here as new citizens. The Deinomenid tyrant Gelon in the 480s had brought significant numbers of Greeks from other cities (­Gela, Kamarina, Leontinoi, Megara Hyblaia) to Syracuse as citizens to ensure support in the capital.14 These dislocations may also have been intended to replenish the city’s population given the ­ever-​­present possibility of (­elite) mobility out of Syracuse, the inevitable purges that accompanied each tyranny’s birth and consolidation, and the loss of population to any colonial ventures. Even when ruling themselves as a democracy (­ca. ­461-​­405), the Syracusans sought out and absorbed new citizens, as did Dionysios I and Timloleon, though no such actions on the part of the Hellenistic monarchs Agathokles, Pyrrhos, or Hieron II are recorded. A related phenomenon attested at Syracuse under Dionysios I is the addition of citizens via mass manumission. In 404, as part of Dionysios’ consolidation of power in Syracuse, he enfranchised slaves and included them as neopolitai (‘­new citizens’) ­ ouse-​­distribution.15 In Diodorus’ account, not among the beneficiaries of a ­land-​­and h only these freed slaves but also foreigners (­xenoi) shared equally with original citizens in the distribution. Dionysios again freed a large number of slaves in order to boost military reserves after the Carthaginians captured Messana in 396, enough to crew 60 triremes (­p erhaps 12,000 people).16 While c­ lassical-​­period Syracuse was perennially in need of new citizens, Hellenistic Syracuse guarded its citizenship somewhat more ­closely – ​­precisely the opposite of the direction of change in other Mediterranean poleis like Athens. A third phenomenon is the impact of Syracuse on its neighbours, whether through the actions of Syracusan exiles or through the ruling regime’s hegemonic behaviour, and the polis of Leontinoi exemplifies this experience. Early in the fifth century, the tyrant Gelon transferred the upper classes of ‘­the Euboians in Sicily’, that is, the Leontinoi, to Syracuse as citizens, but sold the lower classes of these populations into slavery ‘­to be carried out of Sicily’.17 This is probably what allowed Hieron I in 476 to clear the populations out of Naxos and Katane and send them to live at Leontinoi, though just 15 years later the Katanaioi were able to return home and so, probably, were the Naxioi and the original Leontinoi as well, who would have had to leave Syracuse (­Diod. Sic. 11.49.­1–​­2). Between 427 and 422, the Syracusans brought the upper classes of Leontinoi to Syracuse as citizens, although this relocation turned out to be temporary (­Diod. Sic. 12.53.­1–​­12.54.7; cf. Thuc. 3.86.­1–​­5 and 4.25.­9 –​­11). Diodorus describes Leontinoi in 406 as ‘­at that time an outpost of the Syracusans, being full of exiles and foreigners’ (­Diod. Sic. 13.95.3). The terms of the 405 treaty between Dionysios I and Carthage provided that Leontinoi would be autonomous, but just two years later Dionysios laid siege to 450

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

Leontinoi, and gave them Syracusan citizenship in exchange for possession of their city (­Diod. Sic. 14.15.­2 –​­4). In 396, instead of satisfying the demands of 10,000 mercenaries (­led by and including Peloponnesian Greeks) with the pay they were demanding, Dionysios gave them Leontinoi to inhabit (­Diod. Sic. 14.78.­2 –​­3). Timoleon later brought the Leontinoi, once again, to Syracuse as citizens (­Diod. Sic. 16.82). Each group called ‘­the Leontinoi’ in our sources appears to have been dislodged at one point or another, until the Romans gained secure control of Sicily as a whole. Citizenship at Messana, originally founded as Zankle, was, in large part, conditioned by its hostile relationship with Syracuse. The city was inhabited throughout the fifth century by a combination of Chalkidian Zanklaioi, Samioi, and Peloponnesian Messenioi, and of course other smaller groups.18 The Zanklaioi are explicitly named by Diodorus in his account of the koinon dogma of 461 that saw tyrannies replaced by more representative regimes (­Diod. Sic. 11.76.­4 –​­5). The city was destroyed and its population scattered by Himilcon’s counteroffensive against Dionysios I and the Greek poleis allied with him in 396 (­Diod. Sic. 14.56.­2 –​­6, 57.4). Later that same year, after the withdrawal of the Carthaginian army, the scattered Messanioi were able to recover their homeland and resettle Messana, along with 1,000 Lokroi and 4,000 Medmaioi added to the community by Dionysios (­Diod. Sic. 14.78.­4 –​­5). However, by 312, Messana was the only Greek city opposed to Agathokles, and it was one of the centres for the Syracusan exiles agitating against the king. Agathokles’ general Pasiphilos captured prisoners in raids on Messana and used them as hostages not only to force the Messanioi to expel the Syracusan exiles but also to accept back in Messana men whom they had ‘­legally banished’ and who were serving in the Syracusan army (­Diod. Sic. 19.102.­ 3–​­5). Things got worse after the king’s death: his Campanian mercenaries, rejected by the Syracusans, were hospitably received at Messana, then killed the male inhabitants, took possession of the women, and divided up the property and land among themselves (­Diod. Sic. 21.18.1; 21.18.3; Polyb. 1.7.­1–​­4). No surviving community of Messanioi is recorded, but the Campanian Mamertine state operated on Italic political principles for generations, with Greek cultural elements perhaps conserved by the Messanian women as the Kymaian women may have done in Italy in the fifth century. The few new urban centres created in Sicily during this period provide valuable data on Sicilian citizenship at the time. Halaisa Archonidion on the north coast of the island was a new foundation of Archonides, the Sikel leader of Herbita, in 403 with mercenaries, refugees created by Dionysios I’s wars, and poor Herbitaioi (­Diod. Sic. 14.16.­1–​­2). Diodorus notes that even in his own time ‘­numerous ties of relationships are to be found among both peoples, and they administer their sacrifices at the Temple of Apollo with the same routine’ (­Diod. Sic. 14.16.­3 –​­4). The mixed origins of Halaisa’s original settlers, nonetheless, coalesced into a meaningful cultural and political identity for the Halaisinoi (Prestianni Giallombardo 2003). Tyndaris, also on the north coast, was a new foundation of the fourth century. In 396, Dionysios I gave 600 Peloponnesian Messenioi some land outside of Sicilian Messana in which to establish their own city (­Diod. Sic. 14.78.­5 –​­6). Diodorus explains that ‘­by living in concord together and admitting many to citizenship, they speedily came to number more than five thousand citizens’: a population of 600 men could probably not have survived long with serious internal conflict or without the incorporation of newcomers into the group. Many communities experienced significant interruptions in the continuity of their citizenship. In 476, the Akragantine tyrant Theron purged his political opponents from Himera; he ‘­saw that after the slaughter of the Himeraioi the city was in need of 451

Randall Souza

settlers, made a mixed multitude there, enrolling as its citizens both Dorians and any others who so wished’ (­Diod. Sic. 11.48.­6 –​­8, 49.3). In Diodorus’ account, the resettlement worked: ‘­These citizens lived together on good terms in the state for fi ­ fty-​­eight years’ (­Diod. Sic. 11.49.4). In 409, a Carthaginian invasion forced the evacuation of most of the Himeraioi, and while they were allowed to return in 405, the Carthaginian foundation of Therma in Himera’s territory in 407 with Carthaginian citizens as well as ‘­the other inhabitants of Libya’ evidently supplanted the old city.19 Himera proper was never resettled, according to the archaeological record, but the recently evacuated Himeraioi thus resettled in a Carthaginian foundation adjacent to their ruined city, and this mixed population of Carthaginians, Libyans, and Greeks was independent enough to supply troops to Dionysios in one year and to strike an agreement of philia (‘­friendship’) with Himilcon the next. Agathokles’ mother was a Greek woman living in ­Carthaginian-​­controlled Therma (­Diod. Sic. 19.2.­2 –​­6). By 307, the Greeks in Therma were called Thermitai and Himera was only a historical memory. A dossier of decrees inscribed on bronze tablets from the western Sicilian city of Entella documents the expulsion of the population likely at some point during the First Punic War, and although the Romans were responsible for the resettlement, we do not know whether it was they or the Carthaginians who had ejected them (­A mpolo and Parra 2001). In either case, when the Entellinoi were driven from their city, they were scattered among neighbouring communities, some as captives. Archaeological evidence at Entella is consistent with a hiatus in occupation but does not independently prove one (­Michelini 2003: ­948–​­949). The Entellinoi ejected from their city had a functional polis infrastructure during the resettlement at the latest (­a boule, ‘­council’ and a halia, ‘­assembly’).20 The refugees ejected from their city likely travelled at least partially based on previously existing relationships, as was certainly the case with Assoros where they possessed the right of isopoliteia (­the ability to exchange one’s existing citizenship for citizenship in another polis) (­Souza 2019: ­88–​­90). When the Entellinoi were able to return home, they renewed and created relationships of isopoliteia among other honours to reinforce a network of friendly populations bound by citizenship ties to insure them against future disaster. Timoleon’s intervention in Sicily in the 340s and 330s touched many communities with its broad demographic impact (­de Vido 2019). Between 344 and 339, tens of thousands of Greeks, including Syracusans and other Sicilians living abroad, came to eastern Sicily.21 It is not entirely clear what Timoleon’s role was in this resettlement, although at the very least he seems to have had the authority to distribute land in Syracuse and perhaps nearby cities.22 Diodorus writes concisely that Timoleon ‘­added settlers to Kamarina and enlarged the city’; Akragas and Gela are both reported to have been repopulated at that time by other leaders/­oikistai, suggesting that resettlement could occur outside Timoleon’s personal direction.23 Furthermore, he strategically granted Syracusan citizenship, conferring it on his allied soldiers after the battle of the Krimisos and on the freed inhabitants of Agyrion (­Giuliani 1995: ­121–​­124). His work could be destructive as well: he took 15,000 captives from the Carthaginian army he defeated at the Krimisos ca. 340, removed the population of Leontinoi to Syracuse, apparently eliminating the Campanians inhabiting Aitna in 339/­338, and likely at Galaria sometime in the 330s.24 The Greeks who came to Syracuse and Sicily under Timoleon generally came willingly because of economic inducements (­e.g., wages for mercenaries, land allotments) and political ones (­e.g., citizenship), while the ­non-​­Greek populations received little attention, and none of it good. 452

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

One topic to consider here is the citizenship of Sicily’s n ­ on-​­Greek inhabitants. Nothing like a law or a principle of citizenship is known for the Sikels, Sikans, or Elymians, although language and material culture, especially coinage, demonstrate some sense of affective belonging and even a political community.25 These groups appear in our written (­G reek) sources as collective ethnic plurals, although there were multiple urban centres associated with each; occasionally, a ruler of one of these cities is known by name (­e.g., Archonides of Herbita, mentioned above), indicating a monarchy of some kind. Douketios, a Sikel from Menai, brought a number of different Sikel groups into an alliance for a short time in the middle of the fifth century, but aside from a Sikel identity opposed to Syracusan Greek hegemony, citizenship in this Sikel state remains opaque (­Jackman 2006). At the end of the First Punic War in 241, the Romans required all Carthaginians to leave Sicily, but it is not clear exactly to which populations that stipulation applied.26 Certainly, the Carthaginian armies at Eryx and Lilybaion had to leave, but we do not know about the rest of the population inside Lilybaion, or indeed about the populations of other cities in western Sicily who might conceivably be considered Carthaginian. Probably some of these people were forced to evacuate as well but not all of them.27 The obscurity of Punic citizenship practices in Sicily leaves the question open.

The Gulf of Lion From Liguria to the Atlantic Ocean, along the Mediterranean coasts of modern France and Spain, Greeks lived in poleis as well as in settlements of unclear political status. Along this coast, only three poleis are known: Massalia, Emporion, and Rhode. The interactions among these communities, and between them and the ­non-​­Greek inhabitants of their territories, have produced forms of citizenship in line with those that developed elsewhere in the Mediterranean, especially in the Italian peninsula. In this section, I examine what citizenship looked like in the two main poleis in relation to other communities in the area. Massalia in the fifth and fourth centuries was the political centre of a Greek community that spread along the ­north-​­western coast of the Mediterranean. Government, by Aristotle’s time, took the form of an oligarchy that had become less oligarchical at some point (­Arist. Pol. 1305b.­1–​­4). Still, membership as a full citizen was evidently restricted to a closed group (­οἱ ἐν τῷ πολιτεύματι, ‘­those in the citizen body’), although this narrow oligarchy could ­co-​­opt those deemed ‘­worthy’ (­ἀξίοι) into the group (­Arist. Pol. 1321a.­ 29–​­31). It seems that by Strabo’s time, these full citizens very likely comprised a Council of 600, of whom 15 were presidents; of this board of 15, three men were presidents; and of this board of three, one man was president (­Strabo 4.1.5). Strabo also implies that a lesser Massaliote citizenship was available for other inhabitants of the city: he says that the 600, labelled τίμουχοι (‘­having honour’), retain their status for life, and that to become a τίμουχος one must have children, and one must ‘­have been a citizen through three generations’ (­ibid.). The τίμουχοι sound very much like Aristotle’s οἱ ἐν τῷ πολιτεύματι, and the possession of children and a family history of living in Massalia would not be surprising criteria for being considered worthy of c­ o-​­optation. Outside of their own polis, the Massaliotai created from the fifth century onward a number of settlements that are traditionally seen (­following Strabo) as military installations to claim territory and sea routes from local groups. There is little direct evidence for citizenship in Agathe, Rhode, Olbia, and Nikaia, or for a political connection 453

Randall Souza

to Massalia.28 Other settlements are known but with even less detail. Still, taken together they represent a significant extension of Massaliote influence, perhaps involving a physical extension of the Massaliote citizen body, into the territory of the Rhone valley and at its margins (­Dietler 2015: 1­ 14–​­122). Emporion in the early fifth century was shaking off the influence of Massalia, which had likely played a role in the city’s foundation a hundred years earlier. It is not clear whether Emporion constituted an independent political community from its foundation or if it emerged as one later. The ‘­Emporitai’ are mentioned in commercial letters of the late sixth and ­m id-​­fifth centuries (­SEG 37 838 and SEG 38 1036 respectively), although not in a formal legal sense. Emporion began minting coins early in the fifth century but the early issues resemble Massaliote types, and only in the late fifth century does an abbreviated ethnic EM appear, a good sign of political autonomy. And a fragmentary inscription on a lead tablet found at Emporion and dated to the second half of the fifth century contains the words νόμος (‘­law’) and ἐσκατοικίσαι (‘­to found a settlement’), suggesting communal ­decision-​­making about establishing a new settlement somewhere.29 Certainly by the end of the fifth century, then, Emporion was an autonomous polis community. The Greeks of Emporion and their Iberian neighbours, the Indiketai, famously joined together in a common community; the beginning of this change is usually dated to the first half of the fourth century. Strabo again provides the critical information (­Strabo 3.4.8): The Emporitai formerly inhabited a small island lying somewhat in front [of the city’s later location], which they now call the “­old city” (­παλαιὰ πόλις), but now they live on the mainland. It is a double city (­δίπολις δ’ ἐστὶ) divided by a wall, who although they administered their government [or ‘­citizenship’] (­πολιτευόμενοι) in their own way nevertheless desired to have a fortification wall shared with the Greeks for the sake of safety, and in time they joined together into the same government [or ‘­citizen body’] (­πολίτευμα), somewhat mixed with both barbarian and Greek customs, a thing that has happened with many other [cities]. Excavations at Emporion corroborate Strabo’s story and provide a date: ca. 3­ 75–​­350, walls were added to the existing ­fi fth-​­century fortification wall, extending the total area enclosed, which now included areas east of the earlier fortifications.30 A convergence of Greek and Indiketan burial practices and locations documented in the city’s nekropoleis (cemeteries) in the fourth century, as well as contemporary convergences in housing and ceramic production, suggest social equality among the two demographic groups in the new Emporion (­Demetriou 2012: 49, 51). At the same time, the Phokaian Greeks across this region maintained the cult of Ephesian Artemis as part of their Phokaian and Ionian identities, spreading the practice of worshipping the goddess in Greek to their Iberian neighbours (­D emetriou 2012: ­53–​­62). Emporion (­now Emporiae in Latin) in the Hellenistic period had trading links with both the Romans and the Carthaginians, and its political affinities alternated between them through the end of the Second Punic War. Livy’s account of the landing of M. Porcius Cato at Emporiae in 195 complicates our understanding of the city’s constitutional arrangement. He writes that a settlement of ‘­Hispani’ is found to the west of Emporiae itself, with a wall between them; the inhabitants of Emporiae are called ‘­Graeci’. These two communities were evidently hostile to one ­another – ​­one third of 454

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

the Greek citizens (­cives) stood guard each night against the ­Hispani – ​­but cooperated in matters of trade, since the ‘­Greeks’ controlled access to the sea. Only the ‘­Greeks’ were citizens of Emporiae at this time, according to Livy, suggesting that a new group of Iberians had settled on the west side of Emporiae after the merger of communities that began in the fourth century; meanwhile, the ­Indiketan-​­origin citizens of the new Emporiae lost their cohesive identity, differentiating them from the Phokaian Emporitai, so that to the Romans they were all ‘­Greek’. Emporiae appears to have become a Roman municipium in the early first century.

Conclusions While the communities surveyed in the sections above are far too diverse to admit any sort of totalizing analysis or to lead to a single definition of ‘­Western Mediterranean citizenship’, certain conclusions can be drawn and connections made. Patterns in citizenship practices in the regions discussed in this chapter were conditioned by the ability of people to move between communities, and the ability of hegemonic powers to force people to move. Poleis did often define membership in their citizen bodies in opposition to other poleis and to ­non-​­polis political communities, particularly in periods of interstate tensions, but at other moments considerations both practical and ideological led to cooperation and even combination. And while local political communities on the polis model continued to exist and structure the communal identities of their members, by the third and early second centuries the boots of the western ‘­barbarians’ were looming over their heads. The nature of citizenship in both its legal and affective definitions depends on the people who comprise the community in question, and when the composition of the population changes, so do its practices and ideologies of citizenship. Constitutional change and changes in the meaning of belonging to a political community can, of course, occur without demographic change precipitating them, but this actually seems to be relatively rare in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean. The two homegrown staseis in Thourioi described by Aristotle resulted in significant changes to citizenship there; Kroton, Syracuse, and Lokroi established democratic regimes in the late fourth century on their own initiative. Even if a few more examples can be added here or there, by far the most common simulus for changes in citizenship was a change in the population. People moved on their own initiative frequently enough that the reality of or potential for voluntary mobility shaped the composition of virtually all the political communities considered here. For example, whatever the composition of ships’ crews, the distribution of goods and the volume of trade attested in the archaeological record indicate that people were travelling routes that connected major and minor ports across the Western Mediterranean, and beyond. The residence of ­non-​­citizens in all of these communities, or even the possibility of newcomers assuming citizenship, is likely to have been so normal that it needed no comment in our sources. While the military success of Italic peoples in southern Italy cannot have been fabricated wholesale, scholars are generally inclined to see in I­ bero-​­Greek Emporion, Campanian Neapolis, Oscan Poseidonia, or Lucanian Herakleia an influx of population absorbed as citizens not only at the point of a spear but also, more simply, in the course of expected mobility between communities (­e.g., Lomas 2000). Mercenaries, particularly in Sicily, are one ­well-​­documented class of mobile groups who moved in search of employment. Syracusan tyrants frequently settled 455

Randall Souza

mercenaries in conquered territories and urban centres, and mercenaries, especially when unemployed, often upended settled citizen communities. One group of Campanian mercenaries hired initially by the Naxioi during the Peloponnesian War ended up in the service of several different poleis and generals throughout Sicily before installing themselves at Entella ca. 404 (­L ee 2000). A similar scenario played out just over a hundred years later at Messana. The demand for mercenaries in Greek and Carthaginian armies over these centuries meant that the movement of these stateless soldiers could have demographic and political consequences across the region. The abundance of exile communities, especially in southern Italy and Sicily throughout the fifth, fourth, and third centuries, attests the relatively high potential mobility of populations. The Greek term φυγάδες (‘­those who flee’) encompasses people who left their home community for a variety of different reasons and prompted by varying degrees of coercion. Modern scholarship recognizes such people as exiles, refugees, enslaved groups, and perhaps fugitives, reflecting the different motivations and circumstances that drove mobility. The relocation of citizens outside the territorial jurisdiction of the polis raised problems of identity, however. Nowhere is this clearer than in the cases of wholesale or nearly wholesale relocation: the Kymaioi resettled at Neapolis between ca. 470 and 421, or the Entellinoi ejected during the First Punic War and reassembled shortly afterward. Partial dislocations raised the problem of legitimacy: who are the true citizens when stasis has sent a faction into exile? Perhaps not every polis experienced such profound disruption to the civic fabric, but the demographic history surveyed above has the overall impression of instability rather than continuity. Communities like Taras and Massalia, with their relative stability, were exceptions to this pattern. The expansion of hegemonic power, on both regional and local scale, involved demographic domination and intervention in the citizenship of subordinated communities. The most extreme example of this phenomenon is the mass enslavement of defeated communities, practised most extensively in Sicily in the classical period and then adopted as a habit by the Romans.31 But hegemony, whether Massalian, Syracusan, or Campanian, could empower one community or one leader to dictate who could live where. Very often, this demographic manipulation responded to obvious or immediate needs, such as the Massalians’ perceived need for control of more indigenous territory, or Dionysios I’s need to compensate his mercenaries when he lacked sufficient currency to pay them. In general, the leaders of victorious armies were sensitive to the value of the human resource which defeated populations constituted, and they disposed of this resource carefully. Local powers also intervened in the citizenship of neighbours, though at a more restricted scale. Twice in the fifth century, the Krotoniatai expelled the remnants of the Sybaritai when they attempted to r­ e-​­establish their polis. Theron, the tyrant in Akragas, executed political opponents in Himera and added citizens. Archonides resolved the crowding of Herbita by claiming additional coastal territory and sending some of his compatriots along with mercenaries and refugees from elsewhere in Sicily to create a new polis there, Halaisa. But such interventions were not always negative: many small communities helped ensure that the Entellinoi could reassemble as a citizen body and survive their resettlement. It nearly goes without saying that the communities surveyed in this chapter were frequently at war with one another, or at least in hostile relationships, and this dynamic 456

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

certainly led at times to antagonistic political identities. The Krotoniatai and Sybaritai were perennially opposed to each other, Taras stood apart from nearly all the other Italiote poleis, and Syracuse and Rhegion were rarely on the same side of any political question. The Syracusans appear to have imposed their own citizenship on subject populations in order to control them, often bringing them physically to Syracuse to add to the urban population, foreshadowing in part the dynamic that would shortly emerge between the expanding Roman state and its subject communities. The citizens of poleis throughout the Western Mediterranean had a different and ­ on-​­Greek popdistinctive form of political community compared to that of the local n ulations, at least early in the classical period. The G ­ reek-​­‘­barbarian’ dichotomy was more meaningful in certain contexts, and less meaningful in others. Conflict between the polis-​­dwellers and their ­non-​­Greek neighbours can only have contributed to their respective and distinctive political identities, as, for example, at Kyme in 421 or in the wars of the Greeks against the Lucanians and Brettioi in the m ­ id-​­fourth century. Wars of Carthaginians and Greek poleis in Sicily were real and brutally violent events, even if fear of the Carthaginians in Sicily was frequently exaggerated and nurtured opportunistically for political purposes (­Prag 2010). Conflict, however, was only part of the story, and when it gave way to cooperation and interaction, the result was that political boundaries wore down. The Emporitai ­ reek-​ and the Indiketai are a clear example of this tendency, suggesting that the G ­barbarian dichotomy was not immovable. And, as with the examples in southern Italy (­Campanian Kyme, Oscan Poseidonia, Lucanian Herakleia, etc.) they illustrate the diversity of approaches taken by indigenous populations, some of which combined with the Greeks while others maintained a boundary. When the Indiketai eventually joined the Emporitai as fellow citizens, the combined community remained in political opposition to other Iberian groups. Kyme, Poseidonia, and Herakleia adopted new, mixed political cultures, while sometimes opposing the groups from which the city’s newer citizens had come or descended. Unfortunately, we lack documentation of the process of bringing newcomers into the citizen body, but this only suggests that it may not have been as formal a process as in the Aegean world. And they were primarily local phenomena, involving one specific group of Greeks and another specific group of ‘­barbarians’. Yet over time, the ‘­western Greeks’ as a group came to be caught between two ‘­barbarian’ imperial republics: Carthage and Rome. First one, then the other, came to possess regional political domination beyond what any of the individual poleis had been able to acquire. Whatever the constitutional arrangements of the C ­ arthaginian-​ ­controlled communities of Sicily or Iberia, they were soon replaced by the patchwork of statuses by which the Roman state bound subject communities to its interests. In southern Italy, Sicily, and the Gulf of Lion, the Romans encountered distinctively Western Mediterranean poleis shaped by centuries of interaction between each other and with neighbouring ­non-​­Greek communities. The Romans were developing a concept of citizenship that would over generations incorporate new groups into the Roman citizen body, including groups who were themselves the result of experimental and historically contingent mixtures of older citizens and newer ones. Thus in the poleis of the Western Mediterranean, the theories and practices of citizenship, which had responded and adapted to political and demographic circumstances throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods, survived and continued to evolve under Roman hegemony. 457

Randall Souza

Notes 1 I am grateful to the editors for the invitation to contribute to this volume, and to the reviewers for their helpful feedback. All dates are BCE unless otherwise noted, and all translations are my own. 2 Rights and responsibilities: Vink (­2017); belonging: Turner (­1997); Ayata (­2019). 3 See, e.g., Prag and Quinn (­2013) for an outline of the problems inherent in a ‘­Hellenistic’ Western Mediterranean. 4 Monte Iato: Russenberger (­2010); Montagnola di Marineo: de Simone (­2015). 5 It also conditioned n ­ on-​­Greek forms of citizenship in the peninsula; see Bradley in this volume. 6 Arist. Pol. 1303a.­1–​­7 for the constitutional change; Diod. Sic. 11.52.­3 –​­4, Hdt. 7.170.­3 –​­4 for the war with the Iapygoi. 7 Diod. Sic. 12.76; for survivors in Neapolis, see Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 15.6.4; for the survival of Greek kosmos (‘­fashion’), iera (‘­sacred rites’), and nomima (‘­customs’), see Strabo 5.4.4. 8 Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes intriguingly that in 421 the Neapolitai πάντων ἐποιήσαντο κοινωνοὺς τῶν ἰδίων ἀγαθῶν (‘­made [the Kymaioi] partners in all their own good things’), confirming that the refugee Kymaioi were incorporated at Neapolis as citizens. 9 Livy 8.26.6; cf. Cic. Balb. 8.21, Polybius 1.20.14, Livy 35.16.3, 36.42.1. 10 Antiochus FGrHist fr. 11; Diod. Sic. 12.23.2; for Herakleia as a purely Tarantine enterprise, see Diod. Sic. 12.36.4; Strabo 6.1.14. 11 Polyb. 1.7.­6 –​­8; Diod. Sic. 22.1.­2 –​­3; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 20.4.­1–​­8; Livy 28.28.­1–​­3, 31.31.6, Per. 12; Cass. Dio 9.40.­7–​­11; App. Sam. 9.1; Strabo 6.1.6. See Fronda (­2010: ­178–​­179). 12 Polybius 1.7.­9 –​­13; Dion. Hal. 20.5.­1–​­5; App. Sam. 9.3; Livy 28.28.3. 13 Corsica: Mary (­2017); Sardinia: van Dommelen (­2002), Roppa (­2014, 2017); Baleares: Costa (­2019). 14 Gela, Leontinoi: Hdt. 7.156; Kamarina: Thuc. 6.4.3; Megara Hyblaia: Hdt. 7.156 with Thuc. 6.4.2 and Polyaeneus, Strat. 1.27.3. See in general Luraghi (­1994: ­288–​­304) and Vanotti (­1995: ­91–​­96). 15 Diod. Sic. 14.7.­4 –​­5. On the term neopolitēs, see Casevitz (­2002: 101). 16 Diod. Sic. 14.58.1. Siebert (­­1982–​­1983: ­45–​­46) asserts that these freed slaves were likely given citizenship as well. 17 Hdt. 7.156. The term ‘­Euboians’ probably refers to the Leontinoi only, since the Katanaioi and Naxioi are explicitly named shortly after Gelon’s treatment of ‘­the Euboians’. 18 Hdt. 6.­22–​­23, 7.­163–​­4, cf. Thuc. 6.4.­5 –​­6; Paus. 4.23.­6 –​­10; Arist. Pol. 1303a. 19 Fate of the Himeraioi: Diod. Sic. 13.60.7, 61.­4 –​­6, 62.4; Therma: Diod. Sic. 13.79.8. 20 SEG 30 ­1117–​­1123 with Ampolo and Parra (­2001). 21 Plut. Tim. 23; 339/338: Diod. Sic. 16.82.5, 19.2.8. See Braccesi (­1998: 97) and Consolo Langher (­1997: 178). 22 In Diodorus, the Corinthians first sent 5,000 settlers before Timoleon made his proclamation inviting more, while in Plutarch (­Tim. 22) both ‘­Timoleon and the Syracusans’ requested settlers from Corinth. 23 Kamarina: Diod. Sic. 16.82.7; Akragas and Gela: Plut. Tim. 35.2. 24 Krimisos: Diod. Sic. 16.80.5; Aitna: Diod. Sic. 16.82.4; Galaria: perhaps indicated at Plut. Tim. 31.2. 25 On the languages: Prag (­2020); on Sikel material culture: Giangiulio (­2010); for the Sikans: Lo Monaco (­2021); for the Elymian language and coinage: Marchesini (­2012). 26 Polyb. 1.62.8: ‘­the Carthaginians are to withdraw from all of Sicily. . . . ’ (­ἐκχωρεῖν Σικελίας ἁπάσης Καρχηδονίους. . . . ); cf. App. Sic. II.2: ‘[the Carthaginians] are to desert Sicily and the smaller islands around it to the Romans. . . . ’ (­Σικελίας Ῥωμαίοις ἀποστῆναι καὶ τῶν βραχυτέρων νήσων ὅσαι περὶ Σικελίαν). 27 Modern commentators generally follow the ancient sources in their ambiguity; I am not aware of a dedicated study of the treaty’s impact on Sicilian demography. 28 Strabo 4.1.9 has Nikaia belonging unequivocally to Massalia. 29 Almagro Basch (­1952: ­34–​­36 no.21); see Peña (­1992: ­140–​­141) and Santiago (­1993: ­288–​­289) for the dating. 30 Marcet and ­Sanmartí-​­Grego (­1989: ­74–​­75); ­Sanmartí-​­Grego et al. (­1992). 31 For the possibility of surviving mass enslavement, see Souza (­2020).

458

Citizenship in the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean

Bibliography Almagro Basch, M. (­1952) Las inscripciones ampuritanas griegas, ibéricas y latinas (­Barcelona) Ampolo, C. and Parra, M.C. (­eds) (­2001) Da un’antica città di Sicilia: i decreti di Entella e Nakone, catalogo della mostra (­Pisa) Ayata, B. (­2019) ‘­A ffective citizenship’, in J. Slaby and C. von Scheve (­eds) Affective societies: key concepts (­London) ­330–​­339 Braccesi, L. (­1998) I tiranni di Sicilia (­Rome) Casevitz, M. (­2002) ‘­L’évolution de la citoyenneté en Grèce d’après le vocabulaire’, in S. Ratti (­ed.) Antiquité and citoyenneté: actes du colloque international de Besançon, ­3 –​­5 novembre 1999 (­Paris) ­93–​­104 Consolo Langher, S.N. (­1997) Un imperialismo tra democrazia e tirannide: Siracusa nei secoli V e IV a.C. (­Rome) Costa, B. (­2019) ‘­Ibiza’, in B. Doak and C. ­López-​­Ruiz (­eds) The Oxford handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterrnaean (­Oxford) ­569–​­584 Cresswell, T. (­2006) On the move: mobility in the modern Western world (­New York) de Simone, R. (­2015) ‘­Makella: sull’identificazione dell’antico centro indigeno attraverso la documentazione epigrafica’, Kokalos 52, ­105–​­120 de Vido, S. (­2019) ‘­Oltre il confine. Egemonie territoriali, barbari misti, primato greco nella Sicilia di Timoleonte’, in A. Gonzales and M.T. Schettino (­eds) Tra le rive del Mediterraneo: relazioni diplomatiche, propaganda e egemonia politica nella Sicilia antica (­Besançon) ­109–​­134 Demetriou, D. (­2012) Negotiating identity in the ancient Mediterranean: the archaic and classical Greek multiethnic emporia (­Cambridge) Dietler, M. (­2015) Archaeologies of colonialism: consumption, entanglement, and violence in ancient Mediterranean France (­Berkeley, CA) Fronda, M.P. (­2010) Between Rome and Carthage: southern Italy during the Second Punic War (­Cambridge) Gaca, K. (­2010) ‘­The andrapodizing of war captives in Greek historical memory’, TAPhA 140.1, ­117–​­161 Giangiulio, M. (­2010) ‘­Deconstructing ethnicities: multiple identities in archaic and classical Sicily’, BABESCH 85, ­13–​­23 Giuliani, A. (­1995) ‘­Le migrazioni forzate in Sicilia e in Magna Grecia sotto Dionigi I di Siracusa’, in M. Sordi (­ed.) Coercizione e mobilità umana nel mondo antico (­Milan) ­107–​­124 Isayev, E. (­2017) Migration, mobility and place in ancient Italy (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­A ncient wandering and permanent temporariness’, Humanities 10.3, 91, ­1–​­34 Jackman, T. (­2006) ‘­Ducetius and ­fi fth-​­century Sicilian tyranny’, in S. Lewis (­ed.) Ancient tyranny (­Edinburgh) ­33–​­48 Lee, I. (­2000) ‘­Entella: the silver coinage of the Campanian mercenaries and the site of the first Carthaginian mint ­410-​­109 BC’, NC 160, ­1–​­66 Lo Monaco, V. (­2021) ‘­Phrourion and coins in Central Sicily (­­6th-​­3rd Century BCE)’, Classica (­B rasil) 34.1, ­11–​­30 Lomas, K. (­2000) ‘­The polis in Italy: ethnicity, colonization, and citizenship in the Western Mediterranean’, in R. Brock and S. Hodkinson (­eds) Alternatives to Athens: varieties of political organization and community in ancient Greece (­Oxford) ­167–​­185 Luraghi, N. (­1994) Tirannidi arcaiche in Sicilia e Magna Grecia da Panezio di Leontini alla caduta dei Dinomenidi (­Firenze) Marcet, R. and ­Sanmartí-​­Grego, E. (­1989) Empuries (­Barcelona) Marchesini, S. (­2012) ‘­The Elymian language’, in O. Tribulato (­ed.) Langauge and linguistic contact in ancient Sicily (­Cambridge) ­95–​­114 Mary, J.-​­B. (­2017) ‘­Études et constat préliminaire des implantations fortifiées de Corse du second âge du Fer au changement d’ère. Le Cas de la région ­Centre-​­Ouest de la Corse’, in A. Kouremenos (­ed.) Insularity and identity in the Roman Mediterranean (­Oxford) ­165–​­198 Michelini, C. ​­(­2003) ‘­Entella tra III sec. a.C. e I sec. d.C.: note preliminari’, in A. Corretti (­ed.) Quarte Giornate internazionali di studi sull’area elima: Erice, ­1–​­4 dicembre 2000: atti (­Pisa) ­933–​­972 Moggi, M. (­2006) ‘­Peculiarità della guerra in Sicilia?’, in C. Ampolo and M.A. Vaggioli (­eds) Guerra e pace in Sicilia e nel Mediterraneo antico (­­VIII-​­III sec. a.C.): arte, prassi e teoria della pace e della guerra (­Pisa) ­67–​­89

459

Randall Souza Peña, M.J. (­1992) ‘­A mpurias: des la polis a la civitas’, Index 20, ­135–​­145 Prestianni Giallombardo, A.M. (2003) ‘Divinità e culti in Halaesa Archonidea tra identità etnica ed interazione culturale’, in A. Corretti (ed.) Quarte giornate internazionali di studi sull’area elima: Erice, 1-4 dicembre 2000. Atti (Pisa) 1059–1103 Prag, J.R.W. (­2010) ‘­Tyrannizing Sicily: the despots who cried “­Carthage!”’, in A.J. Turner, K.O. ­Chong-​­Gossard and F. Vervaet (­eds) Private and public lies: the discourse of despotism and deceit in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world (­Leiden) ­51–​­71 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­The indigenous languages of Sicily’, Palaeohispanica 20, ­531–​­551 Prag, J.R.W. and Quinn, J. (­2013) ‘­Introduction’, in J.R.W. Prag and J. Quinn (­eds) The Hellenistic West: rethinking the ancient Mediterranean (­Cambridge) ­1–​­13 Prestianni Giallombardo, A.M. (2003) ‘Divinità e culti in Halaesa Archonidea tra identità etnica ed interazione culturale’, in A. Corretti (ed.) Quarte giornate internazionali di studi sull’area elima: Erice, 1–4 dicembre 2000. Atti (Pisa) 1059–1103 Purcell, N. (­2005) ‘­Statics and dynamics: ancient Mediterranean urbanism’, in R. Osborne and B.W. Cunliffe (­eds) Mediterranean urbanization, ­8 00– ​­6 00 BC (­Oxford) ­249–​­272 Roppa, A. (­2014) ‘­Identifying Punic Sardinia: local communities and cultural identities’, in J. Quinn and N. Vella (­eds) The Punic Mediterranean: identities and identification from Phoenician settlement to Roman rule (­Cambridge) ­257–​­281 ——— ​­(­2017). ‘­Connectivity, trade and Punic persistence: insularity and identity in Late Punic to Roman Republican Sardinia (­­3rd–​­1st century BC)’, in A. Kouremenos (­ed.) Insularity and identity in the Roman Mediterranean (­Oxford) ­144–​­164 Russenberger, C. (­2010) ‘­Monte Iato (­PA): ultime testimonianze di una cultura indigena attorno al 300 a.C.’, Bolletino di archeologia online A/­A5/­2, ­12–​­22 Rutter, N.K. (­1979) Campanian coinages: ­475–​­380 B.C. (­Edinburgh) Sammartano, R. (­2020) ‘­Tra Elimi, Punici e Greci: le origini di Drepanon’, in L. Biondo and A. Filippi (­eds) Trapani: la città e il territorio dalla Preistoria alla Tarda Antichità: atti del convegno (­Trapani, 4 maggio 2019) (­Ragusa) ­59–​­79 ­Sanmartí-​­Grego, E., ­Castanyer-​­Masoliver, P., and ­Tremoleda-​­Trilla, J. (­1992) ‘­Nuevos datos sobre la historia y la topografia de las murallas de Emporion’, MDAI(­M) 33, ­102–​­112. Santiago, R.A. (­1993) ‘­Epigrafía dialectal emporitana’, in E. Crespo Güemes, J.L. García Ramón and A. Striano Corrochano (­eds) Dialectologica Graeca: actas del II Coloquio Internacional de Dialectología Griega (­Madrid) ­281–​­294 Siebert, J. (­­1982–​­1983) ‘­Die Bevölkerungsfluktuation in den Griechenstädten Siziliens’, AncSoc ­13–​­14, ­33–​­65 Souza, R. (­2019) ‘­A nomalous grants of isopoliteia and diplomatic discourse in Hellenistic Greek inscriptions’, in C. Noreña and N. Papazarkadas (­eds) Proceedings of the second North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (­Leiden) ­85–​­102 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­Enslavement and redemption in classical Sicily’, in M. Jonasch (­ed.) The fight for Greek Sicily: politics, society and landscape (­Oxford) ­57–​­72 Turner, B. (­1997) ‘­Citizenship studies: a general theory’, Citizenship Studies 1.1, ­5 –​­18 Urry, J. (­2000) Sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the ­twenty-​­first century (­New York) van Dommelen, P. (­2002) ‘­P unic persistence: colonialism and cultural identities in Roman Sardinia’, in R. Laurence and J. Berry (­eds) Cultural identity in the Roman Empire (­London) ­37–​­60 Vanotti, G. (­1995) ‘­Leontini nel V secolo, città di profughi’, in M. Sordi (­ed.) Coercizione e mobilità umana nel mondo antico (­Milan) ­89–​­106 Vink, M. (­2017) ‘­Comparing citizenship regimes’, in A. Shachar, R. Bauböck, I. Bloemraad and M. Vink (­eds) The Oxford handbook of citizenship (­Oxford) ­221–​­244 Zuchtriegel, G. (­2018) Colonization and subalternity in classical Greece: experience of the nonelite population (­Cambridge)

460

32 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTIFICATION, AND THE METIC EXPERIENCE IN CLASSICAL AND EARLY HELLENISTIC GREECE1 Christian A. Thomsen The date of Isodemos’ visit to Dodona is impossible to pin down. He may have arrived at Zeus’ oracle early in the fourth century BCE but might just as well have entered the precinct at any time during the following two and a half centuries. But once there, Isodemos scribbled, or had scribbled for him, a question arising from concerns which he must have shared with thousands of others across the Greek world and across those same centuries (­Lhôte 2006: 52):2 (­Gods. Isodemos asks) if it would be better for him to take a wife and will there be children to take care of Isodemos in his old age, and about going to Athens and being a citizen in Athens? Though the grammar of Isodemos’ question is somewhat bewildering,3 the meaning should be clear enough: Isodemos was an Athenian citizen and his citizenship was among the central concerns he laid before the god at Dodona along with those of migration, marriage, children, and security in old age. The last half of his question to the oracle closely associated ‘­being (­a) citizen’ ( ­politeuomenos) with being in Athens and the implication seems to be that by being elsewhere Isodemos was missing out on a central aspect of his citizenship. According to a l­ong-​­held view, participation in ­decision-​­making and delivering justice were not only a central part of ancient Greek citizenship, but they were its essence,4 and being abroad Isodemos would not have the opportunity to attend the assembly or sit as judge in the courts. Athenian citizenship, however, also carried with it a number of other, legal, cultic, and economic privileges or rights: permission to own land in Attika, freedom from the metic tax, and having a prostatēs (­a citizen ‘­sponsor’) – ​­both may have applied to Isodemos wherever he ­stayed  – ​­freedom from corporal punishment, participation in the polis’ religious celebrations.5 But just like the political privileges, these too would require Isodemos to be present at Athens. Thus, they give rise to the question of what was left of ancient Greek citizenship for those who, for whatever reason, had settled beyond the borders of their home polis? DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-38

461

Christian A. Thomsen

According to modern scholarship on the ancient Greek metic, citizenship did not matter at all. Deborah Kamen’s survey of metic status in classical Athens (­2013) is fairly representative in declaring simply that metics were usually ‘­­free-​­born’ and ‘­generally Greek’, and with little or no attachment to any political community besides that in which they resided.6 Indeed, according to a persistent view of the Hellenistic metic, these people did not dream of returning to live in their original home state and worried little about the political rights which had lost much of their significance and prestige (…) and tended to constitute a homogenous class of Greeks bearing their original ethnic by tradition, but in reality being citizens of the world, because they no longer belonged to any city.7 This view of the metic stands in remarkable contrast to metic ­self-​­identification. As David Whitehead remarked (­and not without some surprise) of those Athenian metics who died and were buried in Attika: ‘­every one of them proclaims himself not as a metoikos of the city where he had lived and died, nor even as “­living in” his chosen deme, but as X, son of Y, of city Z’.8 Hundreds of funerary inscriptions from Athens underscore this crucial point and ­hundreds – ​­if not ­thousands – ​­more from across the Greek world and across centuries give evidence that this was the case everywhere (­it is precisely the proud sporting of an ethnikon that allows us to identify a particular individual as a citizen of this or that polis and therefore ‘­­free-​­born’ and ‘­Greek’). Occasionally, funerary monuments carry epigrams and it is clear from these that some metics thought of their home cities with considerable pride. The grave marker of one Pythokles, for instance, in Athens of the early fourth century BCE, declared his patris, Ephesos, to be ‘­the most glorious among cities’ (­IG II2 8523) and a certain Symmachos recalled with nostalgia his patris, ‘­Chios, glorified by the ­lovely-​­leafed branches of the vine full of grapes’ (­IG II2 10510, fourth century). The purpose of this study is to examine the role of citizenship in shaping what we might term the metic experience by asking a series of interrelated questions: (­1) to what extent might citizenship privilege citizens of one polis when visiting or settling in another?; (­2) how was foreign citizenship verified by polis authorities?; (­3) how and to what extent did the metics maintain a relationship with their poleis of origin? The close affinity with and pride in the polis of origin betrayed by funerary epigrams must dispel any notion that the ‘­ethnics’ by which citizens of foreign poleis identified themselves had ceased to be meaningful. Nor did they petrify, and even those born abroad kept an eye on political changes in their home poleis. In ­late-­​­­third-​­c entury BCE Rhamnous, the fortified town on Athens’ border with Boeotia, a certain Nikon from the Akarnanian polis of Astakos had emerged as a leading member of the foreign soldiers stationed there, the ­so-​­called paroikoi.9 Towards the end of the century, he passed on his ­position – ​­but not his ethnikon – ​­to his son, Nikarchos, who appears in the epigraphic evidence not as Astakenos, as one would expect, but as Aitolos.10 The reason for this change of ethnikon seems to have been an Aitolian military campaign against the Akarnanians during Rome’s First Macedonian War by which a number of Akarnanian towns, among them Astakos, had been pried from the Akarnanians and made to join the Aitolian League.11 Some 200 miles away, in Rhamnous, that political change was felt directly by Nikarchos, son of Nikon, who as far as we can tell was not born, had not resided, nor exercised his political rights in Astakos, but nevertheless changed his name to reflect his new federal Aitolian citizenship.12 462

Citizenship, identification, and the metic experience in Greece

What changes Nikarchos’ newly acquired Aitolian citizenship brought about for him is difficult to ascertain. But that there were tangible benefits associated with ­citizenship – e​­ ven ­abroad – ​­is clear. A w ­ ell-​­k nown and early example of such benefits are the privileges bestowed by Athens on the Sidonians in the 380s BCE. As the Athenians debated the honours voted for Straton, the king of the Sidonians, a certain Menexenos proposed to attach a rider to the decree to the effect that ‘­whenever Sidonians who live in and are citizens of Sidon stay at Athens on business, no ­metic-​­tax shall be exacted from them, nor any chorēgos appointed, nor anyone registered for eisphora’.13 The privileges bestowed on Sidonian metics were clearly worth having. The waiving of the metoikion, a monthly poll tax of six obols, would have been welcome, especially for small merchants while the prohibition against saddling any Sidonian with paying for a choral performance or eisphora would appeal to the richest merchants (­and probably earn them the envy of their Athenian peers). In other words, Menexenos’ rider raised the monetary value of Sidonian citizenship at Athens dramatically. Our knowledge of Menexenos’ rider is, of course, accidental (­and, epigraphically speaking, unique). But since only few decisions of the council and assembly apart from honorific decrees were ever inscribed, and thereby given the chance to survive the millennia, our knowledge of the decision to privilege the Sidonians is due entirely to the fact that it was appended to an honorific decree. Its ostensible uniqueness, therefore, is likely only a reflection of Athenian epigraphic habits,14 and all the more so since ideas about stimulating trade through improving conditions for foreigners were clearly floating around Athens at the time.15 Looking beyond Athens, to cities with different epigraphic habits (­and with their own chance survivals), and eventually extending the search into the early Hellenistic period more documents give evidence of the widespread practice of awarding privileges to citizens of particular poleis. The citizens of ­fourth-​­century BCE Olbia, for instance, voted to renew a range of privileges for any Milesian settling in Olbia, including sacrificing and otherwise participating in local cults with the Olbians, ­front-​­row seating at public gatherings, priority of their cases in Olbian courts, and exemption from taxation.16 In another instance, the Magnesians (­­on-­​­­the-​­Meander), in the third century BCE, voted for the Phokian inhabitants of their city exemption from taxes on their household consumption and the privilege of enktēsis (­the right to own land), as well as priority in approaching public institutions (­I.Magnesia 7b).17 The spread of the ­so-​­called isopoliteia (‘­equal civic rights’) agreements from the fourth century BCE onwards preserves for us a wide variety of privileges and exemptions which Greek cities offered citizens of other poleis: Common enough are also the sweeping clauses such as ‘­a Kyzikene in Miletos is to be a Milesian and a Milesian in Kyzikos a Kyzikene’, recognizing as full citizens the citizens of partner poleis. In some cases, poleis went so far as to include the formal enrolment of citizens of partner poleis, but such offers were often extended along with other privileges, presumably for those who did not make the complete transition from one citizenship to another: In the Karian city of Seleukeia, Milesian citizens were offered an opportunity to become citizens, but the Seleukians also instructed their stratēgoi ‘­to provide for those (­Milesians) who come to the city, so that they will have all that is good when they happen to be there’ (­Milet. I 3 143.­62– ​­64.). Similarly, the citizens of ­early-­​­­third- ​­c entury BCE Temnos and Pergamon not only decreed citizenship for one another, but also voted that ‘­there is to be the right to own land and house for a Temnian in Pergamon and for a Pergamene in Temnos, and a Temnian shall pay taxes in Pergamon just like 463

Christian A. Thomsen

a Pergamene does and a Pergamene in Temnos just like a Temnian’ (­I.Pergamon I 5.­ 17–​­24) for those who did not take up a new citizenship.18 Conversely, citizens of ­fourth-​ ­c entury BCE Keos in the Cyclades on the run from justice would not find sanctuary in Histiaia on Euboia since the citizens there had promised that ‘­if any one (­of the Keans) flees to Histiaia or Histiaian territory, the polis shall not receive him’ (­IG XII.5 594.­1–​­3). The number of preserved s­ o-​­called isopoliteia ­agreements – ​­63 on Sara Saba’s recent count (­to which a few more should perhaps be added)­19 – ​­as well as their geographical distribution give evidence of widespread practice of this form of exchange of privilege between cities, and can reasonably be assumed to represent the proverbial tip of the iceberg.20 The same documents, therefore, are evidence of what must have been an increasingly complex dossier of exempted and privileged individuals and groups kept by every Greek city and which their magistrates had to keep in mind in performing their duties. This gives rise to a problem of identification, or, more properly, of verification of identity. As noted above, being Sidonian in m ­ id-­​­­fourth-​­century BCE Athens came with very real economic advantages and other poleis, as we have seen, had similar privileges for citizens of various other poleis. Verification of citizenship may well have been among the tasks expected of proxenoi, but hidden by the abstract virtues for which they were routinely praised. But even more likely, in the case of Athens and elsewhere, the prostatai that metics were required to seek out may first and foremost have been responsible for establishing that the metics they sponsored were, in fact, who they claimed to be.21 To this we might add that, eventually, the Sidonians, for whom these aforementioned privileges applied, established a private association, a koinon of the Sidonians, in Athens, whose members would have been able to assist the Athenians in verifying who was and who was not a citizen of Sidon.22 Though that koinon is only attested at a later date, several other associations united around shared origins are attested in ­late-­​­­fourth- ​­c entury Athens.23 The idea that fellow citizens among the metic ­population – ​­individually, but also as a ­g roup – ​­could assist in establishing and verifying identity had already occurred to the speaker of Lys. 23 (­delivered shortly before 387 BCE) in his attempt to establish whether or not Pankleon was, in fact, a Plataian: I first asked Euthykritos, whom I knew as the oldest citizen of Plataia and whom I supposed to be best informed, whether he knew a certain Pankleon, son of Hipparmodoros, a Plataian. Then, on his answering me that he knew Hipparmodoros, but was not aware of his having any son, either Pankleon or any other, I went on to ask all the other persons whom I knew as Plataians. Well, they were all ignorant of his name; but they told me that I should get the most definite information if I went to the f­resh-​­cheese market on the last day of the month: for on that day in each month the Plataians collected there. So I went on that day to the cheese market and inquired of the people if they knew a certain Pankleon, their ­fellow-​­citizen.24 There is, however, also evidence to suggest that the Greek poleis at least on occasion would issue documents attesting to citizenship. When the two Lycian cities of Myra and Xanthos entered into an isopoliteia agreement sometime in the second half of the second century, it was specified that ‘­those of the Xanthians who wish to be registered in the community among the Myrians must carry letters (­grammata) from their 464

Citizenship, identification, and the metic experience in Greece

magistrates to the magistrates of the Myrians’ (­SEG 44:1218.­15–​­18) and vice versa. Though this provision for authentication of citizenship is unique among the isopoliteia agreements,25 a ­well-​­known letter sent by the kosmoi of the Cretan city Axos to the officials of the Aitolian league, early in the third century BCE, suggests that this means of authentication was used more widely. The letter, which was inscribed on stone in Delphi (­and also in Therme), provides us with insight into the contents of such letters. It details the history of a certain Epikles, a freedman living in Amphissa, and his father Eraton, a citizen of Axos, with the explicit purpose of documenting Epikles’ Axian citizenship which, in turn, would afford Epikles protection due to an agreement of koinopoliteia between the city of Axos and the Aitolian league.26 Complicating the matter was the fact that Epikles’ father, Eraton, had left home to make a living as a mercenary in Cyprus before Epikles was born. The incredible odyssey which followed will bear repeating (­Syll.3 622):27 The kosmoi and the city of Axos to the [councillors] and the general and the hipparch of the Aitolians, greetings. Know that Eraton, being a citizen of ours, but having sailed off to Cyprus to serve as a soldier and having taken there a wife, had two children, who were called Epikles and Euagoras. Upon the death of Eraton in Cyprus it happened that Epikles and his siblings as well as their mother were captured and Epikles was sold to Amphissa. Having bought his release Epikles lives with you in Amphissa being a citizen of ours, himself as well as his sons Erasiphon and Timonax and his daughter Melita. [Therefore] you will do [well] to remember this so that if anyone attempts to harm [them], he might be prevented by you, collectively or individually, and that an everlasting record be made of their citizenship. The letter of the Axian kosmoi documents and exhibits the willingness of city magistrates to formally authenticate and certify an individual’s citizenship on an ad hoc basis with the specific aim of assisting that individual in having his citizenship recognized by the authorities of another state. The narrative aside, the letter bears a close resemblance with the cover letters sent by polis magistrates authenticating (­σφραγίζω) honorific decrees voted by one polis for (­the) citizens of another, and presumably would also have carried the public seal of Axos.28 Furthermore, the decision to write the letter presupposes that city magistrates knew of the existence of citizens like Epikles, who were born abroad, but is silent on how that information was obtained and verified.29 One possibility is that news such as births and deaths of citizens abroad reached their families, from whom magistrates of the city or the relevant civic ­sub-​­divisions would learn of changes to the citizen rolls. While births do not generally leave much of an epigraphic mark, death is richly documented. One such case was the death of one Agathokleia, daughter of Polykrates from Herakleia, in ­third-​­century BCE Alexandria. Agathokleia died giving birth and, in an epigram on her gravestone, her bereaved husband(?) expressed the hope that news of the tragedy would reach Agathokleia’s polis of origin (­GVI 1353):30 Travellers, if one of you should reach her native Herakleia, Say that pangs of birth led off the daughter of Polykrates, Agathokleia, to Hades. For they did not come upon her easy as her child approached the light. 465

Christian A. Thomsen

Needless to say, there were more reliable and preferable means of communication available to those who set up the memorial for Agathokleia. Any evidence of such means, however, will have been lost. But the epigram clearly assumes that there was at Herakleia someone who knew of Agathokleia and would have wanted to know of her untimely death (­this was not always the case).31 A contemporary epigram from the city of Rhodes provides further evidence for the communication of major life events to one’s family and home polis. A certain Aristanax had died in Rhodes and his brother Andromachos vowed to take the remains back to their father in their native city of Paphos on Cyprus (­IG XII.1 140):32 When the mourning is over Andromachos will take his brother Aristanax’ urn to Paphos, the city of his fathers. You, old man Menneas, will behold not the reward of ­child-​­rearing, but the bones of a son who died on foreign Rhodian soil. There is no explicit evidence that the two brothers had settled in Rhodes, but the decision to leave behind for Aristanax a monument in the Rhodian necropolis is a good indication of a deeper connection to the city of Rhodes.33 What is more, the name of the deceased brother, Aristanax, is a distinctively Rhodian name, and therefore deepens the suspicion that he at least had spent a good part of his life (­if not all of it) at Rhodes.34 These two examples invite us to think about boundaries and distances. Whichever Herakleia was home to Agathokleia’s kin (­there are, of course, several candidates and no means of settling the question), it would likely have been a long journey. But in the world of the Greek poleis, this was not necessarily the case, and for not a few metics travel to their polis of origin may have involved only a short trip. An overview of foreigners buried at Rhodes can give an impression of the distances travelled (­or needing to be travelled in order to return). The city of Rhodes, on the northern promontory of the island of the same name, was not only an important trade hub on the route between Egypt and the cities of the Aegean, it was also home to a substantial foreign population.35 Tallying the foreign individuals named in the city’s funerary epigraphy and weeding out known relations (­so as to count in effect families rather than individuals), it is possible to produce a rough estimate of the origins of the city’s foreign population in the period between ca. 200 BCE and 100 CE.36 A majority of foreigners attested in the funerary epigraphy hailed from cities that clung to Asia Minor’s eastern and southern seaboards, and fairly close to Rhodes. Since the Rhodian state in this period ­included  – ​­apart from the island of ­Rhodes  – ​­parts of the mainland (­the ­so-​­called peraia) and several islands including Karpathos to the southwest, some foreign citizens buried at Rhodes were buried closer to ‘­home’ than Rhodian demesmen of the Karpathopolitai from Karpathos. In fact, more than half (­55%) would have been able to reach their home cities within three days’ sailing by which Ephesos to the north and Side to the east could be reached (­if winds were favourable, Aristanax’ remains could reach his father in Paphos after only a day and a half at sea).37 About 85% could make it home in four days or less in which time also the cities of Antioch and Alexandria could both be reached.38 Most foreigners in Rhodes, in other words, were, in fact, not very far from home and would have been able to visit their home poleis occasionally, if not routinely. If and how often they went must have depended on a variety of (­personal) factors, including their financial means, but travel need not have been for the wealthy few. A late example, The Gospel of Luke, has the 466

Citizenship, identification, and the metic experience in Greece

Holy Family (­also in this telling a family of modest means) make the approximately ­80-​­m ile trip from Nazareth to ­Jerusalem – ​­an ­over-​­land journey of several ­days – ​­every year for Passover.39 Greek metics who made trips of similar duration and frequency would thereby be able to keep families, villages, civic s­ ub-​­divisions, and magistrates ­up-­​­­to-​­date on births and deaths abroad, and some may have split their time between both native and adopted poleis. In the late fourth century BCE, the citizens of Arkesine on Amorgos had decided to seek a loan from a certain Praxikles, a man of considerable wealth from the neighbouring island of Naxos. The Arkesinean magistrates in charge of procuring the loan were eventually approved for three talents of Attic silver. The agreement between the Arkesineans and Praxikles, recorded on a stele in the Arkesinean sanctuary of Hera, contains a long list of rather onerous terms and conditions. These included a very short period of repayment and a prohibition against decisions that would in any way affect the contract. But perhaps most strikingly, the Arkesineans agreed to put down as security ‘­all the public property of the city and the private property belonging to the Arkesineans and to those living in Arkesine, both there and overseas’.40 Philippe Gauthier argued that the phrase ἔγγαια καὶ ὑπερπόντια distinguished between landed property and ships with their cargoes, and was comparable to and derived from the Athenian ἔγγαια καὶ ναυτικά.41 This interpretation, however, begs the question of why the Arkesineans felt the need to change ναυτικά to ὑπερπόντια if they meant to express the same? More importantly, ὑπερπόντια means across the sea and on occasion simply ‘­foreign’ and Wilhelm Dittenberger’s suggestion that the phrase drew a distinction between property in Arkesine (­or perhaps on the island of Amorgos, which included two more poleis, Minoa and Aigiale) and property located in the territory of other c­ ity-​­states cannot be brushed aside.42 Admittedly, the potential seizure of such overseas assets in case of Arkesinean default would involve not a few practical problems, but even so, it may be that the mortgaging of literally all property was simply aimed at preventing the Arkesineans from seeking any additional credit. Alternatively, Praxikles may have had particular Arkesinean metics in mind: fellow Naxian citizens. At some earlier point, Arkesine and Naxos had established a close relationship through a symbolon (‘­agreement’), by which the two poleis (­presumably among other things) had established a common juridical framework to resolve disputes between their citizens.43 The symbolon clearly suggests economic interactions between the citizens of the two cities, but it would provide also the kind of privilege by which, as we have seen, cities sought to make themselves attractive to foreigners of particular cities. Whatever the composition of the metic community in Arkesine, the loan agreement’s last provision, appended directly to the inclusion of the foreign residents, ‘­those living in Arkesine’, clearly suggests that they were believed by Praxikles to have property outside their c­ ity-​­state of ­residence – ​­a further indication that ties between metics and their home cities need not have been completely severed. One such propertied metic is, in fact, known to us through the contemporary speech of Lycurgus against his ­fellow-​­Athenian Leocrates. Leocrates had allegedly snuck out of Athens after the battle of Chaironeia when the fate of the city still hung in the balance and went on to live ‘­as a metic’ for more than five years in neighbouring Megara (­Lycurg. Leoc. ­16–​­17, 21). He had not immediately sold his slaves and considerable property in Attika, but when he did, he handed it all off to close relatives.44 Lycurgus took this as evidence that Leocrates had no intention of returning to Athens ever again 467

Christian A. Thomsen

and by extension as a tacit admission of his guilt (­L eoc. 56: ‘­what need had he to move his family’s sacred images or to sell the house here?!’). But by Lycurgus’ own account, Leocrates had liquidated his property in Attika in order to raise money for a grain shipping operation he ran between Epiros and Korinth (­rather than in an attempt to sever his ties with his home city). The fact that everything was sold to close relatives only should be taken to suggest that Leocrates meant to retrieve his property upon his return (­Lycurg. Leoc. 26). Together the Arkesinean loan agreement and Lycurgus’ narrative of Leocrates’ travels suggest that at least some metics had not entirely severed their ties with their home. Some may have split their time between their home and an ‘­adoptive’ polis while others, like Leocrates, spent several years abroad before they returned home. In considering the metic experience, it will be necessary to move away from the notion that the legal realities that faced metics can be reduced to the single shared metic status. Metic status was qualified by the addition of certain privileges negotiated not only by the individual, but also by entire communities. Citizenship, though not actively practised and perhaps not practised for generations, therefore continued to play a vital part in the social and economic outcomes of the migrant. By extension, it would shape the pattern of migration itself, making some places more or less attractive to settle. The privileges that the Athenians voted for the citizens of Sidon, and which have been brought up repeatedly, seem to have had this effect. As mentioned, an association of Sidonians was eventually established in Athens, but ceramic finds in the area surrounding Sidon show an increase in Attic ceramics in the fourth century,45 a good indication that privileges impacted trade and mobility between the two c­ ities  – ​­privileges that belonged to the citizen ­non-​­citizen.

Abbreviations I.Rhamnous Petrakos, V. (­1999) Ho dēmos tou Ramnountos: synopsē tōn anaskaphōn kai tōn ereunōn (­­1813–​­1998), vol. II: Hoi epigraphes (­Athens) OGIS Dittenberger, W. (­­1903–​­1905) Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae (­Leipzig) available online at https://­ CAPinv. Inventory of Ancient Associations Database (­ ancientassociations.ku.dk/­CAPI/)

Notes 1 This paper was delivered at UCL in 2019 and read at the SCS Annual Meeting in January 2021. I thank the audiences at both events for their comments and constructive criticism. Thanks are also due the organizers of Citizenship in classical antiquity: current perspectives and challenges (­UCL 2019) and the editors of the present volume for the opportunity to contribute to both, and to Sabine Neumann, Paul Vădan, Maja Rechendorff Møller (­all of the Migrants and membership regimes in the ancient Greek world team), Vincent Gabrielsen, and William Mack, who read drafts and offered their comments. Neither are, of course, in any way responsible for the arguments presented here, nor for the faults that remain. 2 = JHS 87 (1967) 133, a: [ἐρωτ]ᾶι εἰ λ[ῶ]ιον γυναῖκα λαμβάνοντι | [κ]αὶ ἄμενον καὶ παῖδες ἔσονται | [γη]ροτρόφοι Ἰσοδήμωι | [κ]αὶ Ἀθήνησι ἐπιδημοῖντι | [κ]αὶ πολιτευομένων Ἀθήνησι. 3 William Mack suggests to me that the shift to the plural πολιτευομένων could refer to the children: ‘­w ill there be children to take care of Isodemos in his old age if he goes to Athens and they be citizens at Athens’. It must also be noted that Ἀθήνησι ἐπιδημοῖντι could mean either ‘­going to’ or ‘­remaining in’ Athens and it may be, therefore, that Isodemos contemplated leaving Athens rather than returning.

468

Citizenship, identification, and the metic experience in Greece 4 E.g., Hansen (­1991: 97). For recent criticism of this view, see Mack (­2019), with bibliography. 5 For the legal requirements of metoikia (­at Athens), see Whitehead (­1977: ­6 –​­68); Kamen (­2013: ­43–​­54). On the (­partial) inclusion of metics in Athenian festivals, see Wijma (­2014); in Rhodian festivals, see Boyxen (­2018: ­182–​­249). On corporal punishment of free foreigners, see Carey in this volume. On extralegal violence against foreigners, see Vădan (­2022). 6 Kamen (­2013: 50). Cf. Whitehead (­1977: ­7–​­20); Kennedy (­2014: 3). ‘­­Free-​­born’ should also receive the further qualification that a substantial subsection of the metic population in Athens were manumitted slaves (­A krigg 2015). 7 Vatin (­1970: ­128–​­129), quoted and translated by Ogden (­1996: 289). 8 Whitehead (­1977: 33). 9 Oliver (­2007: 188). Nikon of Astakos was among the three men elected to effect the honorific decree of the paroikoi for the general Demostratos (­I . Rhamnous 23 = Oetjen 2014: no. 52, after 217/216 BCE) and the only n ­ on-​­Athenian among the contributors who restored the sanctuary of Amphieraios and members of the Amphieraistai, an association of the leading men in Rhamnous (­I .Rhamnous 167 = Oetjen 2014: no. 77, late third century BCE). On the Athenian paroikoi in Rhamnous and their origins as Antigonid mercenaries, see Oetjen 2014: ­76–​­91 (­cf. Oliver 2007: ­186–​­189). The associational landscape of ­late-­​­­third-​­c entury BCE Rhamnous is the subject of Thomsen (­forthcom.). 10 Nikarchos, son of Nikon of Aitolia, proposed the honorific decrees of the paroikoi for the generals Herakleides (­I .Rhamnous 51 = Oetjen 2014: no. 54, 208/207 BCE) and Leukonoion (­I .Rhamnous 47 = Oetjen 2014: no. 55, 200/­199 BCE). 11 Grainger (­1999: ­313–​­315). 12 On the use of polis and federal ethnics, see Rizakis (­2012). 13 IG II2 141.­30–​­36. For the date, see Matthaiou (­2016). See also Woolmer in this volume. 14 It finds some parallel in privileges voted for refugees, but these were clearly special cases connected with the destruction of allied cities. Whitehead (­1977: ­15–​­16). 15 Xen. Vect. 2.­1–​­7 with Gauthier (­1976). Woolmer (­2015); Ober (­2008: ­250–​­254). 16 The last privilege, however, came with the condition that it did not apply to those Milesians who practised their citizenship elsewhere, suggesting that the Olbians expected at least some Milesians to permanently settle in their territory. For a discussion of the treaty and its historical context, see now Saba (­2020); cf. Gauthier (­1972). 17 Saba (­2020: ­98–​­100); cf. Migeotte (­2004). 18 = OGIS 265, with Saba (­2020: 107). 19 Saba (­2020). For potential additions, see ­Savalli-​­Lestrade (­2021). 20 Saba (­2020: ­6 –​­7). 21 Mack (­2015: ­73–​­76). Cf. Whitehead (­1977: ­90–​­92); Todd (­1993: ­197–​­198); Meyer (­2009: 72). Metics were required to have prostatai also in Megara (­Lyc. 16), Oropos (­Lys. 31.9), and in Rhodes (­Cl. Rhodos 2 [1932] 177 no. 6). 22 IG II2 2946 (­96 BCE, CAPInv. 331). Briquel Chatonet (­2012: ­624–​­626); cf. Ameling (­1990). For the date, see Ameling (­1990), with Tracy (­1990: 247). 23 Associations of Kitian (­CAPinv. 295) and Egyptian merchants (­IG II2 337, 333/332 BCE) and Cypriote Salamis (­CAPinv. 332; SEG 51:135, 334/333 BCE; IG II2 1290, ­m id-​­third century BCE); Thracians (­IG II2 1232, before ­m id-​­third century BCE). 24 Lys. 23.­5 –​­7 (­trans. adapted from Lamb 1930). I thank Maja Rechendorff Møller for pointing me to this evidence. 25 Saba (­2020: ­197–​­198) draws a parallel with the ­early-­​­­third-​­c entury BCE agreement between Praisos and Hierapytna which specifies (­Saba’s interpretation here is to be preferred over Chaniotis 1996: 186) that citizens should obtain permission to enrol as citizens of the partner polis. There is, however, no mention of documentation in any form. In the case of Myra and Xanthos, on the other hand, there is no mention of the need to seek permission. 26 Roy (­2020: 67) argues that the koinopoliteia mentioned here must refer to an isopoliteia agreement, but one concluded between a city (­A xos) and the Aitolian koinon. 27 The letter has been frequently discussed, e.g., Chaniotis (­2004). See now Roy (­2020) for extensive commentary and discussion. 28 On polis magistrates’ official correspondence, see Ceccarelli (­2013: ­311–​­330). Among the examples collected by Ceccarelli is a cover letter from the magistrates of Eretria addressed to the boulē and dēmos of the Koans and attached to ‘­a copy of the honours voted by us to your

469

Christian A. Thomsen people and to the judges you sent, authenticating it with the public seal, so that you may know. Farewell’ (­IG XII.4 169.­3 –​­8, Ceccarelli 2013: 313). 29 Roy (­2020: 68, ­71–​­72). For those Kians, who wished to enrol as Milesian citizens (­Milet. I 3 141, 229/228 BCE), a special vote (­or decree) confirming their Kian citizenship had to be taken. Lefèvre (­2004: 112, 123). 30 πάτρην Ἡράκλειαν, ὁδοιπόροι, | ἤν τις ἵκηται, εἰπεῖν· ὠδῖνες ­παῖ-​­|δα Πολυκράτεος ἤγαγον εἰς ­Ἀί-​ |­ δην Ἀγαθόκλεαν· οὐ γὰρ ­ἐλα-​­|φραὶ ἤντησαν τέκνου | πρὸς φάος ἐρχομένου. (­trans. Bing 2009: 131). 31 Compare the epigram of Philo of Thaucheira in Libya, buried in Cretan Gortyn while no one mourned her at home (­IC IV 372, with SEG 15:577). 32 Ἀνδρόμαχος μεὰ πένθος | Ἀριστάνακτος ἀδελφοῦ | [κ]άλπιν ἐπ’ ἄστυ Πάφου πάτριον ἵξει ἄγων. | πρέσβυ, σὺ δ’ οὐχὶ τροφεῖα, | τὰ δ’ ὀστέα παιδὸς ἐπόψει, | Μεννέα, ἐν ξείνηι γῆι Ῥοδίων φθιμένου. For a later example, see IG XII.4 4 3127, both collected by Boyxen (­2018: 1­ 64–​­165 with n. 67). 33 The inscription quoted above was inscribed on a marble base (­IG XII.1 140) that originally supported a monument. 34 ­Twenty-​­eight of 30 instances (­including our Aristanax) of the name belong to Rhodes. LGPN I s.v. Ἀριστᾶναξ. Boyxen (­2018: ­166–​­169) collects further examples of foreigners with Rhodian names. 35 Diodorus Siculus reports that 6,000 citizens and 1,000 foreigners ( ­paroikoi and xenoi) reported for the defence of the city against Demetrios in 306/­305 BCE (­Diod. Sic. 20.84.2). Adopting Hansen’s (­2011) method for converting an army figure to a population figure, and with it the assumptions that (­1) the 6,000 citizen defenders must have approximated the total number of male citizens between the ages of 15 and 59, (­2) that males of 1­ 5–​­59 made up 59% of the male citizen population (­on analogy with Model West, Mortality Level 4 and a growth rate of 0.5%), bringing the number of male citizens in the city of Rhodes to 10,000, and (­3) that the female to male ratio was (­close to) 1:1, this brings the number of citizen inhabitants to 20,000. The same calculation can be made for the foreigners, bringing their numbers to 3,300. On Rhodian trade with Egypt, see Gabrielsen (­1997: ­71–​­74). 36 For a full overview of attested foreigners in Rhodes (­that is including those attested beyond the Rhodian necropolis), see Boyxen (­2018: ­349–​­393). 37 Casson (­1971: 2­ 82–​­288) estimates that ancient vessels averaged ‘­slightly less’ (­288) than 4 to 6 knots while sailing along the coast in favourable conditions. A speed of 3.5 knots would make a 2½-​­day journey from Rhodes to Ephesos up the coast of Asia Minor. 38 Casson (­1971: 287). 39 Luke 2.­41–​­52. Heracleides Criticus expected ‘­a good walker’ to make the approximately 30 miles from Athens to Oropos in only one day (­1.6). Casson (­1994: 72). 40 IG XII.7 67.B.­42–​­44, τά τ[ε] [κ]οινὰ τὰ τ[ῆ]ς πόλεως ἅπαντ[α κ]αὶ [τ]ὰ ἴδια τὰ Ἀρκεσινέων καὶ τῶν οἰκούν[τ]ων ἐν Ἀρκεσίνηι ὑπάρχ[οντα] ἔγγαια καὶ ὑπερπόντια. 41 Gauthier (­1980: ­197–​­202); cf. Migeotte (­2014: 329). 42 Syll.3 955 (= IG XII.7 67) ad loc. 43 IG XII.7 67.B.­44–​­9. Gauthier (­1972: 325) and (­1980). 44 Lycurg. Leoc. ­22–​­23. Amyntas, a ­brother-­​­­i n-​­law, bought Leocrates’ house and slaves and eventually sold on the slaves to Timochares, also a ­brother-­​­­in-​­law of Leocrates, even though the latter did not have the liquidity required for the purchase. The fact that the slaves were sold together, rather than individually, is another indication that Leocrates meant to buy them all back eventually. 45 Elayi (­2018: 262).

Bibliography Akrigg, B. (­2015) ‘­Metics in Athens’, in C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (­eds) Communities and networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) Ameling, W. (­1990) ‘­Koinon ton Sidonion’, ZPE 81, ­188–​­199 Bing, P. (­2009) The scroll and the marble: studies in reading and reception in Hellenistic poetry (­A nn Arbor, MI)

470

Citizenship, identification, and the metic experience in Greece Boyxen, B. (­2018) Fremde in der hellenistischen Polis Rhodos: zwischen Nähe und Distanz, Klio Beihefte, n.f. 29 (­Berlin) Briquel Chatonet, Fr. (­2012) ‘­Les inscriptions ­phenico-​­g recques et le bilinguisme des Pheniciens’, CRAI 1, ­619–​­638 Casson, L. (­1971) Ships and seamanship in the ancient World (­Princeton, NJ) ——— ​­(­1994) Travel in the ancient World (­Baltimore, MD and London) Ceccarelli, P. (­2013) Ancient Greek letter writing: a cultural history (­6 00 ­BC–​­150 BC) (­Oxford) Chaniotis, A. (­1996) Die Verträge zwischen kretischen Poleis in der hellenistischen Zeit (­Stuttgart) ——— ​­(­2004) ‘­Mobility of persons during the Hellenistic wars: state control and personal relations’, in C. Moatti (­ed.) La mobilité des personnes en Méditerranée, de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne: procédures de contrôle et documents d’identification (­Rome) ­481–​­500 Elayi, J. (­2018) The history of Phoenicia (­Atlanta, GA) Gabrielsen, V. (­1997) The naval aristocracy of Hellenistic Rhodes (­Aarhus) Gauthier, Ph. (­1972) Symbola: les étrangers et la justice dans les cités grecques (­Nancy) ——— (­1976) Un commentaire historique des Πόροι de Xénophon (­Genève) ——— ​­(­1980) ‘­Études sur des inscriptions d’Amorgos’, BCH 104.1, ­197–​­220 Grainger, J. (­1999) The league of the Aitolians (­Leiden) Hansen, M.H. (­1991) The Athenian democracy in the age of Demosthenes: structure, principles, and ideology (­Oxford and Baltimore, MD) ——— ​­(­2011) ‘­How to convert an army figure to a population figure’, GRBS 51, ­239–​­253 Kamen, D. (­2013) Status in classical Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Kennedy, R.F. (­2014) Immigrant women in Athens: gender, ethnicity, and citizenship in the classical city (­London) Lamb, W.R.M. (­1930) Lysias. With an English Translation (­Cambridge, MA) Lefèvre, F. (­2004) ‘­Contrôles d’identité aux frontières dans les cités grecques: le cas des entrepreneurs étrangers et assimilés’, in C. Moatti (­ed.) La mobilité des personnes en Méditerranée, de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne: procédures de contrôle et documents d’identification (­Rome) ­99–​­125 Lhôte, E. (­2006) Les lamelles oraculaires de Dodone (­Geneva) Mack, W. (­2015) Proxeny and polis: institutional networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­Beyond potential citizenship: a network approach to understanding grants of politeia’, in M. Dana and I. ­Savalli-​­Lestrade (­eds) La cite interconnectée dans le monde ­gréco-​ ­romain (­IVe siècle a.C.-​­IVe siècle p.C.): transferts et reseaux institutionnels, religieux et culturels aux époques hellénistique et impériale (­Bordeaux) ­61–​­82 Matthaiou, A. (­2016) ‘­Συνθήκη Ἀθηναίων καὶ Σιφνίων (­Agora XVI 50). Σημείωσις’, Grammateion 5, ­71–​­72 Meyer, E.A. (­2009) Metics and the Athenian ­phialai-​­inscriptions: a study in Athenian epigraphy and law, Historia Einzelschriften 208 (­Wiesbaden) Migeotte, L. (­2004) ‘­La mobilité des étrangers en temps de paix en Grèce ancienne’, in C. Moatti (­ed.) La mobilité des personnes en Méditerranée, de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne: procédures de contrôle et documents d’identification (­Rome) ­615–​­648 ——— ​­(­2014) Les finances des cités grecques: aux périodes classique et hellénistique, Epigraphica 8 (­Paris) Ober, J. (­2008) Democracy and knowledge: innovation and learning in classical Athens (­Princeton, NJ) Oetjen, R. (­2014) Athen im dritten Jahrhundert v. Chr. Politik und Gesellschaft in den Garnisonsdemen auf der Grundlage der inschriftlichen Überlieferung, Reihe Geschichte 5 (­Düsseldorf) Ogden, D. (­1996) Greek bastardy in the classical and Hellenistic periods (­Oxford) Oliver, G.J. (­2007) War, food, and politics in early Hellenistic Athens (­Oxford) Rizakis, A.D. (­2012) ‘­La double citoyenneté dans le cadre des koina grecs: l’exemple du koinon achéen’, in A. Heller, and A.-​­V. Pont (­eds) Patrie d’origine et patries électives: les citoyennetés multiples dans le monde grec d’époque romaine (­actes du colloque international de Tours, ­6 –​­7 novembre 2009 (­Bordeaux) ­23–​­38 Roy, J. (­2020) ‘­T he ­life-​­story of Epikles the Oaxian’, in F. Reduzzi Merola, M.V. Bramante, and A. Caravaglios (­eds) Le realtà della schiavitù: identità e biografie da Eumeo a Frederick Douglass. Les réalités de l’esclavage: identités et biographies d’Eumée à Frederick Douglass. Proceedings of the XL International Conference of GIREA (­Naples, ­18–​­20 December 2017) (­Naples) ­65–​­72

471

Christian A. Thomsen Saba, S. (­2020) Isopoliteia in Hellenistic times, Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy 14 (­Leiden) ­Savalli-​­Lestrade, I. (­2021) ‘­Review of Sara Saba, Isopoliteia in Hellenistic times (­Leiden 2020)’, BMCRev 2021.03.30 Thomsen, C.A. (­forthcom.) ‘­Soldiers and associations in ­third-​­century Rhamnous’, in S. Skaltsa and C.A. Thomsen (­eds) Private partnerships: associations and the polis in ­post-​­classical Greece Todd, S.C. (­1993) The shape of Athenian law (­Oxford) Tracy, S. (­1990) Attic ­letter-​­cutters of 229 to 86 B.C. (­Berkeley, CA) Vădan, P. (­2022) ‘­Migration, mobility, and the hierarchy of violence in the classical and early Hellenistic polis’, TAPhA 152.2, ­381–​­425 Vatin, C. (­1970) Recherches sur le mariage et la condition de la femme mariée à l’époque hellénistique (­Paris) Whitehead, D. (­1977) The ideology of the Athenian metic (­Cambridge) Wijma, S.M. (­2014) Embracing the Immigrant. The participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­­5th–​­4th century BC) (­Stuttgart) Woolmer, M. (­2015) ‘­Forging links between regions: trade policy in classical Athens’, in E.M. Harris, D.M. Lewis, and M. Woolmer (­eds) The Ancient Greek economy: markets, households and ­city-​­states (­Cambridge) ­66–​­89

472

33 HELLENISTIC EGYPT AND THE HYBRIDIZATION OF ‘­CITIZENSHIP’1 Patrick Sänger

There existed under the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt an institution, or association, called a politeuma, or ‘­polity’. Usually, the word politeuma is related to Greek city states or poleis. In this context, politeuma can mean ‘­political act’, ‘­government’, ‘­citizenry’, ‘­polity’, or ‘­state’ or, as a technical term, refer to the body o who had political ­ f – active – ­​­­ citizens ​­ rights.2 The Ptolemies seem to have adopted the word politeuma and transferred it to a specific form of association which was apparently destined for organized groups of people living within an urban area and named after an ethnic designation. Indeed, this particular word usage only occurs in the territory of the Ptolemaic kingdom (­see Berthelot and Müller in this volume).3 But was it not somewhat odd to detach the word politeuma from its original meaning and use it to designate a hybrid (­­city-​­like) form of organization? In the case of the Ptolemaic kingdom, such a reinterpretation came as no surprise, because in Egypt polis-​­related terminology was occasionally adopted in an official context (­in papyri and inscriptions) to refer to social features without its original legal meaning. The term polis did not need to indicate that the s­ o-​­called town had a Greek constitution, it was rather a common designation for nome capitals and some villages; a politēs could be a member of an ethnic politeuma and sympoliteuomenoi a description for people belonging to an association or sharing a ceremonial act. This chapter seeks to take a closer look at these semantic shifts and the administrative or social reality behind them. It will be argued that the linguistic hybridizations in question seem to be a consequence of the almost entire lack of polis structures in Egypt, so that the reinterpretation of Greek legal terms seemed to be less problematic than in regions dominated by ­old-​­established poleis and could be used to create inclusive and adaptable concepts for different patterns of belonging.

Preliminary remarks: the polis policy of the Ptolemies With regard to the Ptolemaic heartland, the Nile Valley, it is a ­well-​­known characteristic of Ptolemaic politics that neither the nome capitals nor metropoleis were constituted as Greek poleis in order to ‘­Hellenize’ the traditional district administration, nor is a strong intention discernible to found a series of new poleis in the Nile Valley in addition DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-39

473

Patrick Sänger

to the already existing Greek cities of Alexandria and Naucratis. For the late fourth and the third centuries BCE, only one case can be identified: the completely new foundation of Ptolemais Hermeiou in Upper Egypt. If one compares this ruling practice with that of the Ptolemies’ ­arch-​­enemy, the Seleucids, then a sharp contrast seems to arise, because the rule of the latter is characterized by the foundation of numerous poleis. However, this discrepancy must not be overstressed as a fundamental difference between the city policy of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. Indeed, the latter did not tend to found new poleis in already urbanized and relatively densely populated areas, ­ ell-​­documented examsuch as the Persian heartland.4 A comparable and particularly w ple of this ruling practice is provided by the highly urbanized region of Asia Minor under Seleucid and Attalid rule, where predominantly ­re-​­foundations of already existing urban settlements (­indigenous cities, ­Greco-​­Macedonian military settlements) can be observed; poleis that were completely new foundations were clearly in the minority in Hellenistic Asia Minor.5 The fact that the Nile Valley was structurally and administratively in no need of developmental support, therefore, puts the Ptolemies’ reluctance to found poleis on Egyptian soil in a pragmatic light (­though the lack of ­re-​­foundations remains notable). Indeed, this reluctance is only partly symptomatic of Ptolemaic ruling practice, for outside Egypt the first three Lagids did undertake r­ e-​­foundations of poleis in the Cyrenaica and in southern Asia Minor until the second half of the third century BCE; on the west coast of the Red Sea, no cities were founded that could be called poleis in political and legal terms, but in Berenice Troglodytica and ­A rsinoe-​­Suez urban and administrative centres were created, and in the Aegean region the political and economic presence of the Ptolemies is also manifested in several settlements of village or urban character that were temporarily named after dynasty members.6 In this context, Ptolemy VI and VIII should not remain unmentioned, who had entrusted the ktistēs or ‘­founder’ Boethos with the founding of cities in the Nile Valley, namely those of Philometoris and Cleopatra in the Triacontaschoinos (­Lower Nubia) as well as Euergetis, which, according to unpublished papyri, should be located in the Heracleopolite nome.7 These measures are noteworthy because they were set in a period in which the establishment of politeumata also seems to have been encouraged, an institution that will be discussed in the next section. The establishment of Philometoris, Cleopatra, and Euergetis was probably, like the politeumata, a security measure in response to the revolt in the Thebais and/­or other domestic or foreign policy crises that the Ptolemaic Empire had to endure in the first half of the second century BCE:8 Although the geographic location of Philometoris and Cleopatra cannot be specified for the time being, the fact that the inscription attesting to these cities comes from the southern borderlands of Egypt suggests that they were also intended as military outposts, and in Euergetis a large part of the population is likely to have been soldiers.9

The institution of the ethnic politeuma In Hellenistic Egypt, politeumata are attested for Cilicians, Cretans (­both in the Arsinoite nome?), Boeotians (­in Xois in the delta), and Idumeans (­in Memphis).10 All these politeumata are attested in the second or first century BCE.11 In Roman times, we encounter at the end of the first century BCE a politeuma of Phrygians, whose exact location in Egypt cannot be determined, and in 120 CE a politeuma of Lycians, which existed in Alexandria.12 474

Hellenistic Egypt and the hybridization of ‘citizenship’

In 2001, the papyrus archive of the Jewish politeuma of Heracleopolis (­the capital of the Heracleopolite nome) was published as P.Polit.Iud.13 It provides the first definitive documentary evidence of a Jewish politeuma in Hellenistic times.14 The only other Jewish politeuma known so far belongs to the context of Roman rule;15 it is to be located in Berenice in the Cyrenaica and is, incidentally, the only politeuma that is securely attested outside Egypt.16 The information on the Jewish politeuma of Heracleopolis confirms that ethnic politeumata are linked to military groups.17 The documents belonging to P.Polit.Iud. also seem to indicate that a politeuma was an administrative unit based on a (­­semi-​ ­autonomous) community and its territory,18 which is, in fact, also suggested by the semantic origin of the term. By constituting a politeuma, a community concentrated in a certain city quarter was, therefore, integrated into the administrative structure of the Ptolemaic kingdom; this public and territorial character distinguished the association called politeuma from an ordinary association.19 Because of this nature, the constitution of a politeuma certainly required authorization by the Ptolemaic government,20 while the emergence of communities or the establishment of associations per se was not ­controlled – ​­at least there is no evidence for this.21 Although a politeuma may physically have looked more or less like a s­ elf-​­contained settlement within a larger urban area, it has not been proven that the members of a politeuma formed a body of ­second-​­class citizens in comparison to the citizens of a Greek polis. Given the present state of evidence, an ethnic politeuma should, therefore, be ranked, on a constitutional level, among associations and not be defined as a ­small-​­scale, ­second-​ ­class polis (­Sänger 2016b). That members of the Jewish politeuma of Heracleopolis could call themselves politai (‘­citizens’, P.Polit.Iud. 1.18) does not provide ­clear-​­cut evidence for their belonging to any sort of polis, as will be shown in the section ‘­Sympoliteuomenoi and politai’. What we are dealing with are, therefore, groups where being a member was primarily significant for an individual’s social life (­Sänger 2019: ­169–​­178). Hybrid ­was  – ​­from today’s point of ­v iew  – ​­not only the character of the institution of the politeuma, but also the semantics given to the word in this context. When Hermann Strathmann associates the ethnic politeuma with the semantics of ‘­Fremdenkolonie’ (‘­foreign colony’) and presents it as if it were to be placed on an equal footing with the semantic fields of ‘­Staat’ (‘­state’) or ‘­G emeinwesen’ (‘­polity’),22 one could certainly agree with him on a purely ideational ­level – ​­despite factual reservations about such a colonially connoted form of expression. However, it should be emphasized that this semantic interpretation can only claim to be descriptive in nature, but not to represent a real understanding of the word. For the meaning of politeuma does not change, of course, when it is related to the institution; it, too, will generally have to be rendered as ‘­c itizenry’ or ‘­polity’. Legally, however, as explained above, there was a fundamental difference between the institution of the politeuma and Greek cities or their politeumata, and membership in the former would not have given a person a legal status comparable to citizenship of a polis. Consequently, the Ptolemies seem to have taken the term politeuma from the Greek polis world and applied it to a specific form of association for a settled community in a way that suited their politics, thus giving the term politeuma, as a terminus technicus for an institution, a second field of meaning in Greek administrative language besides the meaning of ‘­active citizenry’ (­cf. Lüderitz 1994: 185). However, with the institution of the politeuma, the meaning of the word and the legal reality behind it were not completely redefined. In fact, the semantics underlying the 475

Patrick Sänger

model of the ethnic politeuma can be explained by looking at the Jewish interpretation of the term.23 This interpretation expanded the meaning of the word in the sense that the context of a politeuma could no longer be formed exclusively by a Greek city and its politeia, but also by other communities that lived ideologically or religiously according to their own (­legal) ideas: the Jews followed in this respect the Torah, their book of laws, which gave an institutionalized veneer to their community of faith.24 This can be applied to the communities organized as ethnic politeumata, because they too were able to live according to their own legal and religious ideas. Moreover, a crucial factor here is that the institution of the politeuma defined them as local administrative units and thus made them (­similar to a polis) an actual ­institutionalized – ​­more or less ­self-­​­­determined – ​­part of Ptolemaic state administration. Thus, the semantics behind the institution of the politeuma can be interpreted as a blending between the original constitutional meaning and the linguistic interpretation to be found in Hellenistic Jewish authors. It combines, on an institutional level, the variety of meanings that can be attributed to the term politeuma in Hellenistic and Roman times. Whether the Hellenistic Jewish authors or the language attested in them was inspired by the introduction of the Ptolemaic institution of the politeuma, or whether the reverse was the case, cannot be answered. However, a mutual influence does not necessarily have to be considered, because parallel linguistic developments are equally possible. The hybrid Hellenistic linguistic usage, the manifestations of which can be well observed in Ptolemaic Egypt and which will be further pursued in the following sections, will probably have been the result of an organic development that was influenced from different directions. If it seems to have been unproblematic in Ptolemaic Egypt to use a word borrowed from the polis world, such as politeuma, as a terminus technicus for a specific institution and to define as its point of reference a specific and organized group of people within an urban settlement area, another aspect is of importance for this creation. For it has to be considered that politeumata have been proved so far only in Egypt and the Cyrenaica. And this may be somewhat logical, because in the context of Egypt’s administration, which was traditionally based on the nome system, administrative units such as the politeumata could be implemented in the existing structures without risking possible tensions between the government and traditional poleis: It was possible to simply incorporate the politeumata into the Egyptian nome capitals, which, from the Greek point of view, did not have the status of poleis, neither on the political nor on the legal level, and which, moreover, may have been based on a spatial concept that was easily compatible with such a measure.25 If we encounter politeumata not only in nome capitals but also in real poleis, which like Alexandria were founded by Alexander the Great or like Berenice in the Cyrenaica were newly founded or r­ e-​­founded by the Ptolemies, this may indicate that the Ptolemies did not intend to interfere with established structures of old poleis by means of this institution.

Sympoliteuomenoi and politai In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle outlined the relationship between state and association: According to this, the state is as much an image of a koinōnia or community as an association formed for economic purposes or for pleasure (­Arist. Eth. Nic. 8.9.­4 –​­6, 1160a; cf. Eth. Eud. 7.9.3, 1241b). In this concept, the differences between public (­state) structures and associations that served certain social and economic purposes become blurred 476

Hellenistic Egypt and the hybridization of ‘citizenship’

(­see Jones 1999: 1­ 6–​­18, 2­ 7–​­33). The parallelization or hybridization of different levels of social organization, group formation, and dynamics expressed here finds its consistent manifestation in Ptolemaic Egypt on a terminological and semantic level: on the basis of the institution of the politeuma, it has already been shown how a term deriving from the polis world acquired a new meaning in Ptolemaic administrative language to designate a specific type of association. However, this is not the only semantic shift that can be observed in Ptolemaic language usage in connection with polis-​­related terminology. A point of contention has been the meaning of the term sympoliteuomenoi, which is attested in the context of the Boeotian politeuma and other comparable groups. According to the evidence, sympoliteuomenoi are encountered in the context of the Ptolemaic kingdom in Xois, where the consecration of a temple district is performed by the priest of the Boeotian politeuma, his sons, as well as on behalf of Boeotian soldiers and sympoliteu​­ or simple omenoi.26 Likewise, in Cyprus the ethnically categorized koina – associations ​­ in Egypt the association of Apollonia(­s)­tai (­or simply gatherings for cult purposes27 – and their gathering?) are composed of soldiers and sympoliteuomenoi;28 and on a statue base from Sebennytos, a nome capital in the northern Nile delta, members of the local gymnasion appear as donors, who are also divided into army members and sympoliteuomenoi.29 The term sympoliteuomenoi in the documented cases likely refers to individuals who, together with a more closely defined core or main group, which in all cases seems to have had a military character, formed a community which was backed by a politeuma, an ordinary association, or a gymnasion, or which was perhaps simply formed on the occasion of an assembly. In the case of the Boeotians at Xois, it would be natural to identify the sympoliteuomenoi with the civilian members of the politeuma.30 The fact that sympoliteuomenoi are mentioned in the context of different forms of communities or associations, however, speaks against the approach that the term ­sympoliteuomenoi –​ ­in the sense of a terminus technicus – ​­provides a general reference to civilian members of a politeuma, because such a conceptual restriction is not given. Thus, it appears that the meaning of sympoliteuō in Ptolemaic Egypt had become detached from its original connection to the citizenry of a polis and had been expanded insofar as the verb was also used in connection with other communities. The documentary evidence, therefore, confirms a phenomenon involving the verb stem politeuō/­ politeuomai.31 This verb is to be rendered as ‘­to be a citizen’, ‘­to live as a free citizen’, or ‘­to administer the state’, and this meaning, like that originally attached to politeuma, also derives from the Greek polis world, and thus it is tied to the reality of the citizen’s life. In Hellenism, however, the verb politeuō acquires a new field of meaning: in the context of Hellenistic Jewish literature, the semantics behind ‘­to be a citizen’ or ‘­to administer the state’ is shaped by a way of life that is now influenced by Jewish religion and thus oriented toward religious and divine laws, the Torah. A comparably hybrid word meaning is also likely to underlie sympoliteuomenoi in the cases examined: The people designated in this way were those who met with another group according to an order that did not have to be primarily a polis order but could be subject to a different definition such as that of a politeuma, an ordinary association, a gymnasion, or a simple gathering.32 In this context, it is also relevant that in P.Polit.Iud. 1, a member of the Jewish politeuma of Heracleopolis distinguished between politai, ‘­ citizens’, and allophyloi, ‘­foreigners’, in his petition directed against a person designated as a ‘­harbour dweller’ (­lines ­17–​­18). Usually, one would understand politai to mean citizens of Greek cities, but this is admittedly not true in this case. One possibility would be to understand the addressed politai as a paraphrase for the members of the politeuma. In this regard, 477

Patrick Sänger

however, the qualification must be made that, as has been pointed out above, there is no reason to compare the institution of the politeuma with a polis on a legal level, that is, to consider a politeuma as an institution that had given its members some kind of citizenship or an elevated personal legal status, which would have justified their designation as politai according to Greek law. In view of the shifts in meaning that could be observed in the case of the words politeuma, politeuō, and sympoliteuomenoi, it could therefore be assumed that politēs was also ‘­m isappropriated’ on a semantic level in order to indicate membership of the community organized as politeuma in a way that was legally ­non-​­binding, but nevertheless appropriate because of the origin of the term. Since this ‘­m isappropriation’ is attested just one time in the sources on the politeumata, it is not possible to derive any regularity from it. Thus, for the time being, there is not enough evidence to interpret the term politēs as a (­­status-​­related) terminus technicus for ‘­member of a politeuma’ (­Sänger 2019: ­112–​­113). Especially in the context of Jewish communities, an interpretation that assumes behind the term politēs a real construct according to Greek law or at least an official status designation could appear too formalistic, if only because the term politēs was adopted into Jewish language usage in order to express the affiliation of the Jews to the politeia of ­Moses – an ​­ understanding that is already encountered in the Septuagint (­see also Berthelot in this volume).33 When in P.Polit.Iud. 1 the politai are contrasted with the allophyloi, then the focus might have been on distinguishing Jews from gentiles, whereby the former would not necessarily have to be restricted to the members of the politeuma.34 As a parallel, reference can be made to a funeral epigram from a Jewish milieu found at Heliopolis and dating to the first century BCE or CE, where the politai are also contrasted with another group of people, which is here called allogeneis.35 In this respect, it is probably a common topos in Jewish circles to distinguish between Jews and gentiles by terms such as politēs on the one hand and allophylos or allogenēs on the other; and as with politēs, in the case of allophylos or allogenēs, the origin of this usage lies in the Septuagint (­Veïsse 2004: 51; Moore 2015: 88). The semantic reinterpretation of polis-​­related terminology discussed in this section conveys a striking impression of the noticeable side effects of the polis policy pursued (­or not pursued) by the Ptolemies in Egypt; namely, it makes clear that Egypt, despite the extremely low density of polis foundations or de facto polis structures, nevertheless developed into a space that, at least according to its outward appearance, was shaped by the Greek polis world or where linguistic elements of this world were adapted and newly shaped. This is also evident from the use of the term ‘­polis’, which will be brought into focus in the next section using the impressive example of OGIS 737.

The polis of the Idumaeans in OGIS 737 In the sixth year; at the assembly (­synagōgē) held at the upper Apollonieion, namely, of the politeuma and the Idumeans from the polis (­hoi apo tēs poleōs Idoumaioi): since Dorion, the syngenēs and stratēgos and priest of the group of machairophoroi, has shown himself charitable in all respects, both in common as well as towards every individual, and behaving piously towards the deity, he willingly procured with great and abundant expenditure the painting and decorating of the temple indicated, as is quite evident to all. It was decided that, on the one hand, the other honours he holds will remain with him for life and that, on the other hand, an olive branch will be offered to him at all future sacrifices, according to the paternal 478

Hellenistic Egypt and the hybridization of ‘citizenship’

custom, and that the priests and sacred singers will be instructed to commemorate him in the hymns of praise, and that he will always be garlanded with a special wreath at the banquets of the politeuma; and (­it was decided) to place the resolution, which was engraved on a stone stele, in a conspicuous place in the temple, and to give Dorion a copy of it, so that he may have knowledge of the grateful response the city (­hē polis) has recorded to him. OGIS 737, a psēphisma or honorary decree, which dates to Ptolemaic times, probably to the end of the second century BCE,36 was found in Memphis and was certainly also erected there. It applies to Dorion,37 a ­h igh-​­ranking official and military dignitary: As syngenēs he held the highest Ptolemaic court rank; as stratēgos he was the leading official on nome level and besides this position he also served as priest of the machairophoroi, by which a troop of professional soldiers, literally ‘­sword or saber bearers’, is meant.38 The text of OGIS 737 shows in a singular way how in Ptolemaic Egypt the term polis was also played with in the representation of group affiliations. With regard to the interpretation of the inscription, it is initially obvious to link the mentioned politeuma with the Idumeans. First, because behind the Apollonieion in lines ­1–​­2 is probably hidden a sanctuary for Qos, the main god of the Idumeans before their conversion to Judaism, who was equated with Apollo.39 Second, because the politeuma is contrasted with other Idumeans, namely ‘­the Idumeans from the polis’ (­hoi apo tēs poleōs Idoumaioi). Regarding the understanding of ‘­the Idumeans from the polis’, it is first of all necessary to recall the ­well-​­known fact that the nome capitals of Ptolemaic Egypt, and thus also Memphis, did not possess the p ­ olitical-​­legal status of Greek poleis and were not organized as such. Therefore, there is also no reason to consider that the term politeuma in the sense of a (­ruling) citizenry of a polis could be transferred to the inhabitants of a nome capital; this ‘­traditional’ use of the word is actually proven in Egypt only for the cities constituted as Greek poleis (­Sänger 2019: 4, 117). In the context of Ptolemaic Egypt, however, the fact that the Egyptian nome capitals ­ olitical-​­legal level does not mean that the are not comparable to Greek poleis on the p word ‘­polis’ was avoided to refer to them. Rather, similar to the semantic reinterpretation underlying the Ptolemaic institution of the politeuma, a hybrid conceptual expansion of the term ‘­polis’ occurred. In comparison with the original semantics of the word, the term ­ olitical-​­legal implications in the context of Ptolemaic adcould be separated from its p ministrative language and thus also applied to settlements, mostly of urban dimensions, whose inhabitants did not possess civil rights.40 In this way, the term ‘­mētropolis’ was also reinterpreted, although in this case we have to speak of a terminus technicus, because it is found exclusively in connection with nome capitals. In this respect, it is advisable to interpret the expression ‘­the Idumeans from the polis’ solely according to the given wording, and this refers quite unspectacularly and unmistakably to ‘­Idumeans from the city (­nome capital) or mētropolis’ (­cf. ­Fischer-​­Bovet 2014: 291). They are probably opposed to the politeuma because they were not among its members and were probably not administratively bound to it. That the difference between the two groups is expressed by the (comparatively unspecific or inclusive) indication of origin apo tēs poleōs (‘­from the polis’) stands to reason, for the politeuma will have been a territorial unit within Memphis, thus associated with its own (specific or exclusive) city quarter. This consideration is supported by the fact that the Jewish politeuma in Heracleopolis can be interpreted as an administrative unit (­cf. above, section 2). The proposed interpretation is 479

Patrick Sänger

also reasonable because the urban area of ancient Egyptian cities like M ­ emphis – in ​­ contrast to Greek poleis – ​­was probably a conglomerate of individual more or less closed or separated city quarters.41 Accordingly, it must be stated that at the upper Apollonieion, the cult centre of the Idumeans, there was an assembly of the politeuma, embodied by its members, be they soldiers and/­or civilians, and the other Idumeans who did not belong to the politeuma and were scattered throughout the city. Since the inscription is to be placed in a highly visible part of the temple, the causal connection between the politeuma, which is not specified in the text, and the subsequent ‘­Idumeans from the polis’ may have been clear to the contemporary observer from the outset. Another argument against the need to explicitly refer to a ‘­politeuma of the Idumeans’ at the beginning of the inscription is that the quarter in which the politeuma was anchored can probably be regarded as the centre of Idumean life in Memphis; it would, therefore, be highly plausible if the Apollonieion, as the cult centre of the Idumeans, had been located on the territory of the politeuma. The reoccurrence of the word ‘­polis’ in line 24 can be explained by the fact that both groups of Idumeans, one defined locally as the members of the politeuma, the other less precisely defined as ‘­the Idumeans from the polis’, could together claim to represent the entire city as a geographical e­ ntity – ​­and this was totally harmless: since Memphis, as already explained, was not a Greek polis and had no citizenry, however defined, there was no basis for establishing a competitive relationship with a ­politico-​­legal collective that would have acted as official representative of the city.42 With regard to the meaning of ‘­polis’ in line 24, it would also be conceivable that the Idumeans wanted to allude to their believed unity in ­ eta-​­level, that is, that they understood their community (­apart a figurative sense or on a m ­ olitico-​­legal implications) as something that could be compared with a Greek from any p polis. Any ambiguity that may have been intended, however, will have been based on, and at least superficially in accordance with, the usual administrative language.

Summary In the documentary sources from Ptolemaic Egypt, from the second century BCE onward, a linguistic usage emerges in which Greek terms causally tied to the polis or its citizenry are transferred to communities that were constituted on a different basis or had formed informally. This would be consistent with Aristotle, who apparently made no ­distinction – ​­albeit within the framework of a polis – ​­between public and private forms of community formation or association (­cf. Ziebarth 1896: ­3 –​­4; San Nicolò 1913: 3). In any case, Ptolemaic Egypt acquired a Greek façade in linguistic terms without making this dependent on the existence of polis structures, indeed without subjecting Egypt to Greek notions of administration and law. This principle is also evident in the fact that the Ptolemaic administration did not favour citizens from the few genuine Greek poleis. They were not treated as the top of a social pyramid, that is, privileged in fiscal terms, for example. Rather, a middle way can be grasped in the official categorization of the ‘­Greek’ connoted population. It manifests itself in the definition of a fiscal category ­ bol-​­tax, which was a very modest called Hellenes (­including persons exempt from the o tax privilege).43 This category comprised mainly migrants or people with a migration background, but in this respect was not only limited to immigrants from the Greek core areas, but also included people from other cultural circles, such as Jews or Thracians; and even indigenous Egyptians could be included in this fiscal category, for example,

480

Hellenistic Egypt and the hybridization of ‘citizenship’

if they held posts in the administration and were thus of use to the Ptolemaic government.44 Thus, the conspicuous designation Hellenes was much broader than one would have thought possible in, say, classical Athens. Such an inclusive concept also underlay the Ptolemaic legal system. It had a category of law called politikoi nomoi (‘­civil laws’); this category probably included not only the laws of the Greek poleis founded in Egypt, but rather the entire body of Greek (­customary) law applied in Egypt,45 including the Jewish constitution, the politeia of Moses, laid down in the Torah.46 Thus, it can be stated that Greek legal culture in Egypt was characterized by openness and a low degree of dogmatism; concepts and realities were based on Greek models without strictly following the precepts of a world shaped by classical Greek poleis. In concrete terms, it can be stated that, on the basis of Ptolemaic administrative and legal policy, hybridized Greek legal concepts were concerned with designating similar patterns discernable in Egypt, which, however, unlike in the Greek motherland, had ­ olitical-​­legal implications. Thus, the concepts in question could be easily adjusted no p to geographical entities or social formations in Hellenistic Egypt as well as taken up and adapted by population groups in order to thereby assign themselves to a Greek or Hellenized milieu. Ultimately, it appears that the lack of polis structures created free spaces that allowed for the legally harmless manifestation of a Greek civic culture or ­identity – ​­perhaps precisely as a substitute for a lack of polis affiliation or structure. The polis and the aspect of citizenship associated with it were, therefore, more present in Egypt than one might think at first glance; for the forms of Greek ‘­civic culture’ that were expressed, there did not need to be a formal citizenship.

Abbreviations For the abbreviations of papyrus editions, see Oates, J. and Willis, W. (­eds) (­2021) The Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic, and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca, and Tablets. (­last accessed 11.03.2021) OGIS Dittenberger, W. (1903–1905) Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae (Leipzig)

Notes 1 The present text contains single passages of Sänger (­2019) and (­2021). 2 On the meaning of the word, see, e.g., Ruppel (­1927: ­268–​­312, ­433–​­454); Biscardi (­1984: ­1205–​ ­1215); Zuckerman (­­1985–​­1988: 174); Lüderitz (­1994: 183); Förster and Sänger (­2014: ­157–​­164); Sänger (­2016c). 3 On the evidence for the politeumata, see most recently Sänger (­2019). 4 On the settlement policy of the Seleucids and Ptolemies, see the comparative remarks by Mairs (­2021) and ­Fischer-​­Bovet (­2021). 5 On the situation in the Persian heartland and Asia Minor, see, e.g., Aperghis (­2004: ­90–​­92, ­95–​­96); Mileta (­2009); Daubner (­2011); ­Fischer-​­Bovet (­2014: ­296–​­297). 6 See Heinen (­1997: 3­ 50–​­354); Winter (­2011); ­Fischer-​­Bovet (­2021); especially on the Cyrenaica: Laronde (­1987: 4­ 05–​­406). Of course, Müller (­2006) remains fundamental on Ptolemaic settlement policy. 7 On Philometoris and Cleopatra, see OGIS I 111 = Bernand (­1989: no. 302) = Bernand (­1992b: no. 14) dating to the reign of Ptolemy VI; on Euergetis SB XXIV 15973 (­origin unknown, 132 BCE) and its clean copy 15974 (­origin unknown, 132 BCE); see also Thompson (­2011a: 103 n.8). On Boethos and his city foundations, see Kramer (­1997); Heinen (­1997); ­Fischer-​­Bovet (­2021: ­75–​­78). 8 On this, see Heinen (­1997: ­361–​­362); Sänger (­2019: ­191–​­198).

481

Patrick Sänger 9 See the papyrus SB XXIV 15974.­9 –​­10 (­origin unknown, 132) referring to the foundation of Euergetis: οἷς … τῶν ἐν τῆι πόλει ἐν στρατείᾳ φερομένων [translate] (‘­from the persons who are listed in the city as military personnel;’; cf. SB XXIV 15973.6, the original of the text of which SB XXIV 15974 is the copy); see also Heinen (­1997: ­361–​­362). 10 Boeotians: SEG II 871 = SB III 6664. Cretans: P.Tebt. I 32 = W.Chr. 448. Idumaeans: OGIS 737 = Milne (­1905: ­18–​­19 no. 33027) = SB V 8929 = Bernand (­1992a: no. 25); on the identification of the Idumaean politeuma, see Thompson (­1984) and (­2012: ­93–​­96). Cilicians: SB IV 7270 = SEG VIII 573 = Bernand (­1975: no. 15) = Bernand (­1992b: no. 22). 11 On the dating of the Cilician politeuma, see Mooren (­1975: 173 no. 281); Bernand (­1992b: 65 no. 22); Sänger (­2015). 12 Phrygians: IG XIV 701 = OGIS 658 = SB V 7875 = IGR I 458 = Kayser (­1994: no. 74); on the provenance of the inscription, see also Huß (­2011: 299 n.232) with further bibliographical references. Lycians: SB III 6025 = V 8757 = IGR I 1078 = SEG II 848 = Bernand (­1992a: no. 61) = Kayser (­1994: no. 24). 13 On the Jewish politeuma of Heracleopolis, see, in general, J.M.S. Cowey and K. Maresch, P.Polit.Iud., Introduction, p­ p.  ­ 1–​­ 34; Falivene (­ 2002); Honigman (­ 2002); Kasher (­ 2002); Maresch and Cowey (­2003); Cowey (­2004); Kruse (­2008, 2010, 2015); ­A rzt-​­Grabner (­2012); Sänger (­2016b). 14 Against Ritter (­2011), who rejects the commonly accepted existence of a Jewish politeuma in Heracleopolis, see Sänger (­2014: 54 n.7) and (­2016a: 29 n.10). 15 CIG III 5362 = SEG XVI 931 = Lüderitz (­1983: no. 70) (­second half of first century BCE/­fi rst half of first century CE [?]); CIG III 5361 = Lüderitz (­1983: no. 71) (­43 BCE or 24 CE [?]); on the dating approaches, see Sänger (­2019: ­39–​­40). 16 On the uncertain case of the four politeumata attested for Sidon (­now in Lebanon) at the end of the third century BCE, see Sänger (­2019: ­229–​­239; forthcom.). 17 For previous approaches, see Launey (­1949/­1950: 1077); Honigman (­2003: 67); Thompson (­2011a: ­109–​­113); (­2011b: ­21–​­22) with further references in n. 47. 18 See Sänger (­2016a: ­35–​­38, 44; 2016b); Kruse (­2010: 95, 97, ­99–​­100). 19 On the approach that the Jewish politeuma of Heracleopolis should not be considered a special case, see Honigman (­2003); Kruse (­2008, 2010); Thompson (­2011a: ­109–​­113; 2011b: ­21–​­22). Rather, it is reasonable to hypothesize that all politeumata in the area ruled by the Ptolemies shared common features in terms of their ­administrative-​­legal anchoring and structural patterns; see Sänger (­2016a: 38; 2019: ­167–​­169). 20 See Launey (­1949/­1950: 1077, 1079); Cowey (­2004: 30); Kruse (­2008: 172; 2010: 98); Sänger (­2016b). 21 See San Nicolò (­1915: 10; 1927: 2­ 99–​­300) about state authorization. 22 See Strathmann (­1990: 535) with regard to the meaning of the word politeuma in Phil. 3.20. 23 On the semantics of politeuma, see note 2 above. 24 Troiani (­1994) has convincingly argued that politeia in Philon and Flavius Josephus should basically be understood as politeia of Moses, i.e., as interpretatio Graeca of the Jewish constitution, the Torah; see also Honigman (­1997: 63). 25 For the conception of ancient Egyptian cities, see below in section 4. 26 SEG II 871 = SB III 6664.­11–​­13 with Launey (­1949/­1950: 1067). 27 See Poland (­1909: 80, ­128–​­129, ­164–​­165); Rzepka (­2002: ­227–​­234); Oetjen (­2014: ­148–​­149). 28 Koina in Cyprus: OGIS 143 = SEG XIII 554.­4 –​­6 (­Salamis, c.116 BCE); OGIS 145 = SEG XIII 579.­3 –​­5 (­Palaipaphos, 123118 BCE); cf. OGIS 151 = IOlympia 301.3 (­­158-​­146 BCE) with Mitford (­1953: 151) and Sänger (­2019: 87 n.28). Apollonia(­s)­tai: see SB V 8066 = Bernand (­1999: no. 6.­2 –​­3 [Hermopolis, 78 BCE]); for the wording cf. SB I 4206 = Bernand (­1999: no. 5.­2 –​­3) (­Hermopolis, 80/­79 BCE). On these koina and the Apollonia(­s)­tai, see Sänger (­2019: ­86–​­89, ­154–​­155 and ­241–​­243). 29 SB I 1106, ­4 –​­6 with van’t Dack (­1984) (­Sebennytos in the Nile Delta; after the third century CE). 30 See also Zuckerman (­­1985–​­1988: 175); Thompson (­2011a: 110). 31 For this verb, see LSJ9 1434 s.v.; Fraenkel (­1906: 271) und Ruppel (­1927: 269). 32 Cf. Oetjen (­2014: ­100–​­101) on the untechnical meaning of sympoliteuomenos in IG IX.2 234.1, a decree from the Thessalian Pharsalos dating to the second half of the third century BCE.

482

Hellenistic Egypt and the hybridization of ‘citizenship’ 33 See Strathmann (­1990: 525); J.M.S. Cowey and K. Maresch, P.Polit.Iud., Introduction, p­p. ­22–​­23, 38; Capponi (­2007: ­141–​­142). 34 See also Honigman (­2002: ­253–​­254) and (­2009: 126 n.18). 35 CIJ II 1489 = Bernand (­1969: no. 69) = Horbury and Noy (­1992, no. 114, 7­ –​­8); cf. e.g., Krauter (­2004: ­148–​­149). 36 For the dating, see SEG XX 643; BL V 106. Cf. Sänger (­2019: 105 n.2, 189 n.13). 37 See Pros.Ptol. I 248 (­w ith Pros.Ptol. VIII) = Pros.Ptol. II 2113b (­w ith Pros.Ptol. VIII) = Pros. Ptol. III 5519, 6337 (­w ith Pros.Ptol. IX). On the person of Dorion, cf. further Thompson (­1984: ­1070–​­1071; 2012: ­105–​­106); Gorre (­2007: ­242–​­245); ­Fischer-​­Bovet (­2014: ­291–​­292, 353). 38 On the machairophoroi, see generally Aubert (­1987: 128 n.9, 129 n.11); P. Schubert, P.Gen. I2 31, note to line ­14–​­15; id., P.Louvre II 98, note to line ­5 –​­8; ­Fischer-​­Bovet (­2014: ­151–​­152). 39 See Rapaport (­1969: 73); Thompson (­1984: 1071; 2012: 9­ 2–​­93); cf. already Lumbroso (­1906: 164). 40 For the conceptual definition of the word ‘­polis’ in the context of Ptolemaic Egypt, see Heinen (­1997: 352); ­Fischer-​­Bovet (­2021: ­70–​­71). 41 See, e.g., Heilporn (­2009: ­36–​­44) on Thebes; Thompson (­2012: 5, ­7–​­17, 81) on Memphis; for a general characterization of the Egyptian city, see, e.g., Kolb (­1984: ­36–​­40). 42 In contrast to what Launey (­1949/­1950: 1073) and Thompson (­1984: 1071, 1­ 072–​­1073; 2012: 94) assumed, this interpretation would not entail a semantic change of the term polis within the text. 43 On this fiscal category, see generally Bagnall (­1997: ­7–​­8); Thompson (­2001: ­307–​­310); Clarysse and Thompson (­2006: ­138–​­147, 155); Huß (­2011: ­246–​­248). 44 Thracians and Jews: see Mélèze Modrzejewski (­1983: ­265–​­266); Clarysse and Thompson (­2006: 145, ­147–​­148). Egyptians: see Thompson (­2001: ­310–​­312); Clarysse and Thompson (­2006: ­142–​­145). 45 Mélèze Modrzejewski (­1988: 177); cf., for instance, Mélèze Modrzejewski (­1966; 1983: 2­ 58–​ ­260; 1997: ­107–​­112; 2014: ­151–​­169). 46 See, for instance, Wolff (­1953: ­39–​­44; 2002: ­55–​­58); Mélèze Modrzejewski (­1966; 1988: 177; 1997: ­107–​­112; 2014: ­151–​­169).

Bibliography Aperghis, G.G. (­2004) The Sekeukid royal economy: the finances and financial administration of the Seleukid Empire (­Cambridge) ­A rzt-​­Grabner, P. (­2012) ‘­Die Stellung des Judentums in neutestamentlicher Zeit anhand der ­Politeuma-​­Papyri und anderer Texte’, in J. Herzer (­ed.) Papyrologie und Exegese: Die Auslegung des Neuen Testament im Licht der Papyri, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2. Reihe, 341 (­Tübingen) ­127–​­158 Aubert, J.-​­J. (­1987) ‘­Transfer of ­tax-​­money from the village of Theadelphia to the village of Apias: P. Col. Inv. 192’, BASP 24, ­125–​­136 Bagnall, R.S. (­1997) ‘­The people of the Roman Fayum’, in M.L. Bierbrier (­ed.) Portraits and masks: burial customs in Roman Egypt (­London) ­7–​­15 (­Repr. 2006 in id. et al. (­eds) Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Sources and approaches [Aldershot and Burlington, VT] Chapter XIV, ­1–​­19) Bernand, A. (­1989) De Thèbes à Syène (­Paris) ——— ​­(­1992a) La prose sur pierre dans l’Égypte hellénistique et romaine, vol. I: Textes et traductions, vol. II: Commentaires (­Paris) Bernand, É. (­1969) Inscriptions métriques de l’Égypte g­ réco-​­romaine. Recherches sur la poésie épigrammatique des Grecs en Égypte, Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon 98 (­Paris) ——— ​­(­1975) Recueil des inscriptions grecques du Fayoum, vol. I: La «méris» d’Hérakleides (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­1992b) Inscriptions grecques d’Égypte et de Nubie au musée du Louvre, Centre de Recherches d’Histoire Ancienne 51 (­Paris) ——— ​­(­1999) Inscriptions grecques d’Hermoupolis Magna et de sa nécropole, BdÉ 123 (­Le Caire) Biscardi, A. (­1984) ‘­Polis, politeia, politeuma’, in Atti del XVII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia (­Napoli, ­19–​­26 maggio 1983), 3 vols. (­Napoli) ­1201–​­1215

483

Patrick Sänger Capponi, L. (­2007) Il tempio di Leontopoli in Egitto: identità politica e religiosa dei Giudei di Onia (­c . 150 a.C. -​­73 d.C.) (­Pisa) Clarysse, W. and Thompson, D.J. (­2006) Counting the people in Hellenistic Egypt, vol. 2: Historical studies (­Cambridge) Cowey, J.M.S. (­2004) ‘­Das ägyptische Judentum in hellenistischer Z ­ eit — neue ​­ Erkenntnisse aus jüngst veröffentlichten Papyri’, in S. Kreuzer and J.P. Lesch (­eds) Im Brennpunkt: Die Septuaginta. Studien zur Entstehung und Bedeutung der Griechischen Bibel, vol. 2. Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament 161 = Folge 9, H. 1 (­Stuttgart) ­24–​­43 Daubner, F. (­2011) ‘­Militärsiedlungen und Territorialherrschaft in der Antike. Anstöße und Perspektiven’, in id. (­ed.) Militärsiedlungen und Territorialherrschaft in der Antike, Topoi. Berlin Studies in the Ancient World 3 (­Berlin and New York) ­1–​­17 Falivene, M.R. (­2002) ‘­Review of P.Polit.Iud.’, BO 59, ­541–​­550 ­Fischer-​­Bovet, Ch. (­2014) Army and society in Ptolemaic Egypt (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Reassessing Ptolemaic settlement policies: another look at the poleis’, ead. and S. von Reden (­eds) Comparing the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires: integration, communication, and resistance (­Cambridge) ­64–​­84 Förster, H. and Sänger, P. (­2014) ‘­Ist unsere Heimat im Himmel? Überlegungen zur Semantik von πολίτευμα in Phil 3,20’, Early Christianity 5, ­149–​­177 Fraenkel, E. (­1906) Griechische Denominativa in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und Verbreitung (­Göttingen) Gorre, G. (­2007) ‘­Identités et représentations dans l’Egypte ptolemaïque’, Ktema 32, ­239–​­250 Heilporn, P. (­2009) Thèbes et ses taxes: recherches sur la fiscalité en Égypte romaine (­Ostraca de Strasbourg II) (­Paris) Heinen, H. (­1997) ‘­Der κτίστης Boethos und die Einrichtung einer neuen Stadt. Teil II’, APF 43, ­340–​­363 Honigman, S. (­1997) ‘­Philon, Flavius Josèphe, et la citoyenneté alexandrine: vers une utopie politique’, JJS 48, ­62–​­90 ——— ​­(­2002) ‘­The Jewish Politeuma at Heracleopolis’, SCI 21, ­251–​­266 ——— ​­(­2003) ‘­Politeumata and ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt’, AncSoc 33, ­61–​­102 ——— ​­(­2009) ‘Jewish communities of Hellenistic Egypt: diverging responses to a varying ­socio-cultural environment’, in L.I. Levine and D.R. Schwartz (­eds) Jewish identities in antiquity. Studies in memory of Menahem Stern (­Tubingen) ­117–​­135 Horbury, W. and Noy, D. (­1992) Jewish inscriptions of ­G raeco-​­Roman Egypt (­Cambridge) Huß, W. (­2011) Die Verwaltung des ptolemaiischen Reiches, Münch.Beitr. 104 (­München) Jones, N.F. (­1999) The associations of classical Athens: the response to democracy (­New York and Oxford) Kasher, A. (­2002) ‘­Review essay on P.Polit.Iud.’, Jewish Quarterly Review 93, ­257–​­268 Kayser, F. (­1994) Recueil des inscriptions grecques et latines (­non funéraires) d’Alexandrie impériale (­Ier-​­IIIe s. apr. J.-​­C.), BdÉ 108 (­Le Caire) Kolb, F. (­1984) Die Stadt im Altertum (­München) Kramer, B. (­1997) ‘­Der κτίστης Boethos und die Einrichtung einer neuen Stadt. Teil I’, APF 43, ­315–​­339 Krauter, St. (­2004) Bürgerrecht und Kultteilnahme. Politische und kultische Rechte und Pflichten in griechischen Poleis, Rom und antikem Judentum. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 127) (­Berlin and New York) Kruse, Th. (­2008) ‘­Das politeuma der Juden von Herakleopolis in Ägypten’, in M. Karrer and W. Kraus (­eds) Die ­Septuaginta — ​­Texte, Kontexte, Lebenswelten. Internationale Fachtagung veranstaltet von Septuaginta Deutsch (­LXX.D), Wuppertal 20.-​­23. Juli 2006, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 219 (­Tübingen) ­166–​­175 ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­Das jüdische politeuma von Herakleopolis und die Integration fremder Ethnien im Ptolemäerreich’, in V.V. Dement’eva and T. Schmitt (­eds) Volk und Demokratie im Altertum, Bremer Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft 1 (­Göttingen) ­93–​­105 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Zwischen Integration, Assimilation und Selbstbehauptung: Das Politeuma der Juden von Herakleopolis in Mittelägypten’, in A. Pülz and E. Trinkl (­eds) Das Eigene und das Fremde. Akten der 4. Tagung des Zentrums Archäologie und Altertumswissenschaften an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 26.-​­27. März 2012. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. ­Philosophisch-​­Historische Klasse, Denkschriften 482 = Origines. Schriften des Zentrums Archäologie und Altertumswissenschaften 4 (­Wien) ­73–​­81

484

Hellenistic Egypt and the hybridization of ‘citizenship’ Laronde, A. (­1987) Cyrène et la Libye hellénistique: Libykai historiai de l’époque républicaine au principat d’Auguste (­Paris) Launey, M. (­1949/­1950) Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 169 (­Paris) (­2nd edn 1987: Réimpression avec addenda et mise à jour, en postface par Y. Garlan, P. Gauthier and C. Orrieux) Lüderitz, G. (­1983) Corpus jüdischer Zeugnisse aus der Cyrenaika mit einem Anhang von Joyce M. Reynolds, Beihefte des Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B, 53 (­Wiesbaden) ——— ​­(­1994) ‘­W hat is the Politeuma?’, in J.W. van Henten, and P.W. van der Horst (­eds) Studies in early Jewish epigraphy, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 21 (­Leiden, New York, and Köln) ­183–​­225 Lumbroso, G. (­1906) ‘­Lettere al signor professore Wilcken’, APF 3, ­163–​­167 Mairs, R. (­2021) ‘­Reassessing settlement policies in the Hellenistic Far East’, in Ch. F ­ ischer-​ ­Bovet and S. von Reden (­eds) Comparing the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires: integration, communication, and resistance (­Cambridge) ­49– ​­64 Maresch, K. and Cowey, J.M.S. (­2003) ‘“­A recurrent inclination to isolate the case of the Jews from their Ptolemaic Environment”? Eine Antwort auf Sylvie Honigman’, SCI 22, ­307–​­310 Mélèze Modrzejewski, J. (­1966) ‘­La règle de droit dans l’Égypte ptolémaïque’, in A.E. Samuel (­ed.) Essays in honor of Bradford Welles, Am.Stud.Pa­p. 1 (­New Haven, CT) ­125–​­173. ​­ 1983) ‘­Le statut des Hellènes dans l’Égypte lagide: Bilan et perspectives des recherches’, ——— (­ REG 96, ­241–​­268 ——— ​­(­1988) ‘­Nochmals zum Justizwesen der Ptolemäer’, ZRG 105, ­165–​­179 ——— ​­(­1997) The Jews of Egypt: from Ramses II to Emperor Hadrian, repr. with corrections, trans. R. Cornman, with a foreword by S.J.D. Cohen (­Princeton, NJ) ——— ​­(­2014) Loi et coutume dans l’Égypte grecque et romaine: Les facteurs de formation du droit en Égypte d’Alexandre le Grand à la conquête arabe (= The Journal of Juristic Papyrology, Supplements 21) (­Warszawa) Mileta, Ch. (­2009) ‘­Ü berlegungen zum Charakter und zur Entwicklung der Neuen Poleis im hellenistischen Kleinasien’, in A. Matthaei and M. Zimmermann (­eds) Stadtbilder im Hellenismus, Die hellenistische Polis als Lebensform 1 (­Berlin) 7­ 0–​­89 Milne, J.G. (­1905) Greek inscriptions (­Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte: Catalogue géneral des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire) (­Oxford) Mitford, T.B. (­1953) ‘­Seleucus and Theodorus’, OAth 1, ­130–​­171 Moore, St. (­2015) Jewish ethnic identity and relations in Hellenistic Egypt. With walls of iron?, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 171 (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Mooren, L. (­1975) The Aulic titulature in Ptolemaic Egypt: introduction and prosopography, Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse der Letteren 78 (­Brüssel) Müller, K. (­2006) Settlements of the Ptolemies: city foundations and new settlement in the Hellenistic world, Studia Hellenistica 43 (­Leuven, Paris, and Dudley, MA) Oetjen, R. (­2014) Athen im dritten Jahrhundert v. Chr. Politik und Gesellschaft in den Garnisonsdemen auf der Grundlage der inschriftlichen Überlieferung, Reihe Geschichte 5 (­Duisburg) Poland, F. (­1909) Geschichte des griechischen Vereinswesens, Preisschriften, gekrönt und heraus­ ürstlich-​­Jablonowski’schen Gesellschaft zu Leipzig 38 (­Leipzig) gegeben von der F Rapaport, U. (­1969) ‘­Des Iduméens en Égypte’, RPh 43, ­73–​­82 Ritter, B. (­2011) ‘­On the “­πολίτευμα in Heracleopolis”’, SCI 30, ­9 –​­37 Ruppel, W. (­1927) ‘­Politeuma. Bedeutungsgeschichte eines staatsrechtlichen Terminus’, Philologus 82, ­268–​­312, and ­433–​­454 Rzepka, J. (­2002) ‘­Ethnos, koinon, sympoliteia, and Greek federal states’, in T. Derda et al. (­ed.) Euergesias charin: studies presented to Benedetto Bravo and Ewa Wipszycka by their disciples, JJP Suppl. 1 (­Warsaw) ­225–​­247 San Nicolò, M. (­1913) Ägyptisches Vereinswesen zur Zeit der Ptolemäer und Römer. Erster Teil: Die Vereinsarten, Münch.Beitr. 2,1 (­München); 2nd edn (­1972) ——— ​­(­1915) Ägyptisches Vereinswesen zur Zeit der Ptolemäer und Römer. Zweiter Teil: Vereinswesen und Vereinsrecht, Münch.Beitr. 2,2 (­München); 2nd edn 1972 ——— ​­(­1927) ‘­Zur Vereinsgerichtsbarkeit im hellenistischen Ägypten’, in ΕΠΙΤΥΜΒΙΟΝ. Heinrich Swoboda dargebracht (­Reichenberg) ­255–​­300 2014) ‘­ The politeuma in the Hellenistic world (­ third to first century B.C.): a Sänger, P. (­ form of organisation to integrate minorities’, in J. Dahlvik et  al. (­ eds) Migration und

485

Patrick Sänger I­ ntegration  — ​­wissenschaftliche Perspektiven aus Österreich. Jahrbuch 2/­2 013. (­­Migrations-​­ und Integrationsforschung 5 (­Göttingen) ­51–​­68 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Adn. Tyche 50. Zu Datierung und Herkunft von SB IV 7270’, Tyche 30, ­258–​­260 ——— ​­(­2016a) ‘­Das politeuma in der hellenistischen Staatenwelt: Eine Organisationsform zur Systemintegration von Minderheiten’, in id. (­ed.) Minderheiten und Migration in der ­griechisch-​­römischen Welt: Politische, rechtliche, religiöse und kulturelle Aspekte, Studien zur Historischen Migrationsforschung 31 (­Paderborn) ­25–​­45 ——— ​­(­2016b) ‘­Heracleopolis, Jewish politeuma’, in S. Goldberg (­ed.) The Oxford Classical ­D ictionary   (­http://­c lassics.oxfordre.com/­v iew/­10.1093/­a crefore/­9780199381135.001.0001/­­ acrefore-­​­­9780199381135-­​­­e -​­8036) (­accessed 31 March 2021) ——— ​­(­2016c) ‘­The meaning of the word πολίτευμα in the light of the J­ udaeo-​­Hellenistic literature’, in T. Derda et al. (­eds) Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Papyrology, Warsaw, 29 ­July -​­3 August 2013 (­Warsaw) ­1679–​­1693 ——— ​­(­2019) Die ptolemäische Organisationsform politeuma. Ein Herrschaftsinstrument zugunsten jüdischer und anderer hellenischer Gemeinschaften, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 178 (­Tübingen) ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Contextualizing a Ptolemaic solution: the institution of the ethnic politeuma’, in Ch. ­Fischer-​­Bovet and S. von Reden (­eds) Comparing the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires: integration, communication, and resistance (­Cambridge) ­106–​­126 ——— ​­(­forthcom.) ‘­Some considerations about the ethnic Politeumata of Sidon’, in P. Sänger and S. Scheuble Reiter (­eds) Söldner und Berufssoldaten in der griechischen Welt. Soziale und politische Gestaltungsräume, ­Historia -​­ Einzelschriften (­Stuttgart) ­163–​­173 Strathmann, H. (­1990) ‘­πόλις κτλ.’, in G. Friedrich (­ed.) Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament. Begründet von Gerhard Kittel, Vol. 6 (­Stuttgart, Berlin, and Köln) ­516–​­535 Thompson, D.J. (­1984) ‘­The Idumaeans of Memphis and the Ptolemaic Politeuma’, in Atti del XVII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia (­Napoli, ­19–​­26 maggio 1983) (­Napoli) ­1069–​­1075 ——— ​­(­2001) ‘­Hellenistic Hellenes: the case of Ptolemaic Egypt’, in I. Malkin (­ed.) Ancient perceptions of Greek ethnicity, Center for Hellenic Studies Colloquia 5 (­Cambridge, MA and London) ­301–​­322 ——— ​­(­2011a) ‘­Ethnic minorities in Hellenistic Egypt’, in O.M. van Nijf, and R. Alston (­eds) Political culture in the Greek city after the classical age, ­Groningen-​­Royal Holloway Studies on the Greek City after the Classical Age 2 (­Leuven, Paris and Walpole, MA) ­101–​­117 ——— ​­(­2011b) ‘­The sons of Ptolemy V in a ­post-​­secession world’, in A. Jördens, and J.F. Quack (­eds) Ägypten zwischen innerem Zwist und äußerem Druck Die Zeit Ptolemaios’ VI. bis VIII. Internationales Symposion Heidelberg 16.–​­19. 9. 2007 (­Wiesbaden) ­10–​­23 ——— ​­(­2012) Memphis under the Ptolemies, 2nd edn (­Princeton, NJ and Oxford) Troiani, L. (­1994) ‘­The πολιτεία of Israel in the G ­ reco-​­Roman age’, in F. Parente and J. Sievers (­eds) Josephus and the history of the ­G reco-​­Roman period: essays in memory of Morton Smith, Studia Post Biblica 4 (­Leiden) ­11–​­22 van ’t Dack, E. (­1984) ‘­Notice au sujet de SB I 1106’, in Atti del XVII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia (­Napoli, ­19—​­26 maggio 1983). Vol. 3 (­Naples) ­1325–​­1333 Veïsse, A.-​­E. (­2004) Les “­révoltes égyptiennes”: recherches sur les troubles intérieurs en Égypte du règne de Ptolémée III à la conquête romaine (­Leuven) Winter, E. (­2011) ‘­Formen ptolemäischer Präsenz in der Ägäis zwischen schriftlicher Überlieferung und archäologischem Befund’, in F. Daubner (­ed.) Militärsiedlungen und Territorialherrschaft in der Antike, Topoi. Berlin Studies in the Ancient World 3 (­Berlin and New York) ­65–​­77 Wolff, H.J. (­1953) ‘­Faktoren der Rechtsbildung im ­hellenistisch-​­römischen Ägypten’, ZRG 70, ­20–​­57 ——— ​­(­2002) Das Recht der griechischen Papyri Ägyptens in der Zeit der Ptolemaeer und des Prinzipats, vol. I: Bedingungen und Triebkräfte der Rechtsentwicklung, ed. by H.-​­A. Rupprecht, HdAW X 5, 1 (­München) Ziebarth, E. (­1896) Das griechische Vereinswesen. Preisschriften, gekrönt und herausgegeben von der ­Fürstlich-​­Jablonowski’schen Gesellschaft zu Leipzig XXXIV (­Leipzig) Zuckerman, C. (­­1985–​­1988) ‘­Hellenistic politeumata and the Jews. A reconsideration’, SCI 8/­9, ­171–​­185

486

34 THE MAKING OF THE CITIZEN IN HELLENISTIC POLEIS Christel Müller

Pergamum 133 BCE In 133 BCE, Attalus III, the last ruler of Pergamum in Asia Minor, died, bequeathing his kingdom to the Romans. The will also granted freedom to the ancient capital, whose inhabitants then issued a decree to ensure their security against a possible attack on the territory (­OGIS 338; Austin 2006: ­430–​­431, no. 248, modified trans. below). This decree is an exceptional snapshot of social and status stratification in the way it refers to the population of the city and its chōra. The Pergamenes decided, for military purposes, to promote several categories of individuals to higher status. Some, who were free residents, ‘­will be given citizen rights (­politeia)’. Others, who were slaves or freedmen, obtained the intermediate status of free residents (­paroikoi). In evoking the categories that benefit from these advantages, the decree becomes a complex inventory: among the free ­non-​­citizens, one finds people ‘­registered in the lists of the resident foreigners (­paroikoi), soldiers who are settled in the city and the countryside, Macedonians and Mysians, settlers (­katoikoi) who are registered in the citadel and in the old city, Masdyeni ( . . . ), armed guards (­paraphylakitai), and all the other free people who are settled or own property in the city or the countryside, and also their wives and children’, and among people of servile origin, ‘­descendants of freedmen, certain royal slaves (­or dependents: basilikoi) ( . . . ) and some public slaves (­dēmosioi)’. This exceptional text allows us to ask three opening questions. The first concerns the Hellenistic Greek city, a particular object of study. The Anglophone historical tra­ ost-​­classical city, and it continues to do dition has for a long time considered it as a p so (­Papazarkadas and Martzavou 2013), as if the period could be defined only in comparison with the previous one. However, over the last 20 years, the Hellenistic city has taken shape across the Channel thanks to several important monographs (­Ma 2002; Oliver 2007; Gray 2015; Mack 2015) and to collective works, notably in Liverpool, on the ‘­Hellenistic Economies’ (­Archibald et al. 2001, 2005, 2011). In French historiography, it enjoys a much longer existence, thanks to the work of Louis Robert and Philippe Gauthier. While the ‘­archaic’ city was the city of anthropologists and the ‘­classical’ city was the city of philosophers and philologists, the Hellenistic city became, in the words of Vincent Azoulay (­2014), the ‘­city of epigraphers’. The latter were able to show that DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-40

487

Christel Müller

the polis was not ‘­dead at Chaeronea, nor under Alexander, nor in the course of the entire Hellenistic period’ (­Robert 1969 [2007]: 603). However, between the end of the fourth and the first centuries BCE, the cities underwent unprecedented upheavals in demographic and social terms, and Pergamum in the late Hellenistic period is a particularly striking example of such changes. The city, the former capital of the Attalid kingdom, was in a delicate transition phase between royal domination and Roman presence. It had to deal with a variety of groups, whose existence on its territory was partly the result of wars, since there were soldiers among others. But this myriad of groups should not conceal a firmly established principle: the maintenance of a status distinction between citizens at one end of the chain, slaves at the other. One observes an intermediate status group conceived as such, that of the paroikoi and assimilated foreigners, not very homogeneous in itself, but undoubt­ avalli-​ edly enjoying a form of freedom with constraints (­Ma 2013; Chameroy and S ­Lestrade 2016: ­234–​­235). Only the ‘­status lift’ instituted by the Pergamenes allowed the crossing of these categorical borders, which were not usually porous. It must be said that Greek politeia has an essential character, well explored in the present volume, which distinguishes it from civitas Romana: it is first and foremost a matter of participation, metousia, whatever the field of action concerned (­religious, political, economic, see Brock 2015; cf. Duplouy; Gordin; Filonik; Joyce in this volume). It is thus the whole community that is concerned when it comes to granting citizenship. In his review of Claude Nicolet’s Le métier de citoyen à l’époque républicaine, published in 1976, Gauthier (­1979) emphasized this difference from Roman citizenship, which was more of a status than a function. But no one would write today that civitas was granted by individuals without state control: under the Republic, a law of the Roman people was required to confer citizenship, either through an imperator or on a general basis, and new citizens did not become full citizens until they were registered at the census, which took place every five years (­see Ando in this volume). This ­long-​­standing controversy, therefore, deserves to be overcome, especially by recalling the numerous common points that link politeia and civitas within a model of citizenship specific to antiquity. But it remains, as we will see throughout this contribution, that, among the Greeks of the Hellenistic period, the decision and control of the dēmos remained essential when the question of integration into the civic body was at stake. The second question raised by the decree of Pergamum is that of the evidence through which the history of the Hellenistic city is written. For this ‘­city of epigraphers’, inscriptions provide the main documentary bulk between the fourth and the first centuries BCE, at least for the Aegean basin, on which I will focus here, even if orators and philosophers remain essential. The inscriptions offer the invaluable advantage of being direct witnesses of their time, although some places like Kos and Rhodes are better documented than others, as we shall see. But, beyond remarkable cases such as Pergamum, they also present several specific biases. In terms of social organization, they reflect more individual, and especially elite, situations. Moreover, they show fewer women than men (­even if they show more than in the previous period, we should not forget that there are far fewer inscriptions in general in the archaic and classical periods). They also have often generated the very Athenocentric view that the mechanisms they mention were first known in Athens before spreading elsewhere, in a more or less unilateral way: this is due, among other things, to the sudden geographical enlargement of the body of evidence, whereas a good part of the classical sources, whether texts or inscriptions, inform us, above all, about the Attic city (­Brock 2015). This dispersion, 488

The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis

not to say spatial heterogeneity, should also make us very cautious about measuring developments within the period, which are much more perceptible on a regional scale than on the (­not always relevant) scale of the ‘­Greek world’. Above all, a large part of the inscriptions consists of normative documents that bear little resemblance to the speeches of orators, the accounts of historians, or the treatises of philosophers. Nevertheless, these caveats do not prevent us from asking the very delicate question of the changes brought about by the Hellenistic period. This leads us to the third point of attention, which the ­above-​­mentioned inscription raises, namely the question of legal norms: it is a decree of ‘­politography’, in other words a registration of new citizens, which shows how status groups change and recompose themselves. The term ‘­status’, notably in French, is not the least complex of all. It can refer to legal as well as social status, and it has no real equivalent in ancient vocabulary, which is not surprising. The Greek terms for social groups have the particularity of being loose and extensive, not to say vague. In the Pergamum decree, the multiple ­sub-​ c­ ategories listed are called genē, the plural of genos, whose first meaning is ‘­group of descent’ but also denotes ‘­class’ or ‘­kind’. ‘­The genē registered below’, says the text, must ‘­have a share in the politeia’ (­ll. ­8 –​­9). Another term, meros, ‘­part’, appears in Aristotle’s Politics Book 4 where it refers to a social category that may cover personal status (­e.g., 1296b): this will not surprise readers of the treatise, who are used to the description of ­socio-​­political systems as composed of different parts nested in a whole. Finally, the term tychē, whose basic meaning is ‘­fate’, emphasizes the randomness of the condition falling upon everyone: it is found at a much later time (­probably around the middle of the second c. CE) in an inscription from Stratonikeia (­I.Stratonikeia 1325A) evoking the good deeds of five members of the same family towards people ‘­of every age and condition (­tychē)’. Beyond the terminological question itself, the inscriptions show to what extent, in the hierarchical world of Greek cities, legal status remained an essential factor in the Hellenistic period, as we have known since the seminal book by Emil Szanto (­1892). The fact remains that statuses are not legal categories ‘­out of the ground’, forming a sort of abstract framework for social action. The manufacture of norms is itself a matter of practices and representations, and legal statuses are social productions in their own right. We will therefore examine here, from an anthropological perspective of politics, the way in which communities produce statuses, and in particular that of the citizen.

‘­On ne naît pas citoyen, on le devient’: politeia and poiēsis The Greeks of the cities conceived, throughout their history, citizenship, politeia, as a matter of participation, metousia: the Pergamum text is a perfect example, since the granting of citizenship is defined as a metechein tēs politeias, which means ‘­to participate in the politeia’. The fields of action of this metechein have been widely explored by historians and are discussed by others in this volume (­s ee esp. Malkin; Filonik; Duplouy; Joyce). My purpose here is different and consists in looking at the process that leads, upstream, to integration into the city. The Greeks did not consider the accession to citizenship as the obtaining of a title, but as a process of social ‘­fabrication’, poiēsis. No politēs escaped this slow process. Modern historians have tended to reduce the extension of poiēsis to adoption in the legal sense of the term, but its semantic field is, in fact, much wider and its contours do not correspond to a single modern concept. The widespread use of this family of words and in particular of the verb poieisthai, ‘­to make for oneself’, may have concealed such an extended 489

Christel Müller

set of meanings. If we try to follow the categories proper to ancient representations, its meanings are divided into two main fields: on the one hand, everything that comes under the ­intra-​­family poiēsis where the father is the linchpin of the process, even if the subdivisions and institutions of the city exercise their control; on the other hand, everything that concerns an integration at the level of the community, which makes the individual a dēmopoiētos, a person ‘­made by the people’. The best proof of the conceptual unity of poiēsis as ‘­making of the citizen’ lies in the obligation for all ‘­candidates’ to go through the same rituals of integration, as Jean Rudhardt (­1962: 60) has long pointed out. The first case involves the father’s recognition of the child at different stages of his existence. Recognition does not go without legitimacy, nor legitimacy without recognition: this manufacturing process is, therefore, a continuous dialogue between the rites performed by the father and the legal proofs that are provided, sometimes throughout life, of the legitimacy of the individual by himself and by his relatives. The most ­well-​­known cases are, of course, the Athenian ones in the various speeches of the fourth century BCE ­ riffith-​­Williams in this volume). As in classical Athens, in many Greek cities both (­see G parents needed to be citizens and united by a marriage that was itself legitimate for the child to be recognized as gnēsios, ‘­legitimate’. But poiēsis could also mean adoption, which brings us back to a field that has been ploughed for a long time by family law specialists. The point here is not to describe all ­ istorians – inter ​­ vivos, testamenthe modalities of this procedure, as distinguished by h tary, posthumous (­Rubinstein 1993; Cobetto Ghiggia 1999) – ​­but to see in what way it is a process of ‘­making’ that differs greatly from adoption in the modern sense of the term. The accepted term in this case is always poiēsis or, better still, eispoiēsis, with the related verbs. Such adoptions constitute transfers from one oikos to another, whatever the size of the anchisteia, the kinship, involved. In almost all cases, it is a question of making an heir for a house in the process of extinction. In order to do this, in Athens, a citizen must be taken from an oikos where he has already been recognized and reborn in another oikos with a new affiliation. He is introduced into the civic subdivisions of the adopter exactly as a biological son, then bears the demotic of his new father and acts as a citizen in the latter’s deme. At the end of the procedure, the poiētos is therefore no longer quite the same person and finds himself in an asymmetrical situation clearly illustrated by the texts: he has two fathers, one biological, the other legal, while remaining the son of a single mother. After the speeches of the classical period, the first inscription that testifies to the poiēsis-​­adoption dates from the beginning of the third century BCE and follows the testimonies of the fourth century BCE and the comedies of Menander where the phenomenon is attested. It still includes the formula of the ‘­making of the son’, in which the biological father appears first: on a statue base, one of the honoured characters is named Lysiphanes, son of Lysidemos, but also son of Kallias, son of Demalkes who ‘­made him his son (­epoēsato huon)’ (­IG II2, 3850). If the family is the main place where citizens are made under the control of civic subdivisions, the second set of ‘­made’ citizens, poiētoi, includes on the side of the city all the foreigners to whom the cities grant the honour of the politeia for their diverse and varied merits. These people are, so to speak, collectively adopted by the People (­Blok 2017: 253). In the Roman imperial period, they are referred to in literary texts as dēmopoiētoi, ‘­made by the People’, as shown by the beautiful definition given by the lexicographer Valerius Harpocration (­L exeis of the Ten Orators, ed. J.J. Keaney, Amsterdam, 1991, ­71–​­72, s.v.): ‘­dēmopoiētos, one who is a foreigner by nature and becomes a citizen by the people’, with a reference to Demosthenes’ Against Neaira, which shows ‘­in what 490

The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis

way some people become dēmopoiētoi’. Curiously enough, the term is not, or hardly, attested in the classical and Hellenistic periods. It is, nevertheless, found in an inscription of the deme of Isthmos in Kos dated around 180 BCE: the text lists in alphabetical order the men of the Melainadai tribe eligible for the magistracy of monarchos, the eponymous magistracy (­IG XII, 4, 461). The heading of ll. 2­ 71–​­272 refers very clearly to this category, after the registration of the other categories of citizens: ‘­the following damopoētoi were also registered’. However, the terms of this family ( ­poēsis) can acquire, in a secondary way, a pejorative connotation, when used in an oppositional context. Some politai appear, so to speak, more ‘­fabricated’, poiētoi, than others, as if there were degrees of ‘­fabrication’ or, at any rate, a heightened visibility of the process in some cases. The poiētoi are sometimes contrasted with the ‘­genuine’ citizens, gnēsioi, thanks to the fundamental difference established by birth. Similarly to ­fourth-​­century Athens, in Kos, the separate classification of the dāmopoētoi in the Isthmos inscription illustrates a similar form of segregation: it is not a simple question of practicality for people who are registered separately because they might have to prove their formal integration into the civic body. This opposition between the poiētoi and the gnēsioi reflects a founding dichotomy of Greek politeia thought: although this is only one aspect of poiēsis, it distinguishes here children by blood from children by law.

What’s in a (­citizen’s) name? Politeia and onoma The fundamental element that allows the individual, whatever his status, to emerge in terms of identity in the family space as well as in the public space is his name. The giving of a name, through its performative power, contributes greatly to the making of the citizen. Beyond the personal name alone, it is, for both Greek and Roman antiquity, the entire onomastic formula that must be taken into account, with all the elements that lead to situating an individual in an ­often-​­complex system of interpersonal links. Hellenistic inscriptions are full of such ‘­name deposits’, which have so far mainly fed studies of onomastics and prosopography: this has been done to the detriment of other aspects, such as strategies and representations conveyed by the ways of naming at the crossroads of strong social constraints and restricted personal choices. Naming gives a citizen an identity and situates him in a lineage, one or more subdivisions, a city, a confederacy. The granting of a personal name, the idionym, is the result of the parents’ choice, but its devolution obeys strong social constraints, which do not, however, constitute legal rules (­Bresson 1983). A name is rarely invented and one had to be Themistocles in the fifth century to dare to give his children names with such personal meaning as, among his five daughters, Italia, Sybaris, and Asia (­Plut., Them. 32). There is little chance, in fact, that these names were already borne in earlier generations. In fact, names are inherited in the same way as immaterial and material goods that are passed on from father to son (­Blok 2017: 1­ 02–​­107). Such a situation is well known from the incredible story related in Demosthenes’ first speech Against Boiotos, which informs us about the main norm of devolution: the eldest son bears the name of the paternal grandfather, here Mantitheos father of Mantias. Outside Athens, the city of Rhodes has produced exemplary situations in the Hellenistic period. As shown by several types of inscriptions, such as lists of donors to sanctuaries or dedications in honour of distinguished people, which date mainly from the second and first centuries BCE, the Rhodians, indeed, follow a pattern of transmission found till 491

Christel Müller

the twentieth century on the neighbouring island of Karpathos (­Bresson 1981): on the boys’ side, the eldest takes the name of the paternal grandfather, the second that of the maternal grandfather, then the third a name on the father’s side, the fourth a name on the mother’s side; the rule is symmetrical on the girls’ side, starting with the first born, who takes the name of her maternal grandmother, and so on. Beyond the demographic hazards that sometimes upset the system, it therefore respects both the patrilineality characteristic of ancient societies, and the alternation of the paternal and maternal lineages with potential conflicts between the two (­Wilgaux 2008). Greek naming is based, moreover, on the association of the idionym and patronymic with the name given by the city itself by means of the ethnic (­when the individual is not at home) or the demotic or its equivalent (­at home). Already observable in the classical period, this practice continued throughout the Hellenistic period, as witnessed by the agonistic catalogues with their characteristic uses. One can simply cite a list of winners in the Amphiaraïa Rhōmaia contests of Oropos after 86 and the Mithridatic War: the names are listed with the individual’s speciality, on the model of ‘­composer of comedies, Ariston son of Chiones, Theban’ (­I.Oropos 526, ll.­31–​­32). This common onomastic formula allows historians, for their part, to evaluate individual status. In principle, citizens are thus designated, and such a person who is a citizen at home will be a resident alien (­metoikos or equivalent) in another city (­see Thomsen in this volume). But nothing allows us to totally exclude that free people residing on the territory of a city without being citizens and belonging to certain categories of paroikoi can from time to time hide under this type of appellation with, in this case, a purely geographical ethnic. This standard model is not fixed, and everything depends on the context of enunciation: the same individual will not be named in the same way on a funerary inscription, on a statue base, or in an official document (­Faraguna 2014). Thus, on the island of Kos, we find the name of the same person, Timachidas son of Pausanias, on two very different inscriptions: on his tombstone, where he is referred to with his simple name together with the patronymic (­IG XII, 4, 3167) and, some time earlier, in a long list dated to the 180s that enumerates the persons admitted to participate in the cult of Apollo and Herakles in the deme of Halasarna (­IG XII, 4, 104, ll. ­634–​­636): there he is called ‘­Timachidas son of Pausanias, whose mother is Lykourgis daughter of Lykon’. We are struck here by the appearance of the matronymic, unthinkable at the time of the Athenian Mantitheos, even if, in fact, his fellow citizens had to use it to distinguish him from his ­half-​­brother. Recording the double paternal and maternal lineage thus flourished in the late Hellenistic period in certain cities such as Kos and Kalymnos; the question is whether this means a simple change of epigraphic habit or an increased requirement in terms of legitimacy. One is tempted to favour the first hypothesis, given the practice that can be seen in Athens itself from the classical period, where dual civic descent is required without the denomination making room for the mother’s line. But the change in epigraphic habit may reflect another way of conceiving the presentation of individuals in the public space, with a luxury of detail that progresses over time and culminates in the Roman imperial period with a form of ‘­genealogical ostentation’ (­Ferrary 2014: 44): ancestry may be indicated at that time far beyond the patronymic with a papponym (­grandfather’s name) and the names of several ancestors up to six generations, as in a memorial of a delegation from Aphrodisias to the sanctuary of Apollo at Claros in 180/­ 181 AD (­Ferrary 2014: no. 228, l. 3). Another phenomenon that shows up from the late Hellenistic period is the use of a double personal name, where the idionym is doubled by one (­or more) customary name(­s) that tends to be a nickname: one of the priests of 492

The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis

Hecate’s sanctuary at Lagina on the territory of Stratonikeia in Caria is thus called Hierokles, son of Mentor of the deme of Koraia, also called Aristophanes Paspalas, the latter name belonging to the field of baking (­I.Stratonikeia 645, with the commentary of Robert 1938: 153). In addition to the matronymic and customary names, all sorts of details are given about civic status itself and its evolution, especially for the adoption procedure. The inscription from the deme of Halasarna at Kos already mentioned (­IG XII, 4, 104) provides excellent examples of these practices: we find there a certain Kallistratos son of Theudotos, whose mother is Aristo daughter of Damatrios, h is father) received in adoption (­epoiēsato) from Athenagoras son of whom (­ Philonidas, according to the procedure of the adoption of a son (­huothesia) before the chreophylakes [i.e., the debt keepers]. (­ll. ­537–​­545) It is interesting to note that the appearance of women here is no longer limited to the matronymic, but that they are also mentioned as objects of adoption according to the principle of thugatropoiia, ‘­­daughter-​­making’. The majority of such cases come from the island of Rhodes and its region but the frequency is about four times less than that of the adoption of a boy. In fact, there is little chance that girls were more involved in adoption than in the classical period: this is mainly a source effect, especially because of the prevalence of the Rhodian record. The details about civic status reach new heights when the date of birth is also included, as is the case in an exceptional document from Kalymnos the neighbouring island of Kos, linked to it by a homopoliteia, a ‘­shared constitution’. In this incredible inscription from the 180s (­IG XII, 4, 4047), the members of the civic community are classified by sex, age, tribe, and deme. In the list of ‘­i mpubescents (­anēboi) of the tribe of Hylleis from the deme of Panormos’, one can quote the name of such a boy with his full identity: ‘­Androphilos son of Sosikles of the tribe of Hylleis of the deme of Panormos, and whose mother’s name is Philinna daughter of Xenophon of the tribe of Pamphyloi of the deme of Pothaia, born under Leontides, in the month of Hyakinthios’ (­ll. ­82–​­84). Women are no less present among the parthenoi and gynaikes, that is, the ‘­unmarried daughters’ and the ‘­married women’, also with the names of their two parents, their subdivisions of belonging, and their date of birth up to the month. This type of information does not exist elsewhere in the Greek world until the censuses found in the Greek papyri of Egypt from the imperial period. The Kalymnian list is clearly a census of the civic population (­­Sherwin-​­White 1978: 157 n. 25). This is even more impressive than the catalogues of only male citizens, compiled around 300 BCE in the city of Eretria in Euboea, already of considerable importance (­e.g., IG XII, 9, 245) because of the scarcity of this type of documents. But such lists remain exceptional, and there were no real central population registers in the Greek world, including in Athens where the lists of citizens were established at the demes level.

Individual and collective bestowals: what does it mean to become a dēmopoiētos? Let us come back to another form of poiēsis, the granting of politeia by a city. What does it mean for a foreigner to become a citizen by decree? 493

Christel Müller

It is possible to become a citizen first of all thanks to a personal grant which generally takes the form of an honorary decree voted by another city in exchange for a euergetic behaviour. Men were the vast majority of recipients of these grants, but women were not excluded. The politis, ‘­­citizen-​­woman’, does exist as such and has done so since classical times (­Sebillotte Cuchet 2016), even if the expected participation is not exercised in the same fields, nor under the same conditions (­s ee Joyce in this volume). The numerous decrees granting politeia by the Milesians in the third century BCE are well known (­Milet. I, 3, nos. 4­ 0–​­93). They were issued not only for men, but also for entire families, where husband, wife, sons, and daughters ‘­b ecome politai (­citizens)’ without any particular restriction, even if implicitly the politeia thus granted depended on age and gender if activated (­e.g., Milet. I, 3, 41, col. II, l. 3­ –​­6). It is also a family context that explains the presence, probably in the second century BCE, of a woman among the beneficiaries of the politeia granted by the city of Seleukia (­of Pamphylia or Cilicia) to the public physician Asklepiades, son of Myron of Perge, who had practised his art there for several years: the measure concerns ‘­h imself, his wife and his children’ because the whole family had settled there before eventually returning to Perge (­IK Perge no. 12, l. ­42–​­43). The situation of these women who were recognized as citizens was thus ambivalent: on the one hand, their existence as citizens was formally acknowledged, which was hardly the case before, as the decrees generally granted politeia to the honoured person and, in a pinch, to his male descendants; but at the same time, they appeared first and foremost as wives and mothers occupying a specific place in the lineage (­van Bremen 1996: ­147–​­148; see Carlsson in this volume). Nevertheless, another noteworthy case is that of Aristodama, a poetess who receives the politeia of Lamia in the third century BCE (­IG IX 2, 62): the decree is both procedurally standard and exceptional since it is a woman who benefits (­see also Ferraioli and Schipani in this volume on Epirus). Another case, somewhat later, is worth mentioning here, as it illustrates several of these points, that of Serapion son of Dionysius of Seleukia in the city of Aigiale on the island of Amorgos in the first century BCE (­IG XII, 7, 392), naturalized under specific conditions. Between the lines of the inscription, one can infer a life rich in adventures, quite characteristic of the population movements that affected the Hellenistic period. The character’s mother, Nikaretē, is called a politis by the citizens of Amorgos, because her father is one of their compatriots, but she had children, a boy and a girl, with a man from an unidentified Seleukia. Whatever the family’s travels, the two children at some point stay in Aigiale and perhaps even settle there with their mother. They are not immediately recognized as citizens, and for good reason: the father is a foreigner. But the exemplary behaviour of the son, Serapion, who keeps showing benevolence towards all the Aigialeans, earns him a solid reward: among other privileges, he is granted politeia. The mother’s place in the civic group is here a recognized asset in the inscription and Serapion is assigned the tribe of his maternal ancestors, that of the Basileitai. Not a word is said, on the other hand, about the sister: we must assume that she either found another family through marriage or remained a ‘­­semi-​­foreigner’ in the city. In addition to individual grants, there are also various collective procedures: politographies, isopolity treaties, or sympolity situations (­explained below). Politographies, a term that should be reserved for group enfranchisements, are the simplest cases and generally respond to a demographic decline that has given rise to a situation of oliganthropy, in other words, a ‘­deficit of men’ understood in the sense of citizens. The decree 494

The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis

of Pergamum in 133 (­quoted above) is one of politography, intended to produce citizens and paroikoi to ensure the security of the city as a reward to those who have shown their loyalty to it. But one of the most famous politographies of the Hellenistic period is that of Larissa in Thessaly at the time of the Antigonid king Philip V. In 217 and 215 BCE, the king sent two letters to the Larisseans (­IG IX, 2, 517= Austin 2006: no. 75), who had complained to him that they no longer had enough inhabitants because of the wars. Philip persuaded them, while waiting for a better solution, to grant citizenship ‘­to the Thessalians and other Greeks who reside (­katoikountes) there’, regardless of the unspecified status of these free residents: this would, according to him, only result in advantages, notably the fact that more land would be cultivated. Some of these politographies were given for a price to the beneficiaries, which has fuelled the debate on the issue of selling citizenship (­Müller 2016). Could one really buy a politeia in Hellenistic cities? The phenomenon is attested only in the fourth and third centuries and, with about ten attestations (­Migeotte 2014: ­341–​­344), it remains rare before the imperial period. For the city, it was not so much a matter of collecting money from a person destined to hold public office as a sort of entrance fee, of varying size, for each newcomer: this made it possible to replenish both the civic body and the city’s coffers. The case of Dyme in Achaia, known from an inscription of the third century BCE (­Rizakis 2008: ­44–​­49, no. 3, ll.­1–​­8), is a good example of this practice. Residents called epoikoi, a kind of ‘­replacement inhabitants’, are allowed to receive politeia in exchange for a sum payable in two instalments, which implies that it was probably not completely negligible. The benefit to the city is thus twofold, but the system only works if there are candidates for naturalization, thus a ‘­market for citizenship’. This entrance fee may correspond to a particular form of financial dokimasia, which allows the integration of not only free people, but also those who are rich enough to be generous towards the city, a tendency that increases dramatically during the Roman Empire. The isopolity ­treaties – ​­there are at least 50 of ­them – ​­designate, in the vocabulary of modern historians, grants of politeia by a city on an equal footing ‘­to the entire citizenry of another city’ (­Rousset 2013). They have been interpreted first and foremost as diplomatic gestures (­Saba 2020: ­1–​­31) but it is more interesting to understand them as a way of creating a network of cities, if not a real territorial mesh. Indeed, it can be a reciprocal as well as a unilateral concession between the two cities. The champion of isopolitical networks is certainly the Ionian city of Miletus in Asia Minor, which dealt with about ten different partners, neighbouring communities, or former colonies of the archaic period: Olbia Pontica, Kyzikos, Phygela, Kios, Seleukia Tralles, Mylasa, and Herakleia Latmos for the unquestionable cases, and maybe also Histros and Apollonia on the Rhyndakos, between the beginning of the third and the middle of the second century BCE. In this respect, although one should not forget that the Greek term isopoliteia is also used for individual grants, isopolities, as well as politographies, are to be conceived as the collective side of the citizenship grant. Situations of sympoliteia, joint or shared politeia (­Scholten 2013), represent even more complex cases where citizenship is shared between two or more poleis, or within a confederacy. The procedure differs, of course, according to the context, and sympolities, especially bilateral ones, are not all forms of annexation of one city by another (­Gauthier 2001: 117). But the way of conceiving a single civic body from two ­pre-​­existing entities is well illustrated by the text on the union of Latmos and Pidasa in Caria between 323 and 313 BCE (­Labuff 2016: ­79–​­87, with commentary in Priol 2017). In addition to measures affecting the community as a whole (­sacrifices, cults, income, 495

Christel Müller

public institutions), the merger will have very concrete consequences on the existence of individuals. The Pidasaeans are assigned by lot to the tribes of Latmos. They are also supposed to move to Latmos where the inhabitants will provide them with sufficient housing for one year, the time it will take for them to build a house on public land. But the most extraordinary clause is the one that orders ­cross-​­endogamy through epigamiai, or intermarriages: it is decreed that the Pidasaeans will only be able to give their daughters to Latmians and vice versa, with a ban on marriage within their community of origin for six years. It is, indeed, the fusion of bodies in the first sense that is planned to produce the future citizens of the new politeuma. The process is seen from the point of view of the transfer of daughters between the oikoi of the two contracting cities, and the interest here is therefore to show the role of women in the process. A little later, after 188 BCE, in the sympoliteia uniting Pidasa and Miletus (­Milet. I, 3, 149; Labuff 2016: ­93–​­103), this role is different and specified from the first lines of the convention (­ll. ­10–​­12): that the Pidasaeans be fellow citizens of the Milesians, as well as their children and their wives, all those at least who happen to be Pidaseans (­Pidasides in the feminine) by birth (­physei, by nature) or w ­ omen-​­citizens ( ­politides) of a Hellenic city. Women appear here as citizens, but as wives and mothers. Moreover, we see that in Pidasa marriages with foreign Greek women were allowed, provided they had politeia: that cannot only be an allusion to the ‘­epigamic’ results of the previous sympoliteia with Latmos. Such a situation can also be observed in Hellenistic Athens, with a clear increase from the second century BCE onwards in marriages between Athenians and foreign women, as shown by funerary steles. Although there is no direct evidence that the rule of dual civic descent for children was abandoned, the use of foreign names by Athenians is perhaps a sign of relaxation (­Oliver 2010). In general, the phenomena of isopolity and sympolity obviously favoured the mixing of citizens and foreigners. In any case, and this is an essential point, the granting of citizenship can be a way to regularize locally the situation of a nothos, that is, a person born out of legitimate marriage (­see ­Griffith-​­Williams in this volume on this debated notion), whether or not they have one citizen parent. This is evidenced by the decrees of Miletus, which grant politeia to nothoi and nothai, that is, to male or female individuals (­Milet. I, 3, no. 45), who, in this case, obviously do not bear a foreign ethnic. Similarly, a politography of Phalanna in Thessaly (­IG IX, 2, 1228), which suggests naturalizing people from neighbouring ethnē, finally states that ‘­sons (­and daughters?) of Phalannean women’, by implication born of foreign fathers, will also be admitted to citizenship.

Power of the polis vs individual choices Cities have several ways of signifying the granting of politeia, which fluctuate according to regions and times. Similar to f­ourth-​­century Athens is the case of the isopolity between Miletus and Kyzikos, expressed in the simplest possible way: ‘­let the Kyzikene in Miletus be Milesian and the Milesian in Kyzikos be Kyzikene’ (­Milet. I.3, 137, ll. ­13–​­16). On the scale of confederal sympolities, when the Orchomenians of Arcadia enter the Achaean koinon between 235 and 229 BCE, it is simply said that ‘­they became Achaeans’ (­IG V, 2, 344, with trans. Austin 2006: no. 68). One can also be said to be a politēs of the host city or a beneficiary of politeia or isopoliteia. In a 496

The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis

decree of Tegea from the last third of the third century BCE (­probably before 228), a Thessalian from Skotoussa, Hagesandros, son of Nikostratos, was granted isopoliteia, that is, citizenship equal to that of other citizens without restriction (­IG V, 2, 11), as was common practice in the Hellenistic period. The Greek cities, however, had a reputation for not being very generous in the distribution of citizenship, compared to the indefinite extension of the civitas Romana, which culminated in 212 CE with the Antonine Constitution: Caracalla then granted citizenship to all free men of the empire who did not already have it (­s ee Besson in this volume). There was never anything of the sort in the Greek world and it is hard to see how an equivalent extension would have been possible given the political fragmentation of the cities, which might have numbered as many as 1500 in the Hellenistic period. This discrepancy between the two practices was underlined already in antiquity by king Philip V in his second letter to the Larisseans in 215. At the cost of some inaccuracies, he gives them the example of the Romans (­IG IX, 2, 517, ll. ­31–​­34; trans. modified from Austin 2006: no. 75; commentary by Gauthier [1974] 2011: 5): when they manumit their slaves, they admit them to the citizen body ( ­politeuma) and grant them a share in the magistracies, and in this way have not only enlarged their own fatherland, but have sent out colonies (­apoikiai) to nearly 70 places. One of the reasons for this false stinginess is undoubtedly the multiple privileges that could be granted by the Greek cities instead of or together with citizenship: they form a bouquet reminiscent, in many ways, of the personal rights contained in civitas. In a decree of Oropos dated ­240–​­180 BCE (­I.Oropos 162), the city first grants proxenia to a certain Nikandrides, son of Nikodamos, of Corinth, as well as to his descendants, but also enktēsis, the ‘­r ight to acquire land and a house’, politeia, asylia, and asphaleia, ‘­the protection of property and persons’, as well as ‘­all the other privileges that other proxenoi and euergetai also obtain’. The beneficiary of these various privileges, therefore, only has to choose between all these ‘­playing cards’ (­Müller 2014: 551), one of which is, indeed, politeia, but only in third place here: everything, therefore, depends on his personal priorities, which partially relativizes the exceptional character of such a grant. In other cases, it is epigamia, that is, the ‘­r ight of intermarriage’, which is granted, for instance, to a Lacedemonian in Kotyrta in the Peloponnese in the second century (­IG V, 1, 961): in the Greek world, this privilege resulted in the recognition of unions between foreigners as legitimate, as well as of the possible offspring, and thus in the possible enlargement of civic bodies. The granting of politeia thus remained under the control of the city, as we saw in Pergamum in 133. Outside Athens, the dokimasia of newcomers (­Feyel 2007) is attested in Sparta at the time of king Cleomenes III (­­235–​­222 BCE) who wished, like Agis IV (­­244–​­241 BCE) before him and Nabis (­­207–​­192 BCE) after him, to replenish the civic body. Thus, writes Plutarch (­Cleom. 10.6), in addition to the redistribution of land and the abolition of debts, Cleomenes, a king with a reputation for revolution, demanded that ‘­the evaluation (­krisis) and preliminary examination (­dokimasia) of foreigners (­xenoi) should be carried out, so that the strongest once they became Spartans would save the city with arms’. This naturalization campaign also included perioikoi, as we see in a later paragraph (­Cleom. 11.2). Philip V, in his campaign to promote politographies among the Larisseans, was furious when some neopolitai were struck off the civic body after having been integrated into it, precisely as a result of 497

Christel Müller

an unfavourable dokimasia. In the city’s response, we see that the names of some of the new citizens were, indeed, erased from the initial stela, and then transcribed again in a transitory manner on a leukōma, a ‘­whitewashed panel’, while awaiting the royal opinion, whereas the names that were definitively accepted were inscribed on two stelae installed in the sanctuaries of Apollo Kerdoios and Athena (­IG IX, 2, 517, ll. ­34–​­45). On the side of the beneficiaries, two questions arise concerning their room for manoeuvre once the politeia has been granted: do they really come to settle in the city that honours them? And, if so, are they then driven out of their original homes? The first question raises the problem of ­so-​­called potential citizenship, extensively studied by Gauthier (­1985: ­150–​­152; cf. Cecchet in this volume). The politeia thus granted can, depending on the choice of the beneficiary, be put into practice or remain, so to speak, a dead letter, hence its qualification as ‘­potential’. This is also the case of isopolitical treaties in an even more obvious way (­Saba 2020: 1­ –​­31): no specific individual is then targeted by the granting of politeia, and it is only a possibility offered to a community as a whole. It is, of course, very difficult to measure what might be called the rate of activation of these new citizenships, because the epigraphic documentation generally predates any realization. One might think that admission into the subdivisions of the city is in itself a sign of such activation. Such integration, which shows to what extent the making of the citizen is a unified process from the case of the legitimate child to that of the dēmopoiētos, is indeed indispensable for participation in the various activities of the city. In Athens, the choice was left to the honorand. Between the years 330 and 229, however, a restriction appears in which only the phratries allowed by the law can be chosen. In the other cities, free choice of subdivision is often the case and the situation of Andros and Thasos in the third century remains rather particular: in these two islands, the beneficiary of the politeia can choose his tribe, but must ‘­p ersuade’ the members of the phratry that his candidacy is worthwhile to be admitted by them (­A ndros: IG XII, 5, 716, ll. ­8 –​­9, decree for Hermias son of Apollonios of Salamis, third c. BCE; Thasos: Hamon 2019: ­109–​­115, no. 14, a decree in honour of Polyaretos of Zone, c. 291 BCE, ll. ­8 –​­9). The last possibility is the drawing of lots to assign subdivisions to beneficiaries. However, such a registration is not necessarily a sign of an effective activation of the politeia (­Savalli 1985: 4­ 10–​­411). The undeniable signal (and condition for the beneficiaries) would rather be the residence of the beneficiary. Philip V in 217 is well aware of the problem when he explains to the Larisseans that the great advantage of granting citizenship to those who are already there is precisely that such a privilege will convince them to stay. Similarly, the itinerant public physician Asklepiades of Perge obtains politeia in Seleukia during a stay that lasts several years: in his case, the link between the granting of citizenship, its activation and residence is obvious. When we are able to evaluate the actual move, we see that it is not always successful. Archaeology and epigraphy have shown that the sympoliteia between Latmos and Pidasa was, in the long run, a failure: the Pidasaeans, who never ceased to exist, ended up being attached to Miletus according to the same procedure shortly after the peace of Apamea in 188 BCE. This point leads to the second question, that of an effective dual or multiple citizenship: could a Greek really have several active ‘­identity cards’ without being driven out of his home? Such a phenomenon is particularly visible in the imperial period (­Boulay 2012). Proven cases of ­multi-​­citizenship exist as early as the Hellenistic period, even if it has long been wrongly considered that acquiring a politeia elsewhere than home implied renouncing one’s own (­Gauthier 2000: 114): there is no written evidence for the 498

The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis

requirement to waive the original citizenship, even if returning home sometimes raised problems. Thus, in a decree of Gortyn in Crete from the beginning of the second century BCE, mercenaries are mentioned who wished to return home after having gone to Miletus to ‘­settle as apoikoi’ (­apoikizomenoi) between 234 and 228 BCE (­IC IV, 176, ll. ­29–​­38, with commentary by Baker 2013). These soldiers were subjected to a merciless injunction: either they remained metoikoi in Miletus and could be Gortynians again; or they became citizens of the great Ionian city, in which case coming back (­anodos) was forbidden (­and not only reclaiming their citizenship), while their goods became public property and they were liable to the same punishment as traitors to their homeland. The case of Gortyn actually appears to be an exception among situations of mobility and settlement abroad that were not so rare. If the general rule concerning dual citizenship had been the immediate eviction from the mother country, the decisions taken against the mercenaries would not have made much sense. Above all, it is clear that their properties remained untouched since their departure: in other words, the decision of the Gortynians must be attributed to a situation of which we know nothing and which earned these soldiers a very severe punishment. On the other hand, we find incontrovertible proof of the possibility of a double membership in the isopolity between Olbia and Miletus dated from the first half of the third century BCE. This text contains a clause concerning the granting of ateleia, ‘­exemption from taxes’: Milesians who stay or reside in Olbia will obtain it ‘­w ith the exception of those who are registered as citizens ( ­politeuontai) in another city and participate (­metechousin) in the magistracies and courts there’ (­Milet. I.3.136, ll. ­17–​­24). These Milesians who exercised politeia outside their own city, perhaps thanks to the network of c­ ross-​ ­c itizenships established by her, were not, as we can see, struck off the lists of Miletus at all. Such a right of return also appears very clearly in the case of Asklepiades of Perge, after several years of expatriation in Seleukia where he obtained the politeia. The inscription, which records the timai granted to this physician by various cities, actually begins with a decree of the Pergaeans proudly celebrating the individual as their ‘­famous (­e udoxos) fellow citizen of Perge’ (­­Savalli-​­L estrade 2012: ­47– ​­48).

Final remarks It is not easy to draw conclusions on such a subject on the scale of the whole Hellenistic period, even restricting it, as I have done, to the Aegean cities and, for the most part, to the epigraphic material, in other words not including Egypt and the papyri treated elsewhere (­see Sänger in this volume). The inscriptions are, it must be repeated, complex sources to deal with. It is difficult, in fact, to measure whether a phenomenon attested only from the end of the fourth century onwards is a real novelty or is simply mentioned for the first time because of changes in the epigraphic habit. It must be emphasized that the Hellenistic period, thanks to the massive increase in documentation, is first and foremost a privileged ‘­observation post’ for all these different procedures. It thus seems adventurous to want to draw firm lines within this period and fix a global evolution of citizenship and, more precisely, of the making of the citizen, between the fourth and the first century BCE. The distinction between an early and a late Hellenistic period is undoubtedly relevant for a number of phenomena, as Gauthier has shown (­Gauthier 2005, with Müller 2015). But it is difficult to say that it applies without restriction to the question of politeia. The second and first centuries BCE do not constitute, in particular, a moment of ‘­relaxation’ of practices that would see the rules of integration 499

Christel Müller

becoming flexible on all sides, with an unprecedented place given to women, foreigners, or illegitimate children and the blossoming of ­multi-​­citizenships. Some of these elements can definitely be observed, but they might have already existed or be in the making as early as the fourth or third century BCE. It seems to me that the differences observed are more regional than well established at a global level. Thus, the cities included in the geographical area covered by the islands of the present Dodecanese, such as Rhodes, Kos, or Kalymnos, undeniably share certain institutions, in the broad sense of the term. The same is true in Boeotia or Achaia, where the profiles are very much linked to the existence of a federal structure with its own mechanisms. In other words, the idea that many practices spread from classical Athens may remain unverified in many regions. This is not to say that institutional transfers do not occur anywhere and that cities do not share some form of legal koinē. But local or regional cultures, practices, and (­possible) adaptations are decisive. Several factors of change can, however, be observed. The first is certainly the increase in mobility. Of course, the ability to move for all sorts of reasons does not date from the rule of Alexander the Great, but the crowds set in motion then disrupted the stability of a certain number of poleis and contributed to modifying the practices as well as the representations of politeia. The more individuals and groups moved, the more potential exiles there were and, conversely, the more candidates for integration whose presence could change civic lines. Some cities, in particular, experienced a decline in their civic population, oliganthropy, which led them to admit outsiders into their midst, such as Sparta in the third century or Pergamum in 133, to return to my first example. It is not surprising, in these conditions, that a certain number of procedures appeared or were formalized, such as the granting of politeia through honorary decrees and politographies, the mechanisms of isopolity and sympolity, or the dokimasia of new citizens, which seem so characteristic of the period. The second factor of change is the existence of kingdoms that succeeded Alexander’s empire and the regular interference of kings in the political life of a number of cities, whether formally free or not. Several kings or dynasts tried, for example, to establish sympoliteiai, with more or less success, as between Latmos and Pidasa. Some advised, if not ordered, massive politographies, and the example of Philip V with the Larisseans is particularly evocative. But the cities resisted rather well these attempts at manipulation: the making of the citizen, poiēsis, which encompasses all the phenomena of integration into the civic body, whatever they may be, always takes place under civic control and in compliance with admission procedures. On the other hand, and this is the third factor of a change that preludes a new era, the arrival of the Romans from the second century BCE onwards could only gradually modify both the representations and the practices of citizenship by the Greeks. As Gauthier (­1974 [2011]: 7) has well put it, the Larisseans in 217 might not have understood much about the Roman model of civitas unveiled by Philip V, in particular in respect of emancipation of slaves. Nevertheless, politeia and civitas had many points in common, especially in terms of all the possibilities that they concealed and that the notion of ‘­civic rights’ imperfectly covers. Such commonalities enabled understanding and interference between the two systems. In Athens, the last known traditional grant of citizenship, free of charge in exchange for a benefit, was to Atticus, Cicero’s friend, who had spent a long time in the city between 86 and 65 BCE (­Nep. Att. 3.­1–​­2). But, from the 50s BCE, the situation changed, with a notable increase in the number of Romani cives among magistrates, ephebes, or members of genē. In other poleis, the 500

The making of the citizen in Hellenistic poleis

phenomenon is identical, as in Akraiphia in Boeotia, where a certain Poplios Kornelios, son of Poplios Rhōmaios (‘­Roman’), was in charge of the agōnothesia, that is, the organization of the trieteric contest of the Sōteria around 80 BCE after the Mithridatic War (­IG VII 2727, ll. ­1–​­3). According to which practical and cultural modalities, not only legal ones, did all these people enter the Greek politeia at the end of the Hellenistic era? This is a field that deserves to be explored further, in the wake of the pioneering studies conducted by ­Jean-​­Louis Ferrary.

Abbreviation OGIS Dittenberger, W. (1903–1905) Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae (Leipzig)

Bibliography Archibald, Z.H. et al. (­eds) (­2001) Hellenistic economies (­London) ——— ​­(­2005) Making, moving and managing: the new world of ancient economies 3­ 23–​­31 BCE (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2011) The economies of Hellenistic societies, third to first centuries BC (­Oxford) Austin, M. (­2006) The Hellenistic world from Alexander to the Roman conquest (­Cambridge) Azoulay, V. (­2014) ‘­Rethinking the political in ancient Greece’, Annales (­HSS) (­English edn) 69.3, ­387–​­408 Baker, P. (­2013) ‘­­Mère-​­patrie et patrie d’adoption à l’époque hellénistique: réflexions à partir du cas des mercenaires crétois de Milet’, in S.L. Ager and R.A. Faber (­eds) Belonging and isolation in the Hellenistic world (­Toronto) ­268–​­291 Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Boulay, Th. (­2012) ‘­Le tableau d’honneur d’­A ntioche-­​­­du-​­Méandre’, in A. Heller and A.-​­V. Pont (­eds) Patrie d’origine et patries électives: les citoyennetés multiples dans le monde grec d’époque romaine (­Bordeaux) ­61–​­77 Bresson, A. (­1981) ‘­Règles de nomination dans la Rhodes antique’, DHA 7, ­345–​­362 ——— ​­(­1983) ‘­Nomination et règles de droit dans l’Athènes classique’, L’uomo. Società, tradizione, sviluppo 7, ­39–​­50 Brock, R. (­2015) ‘­Law and citizenship in the Greek poleis’, in E.M. Harris and M. Canevaro (­eds) The Oxford handbook of ancient Greek law (­Oxford), online DOI: 10.1093/­oxfordhb/­9780199 599257.013.15 ­ avalli-​­Lestrade (­2016) ‘­Pergame, cité et capitale dynastique au miroir de la Chameroy, J. and I. S prosopo-graphie interne et des trouvailles monétaires’, in I. ­Savalli-​­Lestrade (­ed.) L’Éolide dans l’ombre de Pergame, Topoi Suppl. 14, ­229–​­284 Cobetto Ghiggia, P. (­1999) L’adozione ad Atene in epoca classica (­A lessandria) Faraguna, M. (­2014) ‘­Citizens, ­non-​­citizens, and slaves: identification methods in classical Greece’, in M. Depauw and S. Coussement (­eds) Identifiers and identification methods in the ancient world: legal documents in ancient societies III (­Leuven) ­165–​­183 Ferrary, J.-​­L. (­2014) Les mémoriaux de délégations du sanctuaire oraculaire de Claros, d’après la documentation conservée dans le Fonds Louis Robert, Académie des Inscriptions et ­B elles-​ ­L ettres (­Paris) Feyel, Ch. (­2007) ‘­La dokimasia des nouveaux citoyens dans les cités grecques’, REG 120, ­19–​­49 Gauthier, Ph. (­1974 [2011]) ‘“­Générosité” romaine et “­avarice” grecque: sur l’octroi du droit de cité’, in id., Études d’histoire et d’institutions grecques. Choix d’écrits (­Geneva) ­3 –​­12 ——— ​­(­1979) ‘­Sur le citoyen romain’, Commentaire 6.2, ­378–​­383 ——— ​­(­1985) Les cités grecques et leurs bienfaiteurs (­Athens) ——— ​­(­2000) ‘­Epigraphica IV’, RPh 74, ­103–​­114 ——— ​­(­2001) ‘­Les Pidaséens entrent en sympolitie avec les Milésiens: la procédure et les modalités institutionnelles’, in A. Bresson and R. Descat (­eds) Les cités d’Asie mineure occidentale au IIe s. a.C. (­Bordeaux) ­117–​­127 ——— ​­(­2005) ‘­Introduction’, in P. Fröhlich and Ch. Müller (­eds) Citoyenneté et participation à la basse époque hellénistique (­Geneva) ­1–​­6

501

Christel Müller Gray, B. (­2015) Stasis and stability: exile, the polis, and political thought, c. ­4 04–​­146 BC (­Oxford) Hamon, P. (­2019) Corpus des inscriptions de Thasos III: documents publics du quatrième siècle et de l’époque hellénistique (­Paris and Athens) Labuff, J. (­2016) Polis expansion and elite power in Hellenistic Karia (­Lanham, MD) Ma, J. (­2002) Antiochos III and the cities of Western Asia Minor (­Oxford) ——— (​­ ­2013) ‘­The Attalids: a military history’, in P. Thonemann (­ed.) Attalid Asia Minor: money, international relations, and the state (­Oxford) ­49–​­82 Mack, W. (­2015) Proxeny and polis: institutional networks in the ancient Greek world (­Oxford) Migeotte, L. (­2014) Les finances des cités grecques aux périodes classique et hellénistique (­Paris) Müller, Ch. (­2014) ‘(­De)­constructing politeia. Reflections on citizenship and the bestowal of privileges upon foreigners in Hellenistic democracies’, Annales (­HSS) (­English edn) 69.3, ­533–​­554 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­De l’époque classique à l’époque hellénistique: la citoyenneté des Grecs, une citoyen-neté en mutation? Réflexions sur la question de l’appartenance multiple’, Studi Ellenistici 29, ­355–​­369 ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Le prestige ­p eut-​­il s’acheter? Réflexions sur la vente de la citoyenneté et des honneurs dans les cités grecques aux époques hellénistique et romaine’, in R. Baudry and Fr. Hurlet (­eds) Le Prestige à Rome à la fin de la République et au début du Principat (­Paris) ­281–​­294 Oliver, G. (­2007) War, food, and politics in early Hellenistic Athens (­Oxford) ​­2010) ‘­Foreign names, intermarriage and citizenship in Hellenistic Athens’, in R.W.V. ——— (­ Catling and F. Marchand (­eds) Onomatologos: studies in Greek personal names presented to Elaine Matthews (­Oxford) ­155–​­164 Papazarkadas, N. and P. Martzavou (­eds) (­2013) Epigraphical approaches to the p­ ost-​­classical polis: fourth century BC to second century AD (­Oxford) Priol, E. (­2017) ‘­Refonder en Grèce à l’époque hellénistique: acte total ou mutation partielle? Les synœcismes dans le cadre des sympolities des années 350 aux années 150 av. J.-​­C.: l’exemple de Latmos et Pidasa’, in Ph. ­Gervais-​­Lambony, Fr. Hurlet and I. Rivoal (­eds) (­Re)­fonder: les modalités du (­re)­commencement dans le temps et dans l’espace (­Paris) ­143–​­156 Rizakis, Ath. (­2008) Achaïe 3: les cités achéennes, épigraphie et histoire (­Athens) Robert, L. (­1938) ‘­Noms grecs et anatoliens’, in Études épigraphiques et philologiques (­Paris) ­151–​­217 ——— ​­(­1969 [2007]) ‘­Théophane de Mytilène à Constantinople’, Choix d’écrits (­Paris) ­603–​­621 Rousset, D. (­2013) ‘­Isopoliteia’, in R.S. Bagnall, K. Brodersen, C.B. Champion, A. Erskine, and S.R. Huebner (­eds) The encyclopedia of ancient history (­Malden, MA) ­3522–​­3523 Rubinstein, L. (­1993) Adoption in IV. century Athens (­Copenhagen) Rudhardt, J. (­1962) ‘­La reconnaissance de paternité, sa nature et sa portée dans la société athénienne’, MH 19, ­39–​­64 Saba, S. (­2020) Isopoliteia in Hellenistic times (­Leiden) Savalli, I. (­1985) ‘­I neocittadini nelle città ellenistiche: note sulla concessione e l’acquisizione della “­politeia”’, Historia 34, ­387–​­431 ­Savalli-​­Lestrade, I. (­2012) ‘­Collections de citoyenneté et internationalisation des élites civiques dans l’Asie Mineure hellénistique’, in A. Heller and A.-​­V. Pont (­eds) Patrie d’origine et patries électives: les citoyennetés multiples dans le monde grec d’époque romaine (­Bordeaux) ­39–​­59 Scholten, J.B. (­2013) ‘­Sympoliteia’, in R.S. Bagnall, K. Brodersen, C.B. Champion, A. Erskine, and S.R. Huebner (­eds) The encyclopedia of ancient history (­Malden, MA) ­6476–​­6477 Sebillotte Cuchet, V. (­2016) ‘­Ces citoyennes qui reconfigurent le politique. Trente ans de travaux sur l’antiquité grecque’, Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire 43, ­185–​­215 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, S.M. (­1978) Ancient Cos: an historical study from the Dorian settlement to the imperial period (­Göttingen) Szanto, E. (­1892) Das Griechische Bürgerrecht (­Freiburg i.B.) van Bremen, R. (­1996) The limits of participation: women and civic life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (­A msterdam) Wilgaux, J. (­2008) ‘­Transmission et distinction en Grèce ancienne: une étude des règles de nomination’, in Th. Piel (­ed.) Figures et expressions du pouvoir dans l’antiquité (­Rennes) ­35–​­48

502

PART V

Between and beyond Greece and Rome

35 CITIZENS AND CITIZENSHIP IN ­PRE-​­ROMAN CARTHAGE Dexter Hoyos

Hostem qui feriet, mihi erit Karthaginiensis quisquis erit, quoiatis siet. ‘­He who strikes the foe, for me will be a Carthaginian, whoever he shall be, from wherever he may be’.

So Hannibal promised his multinational troops in 218, according to the poet Ennius. According to the historian Livy a century and a half later, the general promised that, once the war was won, every allied soldier who sought Carthage’s citizenship would receive it, along with ­tax-​­free estates in conquered lands. Of course, Ennius and Livy were writing Roman versions of a speech by Hannibal, and there is, in fact, no evidence of ­non-​­Carthaginian veterans ever being made citizens. Nonetheless, implying that Carthaginian citizenship could be something to value was probably not just a Roman fancy.1

Professions and clubs As with so many other aspects of Carthage’s society and politics, details of its ­citizenship – ​­privileges, duties, entitlements, and any ­drawbacks – ​­are reported only fitfully by Greek and Roman writers and in scattered, not always easily interpreted Punic inscriptions, mostly epitaphs. These, nonetheless, illuminate citizens’ active lives in Carthage’s mature centuries. Virtually the only civic inscription from Punic Carthage found so far, a damaged and hard to translate piece of black limestone discovered in the 1960s, reveals a major public works project of the fourth or third century: the building of a street ‘­leading to the New Gate’ (­site unknown). The project was carried out in two successive years dated by the city’s sufetes (­shophetim, the two annual chief magistrates), whose ‘­associates’ may have been from the board of public works (­the ‘­rkt: see below). The stone then lists a very broad collection of participating ­professionals – ​­not all of them performing obvious (­or identifiable) rôles. Two engineers, it seems, supervised: Bodmelqart and Yehawalon, possibly brothers. Workers under their direction included, as tentatively translated, porters and packers ‘­from the plain of the town’, ­gold-​­smelters, DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-42

505

Dexter Hoyos

metalworkers (‘­craftsmen who make vessels’), ­furnace-​­men, ­sandal-​­makers, and (­if rightly translated) ‘­those who have neither silver nor gold’.2 Descending the likely social scale, Punic inscriptions reveal a f­oreign-​­language interpreter, Baalyaton, a maker of strigils (­bathtime ­body-​­scrapers) named Aris, Mago a butcher, and a fuller named Gry (­Giray?) – ​­this last a slave (‘ ­bd: i.e., abd), as he himself recorded, yet able (­with or without help) to afford his own tomb. Other stated professions include perfumiers, smiths, ­wagon-​­makers, sawyers, carpenters, and a lamplighter (­who may have been employed in temples, as there is no evidence for ordinary street lamps). The variety of callings in a big Mediterranean city is vividly illustrated.3 How a Carthaginian would spend his time when not working, if he had any, is only partly documented. One social institution singled out for curt mention in the 330s by Aristotle was the practice of communal public meals (­syssitia in Greek) by friendly societies or clubs, which he terms hetairiai. He compares Carthage’s syssitia with similar gatherings at Sparta called pheiditia (­where club members paid for the meals), and andreia in Crete (­paid for with public funds, which he approves). He states no details about their costs at Carthage or who could belong. Public meals were a widespread practice in Mediterranean societies, for reasons both social and religious, and so were friendly societies. In inscriptions found at eastern Mediterranean sites, and dating especially from the Hellenistic age, a hetairia is termed a mrzḥ (­marzeh); each had its own president, a rab marzeh, and held festive and, where appropriate, ritual banquets. Aristotle must be referring to these.

Full and ­half-​­citizens? Some Punic epitaphs each call their dedicator a ‘­man of Sidon’ (’š Ṣdn), and most such dedicators moreover term themselves beholden to an ’dn (­adon), a lord, master, or ‘­sire’ who is plainly a Carthaginian and often has a family pedigree. Hence, a view that ‘­men of Sidon’ were not migrants from that ancient Phoenician city at all, but ­ex-​­slaves freed by their master. Why such a term should be applied to e­ x-​­slaves is not easy to see, however. Ordinary Sidonians were not slaves or former slaves, and they had slaves of their own. Moreover, another term, ‘ ­bd, was commonly used to mean slave or servant, as by Gry the fuller mentioned above.4 It may be, instead, that ’š Ṣdn was a Carthaginian term for a Phoenician or Libyphoenician who had gained citizenship thanks to the named ’dn as his patron or sponsor. Libyphoenicians were the citizens of the other Phoenician colonies along the North African coast. These cities certainly, and people from most Phoenician cities probably, had a special relationship with Carthage. Libyphoenicians had the right of epigamia or intermarriage with Carthaginians, quite likely Phoenicians as well. Tyre was arguably a special case: as Carthage’s m ­ other-​­city, and with close ties to its daughter, any of its citizens who settled in Carthage may have had full rights from the start. In turn, Sidonians, from Tyre’s ancient sister city, were ­remembered – ­​­­perhaps –​ ­as the earliest extra settlers after Dido’s ­semi-​­mythical founders. It is likely enough that a Phoenician or Libyphoenician coming to Carthage could seek citizenship once he had established himself socially and financially. If approved, conceivably he was known as a ‘­man of Sidon’ because traditionally such grants were first conferred on Sidonians; in turn, he acknowledged the Carthaginian who had backed him.5 A related puzzle is whether there was more than a single category of Carthaginian citizenship. ‘­Man of Sidon’, whether the term for a freedman or a migrant, might seem 506

Citizens and citizenship in pre-Roman Carthage

to imply two categories: a ­foreign-​­born citizen with perhaps restricted rights (­for example, n ­ on-​­voting) and a ­native-​­born, fully entitled Carthaginian. A curious phrase, kyrious Karchēdonious, in Hannibal’s alliance treaty with the king of Macedon in 215, might seem more evidence for two categories: it literally means ‘­lord Carthaginians’ or ‘­legitimate Carthaginians’ – ​­a category not found in inscriptions, in Aristotle, or in other sources. There is also the historian Polybius’ report that in 209, during the Second Punic War, the Roman proconsul Scipio in Spain treated the 8,000 citizens and 2,000 artisans of captured New Carthage (­Cartagena) in different ways. He assured the citizens that they would remain free (­meaning would not be sold into slavery) while telling the artisans that they were now public slaves of Rome but would be freed if they served Rome loyally. It has been held that this report too reveals two levels of citizenship at both New Carthage and its ­mother-​­city.6 The inference is questionable, however. New Carthage’s artisans (­cheirotechnai) were not its only other inhabitants; there was also ‘­a crowd of young residents (­incolae) and sturdy slaves’ whom Scipio now conscripted into his fleet. Livy’s account shows that the young incolae were not citizens of New Carthage but other residents (­no doubt Spaniards), and the sturdy slaves were unskilled workers. The cheirotechnai were almost certainly slaves themselves, rather than free men whom Scipio abruptly reclassified as slaves. As experienced artisans they were important to his needs, hence his relatively benign treatment.7 Most likely, Carthage had a single form of citizenship. ‘­Man of Sidon’ even so, whether ­ex-​­foreigner or e­ x-​­slave, hints at the existence of social ranking in the republic. Single citizenship did not dissolve sharp differences between the rich and the rest, any more than at Athens or Rome.8

Citizens and government Ordinary male citizens had political rights. Assembled as the ‘­m (­ham, ‘­the people’), they elected the senior magistrates: the two sufetes (­shophetim) and a varying number of generals (­each entitled rab mahanet, ‘­army chief’). Citizens could freely debate, oppose, and even reject proposed laws if these were put to the ham, and Polybius was to claim with oligarchic disgust that in the Barcid Hannibal’s day Carthage was in decline because ‘­the common people had by then become the dominant political force’ – ​­with the result that, ‘­since policy was decided in Carthage by the masses and in Rome by the best men, Roman policies would prevail’. Hence, the Romans’ victory in the war of ­218–​­201.9 Ordinary citizens do appear to have gained a fuller voice in affairs by 218. To maintain political dominance, Hannibal’s father Hamilcar Barca and his Barcid successors relied on civilian ­support – ​­initially through Hamilcar’s ‘­demagogic’ ­son-­​­­in-​­law Hasdrubal, Diodorus ­says  – ​­as well as fostering popularity with Carthaginian soldiers. Hannibal himself still had civilian support after 201, which won him election as sufete in ­196–​­195 to carry through crucial reforms. The later historian Appian, in a rather confused summary of ­post-​­200 Carthaginian politics, gives prominence to a ‘­democratic’ faction (­the demokratizontes) – which ​­ in his telling of events was ultimately responsible for the disastrous third war with Rome. Yet the oligarchic structure of the republic always put limits on the ordinary citizen in public life, as Aristotle makes clear. One needed wealth as well as family eminence 507

Dexter Hoyos

to attain office, and the ham was strictly limited in making decisions. A legislative or administrative proposal was put to it only if the sufetes and the senate (­the adirim, ‘­noble ones’) disagreed. If they were in agreement over the proposal, there was no rôle for the ham. What happened if one sufete disagreed with his colleague over it, or both with the adirim? We are not told.10 Probably by Hannibal’s day, a century after Aristotle, a convention existed that all proposals should go to the people. This would fit Polybius’ and Appian’s claims, along with Livy’s compressed account of Hannibal’s sufeteship. But the ­corollary – it ​­ ­appears – ​­was that the ham should then ratify the proposals. That sufetes and the senate continued, in practice, to decide at least crucial issues explains how in 218 it was the adirim who accepted Rome’s declaration of war, and how they are recorded making major decisions affecting the ­war-​­effort, for instance, over troops and resources. When in 202 the defeated Hannibal urged his ­fellow-​­citizens to make peace, he did so in the senate. In 149, faced with the inflexible demand by the invading consuls that the Carthaginians abandon their city and move inland, it was again the adirim who led Carthage in ­defiance – ​­declaring war, freeing the city’s slaves, and organizing resistance. Admittedly in this crisis, the oligarchy and its leaders clearly enjoyed popular backing, and equally so in earlier times when its dominant faction was that of Hannibal’s Barcid family. Other civil rights and procedures for citizens are poorly attested, such as redress for unjust treatment or for crime victims, or laws regulating inheritance and commerce. Interestingly, there seems to be no mention in any source, epigraphic or literary, of Carthaginian lawyers (­in Roman times matters would be different). No inscriptions commemorate members of the court of 104, and in inscriptions ­shophet – ​­Phoenician ​­ and Punic for ‘­judge’ – seems always to mean a sufete. Although it may be that early (­­sixth-​­century?) sufetes did judge various cases, by contrast Aristotle in the fourth century reported that all cases were judged by ‘­the authorities’ (­ta archeia), in a passage ­describing – ​­very ­opaquely – ​­the functions of bodies which he calls ‘­the pentarchies’. Just what these were is unclear, but doubtless a Carthaginian without wealth would not be a member of any. Very likely, the average ­non-​­aristocratic Carthaginian’s encounters with judicial officers or courts would almost always be as a litigant, petitioner, witness, or ­defendant – ​­seldom if ever as a judge or assessor himself; at any rate not until he had amassed enough wealth to cease being average.

Citizens in wartime Like male Roman citizens, Carthaginian adult men were eligible for war service either in armies or in fleets. Aristotle notes a report that veterans were entitled to wear armbands to show how many campaigns they had fought. Early armies, as well as fleets, may have consisted to a sizeable extent of citizens: when, around 535, the political opponents of the s­ ixth-​­century leader conventionally called ‘­Malchus’ had him and his army in Sardinia banned from ever coming home. Malchus and his resentful men returned anyway and forced his reinstatement. If Justin’s account is w ­ ell-​­founded, the army at that time must have been recruited mainly from Carthaginians.11 As early as 480 by contrast, the bulk of every army consisted partly of Libyan ­subjects  – ​­volunteers and ­conscripts  – ​­and partly of a wide range of mercenary professionals. At all times, however, armies’ senior officer corps consisted almost 508

Citizens and citizenship in pre-Roman Carthage

entirely of Carthaginians (­the only known exception is Muttines: see below), and units of citizen troops are mentioned inter-mittently. They served, for example, in the army that the Magonid leader Hamilcar took to Sicily in 480 (­Herodotus calls them ‘­Phoenicians’, a common Greek usage for Carthaginians; Diodorus specifies citizens). In 396 Himilco, a general with a ­plague-​­ravaged army outside Syracuse, chose to abandon all but his Carthaginian troops, put these into ships, and sail home (­the plague followed). Other citizens, all from Carthage’s elite, formed the expensively equipped infantry divisions, 10,000 strong, that fought at Sicily’s river Crimisus in 341. A similar but smaller force formed part of the home army against Agathocles of Syracuse’s invaders 31 years later. Diodorus’ and Plutarch’s accounts of the array at the Crimisus stress the discipline, splendid equipment, and aristocratic composition of the citizen troops, including 2,500 especially impressive infantry called the ‘­sacred battalion’ (­hieros lochos). Another ‘­sacred battalion’ fought in 310. Their discipline and splendour, unfortunately, did not save them in either 341 or 310, and the battalion is not heard of again, but citizen units recur in later wars. Hamilcar Barca, appointed general in dire circumstances in 240, formed a small army in blockaded Carthage from citizens as well as mercenaries and deserters, then was able to exit and open a new front inland, while other armed citizens must have remained within the walls as part of its garrison. Citizen recruits were still available four decades later: Hannibal had them, as well as Libyans, mercenaries, and his own veterans from Italy, at the battle of Zama.12 Two episodes in Diodorus’ history show that ordinary Carthaginians kept arms in their homes and had some military training. In 377, a mass panic broke out, when Carthage faced not only a rebellion in Libya but also a new outbreak of plague (­which may have been partly responsible). ‘­Many men rushed from their houses in arms, having the impression that enemies had burst into the city, and fought constantly with each other as if with enemies, killing some and wounding others’.13 It took time, and many propitiatory sacrifices to the gods, before the city recovered. Discipline and resourcefulness, by contrast, emerge in Diodorus’ narrative of the treacherous general Bomilcar’s failed attempt to seize power in 308 using armed followers, 500 of them citizen troops. After holding a regular military review in the ‘­New City’ (­s ee note 2), he made his move with these confederates and some 1,000 mercenaries, marching in five squads into ‘­old’ Carthage’s central square. Amid uproar in the city, ‘­the young men’ gathered, ‘­formed companies’, and fought back. Other citizens took station in the tall buildings surrounding the square to rain missiles down on the rebels. Bomilcar had to retreat to high ground in or near the ‘­New City’ and, with all available citizens now in arms against him, soon surrendered, and was executed. There were thus plenty of young Carthaginians in the city with at least some military training, and with weapons kept in their houses or readily accessible in nearby depôts or temples. The city and its surrounds on the peninsula had space enough for military drill, and the district which Diodorus calls ‘­the New City, a short distance from old Carthage’, was apparently such an area. It perhaps lay west of Byrsa hill; or rather likelier, near the broad northern headland (­La ­Marsa-​­Gammarth today) which Greeks called Megara and Carthaginians perhaps M‘­rt. Megara’s high ground could have been Bomilcar’s last stand.14 More often and in more numbers, Carthaginians manned the republic’s fleets. So Polybius insists: ‘­the Carthaginians are naturally superior at sea both in efficiency and equipment, because seamanship has long been their national craft, and they busy 509

Dexter Hoyos

themselves with the sea more than any other people’. Hamilcar the Magonid in 480 had 200 ­warships – ​­plus 3,000 transport craft, Diodorus a­ dds – ​­and similar totals are given in later wars, such as 100 warships (­in 399), ­150–​­200 against Timoleon’s Sicilian Greeks in the 340s, and about the same again in Sicilian waters 30 years later during the war with Agathocles. Large or even larger fleets are reported in the First and Second Punic Wars against Rome, although some of the figures in Polybius, Livy, and other sources may be questionable.15 It is very unlikely, even impossible, that Carthaginians alone crewed all these fleets. A trireme, the standard warship from the sixth century to the early third century, needed some 170 oarsmen (­as well as a small number of shipboard troops). The quinquereme, the dominant though not sole battleship of the Hellenistic age, was rowed by some 300 men and could carry up to 120 marines. Smaller ships, like triremes, continued to be used from time to time too. During the First Punic War, Punic fleets ranging from 130 quinqueremes to 330 are reported; in the Second Punic War, after a bad start, Carthage by 211 could put 155 quinqueremes to sea. Citizens alone cannot have provided enough crews for these, especially when others were serving in armies. Libyphoenician and Libyan communities must have been drawn on, including for the equally necessary transport convoys, though Greek and Roman sources had no interest in specifying all this.16 A saving grace for the Carthaginian naval ­recruit – ​­until ­264 – ​­was that ­sea-​­battles were fewer than those on land. Despite the ancient (­and modern) belief that Carthage was essentially a seapower, its main operations before 264 were on land. Citizen seamen were thus less likely to lose their lives than citizen soldiers, whose armies often suffered calamitous defeats. The wars with Rome were very different.

A republic of merchant princes? It was important to be rich. The rich and w ­ ell-​­born citizen could be elected a magistrate or military commander, gain membership of the adirim, of one of Carthage’s various administrative boards, or of a priesthood serving one of the city’s many gods. In fact, he could hold more than one of these offices at the same time, according to Aristotle. The philosopher firmly disapproved. ‘­It would appear to be a bad thing too that the same man carries out several offices, something highly esteemed among Carthaginians. One function is best accomplished by one man’. Women Carthaginians, by contrast, might be priestesses of female deities, but they were not eligible for any other public office.17 How large, and how porous, the upper strata were in Carthaginian society is uncertain. Elite Carthaginians’ remarkably narrow range of personal n Adherbal, Bostar, ­ ames – chiefly ​­ Carthalo, Gisco, Hamilcar, Hannibal, Himilco, Hasdrubal, Mago, and Maharbal (­in their anglicized Latin forms) – does not mean that only a small group of families controlled the ​­ state for centuries. Aristotle stresses that senators and high officials were drawn from a wide range of families, adding (­though his text at this point is damaged) that any outstanding family could aim at election to office. This implies no closed, ­centuries-​­long inner circle of oligarchic houses. Some families endured but, as at Rome, others could disappear politically over time. The Magonids apparently did so in the 390s, after more than a century of dominance; later the Barcids too.18 Elite families kept track of their genealogies. Officials often put impressive pedigrees on their dedicatory stelae, listing generations of (­male) ancestors: a damaged 510

Citizens and citizenship in pre-Roman Carthage

inscription records a rb (­rab; on this title see below) named Abdmilqart (­Hamilcar, in its Roman form) who was ‘­son of Mago son of... [name missing] son of Baalyaton son of Abdilay son of Baalyaton son of Eshmunpilles’ – ​­while his colleague Abdaris presents only his father Abd[...] and grandfather Abdmilqart, who had also been a rab. A devout Birrekmilqart, in recording a couch he dedicated to the god Sadrape, carefully set out six generations of forebears: Azorbaal his father, then Gisco, Mago, Himilco, Knt, and Qaton. The likely acme of familial piety was reached by a man ‘­of the nation of Carthage’ who, having migrated to Olbia in northern Sardinia, left a stele inscribed with the names of sixteen a­ ncestors – all ​­ of whose names survive on the stone, though sadly his own does not. This was a male family line stretching back a good four centuries or so from the unknown’s own, perhaps ­third-​­century, lifetime.19 Carthage is generally viewed as a merchant republic like medieval Venice and Genoa, its aristocracy consisting of rich entrepreneurial merchant ­princes – ​­in sharp contrast to the landowning militaristic elite of its old foe Rome. Yet, rich and commercially successful as the Carthaginian merchant elite must have been, the c­ ity-​­state’s society and politics were not in merchant hands alone. Very few leading Carthaginian figures are known to have been merchants, even mer­ ay – ­​­­perhaps – ​­have been Hanno ‘­k ing of the Carthagchants on a large scale. One such m inians’ (­as the Greek text of his voyage terms him) who, probably sometime after 500, sailed west beyond the straits of Gibraltar. The short but famous ‘­Periplous of Hanno’ tells how he took a large fleet and 30,000 men and women to found ‘­Libyphoenician ­ fth-​­century ‘­k ing’, in cities’, but it does not state or hint that he was a merchant. A fi Greek basileus, almost certainly means a sufete; if both a sufete and a merchant grandee, Hanno was one of the seeming few who combined both activities.20 One Himilco, who explored the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Gaul possibly in the same period, is the likeliest Carthaginian to have been a merchant. So too perhaps the Himilco or ­Yehawmilk – ​­‘­Iomilkos’ in his Greek ­inscription – ​­a ‘­Carthaginian king’ who in 279 or 262 made a golden offering on the Aegean isle of Delos and, if from Carthage, must also have been a sufete (­another view makes him king of a much more obscure Carthage in Cyprus).21 In the city’s early centuries, its dominant class must certainly have been chiefly mercantile, for Carthage then had no substantial mainland territory. But in the ­mid-​­fifth century, the Carthaginians forced submission on their Libyan neighbours and enlarged their own territory. They exacted tribute in money, produce, and military recruits, and, if Aristotle is right, from time to time sent out Carthaginian citizens to settle in other cities. This would have given impetus to an expansion of mainland estates and, at least for some established elite families and ambitious newcomers, might have encouraged a closer interest in landowning than in merchant venturing.22 Rightly or wrongly, Greek and Roman sources for Carthage’s later centuries imply a ruling aristocracy more like Rome’s than like the mercantile oligarchies of Phoenicia. The Magonid leaders were generals: Mago, their founder after the fall of Malchus, reformed and improved Carthage’s military institutions; then his sons waged wars (­like Malchus) in Libya, Sicily, and Sardinia. Mercantile enterprises, if they financed them, they must have left to others to manage; likewise, Mago’s descendants, the generals Hannibal and Himilco, who warred in Sicily between 409 and 396. Roman aristocrats, like Hannibal the Barcid’s contemporary Cato the elder, did much the same in their business activities.23 511

Dexter Hoyos

The ­m id-­​­­fourth-​­century leader Hanno ‘­the Great’ was remembered for a range of exploits, none mercantile: immense wealth, campaigns in Libya and Sicily, his banquet for all the citizens, and something like a private zoo. After a second coup attempt failed, he retreated to ‘­a certain fortified stronghold’ with ‘­20,000 armed slaves’, was overpowered, and dragged back to the city for very painful execution. The number is no doubt exaggerated, but Hanno’s ‘­stronghold’ was probably a ­well-​­fortified villa estate in the countryside like those which drew wonder from later Greek and Roman invaders, and like the great country mansions depicted in late Roman and V ­ andal-​­era mosaics.24 Carthage’s b ­ est-​­known political family, the Barcids, seem to have been wholly l­ and-​ ­based, with an interest in matters, maritime and naval, that on all the evidence was minimal. But they accumulated wealth. When it became imperative for Hannibal in 195 to flee into eastern exile, he rode to ‘­h is tower’ on Libya’s east coast where a fully equipped ­ship  – ​­laden with money and precious ­objects  – ​­was waiting for him. His ‘­tower’ must have been a rural estate by the sea, and is not likely to have been a small or impoverished one. Even years later, he still possessed a sizeable treasure that accompanied him in further travels.25

Elite citizens: office and status As mentioned earlier, Aristotle stresses that only wealthy Carthaginians held ­office –​ ­an admirable feature, in his view, ‘­for it is impossible for a man without means to govern excellently or to have the time’. Still, before long he is critical of another aspect of this, sensibly judging it a defect that Carthage’s chief offices (­he means the sufeteship and generalship) could be bought and that Carthaginians thought this perfectly acceptable. Purchasing office presumably took place through candidates giving money to citizens for v­ otes – ​­their own and their followers’ – ​­in the ham, and providing largesse at other times, like the traitor Hanno with his public banquets. This political m ­ oney-​ c­ ulture may well have embraced even the lifetime appointments to seats in the court of One Hundred, or One Hundred and Four, which was created after 400 to discipline wayward generals and which Aristotle in the 330s saw as ‘­the principal authority’ (­tēn megistēn archēn) in the state.26 Wealth was likewise a necessity for membership in the ­so-​­called ‘­p entarchies’, ­five-​­man administrative boards which ­Aristotle  – ­​­­alone  – ​­mentions. Their members were unpaid and (­he affirms) the personnel were s­ elf-​­selected: in other words, existing ‘­p entarchs’ ­co-​­opted new members to fill vacancies. As mentioned above, he adds that they judged all court cases. Nonetheless, since he is the only source to mention pentarchies, it is not clear how accurate his information is. Inscriptions do mention administrative boards or commissions: for example, the ‘­accountants’ handling finances (­the mḥ šbm [mehashbim]), commissioners of public works (­the ‘­rkt mentioned earlier), and those for sacrifices. But they had ten, thirty, or even fifty members; none of five is mentioned. Unless Aristotle was simply misinformed, ‘­p entarchies’ may have been subcommittees of actual boards. The ‘­associates’ or ‘­colleagues’ of the sufetes in the ­so-​­called Tariff of M ­ arseille – ​­a detailed list of prices for sacrificial animals at Carthage, found in the French city in 1­ 845 – ​­and likewise those of two of the magistrates in the f­ourth-​­century or t­ hird-​­century New Gate inscription, were conceivably subcommittees (­of five?) delegated from the full boards.27 Rb (­rab), meaning ‘­chief’ or ‘­head’ and followed by a defining noun like mahanet (­army), kohanim (­priests), or mehashbim (­accountants), was the title of the most senior officials 512

Citizens and citizenship in pre-Roman Carthage

and an obvious point of pride for aristocrats. A m ­ uch-​­discussed point is that many other Carthaginians added the title to their names without a definition, for instance Abdmilqart the rab noted earlier, and they can rarely be matched to a state office, as with rab Hannibal and rab Himilco on the fragmentary inscription of 405 about their military successes in Sicily. From Diodorus, we know they were Magonid generals (­that is, rabim mahanet). Yet, in fact, even with them the title does not necessarily refer to generalships. Explanations for undefined rabim vary: that they did head administrative boards or armies but did not wish to be specific; or that each had been honorary leader of the senate; or that each was simply one of the adirim. But perhaps more likely, an ‘­undefined’ rab had been a member of what Livy calls the ‘­more sacred council’ (­sanctius consilium): an inner body of thirty senators, senior to the rest of the adirim, privy to state secrets, and able to decide what matters the full senate should debate. If so, membership may have rotated, for one rab calls himself ‘­rab for the third time’. Arguably, with no definition added, citizen readers would recognize what position such a rab had held. Whatever the explanation, the lasting importance to Carthaginian aristocrats of a ­prestige-​­bearing title is clear.28

Carthaginians and others While always sedulously maintaining its ties with m ­ other-​­city Tyre, Carthage nevertheless grew into a busily ­multi-​­ethnic society. It is not likely that the city, which grew vigorously until at least the Second Punic War, consisted throughout its life of a population largely Phoenician in ­descent – ​­even if, as noted above, some Phoenicians migrated to it over the centuries, including intermittent refugees from revolts against Phoenicia’s various overlords, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. Alexander the Great, too, contributed indirectly: his lengthy siege of Tyre in 332 drove many to flee to Carthage. Still, inflows from Phoenicia are not likely to have been the main factor in Carthage’s population growth.29 Greeks and Romans termed North Africa’s other Phoenician colonies ­Libyphoenicians’, no doubt because the colonists often married Libyans. They included Carthage’s close neighbours Utica and Hippou Acra (­Bizerte), also Leptis (­Lemta) and Hadrumetum (­Sousse) on the east coast, and farther away probably Lepcis (­in Roman times Leptis Magna) near modern Tripoli. Carthaginians naturally had close relations with them. According to Diodorus, nearby Libyphoenicians and Carthaginians had the right of intermarriage (­epigamia); whether this extended to distant places like Lepcis, Ebusus (­Ibiza) which was a Carthaginian possession, or Gades in Spain, is not known but is conceivable.30 As it happens, the only Libyphoenician known as a historical personality, a cavalry commander of Hannibal’s named Muttines or Mottones from Hippou Acra, was so disdainfully treated by his Carthaginian superior Hanno in S ­ icily – ​­he called the officer a ‘­lowlife African’ – ​­that Muttines finally went over to the Romans, helped them secure Sicily, served in later wars, and is found at Delphi (­in 190/­189) as a Roman citizen, Marcus Valerius Mottones, making a dedication with his four ­Roman-​­named sons. Yet Hanno’s shabby treatment of an able Libyphoenician need not typify every Carthaginian’s attitude. Not only could a Carthaginian marry a Libyphoenician but some must have married Libyans, and Hamilcar Barca’s promise of a daughter in marriage to the Numidian lord Naravas, who came to his aid during the Truceless War of ­241–​­237, marks only one bond between Carthaginian grandees and Numidian rulers. Later, another general, Hasdrubal son of Gisco, gave his daughter, the famous and 513

Dexter Hoyos

tragic Sophoniba, to be married to a Numidian king. In 1­ 49–​­148, one of the generals defending Carthage against the Romans was grandson through his mother of a further Numidian king, the ­long-​­lived ­Masinissa – ​­ironically Carthage’s bitter enemy.31 Other links developed between Carthaginian citizens and their hinterland. To explain the city’s political stability, Aristotle ­comments – more ​­ cryptically than ­clearly –​ ­that the oligarchy’s policy was ‘­to enrich some part of the people regularly by sending them out to the cities’ (­epi tas poleis), or in another passage ‘­to the surrounding territories’. Not only may Libyphoenician cities have received such emigrés but also Libyan towns, in fertile regions like the Cape Bon peninsula and Byzacium on the east coast.32 Carthaginians thus exported must have been poorer citizens, and to make them rich implies grants of land, as Roman populist leaders would later do for their citizens. Possibly the state gave the emigrés other privileges such as ­tax-​­free status (­Libyans had to pay tribute). How they were received by their involuntary ‘­hosts’ may be wondered. Over time, nonetheless, many or most probably became assimilated with those communities (­i ntermarriage again), a process that contributed to the spread of Carthage’s language, cults, and institutions in Libya which long survived Carthage itself.33 Carthage was home to plenty of foreigners, Greeks included. There were enough of these in 396 to contribute to establishing the cult of Sicily’s patron goddesses, Deme​­ though Carthage was again at war with Syracuse, it had no quarter and ­Kore – for rel with many other Greek states. A couple of f­ourth-​­century individual arrivals are known. One Apollodorus seems to have settled there, for his sculptor son ‘­Boethus the Carthaginian, son of Apollodorus’, active around 300, so signed himself on a statue base discovered at Ephesus. This suggests that Boethus had been born and raised in Carthage, even if he went abroad to pursue his career. Another settler was Arcesilaus, a Syracusan, once a friend of Agathocles and an officer in the army which Agathocles abandoned in Libya in 307. He had notable descendants (­below).34 Private ties between Carthaginian citizens and Greeks were plentiful, as also public links between Carthage and Greek states. The Magonid Hamilcar, who in 480 fought against Syracuse and Acragas, was half a Syracusan himself through his mother, and was aiming at reinstating in power his Greek ­g uest-​­friend Terillus, ­ex-​­ruler of Himera. When Dion, uncle of the worthless Syracusan tyrant Dionysius the younger, sailed from Greece in 357 to overthrow his nephew, he had to land at ­Punic-​­controlled Heraclea Minoa in western Sicily, and received help there from a Carthaginian commander whom Plutarch calls ‘­Synalus’ – ​­probably ­Eshmunhalos – ​­because Dion was his ­g uest-​­friend. And indeed, Dion had originally fallen out with his nephew because of his friendships with, and high repute among, Carthaginians. Roman merchants were regular visitors. Not only do the treaties of 509 and 348 make this clear, but during the city’s Truceless War against rebel mercenaries and oppressed Libyans, the Romans banned Italians from trading with the rebels and ordered that they deal with Carthage alone. There were Italians, Romans no doubt among them, in the city in 149, victims of furious assaults when news came of Rome’s command that Carthage be abandoned. Roman individuals too had Carthaginian connections. Hannibal was forced into exile by political foes who enlisted influential Romans in support even though Scipio Africanus, the victor of Zama, opposed it. Scipio himself had a friendship bond with an aristocratic family, which continued with his descendants. As a result, when his grandson Scipio Aemilianus took charge of operations two years into the Third Punic War, he won over the ablest Carthaginian field general, a cavalryman 514

Citizens and citizenship in pre-Roman Carthage

named Himilco Phameas, who belonged to that family and whom he knew personally. It was so significant a success that Phameas was later honoured by the senate in Rome for his services.35

Conclusion Ordinary Carthaginian citizens for most of their history were more ruled than ruling. A mixed aristocratic elite of moneyed merchants and landowning magnates filled the city’s magistracies, senate, priesthoods, and administration. They ruled a polity which, as we have seen, Aristotle in the fourth century judged stable and (­mostly) laudable. The ordinary citizen’s benefits in this polity flowed from the prosperity brought by his city’s trade, agriculture, a­ nd – ​­after the m ­ id-​­fifth ­c entury – the ​­ tribute imposed on subject communities in Libya and elsewhere. Neither the citizen body nor its dominant elements were static. Intermarriage with Libyan neighbours, the arrival of immigrants from further away, and probably too the enfranchisement of freed slaves meant a growing and versatile population. The elite seems to have been equally under evolution, if Aristotle is right that men outside its existing ranks had opportunities to attain public o ­ ffice – ​­so long as they were ­wealthy –​ ­for wealth counted as much as, or more than, ancestry. Moreover, in later centuries, ordinary citizens did gain a rather greater say in public policy, if we can judge from what is known of internal affairs during the Barcid family’s predominance and the 50 years following the Second Punic War. Carthaginian citizenship meant status and rewards for its holders, with their city owning large and productive tracts of neighbouring territories, and exerting hegemony both in other parts of Libya and, over varying periods, in regions of Sicily, Sardinia, and afterwards Spain. We need not doubt that Hannibal used the appeal of such citizenship to confirm the loyalty of his sorely tested troops.

Abbreviations Gsell, HAAN = Gsell, S. (1913–1929) Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord, 8 vols. (Paris)

Notes 1 All ancient dates are BCE. Ancient Libya corresponds approximately to today’s northern Tunisia, and ‘­P unic’ is a common Latin term for Carthaginian, ‘­He who strikes the foe’: Enn. Ann. fr. 2­ 33–​­234 Goldberg and Manuwald (­2018) = fr. ­276–​­277 Warmington (­1935), from Cic. Balb. 51 (­my translation). Citizenship and other promises of Hannibal: Livy 21.45.­4 –​­7; cf. Polyb. 3.63.4. 2 Lancel (­1995: ­142–​­144) (­i ncluding translation). Board of public works (‘­rkt): so Krahmalkov (­2000: 36, 387); Sznycer (­1978: 585) thinks the members were assessors, rather like Roman censors. ‘­New’ Gate could imply that the gate stood in, or gave access to, a new quarter of the city (­Diodorus’ ‘­New City’, Nea Polis: 20.44.5). ‘­The plain of the town’ would be the original city, presumably the ‘­old Carthage’ in Diodorus. 3 Named professions: Krahmalkov (­2000: 125, 144, ­198–​­201, 223 [Gry], 271, ­277–​­278, 284, ­290–​ ­291, 313, 306, 325). 4 On š Ṣ dn usually followed by bd (­bod: ‘­thanks to’ – ​­or ‘­serving’?) and the patron’s (?) name: Huss (­1985: ­497–​­498); Krahmalkov (­2000: 34, ­97–​­98, 413) s.v. Ṣ dn i; Miles (­2010: 424). ‘­bd (­abd): Krahmalkov (­2000: ­351–​­352), s.v. ‘ ­bd ii and iii, defines as ‘­servant, vassal, subject’, or

515

Dexter Hoyos even ‘­worker’ – but ​­ (­223) as ‘­slave’. On ‘­bd = ‘­slave’: W. van Gucht, DCPP (­Lipiński et al. 1994: 157), s.v. Esclaves. 5 Bond with Tyre: Polyb. 3.24.3 (­second treaty with Rome). Tyrians at Carthage probably full citizens: similarly, Gsell, HAAN 2.227, but he thinks this applied to all resident Phoenicians. 6 Kyrious Karchēdonious: Polyb. 7.9.5; Walbank (­­1957–​­1979) 2.53 (­diplomatic usage). Limited number of full citizens: Huss (­1985: 467); Scullard (­1989: ­491–​­492); Bondì (­1995b: 299, 309); contrast Hoyos (­2010: ­21–​­22, 225 n. 11, 228 n. 43). An emendation to Tyrious Karchēdonious, ‘­Tyrian Carthaginians’, is enticing but has no MS authority (­Gsell, HAAN 2.287 n. 2). 7 Population at New Carthage (­209 BC): Polyb. 10.16.1, 17.­6 –​­16, Livy 26.47.­1–​­4; Walbank (­­1957–​­1979) 2.216. 8 Silenus and Sosylus: Polyb. 3.20.5; Cic. Div. 1.49; Nepos, Hannibal 13.3; Miles (­2011). 9 Sufetes, senate, administration: Sznycer (­1978 and 2001); Huss (­1985: ­458–​­474); Ameling (­2011). Ham: Arist. Pol. 2.1273a; Polyb. 6.51.­5 –​­8 (­trans. R. Waterfield: Oxford World’s Classics, 2010); Sznycer (­2001). 10 App. His­p. 4.16, Hann. 2.3; Diod. Sic. 25.8 (­Hamilcar had ‘­a faction of the basest men’). Politics after 200: App. Pun. 68.­304–​­305; Hoyos (­2015: ­249–​­250). 11 Arist. Pol. 7.1324b. Malchus and early wars: e.g., Ameling (­1993: ­72–​­79); Krings (­1998: ­33–​ ­160); Hoyos (­2019: ­33–​­39). 12 Citizen soldiers: Huss (­1985: ­475–​­476); Salimbetti and D’Amato (­2014). 13 The term is used only by Diodorus on both occasions, but he stresses the elite makeup of the unit. His source (­p erhaps the ­third-​­century Sicilian historian Timaeus) may have borrowed the phrase from Thebes’ elite hieros lochos in Greece, which fought in ­fourth-​­century wars; the Carthaginian name for it is not known. 14 Diod. Sic. 15.24.3 (­panic incident in 377; Loeb trans.); 20.43.­1–​­44.6. M‘­rt (‘­Mehrat’?) = Megara: Krahmalkov (­2000: 301). 15 Polybius 6.52.1 (­Loeb trans.); Ameling (­1993: ­195–​­209). 16 Ameling (­1993: ­195–​­203); Rawlings (­2010). 17 Pol. 2.1273b (­my trans.). 18 Carthaginian names: e.g., Sznycer (­2001: ­16–​­17). Outstanding families: Arist. Pol. 2.1272b, ‘­if any family distinguishes itself ... [the adirim] are to be chosen from these’ (­Loeb trans., modified); despite a MSS gap, the context shows that Aristotle means the adirim. 19 Abdmilqart and Abdarish (‘­Abd’rș): Krahmalkov (­2000: 440). Birrekmilqart: ibid., 451. ­Olbia stele: ibid., 434. On stelae: M.L. Uberti, DCPP (­Lipiński et al. 1994: ­422–​­427). 20 Hanno and the Periplous: Huss (­1985: ­75–​­83); Lipiński (­2004: 4­ 35–​­476); Arcos Pereira and Santana Santana (­2010); Hoyos (­2010: ­50–​­55, ­59–​­60). Himilco the explorer: Plin. HN 2.169, 5.8, 6.­199–​­200; Avienus (­fourth century ad), Ora Maritima lines ­117–​­129, ­380–​­389, ­402–​­415. 21 Iomilkos: Masson (­1979). Or a Cypriot king ruling another Carthage (­­Qart-​­hadasht) perhaps near Limassol? So Lipiński et al. (­1994: 230); Baslez (­1997); but the argument that the name Yehawmilk does not occur at African Carthage is less cogent, for the New Gate inscription reveals a similar name, Yehawalon (­cf. Krahmalkov 2000: 207). 22 Just. Epit. 19.1.­3 –​­4, 2.3; Hoyos (­2010: ­17–​­19, 126, ­131–​­132). 23 Carthage a merchant aristocracy: Whittaker (­1978: ­65–​­66, ­77–​­78); Huss (­1985: ­483–​­486). Merchants dominated in Phoenicia: Woolmer (­2017: ­63–​­65, ­80–​­89). A mixed mercantile and landowning elite: Warmington (­1964: ­154–​­155); Tlatli (­1978: ­115–​­119); Scullard (­1989: ­492–​ 4­ 93). By contrast, Ameling (­1993: ­155–​­181, ­249–​­250, ­265–​­274) sees the elite as entirely landowning and military, and commerce as secondary. Roman aristocrats and commerce: e.g., Cato late in life (­Plut. Cat. Mai. 21.­5 –​­6; Astin 1979: ­249–​­252), and Domitius Afer’s brickwork industry in the first century ad (­Frank 1940: ­208–​­209). Cf. C. Nicolet, in Cambridge Ancient History 9, ­635–​­637; N. Purcell, ibid., ­662–​­664. 24 Hanno ‘­the Great’: Just. Epit. 21.4; cf. Arist. Pol. 5.1307a; Geus (­1994: ­107–​­108, 129). Wealthy countryside: Diod. Sic. 20.8.­3 –​­5; Polyb. 1.29.­6 –​­7. Unconvincingly, Warmington (­1964: ­154–​ ­155) and Bondì (­1995a: ­279–​­280) hold that this was cultivated by small to medium enterprises owned by city proprietors. Mosaics: see Cornell and Matthews (­1982: 215); Raven (­1993: ­165–​­166); Merrills and Miles (­2010: 90 Fig. 4.2). 25 Hannibal’s coastal turris and exile wealth: Livy 33.47.­9 –​­48.2; Nep. Hann. 9.2. 26 Birth and wealth: Arist. Pol. 2.1273a. Court of 104: ibid., ­1272b–​­1273a; Justin 19.2.­5 –​­6 (‘­100’); Huss (­1985: 464); Hoyos (­2010: ­35–​­36). Perhaps the court consisted of 100 senators

516

Citizens and citizenship in pre-Roman Carthage plus the two sufetes and two other officials (­the rab mehashbim and rab kohanim? On these officials, see below); again, no details. 27 Pentarchies (­pentarchiai): Arist. Pol., ibid.; G.C. and C. Picard (­1968: ­144–​­146); Huss (­1985: 464); Hoyos (­2010: ­31–​­32). Administrative boards: e.g., Krahmalkov (­2000: 36 [a prefect(?) of ‘­the fifty’]; 122, 477 [thirty in charge of p ­ ayments  – ​­mehashbim?]; 389 [ten, supervising sanctuaries]). 28 List of 104 known rbm (­rabim) without accompanying noun: Huss (­1979: ­230–​­232). Rb: Gsell, HAAN 2.214 (= senator); Huss (­1979) (­discussing viewpoints, arguing for rab mehashbim). The rabim Hannibal and Himilco: Schmitz (­1994); Hoyos (­2019: 207 n. 13). Sanctius consilium: Livy 30.16.­3 –​­4; cf. Polyb. 10.18.1, 36.4.6; Walbank (­­1957–​­1979) 1.21; Huss (­1985: ­462–​­463). 29 Diod. Sic. 17.41.2; Curt. Alex. 4.3.­19–​­20, 4.4.18; Arr. Anab. 2.24.5. 30 Epigamia: Diod. Sic. 20.55.4. Libyphoenicians: Hanno, Periplus 1; Livy 21.22.3; Strabo 17.3.19 (­ca. 835); Huss (­1985: ­55–​­56, ­468–​­469); Ben Younès (­1995: ­820–​­824); Desanges (­2013); Jiménez (­2014: ­221–​­225). 31 Muttines: Hoyos (­ 2015: 132, ­ 163–​­ 164). ‘­ Lowlife (­degenerem) African’: Livy 25.40.12. ­Carthaginian-​­Numidian marriages: Hoyos (­2010: 17). Sophoniba (­Safonbaal): Livy 29.23.­ 3–​­10, 30.12.­10–​­30.15.10; Lipiński et al. (­1994: 421); Geus (­1994: ­200–​­201). Hasdrubal grandson of Masinissa: Livy, Epit. 50; App. Pun. 93.439, 111.526; Geus (­1994: 156). 32 Citizens periodically exported: Arist. Pol. 2.1273b, 6.1320b. 33 Survival of Punic culture after 146: Kreikenbom (­2004); Fantar (­2011). 34 Boethus: Inschriften von Ephesus (­Bonn, ­1979–​­84) 2, 511; Paus. 5.17.4 (­w rongly corrected sometimes to ‘­the Chalcedonian’); Geus (­1994: 1­ 5–​­16). Not to be confused with the sculptor Boethus of Chalcedon (­R. Neudecker, New Pauly Online s.v. ‘­Boethus 8’ and ‘­Boethus 9’; accessed 21 December 2020). Arcesilaus: Polyb. 7.2.4; Just. Epit. 22.8.14. 35 Hamilcar the Magonid’s mother: Hdt. 7.166. ‘­Synalus’: Plut. Dion 25.­12–​­26.3; Diod. Sic. 16.9.4 (­calling him ‘­Paralus’); Huss (­1985: ­147–​­148); Geus (­1994: ­202–​­203). Aemilianus and Phameas: App. Pun. 97.459, 100.­471–​­101.473; Walbank (­­1957–​­1979) 3.­660–​­661; Geus (­1994: ­171–​­172); Hoyos (­2015: ­258–​­260, 265).

Bibliography Ameling, W. (­1993) Karthago: Studien zu Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft (­München) ——— ​­(­2011) ‘­T he rise of Carthage to 264 bc’, in Hoyos (­2011) ­39–​­57 Arcos Pereira, T., and Santana Santana, A. (­2010) ‘­El Periplo de Hanón: una propuesta de interpretación’, Latomus 69, ­3 –​­17 Astin, A. (­1979) Cato the censor (­Oxford) Baslez, M.-​­F. (­1997) ‘­Le sanctuaire de Délos dans le dernier tiers du IVe siècle: étude historique des premiers inventaires de l’Indépendance’, REA 99, ­345–​­356 Ben Younès, H. (­1995) ‘­Tunisie’, in Krings (­1995) ­796–​­827 Bondì, S.F. (­1995a) ‘­Le commerce, les échanges, l’économie’, in Krings (­1995) ­268–​­281 ——— ​­(­1995b) ‘­Les institutions: l’organisation politique et administrative’, in Krings (­1995) ­290–​­302 Cornell, T. and Matthews, J. (­1982) Atlas of the Roman world (­Oxford) Desanges, J. (­2013) ‘­Libyphéniciens’, Encyclopédie berbère [en ligne], 2­ 8–​­29 | 2008, document L23, from 1 June 2023. DOI: https://­ doi.org/­ 10.4000/­ encyclopedieberbere.343 (consulted 14 November 2020) Fantar, M.-​­H. (­2011) ‘­Death and transfiguration: Punic culture after 146 bc’, in Hoyos (­2011) ­449–​­466 Frank, T. (­1940) An economic survey of ancient Rome, vol. 5: Rome and Italy of the Empire (­Baltimore, MD) Geus, K. (­1994) Prosopographie der literarisch bezeugten Karthager, Studia Phoenicia 13 (­Leuven) Goldberg, S.M. and Manuwald, G. (­2018) Fragmentary republican Latin 1: Ennius, testimonia, epic fragments, Loeb Classical Library (­Cambridge, MA) Hoyos, D. (­ed.) (­2011) A companion to the Punic Wars (­Malden, MA and Oxford) Hoyos, D. (­2010) The Carthaginians, Peoples of the Ancient World (­London and New York) ——— ​­(­2015) Mastering the West: Rome and Carthage at war (­Oxford and New York)

517

Dexter Hoyos ——— ​­(­2019) Carthage’s other wars (­Barnsley and Philadelphia) Huss, W. (­1979) ‘­Die Stellung des rb im karthagischen Staat’, Zeitshcrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 129, ­217–​­232 ——— ​­(­1985) Geschichte der Karthager (­München) Jiménez, A. (­2014) ‘­P unic after Punic times? The case of the ­so-​­called “­Libyphoenician” coins of southern Iberia’, in J.C. Quinn and N.C. Vella (­eds) The Punic Mediterranean: identities and identification from Phoenician settlement to Roman rule (­Cambridge) ­219–​­232 Krahmalkov, C.R. (­2000). A ­Phoenician-​­Punic dictionary, Studia Phoenicia 18 (­Leuven) Kreikenbom, D. (­2004) ‘­P unische Kultur unter römischen Herrschaft’, in S. Peters (­ed.) Hannibal ad Portas. Macht und Reichtum Karthagos (­Karlsruhe and Stuttgart) ­352–​­361 Krings, V. (­ed.) (­1998) Carthage et les Grecs c. ­580–​­480 av. J.-​­C. Textes et histoire (­Leiden, Boston, MA, and Köln) ——— ​­(­1995) La Civilisation phénicienne et punique: manuel de recherche (­Leiden) Lancel, S. (­1995) Carthage: a history, English trans. A. Nevill (­London) Lipiński, E. (­2004) Itineraria Phoenicia, Studia Phoenicia 18 (­Leuven, Paris, and Dudley, MA) Lipiński, E. et al. (­eds) (­1994) Dictionnaire de la civilisation phénicienne et punique (­Brepols) Masson, O. (­1979) ‘­Le “­roi” carthaginois Iômilkos dans les inscriptions de Délos’, Semitica 29, ­53–​­57 Merrills, A. and Miles, R. (­2010) The Vandals (­Malden, MA and Oxford) Miles, R. (­2010) Carthage must be destroyed: the rise and fall of an ancient Mediterranean civilisation (­London) ——— ​­(­2011) ‘­Hannibal and propaganda’, in D. Hoyos (­2011) 2­ 60–​­274 Picard, G.C. and C. (­1968) The life and death of Carthage, English trans. D. Collon (­London and New York) Raven, S. (­1993) Rome in Africa, 3rd edn (­London and New York) Rawlings, L. (­2010) ‘­The Carthaginian navy: questions and assumptions’, in G.G. Fagan and M. Trundle (­eds) New perspectives on ancient warfare (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­253–​­288 Salimbetti, A. and D’Amato, R. (­2014) The Carthaginians ­6th–​­2nd century BC (­Oxford and New York) Schmitz, P.C. (­1994) ‘­The name “­Agrigentum” in a Punic inscription (­CIS I 5510.10)’, JNES 53, ­1–​­13 Scullard, H.H. (­1989) ‘­Carthage and Rome’, in F.W. Walbank et al. (­eds) Cambridge ancient history, vol. 7, part 2: The rise of Rome to 220 B.C. (­Cambridge) ­486–​­569 Sznycer, M. (­1978) ‘­Carthage et la civilisation punique’, in C. Nicolet (­ed.) Rome et la conquête du monde méditerranéen, vol. 2: Genèse d’un empire (­Paris) ­545–​­593 ——— ​­(­2001) ‘­Quelques observations à propos de la première “­g uerre punique”’, in Y. Le Bohec (­ed.), La Première guerre punique: autour de l’œuvre de M. H. Fantar (­Actes de la Table Ronde de Lyon, mercredi 19 mai 1999) (­Lyon and Paris) Tlatli, S.-​­E. (­1978) La Carthage punique: étude urbaine (­Paris and Tunis) Walbank, F.W. (­­1957–​­1979) A historical commentary on Polybius, 3 vols. (­Oxford) Warmington, B.H. (­1964) Carthage (­Harmondsworth) Warmington, E.H. (­1935, repr. 1961) Remains of Old Latin, vol. 1: Ennius and Caecilius. Loeb Classical Library (­London and Cambridge, MA) Whittaker, C.R. (­1978) ‘­Carthaginian imperialism’, in C.R. Whittaker and P. Garnsey (­eds) Imperialism in the ancient world (­Cambridge) ­59–​­90 Woolmer, M. (­2017) A short history of the Phoenicians (­London and New York)

518

36 MANUMISSION AND CITIZENSHIP IN ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello

In 217 BCE, Philip V of Macedonia sent the people of Larissa a letter in response to their concerns about their recent loss of citizens (­IG IX 2 517 = SIG 3 543). Three ambassadors, Petraeus, Anancippus, and Aristonus, had come to the king and told him that their city needed more inhabitants because recent wars had caused depopulation (­lines ­4 –​­5). Philip advised them to grant citizenship to Thessalians and other Greeks who were residing in their city (­lines ­5 –​­7). The city decided to act according to the king’s advice and to make Thessalians and other Greeks living in the city citizens, both themselves and their descendants (­lines ­9 –​­23). Later, in 215, Philip wrote to the city again after hearing that names inscribed on the stele had been erased. Apparently, there was a stele with the names of the new citizens, but some who were not happy with the grant had the names erased (­lines ­23–​­27). Philip insisted that the people of Larissa had ignored his ruling and their best interests. He cited the example of the Romans who, when they manumit their slaves, admit them to the citizen body and grant them a share in the magistracies. In this way, they have not only made their country great, but also sent colonies to almost 70 places (­lines ­29–​­34). The final document in the dossier dated to 214 BCE records that the names that had been erased were restored (­lines 3­ 9–​ ­47). This is followed by a long list of names (­lines ­48–​­93). This passage is often cited by ancient historians to illustrate the differences between Greek and Roman attitudes to citizenship and manumission (­e.g., Gauthier 1974: 5 = 2011: 209; Mouritsen 2011: ­66–​­67). Philip exaggerates a bit for the sake of argument: freed slaves in Rome could not become magistrates but only their sons, and the number of colonies is inflated.1 Yet slaves manumitted in certain ways did become Roman citizens (­see below). By contrast, a slave manumitted in a Greek polis could become a metic, that is, a resident alien, but not a citizen. For instance, the slave Pasion was first manumitted and became a metic and only later after several conspicuous acts of generosity, such as a donation of shields, was he made an Athenian citizen (­Dem. 36.48; [Dem.] 59.2).2 What was the reason for this difference between Rome and the Greek polis? In an essay published in 1974 and recently republished in his collected works edited by Denis Rousset (Gauthier 2011), Philippe Gauthier examined the reasons for what he called generosité romaine and avarice grecque. He rightly rejected the explanations given by earlier scholars who argued that the chief reason of the sharp contrast between DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-43

519

Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello

‘­Roman generosity’ and ‘­Greek avarice’ in the grant of citizenship rights is the fact that Rome was much more ‘­open’ than Greece, and that Greek poleis – ​­unlike ­Rome –​ w ­ ere never able to ‘­merge’ into a wider political community. According to Gauthier, these ‘­unjustified comparisons’ (­as he defines them) need to be abandoned, as the reason for the different attitude of Greece and Rome was to be found in the different nature of citizenship in the Greek polis and in Rome. In Greece, citizenship was the right to participate in the Assembly, the courts, and in public office (­Arist. Pol. 3.­1–​­2.1274b.­41–​ 1­ 276a.6).3 Citizens could vote in the Assembly, serve as judges in the courts, and be elected or chosen by lot to act as magistrates. In Rome, however, citizenship was viewed less as a right to participate in politics: there were restrictions on access to office, and few citizens qualified to serve on the iudicia publica (­public courts). The reason why the Romans were more generous with grants of citizenship was because citizenship was less valuable and brought less power. In this chapter, we would like to take up Gauthier’s question but to seek a different answer by examining the larger institutional context of these practices. What is especially important but not examined by Gauthier are the motives of the masters who freed their slaves: why did masters in Greece not want to see their slaves become citizens while masters in Rome allowed their slaves to become citizens? After all, even though it was possible for masters in Rome to manumit their slaves in such a way that the freed persons became citizens, it was not necessary for them to do so. After the passage of the lex Iunia under Augustus, they could have manumitted them informally so that they became Junian Latins and not citizens (­Gai. Inst. 1.17, 3.56). In this chapter, we will look first at manumission in Greece starting with the practices in Homeric society. We will then turn to the Greek c­ ity-​­state and examine who had the power to grant citizenship, what were the reasons for granting citizenship, and what status distinctions existed or did not exist inside the citizen body of the Greek ­city-​­state. In the second half of the chapter, we will study the same issues in Rome (­w ith specific attention to the Republican period), which, in turn, help us to understand the different practices and attitudes. To place the attitudes and procedures of the Greek polis in perspective, it is necessary to look briefly at the practices of the Homeric period. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the leaders of the community several times accept outsiders into the community and give them land and other privileges. In the Iliad (­6.­144–​­211), Glaucus tells the story of his ancestor Bellerophon who grew up in Ephyre near Argos. Anteia, the wife of Proetus, the king of Ephyre, tried to seduce Bellerophon, who resisted her advances. She then told her husband that Bellerophon tried to lie with her against her will and insisted that either he or Bellerophon should die. Proetus was reluctant to kill Bellerophon but sent him to Lycia where Anteia’s father lived with a letter to have him killed. The king set him several tasks from which he did not expect Bellerophon to return alive and finally set an ambush, but Bellerophon emerged safe and victorious from each challenge. The king realized that Bellerophon was descended from the gods and gave him his daughter in marriage, half of his honour, and much land containing orchards and fields for ploughing (­Il. 6.­191–​­195). His children Isander, Hippolochus, and Laodameia then became full members of the community; Glaucus, the son of Hippolochus, continued to live in Lycia (­Il. 6.225). There are several points to note. First, the king makes the decision to include him in the community. The rest of the community has no say in this decision. Second, the king makes him a member of the community for his personal services to him (­which may indirectly benefit the 520

Manumission and citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome

community). Third, Bellerophon has the right to marry a woman of the community. Fourth, despite his foreign origin, Bellerophon has a right to own land in Lycia. None of this would be possible in the Greek polis unless granted by the community as a whole. Bellerophon is not the only person accepted into a foreign community with full rights. Patroclus is an exile from his community, is accepted by Peleus into his community, and becomes a companion of Achilles (­Il. 23.­85–​­92). Lycophron, the son of Mastor, left Cythera after killing a man and was accepted into the community by Ajax, the son of Telamon (­Il. 15.­429–​­435). Alcinoos offers to give his daughter Nausicaa to Odysseus in marriage with a dowry of house and land (­Od. 7.­313–​­315). He makes the offer without any mention of a requirement to have his decision ratified by the community. In each case, the leader of course gains not only a new member of the community but also a strong companion in his group of followers, who can support his position in the community. There is also a special status in the king’s household for such outsiders who are accepted into the community; they become therapontes and are entrusted with certain duties (­see Greenhalgh 1982 on the status of the therapōn). For instance, they attend their leader in his palace or ­camp-​­ground (­Il. 9.­190–​­224), receive and attend his guests (­Od. 4.­23–​­4; ­216–​­217), carve or serve meat and bread (­Od. 1.109; 16.253; Il. 9.­206–​­207), mix and pour wine (­Il. 9.­201–​­4; Od. 18.­423–​­425), assist in sacrifices (­Il. 9.­219–​­221), and act as heralds (­Il. 1.321; 11.­611–​­617). During battle, they may accompany the leader by fighting at his side or driving his chariot (­Il. 5.­106–​­114; 241ff.; 4.­226–​­230; 5.­580–​­581; 8.­119–​­121; 13.386; 17.501). Because they are completely dependent on the leader who accepted them into their household and have no other ties in the community, they are especially valued for their loyalty. But they have the status of free hetairoi (­Il. 16.240; 11.602; 24.416) and are clearly distinguished from slaves who are owned by their masters. There is only one mention of manumission in the Homeric poems, which occurs in the Odyssey (­21.­212–​­216).4 Before his battle with the suitors, Odysseus addresses Eumaeus and Philoetios and promises them wives, possessions, and houses next to his. He will also consider them companions (­hetairoi) of Telemachus and his brothers. Although Odysseus does not use the language of liberation, it is clear that the two slaves will become members of the community on an equal footing with his son Telemachus. Hetairoi are the free companions of the leaders of the Homeric community and always enjoy the same status.5 As slaves, they were denied kinship relations by virtue of their master’s rights of ownership over them. As free men, they will become companions, bound to his son by ties of loyalty and have the right to own land and to marry, that is, to have a wife whose children will also be members of the community. As is the case with foreigners, Odysseus can make Eumaeus and Philoetius full members of the community without approval from the people of Ithaca. They gain thereby the right to own property and to have a recognized marriage. They earn these rights as a reward for their loyal service to Odysseus, and their inclusion in the community also increases the number of Odysseus’ companions, whose support is key for his position in the community. All of this changed with the advent of the ­city-​­state from the late seventh century through the sixth century BCE. The most important change is that the ­city-​­state made a strict distinction between citizens and foreigners (­see, e.g., Hansen 1998: ­37–​­40). At Athens, one could become a citizen in two ways: either by birth from parents who were citizens, or by a decree of the Assembly.6 There was no other way of becoming a citizen. We have many decrees of the Assembly granting citizenship, which have been collected in a very valuable work by Michael Osborne (­­1981–​­1983). Even though the 521

Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello

dossier is rather large by the standards of ancient history, the number of grants must be examined in context. From the fifth century down to the first century BCE, grants of citizenship are very rare. They are not given at the request of an individual for personal services. One could not walk into the Assembly and ask to have a foreign friend admitted to citizenship simply by saying, ‘­Bellerophon is a nice person and has helped me in many difficult situations’. The candidate for citizenship had to show how he had benefited the entire community, even though he might receive support for the grant from an individual. Let us take two examples. The first is a decree dated to 338/­337 for some Acarnanians (­IG II3 1, 316). Their grandfather Phormio had been granted citizenship, and their rights are recognized by the Assembly because ‘­Phormio and Karphinas, being ancestral friends of the Athenian People, are maintaining the good will, which their ancestors handed down, towards the Athenian People, and now having supported in force, were mustered with the Athenians, as the general commanded’ (­lines 8­ –​­13). Another decree dated to the end of the third century BCE is for a doctor Euenor, who is being rewarded for his services to citizens and residents of Attica and his donation of a talent for some construction or other public project ( ­paraskeuē) (­IG II2 374 [ca. ­307–​­303/­302]). In both cases, the award of citizenship is given to people who have brought benefits to the Athenian People, not just to one or two prominent individuals. All citizens enjoyed equality before the law (­isonomia) in Athens.7 Every citizen could serve as a judge in the courts. If he met the property qualification, he could become an official. It is also important to note that there was only one Assembly in Athens in which all citizens had the same vote. There were not separate assemblies, like the Roman comitia curiata, centuriata, and tributa, in which the people were gathered in different configurations, and in which all the freedmen were placed. Because of the importance of equality before the law as a key principle, there were also no subordinate orders in Athens, nothing like the cliens/­patronus relationship found at Rome.8 But we need to look also at the perspective of the master as well as the community. Even though slaves were owned by their masters, they were still human beings and required incentives to work or disincentives to stop them from shirking. We know that masters used good clothing and better food as a way of rewarding them for good work (­we do not have to discuss disincentives), but the best incentive was the offer of freedom, as Aristotle (­Pol. 1330a.­32–​­33; cf. [Arist.] Oec. 1.1344b) recognized. The master also does not wish to place the e­ x-​­slave on the same social level. In the master’s eyes, the slave may now be free, but he can never be the social equal of his former owner (­cf. Pl. Leg. ­915a–​­b, Res­p. ­495e–​­496a). The Athenians were not the only Greeks with such a grudging attitude toward granting citizenship. In Sparta, for example, slave owners could not manumit their slaves (­Strabo 8.5.4 = Ephorus BNJ 70 F 117): because of the peculiar features of the Spartan slave system, it was only the polis that was entitled to the manumission of the helots.9 This was in line with their general reluctance to grant citizenship. According to Herodotus (­9.33), the Spartans granted Tisamenus citizenship when they heard that the oracle at Delphi predicted that he would win five great victories. At first, he thought it was five athletic victories, but when it became obvious that the oracle meant five military victories, the Spartans asked him to become their leader. Tisamenus then demanded the full rights of citizenship for both himself and his brother. Herodotus (­9.35.1) states that these were the only people given citizenship by the Spartans (­Flower and Marincola 2002: 171). There are also two stories found in Demosthenes’ speech 522

Manumission and citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome

Against Aristocrates (­23.­211–​­212). The speaker recalls the fact that even though Lampis owned the largest fleet of merchant ships in Greece and had built up their city and port, the people of Aegina barely considered him worthy of exemption from the metics’ tax. The Megarians were also reluctant to grant citizenship to foreigners. The Spartans won the battle of Aegospotamoi with the help of Hermon, the helmsman. To reward him, they asked their allies the Megarians to grant him citizenship. The Megarians were offended by the proposal and retorted that they would make him a citizen as soon as the Spartans made him a citizen, which they knew would never happen (­according to Paus. 10.9.­7–​­8, Hermon was given Megarian citizenship). We can now turn to manumission and citizenship in the Roman world. It is important to highlight two aspects of Roman manumission that both modern and ancient writers consider to be highly peculiar and in striking contrast with Greek attitudes towards manumission and citizenship. First, that Roman manumission confers simultaneously status libertatis (­status of freedom) and status civitatis (­status of citizenship) upon freedmen. Second, that the admission of a former slave into the citizen body is the result of a private act of individual slave owners or a legal act before an official as in the case of manumissio vindicta, but it did not require the approval of the community as a whole. A closer look at the Roman conceptualization and legal framework of manumission, however, will enable us to point out some fundamental aspects that need to be kept in mind when discussing the grant of citizenship to freedmen. First of all, we need to make a distinction between ‘­formal’ and ‘­informal’ manumissions. In other words, the simultaneous acquisition of status libertatis and civitatis upon freedmen is not a peculiar feature of Roman manumission per se, but only of the iustae ac legitimae manu-missiones, as opposed to the ­so-​­called ‘­informal manumissions’. This point is made clear in the ancient sources (­Gai. Inst. 1.17; Tit. ex corp. Ul­p. 1.6; Cic. Top. 10). Manumission was iusta ac legitima when it was carried out in one of the three forms recognized by the ius civile, that is, when it was performed vindicta, testamento, or censu. It is worth recalling briefly the main features of these three forms of formal manumissions. ­1 Manumissio vindicta, or by the rod, took the form of a mock trial (­Buckland 1908: ­441–​­442; Mouritsen 2011: 11). The owner of the slave appeared before a magistrate together with a Roman citizen, who acted as adsertor libertatis (­defender of liberty) and declared the free status of the slave. This claim was not contested by the owner, and the adsertor would then touch the slave with the rod and pronounce the formula: ‘­hunc ego hominem liberum esse aio’. The magistrate then pronounced the addictio and declared the slave’s freedom. This structure starts changing towards the end of the Republic, when there was no longer need of an adsertor in libertatem, as the owner could simply declare the slave free before the magistrate; ­2 In the manumissio testamento, or by will, a slave became free upon his/­her master’s death. In order for it to be considered valid, the testamentary provision granting freedom had to be expressed with a specific formula (­that was: ‘­Stichum, servum meum, liberum esse iubeo’; or alternatively, ‘­Stichus, servus meus, liber esto’: cf. Gai. Inst. 2.267).10 The number of slaves who could be freed in this way was later limited by the lex Fufia Caninia (­Buckland 1908: ­546–​­548; Mouritsen 2011: ­34–​­35, 81, 83); ­3 Finally, manumissio censu took place before the censores. Usually a slave, with the authorization of his master, would present himself before the censor and declare himself free (­professio). The censor would then inscribe the name of the manumitted slave as free and citizen in the census lists (­Tit. ex corp. Ul­p. 1.8). This was, of 523

Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello

course, possible only when the census was being taken, that is, for 18 months every 5 years (­lustrum). This form of manumission becomes obsolete in the early Empire (­Buckland 1908: ­439–​­441; Mouritsen 2011: ­11–​­12). It was only in these three cases that manumitted slaves became at the same time free and citizens. All three forms were practised quite early on in Roman history. Although their historical development is still a matter of some debate, scholars commonly recognize that, throughout the Republic, the simultaneous conferral of freedom and citizenship was characterized by some sort of public ‘­recognition’ (­the ratification by the magistrate in the manumissio vindicta; the authorization of the will by the Comitia Calata in the manumissio testamento; and the enrolment by the censores in the manumissio censu). Citizenship, on the other hand, was not granted to those slaves who were liberated through the ­so-​­called ‘­informal’ manumissions, that is, those manumissions that were not carried out in one of the three forms recognized by the ius civile. Within this category are usually included the manumissio per epistulam (­by letter), the manumissio inter amicos (­among the master’s friends) and the manumissio per mensam (­at the table). The main feature of these manumissions is that slaves manumitted ‘­informally’, in point of ius civile, did not acquire status libertatis, but remained slaves (­Gai. Inst. 3.56; fr. Dosith. 5; for informal manumissions, see Mouritsen 2011: 85). However, by the late Republic, their de facto freedom was protected by the praetor (­and for this reason, informal manumissions are also referred to as ‘­praetorian manumissions’). This means that if the manumittor advanced further claims on the manumitted slave, the praetor would intervene and not allow him to start a vindicatio in servitutem (­claim as a slave). Another important consequence descending from informal manumissions is that the peculium remained legal property of the master. In the early Empire (­and, more precisely, with the lex Iunia Norbana of 19 CE), slaves informally manumitted were granted the status of Junian Latins, but not the status civitatis, citizenship rights being acquired exclusively as a result of a formal manumission (­on the lex Iunia Norbana, see Mouritsen 2011: 8­ 5–​­86). One way of granting citizenship rights to Junian Latins was through the ­so-​­called iteratio, which was basically a repetition of manumission in one of the formal ways. Gaius (­Inst. 1.35) makes this point explicit. This fundamental difference between formal and informal manumissions with regard to the status civitatis has been usually connected to the overseeing (­or not) of the manumission procedure by the community (­Treggiari 1969: 2­ 0–​­31; Mouritsen 2011: 69). In other words, while formal manumissions granted both freedom and citizenship because the act was ‘­supervised’ by the community (­either in the person of the praetor, of the censores, or in earlier times of the Comitia Calata), the simple will of slave owners as expressed in informal manumissions could not determine the acquisition of citizenship rights upon manumitted slaves because of the lack of any recognition by the community. To sum up these points: on the one hand, it was only through a formal manumission that Roman slave owners could include their e­ x-​­slaves into the citizen community. If they did not wish to do so, they could decide to manumit them informally. Roman citizenship, therefore, resulted from an act performed by slave owners, although this was somehow recognized and confirmed by officials representing the community during the manumission procedure. On the other hand, unlike Greece, the grant of citizenship was not strictly connected to benefactions made by an individual to the community as a whole, but it was rather the result of a personal decision of individual slave owners. 524

Manumission and citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome

We now need to look at the status of liberti and the nature of their citizenship. Once liberated through ‘­formal’ manumission, liberti were free and cives, and as such they enjoyed the rights and privileges connected to the status civitatis, with some limitations however that are connected to their previous condition as slaves. First of all, liberti were not regarded in the same way as those other citizens who were born free. This point is made clear in a passage from Gaius’ Institutiones (­1.­10–​­11). In this passage, the jurist first highlights the summa divisio between liberi and servi; and then he stresses that, within free individuals, a further distinction has to be made between those who were born free (­ingenui) and liberti, whose free status derives from a iusta manumissio. After all, the very qualification of freedmen as liberti points to the fact that their libertas derives from a previous condition of slavery. This ‘­macula servitutis’ would always be attached to their person. This feature is also common to Greece, where freedmen were labelled as apeleutheroi, so as to stress that their eleutheria derives ‘­from’ (­that is the meaning of the prefix ­apo-​­, see Zanovello 2016: ­14–​­15) a previous condition of slavery ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.10; Arist. Pol. 3.1278a; Aeschin. 3.41). Because of this social stigma, the freedom and citizenship formally granted to liberti suffered from certain limitations. For example, they did not have the right to marry members of the senatorial class (­connubium). Again, they were barred from ­office-​ ­holding and were not admitted to the cursus honorum; it follows that they could not access magistracies, priesthoods, and the highest orders. They could also not serve as judges in the courts.11 These limitations have taken some scholars (­for example, Theodor Mommsen) to argue that freedmen represented some sort of ‘­second class’ citizens; whereas others have pointed out that such limitations were actually common to many other sections of the citizen population. This can be better understood if we consider that within the citizen body there existed differences of statuses, regardless of the complex set of rights and privileges that, in theory, descended upon all cives. For example, during the Republic, wealthier citizens had more possibilities to access offices, while the structure of the main assemblies was strongly connected to the owning of ­property – ​­but we will come back to these points soon. Most importantly, the condition of liberti was shaped by a novel relationship with their previous owners. Such relationship was known as patronatus (­or ius patronatus), and the ­ex-​­master is now labelled as patronus.12 In discussing the status of liberti, Mouritsen (­2011: 36) gives a good description of how this relationship evolves from one based on the right of ownership (­as is typical of m ­ asters-​­slaves relationships) to one based on debt and gratitude in return for freedom: Manumission was... not supposed to terminate the relationship between the freedman and his former owner. Also after freedom had been granted, the two were expected to be closely involved, and in many respects manumission merely redefined their relationship, rather than bringing it to an end. This relationship between patronus and libertus was characterized by a series of duties that liberti owed to their manumittors, and that are usually classified as: obsequium, operae, and bona (­on patronage in general, see Fabre 1981). In short, obsequium was the manumitted slaves’ duty of respecting their patronus and the latter’s family, avoiding any action that could harm them. This means, for example, that liberti could not bring an action against the patronus without a previous authorization of the praetor (­Dig. 2.4.4.1), and could not start an action for infamia 525

Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello

against him (­Mouritsen 2011: ­53–​­57). If the libertus were found ungrateful, his former master could bring an action against him in court (­Treggiari 1969: ­73–​­75). Operae may be described as the obligation to work and perform various services for the patronus for the time after manumission (­Treggiari 1969: 7­ 5–​­78; Mouritsen 2011: ­224–​­226). This obligation normally originated either from an oath taken by the slave before manu-mission and then repeated once freed, or from a stipulatio taken by the slave after being manumitted. A basic distinction is usually made according to the nature of these services, between operae officiales (­that had mainly a domestic nature) and operae fabriles (­which implied the performance of skilled labour). Finally, with the expression bona are usually included both the reciprocal duty (­of libertus and patronus) to support each other in times of need; and the right of the patronus and his descendants to inherit ab intestato the asset of the libertus, if the latter died without offspring.13 But what we would like to focus on in the following part is the significance and extent of the participation of liberti in citizenship. The first thing to keep in mind is that it was in the interest of slave owners to have a dependent status within the citizen body on which they could rely. We know that, at least initially, liberti were part of the crowds of the clientes, that is, those individuals who placed themselves in a dependent status on a wealthier citizen, known as their patronus. The formal legal relationship between ​­ patronus and clientes was characteristic of ­Rome – nothing of the sort existed in the Greek poleis. In his work on Roman patronage, Andrew W ­ allace-​­Hadrill (­1989: 65) has stressed that ‘­the Roman noble felt almost naked without an entourage of dependents, which he expanded to the best of his ability, and who acted as a visible symbol of his social standing’. In short, patronage was functional to patroni, and its political dimension is particularly important: in their clientes, patroni would find supporters at elections, while clientes could count on their patroni for help in various aspects of their life (­from litigation to the running of business etc.).14 Another important aspect to keep in mind is that liberti, as cives Romani, were fully entitled to the right to vote in the assemblies (­ius suffragii), and this, of course, marks a fundamental difference from Greek apeleutheroi. However, the timocratic character ­ ffice-​ of Roman political institutions made sure that they were kept away from both o ­holding a­ nd  – ​­to a large e­ xtent  – having much influence in voting procedures.15 This can be better understood if we consider the structure of Roman assemblies.16 The main feature of these assemblies (­whose main tasks were to choose the magistrates and to vote about the laws after the proposal [rogatio] of the magistrate) was the system of block vote. This system basically represents the idea of voting ­units – ​­which means that a vote was valid when it was passed by the units in the assemblies, rather than when a representative section of the population had given their approval. In other words, it was not the individual vote of citizens that counted, but that of the unit in which citizens were placed. In the Comitia Centuriata, for example (­that represented the people organized on the basis of their census), the populus was grouped in 193 centuriae, military units that, in turn, were grouped into classes according to the census. The upper ones were the richer, while at the lowest level there was the unarmed classis of the proletarii, among which freedmen were confined, regardless of the amount of their property. This element, combined with the fact that voting would take place according to the hierarchy of the classes, starting from the upper one to then stopping once the majority was reached, meant that the lower classes often did not get to express their vote, because the majority was often reached and the decision was taken with the vote of the upper and wealthier classes. 526

Manumission and citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome

A similar structure characterized the operation of the Comitia Tributa, that represented the people organized on a territorial basis. In the Comitia, there were ­thirty-​­one rural tribes, in which land owners were placed, and four urban tribes, which included the rest of the population and were therefore more numerous. Each tribe voted separately, and the decision was taken when the majority of tribes voted in the same way. In the case of Comitia Tributa, liberti were included in the four urban tribes regardless of their domicile and land ownership. This means, once again, that they rarely got to express their vote. The consideration of these mechanisms helps us to view the enfranchisement of freedmen in the context of Rome’s political institution and from the point of view of slave owners. On the one hand, the Roman institution of patronage allowed manumittors to place e­ x-​­slaves in a dependent status within the citizen body. This enabled them to have a number of dependents to advertise their status and be supported at elections. On the other hand, the aristocratic approach to ­office-​­holding made sure that freed­ ssemblies –​ men could not hold office, while the structure and voting system of the A a­ lthough formally inclusive of liberti – ​­rarely allowed them to actually cast their vote. Unlike the case at Rome, as a rule freedpersons in the Greek world did not automatically become citizens of their e­ x-​­owner’s polis.17 It was only in very exceptional circumstances that freed slaves did manage to achieve naturalization in return for benefactions bestowed on the community. When this happened, it was never the result of a decision taken by individual slave owners, or even the result of an act performed by slave owners, but always of a decree taken ad hoc by the Assembly. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, one of the most notorious cases is that of Pasion, a former slave in f­ ourth-​­century BCE Athens. While a slave, Pasion worked as a banker for his owners Antisthenes and Archestratus. He was then manumitted, though he remained in the bank. He later became owner of the bank, accumulated a large fortune from which he made benefactions to the Athenians, and was eventually elevated to citizenship by a decree of the Assembly. Because in Greek poleis there was no subordinate status within the citizen body, one way Greek masters had to keep a freed person in a subordinate position ­was – ​­in Athens at ­least – ​­to make his status similar to that of resident aliens (­metics). As free but ­ ffice-​­holding, but they enjoyed not citizens, they had no access to political rights and o the rights of a free person.18 Because of their exclusion from the citizen community, freed persons (­and metics) could not enjoy certain rights that were considered to be strictly connected to citizenship. This is the case, for example, of the right to marry an Attic woman (­epigamia) and the right to own land in Attica (­enktēsis) unless specifically granted by the community in individual cases.19 On the other hand, specific duties were imposed on those freedmen who decided to reside in Athens. First, they had to pay the metoikion, a residence tax that was paid also by metics and that amounted to twelve drachmas a year for men and six drachmas a year for women (­Harp. s.v. metoikion; see ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz 2005: ­308–​­311). Another tax, the ­so-​­called triobolon (­Harp., s.v. metoikion), seems to have been imposed on freedmen but not on metics. Second, freedmen in Athens had to have their former owners as prostatai (­a similar duty was imposed on metics, who had to register an Athenian citizen as their prostates), whose function was likely that of representing apeleutheroi in courts. Third, they were liable to be called up to fight for the polis in times of war if they were registered as metics. The jurisdiction on those cases which 527

Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello

involved the apeleutheroi both as plaintiffs and as defendants was held by the Polemarch ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 58.3). Finally, a passage from Harpocration informs us that there was a specific private action, known as dikē apostasiou, which could be brought before the Polemarch by manumittors against manumitted slaves in three specific cases: (­1) if apeleutheroi ‘­went away’ from their manumittors; (­2) if they registered a different person, other from their manumittor, as their prostates; and (­3) if they failed to do ‘­what the laws prescribed’ (­Harpocration s.v. apostasiou).20 Harpocration further specifies that those apeleutheroi who lost the trial reverted into slavery, whereas those who were acquitted became ‘­completely’ free. The fact that manumittors could prosecute apeleutheroi if they ‘­went away’ from them shows that in Athens freedmen could be subject to a specific duty of ‘­remaining by’ their former masters and perform services for them. This duty is known as paramonē. The evidence for paramonē, however, is mostly attested in the manumission inscriptions from Hellenistic Delphi. Roughly ­one-​­third of these inscriptions (­the total of which is over 1,300), after describing the liberation of slaves, prescribe that apeleutheroi must ‘­remain with’ their former masters for a specific period of time (­e.g., SGDI II 1721).21 The Athenian evidence for paramonē, on the other hand, is more scanty: the most relevant sources are Harpocration (­s.v. apostasiou) and the wills of the philosophers Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Lyco preserved by Diogenes Laertius (­5.15, ­54–​­55, ­69–​­74); while implicit references to paramonē in Athens are made by Plato (­L eg. ­914e–​ ­915c) and Athenaeus (­6.­267b–​­c).22 This duty of paramonē, however, did not always characterize the condition of apeleutheroi after manumission. Those freedmen who, after manumission, were not legally obliged to perform paramonē obligations towards their former masters, were free not only from a legal point of view (­in the sense that they no longer belonged to their former masters) but also de facto, in the sense that they could live separately from their former masters and constitute a separate household. This freedom of movement and action as characteristic of the condition of freedpersons released from paramonē obligations is often stressed in the Delphic inscriptions, which state that the apeleutheros, after manumission, ‘­is free to do whatever he/­she wants and to go wherever he/­she wants’ (­e.g., SGDI II 1697). Conversely, those apeleutheroi who, after manumission, remained under paramonē obligations were still attached to their former masters’ households. They did not enjoy complete freedom of movement and action but were, nonetheless, free from a legal point of view. In short, what differentiates the Greek attitude towards manumission and citizenship is the fact that manumitted slaves could not be made citizens unless they rendered benefactions to the community as a whole (­which did not happen very frequently). For this reason, slave owners could count on the existence of this subordinate status outside the citizen body, ­ opulation – ​­they managed to comby ­which – ​­in assimilating apeleutheroi to the metic p bine the free status of manumitted slaves with the further exploitation of their services. In order to fully appreciate the different attitude of Greece and Rome towards the grant of citizenship rights to manumitted slaves, we need to take into consideration several factors. Not only the different ‘­nature’ of politeia and civitas, as pointed out by Gauthier, but also the different political institutions of Greece and Rome, and the motives of slave owners. As we have seen, in Greek poleis the enfranchisement of slaves happens in extraordinary circumstances, as a reward that the Assembly of citizens decides to bestow in return to benefactions made to the community. Individual reasons or benefactions do not count. The isonomia among citizens makes sure that there is no subordinate status within the citizen body. For this reason, the only way ­ex-​­masters 528

Manumission and citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome

have to keep their former slaves in a dependent position is to include apeleutheroi among the metic population (­thus placing them outside the citizen body) and to arrange paramonē agreements with them. In Rome, on the other hand, slaves manumitted ‘­formally’ became free and citizens, and they were placed in a dependent status within the citizen body. This was possible because, unlike Greece, differences of statuses among cives did exist. However, two aspects need to be considered. First, the patronage relationship that arose from manumission was functional to patroni, who could count on their freedmen for having supporters at elections and their role advertised. Second, the inclusion of freedmen in the citizen community and their subsequent right to express their will in the assemblies through the right to vote, had a ­counter-​­balance in the timocratic and voting system of Roman assemblies. The system of block vote, in particular, ensured that most times the decision was taken at the higher levels, with the result that freedmen rarely exercised their right to vote.23

Appendix: manumission document from Delphi Ἐ[λατέων οἱ ἄρχ]οντες Δελ[φῶ]ν [το]ῖς ἀρχό[ντ]οις κ[αὶ] τᾶι πόλει χαίρειν. γινώσκετε τὰν ποτεσφραγισμμ[έ]-​­ ναν τῶι ἐπιστολίωι ἀπελευθερίαν, ἀναγεγραμμένα[ν] ἐν τῶι παρ’ ἁμὲ ἱερῶι τι ἐν Ἀσκλαπιείωι. ὑμεῖς οὖν εὖ ποι[ή]-​­ σετε, φροντίξαντες ὅπως καὶ παρ’ ὑμὲ ἀναγραφῇ ἁ ­αὐ-​­ τὰ ἀπελευθέρωσις ἐν τῶι ἱερῶι τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνος τοῦ Πυθίου. ἄρχοντος Νικάνδρου, μηνὸς ἕκτου, ἐν ἐννόμ[ωι] ἐκκλησίαι, γραμματεύοντος τῶν συνέδρων Ἐπικράτεος τοῦ Νέωνος, ἀφίητι Ἄγων καὶ ­Τίμαν-​­ 10 δρος Λαοδίκαν ἐλευθέραν, παραμίνασαν παρὰ ­Τίμαν-​­ δρον ἄχρι κα ζώῃ Τίμανδρος, συν[επ]αινε[ού]σας καὶ τ[ᾶ]ς γυναικὸς Ἄγωνος Ξενοτίμας, [ἐ]πεὶ κ[ατ]έβαλε τ[ὰ] λύτρα ἐκ τῶν πολεμίων Ἄγωνι καὶ Τιμ[άνδρ]ωι. μ[ὴ] ἐξέστω [δὲ] καταδουλίξασαι μηδὲ ἄγειν Λαο[δί]-​­ καν κατὰ μηθένα τρόπον, ἀλλὰ ἐλευθέρα καὶ ἀνέφ[α]-​­ πτος Λαοδίκα ἔστω· εἰ δὲ μὴ, ἀποτισάτω ὁ καταδουλ[ι]-​­ ζόμενος ἢ ἄγων, ὡς ἀπελεύθε[ρ]ον, ποθίερον τῶι ­Ἀσκλα-​­ πίωι καὶ τᾶι πόλει τῶν Ἐλατέων, ἀργυρίου μνᾶς τρ[ι]-​­ άκοντα, καὶ ὁμοίως Λαοδίκα ἐλευθέρα [ἔ]στω, καὶ ἐγ[δι]-​­ καζέσθωσαν οἱ ἄρχοντες οἱ ἀεὶ ἔναρχοι ἐόντες κα[ὶ] οἱ ἱερεῖς τοῦ Ἀσκλαπίου καὶ ἄλλος ὁ θέλων ὑπὲρ Λ[α]-​­ οδίκαν, ἀνυπεύθυνος ἐών, ἐπὶ τῷ ἡ[μί]σωι τοῦ ἐπιτ[ι]-​­ μίου· τὸ δὲ ἥμισον ἔστω ποθίερον τοῦ Ἀσκλαπίου. πα[ρα]-​­ μινάτω δὲ Λαοδίκα παρὰ Τίμανδρον ἄχρι κα ζώῃ Τίμ[αν]-​­ [δρος. μάρτυρες· ······························] Εὔξενος Φιλοξένου, Ἀνδρόνικος, Καλλικράτης ὁ ἱε[ρεύς], Εὐκλείδας, Πυθέας, Σωτέλης Κλευξενίδα, Κλευ[······] Translation: The archons of the Elateians to the archons of the Delphians and the city, greetings. You shall know about the manumission in the attached sealed letter written up by us in the shrine of Asclepius. You do the right thing by making sure that this manumission is inscribed in the shrine of Pythian Apollo. During the archonship of Nikandros, in the sixth

529

Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello month when Epikrateos was the secretary of the councillors Agon and Timandros set Laodika free, and she shall remain with Timandros as long as Timandros lives, with the consent of Agon’s wife Xenotima because she paid the ransom from the enemies to Agon and Timandros. It is not permitted to enslave nor lead away Laodike in any way, but she is to be free and not claimable. If not, let the person who enslaves or leads away because she is a freedperson pay thirty silver minas sacred to Asclepius and the city of the Elateians and likewise Laodika shall be free, and the archons who are in office and the priests of Apollo and anyone else who wishes to protect Laodika shall prosecute without penalty with (­a reward of) half the penalty. The other half of the penalty shall belong to Asclepius. Laodike shall remain with Timandros as long as Timandros lives. Witnesses: [..... ] Euxenos, son of Philoxenos, Andronikos, Kallikrates the priest, Eukleidas, Pytheas, Soteles, son of Kleuxenidas, Kleu[... (­trans. E.M. Harris)

Notes 1 Roman freedmen cannot hold office: Treggiari (­1969: ­54–​­55, ­60–​­61); Mouritsen (­2011: 73). Number of colonies inflated: Salmon (­1969: 69). 2 On Pasion, see Trevett (­1992: ­1–​­17). For the date of his citizenship (­b etween 395 and 370 BCE), see Trevett (­1992: ­21–​­24). 3 Blok (­2017) has recently claimed that that the definition of citizenship found in Aristotle’s Politics is misleading, because it omits participation in religious rituals and the role of women. For other criticism of Aristotle’s discussion, see Müller (­2014, 2015). See, however, Fröhlich (­2016), who shows that Blok’s objections to Aristotle rest on mistaken interpretations of key texts and on a document in [Dem.] 59.104, which has now been shown to be a forgery; see Canevaro (­2013: ­196–​­208); cf. Filonik; Joyce; Rocchi in this volume. 4 For analysis, see Zanovello (­2016: ­32–​­41). There is no reason to believe that Od. 14.­61–​­66 alludes to manumission. See Zanovello (­2016: 2­ 9–​­31). 5 On the status of hetairoi and their reciprocal relations, see Donlan (­1998). The fact that Eumaeus and Philoitius will have the title of hetairoi, which is never granted to slaves, and given houses, which they will own as their property, shows that they are granted legally defined rights as free people. This shows that the claim of Porter (­2021: 263, n.39) that Eumaeus and Philoitius are not freed is untenable and his objection to the analysis of Zanovello is groundless. 6 For citizenship granted to those with two citizen parents at the age of 18, see [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42.1. There is no reason to believe that the two parents had to be married by engyē and that the candidate had to be gnēsios. See Hatzilambrou (­2018) and Joyce (­2019) ( ­pace Rhodes 1978 and Dmitriev 2017). 7 On equality before the law, see Thuc. 2.37.­1–​­2, with Harris (­2013: ­5 –​­6). 8 See Millett (­1989). ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2000) claims that there were relationships between unequal parties similar to the ­patron-​­client relationship at Rome. This may have been true on an informal basis, but these relationships never received legal recognition within the citizen body as they did at Rome. And Athenian citizens were not placed in different groups in the Assembly as Roman citizens were in the comitia centuriata and the comitia tributa. Patterson (­1982: 2­ 52–​ 2­ 54) notes the different statuses of freedpersons in Greece and in Rome but does not analyze the reasons for the difference. 9 For the rationale behind the ban on manumission at Sparta, see Lewis (­2018: ­137–​­139).

530

Manumission and citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome 10 Buckland (­1908: ­442–​­444); Mouritsen (­2011: 12). For testamentary manumission in c­ ross-​ ­cultural perspective, see Patterson (­1982) ­219–​­228. 11 For the limitations imposed on freedmen, see Mouritsen (­2011: ­72–​­73). The lex Visellia of 24 CE prohibited freedmen from serving in municipal offices, which may imply that they could do so before (­Cod. Iust. 9.21.1). 12 The ius patronatus did not, of course, involve the ­so-​­called liberti Orcini, who were those slaves who had been manumitted testamento. For this category of liberti there was no ius patronatus because their manumittor/­patronus ‘­resided in the underworld’. See Mouritsen (­2011: 51, 183, 184). 13 On the rights of the patron to inherit the property of the freedman, see Treggiari (­1969: ­78–​­80). 14 For the role of freedmen in politics, see Treggiari (­1969: ­162–​­193). 15 For the prohibition against holding office in Rome, see Treggiari (­1969: ­52–​­64). 16 On Roman assemblies, see Taylor (­1966), on which this section relies. 17 ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2009: 3­ 09–​­312) points to some possible exceptions to this rule in Thessaly, Aetolia, Phocis, and Buthrotus, but these are dated from the late third century BCE at the earliest. I am not sure, however, that the document from the theatre at Buthrotus indicates that ‘­freed slaves became fully assimilated into their ­ex-​­owners’ families as equal members’. All the document states is that the ­ex-​­slave joined with her ­ex-​­masters in freeing a slave. One should also note that the status of isotelēs in some other inscriptions is not identical to that of a citizen. 18 See, for instance, ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2005: 101) (‘­manumitted slaves were not as a rule incorporated into the body of citizens’); Zanovello (­2016: ­14–​­15). 19 On the right to own land in the Greek polis limited to citizens except in special cases, see Hennig (­1994). 20 On the dikē apostasiou, see ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2005: ­279–​­282). The evidence of [Dem.] 25.65 is probably not reliable because this speech is a Hellenistic forgery containing many mistakes about Athenian law and legal procedure. See Harris (­2018: ­193–​­229, es­p. 219 n.101). There is no reason to believe that the lists of silver bowls had anything to do with this legal procedure. We plan to discuss this topic in a future publication. 21 See Mulliez (­1992: ­38–​­39). On paramonē, see also ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz (­2005: ­222–​­248), who claims that the freedman in this condition was not wholly free. Sosin (­2015) claims that those subject to paramonē were still slaves, but see Zanovello (­2016: ­62–​­83) for a detailed refutation of these views. 22 See Canevaro and Lewis (­2014: ­98–​­110), refuting the claim of Meyer (­2010: 27, n.69) that there was no paramonē in classical and Hellenistic Athens. Cf. Zanovello (­2016: ­164–​­176). 23 We would like to thank David Lewis for reading a draft of this essay and providing helpful comments. Kostas Vlassopoulos also read over a draft and offered encouragement. We would also like to thank the organizers of the London conference in 2019 for their invitation to participate.

Bibliography Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Buckland, W.W. (­1908) The Roman law of slavery (­Cambridge) Canevaro, M. (­2013) The documents in the Attic orators: laws and decrees in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus (­Oxford) Canevaro, M. and Lewis, D.M. (­2014) ‘­K horis oikountes and the obligations of freedmen in late classical and early Hellenistic Athens’, Incidenza dell’antico 12, ­91–​­121 Dmitriev, S. (­2017) The birth of the Athenian community: from Solon to Cleisthenes (­London) Donlan, W. (­1998) ‘­Political reciprocity in Dark Age Greece: Odysseus and his hetairoi’, in C. Gill and N. Postlethwaite (­eds) Reciprocity in Ancient Greece (­Oxford) ­51–​­71 Fabre, G. (­1981) Libertus: recherches sur les rapports ­patron-​­affranchi à la fin de la république romaine (­Rome) Flower, M.A. and Marincola, J. (­2002) Herodotus. Histories Book IX (­Cambridge) Fröhlich, P. (­2016) ‘­La cité grecque entre Aristote et les modernes’, CCG 27, ­91–​­136

531

Edward M. Harris with Sara Zanovello Gauthier, P. (­1974) ‘“­Générosité” romaine et “­avarice” grecque: sur l’octroi du droit de cité’, in Mélanges d’histoire ancienne offerts à William Seston (­Paris) ­207–​­215 (= Gauthier [2011: ­3 –​­12]) ——— ​­(­2011) Études d’histoire et d’institutions grecques: choix d’écrits (­Geneva) Greenhalgh, P.A.L. (­1982) ‘­The Homeric therapon and opaon and their historical implications’, BICS 29, ­81–​­90 Hansen, M.H. (­1998) Polis and c­ ity-​­state: an ancient concept and its modern equivalent, Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre, vol. 5 (­Copenhagen) Harris, E M. (­2013) The rule of law in action in democratic Athens (­Oxford and New York) ——— ​­(­2018) Demosthenes, speeches ­23–​­26 (­Austin, TX) Hatzilambrou, R. (­2018) Isaeus’ On the Estate of Pyrrhus (­Oration 3) (­Newcastle) Hennig, D. (­1994) ‘­Immobilienerwerb durch Nichtbürger in der klassischen und hellenistischen Polis’, Chiron 24, ­305–​­344 Joyce, C.J. (­2019) ‘­Citizenship or inheritance? The phratry in classical Athens’, Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 36, ­466–​­487 Lewis, D.M. (­2018) Greek slave systems in their Eastern Mediterranean context, c. ­8 00-​­146 B.C. (­Oxford) Meyer, E. (­2010) Metics and the Athenian ­phialai-inscriptions: a study in Athenian epigraphy and law (­Stuttgart) Millett, P.C. (­1989) ‘­Patronage and its avoidance in classical Athens’, in ­Wallace-​­Hadrill (­1989) ­15–​­47 Mouritsen, H. (­2011) The freedman in the Roman world (­Cambridge) Müller, C. (­2014) ‘­La (­dé)­construction de la politeia. Citoyenneté et octroi de privilèges aux étrangers dans les démocraties hellénistiques’, Annales (­HSS) 69, ­753–​­775 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­De l’époque classique à l’époque hellénistique: la citoyenneté des Grecs, une citoyenneté en mutation? Réflexions sur la question de l’appartenance multiple’, Studi Ellenistici 29, ­355–​­369 Mulliez, D. (­1992) ‘­Les actes d’affranchissement delphiques’, CCG 3, ­31–​­44 Osborne, M.J. (­­1981–​­1983) Naturalization in Athens (­Brussels) Patterson, O. (­1982) Slavery and social death: a comparative study (­Cambridge, MA) Porter, J. (­2021) ‘­The archaic roots of paternalism: continuity in attitudes toward slaves and slavery in the Odyssey, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, and beyond’, G&R 66.2, ­255–​­275 Rhodes, P.J. (­1978) ‘­Bastards as Athenian citizens’, CQ 1989, ­89–​­92 Salmon, E.T. (­1969) Roman colonization under the Republic (­London) Sosin, J.D. (­2015) ‘­Manumission with paramone: conditional freedom?’ TAPhA 145, ­325–​­381 Taylor, L.R. (­1966) Roman voting assemblies from the Hannibalic War to the dictatorship of Caesar (­A nn Arbor, MI) Treggiari, S. (­1969) Roman freedmen during the late Republic (­Oxford) Trevett, J. (­1992) Apollodoros, the son of Pasion (­Oxford) ­Wallace-​­Hadrill, A. (­ed.) (­1989) Patronage in ancient society (­London) Zanovello, S. (­2016) ‘­From slave to free: a legal perspective on Greek manumission’, diss. Padua and Edinburgh (­unpublished) ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz, R. (­2000) ‘­Did patronage exist in classical Athens?’, AC 69, ­65–​­80 ——— ​­(­2005) Not wholly free: the concept of manumission and the status of manumitted slaves in the ancient Greek world (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­2009) ’Freed slaves, their status and state control in ancient Greece’, European Review of History 16.3, ­303–​­318

532

37 JEWISHNESS AS ‘­CITIZENSHIP’ IN JEWISH WRITINGS FROM THE HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN PERIODS Katell Berthelot In most Greek and Roman texts that mention the Jews, the latter are described as an ethnos (­or, in Latin, a gens or a natio). Jewish texts in Greek likewise use the word ethnos to refer to the people of Israel, but some Jewish authors also conceived of membership in the Jewish people as a form of ‘­citizenship’. This phenomenon raises numerous questions: when did Jews start describing each other as ‘­fellow citizens’, in which contexts, and in response to which political and social practices? What does the use of Greek civic vocabulary mean in these texts? Does it imply that Jews had civic institutions of their own? Or is the use of civic terminology metaphorical? Finally, what are the implications of this civic model for the definition of the people’s boundaries and the integration of newcomers? This chapter aims to shed light on these issues and to analyze the specific impact of the Roman notion of citizenship on Jewish ­self-​­definitions. First, it will examine what experiences of citizenship were available to Jews in the ancient world; then it will look at how Greek texts written by Jewish authors use the vocabulary of citizenship to describe membership in the Jewish people; finally, it will address the impact of Roman notions and policies on Jewish discourses of citizenship.

Jewish experiences of citizenship in the ancient world Judean institutions The main political regime in Judea during the ‘­biblical period’, according to both biblical texts and epigraphic evidence such as the Tel Dan stela, was kingship. It came to an end with the Babylonians’ capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the first temple in 587 BCE, which led to the rise of the priestly establishment, whose members played an important role under Persian and Hellenistic domination. Until Herod’s reign, Judea’s leadership remained closely associated with the (­h igh) priesthood, which was the main intermediary between the Judeans and the Achaemenid, Lagid, and Seleucid rulers. Yet Judea also experienced kingship again: first Hasmonean, starting with Aristobulus and Alexander Jannaeus at the end of the second century BCE, and then Herodian kingship.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-44

533

Katell Berthelot

Civic i­nstitutions – ​­at least as known to us from the Greek and Roman c­ ontexts –​ ­were thus originally foreign to the Judeans. The Greek translations of the biblical books composed in Hebrew reflect this situation, as they hardly use any civic vocabulary to describe ancient Israel’s institutions: the terms politeia, politeuma, and politeuomai are completely absent from the Septuagint (­as are words such as isopoliteia, isopolitēs, and sympolitēs). The word politēs is used to render the Hebrew term re‘­a, ‘­neighbour’, in Proverbs 11:9, 11:12, and 24:28 and in Jeremiah 36:23 LXX (­29:23 in the Massoretic Text) and 38:34 LXX (­31:34 MT). It also translates ‘­amit, ‘­fellow’, in Zechariah 13:7 and the phrase beney ‘­ami, ‘­sons of my people’, used by Ephron the Hittite in Genesis 23:11. In none of these examples does the word carry a civic meaning. Most conspicuously, the term ezraḥ, which means ‘­citizen’ in modern Hebrew but refers to someone who dwells in the land in the Hebrew Bible, is never translated as politēs in the Septuagint. Instead, the translators chose the words autochtōn and enchōrios, both of which refer to people’s connection to the land.1 As a matter of fact, there is no Hebrew equivalent to ‘­citizen’ in the biblical books. ­ ro-​­Hasmonean Also notable is the fact that the Greek translation of 1 Maccabees, a p composition in Hebrew dated to the end of the second century BCE, does not contain a single occurrence of politēs, politeia, politeuma, or politeuomai. The translator apparently did not consider these terms appropriate to describe Judea’s political organization under the Hasmoneans. This choice is all the more understandable if the translation was done under Alexander Jannaeus’ rule, when Judea’s political regime was again kingship. Yet even before the Hasmoneans explicitly claimed the title of king, their ruling style as high priests was in many ways royal. Most importantly, Jerusalem was not a polis in relation to which Jews could have defined their citizenship.2 During the Hellenistic period, the only moment when Jerusalem may have enjoyed the status of polis was under the high priest Jason, with the foundation of ‘­Antiocheia in Jerusalem’ and the creation of a gymnasion and ephēbeion (­2 Macc. 4:­9–​ 1­ 0, 19; cf. 1 Macc. 1:­11–​­15), which was certainly a privilege granted by King Antiochus IV. Several scholars have drawn attention to the parallel between Jerusalem and Tyriaion or Toriaion, in the Pergamene kingdom, a katoikia on which Eumenes II bestowed the status of polis in 188 BCE.3 Yet the Maccabean uprising put an end to the Jerusalem experiment. Shaye J.D. Cohen has argued that the Judaization of the Idumeans, the Itureans, and other groups by the Hasmoneans at the end of the second and the beginning of the first century BCE was tantamount to naturalization and that these groups received Judean citizenship (­1999: 70, 118, 127). According to Cohen, the Hasmoneans embraced a Hellenistic definition of political membership and invested the term Ioudaios with a new, political meaning. However, Cohen’s analysis confuses representations and institutions.4 As far as the Roman period is concerned, Victor Tcherikover has decisively shown that the vocabulary used in fi ­ rst-​­century CE Jewish sources that describe Judean institutions in Jerusalem cannot be taken at face value: It follows that under the procurators5 ‘­archons’, a ‘­boule’, and a ‘­demos’ did exist in Jerusalem, but the archons were not archons in the Greek sense, nor was the boule a boule, nor the demos a demos. Throughout, the Greek names, borrowed from the Hellenistic world, reflected ancient Jewish ­institutions—​­the product of the evolution of the Jewish people through the ages. (­Tcherikover 1964: 74; italics in the original) 534

Jewishness as ‘citizenship’ in Jewish writings

As Tcherikover (­1964: 67) specifies, this does not mean that there was no collective group of people in Jerusalem that ‘­came to assemblies and made resolutions’; ‘­this “­p eople”, however, was nothing like the demos of the Greek polis’ (­it had no legal and political structure). Josephus occasionally mentions the high priests and the city council (­boulē) as Jerusalem’s two main interlocutors with the Roman authorities (­BJ 2.331), but it is doubtful that this council functioned like a Greek boulē; in fact, it seems to have represented the whole nation. Moreover, in other passages of the Jewish War, the high priests are associated with the ‘­powerful people’ (­dynatoi) and/­or people of the highest reputation (­gnōrimōtatoi) (­BJ 2.301), and it is unclear how these elite groups were interrelated or to what extent the members of the city council were elected or ­co-​­opted as members of influential families.6 In a Greek polis, by contrast, magistrates may have come from prominent families, but they were elected and had a role clearly distinct from that of the priests, who were in charge of the city’s official cult. Moreover, while Josephus calls this council boulē in his Jewish War (­henceforth: War), he refers to it as the Sanhedrin (­synedrion) in Jewish Antiquities (­AJ).7 Since Josephus employs the word boulē only in War, where he also uses it for the Roman senate, it is possible that he intended to create a parallel between the Judean and Roman institutions and to suggest that, despite the Great Revolt, Jews and Romans had much in common. In sum, neither in the Hellenistic period (­except for the brief episode of ‘­A ntiocheia in Jerusalem’) nor in the Roman one was there such a thing as Judean citizenship in the ­Greco-​­Roman meaning of the term.

Jews’ civic experiences among Greeks and Romans In the diaspora, many Jews lived in Greek cities, where they had various statuses (­e.g., Barclay 1996; Ritter 2015). Some of them may have been citizens of the poleis in which they ­dwelt – ​­probably on an individual basis rather than as a group. In Against Flaccus 47, Philo alludes to the fact that (­at least some) Jews were citizens of the cities in which they lived. Yet the bulk of the evidence comes from Josephus and is not without problems. In AJ 14.188, Josephus claims that ‘­Julius Caesar made a bronze tablet for the Jews in Alexandria, declaring that they were citizens of Alexandria’ (­trans. R. Marcus, Loeb: 549), but there is no reference to this collective possession of Alexandrian citizen­ on-​­Jewish sources. In AJ 19.­281–​­285, Josephus tells his readers about Claudius’ ship in n letter to the Alexandrians following the riots against the Jews in their city in 38 CE, but Josephus’ formulation is much more favourable to the Jews than the version of the original letter found on papyrus, which does not consider the Jews as Alexandrian citizens (­CPJ 2:­36–​­53, no. 153). In War 7.­43–​­45, Josephus implies that Jews were citizens of Antioch in the first century CE (­see also AJ 12.­119–​­128 and A­p. 2.­38–​­39, where he states explicitly that Seleucus I granted Jews Antiochene citizenship, and suggests that Jews in Ephesus and other Ionian cities also received local citizenship). Yet Josephus may have deliberately conflated grants of citizenship and permissions to dwell in certain cities in a permanent way and other ‘­privileges’ granted to the Jewish communities.8 Hellenistic cities granted their citizenship to foreigners who had bestowed on them important benefits (­euergesiai), and this must have happened with Jewish benefactors as well. Admittedly, as Mary Smallwood emphasized, being a citizen of a Greek city entailed political and religious duties that could conflict with the Mosaic laws (­1961: ­13–​­14). Yet we know that not all Jews were eager to live according to their ancestral traditions, especially elites.9 535

Katell Berthelot

From the first century BCE onwards, some Jews also received Roman citizenship. The case of Antipater, Herod’s father, is well known: he was granted Roman citizenship by Julius Caesar in 47 BCE as a reward for his military support, especially during Caesar’s war in Egypt (­Joseph. BJ 1.­193–​­194, AJ 14.137, 16.53). The examples of the apostle Paul (­Acts 22:­25–​­29), of Philo’s nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander, and of Josephus himself (­Vit. 423) are also famous (­on Tiberius Julius Alexander, see Turner 1954). Josephus’ Antiquities goes beyond these few individual cases, however, quoting documents that concern the exemption of Jewish Roman citizens from military service in Asia Minor ‘­during the Roman civil wars of the 50s and 40s BCE, periods of intensive recruitment of Roman forces in the East’.10 These documents show that there were a number of Jews in fi ­ rst-​­century BCE Asia Minor who had been granted Roman citizenship. In War 2.308, when speaking of the events that happened under Gessius Florus, Josephus also alludes to the presence in Jerusalem of Jews possessing Roman citizenship. Around the Mediterranean, Jews could thus have either indirect or direct knowledge of how Greek and Roman civic institutions functioned. As we shall see below, it is in works produced in this diasporic context that membership in the Jewish people came to be conceptualized as ‘­citizenship’.

Jewish politeumata in the Lagid kingdom Before we proceed to the texts that describe Jewishness as citizenship, however, we must examine yet another issue. At least in Egypt and Cyrenaica, the adoption of Greek civic notions by Jews may also be explained by the existence of an institution that is attested so far only in the Lagid kingdom, the Jewish politeuma.11 In Greek literary and epigraphic sources, the term politeuma has various meanings, including the community of citizens in a given polis, as shown by the case of Tyriaion mentioned above. In his first letter to this community, Eumenes II granted its members the right ‘­to organize together into a single citizen body ( ­politeuma) and to use their own laws’.12 Yet in the Ptolemaic context, the politeumata referred to in papyri seem to have originated as groups of mercenaries who shared a common ­origin – ​­Boeotians, Cilicians, Cretans, Lycians, Phrygians, or Idumaeans. They were thus based on ethnicity. Papyri found in Herakleopolis and dating to between 144/­143 and 133/­132 BCE have demonstrated that in some places in Egypt, Jews too were organized in politeumata.13 Around the middle of the second century BCE, a fort was built in the harbour of Herakleopolis, and the Jewish politeuma may have consisted, at least in part, of Jewish soldiers who lived near it (­Sänger 2014: 60). According to the papyri, the members of this politeuma called themselves politai, even though membership in a politeuma was not equivalent to citizenship of a polis.14 Politeumata had to be approved by the king and his administration but enjoyed a great deal of autonomy: ‘­Unlike private associations, a community constituted as politeuma can be considered as an institutionalized part of the kingdom’s administrative structure ­which – ​­similar to a polis – ​­carried responsibility for itself’ (­Sänger 2014: 63). The archontes (­leaders) of the politeuma played administrative and judicial roles but did not infringe on the jurisdiction of the dikastēria (­the tribunals for Hellenes).15 The Herakleopolis papyri mainly document legal cases concerning contracts. The disputes involved not only Jews but also ­non-​­Jews. It must be emphasized that not all Jews who lived in the area and turned to the archons were members of the politeuma. Nor was every Jewish settlement organized in this fashion (­Honigman 2002: 254). 536

Jewishness as ‘citizenship’ in Jewish writings

In the Roman period, politeumata no longer had any military dimension (­Zuckerman ­1985–​­1988: 178; Honigman 2002: 263). They seem to have been deprived of their legal power and to have become mainly cultic associations.16 We know about one Jewish politeuma in Berenice (­ i n Cyrenaica) under Augustus and Tiberius, through two honorary inscriptions.17 They indicate that the members made their decisions by democratic vote, casting black or white stones in accordance with Greek custom. Constantine Zuckerman notes that the decrees ( ­psēphismata) of the politeuma ‘­are formulated in perfect accord with the protocol of civic decrees (­u nder magistrates ­so-­​­­and-​­so […]), and were displayed in the municipal amphitheater’ (­Zuckerman ­1985–​­1988: 179). This example shows that Jews integrated some aspects of Greek civic norms and organization into their community life, at least in the case of those living in the Ptolemaic orbit.

Citizenship as metaphor for membership in the people of Israel Jewish literature written directly in Greek during the Hellenistic and Roman periods differs markedly from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. In contrast to the latter, the former uses the Greek civic lexicon repeatedly, not only to refer to the institutions of the Greeks and the Romans but also to describe the Jewish people and their laws (­Troiani 1994; Rajak 1998; Carlier 2008).

The Hellenistic period This use of Greek political vocabulary can be traced back at least to the second century BCE. In the fragments of Aristobulus (­a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria), the Letter of Aristeas, and 2 ­Maccabees – ​­all dated to the second century ­BCE – ​­the members of the Jewish ethnos are described as citizens, politai.18 The term politeia is attested as well and generally refers to the Law of Moses, considered the ancestral constitution of the Jewish ethnos and its polity: the Jews are politai to one another, no matter where they dwell, insofar as they live under the same laws.19 Whether ­proselytes – ­​­­non-​­Jews who chose to embrace the Jewish way of life and ​­ seen as having been granted ‘­Jewish citibeliefs and to join the Jewish ethnos – were zenship’ is difficult to pinpoint in the texts dating to the Hellenistic period. It would be a fairly logical implication of the use of the civic metaphor to describe the Jewish people, but we lack conclusive evidence. In 2 Maccabees, when Antiochus IV, the Judeans’ ‘­p ersecutor’, falls ill, he repents of his evil deeds against them and, to obtain divine mercy, vows to become a Jew and to proclaim God’s power worldwide (­9:­11–​ ­17). Then he writes a letter to the Judeans, whose opening reads: ‘­To the respected Jews, fellow citizens ( ­politai), many greetings, health and success (­from) the King and Governor Antiochus’ (­2 Macc. 9:19, trans. Schwartz 2008: 350). However, it is unclear whether the king is addressing the Jews as his (­future) fellow citizens, calling them politai because he has declared that he will set them equal to the Athenians (­v. 15) and thus allow them to form a politeia in the classical meaning of the term, or merely imitating the Jews’ way of speaking (­of their relationship to one another). Moreover, the whole passage is ironic, as the author obviously did not regard Antiochus’ statements as serious. Daniel R. Schwartz rightly notes in his commentary: ‘­T he king speaks like a Jew (­as promised in v. 17 and exemplified in v. 20), denoting the Jews as his “­fellow citizens” […]. This too is part of the joke’ (­2008: 361). This text in itself does not allow 537

Katell Berthelot

us to conclude that native Jews would have considered proselytes to be their ‘­fellow citizens’, even though this looks like a logical outcome of the use of the civic metaphor to define Israel.

The Roman period Philo, Josephus, and the author of 4 Maccabees use the words politeia, politeuma, politēs, and politeuomai extensively. This terminology is also found in some inscriptions dating to the Roman period. In I.Stobi 19, an inscription from the synagogue of Stobi in Macedonia, probably dating to the second half of the second century CE, Claudius Tiberius Polycharmus presents himself in the first lines as the patēr (­father) of the synagogē (­Jewish community) in Stobi and as poleiteusamenos (­read: politeusamenos) pasan poleiteian (­read: politeian) kata ton Ioudaïsmon (­ll. ­6 –​­9). The significance of politeia in this context is unclear.20 In general, politeia may refer to the Jews’ ‘­constitution’ or ‘­political regime / polity’, as in Jewish works from the Hellenistic period.21 However, it seems that Philo favoured the word nomothesia to refer to the Jews’ ‘­constitution’, and that in his writings the Mosaic politeia tends to designate the civic body or ­community – ​­that is, the community of the (­Jewish) ‘­citizens’, which is, in fact, the Jewish ethnos.22 Moreover, in at least one case pertaining to a Jewish context (­Spec. 2.73), politeia should probably be translated as ‘­citizenship’ (­see also Virt. 108, and the discussion of Legat. 157 below). Yet the word politēs is not very common in Philo’s work (­22 occurrences, versus 91 of politeia), and it is only in the Legatio that he explicitly designates the Jews as sharing a common citizenship (§§211 and 265). Josephus uses politeia to mean ‘­constitution’, ‘­polity’, or ‘­citizenship’, but the last is associated only with Greek and Roman examples.23 The word politēs occurs frequently, but sometimes in the loose sense of ‘­inhabitant’ rather than in the technical sense of ‘­citizen’.24 Nonetheless, in other passages, the meaning of politēs involves the bond that unites Jews together, no matter where they ­live – a​­ bond that consists of their laws and way of ­life – ​­and implies that Josephus conceived of Jewishness (­the fact of belonging to the people of Israel) as a form of citizenship. He thus writes that Moses began his legislation with the account of the creation of the world because he wanted to teach his ‘­fellow citizens’ ( ­politai) about God and piety first (­AJ 1.21). In Antiquities 14.226, Josephus describes Jews in the diaspora as politai of Alexander son of Theodorus, an ambassador sent by Hyrcanus II (­then the high priest and ethnarch of Judea) to Publius Cornelius Dolabella (­then the governor of S ­ yria – not ​­ Asia, as erroneously stated in AJ 14.223) to defend the rights of the Jews in Asia Minor. Jews are thus seen as sharing a common citizenship no matter where they live. Throughout Antiquities, Jews are repeatedly designated by the term politai, even in the books dealing with periods when Judea was a monarchy.25 In Against Apion, while describing the laws that govern the Jewish politeuma (­2.­164–​­165), Josephus also states that Jews are politai to one another (­2.170). In all these cases, politai has a metaphorical meaning to a large extent and could also be translated as ‘­countrymen’; it refers to the fact that Jews are members of the same ethnos, despite their settlement in various places throughout the world. Greek and Roman authors also regarded Jews as belonging to a single ethnos (­or gens) even though they were scattered in various countries, but, in contrast to Jewish authors writing in Greek, they did not refer to Jews as sharing a common ‘­citizenship’. 538

Jewishness as ‘citizenship’ in Jewish writings

Noteworthy is the fact that both Philo and Josephus suggest that proselytes can be considered new ‘­citizens’ of the Jewish community or people.26 What remained a mere possibility in the Jewish texts from the Hellenistic period now becomes an explicit statement. An illuminating example comes from Philo’s On the Special Laws. While commenting on the first commandment of the Decalogue, the recognition of the one true God, Philo reflects on the condition of the proselytes within the people of Israel. He distinguishes between people who have been trained in the truth since childhood (­native Jews) and those stemming from a pagan background who have discovered the truth at a later stage in life (­converts): […] These last he [Moses] calls ‘­proselytes’ (­prosēlytoi), because they have joined a new and ­god-​­loving civic community ( ­politeia). They disregard mythical inventions and seize the unaltered truth. Thus, while giving equal honour (­isotimia) to all ­in-​­comers (­epēlytai) with all the privileges which he gives to the ­native-​­born (­autochthōnes), he exhorts the old nobility to honour them not only with marks of respect but with special friendship and with more than ordinary goodwill. And surely there is good reason for this; they have left, he says, their country, their relatives, and their friends for the sake of virtue and holiness. Let them not be deprived of other cities, parents, and friends, and let them find places of shelter standing ready for refugees to (­the camp of) piety. For the most effectual ­love-​­charm, the chain which binds indissolubly the goodwill which makes us one, is to honour the one God. Yet he counsels them that they must not, presuming on the equality before the laws (­isonomia) and the tributes (­isoteleia) which he grants them because they have denounced the vain imaginings of their fathers and ancestors, deal in idle talk or revile with an unbridled tongue the gods whom others acknowledge, lest they on their part be moved to utter profane words against Him Who truly is. (­Spec. 1.­51–​­53, trans. F.H. Colson, Loeb: ­127–​­129, slightly modified) Here, Philo uses the words prosēlytos/­epēlytēs (­newcomer) and autochtōn (­native), which go back to the biblical categories of the ger and the ezraḥ and indicate that the newcomer has joined the Jewish community.27 The reference to ‘­the vain imaginings of their fathers and ancestors’ in §53 makes clear that these newcomers were born and raised in a polytheistic context and have rejected what Philo considers to be the false gods of their ancestors (­see also §51: ‘­they disregard mythical inventions’). What is at stake here is what modern scholars commonly call ‘­conversion to Judaism’. Most interestingly, Philo describes this change of status in civic terms, speaking of proselytes as people who ‘­have joined a new and g­ od-​­loving civic community ( ­politeia)’ (§51). Moreover, his insistence on their equality with those who were born in the community, from the perspective of laws (­isonomia), taxes (­isoteleia), and honours (­isotimia), shows that the ‘­newcomers’ are to be considered full members of this politeia.

The impact of the Roman context Roman and Jewish ‘­generosity’ in granting citizenship
 The Roman policy of granting citizenship to numerous individuals and even whole communities is described in both Roman and ­ pro-​­ Roman writings as very benevolent and generous. In Greek texts, the key term characterizing this policy is 539

Katell Berthelot

philanthrōpos/­philanthrōpia.28 Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus affirms that Rome was ‘­the most hospitable and benevolent of all cities (­koinotatē te poleōn kai philanthrōpotatē)’ (­Rom. Ant. 1.89.1). And Josephus too praises the Romans for their generosity in granting citizenship, which he calls an act of philanthrōpia (­A­­p. 2.40). In a context in which authors such as Apollonios Molon and Apion accused the Mosaic law of being misanthropic, this ideological discourse impacted how Philo and Josephus argued for the benevolent character of the Jewish laws and addressed the issue of proselytes (­Berthelot 2003: chs. 4­ –​­5; 2021: ch. 5, §2.3). In the section Peri Philanthrōpias (­O n Humanity/­Benevolence) of his treatise On the Virtues, Philo thus suggests that the Mosaic law demonstrates its philanthrōpia in the benevolence that it prescribes toward newcomers. His argument is based on Leviticus 19:­34 – ​­‘­You shall love the ger/­ prosēlytos as yourself’ – ​­on which he comments: ‘(­Moses) commands those of the nation to love the proselytes (­epēlytai) not only as friends and relatives, but as themselves in both body and soul’ (­Virt. 103, trans. Wilson 2011: 64; see also Deut. 10:­18–​­19; Borgen 1997: 249, 252). Philo continues his demonstration of the philanthrōpia of the Mosaic commandments concerning ­non-​­Jews by tackling the case of metoikoi, foreign residents (­Birnbaum 1996: 204). However, rather than speak about the metoikoi living among the Israelites, he recalls that the latter were themselves once foreigners in Egypt and must be grateful to those who welcomed them in the past (­Wilson 2011: ­256–​­257). Philo admits that the Egyptians badly treated the Israelites who had settled among them and uses this point to highlight the Mosaic law’s generosity, quoting Deuteronomy 23:8, ‘­You shall not abhor any of the Egyptians, because you were a foreigner residing in their land’. Maybe alluding to events of his own time, especially the attacks on Jews by Alexandrians and Egyptians in 38 CE,29 he then adds: And yet what evil was there that the Egyptians neglected to inflict upon our nation, ever adding new evils to old with schemes contrived for the sake of cruelty? Nevertheless, since they initially welcomed them, neither closing off their cities nor making the countryside inaccessible to those who came, he [Moses] says that, because of this acceptance, they should be granted as a privilege terms of peace. And if any of them should want to cross over to the Jewish civic community (­pros tēn Ioudaiōn politeian), they are not to be scorned unyieldingly like the children of enemies, but are to be treated in such a manner that the third generation is invited into the congregation and granted that share of the divine oracles into which the ­native-​­ and ­noble-​­born are also rightfully initiated. (­Virt. ­107–​­108, trans. Wilson 2011: 65, slightly modified) Philo here depends on Deuteronomy 23:9, which prescribes letting Edomites and Egyptians enter the assembly of the Lord (­qehal YHWH, ekklēsia Kyriou) in the third generation. He interprets this verse as allowing Egyptians to become members of ‘­the politeia of the Jews’ – ​­that is, the Jewish people. The choice of a biblical passage that refers to the descendants of former enemies may be understood as a deliberate echo ­ ro-​­Roman discourse celebrating Rome’s grants of citizenship to its of the Roman or p former enemies. Moreover, since Rome was praised for its philanthrōpia precisely because it granted citizenship to foreigners who included former enemies, Philo’s characterization of the Mosaic politeia’s openness to the Egyptians as an expression of philanthrōpia (§105) can hardly be a coincidence (­Berthelot 2019: ­126–​­127). 540

Jewishness as ‘citizenship’ in Jewish writings

The Romans, however, did not grant citizenship to Egyptians who were not already Greek citizens of one of Egypt’s three poleis, Alexandria, Naucratis, and Ptolemais. Josephus, who claims that Apion was originally an Egyptian, emphasizes that ‘­it is only to Egyptians that the Romans, who are now rulers of the world, have refused to grant any form of citizenship’.30 It is thus possible that Philo, who shared with some Romans contempt for and hostility toward Egyptians, used the example of Deuteronomy 23:­ 8b–​­9 with an implicit a fortiori argument in mind: if the Jews were ready to go further than the Romans and grant citizenship even to Egyptians, then their philanthrōpia was greater than that of Rome. Josephus also describes the Jews as cheerfully welcoming and granting citizenship to those who want to live under their laws, explicitly contrasting them with the Spartans, as authors such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Tacitus did when aiming at emphasizing the superiority of the Romans’ enfranchisement policy.31 Pointing to the Spartans’ reputation for expelling foreigners (­xenēlasia), Josephus writes: They perhaps might reasonably be criticized for their churlishness (­dyskolia): for they would not grant anyone the right of citizenship ( ­politeia) or of residence among them.32 We, on the other hand, are not inclined to emulate other people’s customs, but gladly welcome those who wish to share ours; and that would be evidence, I take it, of both benevolence (­philanthrōpia) and generosity (­megalopsychia). (­A­­p. 2.­260–​­261, trans. Barclay 2007: ­317–​­318) Josephus suggests that, in contrast to the Spartans, Jews grant their politeia (­i.e., ‘­citizenship’) to anyone who is ready to live according to their laws (­cf. Berthelot 2003: ­359–​­368). He thus shares several ideas with Philo: that Jewish ‘­citizenship’ mainly implies a life in accordance with the Torah, and that the openness of the Mosaic politeia to new citizens is proof of its benevolent character (­its philanthrōpia), implicitly putting it on par with Roman norms (­A­­p. 2.210, 2.261).

Philo’s use of politeia as ‘­civic community’ and the Roman civitas Although Philo was steeped in Greek philosophical thought, the Roman context in which he lived influenced his conception of the Jewish politeia in several ways. A passage in the Legatio reveals that he could describe Jewishness as a form of citizenship comparable to the Roman one and saw the two as eminently compatible (­even though in his eyes Jewish ‘­citizenship’ was far more important). Speaking of Augustus’ policy toward the Jews of Rome, Philo emphasizes that the princeps was perfectly aware that they sent money to the Temple in Jerusalem (§156). Yet, Philo argues, nevertheless he neither ejected them from Rome nor deprived them of their Roman citizenship (­tēn Rhōmaïkēn autōn politeian) because they also cared about their Jewish [citizenship] (­tēn Ioudaïkēn), nor took any violent measures against the houses of prayer, nor prevented them from meeting to receive instructions in the laws, nor opposed their offerings of the firstfruits. (­L egat. 157, trans. F.H. Colson, Loeb: 81, modified) Even though the word politeia is not repeated twice, the adjective Ioudaïkos clearly parallels Rhōmaïkos. There is thus no doubt that politeia is the implied noun that Ioudaïkos 541

Katell Berthelot

characterizes. In Philo’s discourse, not only is Jewishness a ‘­citizenship’, but it is even comparable to Roman citizenship, and the two can be put on an equal footing.33 Moreover, Philo’s understanding of the Jewish politeia shares some features with the Roman notion of civitas. As Clifford Ando explains, in Roman political thought a political collectivity, a populus, is formed through the consensual commitment of its members to a particular normative order. […] The distinctiveness and pervasiveness of this Roman commitment to contractarianism is visible above all in the common use of civitas, citizenship, as a metonym for both city and political community. The corresponding term in Greek, politeia, which can mean citizenship or governing order, interanimates no such cluster of concepts. The ability of civitas to serve as a metonym for political community rests upon the assumption that it is individual possession of membership, and individual commitment to the entailments of membership, that bind one to the community. (­Ando 2011: 3; his definition is based on Cicero, Re­p. 1.39) Philo’s use of politeia to refer to the people of Israel linked together by the laws of Moses differs from previous usages in classical and Hellenistic Greek but is in line with this definition of civitas. His understanding of politeia as ‘­political community’ probably resulted from his exposure to the Roman notion of civitas.34 Interestingly, the references to the Jewish community/­p eople as politeia appear nearly exclusively in the part of his work titled ‘­Exposition of the Law’, which Maren Niehoff and others believe postdates Philo’s stay in Rome in ­38–​­41 CE (­Niehoff 2018). Philo’s insistence on the equality of rights and duties between natives and proselytes in On the Special Laws 1.­51–​­53 (­quoted above) also correlates with the Roman emphasis on the ‘­individual commitment to the entailments of membership’. In other words, Philo tends to define the Mosaic politeia as a ‘­structure of integration’ (­l ike the Roman civitas) rather than a ‘­structure of participation’ (­the model of Greek cities), to use Philippe Gauthier’s terminology (­1981: 169, 171). Moreover, like Cicero’s definition of populus referred to by Ando, Philo’s writings reflect the central role played by the citizens’ individual commitments to the law (‘­a particular normative order’) in the formation of the political community. From Philo’s perspective, this meant that the commitment of both Jews and proselytes to the Torah was crucial to the continued existence of the Jewish people.

Conclusion From the Hellenistic period onward, Jewish communities around the Mediterranean conceived of themselves and of the bonds between their members partly through Greek civic notions. Yet the Roman idea of civitas seems to have had a significant impact as well on Jews who, like Philo and Josephus, wrote in a Roman imperial context. We must remain aware, however, that in most cases their use of the words politēs and politeia in connection with membership in the people of Israel is metaphorical or analogical. The question of the impact of Greek and Roman notions of citizenship on Jewish ­self-​­definitions is not limited to Jewish sources in Greek. Some recent publications emphasize the correlation between specific aspects of the Roman notion of citizenship and rabbinic texts from the Land of Israel, even though this literature lacks words such as ‘­citizen’ and ‘­citizenship’.35 542

Jewishness as ‘citizenship’ in Jewish writings

Finally, it is worth mentioning an inscription from Venosa (­Italy) that refers to the Jewish community as a civitas, even though it is dated to the fifth or sixth century CE, and thus much later than the evidence that we have examined so far (­CIJ I, no. 611; JIWE I, no. 86). The inscription is an epitaph for Faustina, the daughter of an apparently important member of the Jewish community in Venosa. She is also presented as the granddaughter of Vitus and Asellus, ‘­who were the leaders (­maiures) of the community (­cibitas)’.36 The inscription further records that ‘­she made great enough grief for her parents and tears for the community (­lagrimas cibitati)’ (­trans. Noy, JIWE I, 115). It is, therefore, clear that the word civitas refers not to the civic community of Venosa as a whole but to the local Jewish community. This epitaph suggests that the description of the Jewish people as a civic community may have been as common in the Empire’s western part as it was among ­Greek-​­speaking Jews in the east, and remained so for a very long time. Unfortunately, the paucity of documents prevents us from reaching firmer conclusions about the weight of G ­ reco-​­Roman notions of citizenship in G ­ reek-​­ and ­Latin-​­speaking late antique Jewish communities.

Abbreviations Abbreviations of Philo’s works can be found under: https://sblhs2.com/2018/03/01 philo-of-alexandria/ Cowey, J.M.S. and Maresh, K. (2001) Urkunden des Politeuma der Juden von Herakleopolis (144/3–133/2v.Chr.) (= P. Polit. Iud.) (Wiesbaden)

Notes 1 See Exod. 12:19.48, Lev. 16:29, 17:15, 19:34, 23:42, 24:16, Num. 9:14, 15:13.30, Josh. 8:33, Ezek. 47:22 (­a utochthōn); Exod. 12:49, Lev. 18:26, 24:22, Num. 15:29 (­enchōrios). 2 See Bernett (­2004), who raises the question of a possible Greek influence on the institutions of Yehud in the Persian period but answers negatively. 3 See SEG 47.1745; Habicht (­1976: 178); Kennell (­2005: ­12–​­14); Ma (­2012); Honigman (­2014: ­29–​­30, 212, ­277–​­278, ­363–​­364, 375); Ma (­2019: 84). 4 For a full discussion of this issue, see Berthelot (­2018: ­298–​­304; 2019: ­108–​­116). 5 From 44 CE, Judea was ruled by Roman procurators (­or: administrators), who were themselves subject to the authority of the province’s governor (­the governor of Syria, in this case). 6 We also find ‘­the high priests, the men of power, and the boulē’ in BJ 2.336. 7 See AJ 17.317, 20.200, 20.202. The New Testament also mentions the high priests and the Sanhedrin as the Judean authorities; see, e.g., Matt. 26:59, Mark 14:55, 15:1, Luke 22:66 (­which depicts the high priests, the elders, and the scribes as constituting the synedrion). 8 See Tcherikover (­1959: ­326–​­332). On the case of Sardis (­Joseph. AJ 14.­259–​­261), see Ritter (­2015: ­203–​­207). 9 Among the examples that come to mind are Dositheos, son of Drimylos, in t­hird-​­century BCE Egypt, some members of the ‘­Hellenized’ Jerusalem elite in the 170s BCE, and Tiberius Julius Alexander, Philo’s nephew. 10 Ritter (­2015: 199). See Joseph. AJ 14.228, 232, 234, 237, etc. 11 According to Sänger (­2016: ­1682–​­1683), the politeuma was an institution found only in the Ptolemaic kingdom and in areas that had been under Ptolemaic rule for a while. He thus doubts that Jewish communities were organized as politeumata elsewhere in the diaspora. 12 SEG 47.1745, ll. ­27–​­28, trans. Kennell (­2005: 13). On the various meanings of politeuma, see Zuckerman (­­1985–​­1988: 174); Sänger (­2014: 52; 2016; 2019: ­3 –​­7). 13 Cowey and Maresh (­2001); Honigman (­2002 and 2003) (­Honigman argues strongly in favour of the existence of a Jewish politeuma in Alexandria, mentioned in only one literary source,

543

Katell Berthelot Letter of Aristeas 310); Sänger (­2014, 2016, 2019). It would not make sense to consider the Herakleopolis politeuma unique. Yet the view of Arieh Kasher (­1985) that Jews in the diaspora preferred to be citizens of their own civic structures, politeumata, rather than of Greek poleis has rightly been refuted by Zuckerman (­­1985–​­1988), and the Herakleopolis papyri further demonstrate the inadequacy of this theory. For a concise history of research on Jewish politeumata, see Ritter (­2015: ­1–​­11); for a detailed study, see Sänger (­2019). Ritter is the only scholar who rejects the interpretation of the Herakleopolis papyri as referring to a Jewish politeuma, arguing instead that the politeuma in P. Polit. Iud. no. 8, ll. 4­ –​­5, is the civic body of Herakleopolis (­Ritter 2011). 14 P. Polit. Iud. no. 1, l. 18. On the difference between membership in a politeuma and citizenship, see Zuckerman (­­1985–​­1988: 184); Sänger (­2016: 1686). 15 Cowey and Maresh (­2001: ­11–​­17); Honigman (­2003: ­63–​­64). 16 On the organization of Jewish communities as associations more broadly, see the case studies presented in Eckhardt (­2019). 17 Lüderitz (­1983: ­148–​­155), nos. 70 (­SEG 16.931; in honour of Decimus Valerius Dionysius, who was a member of the politeuma), 71 (­in honour of Marcus Tittius, son of Sextus). This politeuma had its own archons, mentioned in an inscription from 24/­25 CE (­IGRR 1024), and a synagogue is attested in 56 CE (­SEG 17.823). 18 See Aristobulus, fr. 3.1 (­Holladay 1995: 154); Let. Aris. 3, 126; 2 Macc 5:6, 5:23, 9:19, 15:30. In the Letter of Aristeas, the Egyptian Jews are said to be ‘­fellow citizens’ of the high priest in Jerusalem (­36, 44). Note that similarly, in 2 Maccabees, the politai are not the citizens of Jerusalem but the members of the ethnos as a whole. 19 See, e.g., 2 Macc. 4:11, 8:17; Carlier (­2008: ­77–​­126). In 2 Maccabees 13:14, politeia (­probably with the meaning of ‘­constitution’ or ‘­political regime’) is listed alongside the Jews’ laws, temple, city, and patris; see Schwartz (­2008: 446). 20 See I.Stobi 19 (­IJO I, Mac1). The ­second-​­century date is based on N. Vulić’s (­1932) epigraphic and palaeographic observations. For a detailed discussion of the date and other aspects of this inscription, see Habas (­Rubin) (­2001); Noy, Panayotov, and Bloedhom (­2004 (­IJO I): ­62–​­71). 21 See, e.g., Philo, Spec. 3.24, 4.47, 4.55 (?), 4.159 (?), Virt. 127, Flacc. 53, Legat. 194; Joseph. AJ 3.84, 3.213, 4.45, 4.184, 4.191, 4.­193–​­198 (­etc.), A­p. 2.188, 2.222, 2.226, 2.287. In 4 Macc. 3:20, politeia refers to a ‘­constitution’ (­a set of laws) or a polity; see also 8:7 and 17:9. 22 Philo, Her. 169, Mos. 2.211, Decal. 98 (?), Spec. 1.51 (­see below), 1.60, 1.63, 1.314, 1.319, 3.51, 3.167 (?), 3.181, 4.10, 4.55 (?), 4.100, 4.105, 4.149, Virt. 87, 175, 219, Legat. 1­ 93–​­194, 363 (?). In some passages, it is unclear whether politeia refers to the civic community, the state, or the constitution; see, e.g., Spec. 2.123. 23 In 3 Macc 3:21, 23, and in Joseph. A­p. 2.32, 41, politeia means Alexandrian citizenship. Josephus also refers to Roman citizenship, Spartan citizenship, etc. 24 See, e.g., AJ 7.291, 8.361, 8.370, 9.80, 10.126, 10.129, 12.252, 15.3 (­the inhabitants of Jerusalem), Vita 4­ 2–​­43 (­the inhabitants of Tiberias), 135 (­the inhabitants of Tarichea). See also Philo, Somn. 1:53. The only occurrence of politēs in 3  Maccabees (­1:22) might have this meaning ­too – ​­the scene takes place in Jerusalem, and it is unclear whether politēs refers to ­ élèze-​­Modrzejewski (­2008: 82). the inhabitants of the city or to Jews as fellow citizens; see M Elsewhere in 3 Maccabees, the Alexandrian Jews are not described as politai of one another or of the Judean Jews. In the Testament of Job 29:1, which may also date from the Roman period, it is likewise unclear whether politai refers to fellow citizens or merely to inhabitants; in any case, this work does not present Job and his neighbors as Jewish. 25 See AJ 4.314, 5.54, 5.265, 8.370, 12.46, 12.54, 12.­161–​­162, 12.269, 12.323, 13.287, 15.264, 15.282, 15.290, 15.375, etc. 26 See esp. Philo, Spec. 1.51 and Joseph. A­p. 2.­260–​­261; Berthelot (­2003: ­272–​­279); cf. Carlier (­2008: ­183–​­184). According to ­Mélèze-​­Modrzejewski, the Jewish politeia in this case is Jewishness itself or the Jewish way of life (­2011: ­157–​­158); see also Ritter (­2015: 79). However, Birnbaum (­1996: 2­ 14–​­217) and Carlier (­2008: 1­ 71–​­173) rightly argue that it is the community of Jewish ‘­citizens’ – ​­that is, the Jewish people. 27 The term epēlytēs is not found in the LXX but is equivalent to prosēlytos in Philo’s work (­Birnbaum 1996: 195). On the word prosēlytos and its original Greek meaning of ‘­newcomer’ or ‘­resident alien’, see Moffitt and Butera (­2013); Thiessen (­2013).

544

Jewishness as ‘citizenship’ in Jewish writings 28 See, in particular, Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.9.4, 1.89.1; Dio Chrys. Or. 41.9; Joseph. Ap. 2.41. This perspective was still shared by Augustine, who declared the Roman policy humanissimus, specifically in connection with Caracalla’s edict (De civ. D. 5.17.1). On Roman generosity in granting citizenship, see also Cicero, Balb. 13.31; Livy 8.13.­15–​­16; Tac. Ann. 11.24.­1–​­7; Aristid. Roman Oration ­57–​­66; Lib. Or. 30.5. 29 Wilson (­2011: 261). On the events of 38 CE, see Gambetti (­2009). 30 C. A­p. 2.41, trans. Barclay (­2007: 191). See Marotta (­2017: es­p. ­175–​­181). 31 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.17.1, 14.6.­1–​­6; Tac. Ann. 11.24; Berthelot (­2003: ­362–​­366). 32 Lit. ‘­they would not share with anybody either their citizenship or their lifestyle’. Josephus likewise uses politeia (­tōn) Rhōmaiōn to speak of Roman citizenship (­Vit. 423). 33 See also Honigman (­1997: ­75–​­78), which argues that for Philo, Roman citizenship plays the role of local citizenship, comparable to that of Alexandria, Ephesus, or Antioch, whereas ‘­Jewish citizenship’ is a universal one. 34 On politeia’s meanings in classical and Hellenistic texts, see Bordes (­1980) (­on Aristotle); Bordes (­1982) (­on Greek sources up to Aristotle); Lévy (­1990) (­on politeia and politeuma in Polybius); Murray (­1993) (­on Arist. Pol. 3.3, 1276b, whose politeia Murray translates as ‘­constitution’). The word polis originally referred to both the city and the political community, but it did not mean citizenship (­Lévy 1990: 15; see also Filonik, Plastow, and Zelnick-Abramovitz; Filonik in this volume). On the similarities between Philo’s notion of politeia and that of civitas, see also Carlier (­2008: 155) (­i n connection to Legat. ­193–​­194). 35 See, e.g., Furstenberg (­2019); Malka and Paz (­2019; 2021); Wilfand (­2020; 2021). 36 Ed. and trans. Noy in JIWE I, ­114–​­115. Spelling as in JIWE.

Bibliography Ando, C. (­2011) Law, language, and empire in the Roman tradition (­Philadelphia) Barclay, J.M.G. (­1996) Jews in the Mediterranean diaspora: from Alexander to Trajan (­323 ­BCE–​ ­117 CE) (­Edinburgh) ——— ​­(­2007) Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, translation and commentary (­Leiden) Bernett, M. (­2004) ‘­Polis und Politeia. Zur politischen Organisation Jerusalems und Jehuds in der Perserzeit’, in S. Alkier (­ed.) Die Griechen und das antike Israel (­Fribourg) ­73–​­129 Berthelot, K. (­2003) Philanthrôpia judaica: le débat autour de la ‘­misanthropie’ des lois juives dans l’Antiquité (­Leiden) ——— ​­(­2018) In search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean dynasty between biblical models and Hellenistic diplomacy (­Göttingen) ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­Judaism as “­citizenship” and the question of the impact of Rome’, in Berthelot and Price (­2019) ­107–​­129 ——— ​­(­2021) Jews and their Roman rivals: pagan Rome’s challenge to Israel (­Princeton, NJ) Berthelot, K., Dohrmann, N.B., and ­Nemo-​­Pekelman, C. (­eds) (­2021) Legal engagement: the reception of Roman law and tribunals by Jews and other inhabitants of the Empire (­Rome) Berthelot, K. and Price, J.J. (­eds) (­2019) In the crucible of Empire: the impact of Roman citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians (­Leuven) Birnbaum, E. (­1996) The place of Judaism in Philo’s thought: Israel, Jews, and proselytes (­Atlanta) Bordes, J. (­1980) ‘­L a place d’Aristote dans l’évolution de la notion de politeia’, Ktema 5, ­249–​­256 ——— ​­(­1982) Politeia dans la pensée grecque jusqu’à Aristote (­Paris) Borgen, P. (­1997) Philo of Alexandria: an exegete for his time (­Leiden) Carlier, C. (­2008) La cité de Moïse: le peuple juif chez Philon d’Alexandrie (­Turnhout) Cohen, S.J.D. (­1999) The beginnings of Jewishness: boundaries, varieties, uncertainties (­Berkeley, CA) Eckhardt, B. (­ed) (­2019) Private associations and Jewish communities in the Hellenistic and Roman cities (­Leiden) Furstenberg, Y. (­2019) ‘­The rabbis and the Roman citizenship model: the case of the Samaritans’, in Berthelot and Price (­2019) ­181–​­216 Gambetti, S. (­2009) The Alexandrian riots of 38 C.E. and the persecution of the Jews: a historical reconstruction, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 135 (­Leiden)

545

Katell Berthelot Gauthier, P. (­1981) ‘­La citoyenneté en Grèce et à Rome: participation et intégration’, Ktema 6, ­167–​­179 Habas (­Rubin), E. (­2001) ‘­The dedication of Polycharmos from Stobi: problems of dating and interpretation’, Jewish Quarterly Review 92.­1–​­2, ­41–​­78 Habicht, C. (­1976) 2 Makkabäerbuch, Jüdische Schriften aus ­hellenistisch-​­römischer Zeit, vol. 1.3: Historische und legendarische Erzählungen (­Gütersloh) Holladay, C.R. (­1995) Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish authors, vol. III: Aristobulus (­Atlanta) Honigman, S. (­1997) ‘­Philon, Flavius Josèphe, et la citoyenneté alexandrine: vers une utopie politique’, Journal of Jewish Studies 48, ­62–​­90 ——— ​­(­2002) ‘­The Jewish politeuma at Heracleopolis’, SCI 21, ­251–​­266 ——— ​­(­2003) ‘­Politeumata and ethnicity in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt’, AncSoc 33, ­61–​­102 ——— ​­(­2014) Tales of high priests and taxes: the Books of the Maccabees and the Judean rebellion against Antiochos IV (­Berkeley, CA) Kasher, A. (­1985) The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: the struggle for equal rights (­Tübingen) Kennell, N.M. (­2005) ‘­New light on 2 Maccabees 4:­7–​­15’, Journal of Jewish Studies 56, ­10–​­25 Lévy, E. (­1990) ‘­Politeia et politeuma chez Polybe’, Ktema 15, ­15–​­26 1983) Corpus jüdischer Zeugnisse aus der Cyrenaika, with J.M. Reynolds Lüderitz, G. (­ (­Wiesbaden) Ma, J. (­2012) ‘­Relire les Institutions des Séleucides de Bikerman’, in S. Benoist (­ed.) Rome, a city and its empire in perspective: the impact of the Roman world through Fergus Millar’s research (­Leiden) ­59–​­84 ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­The restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Seleukid state: II Macc. 11.­ 16–​­38’, in R. Oetjen (­ed.) New perspectives in Seleucid history, archaeology and numismatics: studies in honor of Getzel M. Cohen, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 355 (­Berlin) ­80–​­93 Malka, O. and Paz, Y. (­2019) ‘­Ab hostibus captus et a latronibus captus: the impact of the Roman model of citizenship on rabbinic law’, Jewish Quarterly Review 109.2, ­141–​­172 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­A rabbinic postliminium: the property of captives in tannaitic halakha in light of Roman law’, in Berthelot, Dohrmann, and N ­ emo-​­Pekelman (­2021) 3­ 23–​­344 Marotta, V. (­2017) ‘­Egyptians and citizenship from the first century AD to the Constitutio Antoniniana’, in L. Cecchet and A. Busetto (­eds) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the Archaic period to AD 212 (­Leiden) ­172–​­198 ­Mélèze-​­Modrzejewski, J. (­2008) Troisième Livre des Maccabées (­Paris) ——— ​­(­2011) ‘­Un peuple de philosophes’: aux origines de la condition juive (­Paris) Moffitt, D.M. and Butera, C.J. (­2013) ‘­P.Duk. inv. 727r: new evidence for the meaning and provenance of the word Προσήλυτος’, JBL 132, ­159–​­178 Murray, O. (­1993) ‘­Polis and politeia in Aristotle’, in M.H. Hansen (­ed.) The ancient Greek ­city-​ ­state (­Copenhagen) ­197–​­210 Niehoff, M.R. (­2018) Philo of Alexandria: an intellectual biography (­New Haven, CT) Noy, D., Panayotov, A., and Bloedhom, H. (­eds) (­2004) Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, vol. I: Eastern Europe (­Tübingen) Rajak, T. (­1998) ‘­The Against Apion and the continuities in Josephus’s political thought’, in S. Mason (­ed.) Understanding Josephus: seven perspectives (­Sheffield) ­222–​­246 Ritter, B. (­2011) ‘­On the “­politeuma in Heracleopolis”’, SCI 30, ­9 –​­37 ——— ​­(­2015) Judeans in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire: rights, citizenship and civil discord (­Leiden) Sänger, P. (­2014) ‘­The politeuma in the Hellenistic world (­third to first century B.C.): a form of organization to integrate minorities’, in J. Dahlvik, C. Reinprecht, and W. Sievers (­eds) Migration und ­Integration  – ​­wissenschaftliche Perspektiven aus Österreich. Jahrbuch 2/­2 013 (­Göttingen) ­51–​­68 ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­The meaning of the word πολίτευμα in the light of the ­Judaeo-​­Hellenistic literature’, in T. Derda, A. Lajtar, and J. Urbanik (­eds) Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Papyrology, Warsaw, 29 ­July-​­3 August 2013 (­Warsaw) ­1679–​­1693 ——— ​­(­2019) Die ptolemäische Organisationsform politeuma. Ein Herrschaftsinstrument zugunsten jüdischer und anderer hellenischer Gemeinschaften (­Tübingen) Schwartz, D.R. (­2008) 2 Maccabees (­Berlin) Smallwood, E.M. (­1961) Philonis Alexandrini Legatio ad Gaium (­Leiden) Tcherikover, V. (­1959) Hellenistic civilization and the Jews (­Philadelphia)

546

Jewishness as ‘citizenship’ in Jewish writings ——— ​­(­1964) ‘­Was Jerusalem a “­polis”?’, IEJ 14.­1–​­2, ­61–​­78 Thiessen, M. (­2013) ‘­Revisiting the προσήλυτος in “­the LXX”’, JBL 132, ­333–​­350 ­ raeco-​­Roman age’, in F. Parente and J. Sievers Troiani, L. (­1994) ‘­The πολιτεία of Israel in the G (­eds) Josephus and the history of the G ­ reco-​­Roman period: essays in memory of Morton Smith (­Leiden) ­11–​­22 Turner, E.G. (­1954) ‘­Tiberius Iulius Alexander’, JRS 44, ­54–​­64 Vulić, N. (­1932) ‘­Inscription grecque de Stobi’, BCH 56, ­291–​­298 and pl. XIX Wilfand, Y. (­2020) ‘­Roman concepts of citizenship, and rabbinic approaches to the lineage of converts and the integration of their descendants into Israel’, Journal of Ancient Judaism 11.1, ­45–​­75 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘“­A proselyte whose sons converted with him”: Roman laws on new citizens’ authority over their children and tannaitic rulings on converts to Judaism and their offspring’, in Berthelot, Dohrmann, and ­Nemo-​­Pekelman (­2021) ­345–​­364 Wilson, W.T. (­2011) Philo of Alexandria, On Virtues, introduction, translation, and commentary (­Leiden) Zuckerman, C. (­­1985–​­1988) ‘­Hellenistic politeumata and the Jews: a reconsideration’, SCI ­8 –​­9, ­171–​­185

547

38 MULTIPLE CITIZENSHIP IN ROMAN ASIA MINOR1 Lucia Cecchet

Multiple citizenship and its challenges For a long time, and mostly having the classical polis in mind, historians tended to think of Greek citizenship as an exclusive condition (­for example, Hansen and Nielsen 2004). To speak about exclusivity is correct, if we refer to the distinction between citizens and ­non-​­citizens within the polis. Civic status, in fact, marked a clear boundary between insiders and outsiders of the political community and, although recent studies have highlighted that citizens and ­non-​­citizens shared many aspects of everyday life especially in the sphere of religion and professional activities,2 it is undeniable that citizens were a privileged group within the inhabitants of the polis. Depending on the criteria set out in each polis, they had access to ruling bodies and public offices; they could vote for common decisions in the assembly, purchase and inherit land, and marry other ­citizens – ​­and these are just the main rights and privileges they enjoyed. N ­ on-​ ­citizens were generally excluded from most of these rights. In terms of relations between civic communities, and between citizens of different poleis, however, citizenship was not a mutually exclusive status. Since the late classical period, one could be a citizen of two or even more poleis at the same time. Individuals holding citizenship in several poleis are attested already in the epigraphic evidence of the late classical and early Hellenistic period.3 But it is above all during the first two centuries of the Empire that we have much evidence for accumulation of citizenships. This phenomenon is attested in different ways: in some cases, dedications and funerary inscriptions contain the list of the citizenships held by the dedicant or by the deceased. Honorary decrees attesting citizenship grants, by contrast, contain mainly references to the patris (­the mother city) of the honoured individual and the new citizenship awarded, but they only rarely contain references to further citizenships an individual may hold. More often, multiple citizenship is attested by liturgies and offices performed by the same individual in multiple cities and it is the modern historian who deduces multiple citizenships from ­office-​­holding in different poleis (­Ma 2013). Literary texts are also important sources for our knowledge of this phenomenon: rhetors such as Dio Chrysostomus and Aelius Aristides, for example, were citizens of several cities in Asia Minor, as well as Roman citizens. We can reconstruct the full picture of their citizenships by collecting the bits of information scattered in their orations (­Stefan 2017). 548

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-45

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor

When we speak of multiple citizenships, we do not refer only to the practice of cumulating Greek citizenships, but also to the combination of Greek and Roman citizenship since the late Republic and early Principate (­for the first documented case, i.e., Seleukos of Rhosos, see Raggi 2006). Roman citizenship for the Greeks was never an alternative to local citizenship(­s): it was always a sign of prestige and integration within the cosmopolitan imperial elites until at least 212 CE.4 One of the challenges that studies on ancient citizenship face today is that of explaining the phenomenon of multiple citizenship both at the m ­ acro-​­level, as a practice with which both the Greek cities and the Roman imperial administration in time had to deal, and at the m ­ icro-​­level, namely, as a phenomenon that concerns individuals and their lives in terms of mobility, networks, professional experiences, or political career. The main point of discussion has so far concerned the nature of the acquired citizenships, namely whether we have to deal merely with honorific titles, or with ‘­actual’ citizenships (­Heller and Pont 2012). In this chapter, I offer an overview of the problem based on a discussion of selected cases. I argue that the distinction between ‘­honorific’ and ‘­actual’ is not adequate as to explaining the phenomenon of multiple citizenship and its implications.

The dichotomy model: actual versus honorific (­or potential) citizenship At the origin of the problem there is the model of the ancient citizen that has guided studies on Greek citizenship from their beginnings. This model is based on Aristotle’s definition of the citizen in Politics (­3.1275a.­23–​­24), according to which a citizen is the one who shares in judicial function and in office. Clearly, the necessary condition for exerting these functions, which are political in their nature, is that of residing in the city. Aristotle’s paradigm had a strong and ­long-​­lasting influence in modern approaches to Greek citizenship. Historians, such as notably Emil Szántó (­1892) and more recently, Philippe Gauthier (­1985: ­150–​­154; 2000: 114), had Aristotle’s definition of citizen in mind when they considered grants of politeia in the classical and Hellenistic period as grants of ‘­potential citizenship’, unless made effective when the new citizens settled down in the new city and were inscribed in its civic subdivisions. In other words, additional citizenships were not real citizenships unless made effective by exerting civic functions in the new polis. The Greek (­actual) citizenship was, in Gauthier’s words, a form of active citizenship, in contrast with Roman citizenship, which he regarded as a form of ‘­passive citizenship’ since ordinary citizens did not hold office and their political role was fairly limited (­Gauthier 1981: ­167–​­179). Recent works, however, have started challenging the validity of Aristotle’s model. Josine Blok (­2017; cf. Fröhlich 2016) has shown that participation in polis ­religion – ​­and, in particular, the possibility of taking up public functions within cult ­administration –​ ­was one of the aspects defining citizenship in classical Athens. Interestingly, this perspective of citizenship sets the focus on religious participation and religious functions rather than political participation, highlighting that citizenship was not a male ­prerogative  – ​­as the formulation of Aristotle implies. In other recent contributions, ­ xed-​­number Maurizio Giangiulio (­2018; cf. 2017), discussing the s­ o-​­called regimes of fi in the poleis of the archaic period, has stressed the fact that the restricted groups forming the political community in the archaic period should not be regarded as ­oligarchies –​ a­ n idea we derived mainly from ­Aristotle – ​­but rather as civic bodies ‘­in the making’. Alain Duplouy (­2018) has highlighted the role of performance in defining citizenship 549

Lucia Cecchet

and membership in the archaic polis. Citizens were not only those who met the formal requirements (­in the archaic polis mostly wealth requirements), but also those who performed such requirements in public venues, such as the agora or the temple. All of these aspects contributed to the definition of the civic body well before it came to the formalization of political rights and duties. In general, recent research in the social ­sciences – ​­focussing mostly on citizenship in ­ urope – has ​­ highlighted that our modern understanding of citizenship contemporary E depends on how we view the relationship between individuals and communities and what aspects we consider important to define belonging to a community. Citizenship remains the conditio sine qua non for political rights, such as voting in political central elections, but it cannot be defined in terms of active participation in national politics. Phenomena such as ­long-​­term migration, residence in countries different from the native one, and participation in global politics through the social media have radically changed the contours of citizenship and national identity.5 When we look at the p ­ ost-​­classical epochs of antiquity, and above all to the imperial age, the limits of Aristotle’s paradigm of the citizen are obvious. Above all, there are ­ ffice-​­holding or judicial function were the main clear problems in maintaining that o characteristics defining the citizen. A second century honorary inscription from Syllion in Pamphilia provides an illuminating case (­Lanckoroński, Städte I 175,58 = IGR III, 800, ll. ­1–​­12). The inscription honours a certain Megacles for having distributed money among citizens. Distribution follows a precise structure of hierarchy within the civic body. The highest amount (­20 denarii) goes to each bouleutēs (­member of the Council), then, in descending grade, 18 denarii to each member of the gerousia (­Council of the Elders) and of the ekklēsia (­Assembly), and eventually, 2 denarii to each of those defined as just ‘­citizens’ ( ­politai) and 1 denarius for each of the freed slaves (­apeleutheroi) and perioikoi (­­non-​­citizens). This shows a differentiation within the group of the citizens between different categories, according to their degree and capacity of participation in the polis’ institutions. Each of them has a different position in the ‘­h ierarchy of citizenry’, as shown by the fact that they receive different sums of money. What strikes us is that the difference between the sums of money awarded to citizens attending political bodies and those given to ordinary citizens who are not part of political bodies is significant, while the difference between the sums given to ordinary citizens and those given to freed slaves and other ­non-​­citizens is minimal. This shows a clear boundary, in terms of status, between politically active citizens and the ­non-​­active ones. At the same time, it shows that political participation in Syllion was clearly reserved to a restricted group. The assembly of Syllion formed a closed group, like the councillors and the members of the gerousia. If they had changed from meeting to meeting, this would be at odds with the designations of the recipients of Megacles’ donation. This is per se not a surprising fact: even in the classical period, there were limits to the political participation within the civic community (­Blösel et al. 2014). The studies of Anna Heller (­2009) and Patrice Hamon (­2005, 2007), among others, have shown that in the Greek poleis of the imperial period public offices had become a prerogative of the elites. But the inscription of Syllion shows also that the political ­ on-​­active citizens community and the civic community did not just overlap: politically n are, nonetheless, part of the civic body and they are called politai in the text. In this respect, Syllion is unlikely to be an exceptional case: there is much evidence for the ‘­plutocratization’ of the political class in the imperial age, but we have no reason to 550

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor

think that the civic community was restricted to this class. Pace Gauthier, the Greeks did know also ‘­passive citizenship’ as a legitimate condition of the citizen. One other result of Gauthier’s ‘­dichotomy model’ of actual and honorary citizenship is that of regarding citizenship as actual only if its holders possess and exert civic rights, such as enktēsis (­right to purchase land),6 epigamia (­right of contracting marriages in a polis, which also granted legitimacy and citizenship to the children of such a marriage), and often further honours, such as the appointment as a member of the boule or the proedria (­a special seat in the theatre). This implies again a view of citizenship as a unique condition, a status that can be effectively realized only in one city. However, if we look at grants of citizenship in relational terms, namely, as products of the relation between a recipient and a civic community, it becomes evident that neither the concept of ‘­honorific’ nor that of ‘­actual/­effective’ citizenship can fully explain acquired citizenships (­cf. Mack 2019, drawing on Tilly 1995). Per se a grant of citizenship is neither just potential nor actual, it is an act establishing a new relation between an individual and a community. A citizenship grant can have actual implications even if the recipient does not make direct use of his civic rights. The nature of these implications varies depending on whom the recipient is, how he or she relates with the awarding community, and what the expectations from both sides are. In what follows, we will see some examples.

Citizenship as a way of creating a new relation between individuals and cities The most renowned cases of holders of multiple citizenships concern the members of the Lycian elites. The epigraphic documents from the koinon of Lycia from the second and third centuries CE attest to ca. 70 people holding citizenship in more than one polis in Lycia. As the studies of Christina Kokkinia (­2012) and Denise Reitzenstein (­2011, 2012) have shown, holders of multiple citizenships in Lycia were often holders of federal offices (­such as, for example, the lykiarchoi, leaders of the koinon) and priests of the koinon (­archiereis), including priests of the imperial cult. The famous benefactor and archiereus Opramoas of Rhodiapolis has eight attested citizenships.7 But the total number might even be even higher: a recurring formula in his epigraphic documents after 139 CE is ‘­πολιτευόμενος δὲ ἐν ταῖς κατὰ Λυκίαν πόλεσι πάσαις’,8 ‘­being a citizen in all of the cities of Lycia’. This formula occurs also for other nine high priests of the Lycian koinon (­archiereis)­9 and for one holder of a ­lower-​­rank federal priesthood (­an archiphylax, Reitzenstein 2011: 97). Inscriptions, however, contain references only to some (­usually, two) citizenships even if the individual in question held several more. The citizenships which are mentioned are usually the native citizenship and the one awarded by the city in which the inscription was issued. For example, in the honorific inscription found on a statue base in the theatre of Tlos (­TAM II, 578), dating to 136 CE, only two of Opramoas’ citizenships are recorded, namely, that of Tlos (­the city awarding the honour) and that of Rhodiapolis, Opramoas’ patris.10 But the text does not mention the citizenships of Myra and Patara that, by that time, Opramoas already had (­for similar cases, see Reitzenstein 2011: 145). Who makes the choice of what citizenship to mention is obviously the city that awards the honour. Not only does the city of Tlos find it appropriate to record only Tloian citizenship beyond that of Rhodiapolis, but it even puts it in the first position with the obvious intention of featuring Opramoas primarily as a citizen of Tlos. In the case the holders of Roman citizenship among the Lycian elites, the mention of Roman citizenship is often given priority over the other citizenships in public 551

Lucia Cecchet

inscriptions.11 For example, in the honorary inscription for Tiberius Claudius Agrippinus found in the Letoon of Xanthos and dating to the principate of Trajan (­TAM II 495 = Balland 1981, no. 65) the adjective Rhomaios (­Roman) occurs in an emphatic position before information about his hometown (­patris).12 Agrippinus received a golden crown and a bronze statue from the city of Xanthos: as we read in the text of the decree, he held the office of archiereus, the high priest of the Lycian koinon, devoted to the cult of the Emperor, and grammateus, secretary of the Lycian koinon. The reason for the bestowal of honours is Agrippinus’ role within the organization of the sacred games of Leto, in the same years as he was archiereus. The decree also mentions his financial contributions (­epidoseis) to the city of Xanthos and the fact that Claudius Agrippinus had received first, second, and third ­honours – ​­an honorific practice widely attested among the cities of the koinon. The reference to his Roman citizenship comes before the reference to his patris Patara. This formulation serves the function to stress his membership in the Roman provincial elite: Claudius Agrippinus belonged to the equestrian order and reached the highest office of the military career, that is, he was praefectus alae (­commander of a cavalry unit).13 Clifford Ando (­2021: 303; cf. 2016) has recently pointed out that Roman citizenship in Greek communities ‘­was attached to individuals as a result of their successful performance in purely local sociopolitics’. Rather than being a reward for special services to Rome, Roman citizenship often was a sign of recognition of local prestige. However, Roman citizenship did not overshadow Greek citizenship(­ s). Local (­Greek) citizenships and, among them, native citizenship, continued, indeed, to represent a very strong element of individual identity. It was often the context of communication and the polis that issued the inscription that mattered to the effect of deciding what citizenship should be mentioned first and what order the list of citizenships should follow (­cf. Mack 2019: 67 for the Hellenistic period). In an inscription from Patara, for example, again honouring the same Agrippinus, Agrippinus’ native citizenship of Patara is mentioned in the first place before his additional citizenship in Myra (­TAM II 422). The inscription is an honorary text issued by Claudius Eudemos, also a member of the Lycian elite and probably a relative of Agrippinus (­Reitzenstein 2011: 176). The intention is clearly that of stressing Agrippinus’ membership in the local elite as a native citizen of Patara. But in the case of the inscription of Tlos for Opramoas mentioned above, Opramoas’ patris is not mentioned at the first place. There is, clearly, no standard rule in the order in which citizenships are listed: each polis would obviously tend to highlight her own privileged relation with the honoured person. Grants of local citizenship to the members of the Lycian elites were usually rewards for donations and benefactions, as well as tools for securing acts of generosity in the future. Benefactors did not have to hold citizenship of the city where they performed donations and liturgies: in fact, they were often foreigners.14 But citizenship awards, indeed, were powerful instruments in the hands of the civic community to exert pressure on potential benefactors. Thus, it comes as no surprise that a magnate and m ­ ultiple-​ ­citizenship holder like Opramoas made several donations and ‘­favours’ to the Lycian poleis, including anticipating the amount of the taxes to pay to Rome for some cities (­and establishing a deadline for payment to him, see TAM II 905 II E) and providing financial help after the earthquake of 141 CE.15 Louis Robert (­1937: 382) believed it was a characteristics of the Lycian koinon that its members had the enktēsis gēs kai oikias (­the right to own land and house) in any city of the koinon and he pointed at the Tlos inscription mentioned above (­TAM III 578) as evidence, since Opramoas owned land in the city of Korydalla, although the city does not 552

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor

appear among those who awarded him citizenship. However, we should note that this was land he inherited from the mother, who was a citizen of Korydalla (­Reitzenstein 2011: 64, ­99–​­100). In fact, the question of what citizenship in a koinon ­meant – ​­whether it was a form of extended citizenship, giving access to local civic rights in the cities, or a form of federal citizenship giving access only to federal bodies (­for example, the federal assembly) but not to local assemblies, local magistracies, or other rights, such as land ­ownership – ​­is still an open question.16 For the Lycian elites, thus, holding multiple citizenships was a way of integrating in a horizontal way, namely, of stressing one’s identity as a member of an interconnected group within the ‘­h igh society’ of the koinon – ​­a group that cut across several cities. This is, after all, not entirely new: networking between elite families from different cities (­for example, by means of marriages) is a practice that characterizes the behaviour of the elites since the archaic period. The novelty, as compared to previous epochs, is that acquired citizenships become essential in formalizing personal bonds into something that goes beyond the relation between families and involves the dimension of the relation between individuals and communities. The nature of the relation between new citizens and the city, and the kind of ‘­rewards’ that cities obtained by granting citizenship were diverse and not always connected to economic transactions, such as liturgies or benefactions. In the beginning of his speech to the Nicomedians, Dio Chrysostomus (­38.1), a citizen of several Bithynian cities beyond his patris Prusa and Roman citizen as well,17 professes not to know why the Nicomedians awarded him citizenship. He provides an overview of what, in his opinion, are the most recurring reasons for grants of politeia (­ibid., trans. Crosby, modified, emphasis added): Men of Nicomedia, when I undertake to compute the reasons why you made me citizen [of Nicomedia] . . . ; I do not see that I have great wealth such so to believe that I have been sought after by you because of money; nor am I conscious of having an aptitude for flattering the masses: so you do not seem to want me even for the purpose of readily serving every caprice of yours. And I am not even good company at a banquet or a sociable person at gatherings of that sort, so as to be able at least to afford pleasure for the populace from that quality. Dio clearly oversimplifies the reasons for which cities decide to grant citizenship to foreigners, attributing them to the wealth of ­recipients – ​­a probable reference to euergetic donations or, perhaps, even to the ‘­sale’ of citizenships, as he mentions at Or. 34.23 (­see Jones 2012: 215) –​­, the ability to flatter the masses or being good guests at a banquet. He claims that his case does not match any of these scenarios and he adds (­ibid., trans. Crosby, modified, emphasis added): However, if I do not wholly mistake your purpose regarding me, and also if I am cognizant of all the matters of which I am capable of serving you, the only thing left to account for my having been made a citizen by you, is nothing else than that, perhaps to a greater degree than others, I have both the desire and the ability to give advice on the interests of the community. The city of Nicomedia, according to Dio, wants him as a citizen in order to have a competent advisor in public matters by virtue of his experience and knowledge. Dio’s acquired citizenship is a way for the city of creating a bond, inviting him to act as a 553

Lucia Cecchet

counsellor and speak to the community as he would speak to his f­ ellow-​­citizens, reassuring the civic community that the person speaking is ‘­one of them’. At the same time, the grant provides the city with an argument and a tool to exert pressure on Dio: in need for advice, the Nicomedians would call him and remind him that he is a citizen of Nicomedia. In this way, Dio owes duties to the city, not simply favours. Far from being just a bestowal of honour, the grant of citizenship brings with it certain ‘­unspoken’ obligations, which are not always and necessarily of an economic nature. Regardless of whether or not Dio takes residence in the city and makes use of his political and civic rights, he has to act as a citizen of Nicomedia when the city requires his competent advice.

Citizenship as a way to promote professional careers In general, looking beyond the borders of Lycia, holders of multiple citizenships appear to be an internally diverse group. They are not only high priests or benefactors. One other group is that of athletes (­van Nijf 2012). An agonistic inscription from Philadelphia in Lydia (­probably from a base, now missing) from the Flavian period shows that the wrestler ( ­pankratistēs) Titus Flavius Artemidoros was citizen and bouleutēs (­member of the council) of Kyme (­probably his original patris) and of Athens, Philadelphia, Rhodes, and ‘­many other cities’.18 The generic expression ‘­ἄλλων πολλῶν πόλεων πολείτης’ lets us presume the list was long. An inscription from Anazarbos, in Cilicia (­IK, 56 Anazarbos 25), shows that a certain Demetrios of Salamis, also an athlete, had been made citizen in no less than 47 cities. It is clear that in the case of Demetrios these citizenships are nothing substantially different from a mention of agonistic victories. Athletes received gifts and cash prizes by their cities, as Christian Mann (­2018) has recently reminded us, and this was perhaps an additional reason for which citizenship grants were particularly welcome by athletes. Nonetheless, beyond enhancing individual prestige and granting economic rewards within a complex system of g­ ift-​­giving from which cities also benefitted in terms of visibility, citizenships grants often had also practical implications on individual careers in the world of sport, as Onno van Nijf (­2012) has shown. We also have some examples from the Hellenistic period: an honorific decree from Ephesos, dating in the third century BC, grants Ephesian citizenship to a certain Athenodoros, son of Semon, as a result of a victory in a sport competition at the Nemea festival (­IK 14 Ephesos 1415; see van Nijf 2012: 190); another decree honouring the same Athenodoros grants him an economic subsidy for the costs of a trainer and travel expenses to the games (­IK 16 Ephesos 2005). Athenodoros’ new status as a citizen was fundamental to securing him full support by the city for training and travelling to the competitions. Moreover, citizenship grants could consolidate athletes’ careers even after they had ceased competing. The athletes mentioned above, Titus Artemidoros and Demetrios of Salamis held the office of the xystarchia, an important office within the international athletes’ association (­xystarchic synode). Xystarchs were usually retired athletes and, although their precise functions are not entirely clear, we know they had an important role in the organization of competitions: they were in charge of making contacts with the athletes, inviting them to the local festivals, organizing the schedule of the competitions and, as an honorific decree for Aelius Aurelius Menandros dating between 138 and 169 CE (­I. Aphrod. 12.920), xystarch of Antiochia in Phrygia shows, also contributing financially to the organization 554

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor

of the games. Aelius Menandros, in fact, is honoured for organizing the competitions in Antiochia. At the bottom of the decree, the several cities of which Menandros was citizen are listed, together with the cities in which he w ­ as – ​­as well as a ­citizen – ​­a member of the boule (­ibid., ll. ­46–​­55). As is clear, xystarchs needed a solid network within the world of athletics and excellent relations with the cities hosting the competitions. Grants of citizenship, which also often entailed grants of local offices, indeed, contributed in consolidating good contacts between victorious athletes and local authorities. These dynamics allowed athletes to strengthen and expand their network within several poleis and it helped cities to anchor themselves to important hubs within the world of athletics.19 As already the case of athletes shows, holders of multiple citizenships were not just members of the elites. Another category of them is that of professionals from sectors such as commerce, construction works, and artisanship. The epigraphic evidence from the Pontic region is, in this respect, significant. Commercial contacts and mobility of people between the Pontic cities in the proximity of the coast are widely attested (­Dana 2011). The fact that multiple citizenships are attested on the funerary inscriptions of traders, ship owners, and craftsmen shows that they were a reason for individual pride, worth being mentioned on their tombstones.20 And in the Pontic world, we have evidence also for wealthy benefactors being awarded citizenship as a reward for supporting human mobility and economic vitality: this is the case of Orontes of Olbia, who received citizenship from Byzantion (­IK 58 Byzantion 3 = IOSPE I2 79). Among the several merits of Orontes, the decree (­ll. ­8–​­10) found at Olbia and dating to the mid-first century CE mentions also Orontes’ role in helping seafarers to access the commercial port (­emporion) of Olbia (­though the scope of that assistance is not explained, ibid. ll. ­8–​­10). Pondering on the vast evidence for professional associations in the Pontic cities, Madalina Dana (­2012) has suggested that, within the picture of high geographical mobility that characterizes this region, acquired citizenships helped professionals to integrate in the local guilds and associations. Far from being purely honorific titles, grants of citizenship offered practical advantages to professionals. One of them is that, if their business required them to reside in the city, they would be relieved from paying the taxes normally falling on resident aliens, such as the metoikion in classical Athens. One other crucial factor was that, by working as naturalized citizens in the host cities, professionals had access to the courts and were subject to the same jurisdiction as local citizens.21 This gave them the possibility of defending themselves before local judges, which may have accounted to an advantage when it came to local regulations concerning commerce. Thus, grants of citizenships were, for professionals, an instrument for making safer and more economically profitable their stay and business in the hosting city; for the cities, they were a way to secure economic vitality.

Problems of multiple citizenships There are evident clues that multiple citizenships could also cause practical difficulties and disadvantageous situations for their holders. Pliny’s Letters to Trajan provide an example. The case concerns the province of ­Bithynia-​­Pontus, of which Pliny was governor. Pliny had to face a complex situation: in the local councils (­boulai) of the Bithynian cities, many citizens originally from other poleis – ​­so, apparently, holders of dual or multiple c­ itizenship – ​­served as bouleutai despite the fact that the Lex Pompeia, issued at some point between 64 and 62 BC, prohibited Bithynian cities from granting 555

Lucia Cecchet

citizenship to citizens of other Bithynian cities. So he writes (­Pl. Ep. 10.114, trans. Firth, modified, emphasis added):22 Pliny To Trajan. Sir, according to the Lex Pompeia, the free cities of Bithynia have the right to enroll anyone they please as a citizen, provided that he does not belong to any of the other Bithynian cities. The same law lays down provisions stating the causes for which a member of a Boule may be expelled by the censors. Consequently, certain censors have consulted me on the point whether they ought to expel any member who belonged to another city. However, I was influenced by the fact that, though the law forbids the election of such a person, it does not order his expulsion from the senate for that reason; and, besides, I was assured that in every city there were a number of senators belonging to other cities, and that any interference would seriously affect the position of a host of individuals and cities, inasmuch as that section of the law had for many years fallen into abeyance by general consent. So I thought it necessary to consult you as to the line you would wish me to adopt. I enclose with this letter the sections of the law on the subject. In short, the law forbade dual or multiple citizenships among Bithynian cities, although not, apparently, multiple citizenships in general. The reasons behind this specific aspect of the law are not clear. Adrian N. ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973: 303) believed that the law simply reflected the fact that double citizenships was not allowed by Roman law during the Republic; Anthony J. Marshall (­1968: 108) and Christian Marek (­1993: 43) argued that it aimed at reducing migratory movements from the smaller cities to the major ­ e-​­populated small cities and aggravated centres of the province, which would have d the already fragile balance of the region, exhausted after the end of the Mithridatic Wars (­cf. Trampedach 2009: 4­ 07–​­408). Christopher P. Jones (­2012: 216), by contrast, regarded the law as an attempt to prevent cities from using citizenship grants to build ­ on-​­citizens. Recently, personal alliances and a way to continue levying taxes from n Georgy Kantor (­2020b: ­199–​­204) has highlighted the profound changes which occurred in ­Pontus-​­Bithynia in the almost two centuries between the introduction of the law and the arrival of Pliny. The law was probably no longer enforced in the second century CE, as Pliny says that the local boulai of the Bithynian cities were attended also by citizens from other Bithynian cities. The reply of Trajan to Pliny is one of political pragmatics: he shall not expel from the boulē anyone of those ‘­who violated the law’, as this would probably generate ­conflict – ​­but he shall take care that the law is enforced in the future.23 In the case outlined by Pliny, however, the problems arising from multiple Bithynian citizenships seem to be purely limited to the level of Roman jurisdiction and not to that of local laws nor individual interest. By contrast, there is one other field in which multiple citizenships could lead to problematic situations for the recipient, namely that of financial obligations. Aelius Aristides, another citizen of several Greek cities as well as a Roman citizen, in his Fourth Sacred Speech (­50.73) informs us about the difficulties he encountered following the fact that both ­Hadrianoi – ​­his native c­ ity – ​­and Smyrna appointed him as irenarch (­police commissioner). In the speech, Aristides explains how his name came to be known by the proconsul of the Province of Asia Julius Severus and how unfair his appointment by the proconsul was. In what seems to be a desperate attempt to avoid public service, he argues that, although he was a native citizen of Hadrianoi, Hadrianoi was constituted as a polis only in 123 CE, so he argues that Smyrna, of which he was also a citizen, had priority in appointing him as officer. But the office in Hadrianoi 556

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor

was not the only problem: later in the speech, he recalls the other offices to which he had been appointed in Smyrna, (­prytanies of the council and high priesthoods), and in the city of Philadelphia (­the office of tax collector, Aristid. Or. 50.­88–​­100). As we know, office holders such as bouleutai were also expected to contribute to the public finances by means of summae honorariae, that is, sums paid by the magistrates to the city upon entering their office. So multiple citizenships, which often entailed multiple offices, could turn out to be a very expensive privilege. Between 147 and 153 CE, Aristides appeared several times before the proconsuls of Asia in order to convince them to release him from these appointments. The proconsul Severus, in particular, made Aristides fight hard for it: he had to appear before the Boule of Smyrna and defend his right to immunity from liturgies on the grounds of his activity as a rhetor (­on the application, in similar cases, of the distinction between origo and domicilium, see Fournier 2012: ­90–​­95). One last note concerns the (­m issing) discourse of multiple citizenships. Despite the fact that individuals seem to be proud of their multiple citizenships, as suggested by their mention in funerary inscriptions, in public speeches orators prefer to stress the univocal character of the relation between citizen and city. In Oration 38.41, Dio Chrysostomus exhorts the city of Nicomedia to cease discord with Nicaea on the grounds of the advantages that both cities will derive from concord (­trans. Crosby, modified, emphasis added): Well, here is another outcome of concord for you to take into account. At present you two cities have each your own men; but if you come to terms, you will each have the other’s too; and as for ­honours – ​­for a city needs these ­two – ​­set them down as doubled, and likewise the services. Someone in your city is gifted as a speaker; he will aid the Nicaeans too. There is a rich man in Nicaea; he will perform public services for you as well. What Dio envisages is a form of concord (­homonoia, Salmeri 2000) that will by itself lead each city to double its civic body by adding to it, so to say, the citizens of the other city. Beyond the rhetorical exaggeration, what Dio wants to say is that each of the two cities will become stronger, because wealthy people will act as liturgists and ­benefactors – as ​­ well as ­counsellors – ​­in both cities. It is not entirely clear whether Dio is here recommending a treaty of sympoliteia (fusion) between the two cities to effect the mutual grant of civic status to each other’s citizens. He barely dwells with the topic of shared or double citizenship. We find, in fact, no clues of a discourse of multiple citizenships as a condition to be preferred over local citizenship. Despite the spreading of cosmopolitan identities (­see now Lavan, Payne, and Weisweiler 2016), the discourse of citizenship appears to remain centred on the values of local citizenship. In Oration 41 (­To the Apameans on Concord), Dio Chrysostomus (­41.­2 –​­7) addresses the Council of Apamea, a city in which he was also a citizen, as follows (­trans. Crosby, modified, emphasis added): […] wherever I have been, not only cities in general, but even, I may say, most of those who are of equal rank with yourselves, have presented me with citizenship, with membership in the Council, and with highest honours without my asking […] If there are some who are ­ill-​­disposed toward me, it is they in whom I have the most confidence. For it is clear that they feel as they do because they believe I love my fatherland and 557

Lucia Cecchet

try to foster it in every way. Therefore, if they become convinced that I regard this city too as my fatherland and am eager to do on its behalf all in my power, they will readily change and come to love me as the other do. Now, love of native land is a thing which, above all, I do not disclaim. But I ask them whether they regard this as the mark of an unjust man and one who is base, and whether they would not care to have that kind of citizen in their state […] for whoever is inconsiderate toward his natural parents would never be a dutiful son to his parents by adoption; whereas he who cherishes those to whom he owes his being would never neglect those who have become parents as an act of grace. For nature operates without our choice, whereas grace is an act of free will. Now then, I am a citizen of each of our two cities; but while I need not feel grateful to the men of Prusa in that connection, it is only fair that I should requite you as benefactors. For it is through your kindness and generosity that I am a member of your city. However, for all who have gained citizenship by themselves there is only the benevolence inspired by the grant, and the compulsion which nature imposes is not attached to it. But as for me, I partake of both: for my grandfather, along with my mother, acquired from the Emperor of that day, who was his friend, not only Roman citizenship, but along with it citizenship of Apamea too, while my father got citizenship here from you; consequently, I am your fellow citizen by both grant and birth (­ὥστε καὶ χάριτι καὶ γένει πολίτης) […] These, then are the reasons why I happen to be well disposed toward you and have a citizen’s state of mind. Dio explains that he expects hostility against him on the part of the Apameans on the grounds that they will maintain he is more favourable towards his patris Prusa than towards any city in which he has acquired citizenship. Among the other objections he makes to this view, he points to the fact that he is an Apamean citizen not just by decree, since his maternal grandfather had received Roman citizenship by the Emperor (­probably, Claudius) and, because Apamea was a Roman colony, his grandfather became a citizen of Apamea as well, together with Dio’s mother. Dio’s father, by contrast, was awarded Apamean citizenship by the city itself. So, Dio is making the point that he is a citizen of Apamea also by birth. In what might seem a rather tortuous reasoning, Dio is here defending the value of local citizenship by birth and the exclusive relation between citizens and their patris.

Conclusions Let us now attempt to draw some conclusions. Acquired citizenships in the imperial period were not just titles of honour nor were they ‘­effective’ just because they gave to their recipients the possibility of making use of political and civic rights. Even when recipients did not make use of additional citizenship(­s) by changing their residence, by claiming property rights or accessing ruling bodies, acquired citizenships had a concrete impact on the lives of their recipients and on the relations between individuals and their communities. We see holders of multiple citizenships integrating and networking at a wider level than the polis, building political and professional careers beyond the boundary of one single city and even fighting against the issues (­mainly of a fiscal nature) that additional citizenships brought to them. However, holding multiple citizenships was a condition that individuals tended to ‘­handle with care’ in the interaction with civic communities and in public s­ elf-​­representation. Epigraphic documents are rarely exhaustively informative of all the citizenships one held, with some 558

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor

exceptions, such as the Lycian formula πολιτευόμενος δὲ ἐν ταῖς κατὰ Λυκίαν πόλεσι πάσαις and the lists of citizenships in the inscriptions of athletes. Even prominent rhetors, such as Dio Christostomus and Aelius Aristides, refrained from listing out their multiple citizenships in their speeches. When addressing a civic community, the recipient of the citizenship grant and the city awarding it seem eager to present their relation as exclusive. This shows that the horizon of the polis, which for centuries had defined political participation and civic membership, remained absolutely fundamental in the practice and discourse of citizenship also in the imperial period and despite the consolidation of cosmopolitan identities. It is perhaps a paradox that in order to ‘­transcend’ the borders of the polis, one has to have local citizenship and to reckon with the challenges and the tasks that local citizenship entails. This speaks for the complexity and importance of the notion of citizenship in the imperial period, a complexity that reaches far beyond the dichotomy between the ‘­honorific’ and ‘­actual’ dimension.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their comments. This chapter sums up, in part, the results of the Individual Fellowship granted to me by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (­DFG) for the project Multiple Citizenship in Roman Asia Minor (­­I–​­III century CE). I would like to thank, in particular, Victor Walser (­my host in Zurich) and Marietta Horster (­Head of Ancient History Department in Mainz), for their valuable feedback during discussions related to this project, as well as all the colleagues in Zurich and Mainz. My thanks go also to the expert audiences in London (­Citizenship conference 2019), Zurich (­Department research seminar 2020), and Mainz (­Citizenship conference 2021). 2 For classical Athens, see Vlassopoulos (­2007); Wijma (­2014). 3 ­Savalli-​­Lestrade (­2012); Müller (­2014, 2015); Mack (­2019); on the naturalization of entire groups, see also Günther (­2012). 4 Berthelot and Price (­2019), Frija (­2020), Kemezis (­2014); see also Raggi in this volume. 5 Isin and Wood (­1999: ­153–​­162); Lister and Pia (­2008); Karolewski (­2010). 6 However, in the imperial period, benefactors and other members of the elites could own land in the polis without necessarily holding local citizenship; on this, see Pont (­2016: 2­ 33–​­260) for the case of Iasos in Caria; cf. Kantor (­2021: 238) for other cases. 7 For his prosopography, see Kokkinia (­2000) and Reitzenstein (­2011: ­192–​­195). 8 E.g., TAM II, 15.­3 –​­4, 143.­4 –​­6, 145.­2 –​­4, 261.a.­4 –​­5 and b.­2 –​­4, 288.­5 –​­6, 422a.­4 –​­5 and b.­2 –​­3 (­restored), 423.­4 –​­6, 575.­3 –​­5, 578.­6 –​­9, 579.­6 –​­8, 667.­4 –​­5, 790.­2 –​­4, 905. III E.­8 –​­9, IV D.­2 –​­4, V A.­11–​­12, VIII B.­5 –​­6; IX A.­11–​­13, IX F ­1–​­2, XVIII D.­7–​­8, XIX F.­7–​­8, XX D.­12–​­13. 9 For the identity of the archiereis, see Reitzenstein (­2011: 96); in general on archiereis, see Zimmermann (­2007). 10 TAM II, 578: Τλ[ωέα]| καὶ Ῥοδιαπολείτην, πο[λει]|τευόμενον δὲ καὶ ἐν| τα ̣[ῖς] κατὰ Λυκίαν πόλεσι [πά]|σαις, ‘­a from Tlos and Rhodiapolis and citizen of all of the poleis of Lycia’ (­my trans.). 11 Brélaz (­2021: 262). On Roman citizenship among the Lycian elites, see also Kantor (­2020a). 12 Ῥ ̣ωμ ̣αῖον καὶ Παταρέα καὶ Ξάνθιο ̣[ν]| καὶ Μυρέα, πολειτευόμενον δὲ καὶ ἐν ταῖς κατὰ [Λυ]|κίαν π ̣όλ ̣εσι πάσαις, ‘­a Roman citizen and a citizen from Patara, Xanthos, Myra and a citizen of all of the poleis of Lycia’ (­my trans.). Kantor (­2020a) and Brélaz (­2021: 261) note that the use of the adjective Rhomaios to designate a member of a local family who had been awarded ­ lanco-​­Pérez (­2021) stresses the Roman citizenship is a peculiarity of Lycian inscriptions. B fact that the Greeks who held Roman citizenship tended to attest full Roman nomenclature (­tria nomina) only in public inscriptions, while in private inscriptions (­for instance, dedications) and in the speeches of the Second Sophistic, they tended to mention only their Greek names (­see the emblematic case of Aelius Aristides). 13 On the Lycian habit of using the adjective Rhomaios for local notables with Roman citizenship, see Brélaz (­2021: 261). Explicit references to Roman citizenship become fewer in the second half of the second century CE; see Reitzenstein (­2011: 112 and 146).

559

Lucia Cecchet 14 For an overview of the practice of public benefactions in G ­ raeco-​­Roman Asia Minor, see Zuiderhoek (­2009); on honorific practices in Roman Asia Minor, see now Heller and van Nijf (­2017). 15 TAM II 905 XV C, XVII F, XVIII G; see Wörrle (­1975) and Reitzenstein (­2011: 66). However, citizenship was not always a reward for benefactions. It could be acquired also in other ways: one of them was marriage, as in Lycia there was the right of epigamia between the cities of the koinon. This is the case, for example, of Aurelia Olympia, originally a citizen of Kalynda: she probably acquired citizenship of Lydai by marrying Caius Iulius Heliodoros, ‘­fi rst of the polis’ in Lydai (­TAM II, 146). On ­family-​­networking as a way of creating a provincial elite in Lycia, see Reitzenstein (­2011: ­120–​­128). 16 For discussion, see Larsen (­1957); Behrwald (­2000: 226); Lasagni (­2017); on Greek federalism, see now Beck and Funke (­2015), Funke (­2018); on the problem of integrating new citizens in a koinon, see Freitag (­2012). 17 For a biography, see B ­ ekker-​­Nielsen (­2008); for an interesting discussion of Dio’s selected passages concerning citizenship, see Jones (­2012). 18 TAM V, 3, 1505 = CIG 2.3426: Τ ̣(­ίτος) (?) Φλ(­άουιος) Ἀρτεμίδω ̣ρος| Κυμαῖος καὶ Ἀθη|ναῖος καὶ Φιλαδελ|φεὺς καὶ Ῥόδιος| καὶ ἄλλων πολλῶν| πόλεων πολείτης, ‘­Titus Flavius Artemidoros, a citizen of Kyme, Athens, Philadelphia, Rhodes, and of many other cities’ (­my trans.). 19 van Nijf (­2012: 189); on network theory in sport gifts, see Mann (­2018). 20 Some examples from the late second and third centuries CE: An architect from Olbia with double citizenship in Olbia and Nicomedia (­IOSPE I2 174.­12–​­13: ἀρχιτεκτονοῦντ[ος τοῦ δεῖνος, | τοῦ δεῖνος (­υἱοῦ)], Νεικομ[ηδέως] τοῦ καὶ Τομείτ[ου . . . .|). He is the architect who planned the bath of Geta and Caracalla in Olbia, so definitely a famous name; Asklepiades, a merchant, citizen of Nicomedia and Azaneitai in Phrygia (­ISM I, 356: Νεικομηδεύς| ὁ καὶ Ἀζανείτης, ἔνπο|ρος; cf. Tomis, funerary inscription of Euelpistos, citizen of Prusa and Tomis, ISM II 308: Π[ρου|σαεύς ὁ καὶ Τομεί[της). Pontianus, goldsmith and architect, in a funerary inscription of Tomis from the late second/­early third century (­ISM II, 253: χρυσοχόος Λ[…] |[ἀρχι] τεκτόνω[ν.) Tiberius Iulius Apolaustos, a pantomime actor who held citizenship in many cities of Asia Minor in an honorary inscription from Delphi (­FD III, 1, 551.­24–​­28: πολί|την Ἀντιοχέων τῶν πρὸς Δάφνην, Ἐφε|σίων, Ζβυρναίων {Σμυρναίων}, Κυζικηνῶν, Τρωαδέ|ων, Σαρδιανῶν καὶ ἄλλων πολλῶν πό|λεων). 21 The question is not uncontroversial. Fournier (­2012) discusses the problem of what court should try cases concerning naturalized citizens, whether a court from their ­mother-​­city or from the new city. He refers to the famous letter of Hadrian to Aphrodisias (­AE 2000, 1441, ­4 –​­14), as evidence for the fact that naturalized citizens were judged by local courts like native citizens. The letter, which dates to 119 CE, contains instructions about how to regulate the cases of jurisdiction by distinguishing between three groups: Aphrodisian citizens by birth, naturalized citizens, and foreign citizens (­metics). Hadrian says that, in cases concerning money owed to the public treasury, citizens by birth and naturalized citizens who are prosecuted shall be tried by a local court. However, the fact that the city had to involve the Emperor suggests that a certain uncertainty (­i f not confusion) troubled the question. Moreover, Aphrodisias was a civitas libera with considerable autonomy in the fields of administration and taxes, hence it might not have represented a typical case. Further, the case of the inscription applies specifically to the cases of money owed to the public treasury (­causae pecuniariae) and it may not have applied to other cases. For a commentary, see Reynolds and Souris (­2000); for discussion concerning citizenship(­s) and jurisdiction with reference to this inscription, see also Kantor (­2021: ­245–​­246); in general, on Rome and local jurisdiction in Asia Minor, see Kantor (­2015). 22 For discussion, Fernoux (­2012); Kantor (­2020b). 23 The participation of holders of multiple citizenships in the ruling bodies of cities is not a Bithynian peculiarity: we have evidence for holders of multiple citizenships acting as bouleutai also in other regions, above all in Lycia and in Ephesos. I limit myself to a few examples: Aurelios Mausolos was bouleutēs in both Phellos and Antiphellos (­SEG 55 1483). Tiberius Claudius Telemachos was a citizen of both Xanthos and Sidyma, and, as a lychiarch, he appointed the members of the gerousia in Sidyma of which he was also a member (­TAM II 176).

560

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor

Bibliography Ando, C. (­2016) ‘­Legal pluralism in practice’, in P.J. du Plessis, C. Ando, and K. Tuori (­eds) The Oxford handbook of Roman law and society (­Oxford) ­283–​­293 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Romans, aliens, and others in dybnamic interaction’, in Lavan and Ando (­2021) ­285–​­311 Beck, H. and Funke, P. (­eds) (­2015) Federalims in Greek antiquity (­Cambridge) Behrwald, R. (­2000) Der lykische Bund: Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Verfassung (­Bonn) ­Bekker-​­Nielsen, T. (­2008) Urban life and local politics in Roman Bithynia: the small world of Dion Chrysostomos (­Aarhus) Berthelot, K. and Price, J.J. (­eds) (­2019) In the crucible of Empire: the impact of Roman citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians (­Leuven, Paris, and Bristol) ­Blanco-​­Pérez, A. (­2021) ‘­The onomastics of Roman citizenship in the Greek East: from second Sophistic to local epigraphic loyalty’, in Lavan and Ando (­2021) 1­ 67–​­184 Blok, J. (­2017) Citizenship in classical Athens (­Cambridge) Blösel, W., Schmitz, W., Seelentag, G., and Timmer, J. (­2014) Grenzen politischer Partizipation im klassischen Griechenland (­Stuttgart) Brélaz, C. (­2021) ‘­Experiencing Roman citizenship in the Greek East during the second century CE: local contexts for a global phenomenon’, in Lavan and Ando (­2021) 2­ 55–​­284 Cecchet, L. and Busetto, A. (­eds) (­2017) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to AD 212 (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Dana, M. (­2011) Culture et mobilité dans le ­Pont-​­Euxin: approche régionale de la vie culturelle des cités grecques (­Bordeaux) ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­Pontiques et étrangers dans les cités de la mer Noire: le rôle des citoyennetés multiples dans l’essor d’une culture régionale’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) ­249–​­266 Duplouy, A. (­2018) ‘­Citizenship as performance’, in Duplouy and Brock (­2018) ­249–​­274 Duplouy, A. and Brock, R. (­eds) (­2018) Defining citizenship in archaic Greece (­Oxford) ­249–​­274 Fernoux, H.-​­L. (­2012) ‘­À propos de Pline le Jeune, Lettres, X, 1­ 14–​­115: la gestion politique de la double citoynenneté dans les cites bithyniennes’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) ­267–​­284 Fournier, J. (­2012) ‘­L’essor de la ­multi-​­citoyenneté dans l’Orient romain: problèmes juridiques et judiciaries’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) ­79–​­98 Freitag, K. (­2012) ‘­Zur Integration von Neubürgern in den griechischen Bundesstaaten in Hellenistischer ­Zeit -​­Ein Problemaufriss’, in L.M. Günther (­ed.) Migration und Bürgerrecht (­Wiesbaden) ­83–​­95 Frija, G. (­ed.) (­2020) Être citoyen romain dans le monde grec au IIe siècle de notre ère, Scripta Antica 139 (­Bordeaux) Fröhlich, P. (­2016) ‘­La citoyenneté grecque entre Aristote et les modernes’, CCG 27, ­91–​­136 Funke, P. (­2018) ‘­Poleis and koina: reshaping the world of the Greek states in Hellenistic times’, in H. Börm and N. Luraghi (­eds) The polis in the Hellenistic world (­Stuttgart) ­109–​­131 Gauthier, Ph. (­1981) ‘­La citoyenneté en Grèce et à Rome: participation et integration’, Ktema 6, ­167–​­179 ——— ​­(­1985) Les cités grecques et leurs bienfaiteurs (­­IVe-​­Ier siècle avant J.-​­C.): Contribution à l’histoire des institutions, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique, Supplément 12 (­Paris) ——— (­ ​­ 2000) ‘­Epigraphica IV. Étrangers résidents et privilèges’, RPh 74.1, ­109–​­114 Giangiulio, M. (­2017) ‘­Looking for citizenship in Archaic and Classical Greece: methodological and historical problems’, in Cecchet and Busetto (­2017) ­33–​­49 ​­2018) ‘­Oligarchies of ‘­fi xed number’ or citizen bodies in the making?’, in Duplouy and ——— (­ Brock (­2018) ­275–​­293 Günther, L.M. (­ed.) (­2012) Migration und Bürgerrecht in der Hellenistischen Welt (­Wiesbaden) ­83–​­95 Hamon, P. (­2005) ‘­Le conseil et la participation des citoyens: les mutations de la basse époque hellénistique’, in P. Fröhlich and Ch. Müller (­eds) Citoyenneté et participation à la basse époque hellénistique (­Genève) ­121–​­144 ——— (​­ ­2007) ‘­Élites dirigeantes et processus d’aristocratisation è l’époque hellénistique’, in H.L. Fernoux and C. Stein (­eds) Aristocratie antique: modèles et exemplarité sociale (­Dijon) ­79–​­100 Hansen, M.H. and Nielsen, T.H. (­2004) An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (­Oxford)

561

Lucia Cecchet Heller, A. (­2009) ‘­La cité grecque d’époque impériale: vers une société d’ordres’, Annales (­HSS) 64, ­341–​­373 Heller, A. and Pont, A.-​­V. (­eds) (­2012) Patrie d’origine et patries électives: les citoyennetés multiples dans le monde grec d’époque romaine (­Bordeaux) Heller, A. and van Nijf, O. (­eds) (­2017) The politics of honour in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Isin, E.F. and Wood, P. (­1999) Citizenship and identity (­London) Jones, Ch. P. (­2012) ‘­Joys and sorrows of multiple citizenship: the case of Dio Chrysostom’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) ­213–​­219 Kantor, G. (­2015) ‘­Greek law under the Romans’, in E.M. Harris and M. Canevaro, M. (­eds) doi.org/­ 10.1093/­ The Oxford handbook of ancient Greek law, online publication: https://­ OXFORDHB/­9780199599257.013.25 ——— ​­(­2020a) ‘­Roman citizenship among multiple citizenships in Lycia’, in G. Frija (­ed.) Être citoyen romain dans le monde grec au IIe siècle de notre ère, Scripta Antica 139 (­Bordeaux) ­95–​­116 ——— ​­(­2020b) ‘­Navigating Roman law and local privileges in ­Pontus-​­Bithynia’, in K. Czajkowski, B. Eckhardt, and M. Strothmann (­eds) Law in the Roman provinces (­Oxford) ­185–​­209 ——— ​­(­2021) ‘­Citizenships and jurisdiction: the Greek city perspective’, in Lavan and Ando (­2021) ­231–​­254 Karolewski, I.P. (­2010) Citizenship and collective identity in Europe (­London) Kemezis, A.M. (­2014) ‘­Greek ethnicity and the Second Sophistic’, in J. McInerney (­ed.) A companion to ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (­Maldon) ­390–​­404 ­ pramoas-​­Inschrift von Rhodiapolis. Euergetismus und soziale Elite in Kokkinia, Ch. (­2000) Die O Lykien (­Bonn) ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­Opramoas’ citizenships: the Lycian politeuomenos-​­formula’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) ­327–​­340 Lanckoroński, K. (­­1890–​­1892) Städte Pamphyliens und Pisidiens, vol. ­I–​­II (­Vienna) Larsen, J.A.O. (­1957) ‘­Lycia and Greek federal citizenship’, SO 33, ­5 –​­26 Lasagni, C. (­2017) ‘­Politeia in Greek federal states’, in Cecchet and Busetto (­2017) ­78–​­109 Lavan, M. and Ando, C. (­eds) (­2021) Roman and local citizenship in the long second century CE (­Oxford) Lavan, M., Payne, R.E., and Weisweiler, J. (­eds) (­2016) Cosmopolitanism and empire: universal rulers, local elites, and cultural integration in the Ancient near East and Mediterranean (­Oxford) Lister, M. and Pia, E. (­2008) Citizenship in contemporary Europe (­Edinburgh) Ma, J. (­2013) Review of Heller and Pont (­2012), Topoi 18.2, ­565–​­570 Mack, W. (­2019) ‘­Beyond potential citizenship: a network approach to understanding grants of politeia’, in M. Dana and I. ­Savalli-​­Lestrade (­eds) La cité interconnectée dans le monde ­gréco-​­romain (­ive siècle a.C.-​­ive siècle p.C.). Transferts et réseaux institutionnels, religieux et culturels aux époques hellénistique et impériale, Scripta Antiqua 18 (­Bordeaux) ­61–​­82 Mann, Ch. (­2018) ‘­Cash and crowns: a network approach to Greek athletic prizes’, in M. Canevaro, A. Erskine, B. Gray, and J. Ober (­eds) Ancient Greek history and contemporary social science (­Edinburgh) ­293–​­312 Marek, Ch. (­1993) Stadt, Ära und Territorium in ­Pontus-​­Bithynia und ­Nord-​­Galatia (­Istanbuler Forschungen 39) (­Tübingen) Marshall, A.J. (­1968) ‘­Pompey’s organization of B ­ ithynia-​­Pontus: two neglected texts’, JRS 58, ­103–​­109 Müller, Ch. (­2014) ‘(­De)­constructing politeia: reflections on citizenship and the bestowal of privileges upon foreigners in Hellenistic democracies’, Annales (­HSS) 69, ­533–​­554 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­De l’époque classique à l’époque hellénistique: la citoyenneté des Grecs, une citoyenneté en mutation? Réflexions sur la question de l’appartenance multiple’, Studi Ellenistici 29, ­355–​­369 Pont, A.-​­V. (­2016) ‘­Élites civiques et propriété foncière: les effets de l’intégration à l’empire sur une cité grecque moyenne, à partir de l’exemple d’Iasos’, in F. Lerouxel and A.-​­V. Pont (­eds) Propriétaires et citoyens dans l’Orient romain (­Bordeaux) ­233–​­260 Raggi, A (­2006) Seleuco di Rhosos. Cittadinanza e privilegi nell’Oriente greco in età t­ardo-​ ­repubblicana (­Pisa and Roma)

562

Multiple citizenship in Roman Asia Minor Reitzenstein, D. (­2011) Die lykischen Bundespriester: Repräsentation der kaiserzeitlichen Elite Lykiens, Klio Beihefte 17 (­Berlin) ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­Elite und Mehrfachbürgerrechte im lykischen Bund’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) ­153–​­174 Reynolds, J. and Souris, G. (­2000) ‘­New letters from Hadrian to Aphrodisias: trials, taxes, gladiators and an aqueduct’, JRA 13, ­5 –​­20 Robert, L. (­1937) Études Anatoliennes (­Paris) Salmeri, G. (2000) ‘Dio, Rome, and the civic life of Asia Minor’, in S. Swain (ed.) Dio Chrysostom: politics, letters, and philosophy (Oxford) 53–92 ­Savalli-​­Lestrade, I. (­2012) ‘­Collections de citoyennetés et internationalisation des élites civiques dans l’Asie Mineure hellénistique’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) 3­ 9–​­60 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973) The Roman citizenship, 2nd edn (­Oxford) Stefan, A. (­2017) ‘­The case of multiple ­citizenship-​­holders in the ­Graeco-​­Roman East’, in Cecchet and Busetto (­2017) ­110–​­131 Szántó, E. (­1892) Das griechische Bürgerrecht (­­Freiburg-­​­­i m-​­Breisgau) Tilly, C. (­1995) ‘­Citizenship, identity and social history’, International Review of Social History 40, Supplement 3, ­1–​­17 Trampedach, K. (­2009) ‘­Zwischen Alexander und Augustus: Pompeius’ Neuordnung des Ostens’, in H.-​­J. Gehrke and A. Mastrocinque (­eds) Roma e l’Oriente nel I secolo a.C. (­Hierá. Collana di studi ­storico-​­religiosi 13) (­Cosenza) ­393–​­416 van Nijf, O. (­2012) ‘­Athletes, artists and citizens in the imperial Greek city’, in Heller and Pont (­2012) ­175–​­194 Vlassopoulos, K. (­2007) ‘­Free spaces: identity, experience and democracy in classical Athens’, CQ 57, ­33–​­52 Wijma, S. (­2014) Embracing the immigrant: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion (­­5th–​­4th century BC), Historia Einzelschriften 233 (­Stuttgart) Wörrle, M. (­1975) ‘­Zum Wiederaufbau von Myra mit Hilfe des Lykiarchen Opramoas nach dem Erdbeben von 141 n. Chr.’, in J. Borchhardt (­ed.) Myra. Eine lykische Metropole in antiker und byzantinischer Zeit (­Berlin) Zimmermann, M. (­2007) ‘­Die Archiereis des Lykischen Bundes. Prosopographische Überlegungen zu den Bundespriestern’, in Ch. Schuler (­ed.) Griechische Epigraphik in Lykien: Eine Zwischenbilanz (­Wien) ­111–​­120 Zuiderhoek, A. (­2009) The politics of munificence in the Roman Empire: citizens, elites and benefactors in Asia Minor (­Cambridge)

563

39 THE GREEKS AND THE RIGHT OF ROMAN CITIZENSHIP IN THE LATE REPUBLIC Andrea Raggi

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the question of viritane grants of full Roman status (­civitas optimo iure) to free Greeks in the late Republic. A viritane citizenship grant means a bestowal of the right conferred individually on a foreigner (­i.e., on a ­non-​­Roman citizen) by the Roman state, and this notion is often expressed by the use of these adverbs (­obviously not always present) in the sources related to a single enfranchisement: nominatim, singillatim, viritim.1 The evidence comes primarily from late Republican/­early Empire authors and some first century inscriptions (­Raggi 2016: 85).2 Livy relates that in 177 BCE, among the Latins ‘­two kinds of fraud had been practised to secure individual transfers of citizenship’.3 Velleius, referring to his grandfather Minatius Magius of Aeclanum, who militarily helped the Romans during the Social War, proudly states that ‘­the Roman People abundantly repaid his loyal zeal by an individual grant of the citizenship to himself’.4 Cicero records ‘­those on whom Gn. Pompeius . . . conferred Roman citizenship individually’.5 In another passage from the pro Balbo, he informs his audience that ‘­Gaius Valerius Flaccus, as city praetor, submitted a specific proposal to the People that Calliphana of Velia should be made a Roman citizen’.6 Cicero uses the adverb again referring to citizenship grants of Mark Antony, complaining that ‘­citizenship was given no longer to one person at a time, but to whole provinces’.7 In one inscription from Celeia (­Noricum), we read that ‘­C. Iulius Vepo [was] granted the Roman citizenship individually’; another one, coming from Ammaia (­Lusitania), records that ‘­to P. Cornelius Macer of the tribe Quirina(?) the emperor Claudius conferred citizenship individually’.8 In this chapter, I will make some brief reference to citizenship grants to n ­ on-​­Roman communities as a whole, though it will not be my primary focus; I am not, however, going to consider the freed slaves,9 who were a vastly more numerous group than the enfranchised foreigners of free birth. The liberal approach towards the enfranchisement of slaves contrasts with the reluctance of the Romans in the second century BCE to grant their citizenship to ­non-​­Roman citizens, but considering that dozens of Greeks obtained Roman status through manumission (­see in general Mouritsen 2011), this Roman attitude is certainly indicative. Some decades ago, publishing his second edition of The Roman Citizenship, ­Sherwin-​ ­White (­1973: 307) claimed that in the late Republic ‘­evidently citizens of eastern Greek 564

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-46

Greeks and the right of Roman citizenship in the late Republic

cities were not expected to welcome the grant of Roman status at this time, and were not allowed the opportunity’. Following this statement, scholars have supposed a clear, though diminishing in time, reluctance to become Roman citizens among Greeks. However, at the same time, ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973: 295) emphasized the fact that ‘­before the ­long-​­resisted enfranchisement of Italy any extensive enfranchisement of ordinary provincials is improbable’. This is, in my opinion, the first point we need to stress: in this respect, the Greeks were no different from other peoples in the Romans’ view, and there is no sign in the sources that before or after the Social War, the war fought by the Italian people against Rome, any Greek citizen was barred from the grant of Roman citizenship on the ground of his foreign extraction. On the contrary, under the Republic two factors tended to reduce the value of the honour from a foreigner’s point of view, that is, the principle of the incompatibility of Roman citizenship with that of any other state (­a rule enunciated by Cicero with insistence in several passages of the speeches Pro Caecina and Pro Balbo: Cic. Caecin. 100, Balb. 28, 29, 31), and the primitive concept of postliminium, which were two legal norms in general relevant both to established Roman citizens and to new citizens. Postliminium (‘­the right of subsequent return’) was a legal procedure by which the Roman who has settled in the territory of another state, due to extenuating circumstances (­piracy or war) or of his own will, was regarded as ceasing to be a Roman citizen (­and suffered a loss of all his civil rights, i.e., capitis deminutio maxima) through the change of residence, and recovered his status as a Roman citizen only on returning to the Roman territory (­Cursi 1996). A story about postliminium regarding the Greek interpreter Menander (­­mid-​­second century BCE), who obtained citizenship by manumission, confirms that the Romans still regarded the enfranchised person as an individual liable to resume his former status if he returned to his native city: Cicero in the pro Balbo states that also by the ‘­r ight of subsequent return’ a change of citizenship can be made. For it was not without reason that, with respect to Gn. Publicius Menander, a freedman, whom in the time of our forefathers representatives of ours, when leaving for Greece, desired to have with them as interpreter, a proposal was made before the People that, if Publicius went back to his home and then returned to Rome, he should nevertheless remain a Roman citizen.10 The concepts of incompatibility and postliminium were related to the Roman notion that a man could only be a political member of the community in which he resides, and that when he leaves it he ceases to belong to it; in short, during the Republic a Roman citizen could not be a citizen of two states and was not allowed to acquire the citizenship of a foreign community, otherwise he would have lost his Roman status (­Ferrary 2005). Hence, it is not surprising that Romans in the earlier period were slow to adopt the notion of granting full Roman status, with social and political affiliation, to ­non-​­Romans residing outside the Roman state, and the rarity of individual (­viritim) grants before the age of Marius may certainly be connected to this attitude towards citizenship. However, even in this earlier period, we have reference to grants of Roman citizenship to Greeks in the sources. It is not evident at what date the Romans began to grant the full franchise to single individuals who lost their former citizenship and were obliged, as we have seen, to settle within the Roman state (­on the origins of Roman citizenship, see Howarth 2006). In 565

Andrea Raggi

any case, as is clearly stated in a passage from the pro Balbo (­Cic. Balb. 22), Rome was well aware that she needed the help of foreign individuals in the wars she fought, and that these individuals had to be rewarded. As is known, these awards ( ­praemia) were mostly bestowed ‘­for valour’ on the battlefield (­either honoris causa or virtutis causa or ob virtutem), which is a leitmotiv of the individual grants during the late Republic. For that reason, even if these grants occurred in this period with a lack of frequency, the award of citizenship to individuals in return for services rendered was a ­long-​­established practice among the Romans. We have some scanty evidence in Livy of these grants virtutis causa (­Raggi 2016). The first dates to 458 BCE, when the Romans rewarded Lucius Manilius, dictator of Tusculum, who intervened resolutely against the Sabine adventurer Appius Herdonius after the latter had seized the Capitol at Rome (­460 BCE): Livy writes that ‘­on that day Lucius Mamilius the Tusculan was granted citizenship, with the approval of all’.11 A grant of Roman citizenship to 1600 Capuan knights (­equites) is attested in 340 BCE as a reward for loyalty, in consideration of the fact that they did not join the rest of the Campanians in siding with the Latins against Rome: Livy relates that ‘­the Campanian knights received Roman citizenship, and to commemorate the occasion a bronze tablet was fastened up in the temple of Castor at Rome’.12 A similar episode occurred in 215 BCE, when 300 Capuan knights, selected to garrison cities in Sicily, were awarded Roman citizenship and enrolled as municipes of Cumae starting from the day before Capua’s defection: Livy writes that ‘­in addition, a proposal was brought before the people to grant Roman citizenship to three hundred Capuan knights who had come to Rome after loyal service in Sicily’.13 Doubts have been cast on these two episodes: in fact, the second probably refers to a renewal of the knights’ status as cives sine suffragio (‘­citizens without the right to vote’), and not to a grant of civitas optimo iure (‘­citizenship with full Roman status’), and to the transferring of their municipal rights from Capua to Cumae.14 In the course of the Second Punic War, the evidence is more conspicuous. Livy records the grant of Roman citizenship to Carthaginian deserters, who then settled in Sicily: the Syracusan Sosis and the Spaniard Moericus received civitas Romana, land, and a township in Sicily; on the other hand, the Libyphoenician Muttines was given Roman status and a house in Rome.15 We know that Muttines took the Roman names of his patron M. Valerius Laevinus, which are preserved a few years later by a Greek inscription that lists proxenoi from Delphi, where he and his sons appear as Valerii with Roman praenomina and are called ‘­Romans’.16 Now, if Muttines settled at Rome, he rates with the Greek doctor, Archagathus, son of Lysanias, who, according to Pliny the Elder, was given in 219 BCE dominium ex iure Quiritium, namely the right of ownership, which a Roman citizen acquired according to the principles of ius civile (‘­civil law’), and a shop at Rome.17 Further instances of Greek individuals who acquired Roman citizenship are the earliest priestesses of Ceres, who Cicero assures ‘­were nearly always from Neapolis or Velia, which were undoubtedly federate cities’.18 Cicero reports a recent example: ‘­G. Valerius Flaccus, as city praetor [in 96 BCE or earlier], in accordance with a resolution of the Senate, expressly submitted a proposal to the People that Calliphana of Velia should be made a Roman citizen’.19 Note the formality of the procedure by which a separate legislative act was required on each occasion to enfranchise the priestesses of Ceres recruited regularly from Greek cities of southern Italy: to serve the cult, these Greek priestesses should be Roman citizens so that they might perform rites and offer prayers to the immortal gods scientia peregrina et externa, mente domestica et civili 566

Greeks and the right of Roman citizenship in the late Republic

(‘­w ith knowledge that was foreign and from abroad, but in a spirit that was of our own home and citizenship’, says Cicero). Individual grants of the full franchise remained rare in the decades following the Second Punic War. The second century BCE was the ‘­dark age’ of the grants of Roman citizenship to foreign individuals (­Humbert 2010: 142). We need only recall the revolt and destruction of Fregellae (­125 BCE), the struggle caused by the enfranchisement bills of Gaius Gracchus (­122 BCE), the frequent abuse of imperium by Roman magistrates at the expense of individual allies (­Laffi 2001), which led the Italians, in the first instance, to the desire to be freed from this oppression rather than to gain the civitas Romana (­cf. in general Mouritsen 1998). Only between the last years of the second century and the beginning of the first century BCE do viritane grants begin to proliferate. For the first time, a single Roman imperator, Marius, assisted the individual enfranchisement of the allies in a variety of ways: awards ‘­for valour’, virtutis causa, on the battlefield, and the inclusion of a proportion of allied veterans as citizens in the colonial settlements. In 101 BCE, the Roman general offered citizenship to two cohorts of allied soldiers from Camerinum,20 ­ on-​­Romans and in 100 BCE a law (­lex Appuleia) authorized Marius to enrol three n in each of the citizen colonies to be founded whereby they would gain citizenship.21 A few decades before, in 184 BCE, through the same procedure and the patronage of the Fulvii, the poet Ennius obtained the right of Roman citizenship, being enrolled in one of the citizen colonies founded that year (­Pisaurum or Potentia).22 Yet Marius was accused of having violated the law (­Val. Max. 5.2.8), but at the same time he opened the way to change and a new approach to the issue of citizenship. For when during the Social War laws appeared that enabled Roman magistrates with imperium (­acclaimed imperatores) to confer citizenship on foreign individuals, the Greeks were included. The clue is provided by a curious story reported by Diodorus of Sicily in a passage which comes from the fragmentary book 37 of his Bibliotheca Historica. As to the dating of the passage, the reference to the Social War allows us to infer that the consul mentioned is Lucius Iulius Caesar and that the episode must be placed at the end of summer/­beginning of autumn 90 BCE (­Raggi 2015). A Cretan, a mercenary soldier, wished to betray his own part offering his services to the Roman consul. In return for them, L. Iulius Caesar offered him the right of Roman citizenship, but the Cretan surprisingly started to laugh at this offer and eventually exclaimed: ‘­In the eyes of the Cretans citizenship is j­ust-​­sounding claptrap. Gain is what we aim at . . . So I too am here now to get money. Grant your reward of citizenship to the men who are now quarrelling over that very thing, and who are purchasing with blood this empty word for which men fight’. At this remark the consul answered: ‘­If your attempt is successful, I shall give you a thousand drachmas’.23 Promotion in status as a reward for service or loyalty is the mark of the period: Roman imperatores were empowered by law to secure the loyalty of soldiers supporting their cause, be they allies or mercenaries or traitors, by making offers of the franchise ad hoc, even if these enabling laws were probably hasty war measures designed in the first place to reduce the number of insurgents. Pompeius Strabo’s decretum from Asculum Picenum clearly reveals the procedure followed when devotion was rewarded on the field of battle: thanks to his enactment, in 89 BCE a group of 30 Spanish cavalrymen 567

Andrea Raggi

received the Roman citizenship virtutis causa.24 The law enabling this was a lex Iulia, which may or may not be the same as the lex Iulia de civitate of 90 BCE (­there has been a lot of debate among scholars on the issue: see Criniti 1970), but I assume that it is the same law which the consul Lucius Iulius Caesar tried to apply in the case of the Cretan traitor mentioned above. At any rate, Greeks (­such as the poet Archias, see Deniaux 2009) were allowed to receive the right of Roman citizenship during the Social War, in the same way as other foreigners, and were therefore included as recipients in the several leges de civitate of the period, attested by the frequency of such grants made by proconsuls as rewards for service to Rome in the following period and listed by Cicero in the pro Balbo (­­Sherwin-​ ­W hite 1973: 2­ 94–​­295, with relevant sources). Further evidence comes from a bronze tablet found close to the Capitol in Rome in the sixteenth century. It contains a senatus consultum (­the ­so-​­called sc. de Asclepiade: edition in Raggi 2001) issued at Rome in 78 BCE, which grants three Greek ­sea-​­captains an astonishing number of privileges for their help to the Roman cause (­probably on behalf of Sulla) except the right of Roman citizenship. In this senatorial decree, among the provisions intended to repair every damage incurred by the three Greeks in their homeland during their absence, we may read the following privileges: dismissal from military service; a comprehensive immunity (­in Latin: immunitas omnium rerum), that is, exemption from every tax and liturgy (­munus) due to their own cities, and from every customs duty concerning the province of Asia and the island of Euboea; a threefold right to claim jurisdiction where to stand trial (­in Latin: optio fori); grant of the right to send an embassy to the Roman Senate on matters of personal interest. Similar privileges (­immunitas, optio fori) had been bestowed on those Italians or provincials who secured them as a reward for a successful prosecution of a Roman citizen in a public trial under the lex repetundarum 25 of the Gracchan age (­edition in Crawford 1996: no. 1), and who had refused the other available option, namely the right of Roman citizenship. For the lex repetundarum of 123 BCE offered a reward to successful prosecutors in an alternative form: they could receive either (­1) the Roman citizenship together with exemption from military service, or (­2) the ius provocationis (­the right of appeal), together with a dispensation both from military service and from the civic liturgies of their own cities. Possibly, this section also included a choice of jurisdiction (­optio fori) as one of the supplementary benefits alternative to the right of Roman citizenship: this appears among the rewards of the lex repetundarum preserved in the bronze tablet found at Tarentum (­edition in Crawford 1996: no. 8), which also seems to include immunitas omnium rerum. What is clear is that the same choice offered to Italians and provincials (­possibly including Greeks!) under a lex repetundarum could be also offered to individual Greeks by the Senate in the late Republic. They could either accept becoming Roman citizens or choose the option of retaining their local status paired with profitable privileges (­instead of that of acquiring the right of Roman citizenship). In other words, such men would not wish to be separated from the public life of their native cities, and they would cease to be of use to Rome if they were (­cf. Ferrary 2005). But obviously, there is another reason which is more significant and explains the prolongation of the Greek reluctance to accept entering into the Roman civic body: the circumstance that the East was not yet settled completely by the Romans due to the Mithridatic Wars. As a matter of fact, what good was having the right of Roman citizenship during the decades of these wars? The immanent risk was the isolation of 568

Greeks and the right of Roman citizenship in the late Republic

its recipient inside his own community from a political and even a social point of view. The possibilities of exploiting Roman citizenship were, indeed, very few, unless the recipient wanted to change his life completely and decided to settle at the centre of power in Rome, or at least in a local community in Italy, in order to gain access to the political life experienced by an ordinary Roman citizen. However, it seems to me that in the same decades Greek individuals coming from the Eastern Mediterranean regions figured out a way to gain access to the Roman civic body, as we will see below. But firstly, let us turn again to the leges de civitate passed during the Social War. As is well known, it was as communities and not as single individuals that the Italian allies (­socii) were eventually incorporated in the Roman state thanks to the lex Iulia de civitate of 90 BCE. In that circumstance, it is worth remembering the hesitation of Neapolis (­Naples) and Heraclea to accept Roman citizenship after the Social War (­Cic. Balb. 21), when it was finally offered to them thanks to the lex Iulia (­Deniaux 1981): once again, the Romans were willing to offer them citizenship, but some of the Greeks in southern Italy were probably more satisfied by their autonomy or local privileges. The second law, which conferred the right of Roman citizenship on the allies, the lex Plautia Papiria of 89 BCE, provided for a different procedure. In the pro Archia, where he reports a clause of the law (­Cic. Arch. 7), Cicero talks not about granting the Roman citizenship to all foederati (­citizens of towns bound to Rome by separate bilateral treaties), but to individuals alone, who having become members of a civitas foederata by ‘­adscription’ (­Heraclea in the case of the Greek poet Archias) were, nevertheless, living in another city (­Rome in the case of Archias). ‘­Adscription’ (­in Latin: adscriptio) normally describes an artificial relationship created by law (­normally used of colonies), and it is not the designation of a p ­ re-​­existing state of affairs. Under the lex Plautia Papiria of 89 BCE, the individuals adscripti to a civitas foederata, who intended to acquire the right of Roman citizenship, could make their declaration (­in Latin: professio) in front of the praetor at Rome within 60 days of the passing of the law (­Luraschi 1978). This procedure would be very strange if it intended that all those allies (­socii) who had been excluded from the offer of the right of Roman citizenship under the lex Iulia of 90 ­BCE – ​­those who had not desisted from revolt in good ­time – ​­were to make their way to the praetor at Rome: this would be out of question during a civil war. The clause makes good sense only if it refers to people resident in Rome for whom it was simple to apply to the praetor. Probably the scope was to remove an anomaly, consisting of the fact that adscripti of the type of Archias, that is, adscripti not resident in their adoptive patria, were unable to benefit from the lex Iulia of 90 BCE. Therefore, it is likely that here Cicero is quoting a special provision which affected adscripti, and not summing up the whole scope of the lex Plautia Papiria. Whatever the case, thanks to this law Archias, an eastern Greek coming from Antioch on the Orontes in Syria and adscriptus to several Greek civitates foederatae of southern Italy, secured for himself the right of Roman citizenship in 89 BCE. He was backed in this procedure, and rewarded for aiding his cultural pretensions, by L. Licinius Lucullus, a figure similar to Pompey in favouring Greek intellectuals (­see Crawford 1978) and who almost certainly, contrary to Pompey, was not enabled by law to confer on individuals the right of Roman citizenship virtutis causa. However, I believe that the case of Archias is not an isolated one. In a passage from the pro Archia,26 Cicero stresses the fact that several Greek individuals managed to enter their names in the public archives of the communities turning 569

Andrea Raggi

into municipia after the passing of the lex Iulia of 90 BCE in order to become citizens of these communities (­adscripti) and, consequently, to get Roman status. Thus, we have the case of Greeks who managed to get citizenship after the passing of the lex Iulia, probably before the ratification of the lex Plautia Papiria of 89 BCE. Let us now take into consideration another passage which comes from the letters and where Cicero is more unambiguous on the subject (­Cic. Fam. 13.30). Cicero states that a Greek from Catina in Sicily, L. Manlius Sosis, became adscriptus in Naples, a Greek city in southern Italy, before the passing of the lex Iulia of 90 BCE, and thus acquired the right of Roman citizenship thanks to his ‘­adscription’. In this way, Sosis is another example of a Greek individual who obtained Roman status thanks to his adscriptio in an Italian Greek community before the passing of the lex Plautia Papiria of 89 BCE. Epigraphic sources prove that a sort of movement of Greek individuals took place from eastern Mediterranean regions to Italy in the decades before the Social War: they found themselves in the ‘­r ight place’ at the precise moment when the Roman state eventually consented to confer the right of citizenship on all the inhabitants of the communities in Italy. Let us have a quick look at these inscriptions. There are several Greek traders from the island of Delos but native to eastern Greek communities in Syria or Cyprus, for example, who acquired the local citizenship of the Greek civitates foederatae in southern Italy, in other words, became adscripti (­Deniaux 2012). These are the cases of Philostratus from Ascalon (­ca. 140/­35 BCE), mentioned in 18 inscriptions in Delos as a banker, who became a citizen of Neapolis between 106 and 97 BCE (­cf. ID 1724, dated 97/­96 BCE). His son is attested as a citizen of Neapolis in 93/­92 BCE (­ID 1934). Likewise, Simalos son of Timarchos from Salamis of Cyprus became a citizen of Tarentum between 116 and 103 BCE (­ID 1534; cf. ID 1755, 100 BCE). Again, his son is attested as a citizen of Tarentum in 103/­102 BCE (­ID 1927). Other individuals coming from Syria are attested as citizens of Neapolis (­ID 1931, 94/­93 BCE) or Heraclea (­ID 1689). Like Manlius Sosis, these eastern Greeks then succeeded in obtaining the right of Roman citizenship thanks to the lex Iulia de civitate of 90 BCE. Are we sure that they unwittingly took the decision to become adscripti to communities in southern Italy? According to ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973: ­306–​­307, with relevant sources), the first group of Greek externs to acquire the right of Roman citizenship would seem to be some Sicilian gentry, enfranchised for services to the Sullan cause during the Sicilian operations of the young Pompey in 82 BCE; we know their names from the lengthy account of Sicilian affairs in Cicero’s Verrines. Pompey the Great, like his father Pompeius Strabo, rewarded his devotees with grants of citizenship: he had certainly learnt from his father how to increase his clientela. But we have seen that the story is different: some years before, there were certainly several Greeks coming from the eastern regions of the Mediterranean who succeeded in acquiring Roman citizenship (­there are other hints to this in Cicero’ pro Archia and pro Balbo). Moreover, it might be expected that Pompey, who had been liberal to Sicilian Greeks in his early years, would initiate the enfranchisement of eastern Greeks on a generous scale during his six years of action ­in – ​­and organization ­of – ​­the Hellenistic East. Yet, the sources record that he enfranchised only his protégé and historian Theophanes of Mytilene, and this is what is constantly stated in modern literature (­­Sherwin-​­White 1973: 308). Pompeii emerge in the inscriptions coming from the eastern Roman provinces but are certainly rare (­Holtheide 1983: 3­ 5–​­40), and much caution is necessary. 570

Greeks and the right of Roman citizenship in the late Republic

Pompey was sparing in the enfranchisement of eastern Greeks: he initiated the process, though on no generous scale. But what about one of his forerunners in the East, Sulla? I close this chapter by quoting an inscription found at Ephesus and revised by Werner Eck some decades ago with some new interesting readings (­1997: ­110–​­113). Eck made the hypothesis that the new Roman citizen Menodorus, mentioned in this funerary inscription, bore the nomen Cornelius and that the author of the award of citizenship could possibly be Sulla. However, I recently demonstrated that the nomen of Menodorus was Iulius and that he was enfranchised by the triumvir Octavian (­Raggi 2020).27 The inhabitants of the G ­ reek-​­speaking provinces had to wait for Caesar and the triumviral period to see an increase in the grants of the right of Roman citizenship to their fellow natives, whereas in Italy the Greeks had long since been accepted into the Roman civic body.

Notes 1 Cf. the lemma in Paul. Fest. p ­ . 519 Lindsay: viritim dicitur dari, quod datur per singulos viros (‘­it is said to give individually what is given through separate men’). 2 All translations of literary sources are Loeb (­slightly modified), the others are mine. 3 Livy 41.8.9: genera autem fraudis duo mutandae viritim civitatis inducta erant. 4 Vell. Pat. 2.16.3: cuius illi pietati plenam populus Romanus gratiam rettulit ipsum viritim civitate donando. 5 Cic. Balb. 19: ii quos Cn. Pompeius … singillatim civitate donaverit. 6 Cic. Balb. 55: C. Valerium Flaccum praetorem urbanum nominatim ad populum de Calliphana Veliense, ut ea civis Romana esset, tulisse. 7 Cic. Phil. 2.92: civitas non iam singillatim, sed provinciis totis dabatur. 8 CIL III 5232: C. Iulius Vepo donatus civitate Romana viritim; CIL II 159: P. Cornelio Q(­uirina?) Macro viritim a divo Claudio civitate donato. 9 On freed slaves, see the contributions by Harris and Zanovello; Filonik, Plastow, and ­Zelnick-Abramovitz in this volume. 10 Cic. Balb. 28: etiam postliminio potest civitatis fieri mutatio. Neque enim sine causa de Cn. Publicio Menandro, libertino homine, quem apud maiores legati nostri in Graeciam proficiscentes interpretem secum habere voluerunt, ad populum latum est ut is Publicius, si domum revenisset et inde Romam redisset, ne minus civis esset. 11 Livy 3.29.6: eo die L. Mamilio Tusculano adprobantibus cunctis ciuitas data est. Cf. Cato fr. 25 Cornell (­Origines, book I): nam de omni Tusculana civitate soli Lucii Mamilii beneficium gratum fuit (‘­for of all the Tusculan community, only the service rendered by Lucius Mamilius was welcome’). 12 Livy 8.11.16: equitibus Campanis civitas Romana data, monumentoque ut esset, aeneam tabulam in aede Castoris Romae fixerunt. 13 Livy 23.31.10: et de trecentis equitibus Campanis qui in Sicilia cum fide stipendiis emeritis Romam venerant latum ad populum ut cives Romani essent. 14 Humbert (­1978: ­172–​­176) accepts the historicity of this report and takes it to mean that the equites became full Roman citizens. ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973: ­39–​­41) accepts the reference but assumes that it refers to a grant of civitas sine suffragio. See also Fronda (­2010: 1­ 04–​­105, ­113–​ ­114, 118, 245) and recently Gallo (­2013: ­230–​­235) for a more satisfactory interpretation of the episode. 15 Livy 26.21.­11–​­13 (­211 BCE; on the role played by Sosis and Moericus in capturing Syracuse, see Livy 26.21.­9 –​­10) and 27.5.­6 –​­7 (­210 BCE); on Muttines, who at a certain point switched sides, see also Livy 25.40.5 ff., 26.21.15, 26.40.3 ff., 27.8.18. 16 Syll.3 585, ll. ­86–​­88 (­190/­89 BCE): Μάαρκος Ὀαλ[ ̣έ]ριος ὁ Μοττόνης καὶ τοὶ υἱοὶ αὐτοῦ ∏όπλιος, Γάϊος, Μάαρκος, Κόιντος, Ῥωμαῖοι (‘­Marcus Valerius Muttines and his sons Publius, Gaius, Marcus, Quintus, Romans’); cf. Livy 38.41.­12–​­14. Proxenoi were citizens appointed by other poleis to host and protect their citizens.

571

Andrea Raggi 17 Plin. HN 29.12: primum e medicis venisse Romam Peloponneso Archagathum Lysaniae filium …, eique ius Quiritium datum et tabernam in compito Acilio emptam ob id publice (‘­the first physician to come to Rome was Archagathus, son of Lysanias, who migrated from the Peloponnesus . . . , and citizen rights were given him, and a surgery at the ­cross-​­way of Acilius was bought with public money for his own use’). 18 Cic. Balb. 55: video fere aut Neapolitanas aut Velienses fuisse, foederatarum sine dubio civitatum. 19 Cic. Balb. 55: de senatus sententia C. Valerium Flaccum praetorem urbanum nominatim ad populum de Calliphana Veliense, ut ea civis Romana esset, tulisse; cf. Val. Max. 1.1.1. 20 Cic. Balb. 46; Val. Max. 5.2.8; Plut. Mar. 28. Cf. Cuff (­1975). 21 Cic. Balb. 48; Mouritsen (­1998: 90). On Marius, see now Santangelo (­2016). 22 Cic. Brut. 79, Arch. 22, De or. 3.168; cf. Livy 39.54.16 on the foundation of colonies in that year, with Piper (­1987: ­39–​­40). 23 Diod. Sic. 37.18: ∏ ολιτεία, φησί, παρὰ Κρησὶν εὐφημούμενός ἐστι λῆρος. τοξεύομεν γὰρ ἡμεῖς ἐπὶ τὸ κέρδος …. διὸ κἀγὼ νῦν ἀργυρίου χάριν ἥκω· τὰ δὲ τῆς πολιτείας τίμια τοῖς περὶ ταύτης νῦν διαφερομένοις παραχώρει, οἵτινες αἵματος ἀγοράζουσι λῆρον περιμάχητον.  … Γενομένης ἡμῖν τῆς ἐπιβολῆς χαρίσομαί σοι χιλίας δραχμάς. 24 CIL I2 709 = ILS 8888 = ILLRP 515, ll. 1­ –​­3: [C]n(­aeus) Pompeius Sex(­ti) [ f(­ilius) imperator] v ̣irtutis caussa equites Hispanos ceives  [Romanos fecit in castr]eis  apud Asculum  … ex lege Iulia. 25 A law establishing a court against the crime of extortion committed by provincial governors. 26 Cic. Arch. 10: Quid? Cum ceteri non modo post civitatem datam sed etiam post legem Papiam aliquo modo in eorum municipiorum tabulas inrepserunt  … (‘­W hat? When other men, who not only after citizenship had been given, but even after the passing of the Papian law, crept somehow or other into the registers of those municipalities …’). 27 [C(­aius) Iu]lius Alexidis f(­ilius) Cor(­nelia) Menodor(­us) / praef(­ectus) fabr(­u m), tr(­ibunus) mil(­ itum) primus ex i(­i)­s qui in Asia habitant / [et c(­ivitate) R(­omana) don]ati sunt. Monimentum factum ex testamento, arbitratu Corneliae Namnis uxoris. / H(­oc) m(­onumentum) h(­eredes) n(­ on) s(­equetur) / praeter Corneliam Namnem quoi inferri licebit.

Bibliography Crawford, M.H. (­ed.) (­1996) Roman statutes (­London) Crawford, M.H. (­1978) ‘­Greek intellectuals and the Roman aristocracy in the first century B.C.’, in P.D.A. Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker (­eds) Imperialism in the ancient world (­Cambridge) ­193–​­207 Criniti, N. (­1970) L’epigrafe di Asculum di Gn. Pompeo Strabone (­Milano) Cuff, P.J. (­1975) ‘­Two cohorts from “­Camerinum”’, in B. Levick (­ed.) The ancient historian and his materials: essays in honour of C.E. Stevens on his seventieth birthday (­Farnborough) ­75–​­91 Cursi, M.F. (­1996) La struttura del ‘­postliminium’ nella repubblica e nel principato (­Napoli) Deniaux, É. (­1981) ‘“­Civitate donati”: Naples, Héraclée, Côme’, Ktema 6, ­133–​­141 ——— ​­(­2009) ‘­Le poète Archias à Rome: une citoyenneté contestée’, in S. Conti and B. Scardigli (­eds) Stranieri a Roma. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (­Certosa di Pontignano, 2­ 2–​ 2­ 3 maggio 2006) (­A ncona) ­49–​­57 ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­Les Orientaux et la citoyenneté des cités d’Italie: l’exemple d’Archias et des Italiens de Délos (­fi n du IIe et début du Ier siècle av. J.-​­C.)’, in B. Legras (­ed.) Transferts culturels et droits dans le monde grec et hellénistique. Actes du colloque international (­Reims, ­14–​­17 mai 2008) (­Paris) ­419–​­431 Eck, W. (­1997) ‘­Zu kleinasiatischen Inschriften (­Ephesos; Museum Bursa)’, ZPE 117, ­107–​­116 Ferrary, J.-​­L. (­2005) ‘­Les Grecs des cités et l’obtention de la “­civitas Romana”’, in P. Fröhlich and Ch. Müller (­eds) Citoyenneté et participation à la basse époque hellénistique. Actes de la table ronde des 22 et 23 mai 2004, Paris, BNF (­Genève) ­51–​­75 Fronda, M.P. (­2010) Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy during the Second Punic War (­Cambridge) Gallo, A. (­2013) ‘­Sulla “­lex de equitibus Campanis” (­Liv. 23,31,­10–​­11)’, in M. Chelotti and M. Silvestrini (­eds) Epigrafia e territorio. Politica e società. Temi di antichità romane IX (­Bari) ­227–​­237

572

Greeks and the right of Roman citizenship in the late Republic Holtheide, B. (­1983) Römische Bürgerrechtspolitik und römische Neubürger in der Provinz Asia (­Freiburg) Howarth, R.S. (­2006) The origins of Roman citizenship (­Lewiston, NY) Humbert, M. (­1978) Municipium et civitas sine suffragio: l’organisation de la conquête jusqu’à la guerre sociale (­Rome) ——— ​­(­2010) ‘­Le “­status civitatis”. Identité et identification du “­civis Romanus”’, in A. Corbino, M. Humbert and G. Negri (­eds) Homo, caput, persona: la costruzione giuridica dell’identità nell’esperienza romana dall’epoca di Plauto a Ulpiano (­Pavia) ­139–​­173 Laffi, U. (­2001) ‘­Il sistema di alleanze italico’, in Id., Studi di storia romana e di diritto (­Roma) ­17–​­44 Luraschi, G. (­1978) ‘­Sulle “­leges de civitate” (­Iulia, Calpurnia, Plautia Papiria)’, SDHI 44, ­321–​­370 Mouritsen, H. (­1998) Italian unification: a study in ancient and modern historiography (­London) ——— ​­(­2011) The freedman in the Roman world (­Cambridge) Piper, D. (­1987) ‘­Latins and the Roman citizenship in Roman colonies. Livy 34, 42, ­5 –​­6 revisited’, Historia 36, ­38–​­50 Raggi, A. (­2001) ‘“­Senatus consultum de Asclepiade Clazomenio sociisque”’, ZPE 135, ­73–​­116. ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Un episodio della guerra sociale in Diodoro Siculo: il console Giulio Cesare e il mercenario cretese’, Studi Ellenistici 29, ­305–​­320 ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Le concessioni di cittadinanza “­v iritim” prima della Guerra Sociale’, in M. Aberson et  al. (­eds) L’Italia centrale e la creazione di una ‘­koiné’ culturale? I percorsi della ‘­romanizzazione’, ‘­ E pluribus unum?’. L’Italie, de la diversité préromaine à l’unité augustéenne, vol. II (­Bern) ­85–​­96 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘“[C. Iu]lius Menodorus”, il primo tribuno militare dalla provincia d’Asia’, Tyche 35, ­157–​­170 Santangelo, F. (­2016) Marius (­London) ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973) The Roman citizenshi­p, 2nd edn (Oxford)

573

PART VI

Rome and the Roman world

40 POLITICS AND CITIZENSHIP IN ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC SOCIETIES Guy Bradley

Introduction Citizenship in ancient Italy was a constantly evolving concept, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The rights conveyed by citizenship changed out of all recognition from the archaic period to the late Republic, and some citizen bodies also expanded enormously in scale as Rome conquered and incorporated other states in Italy. In Etruscan and Italic societies, citizenship varied in its definition and development by the time of the Roman conquest, which mostly took place in the late fourth to the early third century BCE, but it became increasingly homogenized under Roman control. This process ended with the Social War (91–ca. 88 BCE), when all previously independent Italian communities were incorporated into the Roman state, and their inhabitants became citizens of Rome. Discussing politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies thus requires looking at an enormously varied and rapidly changing situation from around the sixth to the first century BCE. The flexibility of Roman citizenship was one of the keys to the expansion of Rome. It evolved out of the Italian environment, with Rome having close connections to and, in some cases, shared citizen relations with Etruscan and Italic societies. Concepts of citizenship in Italy were also subject to considerable influence from the cities of Magna Graecia (­southern Italy and Sicily), Carthage, and the Western Mediterranean, where distinctive ideas of community life were circulating. The comparison with the situation in Greece helps to show the importance of understanding the wider context out of which Roman citizenship emerged (­cf. Bradley 2020): whilst the citizenship of Athens is the best known of the c­ ity-​­states in Greece, it was by no means the dominant model and was part of a wider fabric of belonging and status in Greece. In fact, recent work on mobility has indicated that all Mediterranean cities were probably open to outsiders, and most would have had ­non-​­citizens present in varying proportions. Some did not fully integrate incomers into the state, restricting citizenship such as in classical Athens, which had a substantial population of metics. Whether this was a typical situation is unclear, as we need broader comparative investigation into ­Mediterranean-​­wide citizenship practices. We can, however, be sure that city populations within Italy were characterized by mobility and fluidity. The state of DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-48

577

Guy Bradley

our evidence means that this movement cannot be quantified and is only visible sporadically in our sources, such as individuals attested migrating in the archaic period, ­large-​­scale movement to Latin colonies occasionally recorded in our literary sources, and Roman laws in the last two centuries BCE attempting (­but probably failing) to impose restrictions on these movements, whether to Rome or elsewhere. But on the basis of recent research, we can hypothesize a model in which mobility was both reciprocal and extensive across most central Italian cities and peoples (­Bourdin 2012; Bradley 2015; Isayev 2017). Recent work has also helped refine our definitions of citizenship, which is now understood in broader terms than its simple legal definition to encompass a shared lifestyle (­particularly performative aspects such as dining), participation in rituals, and customs (­cf. Filonik, Plastow, and ­Zelnick-​­Abramovitz in this volume on the five categories proposed by John K. Davies). Our modern term comes from the Latin civis (­citizen) and civitas (­citizenship; ­city-​­state). Its equivalent in Italic and Etruscan is uncertain, although ­spur-​­ and its derivatives seem to denote a c­ ity-​­state in Etruscan, and ­tota-​­ that in Italic societies (­Bourdin 2012: 2­ 29–​­240; Hall 2016: 117). The close relationship of civis to civitas implies that it only relates to urban, c­ ity-​­based societies, but this may be misleading. It is an important issue as many Italic societies such as the Samnites, Lucanians, and the peoples of the central Appennines did not organize themselves around ­city-​­states until the period after the Roman conquest, and yet probably had defined citizen bodies.

The construction of citizenship in archaic Rome and Italy In Rome, the rights and institutions of citizenship were closely connected to the reforms traditionally introduced by king Servius Tullius in the sixth century BCE, and to the Struggle of the Orders between patricians and plebeians in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The Servian reforms mark an important, if somewhat obscure step in the evolution of Roman citizenship. According to our sources, they were instigated in the ­m id-​­sixth century BCE by the ­republican-​­minded monarch Servius Tullius, and saw the reorganization of the citizen body into two new groups: geographical tribus (­tribes), which formed the basis of the comitia tributa, and centuriae (­c enturies), which were the basis of the five wealth classes of the comitia centuriata. There were four urban tribes and multiple rural tribes. The original number of centuriae is uncertain, but reconstructions envisage at least 40. There has been extensive scholarly debate on how far this system dates back in the monarchic period (­before 509 BCE). We know that tribes already existed by 495 BCE when Livy records their expansion to 21 (­Livy 2.21.7; Bradley 2020: 312). We also know that proletarii and assidui (­those who were part of, or excluded from, the centuries and classes) already existed by 450 BCE (­XII Tables I, 4; Cornell 1995: ­288–​­292; Bradley 2020: ­127–​­131). Whilst the system is probably originally monarchic, it underwent important modifications in the early Republic with the introduction of tributum (­tax) and stipendium (­army pay) in the late fifth century BCE. There were several key features to these new institutions. They combined voting rights with citizen burdens (­m ilitary service and taxation), calibrated to give the rich more political power. They were also flexible, allowing the censors to incorporate into the citizen body anyone who had taken up residence in Roman territory through the regular reassessment of all citizens in the census (­ideally five yearly, but conducted more sporadically). 578

Politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies

This system, with its ‘­archaic rationality’ in exploiting and rewarding its citizens, was clearly integrated with military service (­A mpolo 1988; Bradley 2020: 108). The comitia centuriata, the assembly of the citizens in centuries, was used to draw up its members army service, and took place outside the city boundaries in the Campus Martius. The system also had economic ramifications. As Roman Roth has pointed out, paying out stipendium led to a need for censors to assess people’s property assets and quaestors to cover the financial aspects.1 There was, therefore, an economic nexus between the use of a treasury and citizenship, which went together from the late fifth century. Citizenship in the ancient Mediterranean was also connected to religion. This is clear from the participation of the whole Athenian community in the Panathenaia at Athens, both citizens and metics, and male and female, for instance including a procession and dance of the armed youth of the city. Participation in civic festivals was key to the way that status as a citizen was defined (­and ­non-​­citizens were excluded).2 Citizenship in Italy was also defined by involvement in festivals and rituals. The census at Rome had strong religious associations, and participation in festivals like the Ludi Romani must have helped build a powerful sense of Roman identity. A highly complex programme of festivals was governed by the Roman calendar, a document which probably dates back to the monarchic period. Foreigners were explicitly excluded from some cults, such as that of Hercules at the Ara Maxima. Some cults were explicitly conducted Graeco ritu, that is, according to Greek rites, accentuating the contrast between Roman and foreign through different types of ritual. From a modern nationalist perspective, it is easy to assume that citizenship is a privilege in the ancient world. But there is plenty of evidence that in ancient Italy, just as in the modern world, it could be just as much coercive as beneficial (­cf. Scott 1998 for an anarchist perspective on modern states). The balance of benefits and duties associated with Roman citizenship were clearly weighted in favour of the latter in the archaic period. The struggle of the plebs for greater citizen rights from the fifth century BCE was fundamental in shaping the Roman citizenship of the later Republic, and it probably drew on ideas from Athens and more democratic regimes in Magna Graecia. The plebeian movement emerged in the early fifth century, resisting some of the more onerous duties associated with being a citizen such as the compulsory levy for military service, and working to augment its meagre benefits (­no execution without trial, less harsh punishments than slaves). In doing so, they show the complexity of the forces shaping early citizenship, which was nothing like the ­sought-​­after status known to the inhabitants of imperial Rome. A major plebeian complaint according to the literary sources concerned debt. Whilst some scholars have argued that this is an illegitimate retrojection of conditions of the first century BCE, the contemporary evidence of the XII Tables of 450 BCE supports the picture. They show that citizens could be subject to severe forms of debt bondage, and if they were unable to pay could be sold (­into slavery) across the Tiber in Etruria (­XII Tables III, ­1–​­7; Crawford 1996). If I am correct to argue that the first two Secessions of the Plebs (­494 and 450 BCE) were an implicit threat by the plebs to move away from Rome to join enemies like the Volsci, then the plebeian movement helped to clarify the minimum requirements of citizenship which would enable them to stay: the First Secession in 494 BCE resulted in the establishment of plebeian tribunes, who could protect the plebs; the Second in 450 overturned the tyrannical Decemvirate (­Bradley 2020: ­245–​­254). The movement in Rome may well have provided a model for underclasses in other Italian societies, although the evidence is very fragmentary. Citizens were also defined against the ‘­other’. Holding citizenship 579

Guy Bradley

was the opposite of slavery, an institution that it is reasonable to assume existed from the start of the historical era in Rome and in Etruscan cities. Citizens were also defined against outsiders, such as in Latin the peregrinus (­an outsider, foreigner, someone who moves) and incola (­resident alien), or the Etruscan etera/­etru (­dependents, outsiders) (­Isayev 2020: ­69–​­73). In investigating this topic, we know much more about Rome than about Etruscan and Italic societies. Given the close relationship between these societies, we tend to work out from the Roman evidence towards Italian cultures. This is not unproblematic. The literary evidence of Greek and Roman writers is much later, and (­particularly in Greek authors) there is a distorting emphasis on the positive role of Roman ‘­generosity’ with citizenship. Looking back on the early city from the hindsight of empire, our sources stress the continual openness of Roman citizenship as a positive thing. For instance, Dionysius of Halicarnassus writes the following about the Roman treatment of Tusculum in the aftermath of its defeat in 381 BCE: Believing that the one thing that holds together all who belong to one another by reason either of kinship or friendship is the equal sharing of their blessings, they decided to grant citizenship to the vanquished, giving them a part in everything in which the ­native-​­born Romans shared. Thereby they took a very different view from that held by those who laid claim to the leadership of Greece, whether Athenians or Lacedaemonians. (­Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 14.6, trans. Cary; cf. 1.9.4) Our sources often fail to appreciate just how far citizenship had changed over the course of the Republic. We can use Greek and Roman writers for Etruscan and Italic societies, but must remember they provide an outside perspective. Epigraphy is particularly useful here, especially the prolific epigraphic output of the Etruscan cities. This provides contemporary evidence from an internal perspective and so can act as a corrective to the literary evidence. But it is often frustratingly sporadic in its attention to political status, and many Etruscan texts cannot be understood with certainty. Nevertheless, epigraphic evidence does help us identify immigrants in Etruria because Etruscan was a uniquely ­non-­​­­Indo-​­European language in Italy, and thus allows us to track the immigration of ­p eople speaking Indo-European languages from Latium and other Italic areas. Overall, it is important to appreciate that many of our deductions must continue to remain hypothetical and uncertain at this stage of research.

Etruscan and Italic societies In Etruscan and Italic societies, as in Rome, the origins of citizenship concepts and structures probably go back to the beginnings of urbanization, which in Etruria starts in the early Iron Age, around the ninth to the eighth centuries BCE. Further developments are likely to have occurred in the archaic period (­ca. ­600–​­ca. 450 BCE), the era of the Servian reforms at Rome, when the cities of the Tyrrhenian coast underwent a process of developed urbanization, with extensive building of monumental structures like temples and fortifications. This process affected inland and Adriatic districts at different times: areas such as Umbria and Apulia on the periphery of highly developed zones such as south Etruria and Latium experienced monumental urbanization from around the fourth century BCE onwards; in more mountainous zones, such as the 580

Politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies

central Appennines, Samnium, and Lucania, the onset of this process was generally later, and it was restricted to the third or second centuries BCE (­for this characterization of Italy in terms of three zones, see Torelli 1999: ch. 1). During the rapid conquest of Italy by Rome from the fourth to the early third century BCE, Roman citizenship was extended to many ­non-​­Roman communities. The conquest proceeded in two major stages: first the subjection of the southernmost part of Etruria, Latium, and Campania by 338 BCE, followed by central, southern, and northern Italy south of the Appennines from 338 to 264 BCE. Around 30 cities were made Latin colonies, others (­generally those closer to Rome) were absorbed into the Roman state, and the majority became allies of Rome. Regarded by later writers as generous, some of these extensions came after defeats, involved restricted citizen rights, and were clearly unwelcome. For instance, in 306 BCE, the Hernici of Anagnia ‘­and such others that had revolted against the Romans were admitted to citizenship without the right of voting’ (­Livy 9.43). In 304 BCE, the Aequi complained of Rome intimidating them into becoming Roman citizens, noting that those Hernici who had been able to choose decided to remain independent. Vast swathes of the Sabines conquered in 290 BCE seem to have been given Roman citizenship without the vote, and only later on elevated to full citizen status. This complex patchwork of allied, Latin, and Roman districts was dissolved in the Social War, when many of the allied communities went to war against Rome (­including cities in Roman territory and the vast majority of Latin colonies). The war resulted in the distribution of Roman citizenship to all the peoples of peninsular Italy south of the Po river, which they held alongside citizenship of their own municipium (­town) (­see Roth in this volume).

Etruria The best evidence for citizen communities comes from Etruria. Our literary sources presume that citizenship existed in Etruscan cities by at least the ­m id-​­seventh century BCE. Demaratus of Corinth is said to have become a citizen of Tarquinia when he fled his hometown in 657 BCE, and a generation later his son Lucumo ‘­easily obtained citizenship’ at Rome (­Cic. Re­p. 2.34; cf. Polyb. 6.11a.7). These reports may simply reflect the expectations of the sources’ own times. But there is also contemporary evidence for the existence of politically organized ­city-​­states like that in Rome from many Etruscan centres. The sources record single rulers in Etruscan cities in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, who must be types of kings or dictators. These include Lars Porsenna from Clusium, who besieged Rome in the late sixth century BCE, and Lars Tolumnius, named by Livy as the ruler of Veii in the late fifth century (­Livy 2.9; 5.1). At some point around 500 BCE, Caere had single rulers. A leader called Thefarie Velianas is attested on the bilingual Pyrgi tablets, a record of the dedication of a temple in the port of Caere written in Phoenician and Etruscan in ca. ­500–​­480 BCE. He is named as a zilath (­supreme magistrate) in the Etruscan version of the text and a melek (­k ing) in the third year of his reign in the Phoenician version. This may mean that he occupied a position someway in between lifetime kingship and an annual magistracy, perhaps an ‘­elected’ dictator of some form. Another king of Caere called Orgolnius was said to have been expelled from power by a member of the Spurinna family in Tarquinia, according to the early imperial ‘­Elogia Tarquiniensia’. There is no fixed date for this episode, but a point somewhere in the fifth century seems likely (­Torelli 1975). 581

Guy Bradley

These single rulers are replaced by, or alternate with, republican regimes led by magistrates. A wide range of magistracies are attested epigraphically, although the full cursus is known only from Tarquinia. Some of these attestations are very early, showing that republican regimes do not necessarily always postdate monarchies. For instance, the chief magistrate of Etruscan republics, the zilath, is attested epigraphically as far back as the early sixth century BCE in Rubiera in the Po Valley. The subordinate magistrate known as the maru is attested in Tragliatella (­Caere) in the ­m id-​­sixth century. These magistracies become the mainstay of most Etruscan governments in the fourth and third centuries (­Tagliamonte 2017). They imply the existence of a citizen body which elects the officials, probably on an annual pattern as in Rome. The Etruscan term for such a c­ ity-​­state seems to have been spur-​­ (­Bourdin 2012: ­229–​­240; Hall 2016: 117). Such magistrates will have been drawn from the Etruscan elite. The nature of the lower echelons of Etruscan society has long been a topic of considerable debate. Up until the 1970s, it was widely considered that the mass of Etruscan society consisted of dependents, who made up a type of ­semi-​­servile underclass visible only when they rebelled against their masters. But more recently, scholars have questioned this view, pointing out that Dionysius’s use of the word penestai (­normally used of the s­emi-​ ­servile dependent population of Thessaly) to describe Etruscan dependents is not as significant as it has been claimed, and that other evidence for such a s­ emi-​­servile underclass is weak (­Benelli 2013). Instead, there is likely to have been a substantial middle class of citizens that served in the military from the archaic era and occupied the type of middling size houses we can see in planned cities such as Marzabotto (­A mann 2017). We also have references to the lower classes undertaking military service, although we should not assume that this necessarily brought with it the right to vote (­Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 9.5.4; Livy 9. 36; Amann 2017). The most famous rebellions came in Arretium (­302 BCE) and Volsinii (­264 BCE), both of which required the intervention of Roman armies. Although our sources describe the rebels at Volsinii as ‘­slaves’, they are probably best seen as oppressed citizen groups like the plebeians whose rising power threatened the elite’s control of these cities (­Benelli 2013). These elites then called on their allies to reinstate them (­in this case from Rome), a process which may also have occurred somewhat earlier when the Elogia Tarquiniensia record Aulus Spurinna from Tarquinia defeating a (­presumably slave) revolt in Arretium (­Torelli 1975). Dependents, nevertheless, must have existed in Etruscan society. Slaves and freed persons are attested from an early date. Slaves are represented in paintings in the Golini tomb from Volsinii (­fourth century BCE), although they are rare in Etruscan epigraphy. In contrast, freed persons, lautni, are relatively well attested in Etruria. Whilst they were technically free, only their children could become citizens (­Amann 2017). They first feature on an inscription from Campo della Fiera outside Volsinii in the beginning of the fifth century, and then occur commonly in epigraphy from the third to first centuries BCE, particularly in the northern Etruscan cities (­Benelli 2013: 448). In the later period, they tend to be of external (­Greek or other) origin, and their presence is probably a sign of land distribution in this era (­Benelli 2013: 557). Citizen status in Etruscan cities is implied by the use of the binominal naming system prevalent from the ­m id-​­seventh century BCE, coincident with the beginnings of widespread urbanization. It was used by free adult citizens, whether male or female. Lower status immigrants into Etruria typically formed a new gentilicial name, often from their place of origin (­for example, Tite Latine [Titus Latinus in Latin] at Veii 582

Politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies

in the seventh century BCE). Higher status immigrants are often visible in the elite through gentilicial names derived from ­non-​­Etruscan contexts, such as Larth Telicles (­Etruscan Larth and Greek Telekles) or Rutile Hipukrate (­Latin Rutilius and Greek Hippokrates) in Tarquinii in the late seventh century BCE (­Bourdin 2012). Migrants such as Hipukrate who were buried in prominent tombs are likely to have received citizenship in their Etruscan place of residence, just as happened to Demaratus, the father of Tarquinius Priscus (­Cic. Re­p. 2.19): burial in city cemeteries tends to be reserved for citizens in the ancient world. Many of these communities must have also included foreigners who adopted citizenship in their new place of residence. Nomenclature reveals a high level of migration into Etruscan society from Italic areas, particularly Latium and Umbria. In cemeteries such as the Crocefisso del Tufo in Volsinii, approximately 40% of the buried were originally outsiders (­or the descendants of incomers), and a similar picture is evident from Tarquinia and Caere (­Benelli 2013). This influx is still evident in Etruscan epigraphy in the fourth and third centuries BCE (­Bourdin 2012).

Italic societies Our evidence for political organization and citizenship in Italic societies, whilst not as rich as for Etruria, suggests similar types of polities. There is some limited evidence for kingship in Italic societies, but by the time epigraphy comes to be more commonly used, from the third century onwards, most communities where political institutions are attested seem to be republics, with elected magistrates. This implies that even if monarchic regimes had once been common, they had been replaced by republican or ­quasi-​­republican governments by the fifth or fourth century BCE. As mentioned, Italic zones varied in levels of urbanization. Some regions such as Campania, Umbria, and Apulia were largely made up of ­c ity-​­states from the fifth or fourth century BCE. Other areas such as Samnium and Lucania consisted of more dispersed forms of settlement, with some fortified centres such as Monte Vairano or Monte Pallano, large ‘­r ural’ sanctuaries such as Pietrabbondante (­Samnium) or Rossano di Vaglio (­Lucania), and villages. Despite the lack of developed urbanism, these societies had some features of state organization by the time of the Roman conquest, as they were able to raise substantial armies, sometimes under unified regional command, to resist Rome. All these societies generally consisted of an elite who normally provided the cavalry for the army, and an independent (­and presumably politically active) middling class that served in the heavy infantry. These communities must also have had some form of dependent class as in Etruria, whether slaves or other forms of underclass, although these are naturally very hard to document. Livy records a revolt by ‘­plebs’ at Ardea in Latium in 443, where they were joined by ‘­a great number of artisans’ (­m ultitudine opificium) in plundering the estates of the rich (­Livy 4.9.­8 –​­13). Class divisions are also apparent in cities across Italy in the Second Punic War, where the poor often sought support against the rich from the Carthaginians (­Fronda 2010). It is reasonable to assume that such divisions were widespread (­particularly as they crop up again in the Social War), although their rigidity is uncertain, and it is not clear how far the dependent class in Italic societies had become emancipated in the manner of the Roman plebs. In terms of Italic epigraphy, there is considerable evidence for the type of political institutions that we see in Rome and Etruria: magistracies, assemblies, and divisions of the populace. The community was commonly called a tota/­touta, or one of its 583

Guy Bradley

derivatives, which seems to imply a community tied together by laws (­perhaps equivalent to a civitas). Sacrifices recorded in the great ritual inscription of the Iguvine Tables, for instance, were dedicated to populper totar iiouinar, totaper iiouina, ‘for the people of the state of Iguvium, for the state of Iguvium’ (­Tab. Ig. VIIa ­21–​­22; Devoto 1977: 51; Bourdin 2012: 240–266). This conception is found throughout Italic societies. The term for the supreme magistrate in Oscan communities was meddix tuticus (­meddíss túvtiks in Oscan): túvtíks is derived from touta, and can be translated as publicus (­public in Latin). Within these communities we find types of organization familiar from Rome. At Rome, there were said to have been thirty curiae, grouped into three tribes, tribus, created by Romulus after the foundation of the city. We have no certain date for their introduction, although they must have been connected to urbanistic developments in the eighth and seventh centuries. Our sources imply that the curiae were less flexible in accommodating newcomers than the system set up in the later Servian constitution, which must have superseded it, as membership depended on belonging to specific family groups. We know that the tribus, tribe, was a classification in Umbrian Iguvium and in Etruscan Mantua, a town in northern Italy (­Bradley 2020: ­108–​­109). It is not entirely clear that the Italic tribus is the same thing as the Latin tribus: trifu at Iguvium seems to be the whole community in its territorial sense, and so there was only one tribe for the whole group. The tribus Sapina that Livy refers to in northern Umbria might be similar (­Livy 31.2; 33.37). In contrast, Mantua was said to have been made up of three tribes, which were divided into four curiae each. Scholars have argued that this early Etruscan foundation, therefore, seems much closer to a putative Romulean organization of Rome, and have tended to see this in evolutionary terms with Roman and Etruscan society being more urbanized and advanced than Italic societies. But this is surely too simplistic given the complexity of Iguvine society revealed by the Iguvine Tables, and the main point to take away is the striking correspondence between the organization of all three societies: Roman, Etruscan, and Italic. Iguvium as well as Mantua had curiae, here called dekvias (­similar to Latin decuriae) (­Devoto 1977: 10). Devoto identified 12 such groups mentioned in the Tables, with two groups of five each headed by two ‘­quincurial families’. He also notes that there were two types of assembly of citizens in Iguvium, sacral and military (­Devoto 1977: 9). Other institutions connected to citizenship are attested in the epigraphy of Italic societies. Some Oscan communities have a kenzsur in a subordinate role to the meddix (­see Bourdin 2012: 1024–1031 for the inscriptions). This office seems to equate to the Latin censor and may share a similar role in defining membership of the citizen body for military, political, and taxation purposes. It became particularly important in the third and second centuries BCE as Rome, through the formula togatorum (‘­the list of those wearing the toga’, i.e., those owing troops), demanded military contingents regularly from Italic allies. Another office is the tríbuf plífríks found at Teanum. This is thought to be the Oscan equivalent of the tribune of the plebs at Rome, and it implies a similar conception of citizenship here (­Rix Si 3; cf. Crawford 2011, I: 5­ 32–​­533 for an alternative interpretation). Although we know little of the detail, the shared identity of citizens must have been confirmed in Italic communities by participation in festivals and rituals of the sort documented on the Agnone Tablet and the Iguvine Tables. The ceremony of the lustratio in Iguvium (­a ritual associated with the census) is particularly interesting, as foreigners are ritually banished, implying that this was a formal defining of the citizen body (­Bradley 2000: 181). 584

Politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies

The operation of citizenship in Republican Italy When we turn to look at how citizenship operated in ancient Italy, we need to consider Etruscan, Italic, and Roman societies as interlinked. Various themes can be highlighted. The first striking feature of citizenship in ancient Italy is its flexibility. Interchange amongst the cities and peoples of Italy is very evident, both in terms of physical mobility of citizens and also in terms of the sharing of ideas about citizenship and constitutions. It is likely that all these communities were influenced by wider Mediterranean ideas of citizenship, particularly those from Greek cities. We know, for instance, that there were Italic followers of Pythagoras, according to Aristoxenus, a Greek philosopher writing around 335 BCE. He records Pythagoras as having followers amongst the ‘­Lucanians, Messapians, the Peucetians, and the Romans’ (­fr. 17 Wehrli). In addition, a statue was set up to Pythagoras as the ‘­wisest of the Greeks’ in the Comitium in Rome around 300 BCE (­Plin. HN 34.26). Cicero believed that Pythagoran ideas of the equality of citizens were influential in the early Roman Republic, and they may have played a role in the political reforms of the late fourth century BCE (­Tusc. 4; cf. Humm 2014: 47). We also know that the Samnites, Lucanians, and other ­non-​­Hellenic peoples of southern Italy were strongly influenced by Greek culture and ideas (­Scopacasa 2015). This may explain the prevalence of isopoliteia and other types of shared citizenships, that we find between the Etruscans and Carthaginians in the sixth and fifth centuries, Rome and Caere in the fourth century, and others in ancient Italy (­Bourdin 2012: ­548–​­549; Isayev 2017: 323). As we have seen, the historic and ­long-​­term openness of Roman citizenship is stressed in many of our sources, such as Cicero (­Re­p. 2.34; Balb. 29), Livy (­4.3), and Claudius’ speech to the Senate recorded in the ­so-​­called Table of Lyons, a bronze tablet found at Lugdunum in Gaul and inscribed with the transcript of a speech given in 48 CE by the emperor Claudius (­ILS 212). Although this is a broad generalization, and obscures eras when Roman citizenship was more closely withheld, such as in the period from 133 to 91 BCE, it seems essentially correct, and must imply that this openness is replicated elsewhere in Italian communities (­one cannot really operate without the other). Philip V of Macedon in his letter to Larissa claims that this helps to explain Roman success in sending out many colonies (­Syll.3 543). Reciprocal movement between Rome and the cities of Etruria is presupposed by the Latins present in Etruscan epigraphy, and the Etruscan inscriptions found in Latium (­Bradley 2017). This links in with what our sources say about widespread intermarriage between Rome and the Latins, Rome and the Etruscan cities, and Greek communities such as Pithecusae, Syracuse, Morgantina and their Italic neighbours.3 Although women were excluded from political or military activity, in other ways they were treated as full citizens. They were counted in the Roman census and had the right of holding property in their name in early Rome and Etruria (­Amann 2017). Marriage was thus an important way of integrating newcomers into these societies. This reciprocal freedom of movement is also apparent from our sources on early Rome. For instance, Lucumo (­the later king Tarquinius Priscus) arrived in Rome and was ‘­admitted to citizenship’ (­Polyb. 6.11a.7; Cic. Re­p.  2.35). The same happens for Attus Clausus and his clients: the whole clan of the Claudii were said to have been received into the state, their leader gaining patrician status and his followers all admitted to citizenship with a grant of land (­Livy 2.16: 504 BCE). Coriolanus moved in the other direction, leaving Rome voluntarily and leading a Volscian army against it (­Livy 2.39). Our sources have similar examples of outsiders leading armies from other ethnic 585

Guy Bradley

groups. Quintus Anicius Praenestinus (­elected aedile in 304 BCE) had previously been an enemy of Rome according to Pliny (­HN 33.6). Aristodemus, from Cumae, led the Aricians of Latium against an Etruscan army from Clusium in 504 BCE. Vitruvius Vaccus resided in Rome yet led the Privinates. Oblacus (­or Oplax) Volsiniensis (­from Volsinii) led the Ferentans, of Ferento, Etruria (­or of the Frentani in Samnium), against Pyrrhus in the battle of Heraclea (­Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 19.12; 29.12; Flor. 1.18.7; Plut. Pyrrh. 16). We also know that Oscan speakers infiltrated and gained control of Campanian cities like Capua and Greek colonies such as Paestum in the fifth century BCE, becoming part of the citizen body.4 In other cases, our sources record examples of exile, where Roman citizenship was lost. In some of these cases, such as Camillus in Ardea in 390 BCE, the exile is explicitly attested as gaining citizenship of their new place of residence (­Livy 5.44.1; Bradley 2020: 234). What is striking here is the relative facility of movement between cities and (­presumably) citizenships. Another important feature of citizenship in ancient Italy is change over time. The major categories were transformed by Roman expansion, which subjected other communities to conquest and alliances (­see Roth in this volume). Some communities were given Roman citizenship without the vote, others full citizenship. Roman citizenship was imposed and in some cases resisted. Latin citizenship, taken by colonists in Latin colonies, was open to many of the defeated or allied peoples of Italy (­Bradley 2006: ­171–​ ­177). The key watershed is the Social War, fought between 91 and 88 BCE over the question of whether Roman citizenship should be extended to all Italians. This had a major influence on our sources. By this time, Roman citizenship had become a privileged status, which is not at all apparent in the period before 200 BCE. The massive change introduced here means that all the later literary sources are inherently anachronistic and tend to obscure the hegemonic aspects of the spread of Roman citizenship before this point. The Social War clearly demonstrates that the Italic peoples understood the importance of citizenship as a concept, even if it was a less articulated status in their own communities than in Rome. Our modern (­and implicitly nationalist) perspective might suggest that citizenship operates in tension with these types of movement in ancient Italy. It might be seen as an attempt to get people to commit to one place, and to clarify their duties and privileges in doing so. But this may be misleading. If the institution of citizenship operated in a similar way in Italic areas as in Rome, it would have been able to accommodate high levels of migration and population movement through periodic reinventions of the citizen body, which was continuously dynamic. We also need to emphasize the gradual widening of the distinction between citizens and more dependent statuses. The mass of poor citizens was initially little protected from near slave-like conditions by citizenship: the plebs in Rome were subject to nexum (­debt bondage), and the Etruscan underclass resorted to rebellion in Arretium and Volsinii in the late fourth and the early third century BCE. Citizenship of any Italian city in the archaic period was probably a long way from the ­sought-​­after status of Roman citizenship at the time of the Social War. For the Roman plebs, we might say that citizenship was not fully meaningful until debt bondage was formally abolished in 326 BCE, which coincided with the enormous expansion of chattel slavery. It is also evident that a more flexible idea of citizenship existed in Italy from an early period, which continued to influence conceptions later on. Multiple or interchangeable ­ id-​­Republican pecitizenships were probably normal for the elite in the archaic and m riods. As Rome conquered other cities from the fourth century BCE, so multiple layers 586

Politics and citizenship in Etruscan and Italic societies

of citizenship were built up, with inhabitants of towns in Roman territory, municipia, holding both local and Roman citizenship. This idea was gradually becoming more common in the Mediterranean from the age of Alexander, as it became increasingly dominated by empires like Macedon, Rome, and Carthage. The concept was clearly articulated in the municipalization of ­ex-​­allied towns after the Social War, when they all became municipia in the way that towns in Roman territory had already been before the war. As a result, all citizens in Italy gained dual citizenship, ‘­duae patriae’ in Cicero’s formulation (­Leg. 2.5; Bispham 2007: ­161–​­204).

Conclusion In conclusion, citizenship in ancient Italy was a fluid rather than a fixed concept. It was refined over time, and it was intimately linked to the historical circumstances of the particular era. The Roman system clearly reflects the broader Italian environment with which it was closely linked. Most Italian communities seem to have ended up by the time of the conquest with republican systems of rule based on the participation of a high proportion of the population as citizens. Citizenship of most communities was probably limited in the rights that it conveyed, permeable, and subject to considerable population mobility at all social levels. The system was subject to widespread change with the Social War, which emerges as a watershed moment in the history of both Italy and the Roman Empire. Recovering the situation before the Social War is challenging but not impossible with the evidence we have to hand. Our literary sources generally provide an anachronistic perspective profoundly transformed by the impact of the war, and only dimly perceive the situation beforehand, for instance, in terms of antiquarian memories of other citizenship categories and arrangements such as the citizenship without the vote of Caere, or the shared citizenship of Rome and the Latins. Nevertheless, when used with care these sources can be read alongside the more contemporary source of Italic and Etruscan epigraphy, which, although often more difficult to understand than we would like, provides a rich vein of material.

Abbreviations Rix = Rix, H. (­2002) Sabellische Texte (­Heidelberg)

Notes 1 In an unpublished paper in a workshop in the series Debating Early Rome (­2021). 2 Hdt. 5.55 on how the assassination of Hippias stemmed from the humiliation of Harmodius’ family after his younger sister was rejected by the tyrant as a kanēphoros (­basket carrier) in the festival. 3 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 6.1.2 (­495 BCE); further references in Bradley (­2020: ­222–​­224); for Greek cities, see Saltini Semerari (­2015). 4 Livy 4.37; Aristoxenus fr. 124 Wehrli, in Ath. 14.632a; Torelli (­1999: 36); Bradley (­2020: 291).

Bibliography Amann, P. (­2017) ‘­Society’, in A. Naso (­ed.) Etruscology (­Berlin) ­179–​­194 Ampolo, C. (­1988) ‘­La città riformata e l’organizzazione centuriata. Lo spazio, il tempo, il sacro nella nuova realtà urbana’, in A. Momigliano and A. Schiavone (­eds) Storia di Roma, vol. I: Roma in Italia (­Turin) ­203–​­239

587

Guy Bradley Benelli, E. (­2013) ‘­Slavery and manumission’, in J. MacIntosh Turfa (­ed.) The Etruscan world (­London) ­447–​­456 Bispham, E. (­2007) From Asculum to Actium: the municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus (­Oxford) Bourdin, S. (­2012) Les peuples de l’Italie préromaine: identités, territoires et relations ­inter-​ ­ethniques en Italie centrale et septentrionale (­Rome) Bradley, G. (­2000) Ancient Umbria: state, culture and identity from the Iron Age to the Augustan era (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2006) ‘­Colonization and identity in Republican Italy’, in G.J. Bradley and J.-​­P. Wilson (­eds) Greek and Roman colonization: origins, ideologies and interactions (­Swansea) ­161–​­187 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Investigating aristocracy in archaic Rome and central Italy: social mobility, ideology and cultural influences’, in N. Fisher and H. van Wees (­eds) ‘­Aristocracy’ in antiquity: redefining Greek and Roman elites (­Swansea) ­85–​­124 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­Mobility and secession in the early Roman Republic’, in J. Armstrong and J.H. Richardson (­eds) Politics and power in in early Rome 509–264 BCE, Antichthon 51, special issue (­Cambridge) ­149–​­171 ——— ​­(­2020) Early Rome to 290 BC: the beginnings of the city and the rise of the Republic, The Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome (­Edinburgh) Cornell, T.J. (­1995) The beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (­c . ­1000–​­264 BCE) (­London) Crawford, M.H. (­ed.) (­1996) Roman Statutes, BICS Supplement 64 (­London) ——— ​­(­2011) Imagines Italicae: a corpus of Italic inscriptions, 3 vols., BICS supplement 110 (­London) Devoto, G. (­1977) Le tavole di Gubbio (­Florence) Fronda, M.P. (­2010) Between Roma and Carthage: southern Italy during the Second Punic War (­Cambridge) Hall, J.R. (­2016) The Tyrrhenian way of war: war, social power, and the state in central Italy (­c . ­9 00–​­343 BCE), diss. Cardiff (­unpublished) Humm, M. (­2014) ‘­Numa and Pythagoras: the life and death of a myth’, in J.H. Richardson and F. Santangelo (­e ds) The Roman historical tradition: regal and Republican Rome (­Oxford) ­35–​­51 Isayev, E. (­2017) Migration, mobility and place in ancient Italy (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­Elusive migrants of ancient Italy’, in J. Clackson, P. James, K. McDonald, L. Tagliapietra, and N. Zair (­eds) Migration, mobility and language contact in and around the ancient Mediterranean (­Cambridge) ­53–​­74 Saltini Semerari, G. (­2015) ‘­A gendered perspective on ­Greek-​­Indigenous intermarriage’, in L. Donnelan, V. Nizzo, and G.-​­J. Burgers (­eds) Conceptualizing early colonisation (­Brussels) ­77–​­88 Scopacasa, R. (­2015) Ancient Samnium: settlement, culture and identity between history and archaeology (­Oxford) Scott, J.C. (­1998) Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (­New Haven, CT and London) Tagliamonte, G. (­2017) ‘­Political organization and magistrates’, in A. Naso (­ed.) Etruscology (­Boston, MA and Berlin) ­121–​­142 Torelli, M. (­1975) Elogia Tarquiniensia (­Florence) ——— ​­(­1999) Tota Italia: essays in the cultural formation of Roman Italy (­Oxford)

588

41 ROME’S ITALIAN EXPANSION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROMAN CITIZENSHIP (­­387–​­91 BCE) Roman Roth Introduction The cue to the following discussion comes from a usual suspect. In the year 54 BCE, M. Tullius Cicero successfully defended the curule aedile (­magistrate in charge of public building and festivals) Cn. Plancius on a charge of contravening the lex Licinia de sodaliciis  – ​­a law intended to curb electoral corruption through collusion within individual tribus (­citizen tribes)  – ​­in the previous year. The prosecutor was M. Iuventius Laterensis, one of the losing candidates in the elections to the aedileship, and member of an established senatorial family.1 By contrast, Plancius was a homo nouus (‘­New Man’, i.e., from outside the established nobility) like Cicero himself. As in other speeches, the orator exploited this particular social distance between the two litigating parties to make the point that candidates from old families could by no means expect automatically to beat New Men in the elections. The latter worked especially hard to gain the electorate’s favours, while the former might give in to the temptation of resting on their families’ laurels (­Cic. Planc. 12). Yet in Plancius’ case, Cicero took this line of argument considerably further: as a citizen from the ancient municipium of Tusculum, Laterensis was mistaken to assume that his fellow tribesmen would enthusiastically have supported him at the ballot. On the contrary, Cicero argued, Plancius had the advantage of coming from a praefectura (­Atina), a citizen community of inferior status and negligible political pedigree, whose inhabitants were still keen to help their fellow men succeed in the elections (­Cic. Planc. ­18–​­21).2 By the time Cicero made this statement, Atina had probably obtained municipal status or was at least on the verge of doing so, as is evident from what Cicero said in the speech itself.3 In addition, Cicero was probably being economical with the truth in respect of the number of senior magistrates whom the town had produced before Plancius’ own election (­Farney 2007: 46; Karataş 2019: ­185–​­186, with detailed ref.). Yet, these clearly deliberate anachronisms turned out to be effective in court and are furthermore of considerable interest to the present discussion. Cicero deployed this line of argument precisely to heighten the contrast which he wished to draw between the two opponents’ respective origins, and since praefecturae still existed in some parts of central Italy in 54 BCE, this must have been plausible to the judges.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-49

589

Roman Roth

But why did such a distinction exist, and on what basis could Cicero claim that those citizens who lived in praefecturae were inferior to municipal men, let alone the urban elite? At least part of the answer lies in the aspect of Roman citizenship which I address in this chapter, that is, its geographical extension and resultant transformation from the aftermath of the conquest of Veii in 396 BCE to the Social War (­­91–​­89 BCE) as the event that led to the enfranchisement of all Italians. The approach which I take here moves away from the conventional view that is based on the existence of seemingly stable institutional categories of citizen settlement, such as praefecturae and municipia throughout the period of Rome’s conquest of Italy. Conversely, my analysis proceeds in the reverse order. As my point of departure, I take the observation that citizenship was one of several key institutional mechanisms through which Roman expansion was consolidated in Italy by tying peripheral areas to the community’s centre. As part of this process, Roman citizenship and its institutional properties were themselves subjected to considerable change during the period that is discussed in this chapter. To illustrate this, the two main parts of my chapter examine the geographical dimension of citizenship as an institution in the context of Rome’s Italian empire. In what follows, the progressive spread of Roman citizenship across the Apennine peninsula will be considered as a dynamic process of institutionalization that, rather than operating in precociously defined and static categories, unfolded while the character of Roman hegemony changed over the course of three centuries. This is best shown by following the development of the rural tribus as the key units of institutional integration between individual ­citizens – ​­outside the city of ­Rome – ​­and the Roman community. Of particular interest in this respect is the gradual transformation of these rural tribus from geographically circumscribed groups on conquered ­land – ​­the subject of the first part of this ­chapter – ​­to the more abstractly defined institutions which are discussed in Part Two. As a result of this gradual change, rural tribus of Roman citizens had begun to be distributed across the Italian peninsula by the end of the third century BCE. This happened regardless of the geographical confines in which the tribus had originally been defined, down to (­and including) the time when the last two of the 31 rural ­tribes – ​­the Quirina and Velina – ​­were created in 241 BCE. Concomitantly, this development prompted several measures by which the relationship between tribus and (­­property-​­based) centuriae – ​­as the other main form of a Roman citizen’s institutional ­integration – became ​­ more systematically defined than before. As I propose in my concluding discussion, this complex institutional transformation had significant ramifications for the nature of Rome’s hegemony in Italy, most important among which was ultimately the distribution of the newly established citizen territories among the 31 rural tribus in the aftermath of the Social War. Yet even leading up to this moment, the geographically wider distribution of citizens had brought about a further increase in the spatial intermixing of Roman citizen settlements and communities of other statuses in Italy throughout the second century BC (­Taylor 2013 [1960]; cf. Roth 2019, with detailed ref.). As an integral part of my analysis, therefore, I also consider some of the alternatives to Roman citizenship, which existed in respect of people who had either migrated or become members of new types of communities in the wake of the Roman conquest. Latin colonial status and the rather obscure civitas sine suffragio constituted the two principal alternatives, while there were also significant areas of intersection between these institutional configurations and Roman citizenship. These intersections were conducive to producing considerable tensions between Romans and other Italians during the second century BCE but, at the same time, 590

Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of citizenship

they also facilitated the eventual emergence of the municipal structures that were quite rapidly put into place across the Apennine peninsula between the end of the Social War and the reign of Augustus, that is, during the time immediately after the period with which this chapter is concerned.

Locating the Roman citizenry, I: ­387–​­241 BCE The new rural tribes of 387 BCE Rome’s conquest of Veii in 396 BC constitutes a key date for the following discussion since it is for the aftermath of this event that our sources present for the first time some of the basic structural features of Rome’s subsequent expansion across Italy in a historically plausible fashion. The narrative of the conquest and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the episode of the Gallic Sack, of course, provide two outstanding examples of Livian Kunstprosa in the first instance (­Ogilvie 1965). Yet the creation of four new citizen tribes ​­ the (­387 BCE) – ​­as well as the foundation of two colonies at Nepet and ­Sutrium – in territory of the defeated city and of her erstwhile allies must be accepted as structural facts.5 It should not go without mention that the groundwork for this type of extension of Roman citizenship may have been laid by several institutional developments which we can extract from Livy’s narrative for the second half of the preceding century. Thus, the creation of the censorship in 443 ­BC  – ​­remarkably not a year in which a census was ­taken – ​­might point to an intervention by the leaders of the forming ­city-​­state that aimed to curb the influence which the patrician clans held over the control of Rome’s manpower, in both military and other respects. For while the census – ​­the regular division of the citizenry into ­property-​­based ­classes – ​­had been held since the regal period and continued during the first decades of the young Republic, it is easy to see how this may have been controlled by powerful leaders of patrician gentes who appear to have been dominant, especially in the rural tribus of Rome’s territory. A regularized centralization of this process in the hands of a magisterial collegium – ​­who might also have been charged with conducting the ritual purification and ­re-​­establishment (­lustrum) of the citizen body at this early ­stage – ​­may have added a measure of institutionalizing the relationship between the centre of the community and its citizens and taken it away from the agency of family clans. It is certainly no coincidence that censorial involvement is securely attested on later occasions (­from 332 BC) on which new citizen tribes were established, and it might indirectly be adduced in earlier cases, too. I return to this point further below. In a similar vein, the introduction of the tributum – ​­an ad hoc tax raised to pay for military ­expenditure – ​­as a reaction to the city’s lengthy involvement in the war with Veii nearly 40 years later (­406 BC) points in a similar direction (­Livy 4.59.11; Bradley 2019: 294). For, no matter what physical form this early tax took, it signalled a decisive step which the community’s leadership took towards the mustering of its citizens’ material resources towards territorial expansion.6 We may be justified in seeing both of these measures as related, because it seems unlikely that the tributum as a ­state-­​­­tax – ​­as ​­ have been raised without at least a partially opposed to a feudal corvée vel sim. – could ­community-​­based control of manpower being in place.7 It should moreover be noted that the levying of such a tax effectively depended on there being a sufficiently large number of Roman ­citizens – ​­in the majority ­plebeians – ​­whose property qualified them 591

Roman Roth

to pay it. Without unduly invoking the benefit of hindsight, it is thus possible to see that the systematic extension of citizen territory (­ager Romanus) was at least indirectly a result of the institutional measures that had been taken earlier to strengthen the authority of the community leadership over its citizen body. The names of the four new tribus that were established in Veii’s former territory in 387 BCE constitute another important piece of evidence that lends additional support to my view of an increasingly institutionalized link between the community’s leadership and its territorially expanding membership. Unlike many (­10 out of 17) rural tribes of the archaic period, which had borne the names of patrician gentes, those that were created in the former territory of ­Veii – ​­the Arnensis, Sabatina, Stellatina, ​­ and ­Tromentina – were named according to geographical criteria, and this remained the rule until the formation of the last two tribes (­Q uirina and Velina) in 241 BCE.8 This fits in with the information provided by both literary and archaeological sources, according to which the expansion of Rome and other central Italian c­ ity-​­states was primarily driven by the agency of powerful clan leaders until the late sixth century BCE, with traces of the practice continuing for at least another century.9 Thus, the leadership of the Roman community could integrate those kin groups by recognizing their claim to a specific geographical area which could be extended, as the celebrated case of the gens Fabia might demonstrate, at the cost of neighbouring polities.10 At the same time, this mode of extension by integration also meant that the community’s authority over its new citizens remained somewhat indirect since it had to be mediated by the leadership of the territorially based kinship groups. This, in turn, brought with it the risk of centrifugal ­fragmentation – ​­which is what seems to have occurred in several South Etruscan ­city-­​­­states – ​­unless the leadership of the Roman community was able to check the authority at c­ lan-​­level by introducing increasingly complex forms of institutionalization.11 The creation of four new tribes in 387 BCE, therefore, constitutes a prime example of such institutional innovation since the citizens appear to have been given land not on account of kinship but by the agency of the Roman community leadership. This holds true even if the latter may have had its hand forced by popular agitation on this as well as on later occasions (­see below). By contrast, the dominant role of elite clans in earlier instances of territorial expansion is furthermore suggested by two somewhat confused passages in which Livy reports a heated debate in the assembly over the distribution of land in the territory of Bola in 416 BCE. The issues at stake in these public altercations concerned the extent to which plebeians should be entitled to own land in conquered areas independently from patrician claims.12 Based on the observations made above in this section, it is permissible to conjecture that, by the late 380s, such disputes had resulted in mechanisms being gradually put in place through which the community leadership was able to distribute land directly to its citizens and probably for them to own it, too. To put a different slant on it, these mechanisms may reflect institutionalizing efforts on the part of that leadership to avoid the community’s being atomized through centrifugal dynamics on the part of elite groups who in their majority but not exclusively claimed patrician status. At the same time, Livy’s account of the events leading up to the establishment of the four new tribes also points to an element of popular agitation. Thus, Roman citizens had begun to move to the former Veientine territory where many of them had settled by 388 BCE, some of them even in the buildings of the deserted Etruscan city (­Livy 6.4.5). According to Livy, these citizens were forced to return to Rome by 592

Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of citizenship

senatorial decree in the same year, where they subsequently took part in the rebuilding of the city following the Gallic Sack. Reading Livy’s account against the grain, however, it seems more probable that the Gallic attack had led to a partial dispersal of the Roman population into the countryside. While a partial recall of those citizens might have taken place, it is also probable that many of them were inscribed in the four new tribus when these were created in the following year, together with the ‘­new citizens’ who had formerly belonged to the defeated polities of Veii, Capena, and Falerii.13 In this way, the citizens’ unauthorized desertion and resettlement was retrospectively sanctioned at the institutional level by virtue of their being included in one of the new tribes. Indirectly, this spontaneous migration might also point to a crisis of the patricians’ authority in reaction to their failure to fend off the Gallic threat from the community. Despite the difficulties that undeniably exist with the details of Livy’s narrative here, we can still identify in this account certain key features that are also present in later, more reliably documented cases in which new tribus were established until 241 BCE. The first of these is that citizen tribes were territorially defined and usually coincided with all or a part of recently conquered enemy territory, even if ten or more years might intervene between the conquest and formal establishment of a designated tribe in the area. As a corollary, second, all or parts of the populations that occupied conquered land were included in the new tribes, usually together with Roman beneficiaries of viritane assignation.14 In this way, Rome’s former enemies were able to obtain her citizenship, meaning that territorial expansion by conquest and the increase of the Roman community by means of institutional integration went ­hand-­​­­in-​­glove. At her neighbours’ expense, Rome gained in both land and manpower, which almost certainly meant that the citizenship was not universally welcome among all its recipients.

The citizen municipia of 338 BCE Although the next two new tribes, the Poblilia and Pomptina, were established in 358 ­BCE – ​­created in order to enfranchise the inhabitants of two areas that had been conquered several decades ­before – ​­by far the single most significant moment in Rome’s Italian expansion came in 338 BCE in the wake of the victory over the Latin League.15 Two specific aspects of this comprehensive territorial settlement are particularly relevant to this analysis of Roman citizenship in the context of territorial expansion. These are, first, the incorporation of substantive polities as municipia and, second, the fact that Livy mentions for the first time that the censors were involved in the inscription of citizens into the new tribes as these were being established for several territories six years after Rome’s victory over the Latins. Of the defeated Latin states, some were incorporated in the ager Romanus, while others remained independent and yet others obtained the notoriously obscure status of civitates sine suffragio (­see also below). The first group of polities is of interest here since new rural tribus had not previously included the urban centres of subjected communities.16 Two possible, earlier exceptions are the poorly attested case of ­Capena – ​­located in the tribus Stellatina – ​­as well as Tusculum which the tradition held to have been incorporated as the first municipium, possibly in 381 BCE when the town surrendered to Rome.17 Yet in this last case, the fact that Tusculum sided with the Latins in the Latin revolt and ended up being r­ e-​­incorporated as part of the settlement of 338 BCE raises legitimate questions about the soundness of the traditional account (­Cornell 1995: 593

Roman Roth

­323–​­324). A possible solution to this problem is that the town’s early incorporation may have been unstable and temporary, eventually being revoked by those among the local elite who were opposed to the idea.18 Therefore, 338 BCE remains the secure starting point for the lasting integration of f­ ully-​­fledged polities into the Roman citizen body. The creation of these municipia was of great importance to the subsequent history of Roman citizenship in Italy. By providing a means by which existing polities could be integrated into structures of Roman citizenship without having to give up their own institutions, local elites were more likely to acquiesce. While this is not to diminish the extent to which this initial municipalization was part of Rome’s imperial expansion and thus not necessarily welcomed by everyone in those towns, it is remarkable, nonetheless, that no subsequent, serious opposition to Rome’s hegemony is recorded among the new municipia.19 It is furthermore significant that the towns in question soon produced homines noui, local aristocrats who migrated to Rome where they achieved high political office and thus integration with the Roman nobility. The first of these New Men was L. Fulvius Curvus from Tusculum, one of the consuls of 322 BCE.20 The wholesale incorporation of entire communities moreover provided the first step towards the municipal order that was to come to full fruition in the late Republic, although it is very important to recognize that this was a ­long-​­term development involving significant changes over time (­Bispham 2007). Yet the municipalization of 338 BCE stood at the origin of a development that would later allow Cicero famously to state that every Roman had two patriae (­Cic. Leg. 2.5). On the flipside, the proximity of these towns to Rome and, in addition, their status as the oldest municipia meant that they retained political prominence by virtue of having their elites succeed in the Roman elections.21 This moreover brought with it more informal connections such as those that existed through friendships with the urban Roman elite (­Patterson 2006). By contrast, the populations of rural tribus were otherwise settled mostly outside the municipal contexts. To conduct public business, they depended on rare visits to ­Rome – ​­which they might have undertaken to attend markets or participate in the dilectus (­m ilitary levy)  – ​­or, more indirectly, on the facilitation of such affairs by politically connected tribules (­fellow tribesmen) of higher census classes. In addition, praefecti iure dicundo who were appointed by the Praetor Urbanus visited rural areas from time to time for the purpose of providing jurisdiction to Roman citizens. The increasing regularization of this practice comes through to us in the fact that certain towns became known as praefecturae, which can only mean that they served as local centres where rural citizens were able to conduct public business that was otherwise confined to Rome. An antiquarian list naming several such locations survives, yet it raises as many questions as it answers (­Festus 262L; Bispham 2007: ­11–​­12). For firmer evidence we must wait until the late second century BCE when praefecturae were listed among the different forms of communities for which the lex agraria (­111 BCE) provided, and clearly in descending order of importance from municipia and coloniae (­Crawford 1996: no. 2, chapter 21, ll. 2­ –​­3). This ranking would appear to provide the background to Cicero’s comments in the pro Plancio. Thus, the relative spatial and institutional remove of rural citizens from institutional centres inevitably reduced ­their – ​­however ­indirect – ​­political influence, let alone their active participation in public affairs at Rome. Circles of social integration like kinship ties, neighbourhood relations, and religious ritual may have been more dominant in the everyday affairs of rural tribesmen than what we would usually associate with institutions of the state (­even if this is weakly defined).22 This may form the historical 594

Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of citizenship

background to Cicero’s comments about the difference in status between Tusculum and Atina as a municipium and praefectura respectively, which I discussed at the outset, and which was indirectly a result of the role which these different communities played in Rome’s Italian expansion. It was only over the course of the second century BCE that the greater integration of most rural citizens at the level of local institutions beyond those of the tribe began gradually to take place, a process that would continue well into the first century BCE.

The role of the censors So far, we have established two key aspects of the relationship between m ­ id-​­Republican Rome’s territorial expansion and the growth of citizen numbers. These are, first, that the placement of citizens in recently conquered areas took place in territorially defined units (­tribus). In the first instance, these were created by and institutionally linked to the Roman community, while kinship ties, allegiances to aristocratic clans, and similar networks may have continued to play a significant role at the more informal levels of life in the rural tribes. As we saw in the last section, this must have been especially pronounced in those cases in which ­fully-​­fledged polities were included in new tribal territories. This takes us to the second point: the territorial spread of the Roman citizenship to a significant extent involved the integration of other ­populations – ​­and thus of their ­socio-​­economic ­networks – by ​­ a combination of forcible means and negotiations that varied from context to context. A key role in laying the ground for these processes of institutional integration might have been played by the recently introduced office of the censors who were not only in charge of conducting the census but must also have been responsible for completing the lustrum from or soon after 443 BCE. In this section, we briefly return to this hypothetical relationship between the censorship, the geographical expansion, and numerical growth of the Roman citizen community by considering the relative chronological distribution of attested censorial colleges and the creation of the 14 new rural tribus between the years 387 and 241 BCE (­­Table 41.1). With the exceptions of the Poblilia and Pomptina (­358 BCE), each year in which new tribes were created either coincided with or was immediately preceded by a censorship.23 In the case of the first four tribes (­387 BCE), Livy does not explicitly mention that the censors had been involved in the enrolment of new citizens during the previous year. However, the fact that a college of censors had been in office for 389/­388 ­BCE – ​­hardly surprising since the aftermath of the Gallic catastrophe would certainly have required a lustrum – ​­makes it at least plausible that they were also responsible for accepting Rome’s erstwhile enemies into the citizen community. By 332 BCE, this appears to have become established practice, and on the subsequent two occasions when new tribus were e­ stablished – ​­in 318 and 299 B ­ CE – ​­the censors’ involvement is at least strongly implied. The upshot of these patterns is significant. First, it lends strong support to our initial hypothesis that the establishment of the censorship as the office in charge of counting and ordering the citizens, as well as subsequently ­re-​­creating the community of Romans, may have had repercussions for how the citizenry came to be increased in the wake of Rome’s expansion. Whether this was an afterthought or intended from the beginning cannot be established here, although the latter is the less likely alternative. However, it is clear enough that the office of the censor soon became pivotal in 595

Roman Roth ­Table 41.1  Chronological distribution of censorial colleges and the formation of rural tribus

Date of tribus Names of and reference tribus

Date of most recent censorship

387 BCE (­Livy 6.5.8)

Arnensis, 389/­388 BCE Sabatina, Stellatina, Tromentina Poblilia, 363/­362 BCE 358 BCE (­Livy 7.15.12) Pomptina

332 BCE Maecia, (­Livy 8.17.11) Scaptia

332/­331 BCE

318 BCE Oufentina, (­Livy Per. 19) Falerna

318/­317 BCE

Aniensis, 299 BCE (­Livy 10.9.14) Teretina

300/­299 BCE

Velina, 241 BCE (­Livy Per. 19) Quirina

242/­241 BCE

Names of the censorsa

Comments

M. Furius Fusus (?), L. Papirius Mugillanus (?)

New citizens enrolled in 388 BCE (­Livy 6.4.­4 –​­6).

M. Fabius Ambustus, L. Furius Medullinus Sp. Postumius Albinus Caudinus, Q. Publilius Philo L. Papirius Crassus, C. Maenius P. Sulpicius Saverrio, P. Sempronius Sophus M. Fabius Buteo, C. Aurelius Cotta

No obvious connection to the preceding census and lustrum.

Censors enrolling new citizens and distributing them to the new tribus. Censors in office but not specifically mentioned in connection with the new tribus. Closing of the lustrum, census and establishment of the new tribus mentioned in the same sentence. Censors in office but not specifically mentioned in connection with the new tribus. However, a college of censors was in office in 332/­331 BCE when one or both of the new tribal territories may have been settled.

Note that the censors’ term of office ordinarily lasted 18 months. Based on Suolahti (­1963).

facilitating the expansion of Rome’s territory and people while largely b ­ y-​­passing the patrician gentes.24 Second, the need for a census and lustrum prior to new tribus being established explains the delay that usually occurred between the conquest of a territory and its formal integration into the ager Romanus. This remained true throughout the period during which new rural tribes were established: notably, the tribus Quirina (­241 BCE) was designated for the Sabines who had been given citizenship almost 30 years earlier in 268 BCE. We are mostly reduced to speculation when it comes to explaining these delays between the award of citizenship and a territory’s formal integration. But two possibilities spring to mind, which are by no means mutually exclusive. The first is that the processes that were involved in the taking of the census of a significantly increased population may have been complex and required a long time, especially in those cases in which significant numbers of existing Roman citizens or allies were sent as settlers to a new tribal territory. The second possible explanation is that the formal integration 596

Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of citizenship

of a territory and its inhabitants included more informal processes, such as potentially protracted negotiations with local elites. For these people must have had a vested interest in retaining their prominent positions within the new order that was imposed by the censors’ actions. Finally, along the same lines it is important to stress the significance of the censors’ role in imposing a social order on a new territory that, at least to some extent, replicated the hierarchies that existed among the Roman citizenry elsewhere. Although population figures and wealth varied from area to area, it is probable that some attempt was made to have an at least broadly comparable distribution of census classes across the different tribes, which was certainly desirable in the context of military recruitment. However, clear evidence that such a s­ ocio-​­economic spread was, in fact, formally implemented becomes available only for the period after 241 BCE, by which time the Roman practice of establishing new tribes in conquered territories had come to an end.

Locating the Roman citizenry, II: ­241–​­91 BCE The ending of tribal foundations No simple answer can be given to why the establishment of new tribus ceased after 241 BCE, and it must be stressed that this apparent finality might at least partly be the product of hindsight. At the same time, we should consider some parallel developments in the same period of the history of Roman expansion, which provide a plausible context to the eventual decision to leave the number of tribes at 35. The most obvious of these developments is Rome’s victory over Carthage in the First Punic War, which led to the beginning of Roman expansion into overseas territories. At the same time, the year 241 BCE also saw Rome’s last military conflict within Italy proper (­the short war with Falerii), as well as the final foundation of a Latin colony (­Spoletium) in the central part of the Apennine peninsula.25 If Polybius was moreover correct in stating that, as far as the Romans themselves were concerned, their conquest of Italy had been achieved by 264 BCE, the establishment of new tribus as a means of incorporating new territories must have made even less sense more than two decades later (­Polyb. 1.6.­6 –​­7). At the very least, it may have been inconceivable to have ­self-​ ­contained areas of Roman citizen settlement at a considerable distance from the city, especially when their formal, administrative organization was weak and to a large extent depended on the presence of circuit magistrates.26

Reforms of the comitia centuriata and extensions of individual tribus after 241 BCE The aim of this section is twofold. First, picking up from where we left off in the preceding discussion, we shall briefly consider the impact which the reform of the Centuriate Voting Assembly (­comitia centuriata) had on the nature of the tribes as territorial groupings of Roman citizens. Second, we turn our attention to new modes by which the Roman citizenship was expanded across Italy after the Hannibalic War, the most important of which was the creation of large citizen colonies. Sometime between the years 241 and 215 BCE, the composition of the Centuriate Assembly was altered, which, in turn, suggests that number of 35 tribus had come to be recognized as final by the date of the reform.27 The most consequential part of this 597

Roman Roth

readjustment was that the number of centuries of the First Class was reduced from 80 to 70, two of ­which – ​­one each of iuniores and seniores – ​­were assigned to each tribe. For present purposes, the importance of this change is that it represents a significant ­stepping-​­up of the censors’ role in determining the composition of the tribus. This was further affirmed by other interventions like the rather obscure censorial reform of the year 179 BCE. This also appears to have considered place of residence in relation to tribal affiliation.28 The most plausible explanation for these adjustments was the intention closely to approximate the weightings of the tribes in respect of their voting power. However, it also meant that new citizens could be enrolled into existing tribus, provided that the censors, by and large, ensured that the balance of the census classes remained the same where it mattered. Mutatis mutandis, tribal territories could now be extended, and this could happen without the need for them to be contiguous or even located in the same geographical region, as long as each area that belonged to a tribus comprised a roughly representative spread of census classes. In this way, viritane assignations in rural areas could take place without necessitating the formation of new tribes.29 Even more significantly, these developments also facilitated the ­establishment – ​­through incorporation or f­ oundation – ​­of ­self-​­governing communities of Roman citizens in Italy and Cisalpine Gaul during the second century BCE, with which the remainder of this section is concerned. As we saw earlier, the expansion of the Roman citizenry had occasionally taken the form of f­ ully-​­fledged communities being incorporated as municipia. A larger number of communities had entered into the rather obscure yet certainly weaker type of relationship with Rome that the later tradition knew as civitas sine suffragio (­citizenship without the right to vote) (­Humbert 1978; Cornell 1995: ­349–​­351; cf. Mouritsen 2007). At least three of these ­towns – ​­Fundi, Formiae, and Arpinum in 188 ­BCE – ​­were formally incorporated in the ager Romanus during the second century BCE, with their inhabitants becoming members of existing tribus that were extended by plebiscite (­Livy 38.36.­7–​­9). Yet we cannot infer from this one documented case that it was representative of a more widespread practice, as has frequently been maintained.30 On the contrary, the evidence which we do have is for an increasing reluctance on Rome’s part to accept existing communities into the citizenry wholesale as the second century progressed. However, what we know with certainty is that, from 197 BCE, Rome began to establish new citizen communities by colonial charter on an unprecedented scale. Although citizen colonies had previously been founded, they had always been significantly smaller than their Latin equivalents and, as far as we can tell, taken the form of garrisons that were placed to protect rural tribus, usually in coastal areas. By contrast, the new citizen colonies comprised substantial towns and territories, with colonists who were each assigned large plots of land.31 There is little reason to doubt that the foundations of these colonies were linked to the settlement of military v­ eterans – ​­Romans but also Italian ­allies – ​­during a period of extensive warfare in the Greek East, the Iberian Peninsula, and the North of Italy (­Tweedie 2011). Several of the new colonies were also located in this last area. Although this development was significant for several reasons, what concerns us here is that an increasing number of Roman citizens now lived in a type of ­self-​­governing community that had previously not existed on ager Romanus. In several cases, these colonies were situated at some distance from other areas of citizen settlement in the same tribes. As Lily Ross Taylor suggested many years ago, this development implies 598

Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of citizenship

that such settlements increasingly took on the administrative functions of the tribus or, rather, that these structures were replicated at the local levels of citizen municipia and coloniae (­Taylor 2013 [1960]; cf. Crawford 1998: 31; Roth 2019: 100). This a was a significant step in the development towards the ­self-​­government of local citizen communities that fully emerged between the end of the Social War and the reign of the emperor Augustus (­Bispham 2007: es­p. ­10–​­12).

Concluding discussion: citizenship and its alternatives on the eve of the Social War By the late second century BCE, Roman citizens were living across most parts of Italy, in a variety of rural and nucleated settlements that were becoming increasingly formalized (­Sisani 2011). Of these, colonies and municipia featured significant elements of ­s elf-​­governance and became regional centres. They replicated important administrative functions that had previously necessitated a journey to Rome or involved occasional visits by itinerant officials like the praefecti whose positions became more permanent in nature only in the exceptional case of Campania after the Second Punic War.32 At the same time, the Roman conquest of Italy had also resulted in the formation of other types of community whose members did not have the status of Roman citizens, but which, nonetheless, shared some structural features of coloniae and municipia. These were the Latin colonies which had been established between the middle of the fourth and the early second centuries BCE, as well as the somewhat obscure civitates sine suffragio. This late Republican term probably covered a range of earlier ­socio-​­political realities that are firmly beyond our historical grasp.33 While Latin colonies had been established by Rome and given statutes that must closely have reflected contemporary Roman law, the cives sine suffragio appear to have shared in certain aspects of full Roman citizenship.34 In their case, too, it is probable that their legal and political frameworks were at least partly aligned with those of Rome.35 In addition, we have other evidence to support a model by which other allied communities had indirectly absorbed some of those structures into their own constitutional ­set-​­up.36 Most probably, this was happening as a result both of their being geographically close to citizen and Latin communities, and of the fact that they had to interact with Rome diplomatically and in the context of military recruitment (­Gabba 1994). Thus, the extension of Roman citizenship and especially the institutional emancipation of citizen communities played an integral part in bringing about increasing structural affinity among Italian towns. These similarities in institutional ­set-​­up, as well as the experience which had been gained in incorporating new citizens over the course of almost three centuries were a conditio sine qua non for enabling the mass enfranchisement of the Italians after 89 BCE, in both conceptual and practical terms. In this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate that the extension of Roman citizenship before 89 BCE, rather than being the imposition of an existing framework on other Italian populations, was a lengthy historical process. As an integral part of Rome’s expansion in Italy, it brought about the evolution of institutions which Romans of the early Empire took for granted. Therefore, the passage of Cicero’s speech for Plancius of 54 BCE with which our discussion started may have been one of the last instances in which the growth of the Roman citizenry in Italy was still understood in some of its historical complexity. 599

Roman Roth

Notes 1 On the respective dates of Plancius’ election and the speech, see the discussion by Karataş (­2019: ­149–​­150), with detailed references. These chronological problems are of no relevance here. 2 Atina was in the tribus Teretina. 3 Planc. 23 (­ergo ut alia in te erant inlustriora, Laterensis, quae tibi maiores tui reliquerant, sic te Plancius hoc non solum municipis uerum etiam uicinitatis genere uincebat. ‘­Therefore, just as you had other competitive advantages which your ancestors had bestowed on you, in the same way Plancius beat you by virtue not only of the kind of municipium he came from but also of the character of its neighbours’; emphasis mine.); cf. Karataş 2019: 194; see also Lomas (­2004: ­102–​­104). For epigraphic evidence in respect of a municipal quattuorvirate at Atina, see Bispham (­2007: 509) (‘­­m id-​­c entury?’). 4 Cf. Karataş (­2019: 194). For the continued existence of praefecturae in some parts of central throughout the first century BC, see Bradley (­2000: ­265–​­266) (­on Caes. B Civ. 1.1.15, 1.15.2); cf. Lomas (­2004: 102), for the continuing existence of p ­ re-​­municipal arrangements in Latium into the late first century BC, although the evidence is inconclusive in many cases. 5 Livy 6.5.8. Terrenato (­2019: ­116–​­119); Bradley (­2019: ­292–​­296), for the significance of this to the history of Roman expansion in Italy, with further references; cf. Roselaar (­2010), whose periodization is centred around the subject of conquered land that subsequently became ager publicus. 6 Cf. Cornell (­1995: 313); Eich and Eich (­2005: ­20–​­21); Bradley (­2019: 209, 294). The fact that the collection of tributum from Roman citizens was indefinitely suspended in 167 BCE may have been a factor contributing to the Italian allies’ dissatisfaction at not having citizenship in the period leading up to the Social War. 7 This is not to deny that the tributum may have taken the form of enforced labour on certain occasions, a possible ­case-­​­­i n-​­point being the (­­re-​­)­building of the Servian Walls around the ­m id-​­fourth century BC (­cf. Bernard 2018). My emphasis is on the ­community-​­controlled character of such duties here, not on the physical or material exertions which they may have entailed on the citizens’ part. 8 Cf. the list in Bradley (­2019: 314, ­Table 9.1). The tribus Poblilia (­created in 358 BCE; cf. Livy 7.15.12) forms a partial exception to this rule, oddly bearing the name of a plebeian gens. It is of course possible that, by that stage, the familial name had already acquired geographical connotations, although this is, of course, impossible to prove; cf. Oakley (­1998: 175). At the other end of the scale, another interesting case is the Clustumina – ​­one of the two most recent of the archaic tribes, the other being the ­gens-​­based Claudia (­both in 495 BCE; cf. Livy ​­ 2.21.7) – which might have taken its name from the former territory of Crustumerium where it was located. 9 Armstrong (­2016); Terrenato (­2019) argues for at least a residual continuity of ‘­clan’-​­led expansion down to the early third century. 10 The principal reference is to the raids that were conducted by the gens Fabia into Veientine territory, and which resulted in the clan’s disastrous rout at the river Cremera in 479 BCE (­Livy 2.­48–​­50; cf. Dion. Hal. 9.­15–​­22); for a detailed discussion, cf. Smith (­2006: 2­ 90–​ ­295). Although little doubt exists as to the historiographical elaboration of this episode, historians have generally accepted it as, in essence, providing an important insight into the considerable role played by patrician gentes in the expansion of the early Republic. It is furthermore significant that the original territory of the gens Fabia lay in the part of early Rome’s territory that bordered the area controlled by Veii. Similarly, the territory of the gens Claudia bordered Sabinum from where Attus Clausus, the founder of the patrician Claudii, had migrated to Rome in the company of his kinsmen and clients in 504 BCE. ‘­Structural facts’ (­i n T. Cornell’s sense) are clearly discernible in both cases. 11 For this argument, see Smith (­2006: es­p. ­235–​­280); and cf. Terrenato (­2019: ­43–​­62), for the argument that loyalty to one’s clan beat allegiance to ­city-​­states among early Italian elites, which would similarly have encouraged territorial fragmentation. 12 Livy 4.48.­1–​­4, 51.­5 –​­6; cf. Smith (­2006: 2­ 42–​­243), who also points out that positive evidence for exclusive landownership by the patriciate does not exist, either. Like much in Livy’s first Pentad, the passage is deserving of a healthy dose of scepticism. However, Livy’s (­or

600

Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of citizenship his sources’) failure to make any sense of its subject matter while considering it important enough for inclusion in his narrative arguably points to an element of historicity; on this as a more general principle of source criticism, see my observations in Roth (­2020: 93 n.7). 13 Livy 6.5.8: tribus quattuor ex nouis ciuibus additae (‘­four tribes were added, made up of new citizens’). 14 In the case of the new citizens of 388 BCE, Livy (­6.4.4) describes them as qui Ueientium Capenatumque ac Faliscorum per ea bella transfugerant ad Romanos (‘­those of the Veientines, Capenates and Faliscans who had come over to the Roman side in these wars’), in contrast to others who had presumably opposed Rome and were killed or sold into slavery following the Roman victory (­Livy 5.22); cf. Cornell (­1995: 320); Bradley (­2019: ­294–​­295). 15 Livy 7.15.12 (­creation of the Poblilia and Pomptina); Livy 8.14 (­settlement after the Latin War). 16 These municipia were: Lanuvium, Aricia, Nomentum, Pedum, Tusculum, and, probably, Velitrae (­Livy 8.14.­2 –​­6); cf. Cornell (­1995: ­349–​­350). 17 Cic. Planc. 19 (­Tusculum as the oldest municipium); cf. Livy 6.25, for Tusculum’s submission to Rome in 381 BCE, yet without making explicit mention of the town’s enfranchisement at that date. In his narrative for the year 370 BCE, Livy (­6.36.2) refers to the Tusculans as ‘­allies of old and new citizens’ (­ueteribus sociis, nouis ciuibus); cf. Livy 8.14.4. It might be significant that Tusculum was in the ancient tribus Papiria. This could support an earlier incorporation of the town, that is, before new tribus were created several years after Rome’s victory over the Latins in 338 BCE. For Capena’s municipal status under the Republic, see ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973: 68); Bispham (­2007: 466). As one of Veii’s allies, some of the town’s territory had certainly been annexed by Rome after 396 BCE (­Livy 6.4.4; cf. my discussion above). 18 This is, in fact, suggested by Livy’s statement at 8.14.4 (­338 BCE): ‘­The Tusculans were permitted to keep the citizenship which they possessed, and the charge of inciting a rebellion was laid against a few ringleaders instead of the whole community’ (­Tusculanis servata ciuitas quam habebant crimenque rebellionis a publica fraude in paucos autores uersum). I am sympathetic to Terrenato’s (­2019: 148, 1­ 86–​­193 passim) view that Tusculum may be a ­case-­​­­in-​­point for his model that has central Italian ­city-​­states enter ‘­into a treaty with Rome without major conflict, but as a result of other processes’ (­148). Since these processes may have depended on ­elite-​­alliances, a degree of fluidity was inevitable, at least during their initial phases. 19 But cf. Livy 8.37.­8 –​­12 (­323 BCE), Plin. HN 7.136, Val. Max. 9.10.1, all three of whom refer to a Tusculan uprising in the year before the first consul from the town took office. This episode is problematic from different angles and, if partly historical, might have been transposed from an earlier context to the late 320s BCE. See Oakley (­1998: 7­ 55–​­757), for a full discussion and further references; and cf. Terrenato (­2019: ­186–​­187), for a novel interpretation of the episode. 20 Livy 8.38.1. The predominance of the old Latin municipia among the places of origin of homines noui is evident from Wiseman’s (­1971) classic account. Cf. Farney (­2007), who demonstrates the real ­and – ​­in the later ­Republic – ​­also ideological advantages which municipal men from Latium Vetus enjoyed ­v is-­​­­à-​­vis their competitors who hailed from other parts of Italy. 21 Cf. Cic. Planc. 20, with reference to Tusculum, where he also mentions the gens Fulvia. 22 Cf. Stek (­2010). The fact that the lex agraria lists the uicus, one of those circles of integration, in the same context as praefecturae etc., again suggests that such initially vaguely defined institutions had become increasingly formalized in the legal sense by the late Republic; cf. Sisani (­2011). 23 But cf. Oakley (­1998: 174) for the possibility that 358 BC might, in fact, have been a censorial year. 24 In this respect, it is furthermore important that, following a lex Publilia of 339 BC, the college of censors was always shared between a plebeian and a patrician (­down to the late 130s BC). On the significance of this legislation, see Cornell (­1995: ­340–​­344). 25 The next two Latin colonies to be founded were Cremona and Placentia in Cisalpine Gaul (­218 BCE). 26 Cf. the detailed discussion by Hackl (­1972), who adds the possible explanation that the Roman elite was unwilling further to extend the citizenship in an attempt to keep popular power at bay.

601

Roman Roth 27 The reform must have taken place before 215 BCE when the institution of the centuria praerogatiua is first attested: one of the 35 centuries of iuniores gained by lot the right to cast the first vote in the consular elections (­Livy 24.7.12); cf. Jehne (­2000). 28 Livy 40.51.9. For this puzzling episode, see the discussions by Grieve (­1985); Briscoe (­2008: ­547–​­549); and Roth (­2019: ­100–​­101). 29 Such viritane assignations are attested for the years ­201–​­199 and 173 BCE (­Livy 31.4.1; 31.49.­ 4–​­7; 42.4.­3 –​­4). 30 Thus, Taylor (­2013 [1960]) and, most emphatically, Humbert (­1978); cf. the valid criticism by Mouritsen (­2007). 31 For a detailed discussion and extensive references, see Roth (­2019, es­p. ­88–​­93, note 11), with a list of Rome’s known ­second-​­century colonies before the Gracchi. 32 Cf. Galsterer (­1976: ­31–​­33) and Bispham (­2007: ­36–​­38) on the subject of the Praefecti Capuam Cumas after the Second Punic War. Praefecturae were not communities stricto sensu but described a geographical area for which a praefectus iure dicundo was responsible. As seems to be implied by the list of prafecturae in Festus (­262L), these Prefects in some cases performed their duties within the physical setting of a municipium, a colonia, or a town with civitas sine suffragio; cf. Bispham (­2007: ­11–​­12, ­36–​­38). 33 Mouritsen (­2007); for a highly optimistic reconstruction of the evidence, contrast Humbert (­1978). 34 This seems to have included military service in some cases, notably that of the Campanians. Less clear is whether they served as part of the legions or as allies. The fact that cives sine suffragio were not inscribed in the tribus provides a possible objection to service in the citizen legions. 35 Statutes of Latin colonies: Gargola (­1995); Bispham (­2006). Possible evidence for the proximity of cives sine suffragio to Roman political structures in the late second century BC: Mouritsen (­2006). 36 The clearest case is the lex Osca Tabulae Bantinae from the period that immediately preceded the Social War, which may provide testimony of an allied town resisting Rome from within a fundamentally Roman legal framework (­Crawford 1996: no. 13; cf. Lo Cascio 2018). In the lex agraria of 111 BCE (­Crawford 1996: no. 2), the Roman lawgiver approximated allied settlements to their Roman equivalents by means of legal fiction; cf. Ando (­2019: ­63–​­65); Roth (­2019: 102).

Bibliography Ando, C. (­2019) ‘­Hannibal’s legacy: sovereignty and territoriality in Republican Rome’, in K.-​­J. Hölkeskamp, S. Karataş, and R. Roth (­eds) Empire, hegemony or anarchy? Rome and Italy, ­2 01–​­31 BC (­Stuttgart) ­55–​­81 Armstrong, J. (­2016) War and society in early Rome: from warlords to generals (­Cambridge) Bernard, S. (­2018) Building ­mid-​­Republican Rome: labor, architecture, and the urban economy (­Oxford) Bispham, E. (­2006) ‘­Coloniam deducere: how Roman was Roman colonization?’, in G. Bradley and J.-​­P. Wilson (­eds) Greek and Roman colonization: origins, ideologies and interactions (­Swansea) ­73–​­160 ——— ​­(­2007) From Asculum to Actium: the municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus (­Oxford) Bradley, G. (­2000) Ancient Umbria: state, culture and identity in central Italy from the Iron Age to the Augustan era (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2019) Early Rome to 290 BC: the beginnings of the city and the rise of the Republic (­Edinburgh) Briscoe, J. (­2008) A commentary on Livy, Books ­38–​­40 (­Oxford) Cornell, T.J. (­1995) The beginnings of Rome: Rome and Italy from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (­c . ­1000–​­264 BC) (­London) Crawford, M.H. (­1996) Roman statutes, BICS Supplement 64 (­London) ——— ​­(­1998) ‘­How to create a municipium’, in M. Austin, J. Harries and C. Smith (­eds) Modus operandi: essays in honour of Geoffrey Rickman (­London) ­31– ​­46

602

Rome’s Italian expansion and the transformation of citizenship Eich, P. and Eich, A. (­2005) ‘­War and ­state-​­building in Roman Republican times’, SCI 24, ­1–​­33 Farney, G.D. (­2007) Ethnic identity and aristocratic competition in Republican Rome (­Cambridge) Gabba, E. (­1994) ‘­Rome and Italy: the Social War’, in CAH2 VIII, 221, ­104–​­128 Galsterer, H. (­1976) Herrschaft und Verwaltung im römischen Italien. Die Beziehungen Roms zu den italischen Gemeinden vom Latinerfrieden 338 v.Chr. bis zum Bundesgenossenkrieg 91 v.Chr. (­Munich) Gargola, D.J. (­1995) Laws, lands, and gods: magistrates and ceremony in the regulation of public land in Republican Rome (­Chapel Hill, NC) Grieve, U. (­1985) ‘­Livy 40.51.9 and the centuriate assembly’, CQ 35, ­417–​­429 Hackl, U. (­1972) ‘­Das Ende der römischen Tribusgründungen 241 v. Chr.’, Chiron 2, ­134–​­174 Humbert, M. (­1978) Municipium et civitas sine suffragio: l’organisation de la conquête jusqu’ à la Guerre Sociale (­Rome) Jehne, M. (­2000) ‘­Wirkungsweise und Bedeutung der centuria praerogativa’, Chiron 30, ­661– ​­678 Karataş, S. (­2019) Zwischen Bitten und Bestechen. Ambitus in der politischen Kultur der römischen ­Republik – ​­Der Fall des Cn. Plancius (­Stuttgart) Lo Cascio, E. (­2018) ‘­Gli incensi della Tabula Bantina’, in AA.VV. Munus Laetitiae: studi miscellanei offerti a Maria Letizia Lazzarini (­Rome) ­321–​­334 Lomas, K. (­2004) ‘­A Volscian mafia? Cicero and his Italian clients in the forensic speeches’, in J. Patterson and J. Powell (­eds) Cicero, the advocate (­Oxford) ­97–​­116 Mouritsen, H. (­2006) ‘­Gaius Gracchus and the “­cives sine suffragio”’, Historia 55, ­418–​­425 ——— ​­(­2007) ‘­T he civitas sine suffragio: ancient concepts and modern ideology’, Historia 56, ­141–​­158 Oakley, S.P. (­1998) A commentary on Livy, Books ­VI–​­X. Volume II. Books ­VII–​­VIII (­Oxford) Ogilvie, R.M. (­1965) A commentary on Livy, Books ­I –​­V (­Oxford) Patterson, J.R (­2006) ‘­The relationship of the Italian ruling Classes with Rome: friendship, family relations and their consequences’, in M. Jehne and R. Pfeilschifter (­eds) Herrschaft ohne Integration? Rom und Italien in Republikanischer Zeit (­Frankfurt) ­139–​­154 Roselaar, S.T. (­2010) Public land in the Roman Republic: a social and economic history of ager publicus in Italy, ­396–​­89 BC (­Oxford) Roth, R. (­2019) ‘­The expansion of the citizenship and Roman elite interests in regional Italy, c. ­200–​­91 BC’, in K.-​­J. Hölkeskamp, S. Karataş, and R. Roth (­eds) Empire, hegemony or anarchy? Rome and Italy, ­2 01–​­31 BC (­Stuttgart) ­85–​­106 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­T he colonisation of Pontiae, piracy and the nature of Rome’s maritime expansion before the First Punic War’, in R. Evans and M. De Marre (­eds) Pillage, piracy and plunder in antiquity: appropriation and the ancient World (­Abingdon) ­84–​­96 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973) The Roman citizenship, 2nd edn (­Oxford) Sisani, S. (­2011) In pagis forisque et conciliabulis: le strutture amministrative dei distretti rurali in Italia tra la media repubblica e l’età municipale (­Rome) Smith, C.J. (­2006) The Roman clan: the gens from ancient ideology to modern anthropology (­Cambridge) Stek, T.D. (­2010) Cult places and cultural change in Republican Italy (­A msterdam) Suolahti, J. (­1963) The Roman censors: a study on social structure (­Helsinki) Taylor, L.R. (­2013 [1960]) The voting districts of the Roman Republic: the t­hirty-​­five urban and rural tribes, with updated material by Jerzy Linderski (­A nn Arbor, MI) Terrenato, N. (­2019) The early Roman expansion into Italy: elite negotiations and family agendas (­Cambridge) Tweedie, F.C. (­2011) ‘­The case of the missing veterans: Roman colonisation and veteran settlement in the second century BC’, Historia 60, ­458–​­473 Wiseman, T.P. (­1971) New men in the Roman Senate (­Oxford)

603

42 RELIGION AND CITIZENSHIP IN REPUBLICAN ROME Craige B. Champion

Studying interrelationships of religion and citizenship in republican Rome raises numerous cruxes. Should we view religion and citizenship as autonomous spheres, or rather as interdependent components of something larger, which we may choose to call the state or res publica? And what about the analytical terms themselves? Do they map onto Roman vocabularies and conceptions unproblematically, or do they rather introduce potential for historical misunderstanding, distortion, and anachronism? This chapter places these questions in high relief, destabilizes some commonplace scholarly presumptions, and contemplates how analytical tools may mislead for purposes of historical reconstruction.

Elite instrumentalism and ordering the res publica In the ­m id-​­second century BCE, Polybius asked how Rome conquered the known inhabited world in the space of 53 years (­Polyb. 1.1.­5 –​­6). In Book 6 (­see now Moore 2020: ­92–​­110), he provided his answer: the peculiar nature of the Roman constitution or politeia (­cf. Lintott 1999). Two passages from Book 6, intertwining civic and religious spheres, have left their stamp on subsequent interpretations of religion in Roman statecraft. The first describes Roman aristocratic funerals (­Polyb. 6.53.­1–​­10, trans. Kardan and Champion):1 Whenever one of their illustrious men dies, he is brought during his funeral, with every sort of honor, to the ­so-​­called Rostra in the Forum, sometimes to be conspicuously propped upright, or, more rarely, to be laid upon it. With all the people standing around, his son, if he has a grown one surviving and present, mounts the Rostra and delivers a speech on the virtues of the deceased and his accomplishments in life. (­In the absence of a son, this duty is performed by some other relative). This reminds not only those who shared in his deeds of what happened, but also the multitude of those who did not, and puts it before their eyes to such moving effect that the loss seems not confined to the mourners, but common to all the people. Then they bury him with all customary rites and place a likeness of the deceased in the most conspicuous spot in his house, surrounded by a little wooden shrine. This 604

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-50

Religion and citizenship in Republican Rome

likeness is a mask made to resemble him very closely, in both its modeling and its color. The Romans display these images at public sacrifices, adorned with much care, and bear them to the funeral of any illustrious relative, fitting them on men resembling the originals as much as possible in height and other externals (­see Flower 1996). They wear a toga with a purple border if the deceased was a consul or praetor, a toga wholly purple if he was a censor, or a toga embroidered with gold if he had celebrated a triumph or done something of that kind. These masked men themselves ride in chariots, preceded by the fasces, axes, and other customary insignia of the magistracies, according to the civic rank of each man while he was living. When they come to the Rostra, they all sit down in a row of ivory chairs. There could be no spectacle more ennobling for a youth aspiring to fame and virtue. Who would not be moved at seeing together all the likenesses of the men renowned for virtue, as if they were alive and breathing? And what sight could seem more beautiful? The aristocratic funeral thus becomes a kind of public ritual encompassing the entire Roman community. Polybius explicitly says that the death masks, or imagines, were displayed at public sacrifices, and although he states that aristocratic funerals spurred young men to achieve great deeds (­which must refer primarily to aristocratic youth), it is clear that he was impressed by the impact these spectacles had on all who witnessed them. Most important for present purposes, we seem to be treading a fine line between a civic event and collective religious experience. Roman social hierarchies were reinforced through such theatrical resurrections of the dead, and it is difficult to miss their political import. Several chapters later, Polybius is explicit on the role of such religious pageantry in maintaining control of power elites at Rome (­Polyb. 6.56.­6 –​­12, trans. Kardan and Champion; cf. 3.112.­8 –​­9): But the most important excellence of the Romans’ commonwealth concerns their ideas about the gods. It seems to me that religious awe, which is censured by other peoples, is the very thing that holds together the Roman polity, in which it has been given the greatest possible dramatic role in private and public life so that nothing can exceed it. This may seem surprising to many, but I think it has been done for the sake of the common people. If it were possible to compose a state of wise men, this might be unnecessary; but since every multitude is fickle and full of lawless desires, unreasoning anger, and violent passion, there is nothing left but to control it with vague fears and scenic effects of this sort. Therefore, I think the ancients were not acting without purpose or carelessly when they brought ideas about the gods and beliefs about those in Hades before the masses, but rather that men nowadays are much more careless and foolish to reject them. In a tradition going back to Polybius, for centuries scholars have employed some variant of what I have called the ­elite-​­instrumentalist model; that is, the idea that power elites at Rome consciously employed religion in order to maintain political and s­ ocio-​ ­e conomic hierarchies. If that was indeed the case, then we should have to order our analytical categories hierarchically for the purposes of historical reconstruction, attributing to religion a functional or instrumental role in the service of power politics, with all of the ramifications for the exercise of Roman citizenship that would entail. On such a view, religion becomes one causal factor in the dynamics of political life and the practice of citizenship in republican Rome. 605

Craige B. Champion

Other Greek and Roman sources (­see Champion 2017: ­8 –​­11), aside from Polybius, also suggest that the Roman ruling class used religion in a calculated way as a vehicle for political and social control, and they have fueled the longevity and persistence of an ­elite-​­instrumentalist interpretation of Roman religion.

­Dead-​­end alternative? Religion of form, not belief The ­elite-​­instrumentalist conception of Roman religion held sway for a long while. In recent decades, most scholars have ostensibly forsaken it, although its undercurrents still linger. While scholars frequently mention in passing that the ­elite-​­instrumentalist model is woefully inadequate (­quite correctly), they have not bothered to replace it with anything entirely satisfying. This is because they have pronounced that any questions of elite belief in the Roman republic are misguided and ­w rong-​­footed, the result of anachronistic ‘­Christianizing assumptions’. Religion was putatively a matter of savoir faire, not savoir penser. In this later school of thought, questions of belief have no place in studying polytheistic rituals of public religion in Greek and Roman antiquity, since these were religions of form, not belief. In the case of the Roman augur or pontiff, painstaking care in carrying out minutiae of ritual procedures was what mattered in an outwardly directed, performative religion. Impressive, nuanced studies have no doubt emerged from within this paradigm. For example, Clifford Ando (­2008) has pushed the pragmatic bent of the Romans to its logical conclusion in the religious sphere. He suggests that we should focus on Roman religious behaviours in terms of knowledge, rather than belief (­cf. Feeney 1998: ­12–​­46). Romans operated with an ‘­empiricist epistemology’, in which, through trial and error, results informed and modified practice, but we have still s­ ide-​­stepped what elite practitioners, satisfying religious imperatives, may have emotionally and viscerally experienced as they carried out their duties. Confining study of Roman religion to outward form willfully excludes interiorized religious experiences. Such an approach undoubtedly took us beyond the crudest forms of elite instrumentalism, allowing for nuanced understandings of public religious phenomena. But it may have served its purposes, now seeming like a ­dead-​­end for many of the questions we want to ask. In most recent times, scholars have begun to address problems of subjective religious interiority, as well as intersubjective religious experience. In the field of ancient Greek religion, Andrej and Ivana Petrovic (­2016) examine religious purity and pollution, reconstructing inner states of individual worshippers as they approached the gods. Jennifer Larson (­2016) has recently written on ancient Greek religion from the perspective of cognitive science. For Roman religion, Jörg Rüpke headed the Lived Ancient Religion project. This collaborative team of scholars focuses on experiences and beliefs, putting the individual and individual experience back into the study of Roman religion. One of the expressed aims of the LAR team is, indeed, to rehabilitate the individual ­ elief-​­action as a religious agent. Jacob L. Mackey (2022) has worked to dissolve the b dichotomy, aiming to show how ‘­belief denialism’ became orthodoxy in scholarship on Roman religion by the late twentieth century. Questions of belief and interiorized religious experience are back on the table. This brief survey of directions in the scholarship on Roman religion reveals a field in a state of flux. While this bodes well for enlivened, creative, and vigorously productive debate, it also enjoins upon us circumspection, caution, and vigilance when we turn to considering interrelationships between Roman religion and Roman citizenship. 606

Religion and citizenship in Republican Rome

Res publica and ­politico-​­religious power Public religious ­activity – ​­prayers before meetings of political assemblies, public vows to specified deities, public banquets in honor of the gods, communal thanksgiving celebrations, games in the name of particular deities, triumphal processions (­on their divine aspects, see Luke 2014), consultations of public priests, and sacred books on the direction of ­magistrates – ​­permeated the civic sphere of the Roman Republic. Romans maintained that their major priesthoods and religious rituals arose at the time of, or even prior to, the founding of their city. The primacy of religion could not be gainsaid; everything else was subservient to it (­Val. Max. 1.1.­8 –​­9). Every meeting of the Senate first took up divine matters before turning to human affairs (­Gell. NA 14.7.9). Each of its sessions was preceded by sacrifice and the taking of auspices. Senators mediated religion by recognizing divine signs, accepting or rejecting new deities, and proscribing what they regarded as dangerous foreign religious practices and writings. According to Cicero (­Har. res­p. 9.19), Romans excelled all other people in piety and devotion to the gods, and we have already considered Polybius’ astonishment at the extraordinary attention Romans gave to religion (­6.56.­6 –​­13). The words Livy (­5.52.­2 –​­3) puts in the mouth of M. Furius Camillus make the point succinctly: We have a city founded upon auspices and augury; there is no place in it which is not filled with cultic practices and the gods; the days devoted to solemn sacrifices are as fixed as the specific places where they may be performed. Interpenetration of civic and religious spheres makes it impossible to disentangle them. But perhaps this is the wrong language, and the root of many of our interpretative problems, since discrete categories of ‘­civic’ and ‘­religious’ almost demand that we try to keep them apart. Indeed, at Rome the gods themselves seem to have been something like citizens whose divine role was mediated through magisterial authority (­Scheid 1985: ­51–​­56). From this perspective, we can almost say that the divine was subservient to the power and authority of human will, as it was embodied in the Senate. In this sense, we are in the realm of Ando’s ‘­empiricist epistemology’, though we are stating its principles in starker terms than he would perhaps be willing to put them. This aspect of Roman religion raises another old idea about Roman religious practices that scholars claim to have left behind as crude and outmoded. This is the notion of religion as contract, do ut des, ‘­I give in order that you may give’. Put simply, the gods had to deliver. As Cicero has C. Aurelius Cotta say in On the Nature of the Gods (­1.­115–​­116): Indeed, piety is justice towards the gods; but how can there be anything of justice between them and ourselves, if we have nothing in common? Holiness (­sanctitas) is knowledge regarding the gods, but I do not understand on what grounds they must be regarded if nothing has been received or is to be hoped for from them. It is difficult to argue in the face of this passage that there is not something to the hypothesis of Roman religion as a contract. The idea went awry whenever scholars cast it into the ­elite-​­instrumentalist conceptual dust bin, and we may add that the notion of religion as a contract itself directs attention away from religious feeling, passion, conviction, and yes, belief. And so, for scholars of earlier generations, Roman religion emerged as uninspired, fossilized, and insipidly mechanistic. There was (­in the 607

Craige B. Champion

­religion-­​­­as-​­contract model) and still is (­in the ­religion-­​­­as-­​­­practice-­​­­not-​­belief model) a heavy price to pay for such a partial and simplistic purview. When we banish subjective, interiorized dimensions of religious practice in our historical reconstructions of Roman religion, as a religion of form, contract, and even epistemology, interpretative problems inevitably follow. Let us take up a series of truisms in order to advance the argument. Ancient Romans were doggedly practical, lovers of reliable outcomes, and uncommonly dedicated to organizational efficiency and simplicity; a people dedicated to bending the chaos and confusion of the world to Roman order and hierarchy. If we accept this characterization and think of Roman religion as an institutional agent in service of citizen identity, civic harmony, and political unity, then we should have to conclude that in this sphere, at least, the Romans uncharacteristically botched things up. It is true that a great deal of the business of power elites required religious authorization, and in most of these matters the Senate had the final say. And so, for example, the senators decided what counted as a prodigy in need of expiation and which new deities to import and install cultic observances for in Rome. Moreover, the same men were both senators and priests. So far so good. We seem to have a hierarchically ordered religious system that served to keep the governmental apparatus running smoothly, as Polybius would have it. On closer examination, however, it was not so coordinated, and far from a unified, monolithic religious chain of command. Aside from senatorial oversight, there wasn’t really any centralized religious authority, and when we look at the various priesthoods themselves, we hardly find any systematic organization and hierarchical authority. On the contrary, it often seems as if the competencies of the priesthoods were overlapping, or redundant, or working at cross purposes. Among the senators and priests (­again, these were not distinct classes, but often the same men in different capacities), there is ample evidence for struggles for religious legitimacy (­Champion 2017: ­34–​­46). Political conflicts involving religious authority were commonplace throughout the history of the Republic. One of the most dramatic illustrations of this sort of tension comes from the year 143 BCE. In that year, the Senate blocked the consul Appius Claudius Pulcher’s petition for the right to triumph. Claudius had been assigned Italy as his province, but he was initially defeated in battle by the Gallic Salassi, a tribal people inhabiting the northwestern area of Cisalpine Gaul. At the behest of the Sibylline Books, the board of 15 priests (­quindecemviri) made an offering to the gods in enemy territory, and Claudius was able to get the upper hand and emerge victorious over the Salassi. But back in Rome, the stage was set for a contest of wills. The senators deemed that the consul’s military performance did not merit a triumphal celebration. In the face of senatorial opposition, Claudius celebrated one anyway, at his own expense. Now the tribunes sought to obstruct the parade, intending to forcibly cart off the consul from his own spectacle. But Claudius had installed his daughter Claudia, who was one of the Vestal Virgins, in his triumphal chariot. Her religious inviolability deterred the tribune who was about to lay hands on her father, the renegade consul. Claudius was able to proceed with his celebration. The important point for our purposes about this episode ­ olitico-​­religious drama played out before is that the people witnessed this rancorous p their very eyes, a drama in which the quintessential symbol of Roman pietas, a Vestal Virgin, took centre stage (­Cic. Cael. 14.34; Val. Max. 5.4.6; Suet. Tib. 2.4; Dio frg. 74; Oros. 5.4.7; Macrob. Sat. 3.14.4). For another example, we can turn to the later stages of the Hannibalic war. In 208, religious scruples kept the consul M. Claudius Marcellus in Rome. There were various 608

Religion and citizenship in Republican Rome

inauspicious omens, and the pontifices determined that they indicated a problem with Marcellus’ rededication of the aedes to Honor and Virtue, vowed during his first consulate in 222. The consul Q. Fabius Maximus had vowed and dedicated a temple to Honos in 233, 11 years earlier. Fabius apparently regarded Marcellus’ rededication to Honor and Virtue in 208 as an affront. The priests blocked the action, infuriating Marcellus (­Livy 27.25; Plut. Marcell. 28.1). His solution was to build a separate temple to Virtue hastily and at considerable expense. And then he rushed off to join his consular colleague in operations against Hannibal, where he would soon meet his death (­Champion 2017: ­55–​­56). As in the case of the Vestal Claudia in her father’s triumphal chariot, in the wrangle between Marcellus and Fabius Maximus, and the pontiffs’ intervention in it, religious authority publicly underscored fracture lines among the political elite, hardly what we should expect of religious institutions whose function was to uphold and reinforce the political and civic order. These are but two illustrations of an unwieldy and uncoordinated religious authority highlighting disunity among the ruling political elite. The phenomenon is a commonplace; examples are legion and easily multiplied. In the sphere of relations with the world outside of the urbs, the Romans accepted new gods and cults as part of their pantheon, a practice I have called accumulative civic polytheism. In general terms, this was no theocracy in which citizens observed exclusive religious protocols and worshipped certain deities to the exclusion of others. On occasion, however, the authorities proscribed foreign religious practices. Consideration of the state’s behaviors with respect to two foreign Religious ­phenomena – ​­the Bacchanalian cult and the worship of Magna M the impression of ran­ ater – furthers ​­ domness and inconsistency in the Roman Republic’s handling of religious matters. The s­ o-​­called Bacchanalian conspiracy of 186 is one of the most intensely studied and perplexing executive actions in the annals of Rome’s religious history. The consul Sp. Postumius Albinus brought activities of worshippers of Bacchus to the Senate’s attention, initiating a pogrom of terrifying proportions, as Roman authorities lashed out to hunt down and eliminate Bacchic cells in Rome and throughout Italy (­for sources, MRR 1.­370–​­371). The intensity of the crackdown is singular in Roman Republican history, and scholars have offered various explanations for it. The most compelling interpretations focus on the Bacchanals as a perceived threat to Roman political and social hierarchies, with citizens intermingling with ­non-​­citizens and social and economic hierarchies overturned. The cult’s extent and organization (­appearing as something like a state within a state), the Senate’s will to police and control mass movements of people, in particular as a result of dislocations resulting from the final phases of the Hannibalic war in Italy, and the senators’ desire to assert their authority throughout the Italian peninsula were among the leading motivations for the crackdown. Rome’s treatment of Magna Mater, or Cybele, was a more typical example of accumulative civic polytheism. In 205, Philip V and Antiochus III loomed on the horizon as formidable foes, and Hannibal was still at large in Italy. In that year, according to Livy (­29.10.­4 –​­8), frequent showers of stones had driven priests to consult the Sibylline Books on senatorial directive. The Sibyl advised that in the event of a foreign invasion of Italy, the enemy could be vanquished with the help of the Idaean Mother, whom ambassadors should escort to Rome from Pessinus in Asia Minor. An embassy was dispatched to Attalus I of Pergamum in order to negotiate transfer of the goddess to her new home on the Palatine. Installation of the goddess in Rome was carried out with great pomp and ceremony (­see Livy 29.10.­4 –​­11.8, 14.­5 –​­14; O. Fast. 4.­247–​­348). Cybele, or Magna Mater, would remain an important deity in the Roman pantheon for many generations. 609

Craige B. Champion

Juxtaposition of worship of Bacchus/­Dionysus and Cybele/­Magna Mater at Rome underscores randomness, inconsistency, anxiety, and reactionary impulses of power elites in matters of the gods. In Roman eyes, rites of Cybele were as emotional, abandoned, and excessive as religious practices of putatively frenzied Bacchanals. Yet the approach to the one was diametrically opposed to the authorities’ handling of the other. Magna Mater’s cult, like Bacchanalian revels, was held to be foreign, dangerously unrestrained, characterized by incomprehensibly ecstatic behaviors, transgressive of civil decorum, and therefore objectionable. Cicero states that the Megalesia were the only games at Rome not dignified with a Latin name, and Servius notes that hymns in the goddess’ honor were sung in Greek, never in Latin (­Cic. Har. Res­p.  12.24; Serv. ad Georg. 2.394). According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (­Ant. Rom. 2.19.­4 –​­5), praetors at Rome performed sacrifices and conducted games annually in the goddess’ honor, but no citizen was allowed to walk in the goddess’ procession, with its din of timbrels and flutes and priests in ­parti-​­colored robes, who slavishly begged for alms. In 77, the consul Mam. Aemilius Lepidus banned Genucius, a eunuch priest of the goddess, from receiving an inheritance on the grounds that (­s)­he was neither man nor woman. He insisted that the eunuch’s presence and voice defiled the magistrates’ tribunals (­Val. Max. 7.7.6). Despite all of this, the cult of Magna Mater at Rome and due observance of its religious injunctions were an integral component in creating and maintaining the pax deorum, and the goddess’ worship was exceedingly popular in Roman society. The worship of Bacchus/­Dionysus, on the other hand, was anathema and rooted out in the 180s, though it soon resurfaced and flourished in Roman society in less offensive forms (­Champion 2017: ­143–​­163). All of this is a salutary warning against seeing religion in Republican Rome simplistically as somehow a mere appendage of administering the res publica, and part and parcel of demarcating and organizing Roman citizens. Any approach to Roman religion in the Republican period with such underlying presuppositions is doomed to founder on the rocks of misunderstanding, and rationalizing assumptions are perhaps even more insidious to historical understanding than ‘­Christianizing’ ones. Such an approach has no solutions for military commanders throwing away golden opportunities in observance of religious dictates, as Scipio Africanus did in 190 in carrying out his duties as Salian priest (­Polyb. 21.13.­10–​­14; cf. Champion 2017: 197 n.70); or the public human sacrifice of Greeks and Gauls in 216 at a harrowing juncture in the Hannibalic war, when the Romans could ill afford alienating potential allies (­Livy 22.57.­2 –​­6; Plut. Marc. 3.­3 –​­4, with Eckstein 1982; cf. Schultz 2010; Várhelyi 2007, 2011); or the occasional live interment of noble young Roman women, as Vestals, on charges of unchastity (­attested for 228, 216, and 114/­3 BCE) in what scholars in the Polybian tradition would have to contend was an elite charade to elicit religious terror among ­non-​­elite citizens (­cf. Schultz 2012).

­Politico-​­religious authority, citizenship, urbs and beyond Let us take up religious authority, the city of Rome itself, and citizenship status. Magisterial religious imperatives drew consuls away from the civic sphere of the urbs in legitimizing rituals, outside the pomerium (­on which, see Koortbojian 2020). Consuls were required to take public vows immediately upon entering office, and their religious duties included celebration of the feriae Latinae and the festival on the Alban Mount. These festivities honored Jupiter Latiaris; attendance by all magistrates, even tribunes, 610

Religion and citizenship in Republican Rome

was compulsory; and a praefectus urbi feriarum Latinarum causa was appointed for the time they were away from Rome, so that someone would be in charge of the government during this sacred period. No consul could assume command of an army until he had discharged these religious duties. It also seems that, at least occasionally, consuls presided over ceremonies, discharging sacra, in Lavinium. They and other magistrates cum imperio were obligated to make the pilgrimage to this holy Latin city ten days after the feriae Latinae, in order to sacrifice to the Penates and to Vesta (­Simón 2011). Francisco Pina Polo (­2011: 115) points out the blurry boundaries in these practices between religious authority and political power: All of these tasks were obviously of a religious nature, but they should not be considered as sacerdotal tasks. Rather, they were political functions, because the consuls, as supreme magistrates, acted on behalf of the state with the ultimate purpose of preserving the res publica, thus adopting the role of curatores of the pax deorum. In turning from Roman magistrates as religious functionaries undertaking duties outside of the city of Rome to figures exercising religious powers within the urbs, who were not Roman citizens, we confront further interpretative problems. The worship of the goddess Ceres provides a ­case-­​­­in-​­point (­see generally Spaeth 1996). In 220 or 219, the Ludi Ceriales were expanded to include dramatic performances, and the festival ­ ulti-​­day affair sometime before 202 (­Livy 30.39.8, with Bernstein 1998: 1­ 63–​ became a m ­171). But it is not entirely clear which Ceres the festivities celebrated. Was it the Ceres who was an ancient Italic goddess concerned with agricultural productivity? Was it the Ceres whom scholars have specifically associated with plebeians, who according to tradition dedicated a temple to her on the Aventine hill in 493? Did the celebrations in some way incorporate the Ceres whose mystery cult was the exclusive preserve of women, associated with the cult of Demeter in Magna Graecia? Did the Ludi Ceriales in some way amalgamate these three cults? There are no definitive answers to these questions. Among forms of Ceres’ worship, the Aventine cult is most important for present purposes. All strata of Roman society will have partaken of her cult, as the Aventine was not the exclusively plebeian preserve of earlier scholarly reconstructions (­Mignone 2016). Cicero states that Ceres’ rituals were Greek in origin, that they were called by Greek names, and that priestesses were drawn from Magna Graecia. He goes on to say that these women were hastily made into Roman citizens in order that they might make prayers to the gods not only with foreign knowledge, but also with a domesticated and civil spirit (­Cic. Balb. 24.55: scientia peregrina et externa, mente domestica et civili precaretur). Astonishingly, separate legislative acts were required each year to enfranchise these women (­­Sherwin-​­White 1973: 292 n.1). These priestesses possessed religious authority, and they are the best represented women in honorific inscriptions on Republican tombstones (­see Schultz 2006: ­70–​­71, noting honorific tombstone epitaphs from Rome, Atina, Sulmo, Torre dei Passeri, and Formiae). As public figures they helped to constitute the Roman commonwealth in an expanded sense beyond the purely political realm, but at the same time they were citizens in only the most superficial of conventions. Disjunction of citizenship, political power, and religious authority is even more striking regarding Cybele than Aventine Ceres. As we have seen, the cult of Magna Mater was held to be foreign, dangerously unrestrained, characterized by incomprehensibly ecstatic behaviors, and transgressive of civil decorum, much like the Bacchanals 611

Craige B. Champion

who were persecuted in 186. Yet the worship of Cybele, with its emasculated priests whom Roman elites seem to have reviled and scorned, was officially adopted by these same authorities with great fanfare, and it endured as part of the official pantheon at Rome for centuries. The cult became part of the divine apparatus that created and maintained the pax deorum (­cf. Santangelo 2011). Unlike priestesses of Ceres, hastily made into Roman citizens by a legal fiction, ­eunuch-​­priests of Magna Mater were not citizens, and citizens were even prohibited from taking part in the goddess’ ritual processions. And yet they apparently commanded religious power. In these two ­illustrations – ​­priestesses of the Aventine Ceres and priests of ­Cybele – ​­the interface of religious authority, citizenship, and political and social power becomes slippery ground for purposes of historical reconstruction. Recent scholarship, engaged with anthropological and sociological models, invites us to reconceptualize religion’s role in forming Republican Rome, supplying more nuanced answers to Polybius’ challenging question (­how did the Romans come to dominate the Mediterranean world in such a short space of time?) by directing our attention away from political and military conflicts. Instead, religious, cultural, and ­socio-​ ­economic transformations, mass movements of people (­including itinerant craftsmen, shippers, and traders), local elites as brokers between Roman expansion and their communities of origin, and new forms of building networks and infrastructure (­including construction of temples and sanctuaries) take centre stage (­e.g., Terrenato 2019; Padilla Peralta 2020). We enter a conceptual landscape of mobility corridors and labyrinthine social networks, in which new collective and overlapping identities were forged. This work advances our understanding of Roman expansion and religion’s role in it, even if it still labors with some conceptual terminology, like ‘­statehood’, ‘­i mperial strategy’, or ‘­citizenship’ itself, that may introduce historical distortions. If social nodes and networks based in part on religious practices increasingly brought large numbers of people into the metropole (­Padilla Peralta 2020), colonization schemes removed people en masse on a different vector, based to some degree on Roman citizenship. The profound demographic consequences (­cf. MacMullen 2000 on mass colonial movements of people in the time of Caesar and Augustus) will have included religious hybridity and amalgamation (­for the complexities of such processes, see Woolf 1998; cf. Roselaar 2019: ­121–​­89; Terrenato 2019: 224). Scholars have often seen Roman coloniza­ on-​­elite Roman citizens, as a device for blurring tion of Italy and beyond as a boon for n boundaries between citizen and ­non-​­citizen and thereby enabling allied Italian communities to move toward the Roman citizen franchise, and even as the key to Roman exceptionalism and imperial success. But there was a darker side. Roman colonial schemes are attested as early as the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, but the pace quickened in the third and second centuries (­see Stek and Pelgrom 2014). Between 298 and 218, for example, more than 60,000 colonists were settled in Latin colonies, most of whom were probably veteran soldiers (­Rosenstein 2004: 60; cf. Erdcamp 2011: 113; Gargola 2017). As far as the citizen franchise goes, some Italians viewed it as a punishment (­Lavan 2019: 24); others refused it when offered (­Livy 23.20.­2 –​­3). By the time of Caesar’s colonization projects, discourses on the plebs urbana in Rome as ‘­scum’ or ‘­sewage’ had become commonplace among the elite. Echoing the language of elite disgust concerning urban poor, Suetonius (­Iul. 4) uses the same verb for ‘­draining off’ the plebs from the city of Rome (­exhaurire), as we see in Cicero, Sallust, and Livy. In his brilliant discussion of what we might call the politics of dirt in Roman elite political ideology, and in particular with reference to how Caesar’s colonial foundations 612

Religion and citizenship in Republican Rome

realized the intentions of elite political discourse in objective terms as a demographic outcome, Evan Jewell (­2019: 15) writes, ‘­W hat Caesar’s colonies achieved . . . was not simply the “­draining” of Rome’s “­masses”, but their displacement across the Mediterranean to form what we might ­dub – ​­to deliberately recall the derogatory metaphors of the ­elite – ​­Caesar’s “­Gutter Empire”’. Concerning citizenship, these colonists forfeited any actual political input, such as voting in legislative or electoral assemblies, since the Roman Republic existed politically on the ­city-​­state model: politics happened in the capital, and one needed to be there in order to participate directly. We have yet to articulate fully the ramifications of such demographic displacements during the Republic in terms of religion; a desideratum for future scholarly work. But we can easily see that effectively disenfranchised citizens in colonies could have been unwitting agents of religious changes; while ­non-​ ­citizens in the metropole, at least through association and with some degree of religious authority (­such as priestesses of Aventine Ceres or Cybele’s religious functionaries), could conceivably have exercised indirect political power in Rome. Elite networks transcended boundaries of formal citizenship on other registers. To some extent, informal ­inter-​­polity elite connections were formalized by the municipalization of Italy after the Social War (­Bispham 2007), but what Nicola Terrenato (­2019: 66) says about early Roman expansion applies, mutatis mutandis, throughout the Republican period: ‘­individual lineages and elite networks could weave in and out of their s­ tate-​­level system of treaties and alliances, according to the convenience of the moment, potentially creating an extremely complicated and heterogeneous web of ties of different tiers’. Analytical categories such as citizenship, therefore, will not contain important aspects of many individuals, whether they be elites or nonelites.

Conclusion The dust jacket of ­Dan-​­el Padilla Peralta’s impressive recent book, Divine Institutions, refers to religious observances as ‘­an indispensable strategy [my emphasis] for bringing Romans of many different backgrounds to the center, both physically and symbolically’. But is ‘­strategy’ the right word? The problem lies in implicit presuppositions of conscious human intentionality and agency that are part of the term’s baggage (­precisely where Polybius went astray at the inception of the ­elite-​­instrumentalist tradition). Historical accounts of both the evolution of Roman religion and the growth and development of Roman citizenship must have the ad hoc, the contingent, the accidental, the unintended, and even the unfathomable at the root of their vocabularies. Our analytical frameworks may result in glossing over, or misreading, or distorting recalcitrantly intractable historical material. It is our problem, and a problem that does not lie with the ancients. History is a dialogue between past and present, and historical reconstructions are at best imperfect and murky reflections of vanished lived realities and experiences. Intellectual integrity enjoins acceptance of these working conditions. Analytical tools are analytical tools, nothing more. ‘­Statehood’, for example, has weighty credentials in social science circles, but something simpler, and admittedly equally as nebulous, as Benedict Anderson’s (­1983) famous idea of ‘­imagined communities’ may actually serve us better, especially if it is infused with the notion of overlapping, reinforcing, intersecting, and even discordant personal identities (­including, of course, religious worshipper and citizen); an idea, going back at least as far as Claude ­Lévi-​­Strauss (­Morley 2004: 123). 613

Craige B. Champion

Above all, we should eschew seductive simplification and reductionism, which bedeviled Francis Haverfield’s conceptual p ­ roblem-​­child, ‘­Romanization’, and facile formulations of ‘­push’ or ‘­pull’. Influences move in both directions. Rome did not simply shove its cults or citizenship down the throats of conquered subjects as passive recep­ on-​­Roman community that eventually fell within tacles. Moreover, within almost any n Rome’s orbit and became ‘­Romanized’, we can expect to find special interests, fracture lines, oppositional political positions, ­socio-​­economic cleavages, discrete religious observances, and divergent cultural practices. Fronda (­2010) has cogently demonstrated this for southern Italian communities in the period from 350 to 200 BCE. If both religious practices and citizenship forged some sort of Roman extended ‘­imagined community’ during the Republican period, they certainly did so along different, and not always contiguous, tracks. Individuals in this world occupied multiple and shifting identities, whose valence was largely dictated by social context and circumstance (­cf. Dench 1995). Studying Republican Rome through accustomed analytical lenses of religion, political power, and citizenship (­each elusive in its own right) yields a fair degree of incomprehension, messiness, inconsistency, redundancy, incommensurability, and seeming contradiction. Inability to tie everything up into a neat package is not necessarily a bad thing.

Note 1 All translations of ancient texts are my own. Translations of Polybius are from my forthcoming edition, in two volumes, The Landmark Polybius, Scholar’s Edition.

Bibliography Anderson, B. (­1983) Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (­London) Ando, C. (­2008) The matter of the gods: religion and the Roman Empire (­Berkeley, CA) Bernstein, F. (­1998) Ludi publici: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der öffentlichen Spiele im republikanischen Rom (­Stuttgart) Bispham, E. (­2007) From Asculum to Actium: the municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus (­Oxford) Champion, C.B. (­2017) The peace of the gods: elite religious practices in the Middle Roman Republic (­P rinceton, NJ) Dench, E. (­1995) From barbarians to new men: Greek, Roman, and modern perceptions of peoples from the Central Apennines (­Oxford) Eckstein, A.M. (­1982) ‘­Human sacrifice and fear of military disaster in Republican Rome’, AJAH 7, ­69–​­95 Erdcamp, P. (­2011) ‘­Soldiers, Roman citizens, and Latin colonists in m ­ id-​­Republican Rome’, AncSoc 41, ­109–​­146 Feeney, D. (­1998) Literature and religion at Rome (­Cambridge) Flower, H.I. (­1996) Ancestor masks and aristocratic power in Roman culture (­Oxford) Fronda, M.P. (­2 010) Between Rome and Carthage: southern Italy during the Second Punic War (­C ambridge) Gargola, D.J. (­2017) The shape of the Roman order: the Republic and its spaces (­Chapel Hill, NC) Jewell, E. (­2019) ‘(­Re)­moving the masses: colonisation as domestic displacement in the Roman Republic’, in E. Isayev and E. Jewell (­eds) Displacement and the humanities: manifestos from the ancient to the present, special issue of Humanities 6.3, ­1–​­41 Koortbojian, M. (­2020) Crossing the Pomerium: the boundaries of political, religious, and military institutions from Caesar to Constantine (­Princeton, NJ) Larson, J. (­2016) Understanding Greek religion: a cognitive approach (­London and New York)

614

Religion and citizenship in Republican Rome Lavan, M. (­2019) ‘­The Foundation of empire? The spread of Roman citizenship from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE’, in K. Berthelot and J. Price (­eds) The crucible of Empire: the impact of Roman citizenship upon Greeks, Jews, and Christians (­Leuven and Paris) ­21–​­54 Lintott, A. (­1999) The constitution of the Roman Republic (­Oxford) Luke, T.S. (­2014) Ushering in a new republic: theologies of arrival at Rome in the first century BCE (­A nn Arbor, MI) Mackey, J.L. (2022) Cult and belief: rethinking Roman religion (Princeton, NJ) MacMullen, R. (­2000) Colonization in the time of Augustus (­New Haven, CT) Mignone, L.M. (­2016) The Republican Aventine and Rome’s social order (­A nn Arbor, MI) Moore, D.W. (­2020) Polybius: experience and the lessons of history (­Leiden) Morley, N. (­2004) Theories, models and concepts in ancient history (­London and New York) Padilla Peralta, D. (­2020) Divine institutions: religions and community in the middle Roman Republic (­Princeton, NJ) Petrovic, A. and Petrovic, I. (­2016) Inner purity and pollution in Greek religion (­Oxford) Pina Polo, F. (­2011) ‘­Consuls as curatores pacis deorum’, in H. Beck, A. Duplá, M. Jehne, and F. Pina Polo (­eds) Consuls and res publica: holding high office in the Roman Republic (­Cambridge) ­97–​­115 Roselaar, S.T. (­2019) Italy’s economic revolution: integration and economy in Republican Italy (­Oxford) Rosenstein, N. (­2004) Rome at war: farms, families, and death in the middle Republic (­Chapel Hill, NC) Santangelo, F. (­2011) ‘­Pax deorum and pontiffs’, in J.H. Richardson and F. Santangelo (­eds) Priests and state in the Roman world (­Stuttgart) ­161–​­186 Scheid, J. (­1985) Religion et piété à Rome (­Paris) Schultz, C. (­2006) ‘­Juno Sospita and Roman insecurity in the Social War’, in P. Harvey and C. Schultz (­eds) Religion in Republican Italy (­Cambridge, MA) ­207–​­227 ——— (­ ​­ 2010) ‘­T he Romans and ritual murder’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, ­516–​­541 ——— (­ ​­ 2012) ‘­On the burial of unchaste Vestal virgins’, in M. Bradley (­ed.) Rome, pollution and propriety: dirt, disease and hygiene in the Eternal City from antiquity to modernity (­Cambridge) ­122–​­136 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973) The Roman citizenship (­Oxford) Simón, F.M. (­2011) ‘­The Feriae Latinae as religious legitimation of the consuls’ imperium’, in H. Beck, A. Duplá, M. Jehne, and F. Pina Polo (­eds) Consuls and res publica: holding high office in the Roman Republic (­Cambridge) ­116–​­132 Spaeth, B.S. (­1996) The Roman goddess Ceres (­Austin, TX) Stek, T.D. and Pelgrom, J. (­eds) (­2014) Roman Republican colonization: new perspectives from archaeology and ancient history (­Rome) Terrenato, N. (­2019) The early Roman expansion into Italy: elite negotiation and family agendas (­Cambridge) Várhelyi, Z. (­2007) ‘­The spectres of Roman imperialism’, ClAnt 26, ­277–​­304 ​­2011) ‘­Political murder and sacrifice: from the Republic to the Empire’, in J. Wright ——— (­ Knust and Z. Várhelyi (­eds) Ancient Mediterranean sacrifice (­Oxford) ­125–​­141 Woolf, G. (­1998) Becoming Roman: the origins of provincial civilization in Gaul (­Cambridge)

615

43 CENSUS, CENSOR, CITIZENSHIP Republican subjectivity in advance of monarchy Clifford Ando

The historical record of the operation of the Roman census in the first century BCE is deeply problematic. It may well be that the surviving evidence fails to provide an accurate picture of the frequency of the census and its evolving administration. It is certainly the case that deliberate (­in)­action, as well as crises in the state, interfered with its operations, and some of the silence in the historical record must derive from this fact. Nevertheless, significant evidence does s­ urvive – evidence that is importantly varied in ​­ genre, form, and location, and therefore in the sorts of things it can be interpreted as saying. This essay mounts an historical study of the relevant data in order to inquire into the shifting meanings of republican citizenship, and the forms of Roman political subjectivity, during what ultimately became a transition from imperial republic to republican monarchy. In short, how the Romans counted, what they counted, and whom they counted all changed between 90 BCE and 14 CE. What were the broader transformations in which these changes were implicated? There is, of course, a notable literature in this field, by some of the greats of Roman historical scholarship: Tenney Frank, Gianfranco Tibiletti, Arnold Toynbee, Lily Ross Taylor, Peter Brunt, and Peter Wiseman, to name only six.1 (­It speaks to the historical interests of the present age that a very distinguished body of work continues to focus on the census in the first century, but its field is very largely that of historical demography.2) Broadly speaking, my object is to study changes in the form and nature of politics, and the nature of citizenship and subjectivity, that followed upon changes in the scale, complexity, and form of the Roman state. It is tempting to add the phrase ‘­in Italy’ to any such ­assertion – ​­in this case, to indicate that one is speaking about ‘­the form of the Roman state in Italy’ – ​­both because this was the geographic area where the overwhelming bulk of Roman citizens lived in the first century BCE, and because this is the area where the mechanics of the Roman state as regards its citizens largely extended. But the fact of the matter is that there is virtually nothing about the changes that took place in Italy that can be isolated from the structural and demographic changes that were attendant on empire. Certainly the Romans themselves knew of an imperial diaspora that had taken Roman citizens beyond the confines of Italy into the wider Mediterranean world, and they felt there had been a ­h istory  – a​­ purposive h ­ istory  – in ​­ which ‘­the Romans’ had long avoided the 616

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-51

Census, censor, citizenship

placing of communities of citizens outside Italy, and had continued even after such colonies were implanted ‘­to summon Roman citizens from the provinces back to Italy to be censused’.3 I will return to this curious claim by the imperial historian Velleius Paterculus by and by, but while its wording is odd, one should emphasize that the claim is by no means inaccurate. In writing on the history of the census or, indeed, any institution of the Roman state over the long haul, it is important to remember how little we know about the history of politics, law, or institutions of the Roman state prior to the middle of the third century BCE, in large ­measure – ​­and this may be obvious, but it cannot be emphasized strongly ­enough – ​­because the Romans themselves knew very little about the histories of their politics, law, and institutions before that date. They elaborated a great deal on the basis of the little that they thought they knew, and these acts of conjecture on their part issued in several directions. One prominent strand in (­their) historical scholarship consisted in baroque acts of imagination, in which Romans sought to (­re)­construct a portrait of an archaic version of themselves. The Romans also wrote histories based not on assumed patterns of difference, but rather on substantial assumptions of homeomorphy between earlier versions of the Roman community and that of their own day. ­Finally  – ​­and thinkers also assimilated their history to that of prestige cultures in ­famously – Roman ​­ the wider Mediterranean, often through the assertion of synchronisms: so, for example, the Romans expelled the kings and established a republic at the very moment of the Cleisthenic reforms, and so on (­Asheri ­1991–​­1992; Feeney 2007: ­7–​­42, passim). The census of the early Roman state was almost undoubtedly a tally of such people as might serve the state under arms.4 The Romans expected that other communities would have similar knowledge of themselves, and that they would aspire to collect this information for the very same reasons as the Romans did. This was particularly true of those many Italian states whom, as allies of constraint, Rome tithed for contributions to its military endeavours. At some point, the count became institutionalized and responsibility for its conduct was delivered into the hands of an elected pair of magistrates, the censors.5 Chosen every five years, the censors compiled a list of citizens, notionally based on an examination of each ­one – ​­or, more probably, each head of ­household – ​­in person at Rome. Insofar as the list so compiled was administratively dispositive if not legally final, the censors thus served in a near final manner to adjudicate who was in and who was out of the citizen body. Beyond the tally, Rome also gave legal expression to forms of social differentiation that came to be indexed to net ­worth—​­this is, of course, a fairly brutal simplification of a complex ­landscape – ​­and it also fell to the censors to assign each citizen a legal rank and voting unit according to net worth as calculated according to an official schedule. The censors also had the formal power to review the moral conduct of all citizens. The supervision of morals, and power to assign ranks, converged in the responsibility of the censors to review the membership of the Senate, a power supposedly assigned to the censors in 312 BCE, and it is, unsurprisingly, nearly exclusively in respect of senators that the censors are on record as reviewing moral conduct. The quinquennial reckoning was formally closed by a ritual of purification, cleansing, and renewal called the lustrum, which took place in the s­ o-​­called field of Mars. In the last years of the second century BCE and the first decade of the first century, Rome’s relations with its s­o-​­called allies became ever more tense, most particularly around legal protection against magisterial malfeasance, and around the distribution ­ ar – ​­denominated the ‘­Social War’, after the of the fruits of empire.6 The result was a w 617

Clifford Ando

Latin term for a­ llies  – whose ​­ outcome was the granting of Roman citizenship to all residents of Italy who had held citizenship in a ­juridically-​­constituted community in the l­ ead-​­up to the war. Whither the census? The data for the years between the war with the allies and the final resolution of Rome’s civil wars are massive but problematic, but we can say the following with varying degrees of confidence. First, those who held Roman citizenship before the war were still required to report to the censors at Rome. Second, citizens of j­uridically-​­constituted communities in Italy that were now Roman communities were ordered to report for the census to local magistrates, who were charged with collecting information according to a schedule prepared at Rome. Third, not only is there no evidence of a lustrum to close the census in these distributed communities of citizens, only a single lustrum is recorded at Rome in the final decades of the Republic. Fourth, there is no evidence of a review of moral conduct by supervisory magistrates in the distributed communities of Roman citizens. By contrast, highly politicized revisions of the membership of the Senate are about the only actions attributed to censors at Rome throughout this period. (­In other words, the one thing the censors are on record as having done is to establish the conditions of possibility for participation in politics by individual members of the Roman elite.) Fifth, no data are transmitted in any source for the census figures between 70/­69 and 28 BCE: not for the census of 65, or the one that probably occurred in 61 or 60, or the one in 55, or the one in 50, or the census that Caesar as dictator may have conducted in 46/­45, or the census in 42, and so on down to 28 BCE, under the new, or emergent, constitutional dispensation that would become the Principate. At a minimum, in the aftermath of the near universalization of citizenship among free persons in the Italian peninsula, the census was, for the great bulk of citizens, conducted without censors; it was completed without a lustrum; it reviewed ­no-​­one’s morals; and the count either had ceased to matter or had to be suppressed. What are we to make of this? These changes naturally had great salience for the conduct of politics at Rome. My focus, by contrast, is on the relationship between the powers of government, its knowledge of its subjects, their intersubjective relations, and their subjectivity. My project is therefore Foucauldian, in a fashion that probably needs no elucidation, and which will in any event become clear as I proceed. But it is also indebted to two works of Roman history whose influence might not be obvious: Arnold Toynbee’s Hannibal’s legacy (­1965) and Bruce Frier’s The rise of the Roman jurists (­1985). I offer a word now about Toynbee, and I will close with some reflections on the work of Frier, and one historiographic context in which it can usefully be situated. Toynbee is now little read, and when he is cited, it is generally as an exemplar of historical error in respect of the history of land use.7 But Toynbee’s actual topic was the form of the Roman state, and his thesis simply stated might be that Roman hegemony in Italy prior to 264 took a specific form, distinctive both within the ancient Mediterranean and, indeed, within a history of federal structures known in the world at the time. The wars with Carthage, and Roman engagement with the Hellenistic world more generally, brought Rome into competition with states of a very different form; and in order to beat them, and in consequence of defeating them, Rome itself was transformed. In short, power existing in mimetic relation to that which it resists, through competition with Hellenistic powers, Rome itself became a Hellenistic kingdom, and yet it preserved both public law structures in Italy and republican forms of politics domestically that were more and more profoundly at odds with the scale of state power and the political 618

Census, censor, citizenship

economics of Mediterranean empire. Hannibal’s legacy traces the history of this dissonance and its effects on myriad aspects of Roman social and economic relations. This essay does not overlap with the substantive issues under direct examination in Hannibal’s legacy; its project is not that of review or revision. But Toynbee gave profound voice and brought deep imagination to the question of how the particular institutions and politics of the Roman ­city-​­state were transformed as the powers and effects of empire were borne in upon the Republic itself. (­This description deliberately assimilates his project to that of Machiavelli in the Discorsi, and hence to a tradition largely alien to Toynbee’s evident political commitments.) The object of the remainder of this chapter is to refine and address some of the questions that we might ask in turning Toynbee’s lens to the worlds of citizenship and subjectivity. Consideration of an episode outside the chronological parameters of this chapter may help to clarify the stakes. It is an event without direct attestation, as no narrative source survives for the years in question. Indeed, it may not be an event at all, since what happened was after a fashion nothing. I refer to the decision in 232 BCE not to create a new tribe when new territories were systematically occupied by Roman citizens under shelter of the state. The context is as follows (­on the history of the tribes, Taylor 1960 remains foundational). From a very early date, Rome had organized some aspects of political life by dividing its territory and citizens into ‘­tribes’. Membership was determined by residence, as a change in residence could cause a change in one’s tribal membership. Administratively, tribes had been units connected to both military levies and taxation, and they served as constituent voting units in the ­so-​­called tribal and plebeian assemblies. From the dawn of the fifth century BCE down to 241 BCE, Rome had periodically added new tribes, often in pairs, as imperial action won new territory and that territory was occupied by Romans. The last tribes to be created, numbers 34 and 35, the tribus Quirina and Velina, were founded in 241. In 232, the tribune Gaius Flaminius carried a law to grant individual plots to Roman settlers north of the Apennines, to wit, in territory previously unsettled by Romans. This was an occasion when one might have added a new pair of tribes, but this was not done. The action then taken, and the pat­ ewly-​­settled communities of Romans to existing tribes, tern henceforth, was to assign n whose territorial ­integrity – ​­and the contiguity of tribal spaces and members, one with ­another – ​­was permanently shattered. What are we to make of this? I should first confess that it is likely that at least one tribe, and just possibly two, ­ on-​­contiguous had already received additional territories that were geographically n with their prior forms (­Taylor 1960: 60, 79 on the Curenses; idem 1960: 85 on the Clustumina). But it seems clear enough that for a very long time, tribes were potentially vehicles for a form of solidarity organized around geography, and, ­furthermore – ​­the ­ otwithstanding – ​­that censors, their lists, and fantasies of governmental knowledge n the performance by tribes of their political functions could well have been facilitated by forms of social knowledge of the sort the Roman jurists called communis opinio (­A ndo 2019b: ­381–​­382). These bases of social ­action – ​­shared identity based on geography and mutual ­acquaintance – ​­endowed their collective activity as a voting unit in the assemblies with social meaning beyond that of an aggregate of atomized persons. Whatever had happened before 232, these bases for tribal identity began then to be dismantled. The new logic, in which tribal identity was merely a marker that interpellated one ­v is-­​­­à-​­vis the central state, such that a tribe did no more when voting than aggregate the opinions of members without any social basis to their collective action, was finally 619

Clifford Ando

clarified, as it were, when new installations of veteran colonists in ­pre-​­existing Roman citizen communities were assigned to tribes other than those of prior townsfolk (­Taylor 1960: ­319–​­323). Flash forward now to the Italian peninsula in the aftermath of the s­ o-​­called Social War. I want to suggest what a similar analysis of the grand historical changes afoot in this period might reveal, about the s­ ocio-​­political effects of a set of transformations in the material conditions of social and economic life, and of the instruments of administration and forms of knowledge that were crafted to make this new world legible to, and governable by, a s­ till-​­ancient state. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a promise was made that all citizens of the ­juridically-​­constituted communities of Italy were, or would become, citizens of Rome. It is almost impossible to overestimate the challenges that lay ahead, which few political actors then probably understood. For one thing, there was the question of what law would regulate the social and economic c­ onduct – ​­the intersubjective ­relations – ​­of the new Romans. Certainly later, it would be possible to say that Roman law observed a rule of personality in respect of family law, and a rule of territoriality in respect of the law of obligations, and so forth (­Ando 2016). But what infrastructure existed or could be summoned into being, to educate the n ­ ewly-​­enfranchised Romans in the forms of Roman law? And even if they assented to transformation on this scale, how were ­law-​ ­applying institutions to be reduplicated across the territories and forms of community that had now become Roman? So far as I can tell, this history has never been properly told, but one thing that the surviving evidence ­reveals – ​­evidence that is both fragmen­ etailed – ​­is that an extraordinary effort was made to create tary and yet remarkably d ­law-​­applying institutions whose powers of jurisdiction were understood to be betimes authorized, and betimes delegated, by Rome (­A ndo 2019a). Where politics in a traditional sense is concerned, the immediate future, as it were, was regulated by practices centred on the ­city-​­state of Rome, even as incipient forms of analysis and narration revealed these practices to be unsustainable (­A ndo 2019c). But neither they nor we have crafted an appropriate response to the analytic or historiographic questions raised by this situation.8 What sort of politics was possible in the context of a ­world-​­empire in an ancient communicative technology regime? What did ­ idely-​­scattered peoples, employing a range of languages, in diverse ecolit mean for w ogies, with discrepant cuisines, to imagine themselves as Roman? When, where, why, and to what extent did the actual diversity of their lived experience even matter? What resources were provided, to what ends, that they might imagine themselves as participants to a shared community? And what were the models and languages of membership that were recuperated, mobilized, or invented to make this possible? These are big questions that deserve highly specific answers. This chapter sketches one path by which to address them, by sticking close to the census. What were the ­consequences – ​­what did it ­mean – ​­that most people were now censused without censors? No big answer to the broadest possible version of this question can be framed without keeping in mind that already in this period, the census was being transformed into a mechanism not simply by which the state knew its citizens, but also one through which the empire knew its subjects.9 Jesus the son of Joseph was not Roman, and yet his birth took place in Bethlehem because a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. The meaning of this ­sea-​­change is at least twofold. On the one hand, subjects of empire were henceforth known, and counted, by the centre, even as citizens were, and it seems demonstrable that they came to understand themselves 620

Census, censor, citizenship

as known by, and audible to, imperial government in ways that reflect this elevation (­A ndo 2000: ­351–​­361 and passim). It would also be difficult to deny that the census might thereby have become one among many instruments of domination that were employed over and against subjects, in pursuit of government, which came gradually to be redeployed in new forms among citizens, to ends unimagined in the context of the institution’s first invention (­Ando 2019a: 78, citing earlier literature; see also Ando 2020a: 491). As it happens, there survive two statutory enactments of the first century BCE concerned with the conduct of the census by local magistrates in Italy. The revolutionary outcome of the Social War thus did provoke an attempt to imagine the distribution of the administrative processes of the state throughout what was rather suddenly its territory. On the day before, as it were, Italy had been legally heterogeneous in public law, and it was not so today. One political meaning of this moment is captured in the fact that no consideration was apparently given to the possibility that political agency, in the form of voting, should likewise be enabled throughout the new space of the Roman state, via some distributed mechanism similar to the one that they invented to run the census. (­More on this below.) Another meaning was given to this moment in the drawing of a rule, as it seems, that these mechanisms for counting Roman citizens should be extended only to those citizens who were resident in spaces that were juridically Roman, and this rule was remembered as meaning that Romans abroad had to return in Italiam, to Italy, in order to be counted. In other words, the outcome of the Social War issued in the imagining of the Roman community as something like a territorial state: Roman political space now mapped what we (­and they) might think of as a homogeneous and integrated geographic entity, and local institutions of government were instrumentalized to enable the citizens in that space to live lives that were Roman in form (­A ndo 2002).10 The integrity of Italy as Roman ­through-­​­­and-​­through was enhanced by the distinction that ­ on-​­Roman, and Romans outside Italy as members of a labelled space outside Italy as n diaspora, as foreigners abroad. In so summarizing the situation, I set aside the question of whether magistrates in Roman colonies outside Italy could and did perform a count of their citizens, but the number of persons relevant to this category in the late Republic was vanishingly small. Also, many Romans abroad were simply there on business and had a community of origin in Italy to which they could ­report – ​­and could be required to ­report – ​­in order to be counted. But there were also citizens abroad who had been created as Romans from aliens, who had no community of origin in Italy, and the question of where they were to be counted is also worth posing, though again, the numbers are tiny. These persons are certainly interesting in the light of history; they do not appear to have figured in the thinking on state functions in the last decades of the Roman Republic. How was the census to be conducted by whoever was to conduct it in the communities of Italy? We have, as it happens, an exceptionally full statement on this subject in a law of the age of Caesar, preserved at Heraclea. Three aspects of the operation of local government as it is imagined in this law deserve our scrutiny. First, allowance is made for the diversity of forms in which the citizenly lives of Romans might be lived: they might dwell in municipalities, colonies, fora (­­market-​­towns), conciliabula (­gathering places), or they might be so distributed in the landscape that they lacked local ­law-​­applying institutions and instead received legal services from a ­so-​­called prefect, what amounts to a visiting magistrate. What is more, the public law form of these 621

Clifford Ando

communities remained unstandardized: it is explicitly allowed that public power might be housed in a magistracy of any name whatsoever. Second, in a variety of ways, local governments were enjoined to take care with regard to their own membership rolls. After all, these were perforce now rolls of Roman citizens. In consequence, de facto if not de iure, local governments could now make Romans, and though this power is not named, they were to exercise it with care. ­ ome – conducted ​­ Third, whenever there was a census at R by whatever magistrate was to conduct the ­c ensus – ​­the highest local magistrates in the substituent political spaces of Italy were similarly to conduct a census of all citizens of the locality who were Roman citizens, as follows: [H]e is to receive from them under oath their nomina, their praenomina, their fathers or patrons, their tribes, their cognomina, and how many years old each of them shall be and an account of their property (­rationem pecuniae), according to the schedule of the census (­ex formula census), which shall have been published at Rome by whoever is then about to conduct the census of the people; and he is to see that all this is entered in the public records of the municipium; and he is to send those books by envoys, whom the majority of the decurions or conscripti at the time when the matter shall be raised shall have decided should be dispatched and sent for that matter, to those who shall have conducted the census at Rome... (­R S 24, ll. ­146–​­152) As it happens, later information transmitted by the Roman jurists and, indeed, provincial census returns afford us a more ­fine-​­grained sense of what the ­so-​­called ‘­account of property’ is likely to have contained. But more important perhaps is the presence of economic data and the absence of any scrutiny of moral conduct, indeed, the absence of even potential scrutiny. Simply put, in this text, citizens are of interest to the state insofar as they are economic actors and owners of property; they are interpellated as such; and their sense of self in their relation to other persons similarly interpellated are as participants in households and owners of ­things – ​­that, and that alone. Let me make three observations about this way of thinking about citizens, citizenship, and populations, which I will associate with the figures of Michel Foucault, John Pocock, and Bruce Frier, with a nod to Ronald Syme. First, on governmentality. In his lectures from 1977 to 1978, Foucault indexed the history of government to the emergence of a set of technologies for gathering data, and a further set of techniques for aggregating and analysing that information, which allowed governments to think of their citizens in statistical ways: as units of population and contributors to birthrate; as situated in a demographic profile or as vectors in a disease regime; or as contributors to economic output; and so on (­Foucault 2007). I have elsewhere urged that the Roman Empire constituted on quite different grounds a significant moment in the history of governmentality. The Roman government’s interest in information must be part of that story. Andrew Riggsby has recently suggested that the Romans did nothing with all this i­ nformation – ​­that data collected in one administrative process was siloed from other interests and processes of the state (­Riggsby 2019). My own past work urges a different conclusion, not least as regards the cultural effects of these administrative processes, but a conversation on this topic should be properly opened and rigorously conducted (­an essential text in this debate will be Dolganov 2021). 622

Census, censor, citizenship

Second, on citizenship and subjectivity. Just over a quarter of a century ago, John Pocock published a remarkable essay on what he termed the ideal of citizenship since classical times (­Pocock 1992). I have written two articles that elaborate on not only the achievement, but also the problems, of his argument (­A ndo 2019b, 2020b). In this context, let me emphasize only that Pocock read legal literatures of the second century CE, particularly Gaius, with an eye to the question of what they imagined the rights, powers, duties, and entailments of citizenship to be. His interpretation runs as follows: [F]or the Roman jurist it was altogether different; persons acted upon things, and most of their actions were directly at taking or maintaining possession; it was through these actions, and through the things or possessions which were the subjects of the actions, that they encountered one another and entered into relations [that] might require regulation. The world of things, or res, claimed the status of reality; it was the medium in which human beings lived and through which they formed, regulated and articulated their relations with each other. (­­39–​­40) From being kata phusin zoon politikon, the human individual came to be by nature a proprietor or possessor of things; it is in jurisprudence, long before the rise and supremacy of the market, that we should locate the origins of possessive individualism. (­40) The individual thus became a ­citizen – ​­and the word citizen increasingly diverged ​­ from its Aristotelian ­significance – through the possession of things and practice of jurisprudence. (­40) My point is obviously that the roots of this transformation, from citizen as voter, soldier and legislator, to citizen as owner, lessor, purchaser, and contractor, are openly visible in how citizens were counted, and what the centre sought to know of them, in the new Roman state created by the Social War. In the briefest possible terms, this extraordinary transformation commenced under the Republic as a product of empire; it is not related to monarchy. Pocock’s understanding of how jurists and state conceived of citizens, and perhaps how citizens conceived themselves, has remarkable affinities with conclusions drawn by Bruce Frier about the interests that new Italian Romans brought to the law in their role as subjects of law and users of legal services in the age of Cicero. The rise of the Roman jurists offers a most extraordinary argument, to the effect that the rise of an autonomous and rationalized conception of law in the last decades of the Roman Republic was driven in part by the demands of the vastly expanded ­user-​­base of ­newly-​­enfranchised Romans, who wanted coherence and predictability in legal d ­ ecision-​­making. In Frier’s view, these new users of the Roman legal system ‘­were certain to have been more ­r ule-​ ­oriented in their understanding of law than were the old citizens for whom it was familiar’. The supposition is that they will have responded to the incipient rationalization of the system by demanding its furtherance. In Frier’s words: 623

Clifford Ando

It is probably not amiss, therefore, to describe the mass enfranchisement of the Italians, and the subsequent increase in the judicial caseload, as the direct ‘­precipitant’ for the rise of the Roman jurists within the Roman judicial system. (­279) These various strands of argumentation reach their climax in a passage of great brilliance: Broadly speaking, the rise of the Roman jurists may thus be attributed to three external factors: the enfranchisement of the Italians (­p erhaps the most important factor); the increase in commerce and personal wealth during the late Republic; and the political instability of the era. These external factors produced demands upon the internal structure of the Roman judicial system, which in practice could satisfy the demands only through a gradual upgrading of the weight accorded to jurists’ pronouncements on law. Most of the change probably occurred on the ­m icro-​­scale, as new patterns of judicial conduct emerged and were reinforced through social acceptance; hence the evidence for the change is mainly indirect and circumstantial, though rather conclusive. In general, so I would argue, the increasing scale and complexity of late Republican society made it desirable (­though not necessarily inevitable) that law become differentiated at a higher and more deliberate level than in earlier Mediterranean societies; and the presence of the jurists at the margins of the Roman judicial system made it possible for this to occur. The factors that caused the rise of the Roman jurists are thus broadly similar to those that created and shaped the Principate. (­279) One of the things that makes this passage thrilling is the elegance with which it alludes to a ­half-​­century’s ­hard-​­won consensus about the nature of ­social-​­historical change in the decades that followed the Social War. Frier’s argument is thus deeply indebted to Syme, and in particular to The Roman Revolution. To put the matter another way, according to Frier, the story of Roman law in the late ­Republic is largely the story of the rise to influence on Roman law of the economic and social interests of the ­extra-​­Roman aristocracies of municipal Italy. Furthermore, their salience to history, according to Syme (­1939), resulted not simply from their enfranchisement in consequence of a war, itself fought in consequence of empire. They also filled a vacuum, created by the (­civil) wars that followed, in which the Roman aristocracy consumed itself, and those elites most invested in c­ itizenship-­​­­as-​­agency drowned themselves in bloodshed. Moreover, if I am right to draw a ­through-​­line from Frier to ­Pocock  – ​­and from Cicero to ­Gaius – ​­the reconfiguration that takes place in the legal imagining of citizenship between the late republic and the Antonine age commences here, in the age of Cicero. This reconfiguration of citizenship is, therefore, not a consequence of monarchy. On the contrary, it itself contributed, as Syme and Frier each in their way insists, to the foundation of the Principate, or at least was not caused by it. Indeed, the story of the transformations in republican citizenship and political subjectivity that I have charted can be told without reference to the cosmetic changes undergone by formal politics at Rome, from imperial republic to republican monarchy. Hence, one might conclude, in denigrating any focus on constitutional form in writing the history of 624

Census, censor, citizenship

power, that Syme may have been right after all. My own argument thus joins a network of literatures, participating in disparate domains, which has detected the foundations of Augustan political ­culture – its ​­ practices of government; its rhetoric of public law; its symbolics of ­empire – ​­in the extraordinary ferment of the collapsing republic (­see, e.g., Nicolet 1991; Hodgson 2014).

Notes 1 Frank (­1924); Tibiletti (­1959; see also 2007); Taylor (­1960); Toynbee (­1965); Wiseman (­1969); Brunt (­1987 [1971]). 2 Kron (­2005); Scheidel (­2008); De Ligt (­2012); Hin (­2013). 3 Vell. Pat. 2.7, of which the whole bears citation: In legibus Gracchi inter perniciosissima numeraverim quod extra Italiam colonias posuit. id maiores, cum viderent tanto potentiorem Tyro Carthaginem, Massiliam Phocaea, Syracusas Corintho, Cyzicum ac Byzantium Mileto, genitali solo, diligenter vitaverant, ut cives Romanos ad censendum ex provinciis in Italiam revocaverint (‘­A mong the laws of Gracchus, I would number among the most harmful that he placed colonies outside of Italy. This our ancestors very carefully avoided, as they saw how much more powerful Carthage was than Tyre, Massilia than Phocaea, Syracuse than Corinth, Cyzicus and Byzantium than Miletus, the soil that bore t­ hem – ​­so much so that they summoned Roman citizens from the provinces back to Italy to be censused’). 4 The question of when the census began to gather more complex data need not be taken up here, but it probably is connected to changes in fiscality at the end of the fifth century rather than, e.g., serving any function in institutionalized forms of social differentiation. On this topic, see Tan (­2020). 5 Roman legend assigned the institution of the censorship to 443 BCE (­Livy 4.8.3), with innovations in the census ascribed to later years in the fifth and fourth centuries (­Livy 4.24.5; lex Ovinia, 312 BCE = Elster 2003: no. 38). 6 Millar (­1986) provides a sketch of remarkable analytic power. 7 For a further discussion of Toynbee’s achievement, see Millar (­2008 [2004]) and Ando (­2019a). 8 Pina Polo (­2020) offers an u ­ p-­​­­to-​­date assessment of the historiographic landscape; Ando (­2020a) offers an afterword to that project. Millar (­1984) offers an unparalleled portrait of the relief provided, to these issues and others, by the advent of monarchic power. 9 The most recent ­large-​­scale history known to me is Le Teuff (­2012), whose revision and publication is much to be desired. 10 This imagining of the Roman state, such as it was, was abandoned in the J­ ulio-​­Claudian period, which process deserves its own treatment.

Bibliography Ando, C. (­2000) Imperial ideology and provincial loyalty in the Roman Empire (­Berkeley, CA) ——— ​­(­2002) ‘­Vergil’s Italy: ethnography and politics in fi ­ rst-​­century Rome’, in D.S. Levene and D. Nelis (­eds) Clio and the poets: Augustan poetry and the traditions of ancient historiography (­Leiden) ­123–​­142 ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Legal pluralism in practice’, in P.J. du Plessis, C. Ando, and K. Tuori (­eds) The Oxford handbook of Roman law and society (­Oxford) ­283–​­293 ​­2019a) ‘­Hannibal’s legacy: sovereignty and territoriality in Republican Rome’, in K.-​­J. ——— (­ Hölkeskamp, S. Karataş, and R. Roth (­eds) Empire, hegemony or anarchy? Rome and Italy, ­2 01–​­31 BC (­Stuttgart) ­55–​­81 ——— ​­(­2019b) ‘­Self, society, individual and person in Roman law’, in M.R. Niehoff and J. Levinson (­eds) Self, s­ elf-​­fashioning, and individuality in Late Antiquity: new perspectives (­Tübingen) ­375–​­392 ​­ 2019c) ‘­T he space and time of politics in civil war’, in C. ­Rosillo-​­López (­ed.) Communi——— (­ cating public opinion in the Roman Republic (­Stuttgart) ­175–​­188 ——— ​­(­2020a) ‘­Law, Violence and Trauma in the Triumviral Period’, in Pina Polo (­ed.) 2020, ­477–​­493

625

Clifford Ando ——— ​­(­2020b) ‘­Ex imperio libertas: Freedom and republican empire’, in C. Balmaceda (­ed.) Libertas and res publica in the Roman Republic (­Leiden) ­104–​­117 Asheri, D. (­­1991–​­1992) ‘­The art of synchronization in Greek historiography: the case of Timaeus of Tauromenium’, SCI 11, ­52–​­89 Brunt, P.A. (­1987 [1971]) Italian manpower 225 B.C.–​­A.D.14 (­Oxford) Dolganov, A. (­2021) ‘­Documenting Roman citizenship’, in M. Lavan and C. Ando (­eds) Roman and local citizenship in the long second century CE (­Oxford and New York) ­185–​­230 Elster, M. (­2003) Die Gesetze der mittleren römischen Republik: Text und Kommentar (­Darmstadt) Feeney, D. (­2007) Caesar’s calendar: ancient time and the beginnings of history (­Berkeley, CA) Foucault, M. (­2007) Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France ­1977–​­1978, trans. G. Burchell, ed. M. Senellart (­New York) Frank, T. (­1924) ‘­Roman census statistics from 225 to 28 B.C.’, CPh 19, ­329–​­341 Frier, B.W. (­1985) The Rise of the Roman jurists: studies in Cicero’s Pro Caecina (­Princeton, NJ) de Ligt, L. (­2012) Peasants, citizens and soldiers: studies in the demographic history of Roman Italy 225 ­BC–​­AD 100 (­Cambridge) Hin, S. (­2013) The demography of Roman Italy: population dynamics in an ancient conquest society (­2 01 ­BCE–​­14 CE) (­Cambridge) Hodgson, L. (­2014) ‘­Appropriate and adaptation: Republican idiom in Res Gestae 1.1’, CQ 64, ­265–​­269 Kron, G. (­2005) ‘­The Augustan census figures and the population of Italy’, Athenaeum 93, ­441–​­495 Le Teuff, B. (­2012) Census: les recensements dans l’empire romain d’Auguste à Diocletien, diss. Université Michel de ­Montaigne – ​­Bordeaux III (­unpublished) Millar, F. (­1984) ‘­State and subject: the impact of monarchy’, in F. Millar and E. Segal (­eds) Caesar Augustus: seven aspects (­Oxford) = id. (­2002) ­292–​­313 ——— ​­(­1986) ‘­Politics, persuasion, and the people before the Social War (­­150–​­90 B.C.)’, JRS 76, ­1–​­11 = id. (­2002) ­143–​­161 ——— ​­(­2002) Rome, the Greek world, and the east, vol. 1: The Roman Republic and the Augustan revolution, H.M. Cotton and G.M. Rogers (eds) (­Chapel Hill, NC) ——— ​­(­2008 [2004]) ‘­Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (­­1889–​­1975)’, in Oxford dictionary of national biography (­Oxford); https://­doi.org/­10.1093/­ref:odnb/­31769 (­accessed 27 March 2021) Nicolet, C. (­1991) Space, geography, and politics in the early Roman Empire (­A nn Arbor, MI) Pina Polo, F. (­ed.) (­2020) The triumviral period: civil war, political crisis and socioeconomic transformations (­Zaragoza) Pocock, J.G.A. (­1992) ‘­The ideal of citizenship since classical times’, Queen’s Quarterly 99, ­33–​­55 Riggsby, A.M. (­2019) Mosaics of knowledge: representing information in the Roman world (­New York) Scheidel, W. (­2008). ‘­Roman population size: the logic of the debate’, in L. de Ligt and S.J. Northwood (­eds) People, land, and politics: demographic developments and the transformation of Roman Italy, 300 ­BC –​­AD 14 (­Leiden) ­17–​­70 Syme, R. (­1939) The Roman revolution (­Oxford) Tan, J. (­2020) ‘­The ­dilectus-​­tributum system and the settlement of ­fourth-​­century Italy’, in J. Armstrong and M.P. Fronda (­eds) Romans at war: soldiers, citizens, and society in the Roman Republic (­London) ­52–​­75 Taylor, L.R. (­1960) The voting districts of the Roman Republic: the ­thirty-​­five urban and rural tribes (­Rome) Tibiletti, G. (­1959) ‘­The comitia during the decline of the Roman Republic’, SDHI 25, ­94–​­127 ——— ​­(­2007) Studi di storia agraria romana, ed. A. Baroni (­Trento) Toynbee, A.J. (­1965) Hannibal’s legacy: the Hannibalic War’s effects on Roman life (­Oxford) Wiseman, T.P. (­1969) ‘­The census in the first century B.C.’, JRS 59, ­59–​­75

626

44 CITIZENSHIP IN THE ROMAN PROVINCES The example of Africa Martyna Świerk For inhabitants of provinces of the early Empire, holding citizenship was a reward and a privilege. Before the Antonine Constitution, it gave the possibility of belonging to a very select group who had full citizen rights and constituted the imperial elite. Outside of Italy, this privilege was given to a small group of people (­Besson 2017: 215). Provincials found the matter of holding citizenship very important, as can be seen in the works of Aelius Aristides, a Greek orator originating from Mysia (­a region in the province of Asia) and a member of the Second Sophistic. In his oration Regarding Rome (­Aristid. Or. 26. ­59–​­64), the author depicts citizenship as a privilege granted by Rome to the most talented, virtuous, and powerful people regardless of their provincial origins.1 He also praises the openness of Roman citizenship, which contrary to Greek ­citizenship  – ​­more closely connected with ethnos  – ​­was accessible to anyone regardless of geographical differences. Nonetheless, it should be borne in mind that Aelius Aristides delivered his oration around 155 CE in Rome, in order to seek the emperor’s favour and advance his career. Therefore, it goes without saying that this epideictic oration’s aim was, above all, to praise Rome, not least in the context of administrative organization. However, it can be assumed that it reflects, to a certain degree, the local ­second-​­century CE elites’ attitude towards citizenship, who considered close relations with the capital as an elevation of their social status (­Besson 2017: 201). It is interesting, nonetheless, to ask to what extent local provincials shared such writers’ viewpoints and aspirations. This chapter considers the significance of citizenship in the provinces of the Empire. Despite the scarcity of historical sources, this chapter attempts to determine the significance of citizenship to the local people in social rather than legal terms. African provinces have been chosen as the topic of this chapter because they form a particularly valuable case study. Rome quickly started using the fertile soil of North Africa as a source of agricultural produce, mostly grains, which led to the province’s increased significance and development. It is commonly assumed that the lands of today’s Maghreb were one of the most Romanized territories (­Broughton 1929; Benabou 1968; Pflaum 1973), whose inhabitants were quick to assume Roman lifestyle, culture, and customs.2 Thus, it may seem that obtaining citizenship would be considered an important matter by their communities.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-52

627

Martyna Świerk

Joining the ranks of citizens of the Empire not only meant meeting certain conditions, but also offered certain privileges which characterized only this social group.3 Ius suffragii and ius honorum were the most important rights in the context of the political aspirations of the local elites. Ius suffragii provided the opportunity to take part in Roman assemblies, vote on the proposed bills, and participate in the elections of officials. Nonetheless, this privilege lost much of its importance at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Principate when assemblies of comitia gradually ceased to exist. From the provincial perspective, ius honorum was a more significant right because it allowed the citizen to hold every office in the Roman magistrature in accordance with the cursus honorum. For privileged members of society, having these rights meant the possibility of holding an office which was evidence of their status and position. However, for other people, especially those not inhabiting significant city centres, political rights were mostly a façade, as citizenship was associated with different privileges that made everyday life much easier. Under ius provocationis, a citizen could appeal to the people against the decision of a ­h igher-​­ranking official in criminal proceedings. In an economic context, ius commercii was an important privilege as it gave the right to carry out legal actions based on civil law and conduct civil law transactions of material goods known as res mancipi, which included draught animals crucial for agricultural production, land, and houses. Having Roman citizenship was particularly significant in the context of family life because a citizen was authorized under ius conubii to contract a legally binding marriage, which, in turn, gave the children born from such a union citizenship and the possibility of coming into an inheritance. In the Empire, only a person holding citizenship could draw up a will and be designated an heir. As can be seen, Roman citizenship was an important attribute, especially in a legal context. It also gave its holder many opportunities in the political, economic, and social spheres. The opinion of James Frank Gilliam, that being a Roman citizen was in large part a ‘­matter of law, not a culture’, seems justified in this case (­Gilliam 1965: 66). Access to rights for only a selected social group served as a means of emphasizing the status of a community in both the imperial capital and the provinces (­Ando 2020: ­355–​­356). Roman citizenship could be obtained in a number of ways. As has been mentioned before, one of the simplest ways of becoming a citizen was being born from a legally binding ­marriage – ​­conubium (­further on conubium: Kremer 2006). A child born from such a union acquired the father’s legal status and, therefore, became a free citizen. In some parts of the Empire, particularly in provinces and limes where soldiers played an important part in local social structures, the emperor granted Roman citizens the right of conubium, so that they could marry a local woman of peregrina status.4 In Africa, an example of a city granted this privilege during the reign of the emperor Claudius was ­Volubilis – the ​­ capital of Mauretania Tingitana (­IAM 2.448). As to the children born in a marriage that Roman law did not consider legal, their status was problematic. In such cases, a child acquired the mother’s legal status. However, there was an exception to this rule. Under lex Minicia, if a mother of citizen status married a man of peregrinus status who did not have the right of conubium, the child did not obtain citizenship. However, it was not prevented from being granted citizenship, as a child born from such a union could apply to be a citizen, but ­well-​­defined conditions had to be met (­Gai. Inst. 1.77). Being freed was a chance for slaves to gain both personal freedom and civitas romana. In order for manumissio to be considered legal, certain criteria had to be met, 628

Citizenship in the Roman provinces: the example of Africa

one of which was that the slave’s age had to be above 30 years.5 Failure to comply with some conditions led to restrictions on freedom, which according to the lex Iunia Norbana granted freedmen the s­o-​­called Junian Latin status. Junian Latins admittedly gained freedom and Latinitas. However, they did not have access to civitas and the privileges associated with it. In North Africa, like other parts of the Roman Empire, gaining freedom on the basis of the lex Iunia was most common (­Garnsey 1981; Pawlak 2002: 78). Peregrini inhabiting Roman territories could obtain citizenship on the basis of a grant conceded by an emperor to an individual or a group. According to Fergus Millar, the most useful documents on procedures, limitations, and consequences of granting Roman citizenship in marginal areas of the Empire come from the regions of Africa (­Millar 1983: 105). The Tabula Banasitana  – a​­ bronze tablet produced in the second ­c entury – ​­is a record of granting Roman citizenship to a Berber noble of the Zegrenses tribe and his family (­AE 1971: 534). It was found in 1957 near the village of Banasa in ­modern-​­day Morocco and its text was published for the first time in 1971. The tablet is 24 × 18 inches, so it was probably not a personal certificate but a public inscription or a monument.6 The inscription can be divided into three main parts: the first, probably dating to 168/­169 CE, regards a civil grant conceded by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus via the governor of Mauretania Tingitana, Coiedius Maximus, to Iulianus Zegrensis, his wife Ziddina, and their four children. This first inscription contains the information that in the area of the province of Mauretania Tingitana citizenship was awarded for exceptional merit and loyalty to Rome. The Iulianus family displayed such outstanding loyalty, as one of very few clans of the Zegrenses tribe. The second part of Tabula is an inscription dating to 6 July, 177 CE which commemorates the grant of civil rights by the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus through Vallius Maximus, the governor of the province, to Fagguna and her sons. Fagguna was a wife of Aurelius Iulianus who was listed as a chief of Zegrenses, and assumed to be the son of the Iulianus Zegrensis mentioned in the first part of the inscription. In the last part of the tablet inscription, there also appears a fragment of imperial commentarius – ​­an administrative act of the ­emperor  – where ​­ the decision has been written down. After that appear full names of signatories who were to form a consilium principis (­an eminent group of the emperor’s advisers), which seem to additionally confirm the grant of citizenship (­Seston and Euzennat 1971: 4­ 80–​­481). The Tabula Banasitana allows us to assume that having citizenship was an important matter even for people inhabiting peripheral regions of ­ herwin-​­White emphasizes that the local community had to be the Empire. Adrian N. S aware of the privileges associated with having Roman citizenship, especially in matters related to inheriting assets, because in both cases grants were extended also to children (­while children from mixed marriages could not be the beneficiaries of a testament) (­­Sherwin-​­White 1973: 94). Loyalty, as emphasized in the text of the Tabula, was significant particularly in limes areas, and although its exact meaning is not known, it could provide an opportunity for the whole local gens (‘­family’) to be awarded a grant, whereas other ways of gaining citizenship such as military service were limited only to individuals. Granting civitas Romana to communities inhabiting provincial regions of the Empire should be analyzed not only from the local communities’ viewpoint, but also from a broader perspective of the politics of the Empire. Granting citizenship and therefore gaining the loyalty of people inhabiting the frontier made it possible to keep a region 629

Martyna Świerk

subdued using only political channels (­Besson 2017: 207). Maintaining calm at a frontier was important especially in provinces such as the two Mauretanias, which were constantly susceptible to Berber invasions. Apart from the information on a clan of the Zegrenses tribe from the province of Mauretania Tingitana, we also have sources documenting contacts with the provincial administration of another local gens – ​­Baquates. Numerous inscriptions from an altar dating to a period between 173 and 280 CE refer to agreements made between the procurators of the province of Mauretania Tingitana and the leaders of the Baquates tribe, whose purpose was to achieve peace (­IAM 2.376). In the texts of these agreements, principes repeatedly appear, mentioned already in the Banasa inscriptions. There is still no consensus as to who these principes were. However, Edmund Frézouls (­1957: 87), on the basis of onomastic analysis, shows their strong ties with the Roman tradition and even suggests that they may have had Roman citizenship.7 In fact, it is not known whether the Baquates and Zegrenses tribes lived within or beyond the limes.8 Nonetheless, maintaining peaceful relations and possibly also guaranteeing the privilege of having citizenship, even though it was granted to a very small elite group, could have been a way of tackling threats to the peace and safety of provincial people. An emperor could grant citizenship to a local community inhabiting a regional centre as a whole. An inscription originating from the village of Gigthis in Tripolitania can serve as an example (­CIL 8.22737). The inscription, made during the reign of the ­Nerva-​­Antonine dynasty, tells the story of two missions to Rome undertaken on behalf of the local community by a citizen of a city, a duumvir and flamen perpetuum M. Servilius Draco Albusianus.9 The inscription was carved on the base of a pillar placed in the forum of Gigthis and praises Albusianus’ accomplishments and his generosity as he renewed the mission by providing his own financial resources. At the imperial court, the representative of Gigthis managed successfully to obtain the Latin maius privilege (­Mommsen 1907: 33), which allowed the extension of Roman citizenship to the entire ordo decurionum10 of the town. Originally Gigthis was a typical civitas peregrina where the influence of local people mixed with Punic traditions until Antoninus Pius granted it the status of municipium (­CIL 8.22707). It is likely that the town undergoing Romanization was granted by the emperor only the Latin minus privilege that awarded citizen rights only to municipal officials. Therefore, the inscription from Gigthis can provide not only an example of the political ambitions of local elites for whom having citizenship meant an open door to a municipal career, but also proof of the progress of adopting Roman models in Tripolitania, which is emphasized by the brass sculpture of the Capitoline Wolf adorning the forum of Gigthis (­CIL 8. 2269 = ILAfr 16; Kotula 1973: 448). Besides its political and legal aspects, Roman citizenship could also be of value in creating the personal identity of members of a particular social group (­Mathisen 2006: 1013). Studies on individual perception of the significance of citizenship contain many presumptions and difficulties, mostly caused by the lack of historical sources that could shed light on individual reasons for obtaining citizen rights. We do not have any historical sources at our disposal that could allow us to recreate cultural aspirations of particular members of society. We also do not have any way to get to know their ‘­human experience’ (­Woolf 1992: 350). The only testimony that makes it possible to find more information about different social groups, not only about the elites whose perspective is presented in literature, is epigraphy, even though it also has its limits especially in the context of individual citizenship. 630

Citizenship in the Roman provinces: the example of Africa

North Africa is considered to be a particularly rewarding subject of epigraphic investigation, as it provides the greatest amount of preserved epigraphic material among all of the provinces of the Empire. In this regard, the province of Africa Proconsularis, where almost 28,000 preserved inscriptions have been found, stands out the most, whereas around 16,500 epigraphic testimonies come from Numidia and around 6,000 originate from the two Mauretanias (­Beltrán Lloris 2015: ­138–​­139).11 In the whole Empire, epitaphs commemorating representatives of various social groups predominate in the total group of inscriptions. The basic problem is the randomness of preserved epigraphic material. For example, in Carthage, the capital of the province of Africa Proconsularis, where throughout the entire Roman period political and cultural life flourished, Roman citizens are rarely presented in the local epigraphic habit. By contrast, in cities of lesser importance such as Volubilis, where considerably fewer epigraphic documents could be expected, the group of Roman citizens is practically overrepresented (­Le Bohec 1989). Another problem, often impossible to solve, is the difficulty of clearly determining the status of people appearing in such inscriptions. According to the classical authors (­Sen. Ben. 4.8.3; Juv. Sat. 5.127), having tria nomina was an anthroponymic indicator of being a citizen (­Gallivan 1992: 51). A Roman name was traditionally composed of praenomen, nomen gentile, and cognomen,12 and could be borne not only by f­ ree-​­born citizens but also by peregrini, for whom imitating Roman onomastic customs symbolized some privileges, or freedmen, among them also the aforementioned Junian Latins. Therefore, the only anthroponymic indicator unambiguously showing that the inscription mentions a person with full civic rights is the appearance of filiation and tribus. Encountering these markers is, nonetheless, difficult because in the first ages of the Empire indicators of status such as tribus, filiation or information on having become a freedman were gradually losing significance and thus were often entirely omitted (­Kajanto 1968: 521). Due to the a­ bove-​­mentioned difficulties, only inscriptions clearly referring to citizens by using the term civis will be analyzed here. Such testimonies are extremely rare: in a vast amount of 60,000 inscriptions originating from Africa, only 30 inscriptions use the term civis, seemingly an extremely insignificant percentage. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Roman citizenship was of little importance to provincial people, but it does prove that this was not worth explicitly emphasizing in inscriptions.13 In the majority of cases, the term civis appears in honorific or public inscriptions, where it is not so much a direct reference to a citizen as an element of a defined formula expressing gratitude to a local community or praising the issuer of the statue on which the inscription was engraved. Ten of the selected inscriptions are sepulchral examples that lack an unambiguous date. Taking into account the paleographic criteria, it seems likely that they were created between the first and the third centuries CE. A vast majority of them were found in the regions of Africa Proconsularis (­seven inscriptions), while two come from the Mauretanias and one originates from Numidia. Only in two inscriptions is there a clear reference to Roman citizenship (­CIL 8.4838; 8.16914). Two citizens who are mentioned in the inscriptions from Guelaa Bou A ­ tfane – ​­a town in Africa Proconsularis whose status in antiquity remains u ­ nknown – ​­are declared to be cives Romani. These citizens could have originated from the municipium of Nattabutes, 13 kilometres from Guelaa Bou Atfane, though it is not named in the inscriptions. This may indicate that placing emphasis on the status of a Roman citizen in an inscription coming from a town of lesser importance was meant to distinguish an individual 631

Martyna Świerk

among the local community. Yet it is obvious that such an interpretation is a hypothesis because it is uncertain whether the inscription’s fi ­ nd-​­spot and the location where the tomb had been erected are the same. In the remaining cases, there is no certainty whether the word civis refers to people holding Roman citizenship. Still, it is used as a means of defining one’s origins and belonging to a local community. The term civis was used in a small number of inscriptions in order to refer to people not originating from Africa. In a sepulchral inscription found near the town of Hammamet, the term civis Pempeiopolitanus appears, probably originating from the town of Pompeiopolis in Galatia (­ILAfr 316). Another inscription from Ruscicada belonging to the Christian cultural circle mentions a female inhabitant of Pannoni (­civis Pannonica) (­AE 8.819). Other inscriptions relate to the permanent presence of the Roman army in the areas of the two Mauritanias and come from the graves of two soldiers: one from Thrace (­CIL 8. 21021) and the other described in the inscription as laeti civis, which meant a foreigner (­BCTH 1993/­1995 150). Most often civis appears in collocation with the name of a town, for example, the tomb in the town of Belalitanus Maior (­AE 1961 80) commemorating an inhabitant of the town or a votive inscription offered to Minerva by a civis Vazanitanus (­CIL 8.14349). However, it is impossible to determine if the aforementioned citizens also held Roman citizenship because the legal status of the mentioned cities remains unknown. Inscriptions have also been found in which it can be assumed that the deceased person could have been a Roman citizen, but the epitaph places an emphasis only on local identity. Such a case is an inscription found near the town of Thaenae which in antiquity had the status of a colony, therefore it is possible that some of its inhabitants had the status of Roman citizens. However, the inscription uses the term civis Tenitanus instead of civis romanus (­ILAfr 38.50). Inscriptions mentioning citizens of a location different from the ­fi nd-​­spot of the inscription should be considered in a slightly different context. An inscription originating from the colony of Thubursicum Numidiarum refers to a citizen of another colony from Africa, Hippo Diarrhytus (­CIL 8.4894), and in an inscription from the neighbourhood of Madaura appears a citizen of Theveste (­ILAlg 1.2238). There are no indications that would clearly prove if these people were Roman citizens. However, it seems obvious that in these instances the references to citizenship of particular towns could have been, above all, an indicator of origins, emphasizing the individuality and attachment to local identity of people appearing in the texts of the inscriptions. Nonetheless, defining individuals in inscriptions as citizens of a particular town in preference to defining them in a more cosmopolitan way as Roman citizens may be evidence of greater attachment to a local community and stronger identification with a provincial town. Therefore, when we talk about Roman citizenship in the context of provinces, we may have in mind mostly citizenship of a city. As stated above, civic privileges could be granted not only to an individual but also to a collectively defined community. An inhabitant of a town that had a status of municipium could, as a reward for holding a public office, be granted Roman citizenship. Nonetheless, municipal aristocracy aspired for their city to be granted an honorary title of colony, since colonies were considered to be in many respects s­ mall-​­scale versions of Rome.14 In the majority of cases, having the status of colony or municipium guaranteed to at least a defined group the status of Roman citizens. Therefore, an analysis of the statuses enjoyed by the local centres before the proclamation of Caracalla’s edict may be an attempt to answer the emerging question about the scale of citizenship in African 632

Citizenship in the Roman provinces: the example of Africa

provinces. Taking into consideration 462 African towns from which inscriptions come, the data compiled from municipia and colonies are as follows:15

Africa Proconsularis Numidia Mauretania

Municypia

Colonies

All locations

65 11 6

102 9 11

295 65 102

The data above show the far greater number of cities in Africa Proconsularis, which was considered to be the most urbanized province in Africa. However, in both Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, the percentage of municipia and colonies in comparison with the rest of the centres remains around 30%. This percentage is much lower for both Mauretanias (­17%). These data do not allow us to clearly determine the scale of citizenship in provinces. However, certain geographical differences become evident. It can be assumed that in Numidia and Africa Proconsularis the number of citizens was definitely much higher than in Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana. Nonetheless, it is still a small share if we take into consideration the fact that only a certain limited group of inhabitants of one third of provincial cities enjoyed the status of a citizen. Therefore, citizenship remained a privilege of an elite group of inhabitants, mainly in bigger towns in the most urbanized provinces of the Empire, being still marginal elsewhere. It is common to assume that in the provinces privileges related to having citizenship were considered by Roman administration an element of soft power that allowed exercising control over territorially vast provinces (­Besson 2017: 202). In the Roman system of provincial government, a strong involvement of local elites was vital, and close ­co-​­operation with them seems to have assured the success of the Empire (­Rives 2001: 100). Therefore, one can wonder what was the real significance of civic privileges for the local elite and whether their relation with the capital of the Empire was as strong as is implied by Aelius Aristides’ oration. The elites’ viewpoint is known mostly from literary sources. When we talk about Africa, we do not have at our disposal any source that could explicitly present the attitudes of local nobles towards citizenship. However, some conclusions can be drawn on the basis of the works of authors who originated from Africa and knew local conditions. The best example is Apuleius, who, besides ­ ell-​­known classical writTertullian and Marcus Cornelius Fronto, is one of the most w ers of African origin. A philosopher and rhetorician born c. 120 CE in Madauros, he was, above all, known to a broad audience as the author of Apologia and The Golden Ass (­Harrison 2000). The Florida,16 one of his works from a later period, is an anthology of his speeches delivered in Carthage between 157 and163 CE. Apuleius’ ‘­Carthaginian orations’, as they are often described, are considered to be epideictic speeches, whose main purpose was to entertain the audience, delivered to display the mastery of art without any legal or political connotations. Therefore, in this case it can also be assumed that their purpose was to display Apuleius’ rhetorical talents and to seek the audience’s favour. Scholars do not agree on the exclusively entertaining character of epideictic speeches. According to Jeffrey Walker, such declamations were to demonstrate values and beliefs important to a community and its cultural life (­Walker 2000: 9). In the context of the analyzed problem, speeches delivered before 633

Martyna Świerk

members of Carthage’s local elite are especially significant. In excerpt XVI, Apuleius expresses gratitude to his friend, the consul Emilianus Strabon, and the rest of the members of the assembly, Carthage’s decurions, for erecting his monument. Provincials are called principes Africae viri (‘­foremost men of Africa’) at the beginning of the oration (­Apul. Flor. 16.1). In many excerpts of his speeches, Apuleius addresses his audience, emphasizing, above all, their local Carthaginian or comprehensively African origins. He holds the city in high esteem, placing an emphasis on the education he received in Carthage and deeming its inhabitants as authorities in the field of culture (­Apul. Flor. 19.36). Moreover, he claims that Carthage is both his muse and teacher (­Apul. Flor. 20.10). Above all, he lays emphasis on his own and his audience’s African identity, despite becoming close to the Roman culture himself and adopting its typical patterns in his orations. ­ igher-​­ranking municipal offiHowever, it is intriguing that Apuleius, when addressing h cials, never alludes to their status as Roman citizens, especially if we take into account Aristides’ statement that belonging to the circle of Roman culture was a considerable act of ennoblement. Lack of such mentions cannot indicate anything with certainty. However, it allows the assumption that belonging to a smaller group of citizens of a city was more important than belonging to a wider group of Roman citizens, and the local elites had, above all, the best interest of their small homelands at heart. Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the words spoken by Apuleius were a typical captatio benevolentiae, a phrase intended to gain the audience’s favour, in this case by identifying with them. However, it can be assumed that emphasizing especially African identity can be significant. Claude Lepelley made similar observations on the late Empire and deemed that the African municipal aristocracy had strong ties to their local, provincial cities and rarely applied for imperial administrative offices (­Lepelley 1979). This state of affairs could be associated in Africa with the particularly great participation in this social group of land­ on-​­participation (­Kotula 1981: owners who were characterized by a certain political n 102). Danuta Okoń noted the limited participation of people of provincial origins in the group of consuls and consulares17 during the reign of the Severan dynasty (­Okoń 2017). Although Africa still dominates in this compilation,18 contrary to popular belief, the participation of provincial officials in the central administrative system was relatively small. Such an observation is significant, especially if we take into consideration the African origins of the Severan dynasty, which did not seem to be reflected in the participation of Africans in central administration. It might have been, above all, the result of the dominance of the ‘­old’ senatorial aristocracy who concentrated the highest offices in their hands. However, it did not curb the aspirations, albeit limited, of provincial elites. The edict issued by the emperor Caracalla in 212 CE declaring that all free men inhabiting the Empire were to be given civil rights tends to be considered a revolution.19 The Constitutio Antoniniana often brings discussions about citizenship to an end, because it is a moment when citizenship loses its previous significance as a privilege to be granted. The edict was a conclusion of the integration process of the provinces with hitherto politically privileged Italy. The possession of citizenship no longer paved the way to holding provincial office and, therefore, lessened the significance of the benefits gained from reaching further stages of Roman city s­ tatus – ​­municipium or colony (­de Visscher 1961). As a result, the custom of mentioning the legal and constitutional rank of a town started disappearing. Terms such as civitas, municipium, and colonia were replaced in the third century by civitas as a universal name for all cities (­Kornemann 1933: 575). This phenomenon could be observed in all parts of the Empire. However, 634

Citizenship in the Roman provinces: the example of Africa

African provinces are an exception in this regard (­Kotula 1973). A differentiation between municipia and colonies appears in onomastics popularly and on a large scale in Africa throughout the third and fourth centuries in many kinds of sources, mostly epigraphic and itinerary ones. In ancient Rome, itineraria were topographical road descriptions that also included the surrounding cities and villages and intervening distances between them. In itineraries dating back to the period of the late Empire, such as the Itinerarium provinciarum Antonini Augusti, Tabula Peutingeriana, or Ravennatis Anonymi Cosmographia, legal and constitutional titles are provided only for African cities. The analysis of epigraphical testimonies reveals that this demonstration of status was not limited only to significant city centres. On the contrary, quite inconspicuous towns and villages boasted the title of colony or even municipium.20 Researchers seek the causes of this phenomenon in a psychological factor: the pride of local elites in the status ascribed to their city (­Kornemann 1933: 575). The late Empire is considered to be a period when the gradual decline in significance of city centres and the worsening financial condition of the curiales governing the cities caused by increasing state interventionism and tax burdens was noticeable. This is quite a generalizing observation that does not consider the specifics of particular regions of the Empire. In Late Antiquity, the production of olives in Byzacena and southern Numidia led to the economic rise of these lands, which later developed further under Roman rule. The regions in the central basin of the Bagradas River in the province of Africa Proconsularis, characterized by an exclusive concentration of municipia and colonies, also remained in good economic condition thanks to both their traditional cultivation of crops and the enrichment of agriculture with the production of olives (­Kotula 1973: 4­ 4–​­46). A favourable economic situation and the good condition of the local centre could thus have been reasons for pride, reflected in preserving the nomenclature which was once a manifestation and symbol of certain privileges that local people enjoyed, including with regard to citizenship. There is no clear answer to the question of what significance the inhabitants of the provinces of the Roman Empire ascribed to having citizen status. Different ancient viewpoints should be taken into consideration, formed by many changing factors such as the geopolitical situation in the region or individual status and personal experiences. African provinces of the Empire are an example that illustrates this complexity. As ­Hans-​­Georg Pflaum emphasized, there were, in fact, two types of Africans: one Romanized and concentrated around city centres and the other more peripheral and living in areas where local Berber influences became more pronounced (­Pflaum 1973: 65). As a result, in provinces such as Mauretania or Numidia where Roman influences were seemingly weaker, citizenship was perceived in a different way than, for example, in Carthage. Particularly on the frontiers, which were constantly under threat of conflicts with native people, citizenship and pertaining privileges could be a reward for loyalty to the capital and thereby a tool allowing the maintenance of stability in the region through diplomatic channels. The significance of citizenship was different in areas where Roman traditions were largely adopted, for example, by inhabitants of the numerous municipia and colonies in the province of Africa Proconsularis. There, citizenship could be viewed as a privilege serving as a means of exercising control over elites and maintaining their close ties to Rome, so that local nobles attached to Roman traditions could become the mainstay of provincial administration. It remains, by and large, impossible to define an individual’s attitude towards the matter of citizenship, though one could speculate that it varied according to individual 635

Martyna Świerk

social, economic, and cultural status. Different civic privileges may have been important to peregrini from smaller towns, where prerogatives enabling contracting legally binding marriages and inheriting assets or participating in commercial exchange could be a priority. Different was the perspective of local aristocracy, for whom having citizenship meant paving the way to a municipal career and in the long run holding an office in Rome. Historical sources justify the belief that citizenship in African provinces was more local than Roman. It seems that local inhabitants identified themselves, above all, with their small homelands, which in no way interfered with belonging to a circle of Roman citizens,21 though local provenience whether of urban or generally provincial character seems to be more willingly emphasized. Therefore, it is difficult to respond in any way to the argument of David Cherry who claims that Africans did not distinctively seek civic privileges (­Cherry 1999: 92). Considering the subject of his publication, it can be assumed that the author had in mind mostly the native people inhabiting the frontier. However, in this context, that thesis is difficult to clearly confirm. Classical sources give us limited access to the reality of those times, because we have only occasional insight into many aspects of the lives of local communities. A similarly unclear picture is painted with regard to the significance of Roman citizenship in the provinces. Although we are capable of determining the model of granting citizenship, possibilities of its acquisition and pertaining privileges, we still can only presume what motivated local people to join the elite ranks of Roman citizens.

Abbreviations AE = L’ Année épigraphique BCTH = Bulletin archéologique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, Paris CIL = Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum IAM = Inscriptions antiques du Maroc. 2 vols. Paris ­1966–​­2003 ILAfr = R. Cagnat, A. Merlin, and L. Chatelain (eds) (1923) Inscriptions latines d’Afrique (Paris) ILAlg = S. Gsell and H.-G. Pflaum (eds) (1922–2003) Inscriptions latines de l’Algérie (Paris and Algiers)

Notes 1 Arist. Or. 26. 59: τοῦτο δ’ εἰπὼν ἄπασαν εἴρηχα τὴν ­οἰκουμένην –​­, τὸ μὲν χαριέστερόν τε καὶ γενναιότερον καὶ δυνατώτερον πανταχοῦ πολιτικὸν ἤ καὶ ὁμόφυλον πᾶν ἀπεδείξατε, τὸ δὲ λοιπὸν ὑπήκοόν τε καὶ ἀρχόμενον. (‘(…) and everywhere you have made citizens all those who are the more accomplished, noble, and powerful people, even if they retain their native affinities, while the remainder you have made subjects and the governed’, trans. Behr 1981) 2 The term ‘­Romanization’, its meaning and usage limitations are widely discussed in literature. For an account of those discussions, see, among others, Cherry (­1999: ­175–​­178). 3 Basic rights which Roman citizens held will be presented here only briefly, without a detailed commentary on legal aspects. Further on civil rights in Rome: Gardner (­1993). 4 Peregrini is a term that describes free men who do not have civic rights. 5 More details on conditions of manumission in the early Empire: Weaver (­1990: ­275–​­277). 6 ­Sherwin-​­White (­1973: 87). The author presents a detailed analysis of legal matters related to particular inscriptions in the text of the Tabula. 7 ­Sherwin-​­White discusses the extent to which the Roman citizenship granted to representatives of both tribes was limited to principes: ­Sherwin-​­W hite (­1973: 87).

636

Citizenship in the Roman provinces: the example of Africa 8 The discussion on this topic mostly went on among French scholars: Frézouls (­1957: 95). 9 In the colonies and municipia, duoviri iure dicundo were two chief magistrates. Flamen perpetuum meant lifelong honorary priestly dignity. 10 Ordo decurionum was a term used for the members of local assemblies, who ruled the cities of the Roman Empire with municipal status. 11 Presented numbers do not include instrumenta domestica from Africa whose amount nearly reaches 5,000. 12 The presence of all mentioned parts of a name in Roman onomastic custom underwent changes throughout the centuries, which were comprehensively reviewed by Salway (­1994). 13 It does not seem to be a distinctive feature of African provinces, as in different parts of the Empire the percentage of inscriptions mentioning civis in any way with regard to an individual is equally insignificant. For example, only six such inscriptions were found in Hispania Tarraconensis, and only eight inscriptions were discovered in Gallia Narbonensis. 14 Primacy of colonies over municipia has been emphasized since antiquity by Aulus Gellius: meliore condicione esse colonias quam municipia (­Gell. 16.13.3). 15 The presented data are based on vol. VIII of CIL and Trismegistos Data Service. 16 B.T. Lee (­2005) provides one of the most recent critical editions with translation. 17 Viri consulares were a group of senators who had already held the office of the Roman consul in their careers. 18 Among 369 viri consulares whose origins were clearly defined, 73 (­19.8%) came from Africa: Okoń (­2017: 54). 19 There have been ongoing discussions among scholars about the significance of Caracalla’s edict. For example, Eck considers it not to be a revolutionary act but merely a logical final point in the development of civil rights which had been promoted by the ­Roman-​­Latin municipal laws (­Eck 2020: 328). See also Besson in this volume. 20 A detailed compilation of analyzed inscriptions is provided by T. Kotula (­1973: appendix). 21 On the collective identity of provincial people in the late Empire, see Mathisen (­2006).

Bibliography Ando, C. (­2020) ‘­P ublic law in Roman North Africa’, in K. Czajkowski and B. Eckhardt (­eds) Law in the Roman provinces (­New York) ­346–​­358 Behr, C.A. (­1981) P. Aelius Aristides, The complete works, vol. 2 (­Leiden) Beltrán Lloris, M. (­2015) ‘­The “­epigraphic habit” in the Roman world’, in C. Bruum and J. Edmondson (­eds) The Oxford handbook of Roman epigraphy (­Oxford) ­131–​­148 Benabou, M. (­1968) La résistance africaine à la romanisation (­Paris) Besson, A. (­2017) ‘­Fifty years before the Antonine Constitution: access to Roman citizenship and exclusive rights’, in L. Cecchet, A. Busetto (­eds) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to AD 212 (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­199–​­222 Broughton, T. (­1929) The Romanization of Africa Proconsularis (­Oxford) Cherry, D. (­1999) Frontier and society in Roman North Africa (­New York) de Visscher, F. (­1961) ‘­La Constitution Antonine et la dynastie africaine des Sévères’, RIDA 8, ­229–​­245 Eck, W. (­2020) ‘­T he leges municipales as a means of legal and social Romanization of the provinces of the Roman Empire’, in K. Czajkowski and B. Eckhardt (­eds) Law in the Roman Provinces (­New York) ­315–​­331 Frézouls, E. (­1957) ‘­Les Baquates et la province romaine de Tingitane’, BAM 2, ­65–​­116 Gallivan, P. (­1992) ‘­The nomenclature patterns of the Roman upper class in the early Empire: a statistical analysis’, Antichthon 26, ­51–​­79 Gardner, J.R. (­1993) Being a Roman citizen (­London) Garnsey, P. (­1981) ‘­Independent freedmen and the economy of Roman Italy under the Principate’, Klio 63, ­359–​­371 Gilliam, J.F. (­1965) ‘­Romanization of the Greek East: the role of the army’, BASP 2, ­65–​­73 Harrison, S.J. (­2000) Apuleius: a Latin sophist (­Oxford) Kajanto, I. (­1968) ‘­The significance of ­non-​­Latin cognomina’, Latomus 28, ­517–​­534 Kornemann, E. (­1933), ‘­Municipium’, RE 16.1

637

Martyna Świerk Kotula, T. (­1973) ‘­Z badań nad ustrojem municypalnym epoki późnego Cesarstwa. Afrykańskie municypia i kolonie’, Przegląd historyczny 64.3, ­445–​­468 ——— ​­(­1981) ‘­A frykańscy principales curiae, z badań nad elitą municypalną epoki późnego Cesarstwa’, Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego 613, Prace Historyczne 70, ­93–​­105 Kremer, D. (­2006) Ius Latinum: Le concept de droit latin sous la république et l’empire (­Paris) Le Bohec, Y. (­1989) ‘­Onomastique et société à Volubilis’, L’Africa romana 6, ­339–​­356 Lee, B.T. (­2005) Apuleius’ Florida: a commentary (­Berlin) Lepelley, C. (­1979) Les cités de l’Afrique romaine au ­B as-​­Empire, vol. 1: La permanence d’une civilisation municipal (­Paris) Mathisen, R.W. (­2006) ‘­Peregrini, barbari et cives Romani: concepts of citizenship and the legal identity of barbarians in the later Roman Empire’, AHR 111.4, ­1011–​­1040 Millar, F. (­1983) ‘­Epigraphy’, in M. Crawford (­ed.) Sources for ancient history (­Cambridge) Mommsen, T. (­1907) ‘­Latium maius, in id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (­Berlin) Okoń, D. (­2017) ‘­Konsulowie i konsularowie epoki ­Sewerów-​­nowe spojrzenie na zagadnienia ilościowe’, in M. Pawlak (­ed.) Rzymski Zachód od Augusta do upadku Cesarstwa (­K raków) ­49–​­60 2002) Niewolnicy prywatni w rzymskiej Afryce w okresie wczesnego Cesarstwa Pawlak, M. (­ (­Wrocław) Pflaum, G.H. (­1973) ‘­La romanisation de l’Afrique’, Vestigia 17, ­55–​­72 Rives, J.B. (­2001) Religion and authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (­Oxford) Salway, B. (­1994) ‘­W hat’s in a name? A survey of Roman onomastic practice from c. 700 B.C. to A.D. 700’, JRS 84, ­124–​­145 Seston, W. and Euzennat, M. (­1971) ‘­Un dossier de la chancellerie romaine: la Tabula Banasitana. Etude de diplomatique’, CRAI 115.3, 4­ 86–​­490 = eid., Publications de l’École française de Rome 43.1 (­1980) ­85–​­107 ­Sherwin-​­White, A.N. (­1973) ‘­The Tabula of Banasa and the Constitutio Antoniniana’, JRS 63, ­86–​­98 Weaver, P.R.C. (­1990) ‘­W here have all the Junian Latins gone? Nomenclature and status in the early Empire’, Chiron 20, ­275–​­305 Woolf, G. (­1992) ‘­The unity and diversity of romanisation’, JRA 5, ­349–​­352 Walker, J. (­2000) Rhetoric and poetics in antiquity (­Oxford)

638

45 CITIZENSHIP IN ROMAN EGYPT BEFORE 212 CE1 Maria Nowak

It is common knowledge that the Roman concept of citizenship was more complicated than a simple dichotomy of ‘­­citizen – ​­foreigner’ or ‘­­Roman – ­​­­non-​­Roman’. This is especially evident in Egypt, which provides us with thousands of individual stories, with Romans constituting only a tiny minority of the protagonists.2 This chapter’s aim is to give an overview of the notion of citizenship in Roman Egypt, provide a picture of citizens in the province, and tackle some problems that the ­multi-​­layered statuses of this society could cause.

Romans in Egypt Although Latin names and Latin derivations of Greek names3 were ­w ide-​­spread in Roman Egypt, their holders should by no means be classified automatically as Romans (­­Bieżuńska-​­Małowist 1972/­1973: 311). Even the use of Latin tria or duo nomina cannot be taken at face value: clear examples of their bearers are attested in the lists of payers of laographia,4 a tax from which Roman citizens enjoyed complete exemption, for example, C. Iulius Diodoros and his brother, C. Iulius Ptolemaios in P. Mich. IV 223, ll. ­430–​­431, 1887 (­Keenan 1973: 41 n.35). The only determinative element of the identification cluster indicating that an individual was indeed a Roman citizen is the tribus, the tribe (­Jördens 2012: 250). It is, however, rarely attested in Egypt. Although tracing Roman identity in papyri is difficult, there can be no doubt that Romans lived in Egypt. Certain central positions in the Roman administration of Egypt were always occupied by Romans, and some of them were born outside the province. The most prominent example is the praefectus Aegypti, a position that could be held only by an eques (­k night) of high rank selected by the emperor himself.5 Some other posts were also occupied only by Romans, for example, the regional governors known as epistrategoi, the office of iuridicus, the chief of justice, or various procuratorships, such as that of the idios logos, the emperor’s private accounts.6 Another category of ‘­old Romans’ attested in the sources from Roman Egypt are holders of big imperial estates called ousiai (­­Bieżuńska-​­Małowist 1972/­1973: 312). Not only were such landholders usually Romans, but also some of them belonged to the highest strata of the imperial society, including the emperor’s family. Thus, a large DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-53

639

Maria Nowak

number of the holders of these estates did not live in Egypt, but only collected the revenues from such lands (­Parássoglou 1978; Kehoe 1992; Broux 2019). Obviously, some Romans had to travel to Egypt in order to settle and live there, either as members of the provincial bureaucracy or as staff of the great estates or simply in search of new opportunities. We cannot, however, recognize such individuals easily or distinguish them from ‘­new Romans’, those who were granted or obtained their citizenship only in Egypt (­Jördens 2012: 250). It is practically impossible to assess the size of ‘­old Romans’ or determine whether it was concentrated in Alexandria or dispersed across the Egyptian chōra. John Rea suggests that such ‘­old Romans’ might have been perceived as a group, at least this is suggested in the t­ hird-​­century corn dole archive from Oxyrhynchos (­POxy. XL). Romans (­Ῥωμαῖοι) can be found on the lists of epikrithentes, principal receivers of the corn dole, consisting of a maximum of 3,000 men registered as inhabitants of the city of Oxyrhynchos who underwent an epikrisis and were appointed by lot when a place within this group fell vacant by death.7 Admission to the group depended on membership of the correct social class: a vast majority of the epikrithentes were inhabitants of Oxyrhynchos belonging to the metropolite or gymnasial class.8 Alexandrians and Romans, however, also could apply for free corn. POxy. XL 2927, ll. ­1–​­10, contains formulaic headings which the phylarchs were to use in their registers of people entitled to the doron (­g ift). The first two lines list and describe epikrithentes, while in line three we find the information that Romans and Alexandrians were additionally admitted: ὑφʼ οὓς Ῥωμαῖοι καὶ Ἀλεξανδρεῖς ‘­beneath them Romans and Alexandrians’.9 In the following lines (­­4–​­10), descriptions of homologoi and rhemboi continue, which means that the Romans and Alexandrians mentioned above them, in line 3, were entitled to their dole in the first class. The pattern seems to repeat in POxy. XL 2932, l. 5 (­reconstructed). The identity of this group of Ῥωμαῖοι (‘­Romans’) is not clear. The lists and the entire archive are dated to ­268–​­271 CE, half a century after the Constitutio Antoniniana. For this reason, the literal understanding of the term as ‘­Romans’ or ‘­Roman citizens’ can easily be excluded. If this were the case, everyone would have been admitted to the corn dole, which is not what POxy. XL proves. Ῥωμαῖοι might have encompassed persons whose citizenship predated 212 CE. As discussed later in this article, Romans benefitted from various privileges, so perhaps also from the corn dole in provincial towns. Furthermore, the distinction between Romans from before and after the edict of Caracalla was kept to some extent. The interpretation suggested by Rea, though, is more convincing. He proposes to interpret them as the Romans from Rome, domo Roma. He argued that the dole was a gift from the emperor, originally for the people of Rome, so any such individual domiciling in Oxyrhynchos would have been automatically eligible (­Rea in POxy. XL: 3). Additionally, the categories admitted to the siteresion beneath the epikrithentes are only Romans and Alexandrians, not Romans and astoi. It was not accessible, therefore, to any fiscally privileged group of inhabitants of Roman Egypt,10 but only to those originally entitled to the doron of the emperor. If ὑφʼ οὓς Ῥωμαῖοι καὶ Ἀλεξανδρεῖς are not dead letters, they indicate that ‘­old Romans’ not only travelled as tourists to see the sights of Egypt, such as the Colossus of Memnon (­see Rosenmeyer 2018) or Soknopaiou Nesos (­see Jördens 2018), but also inhabited the Egyptian chōra. Another group of Romans always present in Roman Egypt were higher officers and legionary soldiers in the Roman army. In theory, only freeborn Romans were enrolled 640

Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE

in the legions in order to serve outside their place of origin (­Delia 1991: 4­ 0–​­41). Even if this may have been at least partly true at the beginning of Roman rule in Egypt, certainly in the second century legionaries were recruited locally, often from among the legionaries’ sons, and were given Roman citizenship only upon their enrolment (­A lston 1995: 39; see CIL III 6950; for outside of Egypt, see Sołek 2015). Yet even the latter was not always true11 and proves that Romans in Egypt must have been few before 212 CE.

The grant of citizenship Roman rulers were happy to give their citizenship to Hellenized elite families from Alexandria, as they built their bureaucratic apparatus based on such families, for example, Tiberius Iulius Alexander, the prefect of Egypt between 66 and 69 CE, who was a member of a prominent Alexandrian Jewish family (­see Syme and Rajak 2015). The grant was not only a matter of privilege, but also offered connections, rewards, and recognition (­Jördens 2009: ­516–​­517). For commoners, though, becoming Roman was not easy. In truth, not much evidence regarding accession to Roman citizenship survives. The most frequently discussed case is that of Harpokras, an Egyptian freedman, for whom Pliny the Younger petitioned for Roman citizenship (­Plin. E­p. 10.5, 6, 7, 10). The grant of citizenship was to be awarded to Harpokras for his service as iatraliptes12 to Pliny. Initially, the emperor agreed to make Harpokras a Roman. Yet, after this initial consent, a new difficulty emerged: to become a Roman he first had to become a citizen of Alexandria (­or another polis). Therefore, Pliny requested of the emperor this favour too (­E­­p. 10.6). Although Trajan agreed to Pliny’s request this time as well, it seems that the procedure was far from standard and this second favour was given exceptionally and only because the first one had been already granted.13 This testimony seems to corroborate the opinion expressed by Josephus that Romans denied any civic rights to Egyptians (­A­­p. 2.41 and 72, see Delia 1991: ­41–​­43; Rowlandson 2013: 228). Outside of the top elite (­whose members must have been given citizenship at the beginning of the Roman rule), such grants must have been very rare. This restriction, however, did not apply to those who served in the Roman army. As mentioned above, legionaries were supposed to be Romans (­or were given citizenship upon their enrolment), while soldiers of auxiliary units and the fleet were recruited from the ­non-​­Roman population and given citizenship only at their honesta missio, which is attested in numerous military diplomata. Importantly, veterans were given citizenship together with their extramarital offspring and the right of conubium to marry their ­non-​­Roman life partners.14 (­Obviously, only children born of ­non-​­Roman mothers needed the grant, as those whose mothers were Romans acquired their status, see below.) This continued until 140 CE when children disappear from the diplomata of the auxiliary units (­see Waebens 2012).15 Although their number was relatively high in some places, such as Karanis or Philadelphia in the Arsinoite nome, the general number of soldiers in Egypt, and consequently veterans, could not have been high in proportion to the entire population of the province. According to Richard Alston, the number of soldiers in Egypt ranged from 23,000 at the beginning of the Roman rule, to around 11,­000–​­12,000 in the second century (­A lston 1995: 31). The service lasted over 20 years, which means that only a few hundred were released from service every year, and not all of them decided to stay in Egypt. 641

Maria Nowak

Not only soldiers and veterans, but also their children are well attested in papyri. A number of testationes made upon the birth of soldiers’ children illustrates that many soldiers lived in stable relationships and wanted their children to be recognized as their own.16 Yet, this phenomenon should not be exaggerated: certainly not all military men had de facto families (­Phang 2000: ­142–​­169). It is clear from the ostraca excavated in the Eastern Desert that prostitutes resided close to the garrisons, which is unsurprising, and that prostitution was organized into a proper business involving agents, fiscal duties etc. (­see Cuvigny 2012: ­379–​­388). Finally, demographic data show that many soldiers and veterans would have died before being able to reproduce. According to Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier (­2006: 1­ 05–​­109), the average age of death of those who survived after the age of five was 43.7.

Children of Romans Children obtained Roman citizenship if both parents were Romans. If their parents were married, the children were entitled to their father’s status (­Tit. Ul­p. 5.8). If unmarried,17 the children obtained the status of their mother (­G. 1.64 and Tit. Ul­p. 5.7–5.8 and, especially, 1.87). The situation was similarly easy if the mother had no partner recognized as her husband: she issued a testatio that her child was ex incerto patre natus / nata. The mother alone could register her child, but if she did so contrary to the facts, it could be proved and changed, D. 22.3.29.1 (­Scaev. Dig. 9). The difference between both types of birth certificates disappears in the time of Marcus Aurelius, after which it became mandatory to register all children within 30 days of their birth (­Terreni 1996). Obviously, birth certificates made for ‘­single mothers’ are fewer than professiones of legitimate children, but they are attested18 and served the very same purpose of proof for further scrutiny (­epikrisis) performed upon a child’s reaching the legal age. Obviously, they must have been fully effective for this purpose, as some deeds of scrutiny for children born ex incerto patre survived.19 The same rule applied to children born of unions that Roman law did not allow, such as with male slaves, soldiers, or one’s close relatives (­D. 1.5.23: Mod. pand. 1; G. 1.64; Tit. Ul­p. 5.5). For example, a child born to a Roman woman and her slave was a free Roman, but always illegitimate.20 Yet, such cases are not often attested in the papyri, or they evade recognition, as a Roman mother simply registered her child as incerto patre (­of unknown father), for the father did not matter from the legal point of view (­Tit. Ul­p. 5.5 together with 5.7, 8 and 10; C. 5.18.3; I. 1.4. pr.; see Nowak 2020: ­113–​­117). In such cases, the father was legally nonexistent, so the mother was the only parent of her child and thus the only one from whom a child could acquire their status. More problematic are the children of ‘­m ixed unions’ between Romans and free n ­ on-​ ­Romans. In regard to children born of ‘­m ixed unions’, it was the combination of status civitatis and conubium that determined which status the children obtained. If the conubium existed and the father was Roman, the children became Romans (­G. 1.56). If the mother was Roman, the children became peregrini according to the same rule. Different rules applied to children of parents without conubium. If the father was a Roman, the children took the status of their mother under the rule of the law of nations, ius gentium (­G. 1.78). The issue became more complicated when it was the mother who was a Roman citizen. According to ius gentium, the children should take her status, which would mean acquiring Roman citizenship. In late Republican times, however, 642

Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE

the introduction of the lex Minicia ruled that children should always take the status of the lesser parent (­Roselaar 2013: ­108–​­110). As a result, children of a Roman mother with no conubium with her ­non-​­Roman partner became peregrini (­­non-​­Romans), exactly in the same manner as children of a Roman woman and her l­egally-​­wedded peregrine husband. This solution, however, was at odds with the system of status acquisition: a child not recognized as a legal offspring of their father nevertheless took his status. It was perhaps for this reason that Hadrian decided that any marriage between a Roman woman and peregrinus would produce offspring of the father recognized as just and lawful, iustus / iusta (­G. 1.77). The observations made so far allow for three conclusions. First, Romans must have been relatively few in Egypt, although their exact number cannot be estimated, for even the recognition of Romans is difficult. Second, all the aforementioned means of becoming Roman based on military service suggest that Roman men must have significantly outnumbered women. Third, Roman citizenship was not easily attainable before 212 CE. There is certainly more than one explanation why Romans did not grant their citizenship easily to their subjects. Speaking about the provincial reality, although only Romans could obtain some offices in the administrative apparatus, the highest offices and procuratorship were anyhow accessible and of interest rather to the top elite, as one had to possess enough resources to hold them.21 Another reason could be privi­ oll-​ leges, as citizenship granted exemption from certain obligations, for example, the p ­tax or liturgies. Yet, other groups of people were also exempted from the laographia or permitted the gift of free imperial grain, while Romans had some burdens that other inhabitants of the Empire did not have: for instance, they paid the tax on inheritances and manumissions and could be punished for staying celibate and childless, among other things (­Babusiaux 2018). Perhaps the idea was to grant citizenship only to those who had real connections with the Empire, such as soldiers upon their honourable dismissal or bureaucratic elites.

Local ­citizenship – ​­unity in diversity? In Egypt, ­non-​­Romans were further divided into astoi and Aigyptioi.22 Such a division was not exclusive to Egypt, as local citizenship, rooted in Hellenistic times, was recognized by Romans throughout the Empire. Citizens of Alexandria, Ptolemais Hermiou, Naukratis, and Antinoopolis enjoyed a different status civitatis than the peregrini Aegyptii.23 Local citizens were fully exempt from laographia and enjoyed other privileges such as exemption from liturgies in the chōra.24 Most importantly, astoi were also subject to different sets of laws; these laws were not, however, the result of an o ­ n-​­going legislative process (­Mélèze Modrzejewski 2010: ­114–​­115). Thus, they must have differed considerably in content between different cities. Except for Antinoopolis, founded only in 130 CE, the laws of the poleis, dating back to Hellenistic times,25 were at least partly based on much more ancient laws of different Greek poleis and were further developed to some extent independently by each of the three poleis in the Ptolemaic period (­Mélèze Modrzejewski 2014: ­88–​­89). Οur knowledge concerning local citizenship, in comparison to Roman citizenship, is limited, especially since sources for Ptolemais Hermiou and Naukratis are almost nonexistent. Yet, given the history of the poleis and Roman willingness to preserve and 643

Maria Nowak

respect local customs and practices,26 one would expect that local citizenship and the acquisition thereof would have been left to the poleis, and, as a result, developed independently from Roman citizenship and even amongst themselves. Such a conclusion is suggested by the admission procedure of Alexandria. It was assumed that the laws of Alexandria were based on the Athenian ones (­Meyer 1906: 85), focussed on ancestry, and required a special procedure unknown to Roman law. Since early Ptolemaic times, the acquisition of citizenship had been closely related to the institution of ephebeia.27 Access to the ephebeia involved eiskrisis (­Nelson 1979: ­47–​­59), a personal examination of candidates that took place in the Great Serapeum and for which written proof of status was required.28 Young men who submitted to eiskrisis and went through one year of ephebeia 29 were then further scrutinized to become Alexandrians (­Bowman and Rathbone 1992: ­114–​­115), a procedure that was carried out by the prefect of Egypt (­Jördens 2012: 252) and ended with enrolment in demes and tribes.30 The documentation referring to the ephebeia and the acquisition of Alexandrian citizenship concerns young men born of Alexandrian marriages or marriages between an Alexandrian man and an astē of another polis (­Delia 1991: 54). Such a strong focus on ancestry and the Athenian inspiration of the procedure suggest that citizenship was hardly accessible for outsiders and excluded anyone born out of wedlock or a freedman, as they could not present the proof of Alexandrian citizenship on both sides. Such a reconstruction of the principles governing Alexandrian citizenship seems to be supported by the aforementioned story of Harpokras in the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Trajan, if interpreted at face value. In his response to Pliny, the emperor underlined that he granted Alexandrian citizenship to Harpokras only exceptionally: he would not have given the citizenship of Alexandria temere, ‘­rashly’ (­Plin. E­p. 10.7, above). The emperor seems to emphasize that he would only exceptionally interfered in this matter, which would otherwise have been left to the exclusive discretion of the Alexandrians. Yet a contrary conclusion could also be drawn from this text: the emperor could effectively give Alexandrian citizenship to whomever he wished, skipping the regular procedure and depriving the city of its autonomy in this regard, although he only did it after long consideration. This interpretation suggests that Romans did not always leave local citizenship to the discretion of the cities. Another argument against the Alexandrians having autonomy over their own citizenship comes from the Gnomon of the Idios Logos (­BGU V 1210 and POxy. XLII 301431), which, when it comes to the acquisition of civic status, refers to astoi32 and only rarely to Alexandrians, while no citizens of Ptolemais or Naukratis (­or Antinoopolis, which could be, however, explained by the late date of its foundation) are mentioned at all. This suggests that the Roman administration perceived the matter of status as uniform for all cives peregrini with some special regulations applicable only to Alexandrians. If citizenship was left to the discretion of the cities, it would have been shaped differently for each of them. This is not a strong argument, however, as citizenship might simply have been shaped similarly for the three poleis since the Ptolemaic period. But a few more arguments also suggest that some rules governing Roman citizenship were directly imposed on local citizenship. Such an example is found in paragraph 46: BGU V 1210, ll. ­ 128–​­ 129: μ[ϛ]’ Ῥωμαίοις καὶ ἀστο ̣ῖ ̣ς κατʼ ἄ[γνοι]αν Αἰγυπ[τί]αις συνελθοῦσι⟦αις⟧ συνεχω|ρήθη μετὰ τοῦ ἀν ̣ευθύν ̣[ους] ε ̣ἶναι καὶ τ ̣[ὰ] τέκνα τῷ πατρικῷ γένει ἀκολουθεῖ. 644

Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE

46. Romans and astoi who were united with Egyptian women out of ignorance were allowed not to be held accountable, and their children will follow the paternal status. The paragraph refers to the senatus consultum known from Gaius (­G. 1.­67–​­68), which stated that a Roman who married a peregrina by mistake was given a chance to prove the mistake. If they succeeded, both their children and the ­non-​­Roman spouse were given citizenship (­on the relation between the Gaian text and the Gnomon see Nowak 2020: ­190–​­194). Paragraph 46 proves that both the general rule that children of mixed unions inherited the status of the lesser parent and its exception that unions contracted mistakenly could be validated in favour of children’s status were common for Roman and local citizenship. If it had been only the general rule, it would be difficult to draw such ­far-​­reaching conclusions, yet the exceptions seem striking, especially since in Roman law it belonged to the civil law, ius civile. A further argument that the acquisition of status by the offspring of mixed unions in the poleis was regulated according to the Roman model comes from § 39, which notes that a child of a Roman who had a partner of lesser status became either Egyptian or astos, not simply peregrine, τὰ τέκνα ⟨τῷ⟩ ἥγτονι (­l. ἥττονι) γένει ἀκολουθεῖ. This would imply that astoi held the lesser status, thus the status and rule were framed according to Roman perceptions. Consequently, astoi had to accept the children of Romans among their number. A similar picture emerges from case studies, for example, a daughter of a Roman and an astē is attested in a census return submitted by a certain Sarapion on behalf of Isidora alias Harpochratiaina, BGU XIII 2223 (­Ptolemais Euergetis, 175 CE) = 1­ 73-­​­­Ar-​ 1­ 2 (­Bagnall and Frier 2006): ll. ­2 –​­5: ὑπάρχει τῇ φροντιζο|μένῃ ὑπʼ ἐμοῦ Ἰσιδώρᾳ τῇ καὶ | Ἁρποκρατι ̣α ̣ίνῃ θυγατρὶ Γαίου Ἰου|λίου Γ[εμ]έ· λ ̣λ ̣ου (­BL VIII: 55: Γ[ ̣ ̣]λ ̣λ ̣ ̣ου ed. princ.) ἀστῇ (…) There belongs to Isidora alias Harpokratiaine daughter of Caius Iulius Gemellus, astē, represented by me … Isidora alias Harpokratiaine, described with the term astē, must have been a female citizen of one of the four poleis (­Delia 1991: ­20–​­21), although her property, declared in BGU XIII 2223, was located in the Sekneptyneiou amphodon in Ptolemais Euergetis. It seems that her father had, indeed, been a Roman, as his tria nomina suggest (­on the one hand, he could not be an astos himself, as elements of the identification cluster pointing to this are lacking. On the other hand, if he had been an Egyptian, his daughter would have not been an astē.). This would mean that Isidora alias Harpokratiaine’s mother belonged to the citizen body of one of the poleis and transferred her status to the daughter, that is, she received the status of the lesser parent, which suggests the universality of the Roman rule. In P. Tebt. II 316 = W. Chr. 148, it is the mother who was Roman, while the father was an Alexandrian (­Delia 1991: 54). In the document, several men declare that they had been enrolled as epheboi in Alexandria. One of the men whose declaration has survived (­P. Tebt. II 316, col. III, ll. ­30–​­71) is Sarapion, son of Sarapion, son of Apollonios, a man ascribed to both a phyle and a deme of Alexandria. In addition, he claimed to have been enrolled among the Alexandrian ephebes in 82 or 83 CE, that the registration was legitimate, and that the proper documents had been issued. 645

Maria Nowak

The description of Sarapion’s mother is interesting, ll. ­ 55–​­ 56: καὶ εἰμὶ μητρὸς Ῥω|μανίας Βερνίκης. If Ῥωμανία is, as assumed by Diana Delia and Bernard Legras, a nomen gentilicium (­Delia 1991: 54; Legras 1999: 160), it would mean that having a Roman mother was not an obstacle to becoming an Alexandrian citizen.33 Another piece of proof that the Roman rules were imposed on local citizenship in Egypt is the admission of children born of an astē and ex incerto patre, which is against the Greek (­or Athenian) principle of civic patrilocality. Yet only one reasonably secure case is to be found in the papyri. It is in BGU VII 1662 (­182 CE; Rupprecht 1972: 52): Longinia Nemesilla paid some money on behalf of her underage sons, heirs to their father, the veteran Marcus Valerius Turbo. The sum was paid by virtue of the bequest made by him in favour of his other daughter, Kyrilla. Kyrilla was an astē (­ll. 2 and 12: Κυρίλλα θυγάτηρ Μάρκου Οὐαλερίου Τούρβωνος ἀστή) married to an Alexandrian (­l. 12); other family ­members  – ​­Longinia Nemesilla, her husband and Kyrilla’s father, Marcus Valerius Turbo, and his sons, Marci Valerii Montanus and Longinus alias ­Numisianus – ​­were all Romans.34 Marcus Valerius Turbo appears in three more texts, which allow the reconstruction of some events from his life:35 he became a father to Marcus Valerius Maximus in 144 CE, and by 182 CE he was already dead. He submitted the professio for his legitimate child in 144 CE, and he was enrolled as a soldier only after this professio. Since he was able to produce a legitimus, he must have been Roman before his recruitment. If he was recruited shortly after the professio, he would have reached the end of his military career by the end of the 160s or at the beginning of the 170s, which would explain why he is labelled as στρατιώτης in BGU VII 1565, as well as the lack of this description in BGU VII 1574 and 1662. If this reconstruction is correct, it would mean that Marcus Valerius Turbo had children with three different women: Marcus Valerius Maximus with Octavia before his recruitment, Kyrilla with an astē, with whom he lived during his time of his service, and, finally Marci Valerii Montanus and Longinus alias Numisianus with Longinia Nemesilla ​­ after his discharge.36 If Kyrilla was, indeed, born when her father was still a s­ oldier – in BGU VII 1662 she is listed as being about 3­ 0 – ​­then she would have been a fatherless astē, as soldiers were still banned from conubium and could not count for children’s status (­above). It would prove that status acquisition in such cases did, indeed, come from the mother. At any event, we cannot be certain to which polis Kyrilla belonged.

Conclusion Status acquisition may have been one of the legal points which the Romans wished to make uniform under iuris gentium regula. There are a handful of arguments in favour of this interpretation. In regard to astoi, the rule of status acquisition from the lesser parent certainly applied to unions of a Roman and an astos or astē: their children became peregrini cives, not peregrini Aegyptii, which makes astoi the lesser status within this context. This is attested in both the Gnomon (­BGU V 1210, ll. ­111–​­112) and in legal practice (­e.g., P. Tebt. II 316, col. III, ll. ­30–​­71; BGU XIII 2223; PSI XVII 1691). The Gnomon also illustrates that astoi who married Egyptians in ignorance were treated in the same way as Romans who, through their ignorance, married peregrines, and thus were allowed to prove their mistake and transmit the higher status to their offspring (­BGU V 1210, ll. 1­ 28–​­129). These elements of status acquisition strongly suggest that the acquisition of citizenship of the poleis in Roman Egypt was shaped according to Roman rules. 646

Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE

Notes 1 This chapter was written in the framework of the Diversity Program sponsored by the University of Bamberg. I would like to express my gratitude to prof. Cathrine Gerhardt, the head of this program, and prof. Peter Riedlberger, my host, for making this research possible. I would also like to thank W. Graham Claytor for commenting on the earlier version of this article and his substantial suggestions and to Michael ­Konstantinou-​­Rizos for improving my English. 2 Walter Scheidel assessed that Romans constituted only 1­ 0–​­15% of the inhabitants of the Empire before 212 CE; over 50% of them would have lived in Italy, Scheidel (­2007). Yet, even if this estimation is true, it tells us nothing about the number of Romans in Egypt, as the distribution of Roman citizens in the provinces was unlikely to be equal. 3 Obviously, taking a new Latin name or latinizing an old ­non-​­Latin name, e.g., by adding the ­ending -​­ιανος (­­Latin -​­ianus), as Ammonianus, Nemesianus, Heraclianus, Apollonianus, Herodianus, or Isidorianus, could be a sign that a person obtained citizenship or, more likely, was recruited to the army which eventually led to obtaining citizenship (­Dogaer 2015: ­52–​­56). Yet, using such names for n ­ ew-​­born children could be interpreted not only (­and not even primarily) as a mark of Roman citizenship, but also as an expression of one’s connections to the Roman milieu, e.g., by newly appointed officials, or simply as a matter of onomastic fashion (­Dogaer 2015: ­60–​­61). 4 The laographia was a punitive capitation tax imposed on the Egyptian male adult free and unfree population at the beginning of Roman rule. It was calculated yearly, but paid in several installments, ranging between 9 and 40 drachmae depending on the nome, which could be paid in wheat equivalent. See Monson (­2014: 156). 5 The prefect of Egypt was one of the highest (­and best paid) positions accessible within the Roman cursus honorum. On the office and individuals having held it, see Jördens (­2009). 6 The procurator responsible for the financial control of the priests, properties falling to the fisc, and confiscated property. See Beutler (­2014). 7 The other two groups were rhemboi and homologoi. Needless to say, only men were admitted to all three groups. For a summary of the research on these groups, see Nowak (­2017). 8 In another article, I advocate the latter; see Nowak (­2017). 9 Ll. ­1–​­3: ἐπικριθ(­έ ντες) φύλ(­αρχος). κατʼ ἄνδρα ἐπικριθέντων ⟦ακολουθ⟧ ὡς ἔχουσι καὶ ἐν τῇ δημ ̣[οσ]ί ̣ᾳ ̣ βιβλιοθ(­ήκῃ) | αὐτῶν ὄντων τῶν διακριθέντων καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς ἀναγορείας ὑπακουόντων | ὑφʼ οὗς Ῥωμαῖοι καὶ ­Ἀ λεξανδρεῖς – ‘­​­ Those who have passed the scrutiny. Phylarch. Register of individuals who have passed the scrutiny as they stand in the public records, being the same persons whose qualifications were examined and who answer to their names at the muster, beneath whom (­are appended) Roman and Alexandrian citizens’ (­trans. J. Rea in POxy. XL). 10 One application by a citizen of Antinoopolis survives in the archive (­POxy. XL 2917), but it was submitted in the group of rhemboi, so it depended on his service, not his membership in one of the groups privileged with the corn dole. 11 Such a situation is attested in VBP IV 72 (­A nkyron, after 117/­8 CE), in which children of the legionary soldier tried to prove that their father, who died before his dismissal and thus without obtaining the grant of citizenship for him and his children, was not Roman, so they (­also ­non-​Romans) could inherit his property. See Nowak (­2020: ­122–​­123). 12 Called also aliptes, a specialist who took care of his patients’ convalescence (­­Sherwin-​­White 1966: 566). 13 Plin. E­p.  10.7: Civitatem Alexandrinam secundum institutionem principum non temere dare proposui. Sed, cum Harpocrati, iatraliptae tuo, iam civitatem Romanam impetraveris, huic quoque petitioni tuae negare non sustineo. 14 Soldiers were forbidden to marry from the early Principate until the end of the second or beginning of the third century. For a summary of the discussion on when the ban was lifted, see Nowak (­2020: ­296–​­298). 15 Centurions and decurions were, however, granted the citizenship for their children even after 140 CE (­Weiss 2008: ­34–​­35), but they had to prove that the children were born to them of stable unions during their service in the army (­Eck 2007: ­92–​­93). 16 An example comes from the famous archive of Marcus Lucretius Diogenes, P. Diog. 1 = CPL 159 (­Contrapollonopolis, 127 CE). It was written for Marcus Lucretius Clemens, the great ­g rand-​­father of the archive’s owner, to confirm the birth of his son Serenus, Diogenes’ great

647

Maria Nowak uncle. Marcus Lucretius Clemens was a soldier serving in the auxilia when the testatio was written, as Serenus is said to be in militia natus, and his aim was to use the document on his discharge from the army in order to safeguard the grant of Roman citizenship for his son. We know that this attempt was successful, as the epikrisis of both the father and son also survived in the archive, P. Diog. 5. See ­Sánchez-​­Moreno Ellart (­2008). 17 These reasons will not be discussed here, but see Urbanik (­2016). 18 Only two survive: P. Mich. III 169 = FIRA III 4 = CPL 162 (­Karanis, 145 CE) and P. Wisc. II 50 = ChLA XLVII 1439 (­provenance unknown, 165 CE). For a full list of registrations made for Roman children, see Bernini (­2018: tab. 2). Yet, in his list he also includes testationes made on the request of auxiliary soldiers, which in my opinion are not the same as those made for Roman mothers. The difference is crucial, as the former children were not Romans by birth (­u nless their mother was Roman) and could become one only if they were given citizenship with their fathers upon their missio honesta, while children registered by Roman mothers were Romans by birth and the scrutiny was only to confirm this fact. 19 E.g., SB I 5217 = FIRA III 6: Theadelphia, 148 CE; BGU IV 1032: the Arsinoite nome, 173 CE or after; POxy. XII 1451: Alexandria?, 175 CE, see Nowak (­2020: ­56–​­59). 20 The rule was more complicated if the slave who fathered a woman’s child did not belong to her. One modification was introduced in 52 CE by the s.c. Claudianum: a woman who had intimate relations with a slave against the will of his owner (­and despite the owner’s warnings) could become a slave herself, and consequently bear slave children (­G. 1.160; P.S. 2.21a.1 and 17). It is, however, not very clear what status children born of such unions, if the owner did not oppose, had between 52 CE and Hadrian who restored the rule of the ius gentium that such children were always born free (­G. 1.84). Furthermore, it was not the only or even earliest modification applicable to the status acquisition of children of free women fathered by slaves, G. 1.86. The extensive discussion is summarized in Kacprzak (­2018). 21 We should not, however, forget that unlike in many other historical societies a major political and social promotion was possible in the Roman world; Tac. Ann. 11.21: ‘­Curtius Rufus videtur mihi ex se natus’ are the words of Tiberius about the senator of lowly origin. ­Sherwin-​ W ­ hite (­1973: 265). 22 In the Gnomon of idios logos, astoi are recognized as an independent civic status besides Romans and Egyptians: Rowlandson (­2013: 220). 23 Not even this group was uniform, as privileged classes, katoikoi, gymnasial and metropolite classes, existed within it. These groups had privileges as Romans or astoi, but lesser, since they were entitled to a lower rate of the laographia instead of the full exemption. Archai, thus high local offices, e.g., strategos, agoranomos, gymnasiarch, and kosmetes, were accessible only to astoi and these privileged groups of Egyptians. Rowlandson (­2013: ­223–​­224). 24 Yet the tax privileges are attested only for Alexandria and Antinoopolis; see Jördens (­2009: ­331–​­338). 25 Naukratis was founded much earlier, in the seventh century BCE, but its status as polis could have existed only since the Ptolemaic period: Mélèze Modrzejewski (­1986: 121). 26 Rules were often based on past traditions and were applied on a c­ ase-­​­­by-​­case basis. It is important to note that ‘­p eregrine’ rules were applied by Roman officials in ­Egypt – ​­even, as in the case of the incest ban, if they opposed the basic principles of Roman l­ aw – ​­yet they were not applied equally in every case. Alonso (­2013: ­352–​­353); Jördens (­2016). 27 Ephebate and citizenship of Alexandria were connected from Ptolemaic times, as is explicit from the letter of Claudius to the Alexandrians, P. Lond. VI 1912 = C. Pap. Jud. II 153 = Sel. Pap. II 212 (­A lexandria, 41 CE). The chronology is discussed in detail in Chankowski (­2010: ­174–​­179). Perhaps ephebate also existed in Ptolemais and Naukratis already in the Hellenistic times: ibid.: 180. 28 The procedure is reconstructed in Whitehorne (­2001). 29 Wolff claimed that men born of engraphos gamos became citizens when they turned 14 years old; although they needed to undergo eiskrisis, they did not need to complete the ephebeia (­P. Flor. III 382 = P. Flor. I 57, ll. ­67–​­91 = W. Chr. 143 [Hermopolites, 233 CE]): Wolff (­1939: 42–​­43). 30 Bowman and Rathbone (­ 1992: ­ 113–​­ 115) proposed that ephebeia was the way through which Alexandrians were admitted to the gymnasial group, which consisted only of some Alexandrians.

648

Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE 31 Previously dated to the first century CE, but recently redated, see Dolganov (­2021). 32 In previous scholarship, the astoi from the Gnomon were understood to mean Alexandrians, but since Delia’s monograph on Alexandrian citizenship, it has become accepted that the term applied in the Gnomon refers more generally to citizens of all the poleis, but not Antinoopolis. See Delia (­1991: ­13–​­20). 33 According to Legras, this is an example of double citizenship, in which the mother was both Roman and Alexandrian, Legras (­1999: 160). This seems doubtful for the simple reason that if she had been an Alexandrian, and if her Alexandrian designation was essential for the status of the child, she would have been labelled as Alexandrian in the document. Instead, the mother is described only with her duo nomina. Unlike other entries from the same text, no maternal grandfather is indicated (­ll. ­13–​­14, ­87–​­88). See also PSI XVII 1691, the actual case of double citizenship in regard to the Alexandrian ephebeia analyzed in Nowak (­2020: ­205–​­206). 34 That they were Romans is proved not only by the onomastics, but also by the fact that Marcus Valerius Turbo made a Roman will (­l l. 7 and 14), and Longinia Nemesilla acted without a guardian because of ius trium liberorum (­l l. ­3 –​­4 and ­19–​­20). 35 The editors of BGU VII recognized Marcus Valerius Turbo as a veteran on the basis of other three texts: BGU VII 1565, 1574, and 1692 = FIRA III 3 = CPL 152, comm. to l. 6. Marcus Valerius Turbo first appears in 144 CE as a father registering his legitimate son Marcus Valerius Maximus, born to Antonia Casullus (­BGU VII 1692). In BGU VII 1565, dated to 169 CE, Marcus Valerius Turbo is labelled στρατιώτης (­l. 6). Finally, in BGU VII 1574 dated to 176/­7 CE, Marcus Valerius Turbo appears again but is labelled as neither a soldier nor a veteran. Gilliam (­1986: 366). 36 According to Phang, Kyrilla would have been his daughter born when he still served in the army, Nemesilla and the two boys would have been his legitimate family settled after the discharge, but Phang did not include Marcus Valerius Maximus: Phang (­2000: 220).

Bibliography Alonso, J.A. (­2013) ‘­The status of peregrine law in Egypt: “­customary law” and legal pluralism in the Roman Empire’, JJP 43, special issue, ­351–​­404 Alston, R. (­1995) Soldiers and society in Roman Egypt: a social history (­London) Babusiaux, U. (­2018) ‘­Römisches Erbrecht im Gnomon des Idios Logos’, ZRG 135, ­108–​­177 Bagnall, R. and Frier, B. (­2006) The demography of Roman Egypt (­Cambridge) Bernini, A. (­2018) ‘­Fragmentarische Notiz einer lateinischen Geburtsanzeige’, JJP 48, ­37–​­52 Beutler, F. (­2014) ‘­Der Idios Logos in römischer Zeit’, paper given at the conference Dienst nach Vorschrift? Vergleichende Studien zum ‘­G nomon des Idios Logos’. 3. Wiener Kolloquium zur antiken Rechtsgeschichte (­unpublished) ­Bieżuńska-​­Małowist, I. (­1972/­1973) ‘­Sui cittadini romani in Egitto durante il primo impero’, AAPat 85, ­309–​­321 Bowman, A. and Rathbone, D. (­1992) ‘­Cities and administration in Roman Egypt’, JRS 82, ­107–​­127 Broux, Y. (­2019) ‘­Imperial vs. ­non-​­i mperial ousiai in ­Julio-​­Claudian Egypt’, CE 94.187, ­149–​­176 Chankowski, A.S. (­2010) L’éphébie hellénistique: étude d’une institution civique dans les cités grecques des îles de la Mer Égée et de l’Asie Mineure (­Paris) Cuvigny, H. (­2012) Didymoi: une garnison romaine dans le désert oriental d’Égypte, vol. II: les textes (­Cairo) Delia, D. (­1991) Alexandrian citizenship during the Roman Principate (­Atlanta) 1991 Dogaer, N. (­2015) ‘­Greek names with the ­ending -​­ιανος/-​­ianus in Roman Egypt’, JJP 45, ­43–​­63 Dolganov, A. (­2021) ‘­A new date for the Oxyrhynchite epitome of the Gnomon of the Idios Logos (­P.Oxy. XLII 3014)’ Chiron 50, ­167–​­188 Eck, W. (­2007) ‘­Die Veränderungen in Konstitutionen und Diplomen unter Antoninus Pius’, in M.A. Speidel and H. Lieb (­eds) Militärdiplome. Die Forschungsbeiträge der Gespräche von 2004 (­Stuttgart) ­87–​­104 Gilliam, J.F. (­1986) ‘­Notes on Latin texts from Egypt’ in id., Roman army papers (­A msterdam) ­363–​­371

649

Maria Nowak Jördens, A. (­2009) Statthalterliche Verwaltung in der römischen Kaiserzeit. Studien zum praefectus Aegypti (­Stuttgart) ——— ​­(­2012) ‘­Status and citizenship’, in C. Riggs (­ed.) The Oxford handbook of Roman Egypt (­Oxford) ­247–​­259 ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Keine Konkurrenz und dennoch Recht: zum Umgang Roms mit den lokalen Rechten’, in D. Leăo and G. Thür (­eds) Symposion 2015. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (­Coimbra, 1.-​­4. September 2015) (­Vienna) ­237–​­250 ——— ​­ (­ 2018) ‘­ Soknopaiu Nesos Disneyland?’, in M.-​­ P. Chaufray et  al. (­ eds) Le Fayoum: ­archéologie -​­­histoire -​­religion: Actes du sixième colloque international, Montpellier, 2­ 6–​­28 Octobre 2016 (­Wiesbaden) ­55–​­74 Kacprzak, A. (­2018) ‘­Servus ex libera natus. Überlegungen zum senatusconsultum Claudianum’, in D. Feichtinger and I. Fischer (­eds) Sexualität und Sklaverei (­Münster) ­63–​­82 Keenan, J.G. (­1973) ‘­The names Flavius and Aurelius as status designations in later Roman Egypt’, ZPE 11, ­33–​­63 Kehoe, D.P (­1992) Management and investment on estates in Roman Egypt during the early Empire (­Bonn) Legras, B. (­1999) Néotês: recherches sur les jeunes grecs dans l’Égypte ptolémaïque et romaine (­Geneva) Mélèze Modrzejewski, J. (­1986) ‘­Bibliographie de papyrologie juridique: ­1972–​­1982 (­III.3)’, APF 32, ­97–​­147 ——— ​­(­2010) Droit et justice dans le monde grec et hellénistique (­Warsaw) ——— ​­(­2014) Loi et coutume dans l’Égypte grecque et romaine (­Warsaw) Meyer, P. (­1906) ‘­Papyrus Cattaoui. II. Kommentar’, APF 3, ­67–​­105 Monson, A. (­2014) ‘­Late Ptolemaic capitation taxes and the poll tax in Roman Egypt’, BASP 51, ­127–​­160 Nelson, C. (­1979) Status declarations in Roman Egypt (­A msterdam) Nowak, M. (­2017) ‘­Get your free corn: the fatherless in the ­corn-​­dole archive from Oxyrhynchos’, in M. Nowak, A. Łajtar, and J. Urbanik (­eds) Tell me who you are: labeling status in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world (­Warsaw) ­215–​­228 ——— ​­(­2020) Bastards in Egypt: social and legal illegitimacy in the Roman era (­Leuven) Parássoglou, G.M. (­1978) Imperial estates in Roman Egypt (­A msterdam) Phang, S.E. (­2000) The marriage of Roman soldiers (­13 B.C. -​­A.D. 235): law and family in the imperial army (­Leiden and Boston, MA) Rosenmeyer, P. (­2018) The language of ruins: Greek and Latin inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus (­Oxford) Rowlandson, J. (­2013) ‘­Dissing the Egyptians: legal, ethnic and cultural identities in Roman Egypt’, in A. Gardner, E. Herring, and K. Lomas (­eds) Creating ethnicities and identities in the Roman world (­London) ­213–​­247 Roselaar, S.T. (­2013) ‘­The concept of conubium in the Roman Republic’, in P.J. du Plessis (­ed.) New frontiers: law and society in the Roman world (­Edinburgh) ­102–​­122 Rupprecht, H.-​­A. (­1972) Studien zur Quittung im Recht der ­graeco-​­ägyptischen Papyri (­Munich) ­Sánchez-​­Moreno Ellart, C. (­2008) ‘­Ipsis liberis posterisque eorum. Die Bedeutung der Geburtsurkunden von Soldaten der Auxiliareinheiten und der Wandel im Formular von diplomata militaria im Jahre 140 n. Chr. ausweislich RMD I 39 und RMD IV 266’, ZRG 125, ­348–​­374 Scheidel, W. (­2007) ‘­Roman population size: the logic of the debate’, Princeton/­Stanford Working Papers in Classics Paper No. 070706; DOI: 10.2139/­ssrn.1096415 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1966) The letters of Pliny: a historical and social commentary (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­1973) The Roman citizenship (­Oxford) Sołek, M. (­2015) ‘­Origo castris and the local recruitment policy of the Roman army’, Novensia 26, ­103–​­115 2015) ‘­ Iulias Alexander, Tiberius’, Oxford Classical Dictionary, Syme, R. and Rajak, T. (­ https://­o xfordre.com/­c lassics/­v iew/­10.1093/­a crefore/­9 780199381135.001.0001/­­a crefore-­​ 9­­ 780199381135-­​­­e -​­3386 (­accessed 5 September 2022) Terreni, C. (­1996) ‘­P. Mich 3.169: Il misterio di Sempronia Gemella’, SDHI 62, ­573–​­582 Urbanik, J. (­2016) ‘­Husband and wife’, in P.J. du Plessis, C. Ando, and K. Tuori (­eds) The Oxford handbook of Roman law and society (­Oxford) ­473–​­486

650

Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE Waebens, S. (­2012) ‘­Reflecting the “­change in A.D. 140”: the veteran categories of the epikrisis documents revisited’, ZPE 180, ­267–​­77 Weiss, P. (­2008) ‘­Die vorbildliche Kaiserehe. Zwei Senatsbeschlüsse beim Tod der älteren und der jüngeren Faustina, neue Paradigmen und die Herausbildung des ‹antoninischen› Prinzipatsʼ, Chiron 38, ­1–​­45 Whitehorne, J. (­2001) ‘­Becoming an Alexandrian citizen’, Comunicazioni 4, ­25–​­34 Wolff, H. (­1939) Written and unwritten marriages in Hellenistic and postclassical Roman law (­Haverford, PA)

651

46 TOWARDS UNIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP The Roman Empire in 212 CE Arnaud Besson

In 212 CE, the emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus ‘­ Caracalla’ granted Roman ­citizenship – ​­so Ulpian says (­Dig. 1.5.17) – to ​­ ‘­all those who were living in the Roman world’ through a legal decision known as the Antonine Constitution. Despite the apparent scale of this act, little contemporary literature has survived to provide us with an extended interpretation regarding the consequences of the universalization of Roman citizenship. All we have is this brief quotation from the highly influential contemporary jurist Ulpian, and a cynical note from the senator Cassius Dio (­78.9.­4 –​­5) implying that Caracalla’s only goal was to raise more money from taxes even if the grant was supposed to be honorific. Later literature hailed this imperial constitution as a universal benefit, but all details of its application have been lost (­Besson 2020: ­49–​­60). The publication by Paul Meyer (1910) of the Papyrus Giessen 40, which bears a frustratingly fragmentary text of the Antonine Constitution, provided more questions than answers. It mentions gratitude towards the gods, the idea of accepting more people as befits the divine majesty, the grant of what is probably the Roman citizenship, even if this last word is barely readable, and the rest of the content is mostly left to pure interpretation and educated guesswork.1 No date, details, or provisions for its application can be recovered with certitude from this papyrus. Sources are also too scarce to allow us to understand Caracalla’s reasons in universalizing Roman citizenship.2 It might have been demagogic opportunism, an ­empire-​­vast expiatory offering to find favour anew with the gods after a fratricide, or more prosaically for posterity’s sake. It may have been the result of cosmopolitan philosophy or the influence of highly trained jurists, or, as Cassius Dio put it, a roundabout way of collecting more taxes. It might also have been a combination of these hypothetical factors. There is thus no way to judge the impact of the universalization of Roman citizenship without broadening our perspective and trying to assess the significance of the Roman status both before and after Caracalla’s grant. The Antonine Constitution was probably well received within the provinces. Its most visible effect is a massive onomastic change. Numerous papyri and inscriptions show new citizens taking Roman names and using the emperor’s name Aurelius as a sign of enfranchisement. This new nomenclature forced people to mention their new and former identity side by side for a few decades, and they did it despite the complication. One 652

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-54

Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE

of the early examples of this phenomenon is found in a papyrus dated from 16 August 215, a receipt for the delivery of skins for leather military equipment. The supplier’s name is ‘­Aurelios Zosimos, known before the “divine gift” as Zosimos son of Leonidas’.3 In this document, the traditional patronymic name, identifying an individual as the son of someone, is thus replaced by a Roman name using a praenomen,4 a nomen (­Aurelius or Aurelios), and a cognomen. As Aurelios Zosimos did, new Roman citizens thus symbolically entered the emperor’s family. In this receipt as in other sources from Egypt, the Antonine Constitution is referred to by the expression theia dorea, which should be translated into Latin as beneficium imperatoris, the divine (­or more simply imperial) gift or favour. This positive expression was usually used to denote free grain distributions, grants of tax immunity, honorific positions, or better legal status to individuals, as, for example, a grant of freeborn status to a freedman.5 New Roman name changes can be tracked throughout the provinces and allow us to ascertain the date, if not of the promulgation, at least of the application of the Antonine Constitution, with the caveat that there were already people using ‘­Aurelius’ as one of their names in the provinces before the Antonine Constitution. These individuals could trace their citizenship back to Caracalla’s predecessors, among them the emperor Marcus Aurelius. However, some sources allow us to trace name changes certainly associated with the Antonine Constitution, suggesting that it was, in effect, in Asia Minor by the third of March 213 at the latest (­TAM V 1.122), in Achaea during summer 213 (­IvO 110), and in Egypt before June 213 (­P. Köln II 94). Imperial decisions such as the Antonine Constitution took several months to be applied in the provinces, as even their physical communication needed time. Considering the randomness of the manifestation of this onomastic change in documentation and then of the intact transmission of these sources to us, it is very likely that Caracalla’s decision took place in 212 CE, which is congruent with traditional historiography.

A rupture from earlier imperial policy Was the Antonine Constitution a radical decision, a break from previous policies, or was it the culmination of a long process? During the Republic, the grant of citizenship to individuals residing outside of Rome had always been a source of tension. Rome had to find a range of solutions to include foreign populations into its territory without upsetting its own political organization. It went as far as creating the concept of citizenship without political rights, which could be bestowed both as a reward and as a punishment (­Humbert 1978). And for some periods of time, the Latin allies could benefit from equivalence of rights in matters of contracts, marriage, and even immigration. Citizenship was then a d ­ ouble-​­edged tool of annexation. On the one hand, it was a benefit coveted by allies wanting to claim their fair share of the nascent empire and relief from the tribute, and on the other hand, it was an unwanted status imposed on rebellious populations. However, the situation was totally different in 212 CE: at this point, the Republican regime was gone, and the emperor could openly consider every inhabitant of his empire as his subjects. In other words, annexation was no longer in question, as it had become a ­long-​­standing reality. The Antonine Constitution was not the first territorial grant of Roman citizenship, but it was the first one on such a geographical scale and the first one since the end of the Republic. Roman citizenship had been granted to the allied populations south of the Po in 89 BCE and then to the inhabitants of Gallia Cisalpina in 49 BCE and of 653

Arnaud Besson

Sicily in 44 BCE (­­Sherwin-​­W hite 1973a: ­157– ​­60).6 However, after this expansion phase, Roman citizenship ceased to be granted on such a large scale. The only later parallel at a territorial level was the grant of Latin Rights to the Hispanic provinces by Vespasian in 73/­74 CE (­Plin. HN 3.30) (­K remer 2005: 180). During the Principate, collective grants took place on a smaller scale in the form of a rank upgrade for communities that also bestowed a new legal status to its c­ itizens. The rank of Roman colony granted Roman citizenship, while lower ranks such as ­municipium were given Latin Rights. Such grants were not only honorific but also had legal and fiscal implications that could be modulated. Caracalla awarded the rank of Roman colony to Antioch, but he did so without granting immunity from the ­tribute (­Dig. 50.15.1.3). Such immunity constituted a different right called ius italicum that could be separately given even to communities outside of Italy. As mentioned earlier, Latin Rights were conceived as an intermediate status, a step towards Roman citizenship. Being of Latin status assumed the use of private law similar to Roman private law, though Latins were not considered Roman citizens (­see below about personal rights and Besson 2020: ­330–​­331). Moreover, magistrates of Latin communities were granted Roman citizenship during or at the end of their service, depending on the status of their community. Their whole family was then to become Roman, and all legal relationships between individuals were maintained by Roman law (­marriage, filiation links, paternal power, inheritance tax privileges, etc.). As holding a magistracy was ­c ensus-​­based, this route to citizenship was itself based on family wealth. Social stagnation in Latin communities due to a mostly rural economy might mean that this path to citizenship slowed down over time. It was, nevertheless, an important way for provincial elites to obtain Roman citizenship, without having to court the governor or the emperor himself for a personal grant. Such legal avenues to citizenship were also embedded within another ‘­Latin’ status, the one that was conferred upon freedmen who had been informally manumitted (­Gai. Inst. 1.­17–​­19). These individuals were named ‘­Junian Latins’, after the lex Iunia (Junia) passed in 19 CE. As they had been informally released from slavery (­or were aged less than 30 years), they enjoyed liberty under the protection of the Roman praetor but were considered as slaves once again after their death. Their former masters thus claimed their right of succession. This status was abolished only by Justinian, as late as 531 CE, and, though it had certainly fallen into disuse before that (­Inst. 7.6.1), it was still in use at least during Constantine’s reign, in 320 CE (­Cod. Theod. 2.22.1). On the other hand, Junian Latins were automatically granted Roman citizenship not only once they had a child from a legitimate marriage, but also after serving for three years in the vigils, working as a baker, investing money in the annona (­g rain supply), or building a house in Rome. All these were related to natalist policies or designed to reward socially useful behaviours (­Gai. Inst. 1.­32b–​­34). On the other hand, slaves who were old enough and had been manumitted by a Roman citizen in front of the magistrates (­by vindicta or by census), or by testament, were granted Roman citizenship. Finally, military service in the auxiliary troops was open to ­non-​­Roman males. Veterans earned Roman citizenship upon completion of 25 years of service. Unlike holding a magistracy in a Latin community, or being released from slavery, this path to Roman citizenship was open to individuals without financial means and was a matter of choice. It was thus probably the most unrestricted way to become Roman for ordinary provincials, besides collective grants to one’s community. We shall come back to this point later. 654

Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE

Adrian N. ­Sherwin-​­White compared these legal mechanisms for l­arge-​­scale citizenship grants to the inevitable advance of a ‘­flood tide’ (­1973a: ­251–​­263). This narrative suggests seeing the Antonine Constitution as the culmination of these processes, as if the universalization of Roman citizenship had been the goal all along. However, social immobility for Latin communities and, as we will soon see, changes in military reward policies threw sand in the gears during the second century.

Individual grants From at least the second Punic war on (­­218–​­202 BCE), Roman citizenship could also be directly granted to individuals (­Cic. Balb. 57). At the end of the Republic, the power to bestow Roman citizenship to reward their allies was given to Roman generals. During the Principate, powerful Romans commonly established p ­ atron-​­client relationships with members of their local network, using Roman citizenship as a reward. One of the most ­well-​­known examples is Pliny the Younger courting Trajan’s favour for his former doctor Harpocras, an Egyptian freedman, only to be debarred to his surprise by the fact that Egyptians could not be granted Roman citizenship unless they had previously obtained Alexandrian citizenship (­Plin. E­p. 10.6.22; 10.7.23). Much before this case, Octavian, the future Augustus himself, whose reign launched many new policies that lasted for decades, used such powers to benefit one of his allies, Seleukos of Rhosos, in 42 BCE (­Raggi 2004). We know from quite a lengthy inscription (­SEG 54.1625) that Seleukos and his future wife and children were to be granted Roman citizenship of the best condition, which implied among other privileges: fiscal immunity, right of appeal to Roman courts in capital cases and choice of forum for any litigation, and even choice of law, be it Roman law, Rhosos law, or the law of any free city. This bundle of privileges was conceived to offer the maximum of advantages available and is not representative of any other grants. It offers us a glimpse of the kind of rights that could be sought and of the jurisdictional diversity of the Mediterranean world of the first century BCE. Another slightly later inscription provides us with a stark contrast to the ones already mentioned. Among five other texts, all dating from 6 to 4 BCE, the third edict of Cyrene deals with local jurisdictional problems (­SEG IX 8 = FIRA I 68). This time, Augustus states that there are 215 Roman citizens in the province, but this small number of individuals is already a disturbance. The text specifies that Greeks who would have been granted Roman citizenship did not enjoy tax immunity unless this privilege was specifically part of the grant. And even if they had been granted such privilege, it would be valid only for their possessions at the time of the grant, not for the goods they would have acquired thereafter (­Purpura 2012). Thus, during the Principate, immunity from taxation was no longer associated with citizenship, even if this had been the case in the last centuries of the Republic.

Military diplomas It is quite possible that veterans of the legions, who were thus already Roman citizens at the time of their recruitment, were given some kind of tax immunity after their discharge (­FIRA I 76). For foreigners, as mentioned above, the most unrestricted way for a foreigner to obtain Roman citizenship was through a ­25–­​­­26-­​­­year-​­long military service in the auxiliary troops. At the time of their discharge, veterans were awarded privileges. 655

Arnaud Besson

These could be engraved on personal documents called diplomata that confirmed the honesta missio or honourable discharge of their bearer (­Eck and Wolff 1986; Pferdehirt 2002). The diplomata were two small bronze tablets tied together bearing two copies of the same text: one was sealed inside to preserve its authenticity against any forgery, and one was available on the outer face. The text was a copy of a bronze inscription, publicly displayed on the Palatine in Rome, and its content did not change much from its first occurrence under Claudius (­CIL XVI 1) till Antoninus Pius’ reign. Three privileges could be bestowed by diplomata: Roman citizenship for the veteran himself, conubium or the right to legally marry a foreign woman, and citizenship for any children they already had. Auxiliary troops were quite often stationed for long periods of time, and civilian communities gravitated to military camps. Many soldiers had partners and offspring, though these were illegitimate. As long as these three different rights were granted, they had the effect to formalize the situation of many existing families. However, soldiers’ foreign partners never received Roman citizenship. We know from Egyptian sources that they were debarred from assuming this status (­G nomon of the Idiologos 42 and 53) and this was likely the case in other provinces too. However, around 140 CE, the usual clause granting citizenship to the soldiers’ offspring disappeared from the documents altogether. Only the children born of a legal marriage after discharge would henceforth be recognized as Romans. The causes of this change remain unclear: it might have been a way to ensure that the ‘­camp children’ would themselves enrol in the army, or just a way to improve military discipline (­Phang 2001). Whatever the reason might be, it meant that the extension of Roman citizenship slowed down after 140 CE. The end of collective grants of citizenship on a regional scale, the relative social immobility of Latin communities, and the diminution of privileges for veterans after 140 CE are elements that challenge S ­ herwin-​­White’s ‘­flood tide’ narrative. Myles Lavan (­2016: 230; 2019) recently developed a stochastic model that shows it is highly improbable that the proportion of the population of the Empire that benefitted from Roman citizenship could have been higher than 30%. It thus seems reasonable to understand the Antonine Constitution as an unexpected and, indeed, quite revolutionary event (­Marotta 2009; Besson 2020). If there was a continuity of policy, it must be compared with the grant of municipal status to Egyptian communities in 200/­1 CE by Septimius Severus, Caracalla’s father.

What was included? If tax immunity and political rights were restricted during the Principate, other privileges were still available through Roman citizenship. In this regard, citizenship can probably be conceived as a bundle of rights (­Gaudemet 1967: 533), allowing for additions and subtractions. Even so, rights could remain only passively available or be actively exercised by individuals, in a way that could be contingent upon other parameters such as age, gender, social rank, or financial means. Moreover, citizenship can also be perceived as a set of relationships: between individuals, for example, in familial or contractual relationships; and between individuals and entities such as local communities, courts of justice, governors, or even the emperor himself. Identifying these rights and relationships gives us an idea of what it meant or could mean to become a Roman citizen in 212 CE, even though here we can only offer a glimpse of the answer to this complex question. 656

Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE

Regarding this matter, there are similarities between the Antonine Constitution and previous grants of citizenship. For example, the most interesting late example of a detailed grant of Roman citizenship before the Antonine Constitution is an inscription from Banasa in Tangerine Mauretania: the Tabula Banasitana (­IAM II 94).7 The inscription bears two imperial rescripts and an extract of a ‘­commentarius’, a record keeping a precise track of every personal imperial grant from the time of Augustus on (­Seston and Euzennat 1971). These texts deal with a grant of citizenship to a powerful local family, head of the tribe of the Zegrenses. In the first document dating from 161 to 169 CE, Roman citizenship is granted to the ‘­prince of the Zegrenses’ whose name is or just became Iulianus Zegrensis. His wife Ziddina and their sons who bear ­Greco-​ ­Roman names also benefit. In the second document dating from 177 CE, Iulianus’ son, whose name is Aurelius Iulianus, sees a second demand being satisfied: Roman citizenship is conferred upon his wife Faggura and their children. Considered as a whole, the Tabula Banasitana shows provincial individuals, powerful enough to reach out to the emperors through provincial governors’ intercession and obtain a privilege. However, the second grant also shows that without the right of conubium, mixed marriage had no legal recognition. Only a Roman marriage between two Roman citizens could produce Roman offspring. Similarly, in his Description of Greece (­8.43.5) written around 175 CE, Pausanias reveals the problematic situation in which h ­ alf-​­Roman families could find themselves. Some provincials had obtained Roman citizenship for themselves but not for their children who were still considered ‘­Greeks’, as they were probably born before the grant. From a legal standpoint, in such cases children and parents were no longer part of the same family since they lacked a Roman agnatic relationship. This had consequences such as disruption of succession rights: only Roman citizens could be designated as heirs by a Roman will, and only direct heirs with an agnatic relationship could inherit without taxation (­Besson 2020: ­340–​­342). In the Tabula Banasitana, in both cases, Roman citizenship is granted while other privileges are withheld. In the son’s case, the wording is salvo iure gentis, sine diminutione tributorum et vectigalium populi et fisci, and in the father’s case only the clause salvo iure gentis is included. The last part is easy to understand and to translate, as it stipulates that there are no fiscal privileges attached to the grant, which is bestowed ‘­w ithout diminution of the tribute and vectigal taxes [due to] the [Roman] people and [the imperial] fiscus’. The first part is much more difficult to interpret, as it literally means ‘­the law of the tribe being preserved’. However, the Latin ius has a wide semantic range. We cannot know for sure if this clause alludes to local private law, to fiscal agreements (­­Sherwin-​­White 1973b), or whether it implies even more general provisions. Does it mean that Iulianus might still use local law even if he was a Roman citizen? Or does it rather mean that personal relationships are not severed between individuals themselves and with their communities? In this case, salvo iure gentis might mean ‘­all existing legal relationships with the tribe being preserved’ and the following clause about the preservation of the tribute and vectigal would then only be a precision that these legal relationships have fiscal aspects. I, indeed, suggest that the Antonine Constitution did not sever the links that existed between individuals and their communities (­Besson 2020: ­293–​­303). The concept of origo or place of origin was at the time widely used to determine fiscal obligations and it was a status that was transmitted to children through the paternal line (­Dig. 50.1.1) (­Nörr 1963). So even if Roman citizenship was bestowed upon everyone in 212, local 657

Arnaud Besson

citizenship did not cease to exist and the same is true not only for local rights, but for local duties as well. The survival of all these local legal relationships might well be what was implied by clauses like salvo iure gentis in the Tabula Banasitana and of which an equivalent might well be read in the fragmentary Papyrus Giessen 40.

Legal pluralism Even so, the legal consequences of the Antonine Constitution remain a debated question. Legal history research has mostly considered this matter from the angle of the conflict of laws, ever since Ludwig Mitteis (­1891: 110) linked the general grant of Roman citizenship with a ‘­brutal’ universalization of Roman law. It leads to the more general question of legal relationship in a situation of legal pluralism, that is, when there are several concurrent jurisdictions using different bodies of law. Contemporary methods of resolving conflicts of laws first consider which authority is competent or has jurisdiction on the matter, and they then determine which law must be applied. The judge decides if any foreign law should and can be applied without breaching any local binding provisions or without compromising public order or basic ethical principles. However, this method is designed to operate within a modern context, where there is a strong principle of territoriality of law and a clear hierarchy of laws, based on a principle of subsidiarity. When Rome started to outgrow its urban borders, individuals of various status were soon to live under its authority. Conflicts were quick to arise and had to be dealt with, so there was a de facto situation of legal pluralism, both public and private. During the Republic, Rome used to recognize the validity of several bodies of law and the authority of various jurisdictions. For instance, Cicero (­Verr. 2.2.32.) describes the administration of justice in the province of Sicily, taking place according to ‘­Sicilian law’ and within a Roman framework called the lex Rupilia. Trials between Sicilians of the same city were to be judged by their city courts according to their laws. In case of litigation between Romans and Sicilians, as well as between Sicilians of different cities, the Roman governor was to step in and to select judges at random among the defendant’s fellow citizens. Lastly, when a problem was to arise between cities, the Roman governor would appoint the senate of a third city to examine and resolve the litigation. Setting rules to deal with conflicts of law were the objects of treaties, for example, the one passed with the Lycians in 177 BCE and renewed by Caesar in 48 BCE (­P. Schøyen I 25) (­Sánchez 2007). Again, litigants were judged according to the law of the defendant, and in capital cases (­including ‘­civil death’ like enslavement) the judgement was to take place in the city of the defendant. Similar rules were also found in the ­above-​­mentioned edict of Cyrene and were applied by Cicero in his own administration of the province of Cilicia (­Att. 6.1.15).

Jurisdictions Cicero (­B alb. 8.­20–​­22) provides an important definition of legal pluralism in a context of a power relationship. Rome had sovereignty, and its interests conditionned the amount of liberty left to its subject communities. They usually had the possibility to enjoy their own laws if these were not against Roman interests. Most communities throughout the Empire were bound to Rome by treaties. Each treaty was different and some of them granted the privilege of jurisdiction, autonomia (­that is, legislative power), and so on. 658

Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE

These privileges could be granted later by the emperors but could also be withdrawn as a punishment for disloyalty. The best examples of communities enjoying autonomous jurisdiction were the free Greek cities, such as Athens, Sparta, or Rhodes (­Fournier 2010). Free cities fell outside the provincia of a Roman governor, and thus they were not directly subject to his power. In the early second century CE, Pliny the Younger repeatedly asks Trajan to confirm his decisions concerning the internal affairs of the cities in his province of Bithynia (­E­­p.  10.­93–​­94) and 10.­113–​­114). In both cases, the emperor answers that he does not want to take a decision of general scope and that it is generally wiser to apply to each city its own law. He reminds Pliny that if the city is allowed by treaty to use its own law, nothing should be done against it. However, one case bears on the right of association, regarded with suspicion for political reasons, which leads the emperor to specify that associations must be forbidden in cities that are subject to the Roman law. We know from many inscriptions that communities were anxious to obtain confirmation of their privileges from new emperors. They sent costly embassies for this sole purpose. The best example of this relationship is found in the inscriptions of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, which record several letters from the emperors. Hadrian confirmed in 119 CE that the city’s judges could decide litigation between Aphrodisian citizens in cases regarding local finances. Should there be a litigation between an Aphrodisian and another Greek, the trial was to take place in front of the provincial courts, that is, under Roman authority. This privilege of autonomous jurisdiction is again confirmed by Septimius Severus and Caracalla in 198 CE and, finally, around 240 CE by Gordian III. It thus seems that curtailing the autonomy of local courts was not part of the Severan dynasty’s policies, nor did it take place right after the application of the Antonine Constitution.

Arbitrary confirmations However, an important change regarding provincial justice took place quite some time before the universalization of Roman citizenship. During the Principate, the ordinary procedure, whereby judges were elected or randomly selected, was progressively replaced by the ‘­extraordinary’ procedure where the Roman governor handled the entire trial and rendered the final sentence. This was probably inspired by the procedure first used in important criminal cases and capital cases handled by the governors. The absence of autonomous jurisdiction did not necessarily mean the disappearance of local law. In the province of Egypt, where there were no independent communities or courts of justice, any local law that survived Roman rule was hence applied with the approval of Roman authorities (­A lonso 2013). Local institutions continued to be in use, and the Roman Prefect of Egypt (­the equivalent of governors) actively worked to preserve local law. An example of this is the reform of archival practice for real securities decreed by Mettius Rufus, Prefect between 89 and 92 CE, who decreed that marriage contracts should henceforth be stored along with property titles (­POxy. II 237 8dupl. l. 2­ 1–​­27). The reason was that Egyptian wives could have rights to their husbands’ property, granted to them through marriage contracts according to local law. This information might then be hidden when the property was mortgaged, leading to heavy litigation (­A lonso 2010; Legras 2010: 217). There are only two known cases where local law was likely pushed aside. The most important one is a dispute between a woman named Dionysia and her father Chairemon 659

Arnaud Besson

(­around 186 CE), precisely regarding a right that Dionysia had acquired to one of her father’s landed properties as a dowry through her marriage contract (­POxy. II 237).8 Even if we do not have all the details of the matter, we understand that the piece of land was probably mortgaged, something went wrong, and a conflict arose. The Prefect was later petitioned, perhaps because Chairemon had been physically threatened by Dionysia’s husband. Provincial jurisdiction was, indeed, competent for violent crimes and impious disrespect for parents, but not for private property litigation.9 Chairemon had apparently opted for the strategy of breaking up his daughter’s marriage, ending the property litigation by taking his daughter back. Chairemon argued that this action was allowed by local law.10 We do not have the Prefect’s final decision, but the lengthy papyrus preserves Roman decisions that were proposed as precedents. Although the right to take back a daughter given in marriage was supported by local law, the Prefect Titianus had decided in a similar case in 138 CE not to follow the inhumanity of that law and to apply instead the Roman idea that marriages and divorces must be based on consent (­K reuzsaler and Urbanik 2008). In both cases, we see Roman authorities, once petitioned, imposing their judgement in full sovereignty. Indeed, the Prefects had a council of advisors and jurists trained in local law. However, they had the discretionary power to decide the case according to Roman norms, be they cultural or ethical ones, with a result much closer to Roman than local law. Yet, in no way did they use a principle of personality of the law, where they would blindly apply Egyptian law to provincials, and Roman law to Roman citizens. Actually, they did not even discuss the possibility to base their decision on such a criterion. This offers a stark contrast with all other cases, where the capacity to conduct business according to local practices was left to the inhabitants of the province. Local law, in general, thus appears to be subject to Roman confirmation. However, we might ask ourselves what we mean by ‘­Roman law’. At the end of the first and during the second century CE, Roman courts, and litigants as well, increasingly operated by basing their argumentation on precedent decisions of Roman courts in similar cases. Thus, the law as it was used might well be qualified as provincial law, since Roman governors were able to blend local practices and Roman principles. Their arbitrary decisions were kept in check by precedents and, above all, by the right of appeal to the emperor, whose answers (­and those of his jurists) sometimes expressed discontent with ‘­ignorance’ of Roman law.

Foreigners and Roman law Roman magistrates and jurists also designed solutions to let foreigners use Roman law. Several remedies had been developed, such as the concept of a shared ‘­law of nations’ (­ius gentium) that allowed business to be conducted throughout the Mediterranean world. Moreover, territorial development of Roman hegemony also saw the creation of praetorian actions and remedies. From a conceptual point of view, many of them were based on fictions. One of these fictions was the fictio civitatis, with which it was possible to pretend that someone was a Roman citizen when he was not (­Thomas 2011: 137; Ando 2015). If it appeared fair to try a foreigner according to Roman law, it could be done ‘­si civis Romanus esset’ or ‘­as if he were a Roman citizen’ (­Gai. Inst. 4.37). According to this logic, Roman civil law was not entirely open to be used by foreigners, but it could, nevertheless, be applied to them. It was thus possible to adapt the application of the law without changing the law itself. This could be done at least for legal obligations (­in Gaius’ example it 660

Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE

was an obligation created ex delicto, from a delict) between Roman citizens and foreigners or between foreigners only. A similar process was used to define the way Latin Rights were supposed to work ‘­as if it was’ Roman law (­lex Irnitana 91). More efficient remedies were also available to praetors. They could grant a special type of formula, that is an instruction for the judges, to decide a case according to the facts and not strictly to the law. Foreigners could be judged in Rome according to the formulae of the praetors at least as early as 240 BCE. We have one example of a foreigner who had at least planned to make use of an actio tutelae (­that is a Roman legal action arising from mismanagement of a ward’s property): Babatha, a wealthy Jewish woman, who fled the province of Arabia during the revolt of Bar Kokhba in ­132–​­135 CE. Her personal papers were found in a cave of the Nahal Hever among human remains of a group of refugees. She had documents redacted in three different languages: Greek, Aramaic, and Nabatean. Among these were property titles, sales contracts, tax declarations, marriage contracts, and summons to appear in justice (­Czajkowski 2017). These documents were obviously written by professionals with some knowledge of the law. But, most of all, she had several copies of the praetorian actio tutelae written in Greek, probably meant to be used in litigation with her son’s guardians. We are not sure whether Babatha could have fully used praetorian actiones in front of her provincial court without being a Roman citizen. This actio tutelae might also have been intended as a kind of argument or precedent to convince the Roman governor arbitrarily ruling on the case.

Personal rights There were, however, personal rights that could not transcend citizenship. This is very much visible in Egypt where Rome had important fiscal interests in keeping populations and communities separated from each other.11 One could not usurp another status: for example, an Egyptian could not pretend to be a citizen of Alexandria or a Roman citizen. This was probably the case in other provinces as well (­Suet. Claud. 25.3). Unions between individuals of different status were not recognized as legal marriage and could not produce legitimate offspring, which also impaired succession rights. Before 212 CE, according to the ‘­law of nations’ (­ius gentium), a child born outside of a recognized marriage was to inherit the status of the mother. However, Roman civil law contradicted this last principle. According to the lex Minicia, the children of a mixed couple (­Roman and foreigners) born outside a legitimate marriage would obtain the worst status of the two parents (­Cherry 1990). Roman citizenship was thus more difficult to transmit than other citizen status, even if we know that many Greek cities had similar dispositions. This might be one of the most significant changes brought by the Antonine Constitution: after 212, Roman marriages could be contracted by everyone. Other rights were specifically reserved for Roman citizens and became suddenly available to the new citizens in 212. It did not really create conflicts but sometimes sparked changes that show interactions between authorities, provincials, and what an enduring legal pluralism looks like (­see Dolganov 2019; Czajkowski et al. 2020). In his Institutes (­a course of Roman law from around 160 CE), Gaius takes a special note when rights are reserved for Roman citizens. Among these, he lists paternal power over children (­patria potestas) and power over other members of the household (­manus). Roman paternal power was quite different from legal concepts of other Mediterranean ­ raeco-​­Egyptian law knew of a form of guardianship but communities. For example, G 661

Arnaud Besson

nothing as restrictive as Roman patria potestas (­Wolff 2002). Papyri after 212 show that new citizens were supposed to make use of these institutions. Yet, most sources show notary practices being conservative and provincials sticking to their former ways of doing business. Patria potestas was also important because it created other legal relationships, notably cognate kinship that was used to determine who was a direct heir in case of intestate succession and who was freed from paying an inheritance tax. Yet, succession law and the capacity to write a Roman will were, indeed, universalized by the Antonine Constitution: after 212, every testament was considered a Roman will. However, local practices seem to have endured (­Nowak 2015) and this situation seems to have pushed the emperor Constantine to simplify the form of the testament in the early fourth century CE (­Cod. Iust. 6.23.15.0). Such conservatism of local testamentary practices was probably favoured by the fact that, since the reign of Alexander Severus in the early third century CE, it became possible to draft such formal documents in Greek (­SB I 5294). After 212, newly Roman women seem to have enjoyed the ‘­r ight of the three children’ (­Wolff 2002: ­134–​­136). It bestowed a fuller civil capacity on women who had had three children or more, freeing them from the obligation of being assisted by a tutor in legal business and granting them better inheritance rights. On the other hand, it seems that legal guardianship exercised by women was foreign to Roman law. Papinian insisted somewhat before 212 that, though provincial governors allowed such practices by ignorance, they were illegal. His answer probably concerned cases where legal guardianship had been attributed to surviving mothers by their husbands’ testaments, who might have been new Roman citizens sticking to their former practices. After the universalization of Roman citizenship, Alexander Severus had to reiterate this ban in 224 CE (­Cod. Iust. 5.35.1), but probably to no avail (­Mélèze Modrzejewski 2014: 329). Other local laws were the subject of abrogation attempts, such as dispositions in marriage contracts that could provide for compensation and thus restrain the consensual nature of marriage, or the apokeryxis, a Greek practice for cutting children out of a family (­Cod. Iust. 8.46.6). Such attempts of abrogation by imperial authorities still occurred much later and this shows that such changes are not directly linked to the Antonine Constitution. They are part of a general evolution of the law, the result of tensions that never ceased to be negotiated between the norms conceptualized by the imperial chancellery and Roman jurists, enduring local practices in the provinces, and pragmatic arbitrary adaptations by governors. As a c­ ounter-​­example, in Macedonia, local forms of sacred manumission endured till 313 CE in the sanctuary of Leukopetra (­Petsas 2000), and in the years following the universalization of Roman citizenship, enfranchisements were made ‘­in conformity with the decision of the governor’ contemporary to the Antonine Constitution.

Synthesis In sum, the Antonine Constitution was a break with previous Roman citizenship policies, but one deeply imbued with legal and administrative continuity. Before 212, citizenship was still a ­sought-​­after status, with heavy penalties for usurpation and a strict control on who could enjoy it from birth. Throughout the Empire, institutions such as ­c ensus-​­related grants in Latin communities and a network of influential relationships with provincial governors favoured the grant of Roman citizenship to the upper social 662

Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE

strata of local societies. Some restrictions imposed on grant mechanisms during the second century CE suggest that only a relatively low number of individuals already enjoyed Roman citizenship at the eve of the third century. Even if, after 212, every free person theoretically became a Roman citizen, lower statuses still existed, such as the tremendous number of slaves, the Junian Latins and other freedmen, and soon ‘­barbarians’ or individuals from outside the borders of the Empire would appear again. The legal consequences of the Antonine Constitution must be considered through the prism of a confrontation between practice as seen in the documents and normative standards fixed by the jurists or the emperor. Before, as well as after the universalization of Roman citizenship, Roman provincial magistrates consistently recognized the ability of litigants to use their own rights as well as the Roman law, without applying a constraining principle of the personality of law. The Antonine Constitution did not abrogate local law, nor did it call into question the privileges and fiscal obligations of the communities of the Empire. Individuals were still the citizens of their cities of origin, where they had to pay taxes. The biggest changes for individuals took the form of a change in nomenclature. Also, many deeds, written according to local practices, were suddenly considered as Roman deeds, for example, wills theoretically had to follow specific formal requirements and had to be opened publicly according to Roman law for fiscal reasons. Marriages could be more easily contracted between individuals of different communities. After 212 CE, Roman citizenship brought new legal possibilities for everyone, without negating individual obligations towards their local communities.

Notes 1 See Meyer (­1910); Sasse (­1962, 1965); Kuhlmann (­1994); van Minnen (­2016). 2 For hypothesis on this matter, see Buraselis (­2007); Corbo (­2013); Imrie (­2018). 3 BGU II 655: Αὐρήλιος Ζώσιμος πρὸ μὲν τῆς θeίας δωρεᾶς καλούμενος Ζώσιμος Λεονίδου. A similar and earlier but far more fragmentary example can be found in BGU VII 1652. Another one with uncertain dating is P. Bodl. I 42. The term theia dorea and papyrus BGU II 655 were first commented on by Buraselis (­2007). 4 The first name Marcus is missing here as the use of the praenomen fell progressively into disuse from the second century CE on Salway (­1994); Besson (­2020: ­80–​­83). 5 Plin. E­p. 10.5.1; 10.6.2; Plin. Pan. 37.­3 –​­4; Sen. Ben. 3.9.2; CIL VIII 20682; Saller (­2002: 42). 6 Plin. HN 3.138; Asc. Pis. 3c; Dion 41.36.3; Strabo 4.1.1. 7 Carlsson in this volume offers a detailed discussion of this inscription. See also Seston and Euzennat (­1971). 8 The other case is a conflict between a freedman named Damarion and his former master; see POxy. IV 706. Also Purpura (­2000); Wolff (­2002: 118); Dolganov (­2019). 9 See SB XII 10929; Lewis (­1972, 1973); Jördens (­2011); Dolganov (­2019). 10 On what exactly is this local law, see Taubenschlag (­1951); Wolff (­1978: ­71–​­77 and 1­ 19–​­121); Alonso (­2013); Mélèze Modrzejewski (­2014: §­4 –​­5 and §­20–​­22). 11 Gnomon of the Idiologos 12, 13, 38, 42, 46, 48, 49, 51, 57.

Bibliography Alonso, J.L. (­2010) ‘­The “­Bibliotheke Enkteseon” and the alienation of real securities in Roman Egypt’, JJP 40, ­11–​­54 ——— ​­(­2013) ‘­T he status of peregrine law in Egypt: “­customary law” and legal pluralism in the Roman Empire’, JJP 43, ­351–​­404 Ando, C. (­2015) ‘­Fact, fiction, and social reality in Roman law’, in M. Del Mar and W. Twining (­eds) Legal fictions in theory and practice (­Rotterdam) ­295–​­323

663

Arnaud Besson Besson, A. (­2020) Constitutio Antoniniana: l’universalisation de la citoyenneté romaine au 3e ­siècle (­Basel) Buraselis, K. (­2007) Theia dōrea: das ­göttlich-​­kaiserliche Geschenk: Studien zur Politik der Severer und zur ‘­Constitutio Antoniniana’ (­Wien) Cherry, D. (­1990) ‘­The Minician law: marriage and the Roman citizenship’, Phoenix 44, ­244–​­266 Corbo, C. (­2013) Constitutio Antoniniana: ius philosophia religio (­Napoli) Czajkowski, K. (­2017) Localized law: the Babatha and Salome Komaise archives (­Oxford) Czajkowski, K., Eckhardt, B., and Strothmann, M. (­2020) Law in the Roman provinces (­Oxford) Dolganov, A. (­2019) ‘­Reichsrecht and Volksrecht in theory and practice: Roman justice in the ­province of Egypt (­P. Oxy. II 237, P. Oxy. IV 706, SB XII 10929)’, Tyche 34, ­27–​­60 Eck, W. and Wolff, H. (­eds) (­1986) Heer und Integrationspolitik: die römischen Militärdiplome als historische Quelle (­Köln) Fournier, J. (­2010) Entre tutelle romaine et autonomie civique: l’administration judiciaire dans les provinces hellénophones de l’Empire romain (­129 av. J.-​­C.-​­235 apr. J.-​­C.) (­Athènes) Gaudemet, J. (­1967) Institutions de l’Antiquité (­Paris) Humbert, M. (­1978) Municipium et civitas sine suffragio: l’organisation de la conquête jusqu’à la guerre sociale (­Rome) Imrie, A. (­2018) The Antonine constitution: an edict for the Caracallan Empire (­Leiden) Jördens, A. (­2011) ‘­Eine kaiserliche Konstitution zu den Rechtsprechungskompetenzen der Statthalter’, Chiron 41, ­327–​­356 Kremer, D. (­2005) Ius Latinum: le concept de droit latin sous la république et l’empire (­Paris) Kreuzsaler, C. and Urbanik, J. (­2008) ‘­Humanity and inhumanity of law: the case of Dionysia’, JJP 38, ­119–​­155 Kuhlmann, P.A. (­ed.) (­1994) Die Giessener literarischen Papyri und die C ­ aracalla-​­E rlasse: ­Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar (­Giessen) Lavan, M. (­2016) ‘­The spread of Roman citizenship, ­14–​­212 CE: quantification in the face of high uncertainty’, P&P 230.1, ­3 –​­46 ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­The army and the spread of Roman citizenship’, JRS 109, ­27–​­69 Legras, B. (­2010) Hommes et femmes d’Egypte: droit, histoire et anthropologie (­Paris) Lewis, N. (­1972) ‘­Un nouveau texte sur la juridiction du préfet d’Égypte’, RD 50, ­5 –​­12 ——— ​­(­1973) ‘­Un nouveau texte sur la juridiction du préfet d’Égypte (­complément)’, RD 51, ­5 –​­7 Marotta, V. (­2009) La cittadinanza romana in età imperiale (­secoli ­I -​­III d.C.): una sintesi (­Torino) Mélèze Modrzejewski, J. (­2014) Loi et coutume dans l’Égypte grecque et romaine (­Oxford) Meyer, P.M. (­ed.) (­1910) Griechische Papyri im Museum des Oberhessischen Geschichtsvereins zu Giessen (­Leipzig) Mitteis, L. (­1891) Reichsrect vs Volksrecht (­Leipzig) Nörr, D. (­1963) ‘­Origo. Studien zur Orts, Stadt und Reichszugehörigkeit in der Antike’, RHD 31, ­525–​­600 Nowak, M. (­2015) Wills in the Roman Empire: a documentary approach (­Warsaw) Petsas, P.M. (­ed.) (­2000) Inscriptions du sanctuaire de la Mère des Dieux Autochtone de Leukopétra (­Macédoine) (­Athens) Pferdehirt, B. (­2002) Die Rolle des Militärs für den sozialen Aufstieg in der römischen Kaiserzeit (­Bonn) Phang, S.E. (­2001) The marriage of Roman soldiers (­13 B.C. -​­A.D. 235): law and family in the imperial army (­Leiden) Purpura, G. (­ed.) (­2012) Revisione ed integrazione dei Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani (­FIRA): studi preparatori, vol. I (­Torino) Purpura, G. (­2000) ‘­Diritti di patronato e astikoi nomoi in P. Oxy. IV 706’, in Russo, S. (­ed.) Atti del V convengo nazionale di egittologia e papirologia (­Firenze), ­199–​­212 Raggi, A. (­2004) ‘­The epigraphic dossier of Seleucus of Rhosus: a revised edition’, ZPE 147, ­123–​­138 Saller, R.P. (­2002) Personal patronage under the early Empire (­Cambridge) Salway, B. (­1994) ‘­W hat’s in a name? A survey of Roman onomastic practice from c. 700 B.C. to A.D. 700’, JRS 84, ­124–​­145 Sánchez, P. (­2007): ‘­La convention judiciaire dans le traité conclu entre Rome et les Lyciens (­P. Schøyen I 25)’, Chiron 37, ­363–​­381 Sasse, C. (­1962) ‘­Literaturübersicht zur Constitutio Antoniniana’, JJP 14, ­109–​­149

664

Towards universal citizenship: the Roman Empire in 212 CE ——— ​­(­1965) ‘­Literaturübersicht zur Constitutio Antoniniana II’, JJP 15, ­329–​­366 Seston, W. and Euzennat, M. (­1971) ‘­Un dossier de la chancellerie romaine: la Tabula Banasitana. Etude de diplomatique’, CRAI 115.3 = eid., Publications de l’École française de Rome 43.1 (­1980) ­85–​­107 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973a) The Roman citizenship [2nd rev. edn 1980] (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­1973b) ‘­T he Tabula of Banasa and the Constitutio Antoniniana’, JRS 63, ­86–​­98 Taubenschlag, R. (­1951) ‘­The Roman authorities and the local law in Egypt before and after the C.A.’, JJP 5, ­121–​­141 Thomas, Y. (­2011) Les opérations du droit (­Paris) van Minnen, P. (­2016) ‘­Three edicts of Caracalla? A new reading of P.Giss. 40’, Chiron 46, ­205–​­221 Wolff, H.J. (­1978) Das Recht der griechischen Papyri Ägyptens in der Zeit der Ptolemaeer und des Prinzipats (­München) ——— ​­(­2002) Das Recht der griechischen Papyri Ägyptens in der Zeit der Ptolemaeer und des Prinzipats, ed. H.-​­A. Rupprecht (­München)

665

PART VII

Late antiquity and the Middle Ages

47 THE USES OF CITIZENSHIP IN THE ­POST-​­ROMAN WEST Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

When the W ­ est-​­Roman Empire came to an end in the late fifth century, there had been roughly a millennium’s worth of civic traditions in the West. In many cases, these traditions had ­pre-​­Roman, local origins. The Roman conquest had introduced new models of citizenship to incorporated territories, which had profoundly influenced, but never quite replaced, local civic traditions. As a result, citizenship had by the late Roman period become a deeply ingrained concept in the understanding of politics and identity in the provinces of the Western Empire, and neither the disappearance of the Roman state nor the emergence of the successor kingdoms could erase the relevance of civic culture. It has been a recurrent shortcoming in the historiography of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages to dismiss the importance of citizenship after the fall of Rome (­cf. Rose 2021a; Pohl 2018) because of the implicit assumption that citizenship in this period referred either to the vestiges of an outdated Roman citizenship or to a Christian spiritual model of civic belonging that focused first and foremost on a world to come (­see Rose in this volume). Building on recent attempts to reassess this orthodoxy,1 this chapter presents an overview of the ways in which citizenship and civic language continued to be useful and meaningful in the ­post-​­Roman Latin West, covering the period from the fourth until the seventh century CE. It will start with a first section that briefly outlines the state of affairs in the late Roman Empire, when Roman citizenship still functioned within the legal and political framework of a Roman state. We will then move to the p ­ ost-​­Roman West, for which we will address three successive points. In the second section, we discuss the continued use and development of Roman citizenship as a legal category after the disintegration of the ­West-​­Roman Empire; in the third section, the diverse and widespread role of local citizenships in the former Roman territories of the West; and in the last one, the appropriation and ­re-​­purposing of civic language in Christian discourse, the aims of which, we submit, were by no means exclusively spiritual (­see Rose in this volume). It deserves to be underlined that social identity in the early Middle Ages (­as in Antiquity) was m ­ ulti-​­layered (­Halsall 2007; Pohl 2013; Reimitz 2015). Individuals could combine multiple identities, the salience of which depended on context and circumstances.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-56

669

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

Being a citizen did not preclude other identities, nor would it have been relevant in all social interactions. However, as this contribution will show, citizenship continued to be a valid mode of identification and ­self-​­definition across the ­post-​­Roman West.

The Roman civic order in the late Roman Empire The history of Roman citizenship is often told as a story of decline and dwindling relevance (­­Sherwin-​­White 1973; Nicolet 1980). What had once been a status of privilege aspired to by many but held by few devolved over the centuries into a ­self-​­evident accompaniment to free status, the lowest common denominator among the n ­ on-​­servile inhabitants of the Roman world. The consecutive stages of the process are well known: the collapse of citizen participation under the Principate; the emergence in the second century CE of a new social distinction among the free inhabitants of the Empire between those with means and standing (­honestiores) and those without it (­humiliores) (­Garnsey 2004: 140), replacing citizenship as a marker of legal protection and entitlement; and finally, the Antonine Constitution of 212 (­see Besson in this volume), through which the Emperor Caracalla extended citizenship status to all his free subjects, the point of no return on the road towards obsolescence (­Ando 2016; Imrie 2018; Besson 2020). In this traditional narrative, indeed, Roman citizenship did not die with the collapse of the ­West-​­Roman Empire but several centuries before it. That Roman citizenship changed over time and became less relevant as a political identity and privileged legal status need not be disputed. But the focus on decline has served to obscure areas of life in the late Roman world in which Roman citizenship continued to be meaningful, even gained new momentum, that is, as a gateway to Roman private law, as a barrier separating citizens from aliens and slaves, and as a legal framework for marginalizing religious transgressors and others living under a stigma of infamy.2 We will explore these areas in turn. In terms of rights and privileges, the citizen of the fourth century CE undoubtedly found himself in a weaker position than the citizen of the first century BCE. It bears repeating, all the same, that the erosion of many such rights predated the late imperial period and that some had in practice been inaccessible to the majority of citizens from early on (­­Wallace-​­Hadrill 2020: 7). The right to vote in Rome’s public assemblies ­ ffice – ​­the participatory side of Roman c­ itizenship – ​­had always been and stand for o difficult to exercise for citizens residing outside of Rome (­Lavan 2019: 2­ 2–​­31). In this sense, Rome’s political institutions had ceased functioning as an avenue of genuine participation by the citizen body long before Augustus c­ o-​­opted these institutions into the imperial system (­Ando 2010). Other civic rights show an equally slippery trajectory, even if the chronology varies. The citizen’s traditional exemption from the poll and land taxes levied in the provinces was not fully abandoned until Diocletian’s tax reforms in the late third century (­Corbier 2005: 365). Yet previous emperors had already made serious inroads on it, by introducing new taxes on inheritance and manumission targeted at citizens, and by handing out citizenship grants to provincials that kept ­pre-​­existing tax obligations intact. It is quite conceivable, in fact, that the Antonine Constitution of 212 had also come with such a salvo iure gentium clause (­­Blanco-­Pérez 2020). We know from the trials of the Apostle Paul that Roman citizenship could offer protection against public beatings, torture, and execution, while also allowing the citizen to appeal to the emperor in the face of unwarranted violence by a magistrate (­Acts 22:­22–​­29, 25:­10–​­13; Adams 2009). Formally, these rights continued to be associated with citizenship at least until the 670

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

second century CE. After that, they appear to have become privileges of rank, of being a member of the honestiores (­which did not necessarily require citizenship). In practice, as Peter Garnsey has rightly stressed, a citizen’s ability to escape physical punishment or to appeal to the emperor would always have been contingent on social standing and influence (­Garnsey 1970: ­260–​­71). There were certain types of crime, moreover, such as treason, magic and, from the fourth century onwards, heresy, that could result in torture no matter one’s status or standing (­Garnsey 1970: ­103–​­152). Without doubt, the most persistent right tied to Roman citizenship was access to Roman private law, which governed such crucial areas of life as marriage, property, commerce, and inheritance (­Garnsey 2004: 138; Besson 2017: 2­ 09–​­215; Atkins 2018: 67). Naturally, the significance of such access would have differed for each citizen. The Romans accepted and even facilitated the use of alternative legal systems in the localities of the Empire, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that even those with citizenship status continued to avail themselves of this option long after 212 (­see, e.g., Humfress 2013; Mathisen 2014; Ando 2016). Still, not having access to Roman law, or being deprived of such access by way of punishment, could have severe economic and social repercussions, as we will see shortly. Beyond the erosion of the citizen’s legal rights, the decline of Roman citizenship as a valid marker of differentiation is often linked to its increasing universality: when virtually everyone was a Roman citizen after 212, it naturally stopped being a salient form of identification. Recent scholarship has nuanced this claim on two counts. First, that the late Empire continued to be inhabited by a large and diverse body of n ­ on-​­citizens. Slaves, for one, had not been enfranchised by the Antonine Constitution and remained a ubiquitous presence in the late Roman household (­Grey 2011). If anything, the increasing use of Roman law in the wake of 212 resulted in an unprecedented outpour of imperial rescripts and juridical literature on the correct procedures regarding slavery and manumission (­Harper 2011: 3­ 67–​ ­390). Such material calls our attention to another category of ­non-​­citizen that survived into the late Empire and even beyond: the Junian Latin (­Corcoran 2011). This was a type of free status acquired when a slave was freed outside the formal rules and regulations set for manumission. While Junian Latins enjoyed limited access to Roman law (­Koops 2013: 116), they were barred from making a will, meaning that upon death, their property reverted to their former master (­or the public treasury). ‘­They live as free men, but die as slaves’, as one Christian commentator put it (­Salv. Mass. Ad eccl. 3.7.34; Harper 2011: ­465–​­467). A final group of ­non-​­citizens were the ­so-​­called dediticii, which included both manumitted slaves with criminal records and enemies of Rome who had surrendered unconditionally. It is a matter of ongoing debate whether the Antonine Constitution contained a provision explicitly excluding the dediticii from its citizenship grant (­see for discussion Imrie 2018: ­66–​­72). Certain is that the dediticii persisted into the late Empire, as yet another category of free person deemed unfit for citizenship status (­­Wallace-​­Hadrill 2020: 8). A second case against the universal character of Roman citizenship in the late Empire can be found, paradoxically enough, within the citizenship body itself, among the citizens who lived under a form of legal disability. As shown by Jane Gardner, this technically covered the majority of citizens in the Roman world, ranging from women and children to freedmen and the s­ o-​­called infames (­Gardner 1993). In the Republican period, infamia had been a status reserved for tried criminals; a civic demotion for those crimes that did not incur total loss of liberty (­Harper 2013: ­47–​­49). By the third century CE, the stigma of infamia had become inherent to morally dubious occupations like gladiators, pimps, prostitutes, tavern owners, and undertakers. Infames, like the other legally disabled 671

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

groups mentioned above, were citizens, but were denied certain rights in the public and private sphere, for example, they could not act as accusers in a trial, they could not stand for office, they were not allowed to marry ­high-​­ranking citizens, and the children born from infames women could not be legitimized (­CTh 4.6.3; Kuefler 2007). The disenfranchisement of morally compromised citizens took on new urgency under Constantine I and his Christian successors, who began to legislate against individuals and groups perceived to fall short of the newly emerging Christian orthodox norms (­Lo Nero 2001). This was not a strictly linear development, nor was it born out of a ­single-​­minded imperial ambition to redefine Roman citizenship along Christian lines (­Noethlichs 2006; Humfress 2008; Escribano Paño 2009; Flierman and Rose 2020). Programmatic statements were certainly made on occasion, such as Theodosius I’s famous cunctos populos of CE 380, which declared that all peoples under Roman rule should live in accordance with the Nicaean Creed (­CTh, 16.1.2; 16.2.25). By and large, however, imperial legislation was reactionary and situational: emperors were prompted by petitioners or decided for their own strategic reasons to intervene in the status, rights, and freedoms of certain groups of unorthodox citizens, often within the confines of specific cities such as Rome and Constantinople. This could take various forms (­Flierman and Rose 2020: ­74–​­76). Some measures were aimed at closing down avenues of religious and political participation: heretics and pagans were denied the right to hold religious ceremonies (­CTh, 16.5.­3 –​­4; 16.5.6; 16.10.2; 16.10.25) and banned from enlisting in the imperial service (­CTh, 16.5.29; 16.10.21). A second line of attack was to deny religious deviants access to vital areas of Roman private law. Theodosius I forbade apostates and Manichaeans to make a will or receive an inheritance (­CTh, 16.7.1; 16.5.7). His son Honorius went further still, denying Manichaeans and affiliated heretical groups the right to own, buy, or sell, and confiscating their property in the process (­CTh, 16.5.40). A third approach was to altogether ban religious deviants from civic space, a treatment that was reserved, above all, for the ‘­disease’ of heresy with its ‘­polluting’ influences (­Escribano Paño 2018: ­70–​­73; 2009: ­46–​­47). Officials were ordered to throw heretics out of their cities (­CTh. 16.5.­12–​­14, 16.5.18, 16.5.20, 16.5.­29–​­30, 16.5.62). Some heretical leaders who were deemed particularly dangerous to public order found themselves permanently banished to remote islands under a formal sentence of deportatio, which came with complete loss of citizenship status (­CTh. 16.4.3; 16.5.34; 16.5.45; 16.5.­57–​­58; Washburn 2012: ­30–​­60). Through such incremental acts of marginalization, Christian emperors sought to refashion the Roman civic body, yet another indication that the continued salience of Roman citizenship in the late Roman period relied heavily on its potential to exclude and to draw up legal, social, and spatial boundaries. The inherent complexities of the late Roman civic order are perhaps best seen in the way the traditional ­non-​­Roman (­the ‘­barbarian’) was integrated into the Roman administration. The Roman army had always relied on recruits from beyond the frontier to bulk up numbers, and this was particularly true in the late Roman period, when the reform of the army created a military administration separate from the civilian one. This, on the one hand, kept senators from leading troops, but on the other, meant that ­non-​­Roman leaders rose to unprecedented positions of political and civic prominence, obtaining the rank of senator and even consul (­Halsall 2007: ­101–​­111). By this period, however, military service in itself did not grant citizenship, which had traditionally been one of the main ways for foreigners to obtain civitas Romana. Instead, barbarian veterans acquired the status of freeborn (­laetus or gentilis) upon being discharged, through which they were incorporated within the late Roman civic order but without 672

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

the full rights of the citizen, de facto operating as many of the other ­non-​­elite free inhabitants of the Empire (­Liebeschuetz 1998: 138; Mathisen 2006: ­1022–​­1038).3 In the late fourth and fifth centuries, this system was pushed to new limits, when the Roman army, rather than recruiting barbarian individuals into their ranks, began to incorporate entire groups as military units under a treaty ( ­foederati). In terms of civic prerogatives, this shifted the balance in favour of the barbarians, for even if these troops and their families did not achieve citizen status by virtue of service, they obtained other privileges that many citizens did not enjoy, above all a public salary and exclusion from taxation (­Faber 2013: ­125–​­128). Moreover, while many of these groups (­Visigoths, Burgundians, Vandals, etc.) were Arian Christians, their federate status meant that they were not in danger of suffering the civic impediments imposed on other heretics. Over the course of the fifth century, Rome gradually lost control over its western provinces (Figure 47.1). Barbarian ­k ings  – ​­many of whom had previously served as

Figure 47.1  Map of Europe in the 480s CE. ©2021 Mappa mundi cartography.

673

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

generals in the Roman ­army – ​­took over as the new authorities on the ground, supported by provincial elites who preferred the opportunities offered by a local barbarian court over allegiance to a distant emperor. Roman administrative and legal institutions did not immediately collapse upon the emergence of these ­post-​­Roman kingdoms. In some, they continued more or less unhampered. But Roman citizenship in the West was no longer guaranteed by a single Roman state. The effect, as we will see, was fragmentation: the significance of being a Roman citizen came to be contingent not just on social rank and moral behaviour, but also on the polity in which one resided.

Roman citizenship and legal Romanness after Rome Under the late Empire, Roman citizenship had functioned as a legal status, providing ­ on-​ access to Roman private law and other (­legal) actions and instruments denied to n ­citizens. This legal understanding of Roman citizenship persisted into the early Middle Ages. Indeed, from a strictly legal perspective, we can assume that most of the new kingdoms established on Roman territory over the course of the fifth century continued to be inhabited by large populations of Roman citizens for several generations. Yet the meaning of such citizenship and the political framework in which it functioned underwent significant changes. Most importantly, Roman citizens now found themselves under barbarian rule and their legal position defined by barbarian law, or more often, by Roman law that was sanctioned by a barbarian ruler. As a result of this, such prestige and benefits as had still been attached to citizenship status under the late Roman Empire came to be subjected to further erosion. The Roman citizen continued to have access to Roman legal procedure and law, with its refined juridical instruments for ­property-​­transactions and inheritance (­Esders 2018: ­329–​­331). Up to the seventh century, elite Romans also continued to dominate the new civil bureaucracy and the higher offices of the Catholic Church (­see, e.g., Patzold 2014; Liebeschuetz 2015: 211; Bjornlie 2016). Yet such rights and entitlements were offset by drawbacks; for example, Romans carried a heavier tax burden than ­non-​­Romans and would often find themselves excluded from the most prestigious military and administrative offices (­A mory 1997: ­53–​­54; Halsall 2018: 55). Their precise situation came, at any rate, to vary from kingdom to kingdom. In Ostrogothic Italy, Roman law was open to all subjects, whether they were Romans or Goths (­Lafferty 2013: 5­ 4–​­100), while in northern Gaul, the position of the Roman citizen was from early on defined by Frankish rather than Roman law, which treated it as a ­second-​­rate legal status (­Bothe 2018). In Britain, rapid d ­ e-​­Romanization meant that Roman citizenship quickly ceased to be a meaningful legal category at all, though the language of citizenship remained a powerful rhetorical resource (­Jones 2001). Roman citizenship, in short, persisted into the early Middle Ages but lost its uniform character. How did one become a Roman citizen in this rapidly decentralizing ­post-​­Roman world? As before, the most straightforward route was through descent, by being born to two parents with citizenship status (­Esders 2018: 327). The majority of free inhabitants of the late Empire had been Roman citizens, and so as a result were their descendants who lived under barbarian rule (­Mathisen 2006: ­1036–​­1038). For many in the early Middle Ages, Roman citizenship thus functioned as a default status: a ­s elf-​­evident concomitant to being a free member of the ­non-​­barbarian population, to being a Romanus. A second route to citizenship was through manumission. Manumission into citizenship had been an established Roman practice. It was an area of 674

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

Roman law, moreover, on which jurors and legislators had always lavished special care and attention (­Gardner 1993: ­7–​­51). Early medieval legislators continued to be preoccupied with this area of Roman law, but they developed it in diverging directions that reflected the needs and circumstances of the different successor kingdoms. A ­seventh-​­century ­East-​­Frankish law code, for example, took care to distinguish between three different forms of manumission, only one of which would result in Roman citizenship (­LR, 64 [61]; Bothe 2018: 361). In late Visigothic law, by contrast, it seems to have been standard procedure to free all slaves to the status of Roman citizen (­Form. Visig. ­2 –​­6). Significantly, early medieval laws and formularies used the term cives Romani almost exclusively in the context of manumission (­Rio 2009: ­67–​­164).4 In other contexts, they simply referred to Romans (­Romani) as a legal category distinct from Franks, Goths, or even barbari. Such usage suits the rhetorical purpose of these law codes, establishing a neat legal landscape inhabited by distinct peoples or ethnic groups. Moreover, because Roman citizenship was largely transmitted through descent, it was possible and perhaps even logical to conceptualize ‘­the Romans’ as just another ethnic group (­cf. Pohl 2018: ­24–​­33). Overall, it would seem that these legal texts were trying to adapt the late Roman legal framework to the new circumstances, and while most of the implications of Roman citizenship were preserved, these had to fit in a world where the Romans were no longer in charge. In such a world, Romanness as a legal status (­the traditional domain of citizenship) no longer needed to be expressed with civic language, hence Romani rather than cives Romani. When it came to defining the civic rights of these Romani, the ‘­Roman outside a Roman state’ conundrum solicited different responses across the West. Moreover, the legal situation of Romani was under constant renegotiation. Take, for instance, the Liber Constitutionum, a collection of royal laws issued by the Burgundian kings before their kingdom fell to the Franks in the 530s (­Wood 2016: ­4 –​­7). To an extent, these laws express what has been called a ‘­legal dualism’, with Burgundians and Romans being entitled to different legal procedures. Cases between two Romans should be heard by Roman judges who should apply Roman law (­LC, Prima Constitutio 8). Yet social and legal interaction between Romans and Burgundians was clearly expected to occur: when a case involved members of both groups, royal rather than Roman law was to be applied (­LC, Prima Constitutio 13). Interestingly, the royal laws of the Liber Constitutionum show a sense of legal parity. Knocking out the teeth of a freeborn Roman required the same monetary compensation as knocking out those of a Burgundian freeman (­LC, 26). Rank (­as defined by gender, age, office, and free status) was deemed more important than Romanness. The legal situation in the Burgundian kingdom was, at any rate, open to change. The laws collected in the Liber Constitutionum covered several decades. There are signs that by the time the code was redacted c. 516, ethnic barriers were starting to crumble and legislation was taking on a more territorial character (­A mory 1993: 8­ –​­10). The label populus noster (­our people), at first a synonym for Burgundians in royal legislation, could by the early sixth century cover all inhabitants of territories subject to the king. The laws of the Visigothic kingdom present us with a more ­long-​­term perspective on the regional development of Roman citizenship. Like in the Burgundian kingdom, the Visigothic kings initially addressed the needs of their Roman and Gothic subjects with both royal edicts and updated Roman law. Euric’s Code is the first example of compiled royal edicts (­dated to the 470s). These were created to address the specific 675

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

circumstances derived from the Gothic settlement and, as such, applied to the whole population. His son Alaric II issued his Breviary in 506, collecting excerpts and titles from various late imperial law codes, accompanied by interpretationes explaining their relevance and meaning in a contemporary setting. Among the Roman laws incorporated in the Breviarium, and updated for continued use, was a f­ ourth-​­century imperial edict forbidding intermarriage between Roman citizens and barbarians (­CTh 3.14.1; Liebeschuetz 1998: ­139–​­140). This claim of segregation was not fully upheld in practice even in 506 (­Mathisen 2006: ­1030–​­1032), and subsequent generations took steps to dismantle this legal fiction. Firstly, when Liuvigild lifted the ban on intermarriage in the 570s, partly because it had already been disregarded left and right (­LV 3.1.1), and then more definitively with the conversion to Catholicism of his successor Reccared. It is unclear whether Goth and Roman were still two different legal categories at that point: Liuvigild’s Codex Revisus is usually considered to have applied across the kingdom (­A lvarado Planas 2011). Goth and Roman were still useful rhetorical labels to underline certain aspects of identity: in the eyes of contemporaries, someone like Claudius, the duke of Visigothic Lusitania in the 580s and 590s, was a Roman aristocrat where his lineage and legal status were concerned, a Catholic when he cracked down on his Arian neighbours, and a Goth when he led a victorious army against the Franks (­VPE, 5.10.­6 –​­7; John Bicl. Chron. 218; Buchberger 2017: ­59–​­61). By the ­m id-​­seventh century, however, when Recceswinth promulgated his Liber Iudiciorum (­or Lex Visigothorum), the aim was to create a unifying Catholic narrative for the kingdom (­Kelly ­2016–​­2017). In this code, royal law became default territorial law, reducing Roman citizenship to a basic free status without any further legal or civic advantages. In Burgundy and Spain, Roman citizenship gradually transformed. In other regions, like northern Francia, it was actively marginalized and replaced. The Merovingian kings never issued a law code that applied to their whole kingdom. Rather, as Merovingian authority came to spread over Gaul and the surrounding regions, they maintained the legal systems they found in place. Thus, in Aquitaine, late antique Roman and Visig­ ost-​­conquest Burgundy the ‘­dual’ legal othic practices remained dominant, while in p system developed under the Burgundian kings was allowed to persist (­Esders 2018: ­333–​­334). The Frankish heartlands in northern and eastern Gaul did give rise to their own law codes, which applied to both Franks and Romans. Significantly, these codes consistently relegated Romans to an inferior legal position (­Bothe 2018). As early as the fifth century, the Lex Salica established the wergild (­monetary compensation) of a free ­land-​­owning Roman at half that of a Frankish freeman, effectively placing the former at the level of Frankish liti (­freedmen). The ­seventh-​­c entury Lex Ripuaria continued this line (­c. 40 [36]), while simultaneously limiting the accessibility of Roman legal status. Replacing personal with territorial law, the Lex Ripuaria treated all those born in Ripuaria (­the Rhineland region around Cologne) as Ripuarians, regardless of the background of their parents or ancestors (Figure 47.2). The principal road to Roman legal status that was left open in the ­seventh-​­century Rhineland was through manumission: a slave freed under Roman law would become a civis Romanus (­c. 64 [61]). However, as a freedman, he would also have an inferior wergild and social status under the Lex Ripuaria. Laws like this were part of a wider process of ethnic engineering taking place in northern Gaul, which made it more advantageous, socially and legally, to identify as Frank than as Roman (­Reimitz and Esders 2021; Halsall 2018: ­51–​­56). And indeed, by the seventh century, Frankish identity had become the norm above the Loire, even among those whose ancestors had considered themselves Roman citizens (­Halsall 676

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

Figure 47.2  Map of Europe in the 620s CE.

2003: 47). By this period, in northern Gaul, citizenship was used to highlight local and Christian forms of belonging rather than the legal status associated with Romanness. If Merovingian Gaul sees the marginalization of Roman citizenship and the discontinuity of legal Romanness, ­post-​­Roman Italy is an example of the contrary. During the Ostrogothic period, both Goths and Romans lived under the same Roman common law (­Var. 8.3; 9.18.2: Gothis Romanisque apud nos ius esse commune). This is a pattern very similar to the Burgundian/­Visigothic system. It is generally agreed in the literature that the Ostrogoths (­and Theoderic in particular) tried to consolidate Roman provincial law in Italy (­Var. 9.19.1), maintaining Roman citizenship as a legal and social category distinct from Ostrogoths, who acted as a separate military ‘­caste’ under the ­pre-​­existing late Roman social ranking system (­Lafferty 2013: es­p. ­56–​­57, 157). Roman citizenship was thus preserved on terms that were highly similar to those of the late 677

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

Roman Empire (­w ith all Italic provincials being Roman citizens). This legal landscape fitted the rhetoric of continuity cultivated by the Ostrogothic monarchy (­esp. Var. 1.1; Cellurale 2011; ­Wallace-​­Hadrill 2022). The E ­ ast-​­Roman emperor Justianian thought differently. In the early 530s, he launched a military campaign against the Ostrogothic Kingdom, signalling clearly that he did not consider the Amal dynasty legitimate continuators of the West-Roman imperial order. Two decades of destabilizing warfare brought only parts of Italy under ­East-​­Roman control. Following a strategy he had recently pursued in Vandal Africa (­Nov. ap­p. 7.11), Justinian sought to reintroduce ‘­untarnished’ Roman law in these conquered Italian territories. The Pragmatica sanctio of 554 acknowledges that Italy and the Empire are part of the same body (­unum corpus) and, as such, it was to be under direct imperial law (­iura insuper vel leges codicibus nostris insertas, quas iam sub edictali programmate in Italiam dudum misimus, obtinere sancimus). This implied the imposition of Justinian’s recently published Corpus iuris civilis and, with it, the confirmation of Roman citizenship as the main form of civic and legal identity in Byzantine Italy. From the middle of the sixth century onwards, Roman citizenship in Italy was defined once more by a Roman state (­Greatrex 2000; Cellurale 2011; more generally on Roman citizenship in the East, Chrysos 2003: ­126–​­130). With the disintegration of the Empire in the West, Roman citizenship entered a prolonged process of fragmentation. It continued to be a legal status that could confer certain rights and privileges, but its precise implications and importance differed from kingdom to kingdom, as this brief survey of the legal codes has shown. In some kingdoms, Roman citizenship developed into a default rank for free subjects of the king, whereas in others it quickly dissolved into a secondary status. In still other regions, it stopped being a meaningful category at all. The gradual erosion and regionalization of legal Romanness in the early Medieval West did open up other avenues of civic expression. Even under the Empire, Roman citizenship had been only one form of civic belonging. Citizenship had originally denoted membership of a city. Indeed, even Roman citizenship had never abandoned its link to the city of Rome (­cf. Maskarinec 2013). It is to this local understanding of citizenship and its renewed salience in the ­post-​­Roman West that we now turn.

The relevance of locality Already in the first century BCE, Cicero had highlighted the conundrum of dual citizenship within the Roman system in his discussion of the two patriae (­Farney 2007: ­2 –​­8). In his De legibus, Cicero mentions that town dwellers have two fatherlands (­municipibus duas esse censeo patrias), ‘­one by nature (­naturae) and one by citizenship (­civitatis)’ (­Cic. Leg. 2.5). Of course, Cicero referred specifically to the situation of the Italians, newly enfranchised in the wake of the Social Wars, but his take remained relevant during the imperial period. As Rome extended its political control over the Mediterranean, it incorporated cities with local citizenships into its administrative order, leading to a complex structure of incorporated towns, allied cities, and colonial foundations. It was in Rome’s nature to preserve local civic orders and this did not change with the Constitutio Antoniniana which, as we have seen, preserved local judicial particularities (­Girdvainyte 2014: ­39–​­41; Andrades Rivas 2017: ­66–​­67). With the political disintegration of the Empire in the West, the local dimensions of citizenship and civic language became more pronounced. In early medieval contexts, 678

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

citizens are frequently defined as members of an urban community. For Isidore of Seville, for instance, that great compiler of late antique knowledge and scholarship, the link between citizen and city was easy and ­self-​­evident (­Etym. 9.4.­2 –​­6): Citizens (­cives) are called such because they live together (­quod in unum coeuntes vivant) so they may live more honourably and safer. The house is the dwelling of one family, just like the city is of one people (­sicut urbs unius populi)  … the ­p eople ( ­populus) is the totality of the citizens, including the city elders (­senioribus civitatis). Isidore was indulging in archaizing definitions: Cicero had defined the citizen along very similar lines (­cf. Cic. Res­p. 1.25.40). Yet it was more than antiquarianism: across the West, we have numerous examples of civic language used both to identify individuals as members of an urban community and to define municipal communities as a whole from the fourth century onwards (­Mathisen 2006: 1016). Already in the fourth century, Ausonius underlined in his writings his status of civis and his rank of consul of Bordeaux (­Auson. Ordo nob. urb. 20), even if he was an imperial tutor and consul in 379. Other examples of individuals being identified as local citizens can be found in funerary inscriptions. From the fourth century we know of Aur(­elius) Aeliodorus, a citizen of Tarsus and neighbour of Seville (­civis Tarsus Cilicia(­e) commorans Ispali; ICERV 196), and Eustacius from Trier, who is described as a civis Surus (­RICG I.32b). The examples become more common in the ­post-​­Roman period: Cantiori(­us), citizen of Gwynedd (­Vene{d}otis cive(­s) [sic]; ­Charles-​­Edwards 2012: 177) in northern Wales, Rustecius of Gévaudan (­cive Gabaletana; Merten 2018: ­83–​­84) buried in Trier, Alethius of Lyon (­ordine princeps/ Lugduni … [c]ivis qui fuerit; RICG 15.11), and Samon of Toulouse (­civis Tolosianus; AE 1978: 422). Significantly, in all these cases the inscriptions were not found in the town or region of which citizenship was claimed. We are dealing with outsiders who were buried away from their hometown, in another city or region, yet nevertheless considered it useful to identify themselves as citizens of their former community. We encounter a similar mechanism of identifying an individual by his community in chronicles and other written sources of the period. Here, however, it is the narrators who describe individuals as citizens in order to identify where they come from, like Sidonius Apollinaris’ friend Lampridius (­Sid. Apoll. Epist. 8.9.3), Agrippinus of Narbonne (­et comes et civis; Hydat. 212), Lupus of Tours (­urbis Turonicae civis; Greg. Tur. Hist. 5.13), or the British martyrs Julius and Aaron (­legionum urbis cives; Gildas, 2.10). Highlighting the connection between an individual and their community through citizenship was a relatively common phenomenon. Whether it was done by the individuals themselves, or by another witness, it has to be understood in a context where belonging to a civic community was politically and socially relevant. Naturally, identifying an individual as belonging to a different community presupposes that the local community defines itself as such, and that it uses community affiliation and belonging as a way of distinguishing the ‘­us’ from the ‘­them’. It is clear from the sources that urban populations are seen as citizens and described in terms of citizenship. To name a few, Hydatius, Sidonius, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, Venantius Fortunatus, and Isidore of Seville all use cives to describe townsfolk in their writings. The same can be inferred from council acts (­e.g., Orleans V [549], 3; Tours II [567], 5, Toledo IV [633], 19) and Visigothic law (­e.g., LV 1.13, 1.2.4).5 In a period when 679

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

individual and group definitions were under constant r­ e-​­assessment due to processes of state formation and ethnogenesis (­Halsall 2007; Pohl 2018), locality appears as a salient layer of identity, which makes sense because ­place-​­based identities are more resilient to historical change and provided continuity in a time of rapid transformation. Townsfolk in this period looked at their local urban environment as a point of reference, because their cities offered a defining connection with the past and links to an established community in a time of rapid change. City dwellers shared amongst themselves localized memories and traditions in ways that outsiders did not and could not understand (­Martínez Jiménez 2020). ­Politically-​­active urban communities that defined themselves in civic terms continued to exist throughout the late Roman and ­post-​­Roman centuries. The administrative changes implemented by Diocletian and Constantine had transformed local government and tax collecting (­­Ward-​­Perkins 1997), but there was still a municipal rule in the fourth century that was the focal point of local, civic life (­contra Liebeschuetz 1992). In the late Empire, the local cursus honorum formed the civil ­stepping-​­stones from which to access a position in the imperial bureaucracy (­Curchin 2014). Most municipal duties fell on the curiales (­the old decuriones), the members of the town council who kept cities running with their liturgies and ex officio payments. The duty towards local councils was closely regulated, with imperial legislation punishing those curiales who moved to another city without paying their dues (­cf. CTh 12.1.9 and 12.1.12). But beyond the elite, enfranchised urban populations were still envisaged as part of the civic body, for technically, at least, the city was ruled by the consilium primatum municipumque, the ‘­decision of the notables and town dwellers’ (­CTh 12.1.4). This situation continued into the early Middle Ages, as is perhaps best exemplified by Ostrogothic Italy, where the degree of rupture with the Roman imperial past was less evident than elsewhere in the West. Cassiodorus refers recurrently to civic lan­ allace-​­Hadrill 2022). His letters appeal to the guage in his letters (­Cosentino 2018; W citizens’ love for their hometown (­e.g., Var. 1.21.1: amor patriae), to their local duty (­3.10, 7.44), and even to civic charity (­3.49: caritas civica), but his ­sixth-​­century view is perhaps best encompassed in the conclusion of one of his letters (­9.2): ‘­to every citizen, their [own] city is the state (­unicuique civi urbs sua res publica est)’. These letters were addressed to the members of the town councils, who are described as the primarii civitatis, ordo, maiores, seniores or senatores, although they are usually referred to in the modern literature as the curiales; the backbone of municipal government. There is, in fact, plenty of evidence for urban administration elsewhere in the West. Municipal magistrates appear in Visigothic legislation (­Curchin 2018; Fernández 2020); they are not only prominent in Salvian (­­Wallace-​­Hadrill 2019) but also present in Gaul into the eighth century (­Barbier 2014). Local government should be seen behind the maintenance and regulation of municipal infrastructure, like water supplies (­Marano 2015; Martínez Jiménez 2019), road and drainage systems (­Ruiz Bueno 2018), and civic centres (­Esmonde Cleary 2013: 100–123; Heijmans 2018). Even the dismantling or transformation of spectacle buildings must have happened under some degree of supervision (­Underwood 2019: 149, ­181–​­194). Local councils might have also been involved in the construction of palatia and other late antique administrative buildings that substituted the old basilicas, like those of Mérida, Barcelona, or perhaps Wroxeter, where a new timber building with a possible public function was built on the forum (­Crabtree 2018: ­20–​­36; Fafinski 2021; Martínez Jiménez et al. 2018: ­170–​­173). 680

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

The devotion of urban elites towards their city is an example of community commitment that underlines the deep connection between townscapes and their inhabitants (­Lalli 1992). These municipal leaders might have invested their time and resources out of amor patriae or caritas civica, as Cassiodorus suggests, but we have to remember that the citizen body was their power base. Traditional magistracies might have disappeared (­substituted by c­ entrally-​­appointed figures like the count), but local citizens still played a role in nominating, electing, and approving officers. Late Roman civic positions like the defensor civitatis, the adsertor pacis, the numerarius (­LV 12.1.2), and even counts (­comites) were in many cases dependent on popular support in this period. This sometimes resulted in clashes between factions, as portrayed in colourful detail by Gregory of Tours (­Hist. 5.48, 8.58, 8.18). In many cases, local citizenship and a local cursus honorum were a prerequisite for these higher offices (­Fernández 2020). The same could be said about episcopal elections. The ancient church fathers had emphasized that a new bishop should have the consensus (­agreement) of the community, meaning the clergy of the vacant see and its citizens. This norm continued to be upheld in early medieval church councils.6 Even if the ­post-​­Roman centuries did not witness the same level of private munificence and elite display (­like statue dedications) as before, this does not mean that cities did not form active political communities, as we have seen. Furthermore, local citizenships were not only a way of defining urban communities by their own right, but they also served to represent the community against the central administration. Even in ­second-​­ranking cities without a clear display of late antique civic architecture, citizenships existed as the basis for town councils, which acted as intermediaries between the city and the monarchy, and it is through this interaction with the central administration that local citizenships were validated. ­ ft-​­cited example of direct inCassiodorus’ administrative correspondence is an o teraction between the royal, central government and the local, municipal powers. But this was the standard throughout the West. In Gaul and Spain, we see cities sending emissaries (­usually bishops) to the court to demand justice or claim privileges like tax exemptions (­Greg. Tur. Hist. 5.28, 9.30; Var. 3.40, 42, 4.20; Toledo XIII, can. 3). ­Post-​ ­ oman kings also demanded oaths of allegiance from cities and offered levies (­citizen R militias) to the royal armies (­Greg. Tur. Hist. 2.37, 4.30; Jul. Tol. Hist. Wamb. 8). It is commonly accepted in the literature that cities were key to the functioning of the successor kingdoms. This implies, on the one hand, that municipal governments collaborated with the royal administration, and on the other hand, that kings acknowledged civitates as urban communities. In fact, in the Visigothic kingdom, the monarchy was responsible for promoting secondary towns to city status and for the foundation of cities ex novo in those areas where there were no ­pre-​­existing urban communities (­Martínez Jiménez et al. 2018: ­173–​­178). Urban populations in the ­post-​­Roman centuries used local citizenships to link themselves to their past and to validate their position as a civic community. Citizenship was a way of marking belonging and distinguishing alterity. Powerful and salient though such local civic affiliations could be, they were not exclusive. Early medieval identity, as already said, was ­multi-​­layered, and so by extension was early medieval citizenship. Many of the local citizens discussed in this section would in a legal context have identified as Romans. In fact, even their membership of an urban community was open to multiple interpretations. For Christians, their true patria was said not to be on earth but beyond. They should aim to be citizens of the City of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. 681

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

This Christian interaction with the language of citizenship, and its paradoxical implications, will be the focus of the next section.

Christian definitions of citizenship Throughout the ­post-​­Roman West, Christian authorities turned to the language of citizenship to address and shape their communities (­Rose 2021a and in this volume). The Roman world had generated a rich Latin discourse on citizenship which early medieval Christians had no trouble appropriating, ­re-​­purposing, and reshaping. By 500 CE, this was no longer uncharted territory, of course. Medieval authors could draw inspiration and guidance from an extensive patristic legacy, most importantly the Latin translations of the Bible. Indeed, the Scriptures proved to be an authoritative resource for early medieval thinking about the city and the citizen, but also an ambivalent one, generating multiple and potentially contradictory models of Christian belonging. The biblical world is a world of cities and citizens (­Wilson 1986; Dale et al. 2012: ­361–​­379). From Genesis to Revelation, the foundational stories of Christianity tend to be set in an urban landscape. As a model for Christian thinking about citizenship, two biblical themes proved particularly influential (­­Ottewill-​­Soulsby 2022). First, the focus on the city as a locus of sin and salvation. The Bible commences with a number of iconic stories involving cities, almost all of which carry negative associations: Caïn founding the first city after his fratricide (­G enesis 4:17); the vain effort of the Tower of Babel (­G enesis 11:4); and the depravities of Sodom (­G enesis 18:24). Indeed, in the eyes of the prophets, even Jerusalem, the City of God, became a sinful city under Israel’s kings, worthy of the destruction that befell her at the hands of Babylon (­Isaiah 1:21, 64:10; Jeremiah 6:6, 19:­8 –​­15; Ezekiel 24:­6 –​­9). Yet as stressed by those same prophets, she also carried within her a unique promise of future restoration (­Isaiah 1:26, 62:­7–​­12; Jeremiah 33:­13–​­16; Ezekiel ­40–​­48). According to the Christian theology, the fulfilment of this promise was set out in Revelation, with its elaborate description of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to serve as an eternal dwelling place for the ­faithful – ​­a city perfectly proportioned in accordance with ancient urban ideals (­Revelation 3:12, 21:­ 2–​­27; Haverfield 1913: 55). A second and related theme was the Bible’s subversive approach to belonging, particularly the suggestion that to become a citizen of the Heavenly Jerusalem one had to be prepared to live as a stranger on earth. The roots of this idea went back to ancient Israelites’ frequent displacements in the Old Testament (­G enesis 12:10, 15:13, 23:­3 –​­4; Exodus 22:21, 23:9), but the suggestion was cultivated to a fuller extent in the New Testament epistles. In 1 Peter, the apostle famously addresses his dispersed Christian audience as ‘­foreign visitors and resident aliens’ (­1 Peter 2:11: advenas et peregrinos), implying that, on some fundamental level, being a Christian meant being an outsider (­Dunning 2009: 12). At the same time, as the apostle Paul suggested in another paradigmatic phrase, embracing Christ brought access to a new and infinitely more meaningful civic identity: ‘­Now therefore you are no more guests and foreign visitors: but you are citizens with the saints and members of God’s household’ (­Ephesians 2:­18–​­19: ergo iam non estis hospites et advenae sed estis cives sanctorum et domestici Dei). The scriptural ideal of alien citizenship made for a ‘­marvellous paradox’, yet its practical implications for Christian society were far from straightforward (­Greer 1986: 39). Nor was it a paradox that patristic authorities like Augustine were necessarily keen on 682

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

resolving, preferring instead to develop a complex theory of dual belonging (­Vanderjagt 2013). Evidently, the principal loyalty of the Christian was to a world to come: the Heavenly Jerusalem, the civitas caelestis, the patria superna. This sense of belonging to the city beyond is clearly visible also in the development of funerary rites and eulogies, which from Venantius Fortunatus (­Carm. 4.7, 4.27, 7.12.50) to Bede (­Hist. Eccl. 1.26, 4.23) celebrate the civitas caelestis. But allegiance towards the City of God did not absolve the Christian from earthly duties and obligations. ‘­Without a road the traveller cannot reach the fatherland’, Caesarius of Arles assured his episcopal congregation in ­sixth-​­century Gaul (­Sermo 190.3: sine via redire ad patriam non poterat peregrinus). For Caesarius, travelling the road not just meant keeping to the correct faith and abstaining from sin; it also involved public charity and actively partaking in the urban liturgy. In other words, reaching the heavenly homeland required civic participation on earth (­Rose 2021b). Caesarius implicitly calls our attention to another paradoxical feature of the Christian ideal of alien citizenship: its ambivalent relationship to other ‘­earthly’ forms of community. Christianity had universal aspirations that transgressed political and territorial boundaries. Membership of the City of God was defined not by birth or law, as with Roman citizenship, but by baptism, virtue and, depending on one’s theological leanings, divine election. ‘­The heavenly city’, as Augustine put it, ‘­calls forth citizens from all peoples and assembles a society of strangers from all languages, with little care for differences in customs, laws and institutions’ (­De civ. D. 19.17: haec ergo caelestis civitas…ex omnibus gentibus cives evocat atque in omnibus linguis peregrinam colligit societatem, non curans quidquid in moribus legibus institutisque diversum est). Yet in practice, Christian civic ideals tended to be asserted and acted out in the context of specific earthly communities. Far from standing in opposition to Roman or local civic affiliations, therefore, Christian models of citizenship came to exist alongside them and even to be mapped onto them. We have seen already how from the fourth century onwards, Christian emperors started experimenting with making Christian orthodoxy a precondition for exercising full legal rights, working towards a polity in which a Roman citizen was, by definition, a Christian. We see something similar happening in the late antique and early medieval city, where bishops like Caesarius sought to remodel the civic community and its constitutive practices along Christian lines. Building projects, f­ood-​­donations, funerals, festivals, elections for office, the ransoming of citizens from captivity, they all continued into the Middle Ages. But such ‘­urban dramas’ increasingly revolved around Christ, the bishop, and the saints (­Loseby 1996: ­64–​­67; with Rapp 2014 on the ­East-​­Roman world). A few more words need to be said here about the saints, for they proved in many ways the perfect embodiment of the Christian civic ideal, with all its inherent tensions and paradoxes (­Brown 2013: 109; Rose, this volume). Take the hagiographical corpus surrounding the enigmatic saint Severinus, who was active in late ­fi fth-​­century ­Noricum – ​­modern central Austria and northern ­Slovenia (Figure 47.1) – ​­right when it transformed from a Roman province into barbarian territory. As recalled by his hagiographer Eugippius, Severinus was notoriously evasive about his own social standing and background. When a friendly priest had finally plucked up the courage to ask the saint where he was from, Severinus had first responded with a very Roman ­joke – ​­do you think I am a runaway slave? – only ​­ to follow up with a stern Augustinian reprimand: earthly ties meant little to a servant of God; his sole focus should be on good works and, divine grace permitting, ‘­to be enrolled as a citizen of the heavenly fatherland’ (­Eugip. E­p. 9.20: supernae patriae civis adscribi). Understandably, no one 683

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

dared ask Severinus about his terrena patria thereafter. Yet despite the sentiments of its protagonist, the Vita Severini is a text deeply concerned with earthly citizenship, to the extent that it can be read almost as a blueprint for how to act as a civic community in a rapidly ­de-​­Romanizing world (­s ee, e.g., Wood 2001; Diesenberger 2001; ­Ward-​­Perkins 2005: ­17–​­20). The saint’s efforts were almost exclusively centred on Noricum’s towns and cities (­oppida, civitates), whose citizens (­cives, Romani) he assisted against barbarian raids, natural disasters, and theological fallacy. Again and again, the fate of the cives is shown to have depended on how well they followed the saint’s instructions to perform a list of public duties. Most of these duties were of the type invoked also by the bishops of ­A rles  – ​­charity, ­poor-​­relief, paying tithes, ransoming captives, communal fasting, and ­praying – ​­but they could extend beyond explicitly Christian activities. In one notable episode, the saint instructed the citizens of Lauriacum to collectively man the city walls at night, thereby miraculously scaring off the barbarian force lying in hiding in the vicinity (­Eugip. VS c. 30). Even if holy men like Severinus preferred themselves to live as strangers on earth, they inspired civic behaviour, in person and through the ‘­p ersuasive literature’ (­K reiner 2014: 2) that developed around them. The late antique and early medieval city constituted a crucial site for the development of Christian civic ideals. Yet it should be underlined that such ideals did not necessarily require an urban landscape. By way of conclusion, let us turn to s­ ub-​­Roman Britain, arguably the most ­de-​­urbanized of the former territories of the Empire (Fafinski 2021), which nonetheless gave rise to striking examples of Christian civic discourse. There is the ­well-​­known letter of admonition that St Patrick wrote to the ­Romano-​­British warlord Coroticus and his men sometime in the fifth century (­Thompson 1980). Though Christians themselves, they had dared to kill some Christian captives and sell others as slaves to the pagan Scots and Picts. For Patrick, this constituted a profound betrayal ­ oral – ​­which he encapsulated of all sorts of communal t­ ies – ​­political, religious, and m using the language of citizenship: ‘­on account of their evil deeds, I do not say “­to my ­fellow-​­citizens”, nor “to the ­fellow-​­citizens of the Roman saints”, but “­to the ­fellow-​ ­citizens of daemons”’ (­Epistola ad Corotici, c. 10: non dico civibus meis neque civibus sanctorum Romanorum sed civibus daemoniorum ob mala opera ipsorum; see Snyder 1998: ­77–​­78; ­Charles-​­Edwards 2012: 227). We encounter still more elaborate use of civic rhetoric in the work of Gildas. Writing in the early sixth century in the wake of the continental migrations to Britain, Gildas crafted a ­multi-​­layered ­invective – ​­part historical narrative, part letter of exhortation, part biblical ­florilegium – ​­in which he hectored Britain’s moral failings. Rather than frame the Britons in ethnic terms, he consistently described them as citizens (­cives) of a shared homeland ( ­patria) (­Flierman and Welton 2021; Turner 2009). Inspired by the scenes of urban destruction found in the Old Testament, he framed this patria as a land of once splendid cities, which had been reduced to ruin due to their citizens’ vice. His hopes for the future were similarly scriptural. If the Britons and their leaders would return to virtue, that is, if they would ­re-​­embrace military valour, Christian charity, and loyalty to each other and to God, they could avoid further disaster and save the patria. God willing, it might make them citizens of Heavenly Jerusalem (­Gildas, c. 110: deus … municipes faciat … civitatis Hierusalem caelistis). Gildas stands as a final example to the potency of civic rhetoric in the early Medieval West and the ease with which Christian authorities harnessed such rhetoric for their own ends. From southern Gaul and Italy to Pannonia and Britain, Christian bishops, 684

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West

preachers, and historians came to redefine what it meant to be a citizen from a biblical and Christian perspective. The resulting models of citizenship could be made to stand in opposition to other political and civic loyalties or they could be mapped onto them, reconceptualizing the city or the polity along new religious lines. Regardless, such Christian rhetoric came to have a profound, and by no means exclusively spiritual, impact on the communities of the late Roman and p ­ ost-​­Roman world. The Christian might have his true homeland in the hereafter with the angels and the saints, but reaching this homeland required an earthly civic performance, which in breadth and scope, if not in form, could be remarkably similar to the demands placed on the ancient citizen.

Conclusions Early medieval approaches to citizenship and civic language were profoundly shaped by late Roman civic traditions. There had existed many forms of citizenship in the Roman world, many of which continued into the early Middle Ages. But they did not remain unaltered. This is exemplified by the diverging trajectories of Roman citizenship in the early Medieval West. Their shared point of departure was the late Roman civic system. Without the presence of a Roman state to promote, define, and uphold a uniform understanding of what it meant to be a Roman citizen, however, legislators across the West were free to develop their own legal understanding of Roman citizenship and its associated rights and duties. By the seventh century, Roman citizenship could thus simultaneously denote being a free subject of the Visigothic kings and being a ­second-​­rate inhabitant of northern Gaul. In truth, there were as many forms of Roman citizenship in the early Medieval West as there were successor polities. The early medieval city, meanwhile, constituted another fertile ground for claims of civic identity and belonging. And here, too, citizenship could entail different and potentially competing things. Being a citizen of a city still signified local civic values and municipal responsibilities. But such loyalty to one’s city was complicated by other allegiances: just as Roman citizenship had been an indicator ­ ost-​­Roman urban communities carried financial and of belonging to a Roman state, p military obligations towards the new barbarian rulers. Finally, urban citizenship was increasingly influenced also by Christian ideals of community: being a citizen meant performing Christian rituals and duties under the supervision of bishops and saints. In fact, while it was in cities that Christianity’s impact on civic ideals was most concrete, this impact could extend beyond urban contexts. Framing Christians as cives whose principal patria was the Heavenly Jerusalem was a rhetorical strategy that was employed also, and quite spectacularly so, in the more ­de-​­urbanized regions of the early medieval world. Citizenship, in short, was not a marginal phenomenon in the early Medieval West. Nor was it a mere l­eft-​­over from the Roman period, passively received and slowly allowed to peter out. ­Post-​­Roman societies found in the concept and language of citizenship a powerful resource that they engaged with actively, on their own terms and for their own specific needs. There was continuity in such engagements, certainly, as well as profound change and even breakdown. But even in the most ­de-​­Romanized of the successor kingdoms, the citizen remained a recognizable and meaningful category, which could convey diverse and sometimes contradictory claims of belonging. 685

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman

Abbreviations AE = L’Année épigraphique Bede Hist. Eccl. = Bede, Historia ecclesiastica Caes. Arel. Sermo = Caesarius of Arles, Sermones CTh = Codex Theodosianus Epistola ad Corotici = Patrick, Epistola ad Corotici milites Eugip. Ep. = Eugippius, Epistula ad Paschasium Eugip. VS = Eugippius, Vita Severini Form. Arv. = Formulae Arvernenses Form. Bit. = Formulae Bituricenses Form. Tur. = Formulae Turonenses Form. Visig. = Formulae Visigothicae Gildas = Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae Greg. Tur. Hist. = Gregory of Tours, Histories Hydat. = Hydatius, Chronica subita ICERV = J. Vives (­1963). Inscripciones Cristianas de la España Romana y Visigoda (­Barcelona) Isid. Hisp. Etym. = Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae John Bicl. Chron. = John of Biclar, Chronica Jul. Tol. Hist. Wamb. = Julian of Toledo, Historia Wambae regis LC = Liber Constitutionum sive Lex Gundobada LR = Lex Ripuaria LRB = Lex Romana Burgundionum LV = Lex Visigothorum MGH Conc = Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Concilia RICG = H. Marrou, et  al. (­­1975–​­). Recueil des Inscriptions Chrétiennes de la Gaule antérieures à la Renaissance carolingienne (­Paris) Salv. Mass. Ad eccl. = Salvian of Marseilles, Ad ecclesiam Var. = Cassiodorius, Variae Ven. Fort., Carm. = Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina VPE = Vitae Sanctorum Patrum Emeritensium

Notes 1 See Brélaz and Rose (­2021); Flierman and Welton 2021; ­Ottewill-​­Soulsby and Martínez Jiménez (­2020); ­Wallace-​­Hadrill (­2020); Welton (­2020). 2 Overall discussed in ­Garnsey (2004), Lo Nero (2001), Mathisen (2006), Wallace-Hadrill (2020). 3 Cf. other ­non-​­veteran Barbarians living within the Empire using Roman law (­Dolganov 2019). 4 For specific examples, LR c. 64 [61]; LRB 3; LV 12.2.­13–​­14; Form. Visig ­2 –​­6; Form. Arv. c. ­3 –​­4; Form. Bit. c. 9; Form. Tur. c. 12. 5 Gallic councils compiled in Maasen (­1883); Hispanic councils compiled in Martínez Díez and Rodríguez (­­1966–​­2002). 6 Toledo IV [633], 19; Orleans IV [538], 3; Orleans V [549], 2; Paris [556], 8, etc.; cf. Castellanos (­2003) and Loftus (­2011).

Bibliography Adams, A. (­2009) ‘­Paul the Roman citizen: Roman citizenship in the ancient world and its importance for understanding Acts 22:­22–​­29’, in S.E. Porter (­ed.) Paul: Jew, Greek, and Roman (­Leiden) ­309–​­326

686

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West Alvarado Planas, J. (­2011) ‘­A modo de conclusiones: el Liber Iudiciorum y la aplicación del Derecho en los siglos VI a XI’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez ­41–​­2, ­109–​­127 Amory, P. (­1993) ‘­The meaning and purpose of ethnic terminology in the Burgundian laws’, Early Medieval Europe 2.1, ­1–​­28 ——— ​­(­1997) People and identity in Ostrogothic Italy, ­4 89–​­554 (­Cambridge) Ando, C. (­2010) ‘­Citizenship, Roman’ in M. Gagarin (­ed.) The encyclopedia of ancient Greece and Rome (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­Introduction. Sovereignty, territoriality and universalism in the aftermath of Caracalla’ in C. Ando (­ed.) Citizenship and Empire in Europe, ­2 00–​­1900: the Antonine Constitution after 1800 years (­Stuttgart) ­7–​­27 Andrades Rivas, E. (­2017) ‘­La transformación de la ciudadanía romana en el fin del Imperio’, Revista de Estudios ­Histórico-​­Jurídicos 39, ­61–​­83 Atkins, J.W. (­2018) Roman political thought (­Cambridge) Barbier, J. (­2014) Archives oubliées du haut moyen âge: les gesta municipalia en Gaule franque (­­V Ie – ​­IXe siècle) (­Paris) Besson, A. (­2017) ‘­Fifty years before the Antonine Constitution: access to Roman citizenship and exclusive rights’, in L. Cecchet and A. Busetto (­eds) Citizens in the ­G raeco-​­Roman world: aspects of citizenship from the archaic period to AD 212 (­Leiden) ­199–​­220 ——— ​­(­2020) Constitutio Antoniniana: l’universalisation de la citoyenneté romaine au 3e siècle (­Basel) Bjornlie, M.S. (­2016) ‘­Governmental administration’, in J. Arnold, M.S. Bjornlie, and K. Sessa (­eds) A companion to Ostrogothic Italy (­Leiden) ­47–​­72 ­Blanco-​­Pérez, A. (­2020) ‘­Salvo iure gentium: Roman citizenship and civic life before and after the Constitutio Antoniniana’, ­Al-​­Masāq 32.1, ­4 –​­17 Bond, S. (­2014) ‘­A ltering infamy: status, violence, and civic exclusion in Late Antiquity’, ClAnt 33, ­1–​­30 Bothe, L. (­2018) ‘­From subordination to integration: Romans in Frankish law’ in Gantner et al. (­2018) ­345–​­369 Brélaz, C. and E. Rose (­eds) (­2021) Civic identity and civic participation in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (­Turnhout) Brown, P. (­2013) The rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. 2­ 00–​­1000, 2nd edn (­Malden, MA) Buchberger, E. (­2017) Shifting ethnic identities in Gaul and Spain, ­500–​­700 (­A msterdam) Castellanos, S. (­2003) ‘­The significance of social unanimity in a Visigothic hagiography: keys to an ideological screen’, JECS 11.3, ­387–​­419 Cellurale, M. (­2011) ‘­Romani y Gothi en Italia; la comunion de derecho en la Republica Unida de Justiniano’, Rev. Derecho Privado 21, ­21–​­40 ­Charles-​­Edwards, T. (­2012) Wales and the Britons (­Oxford) Chrysos, E. (­2003) ‘­The Empire, the gentes and the regna’, in H.-​­W. Goetz, J. Jarnut and W. Pohl (­eds) Regna and gentes: the relationship between late antique and early medieval peoples and kingdoms in the transformation of the Roman world (­Leiden) ­13–​­20 Corbier, M. (­2005) ‘­Coinage and taxation: the state’s point of view, A.D. ­193–​­337’ in A. Bowman, A. Cameron, and P. Garnsey (­eds) The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 12 (­Cambridge) ­327–​­392 Corcoran, S. (­2011) ‘“­Softly and suddenly vanished away”: the Junian Latins from Caracalla to the Carolingians’ in K. Muscheler (­ed.) Römische J­ urisprudenz -​­Dogmatik, Überlieferung, Rezeption: Festschrift für Detlef Liebs zum 75. Geburtstag (­Berlin) ­129–​­152 Cosentino, S. (­2018) ‘­Istituzioni curiali e amministrazione della città nell’Italia ostrogota e bizantina’, AntTard 26, ­241–​­254 Crabtree, P. (­2018) Early Medieval Britain: the rebirth of towns in the p­ ost-​­Roman West (­Cambridge) Curchin, L. (­2014) ‘­The role of civic leaders in late antique Hispania’, SHHA 32, ­281–​­304 ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Curials and local government in Visigothic Hispania’ AntTard 26, ­225–​­240 Dale, A. et  al. (­2012) Encyclopedia of the Bible and its reception, vol. 5: ­Charisma  – ​­Czaczkes (­Berlin) Diesenberger, M. (­2001) ‘­Topographie und Gemeinschaft in der Vita Severini’, in W. Pohl and M. Diesenberger (­eds) Eugippius und Severin. Der Autor, der Text und der Heilige (­Vienna) ­77–​­97 Dolganov, A. (­2019) ‘­Reichsrecht and Volksrecht in theory and tractice: Roman justice in the province of Egypt (­P. Oxy. II 237, P. Oxy. IV 706, SB XII 10929)’ Tyche 34, ­27–​­60

687

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman Dunning, B. (­2009) Aliens and sojourners: self as other in Early Christianity (­Philadelphia) Escribano Paño, M.V. (­2009) ‘­The social exclusion of heretics in Codex Theodosianus XVI’, in J.-​­J. Aubert and P. Blanchard (­eds) Droit, religion et société dans le Code Théodosien (­Geneva) ­39–​­66 ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Superstitiosa coniuratio soluatur: Jovinian’s exile in Cod. Thds. 16.5,53 (­398)’, in D. Rohmann, J. Ulrich, and M. Vallejo (­eds) Mobility and exile at the end of antiquity (­Berlin) ­69–​­90 Esders, S. (­2018) ‘­Roman law as an identity marker in ­post-​­Roman Gaul (­­5th–​­9th centuries)’, in Gantner et al. (­2018) ­325–​­344 Esmonde Cleary, S. (­2013) The Roman West, AD ­2 00–​­500: an archaeological study (­Cambridge) Faber, E. (­2013) ‘­How foreign soldiers became more important than Roman citizens: the development of difference in status between Julius Caesar and Theodosius I’, in D. Álvarez, R. Sanz, and D. Hernández (­eds) El espejismo del bárbaro. Ciudadanos y extranjeros al final de la Antigüedad (­Castellón) ­115–​­130 Fafinski, M. (2021) Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: the adaptations of the past in text and stone (Amsterdam) Farney, G. (­2007) Ethnic identity and aristocratic competition in Republican Rome (­Cambridge) Fernández, D. (­2020) ‘­Transformaciones institucionales y liderazgo cívico en la Hispania ­post-​ ­imperial’, in A. Carneiro, N. Christie and P. Diarte (­eds) Urban transformations in the late antique West: materials, agents, and models (­Coimbra) ­259–​­279 Flierman, R. and E. Rose, (­2020) ‘­Banished from the company of the Good: Christians and aliens in ­fi fth-​­c entury Rome’ ­Al-​­Masāq 32.1, ­64–​­86 Flierman, R. and M. Welton (­2021) ‘­De Excidio Patriae. Civic discourse in Gildas’ Britain’ EME 29.2, 137–160 Gantner, C., C. Grifoni, W. Pohl and M. Pollheimer (­eds) (­2018) Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval regions and identities (­Berlin) Gardner, J. (­1993) Being a Roman citizen (­London) Garnsey, P. (­1970) Social status and legal privilege in the Roman Empire (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2004) ‘­Roman citizenship and Roman law in the late Empire’, in S. Swain and M. Edwards (­eds) Approaching Late Antiquity: the transformation from early to late Empire (­Oxford) ­133–​­155 Girdvainyte, L. (­2014) Roman law, Roman citizenship, Roman identity? Interrelation between the three in the late Republic and the early Empire, MA diss. Leiden (­unpublished) Greatrex, G. (­2000) ‘­Roman identity in the sixth century’, in S. Mitchell and G. Greatrex (­eds) Ethnicity and culture in Late Antiquity (­Swansea) ­267–​­92 Greer, R. (­1986) ‘­A lien citizens: a marvellous paradox’, in P. Hawkins (­ed.) Civitas: religious interpretations of the city (­Atlanta) ­39–​­56 Grey, C. (­2011) ‘­Slavery in the late Roman world’, in K. Bradley and P. Cartledge (­eds) The Cambridge world history of slavery, vol. 1 (­Cambridge) ­482–​­509 Halsall, G. (­2003) Warfare and society in the barbarian West ­450–​­90 (­London) ——— ​­(­2007) Barbarian migrations and the Roman West, ­376–​­568 (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Transformations of Romanness: the North Gallic case’, in Gantner et al. (­2018) ­41–​­58 Harper, K. (­2011) Slavery in the late Roman world, AD ­275–​­425 (­Cambridge) ——— ​­(­2013) From shame to sin: the Christian transformation of sexual morality in Late Antiquity (­Cambridge, MA) Haverfield, F. (­1913) Ancient town planning (­Oxford) Heijmans, M. (­2018) ‘­L’entretien des centres civiques dans les provinces occidentales de l’Empire (­­IVe-​­VIIe siècles)’ AntTard 26, ­73–​­84 Humfress, C. (­2008) ‘­Citizens and heretics: late Roman lawyers on Christian heresy’, in E. Iricinschi and H. Zellentin (­eds) Heresy and identity in late Antiquity (­Tübingen) ­128–​­142 ——— ​­(­2013) ‘­Thinking through legal pluralism: ‘­forum shopping’ in the later Roman Empire’, in J. Frans, J. Duindam, and J. Harries (­eds) Law and Empire: ideas, practices, actors (­Leiden) ­223–​­250 Imrie, A. (­2018) The Antonine Constitution: an edict for the Caracallan Empire, Impact of Empire 29 (­Leiden)

688

The uses of citizenship in the post-Roman West Jones, M. (­2001) ‘­The legacy of Roman law in ­post-​­Roman Britain’, in R. Mathisen (­ed.) Law, society, and authority in Late Antiquity (­Oxford) ­45–​­57 Kelly, M. (­­2016–​­2017) ‘­Recceswinth’s Liber Iudiciorum: history, narrative and meaning’ Visigothic Symposia 1, ­110–​­130 Koops, E. (­2013) ‘­Masters and freedmen: Junian Latins and the struggle for citizenship’, in G. de Kleijn and S. Benoist (­eds) Integration in Rome and in the Roman world, Impact of Empire 17 (­Leiden) ­105–​­126 Kreiner, J. (­2014) The social life of hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom (­Cambridge) Kuefler, M. (­2007) ‘­The marriage revolution in Late Antiquity: the Theodosian code and later Roman marriage law’, Journal of Family History 32.4, ­343–​­370 Lafferty, S. (­2013) Law and society in the age of Theoderic the Great: a study of the Edictum Theoderici (­Cambridge) Lalli, M. (­1992) ‘­­Urban-​­related identity: theory, measurement, and empirical findings’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 12, ­285–​­303 Lavan, M. (­2019) ‘­The foundation of Empire? The spread of Roman citizenship from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE’, in K. Berthelot and J. Price (­eds) In the crucible of Empire: the impact of Roman citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians (­Leuven) ­21–​­54 Liebeschuetz, W. (­1992) ‘­The end of the ancient city’, in J. Rich (­ed.) The city in Late Antiquity (­London) ­1– ​­49 ——— ​­(­1998) ‘­Citizen status and law in the Roman Empire and the Visigothic kingdom’, in W. Pohl and H. Reinitz (­eds) Strategies of distinction: the construction of ethnic communities (­Leiden) ­131–​­152 ——— ​­(­2015) ‘­Goths and Romans in the Leges Visigothorum’, in W. Liebeschuetz (­ed.), East and West in Late Antiquity (­Leiden) ­202–​­217 Lo Nero, C. (­2001) ‘­Christiana dignitas: new Christian criteria for citizenship in the later Roman Empire’ Medieval Encounters 7, ­146–​­164 Loftus, S. (­2011) ‘­Episcopal elections in Gaul: the normative view of the Concilia Galliae versus the narrative accounts’, in J. Leemans and S. Keough (­eds) Episcopal elections in Late Antiquity (­Berlin) ­423–​­436 Loseby, S. (­1996) ‘­A rles in Late Antiquity: “­Gallula Roma Arelas” and “­Urbs Genesii”’, in N. Christie and S. Loseby (­eds) Towns in transition: urban evolution in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (­A ldershot) ­45–​­70 Maasen, F. (­ed.) (­1883) Concilia Aevi Merovingici, MGH Conc 1 (­Hannover) Marano, Y. (­2015) ‘“­Watered... with the ­life-​­giving wave”: aqueducts and water management in Ostrogothic Italy’, in P. Erdkamp, K. Verboven, and A. Zuiderhoek (­eds) Ownership and exploitation of Land and natural resources in the Roman World (­Oxford) ­150–​­169 Martínez Díez, G. and F. Rodríguez (­eds) (­­1966–​­2002) La colección canónica hispana, 6 vols. (­Madrid) Martínez Jiménez, J. (­2019) Aqueducts and urbanism in ­Post-​­Roman Hispania (­Piscataway, NJ) ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­Urban identity and citizenship between the fifth and seventh centuries’, ­Al-​­Masāq 32.1, ­87–​­108 Martínez Jiménez, J., Sastre de Diego, I., and ­Tejerizo-​­García, C. (­2018) The Iberian Peninsula ­3 00–​­850: an archaeological perspective (­A msterdam) Maskarinec, M. (­2013) ‘­W ho were the Romans? Shifting scripts of Romanness in early medieval Italy’, in W. Pohl and G. Heydemann (­eds) ­Post-​­Roman transitions: Christian and barbarian identities in the early Medieval West (­Turnhout) ­297–​­364 Mathisen, R. (­2006) ‘­Peregrini, barbari, and cives romani: concepts of citizenship and the legal Identity of barbarians in the later Roman Empire’, AHR 111, ­1011–​­1040 ——— ​­(­2014) ‘­T he citizenship and legal status of Jews in Roman law during Late Antiquity (­ca. ­300–​­540 CE)’ in J. Tolan (­ed.) Jews in early Christian Law: Byzantium and the Latin West, ­6th–​­11th centuries (­Turnhout) ­35–​­53 Merten, H. (­2018) Die frühchristlichen Inschriften aus St. Maximin bei Trier (­Trier) Nicolet, C. (­1980) The world of the citizen in Republican Rome (­London) Noethlichs, K.L. (­2006) ‘­Revolution from the top? Orthodoxy and the persecution of heretics in imperial legislation from Constantine to Justinian’, in C. Ando and J. Rüpke (­eds) Religion and law in classical and Christian Rome (­Stuttgart) ­115–​­25

689

Javier Martínez Jiménez and Robert Flierman ­Ottewill-​­Soulsby, S. (2022) ‘­Hunting diligently through the volumes of the ancients: Frechulf of Lisieux on the first city and the end of innocence’, in J. Martínez Jiménez and S. O ­ ttewill-​ ­Soulsby (­eds) Remembering and forgetting the ancient city (Oxford) 225–246 ­Ottewill-​­Soulsby, S. and Martínez Jiménez, J. (­2020) ‘­Cities and citizenship after Rome: introduction’, ­Al-​­Masāq 32.1, ­1–​­3 Patzold, S. (­2014) ‘­Die Bischöfe im Gallien der Transformationszeit. Eine sozial homogene Gruppe von Amtsträgern?’, in S. Brather, H.U. Nuber, H. Steuer, and T. Zotz (­eds) Antike im Mittelalter. Fortleben, Nachwirken, Wahrnehmung (­Ostfildern) ­179–​­193 Pohl, W. (­2013) ‘­­Introduction – ​­Strategies of identification: a methodological profile’, in W. Pohl and G. Heydemann (­eds) Strategies of Identification: ethnicity and religion in early Medieval Europe (­Turnhout) ­1–​­64 ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Introduction: early medieval ­Romanness – ​­a multiple identity’, in Gantner et al. (­2018) ­3 –​­40 Rapp, C. (­2014) ‘­City and citizenship as Christian concepts of community in Late Antiquity’, in C. Rapp and H. Drake (­eds) The city in the classical and p­ ost-​­classical world: changing contexts of power and identity (­New York) ­153–​­166 Reimitz, H. (­2015) History, Frankish identity, and the framing of Western ethnicity, ­550–​­850 (­Cambridge) Reimitz, H. and Esders, S. (­2021) ‘­Legalizing ethnicity: the remaking of citizenship in ­post-​ ­Roman Gaul (­­6th–​­7th centuries)’, in Brélaz and Rose (2021) 295–332 Rio, A. (­2009) Legal practice and the written word in the early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae, c.­500–​­1000 (­Cambridge) Rose, E. (2021a) ‘­Citizenship discourses in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages’, FMS 55, 1–21 ‘­Reconfiguring civic identity and civic participation in a Christianizing world: ——— (2021b) ​­ the case of ­sixth-​­century Arles’ in Brélaz and Rose (2021) 271–294 Ruiz Bueno, M. (­2018) ‘­La desarticulación del callejero hispanorromano: cambios en la infraestructura viaria y de saneamiento entre los siglos II y VII d. C.’, AEA 91, ­143–​­162 ­Sherwin-​­W hite, A.N. (­1973) The Roman citizenship, 2nd edn (­Oxford) Snyder, C. (­1998) An age of tyrants: Britain and the Britons, A.D. ­4 00– ​­6 00 (­Stroud) Thompson, E.A. (­1980) ‘­St. Patrick and Coroticus’ JThS, n.s. 31.1, ­11–​­27 Turner, P. (­2009) ‘­Identity in Gildas’ De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 58, ­29–​­48 Underwood, D. (­2019) (­Re)­using ruins (­Leiden) Vanderjagt, A. (­2013) ‘­Political thought’, in K. Pollmann and W. Otten (­eds) The Oxford guide to the historical reception of Augustine (­Oxford) ­1561–​­1569 ­Wallace-​­Hadrill, A. (­2019) ‘­Salvian of Marseilles and the end of the ancient city’, in J. Andreu and A. Blanco (­eds) Signs of weakness and crisis in the western cities of the Roman Empire (­c . ­II-​­III AD) (­Stuttgart) ­223–​­232 ——— ​­(­2020) ‘­Civitas Romana: the fluidity of an ideal’, ­Al-​­Masāq 32.1, ­18–​­33 ——— ​­(2022) ‘­The cities of Cassiodorus: the resilience of urban values’, in S. O ­ ttewill-​­Soulsby and J. Martínez Jiménez (­eds) Remembering and forgetting the ancient city (Oxford) 23–44 ­Ward-​­Perkins, B. (­1997) ‘­The cities’, in A. Cameron and P. Guernsey (­eds) The Cambridge ancient history, Vol. XIII: ‘­The late Empire, AD ­337–​­425’ (­Cambridge) ­371–​­410 ——— ​­(­2005) The fall of Rome and the end of civilization (­Oxford) Washburn, D. (­2012) Banishment in the later Roman Empire, ­284–​­476 CE (­London) Welton, M. (­2020) ‘­The city speaks: cities, citizens, and civic discourse in the Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages’, Traditio 75, ­1–​­37 Wilson, R. (­1986) ‘­The city in the old testament’, in P. Hawkins (­ed.) Civitas: religious interpretations of the city (­Atlanta) ­3 –​­15 Wood, I. (­2001) ‘­The monastic frontiers of the Vita Severini’, in W. Pohl and M. Diesenberger (­eds) Eugippius und Severin. Der Autor, der Text und der Heilige (­Vienna) ­41–​­51 ——— ​­(­2016) ‘­The legislation of Magistri Militum: the laws of Gundobad and Sigismund’, Clio 10, ­1–​­16

690

48 CHRISTIAN RECONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF CITIZENSHIP AND FREEDOM IN THE LATIN WEST Els Rose Introduction The impact of Christianity on citizenship in the late Roman and ­post-​­Roman world cannot easily be overestimated.1 Notions of citizenship and civic participation underwent fundamental changes in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The concept of citizenship itself had lost much of its legal and political relevance since the early ­third-​ ­c entury Constitutio Antoniniana had granted citizenship to ‘­nearly all ­free-​­born residents’ (­A ndo 2016: 7; cf. Besson in this volume). Citizenship and the locus where civic rights and duties were enjoyed became subject to new definitions (­Besson 2020; Brélaz 2021). Examples of such new definitions are found in late Roman imperial legislation codified in the first half of the fifth century CE, in which process the imprint of Christianity is clearly visible: the laws collected in Book XVI of the Theodosian code introduced baptism and loyalty to Nicaean orthodoxy as prerogatives for the full enjoyment of Roman citizenship.2 The present chapter examines the presence of Latin civic vocabulary in narrative and performative texts in which saints figure as role models for the Christian faithful. The r­ e-​­use of this ancient vocabulary, inherited from Roman and biblical discourses, will show a repeated process of Christian reconceptualizations of the community as civitas, and of the members of that ­community – ​­with their privileges and ­obligations –​ ­as cives. The chapter will, by its choice of sources, highlight the early Medieval West, which is rarely taken into account in the history of citizenship (­Rose 2021). The scholarly discussion tends to summarize Christianity’s impact on ­post-​­classical citizenship by concentrating on the discourses of philosophy and theology and their two main protagonists, Augustine of Hippo (­­354–​­430) and Thomas Aquinas (­­1225–​­1274) (­Arthur 2008), which leaves the period of the early Middle Ages undiscussed. Moreover, the chapter will focus not on theoretical treatises but on the performative sources of Christian cultic worship, particularly hagiography and liturgical prayers. Just as the material city changed fundamentally in its geographical layout and location through the lasting presence of a saint’s bodily remains,3 the narrative and cultic texts commemorating a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-57

691

Els Rose

saint’s life show a longue durée process in which new generations added new layers to various ­re-​­imaginations of the city, citizens, and citizenship. The focus in this chapter will be first (­Section “­Miracles in the city gate”) on Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Martin, one of the earliest Latin Lives of a ­saint-­​­­non-​­martyr, and in many ways the model example of Latin hagiography (­Stancliffe 1983: 6; Ristuccia 2018: 158). Martin’s performance in the city gates of Amiens and Paris, transforming outsiders into participants in the civic community, invites us to tease out the profile of this saint as a liminal persona (­Turner 1969: ­94–​­130). In the “­Performing and mediating libertas” and “­Performing libertas: the evidence in liturgical sources” sections, the focus will be on the saints’ embodiment of one particular civic virtue, namely libertas. We will take this as a case study to uncover Christian reconceptualizations of this ancient civic concept in hagiography (­Section “­Performing and mediating libertas”) and in liturgical texts in commemoration of saints (­Section “­Performing libertas: the evidence in liturgical sources”).

Miracles in the city gate The figure of the Christian saint takes a special position in the triple relation of city, citizen, and citizenship. Portrayed as living outside the city, the earliest saints whose Lives were committed to writing were told to shun the city, while the city and its obligations did not let them go (­Life of Anthony 14, 44). Clare Stancliffe’s monumental study of Sulpicius’ Life of Martin brings into focus the special position of Martin of Tours among his fellow bishops in f­ourth-​­century Gaul. A foreigner by birth, an outsider in terms of education, and an exception because of his outlook on political and ecclesiastical matters, the famous bishop of the metropolitan civitas Tours is profiled in Sulpicius’ work as an alien to the late G ­ allo-​­Roman civic elite. Stancliffe links this ‘­marginal position’ to Martin’s identification with people of low societal status, such as the beggar of Amiens (­Life III.­1–​­5) and the leper of Paris (­Life XVIII.­3 –​­5; Stancliffe 1983: 3­ 50–​­352). In the following, I propose a r­ e-​­reading of these two passages, focussing on the role of the city gate in both stories as a liminal space that separates those in the city, participating in its civic life, from those outside the city, without access to the civic community.

Clothing the naked: Life of Martin III.­1–​­5 The scene of Martin clothing the naked beggar has become the most famous part of Sulpicius’ Life. The oldest iconography of the scene, as depicted, for example, in an early ­eleventh-​­c entury Fulda Sacramentary (­c.975) (­­Figure 48.1) stresses the civic character of Martin’s exemplary act of charity by placing the saint in the city gate of Amiens (­Life III.1; Fontaine 1967: 256). Martin, depicted against a shining yellow background, is literally in the spotlight when he encounters the beggar, positioned in the porta civitatis as an outsider. In this liminal space between inside and outside, between belonging and expulsion, Martin shares his cloak with the naked man. By doing so, Martin performs one of the acts of civic benefaction, ‘­fused’ with Christian charity (­Salzman 2017: 76), that a bishop of his time was supposed to perform.4 Significantly, Martin is seen to perform this act long before he was elected bishop, even before he was baptized. The position of the celebrated ‘­charity of St Martin’ early in the saint’s life enables Sulpicius to make Martin’s election to the episcopate plausible from the start. 692

Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom

­Figure 48.1 MS Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek MSc.Lit.1, f. 170r. Image courtesy of Bamberg National Library.

Immediately after the division of the cloak, the beggar disappears from the scene. Sulpicius’ first concern is the derogatory reaction of the bystanders, scorning Martin, now ­half-​­naked himself, for his ­un-​­citizenlike appearance. Their sceptical response is overwritten by the dream vision in the next passage, where Christ appears in the same cloak that Martin shared with the beggar. Sulpicius’ focus is now entirely on the saint and the deeper meaning of his act of charity. The vision, a heavenly reward for Martin’s 693

Els Rose

charity, prefigures the saint’s investment with the episcopal ­robes – ​­a custom of which Sulpicius was critical (­Miller 2014: 16; Burton 2017: 1­ 58–​­159). According to Sulpicius, Martin qualifies best for the episcopal office by fulfilling the evangelical commandment to clothe the naked (­Matthew 25, 40) and, by doing so, restoring the beggar’s access to the civic community.

Kissing the leper: Life of Martin XVIII.­3 –​­5 The miracle story in Life XVIII.­3 –​­5 of Martin healing a leper by kissing him is commonly read as a parallel to the beggar scene in Ch. III.5 It is important to place the two scenes in the entire structure of the 27 chapters of the Life. The two scenes describing Martin’s exceeding charity, in Ch. III as a catechumen, in XVIII as a bishop, form, as in a narrative triptych, the two side panels around the central pane (­Ch. ­12–​­15) presenting Martin’s iconoclastic conversion of the pagan heartlands of his diocese (­Burton 2017: 204).6 At the city gate of Paris, bishop Martin encounters a leper, the biblical archetype of isolation from the civic and ritual community (­Carmichael 1993: 838). Sulpicius presents the intimacy of this encounter, with Martin kissing (­osculatus), blessing, and cleansing7 the outcast. At first sight, the biblical frame seems to be dominant, where Luke 17, ­11–​­19 narrates Christ’s curing ten lepers, of whom only the Samaritan returns to give thanks.8 As in Amiens, the setting in the city gate marks the leper as an outsider, an ­anti-​­citizen. After the intense encounter with Martin, the spotlight is now fully on the person cured of the horrible illness. While the beggar of Amiens immediately disappeared from view to give the stage to Martin, in this episode we follow the cleansed leper into the city of Paris, entering the ritual space where Christian citizens perform their cult. In the previous passage of the same chapter, the church was already presented as a public space (­Burton 2017: 229). This is underlined once more when the leper is seen to participate in the public ritual of the Eucharist, summarized by the technical term referring to this core Christian ritual: gratias agere, to give thanks (­Blaise 1966: 201). Through his encounter with Martin, the former outcast received access to the circle where those baptized celebrated their religious cult in the heart of the civitas (­R istuccia 2018: 180) and participated in the civic and Christian community.

Performing and mediating libertas Martin’s double act of charity forms the side panels of Sulpicius Severus’ narrative triptych depicting Martin’s Life, as we have seen. Two other scenes have a similar structural function. A bit closer to the inner panel depicting Martin’s destruction of pagan cults are two narratives in which the saint is presented as practising and mediating free speech, one performed before he was baptized and the other as a bishop. In the third episode to be discussed in this section, we will examine Martin’s approach to freedom as an antonym to slavery (­Lavan 2013: 7­ 5–​­80).

The saint as embodiment of free speech Freedom to express oneself in writing or speaking, as one of the s­ ub-​­categories of the complex Roman concept of libertas, is among the forms of civic freedom related to, 694

Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom

though never fully overlapping with, ancient citizenship.9 To speak freely in the face of rulers is also a biblical virtue that we find embodied by Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles (­Arena 2018: 651; Wood 2018). Sulpicius’ saint Martin has long been recognized as a representative of this biblical virtue of speaking up before kings and rulers (­Psalm 118/­119: 46), in his relation to the emperor (‘­the tyrant’) Julian (­Life of Martin 4.4; Burton 2017: 23, 168) and Maximus ­ ell-​­known stories (­Life of Martin XX.­1–​­7).10 Sulpicius’ Life includes two relevant and w that portray Martin’s commitment to libertas dicendi (­freedom of speech). In Ch. IV.­ 4–​­5, when Martin was still serving in the military, he himself embodied this form of freedom. Sulpicius emphasizes Martin’s courage when he decides to become a miles Christi and, therefore, refuses to carry the weapons that kill (­Fontaine 1967: 260). In Ch. XVIII.2, Martin mediates the same freedom of speech to a person possessed by an evil spirit (­Fontaine 1967: 292). Here, he does not speak up himself but enables someone else to practise this civic virtue to the benefit of the entire community. The citizens of Trier are troubled by rumours of an imminent barbarian attack upon their city. Thereupon, Martin asks a man possessed by an evil spirit to tell whether the stories are true. They are not, the man confesses in media ecclesia – ​­and upon this public confession (­Fontaine 1967: 860; Burton 2017: 229), the city is set free (­civitas liberata est). Although Fontaine treats this story as the third element in a ‘­triptych’ of exorcisms delivering three men from evil spirits,11 it is important to note that the story in XVIII.­1–​­2 does not tell whether the possessed person is liberated, only that the city is set free. Burton, therefore, reads this episode as a political narrative, where Sulpicius presents Martin as ‘­the good statesman’ (­Burton 2017: 229).

The saint providing freedom from servitude Now that we have recognized Martin as a practitioner and mediator of libertas dicendi, we will examine how this model saint furthered other forms of freedom, namely freedom from servitude. To this end, we will study Life of Martin II.5, again an episode from Martin’s life before baptism. While the acceptance of slavery was common among most early Christian theologians, ecclesiastical authorities, and Christian ascetics (­K itchen 2005: 140), Sulpicius describes Martin here as abstaining from his right, as the son of a higher military official, to own several slaves (­Fontaine 1967: 459) and contenting himself with only one servant (­Fontaine 1967: 254). Sulpicius describes Martin as treating this single servant as an equal, serving him in cleansing rituals before sharing his meal with him. This passage is most commonly read against the biblical background of John 13 where Christ, washing his disciples’ feet, inverted the roles of master and servants. Several textual elements, including lexical parallels (­Burton 2017: 156), justify this reading. Fontaine finds the hermeneutic key to the passage in the sequence of washing first and then sharing food (­Fontaine 1967: 460). Although the example that Martin aims to imitate is without doubt biblical, reading this passage only against the background of John 13 does not do full justice to the text, where no feet are washed ­ fth-​­century Paulinus of but boots.12 An early rewriting of Sulpicius’ text by the late fi Périgueux accentuates Martin’s act as liberating the slave and granting him a position that, as Paulinus emphasizes, noblemen would envy. Paulinus versified Sulpicius’ Life between 461 and 470 (­Labarre 1998: 20) at the request of bishop Perpetuus of Tours (­­461–​­491). While other rewritings of Sulpicius’ hagiography omit the episode described in VM II.5, such as Venantius Fortunatus’ 695

Els Rose

versification of the late sixth century (­Corpet 1849; Quesnel 1996), Paulinus reflects on the relationship between Martin and his servus extensively. In 11 verses, the reader’s attention is drawn to the happy ( ­felix) slave ‘­set free’ (­solutus): He barely allowed one companion to go with him, not fettered by work, but a slave only in name. O happy man, to whom such a graceful condition prepared such a yoke that noble men could vie with you for your fate in a spirit of ­competition – ​­if only they were allowed to serve. You are constrained to the harsh law of birth and now set free from that law. For the saint in ­self-​­sacrifice submits himself to you and serves you. The same dress; the shared abundance of a sober meal. He is the first to serve, so that not even the most diligent observer might recognize the slave placed before his master.13

Following Paulinus, we read this story not so much as an allusion to the pedilavium in John 13, but rather as a narrative altercation with late Roman social reality, profiling the rare master who treated his servant as an equal and took the slave’s role. What the passage has in common with John 13 is this inversion of roles. Paulinus’ reading, however, presents even more explicitly than the Gospel story an actual performance of freeing the slave, obviously born in slavery but now freed.14 Through Paulinus’ rewriting, this passage in the Life of Martin stands out as an example of late Roman hagiography as ‘­subversive’ literature (­Herrin 1987: 7; Kitchen 2005: 129), with Martin changing the ‘­social status’ (­K itchen 2005: 131) of the unnamed slave. By choosing this focus of liberation, Paulinus portrayed Martin as similar to rare Christian ascetics abstaining from the possession of slaves in Late Antiquity. Famous is the example of the ascetic woman Marcrina who liberated her household servants to share the ascetic life with her, as described by her brother, bishop Gregory of Nyssa (­Life of Macrina 7).15 Likewise, sharing the same way of dressing (­idem habitus16) and a sober meal refer to the monastic life that Martin chose to share with his former slave. ­Re-​­reading Life of Martin II.5 through contemporary interpreters sheds new light on the character of the Christian saint as a liminal persona (­Turner 1969), a figure on the threshold between civic life and its opposites. While previous scholars applying Turner’s concept mainly took the saint as the ‘­liminal figure’ (­Coleman 1987: ­205–​­225; Elliott 1987: ­168–​­180), the Life of Martin and its early rewritings raise the question of who the liminal figure is, in the end. Martin, or the man born under the law of enslavement and now freed from that law? Martin, or the kissed leper, participating in the ritual community of citizens? Martin or the naked beggar? Martin is depicted by Sulpicius as a prisoner of the military life forced on him, as himself a person ‘­deprived of freedom’ (­Fontaine 1967: ­458–​­459). Martin, ‘­betrayed’ by his own father, was ‘­imprisoned and chained by the military oaths’ (­Fontaine 1967: 254). Paulinus teases out the strenuous relation with the ­veteran-​­father, whom he depicts as a proditor, ‘­handing over’ his son, (­I.29; Labarre 2016: 134), so that Martin becomes a ‘­captive soldier’. Yet Paulinus stresses that only Martin’s body is bound, while his heart is free to resist the vices typical of the militia saeculi (­I. ­35–​­42; Labarre 2016: 136). In this pluriform change of social roles, where the captive officer liberates the slave, the full paradox of the Christian saint comes to the fore. Himself a captive, he becomes the mediator of freedom. Martin granted outsiders access to the civic community and its benefits, while he rejected the city as a dwelling place for himself both before and after he was elected bishop of Tours.17 Martin’s act of charity in Life 3, parting with the 696

Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom

proper clothing, can likewise be read as an act of giving up participation in the civic community while transforming others into members of that community. Likewise, by taking upon himself the yoke of slavery, the saint is able to liberate the slave. Thus, the salvific, ­Christ-​­like character of the saint (­Rose 2004: 1­ 27–​­128), offering to others what he himself gave up in ­self-​­sacrifice (­K itchen 2005: 147), enables those who encountered the saint to cross the threshold. As we have seen in the previous two sections, the late Roman saint Martin in the narratives of Sulpicius and Paulinus embodies civic virtues as much as he is a mediator of civic participation and liberation, to the benefit of citizens (­cives) and the community as a whole (­civitas). The next section will show that such complex use of citizenship discourse was not limited to hagiography.

Performing libertas: the evidence in liturgical sources Liturgical prayers for saints’ feasts provide another corpus to bring into focus the Christian ‘­appropriation and revalorization’ (­Burton 2017: 160) of civic vocabulary and the role of the saints in profiling the civic community in new ways. In what follows, the key word libertas forms a persuasive case study,18 traced in prayers for saints’ feasts that echo the narrative traditions studied in the previous sections. The focus will be on cathedral liturgy, where the congregation joined the clergy in the celebration of Sunday and ­feast-​­day Masses.19 A search for the key word libertas through the digital corpus of late antique and medieval Latin liturgical prayers in celebration of saints (­Moeller ­1971–​­1979; ­1980–​ 1­ 981; Moeller et al. 1992) indicates one specific category of saints as the embodiment of freedom: the apostles and a­ postle-​­like saints. In itself, this is not surprising. The liturgical cult commemorates the apostles for their missionary work, bringing the Christian message to the world (­Matthew 28, ­19–​­20). To highlight this, the composers of liturgical prayers made ample use of hagiographic traditions in which the replacement of ancient cults by the exclusive Christian religion is central. In hagiographic narratives on the individual apostles (­the ­so-​­called ‘­apocryphal Acts of the apostles’), this transition is framed in terms of ‘­liberation’: the ancient cult is invariably presented as one of dependency and oppression, while Christianity, represented by the apostle, is introduced as liberation. The object of this liberation through the saintly apostle is, crucially, not the individual soul but the civitas, the entire civic community (­Rose 2017b). As we will see in the following three examples, libertas as enacted by the apostles and ­apostle-​­like saints operates on several levels: social, particularly the inversion of the roles of master and slave; political, especially the apostle’s privilege and duty to speak up against a secular ruler; and spiritual, in the sense of liberation from sin that purifies the community and enables it to fulfil its cultic duties.

Reconceptualizing public office The earliest Western ­saint-­​­­non-​­martyr labelled vir apostolicus is Martin of Tours (­Burton 2017: ­27–​­28). By examining libertas in Martin’s liturgical cult, the close link between apostolicity and freedom comes into sharp focus. In the previous sections, we encountered Martin in various enactments and mediations of libertas, among which was the ­master-​­slave episode in Life of Martin II.5. This scene is rarely referred to in 697

Els Rose

the liturgical prayers for Martin, which are largely dominated by the saint’s famous act of charity in sharing his cloak with the naked beggar and his fight against the Arians (­Oury 1961). Only in the Old Hispanic liturgy in commemoration of Martin’s episcopal ordination does the image of Martin rejecting the traditional role division of slave and master occur. This early medieval liturgical tradition, preserved in ­eleventh-​­century manuscripts and in the early modern printed codices of Toledo (­Boynton 2015), celebrated not only Martin’s natale on November 11, but also his episcopal ordination on August 11 (­Cathedra Martini; Oury 1961: ­644–​­645). This ­feast-​­day is exceptional for various reasons.20 First, its prayer texts are not limited to Martin’s apostolic qualities in the traditional wording that we find already in Sulpicius’ Life, describing Martin as vir apostolicus and sharing in the ‘­dignity of the apostles’ (­Férotin 1911/­1995 no. 888: 398). The prayers grant Martin concrete apostolic properties, most notably the apostolic authority to forgive sin (­Férotin 1911/­1995 no. 891: 399). Among the 12 apostles, Peter was exclusively endowed with this authority (­Matthew 16, 19). Martin’s equality with Peter is expressed even more remarkably in the final blessing of this Mass, which portrays Martin as having received the keys of the heavenly kingdom (­Férotin 1911/­1995 no. 892: 400). Likewise, Martin’s episcopacy is put on par with Peter’s in the unusual title of this feast: Cathedra Martini (­Férotin 1911/­1995 nos. 887 and 892: 398, 399) – ​­a title most commonly reserved for Peter’s Chair celebrated on February 22 (­Harnoncourt and Auf der Maur 1994: 137). In several ways, this remarkable set of prayers singles out Martin as truly an ‘­apostolic man’. In more specific detail, the Old Hispanic prayers position Martin’s authority in the paradox of the ascetic attitude with which Martin exercised his episcopacy. Seeking the seclusion from civic duties (­no. 884: 396) and longing for the isolated hiding places of the desert (­no. 886: 397), he was elected for this public office of serving the people (­no. 886: 397). In this emphasis on the ascetic authority (­Rapp 2005) with which Martin served the community of his diocese, the prayer texts approach the civic office of the bishop in religious tones of humility and obedience. The prayers echo Life of Martin II.5 where the saint, still under secular arms, was already a priestly bishop in his heart (­no. 888: 397); where the office of bishop made him accept the form of a slave (­Philippians 2, 7); and where his interpretation of the episcopical office was not ‘­domination’, but ‘­servitude’, and ‘­obedience’ rather than ‘­power’.21 Thus, the prayer highlights how Martin, in imitation of Christ, took upon himself the role of a slave, as narrated in Life of Martin II.5, to fulfil his public office, thereby fundamentally redefining the public and civic office of the bishop that dominated his age (­Stancliffe 1983). Moreover, the prayer sheds new light on the hymn of obedience sung in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians 2, ­5 –​ ­11, which is often interpreted as a purposefully Christian affirmation, if not propagation of slavery.22 The Old Hispanic Prayer, conversely, underlines the elevation central in this passage, emphasizing the liberation that comes as an answer to the humiliation enacted not by the slave but by the master: For he did not accept the public office of the episcopacy in order to exercise power, but he understood it as the acceptance of the form of a slave. For he was so formed by the example of his Lord and Saviour, that the undefiled liberty of divine election remained in him.23 In the Old Hispanic Prayer, clearly, the ­apostle-​­bishop was meant to subvert the institution of slavery by enacting it rather than confirming it without question. 698

Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom

Freedom of speech in the liturgical cult of the apostles The earliest preserved Latin liturgical prayers commemorating the apostles themselves also verbalize the political aspects of freedom that we encountered in the previous sections, especially freedom of speech. Late antique theologians saw the right and duty to speak freely in the face of rulers as an ‘­apostolic freedom’, as Irene van Renswoude has pointed out in her discussion of Hilary of Poitiers (­c. ­315–​­367) and his work Against Constantius. Hilary insists on the libertas apostolica that the bishop inherited from the apostles (­Rocher 1987: 176; van Renswoude 2019: 50). Hilary was also aware that libertas dicendi often comes with a price, and explicitly connected speaking up to a ruler with martyrdom (­Rocher 1987: 166; van Renswoude 2019: 41). This theme is present in the liturgical prayers for many apostles, beginning with Peter and Paul. The urban patron saints of Rome exercised their frankness in the face of the emperor Nero, and this formed the direct cause of their martyrdom (­Rose 2021). Libertas dicendi and martyrdom are linked in similar ways in the prayers for Mass in honour of the apostle Andrew. Andrew’s preaching ‘­w ith a free voice’ (­libera voce) is connected immediately with his death on the cross in an ­eighth-​­century Frankish prayer for this Mass (­Dumas 1981, no. 1667: 216). The act of speaking freely is linked not only to Andrew’s death, but also to his conversatio: the apostle witnesses Christ both with his ‘­way of life’ as a preacher and in his death as a martyr. The prayer in celebration of Andrew presents the apostle as an imitator of Christ through his life and his way of dying, but it does not make explicit how or if the faithful in their turn should follow the apostle’s example. The latter aspect does come to the fore in the liturgical commemoration of the apostles James and John in a late ­seventh-​ c­ entury collection of prayers for Mass located in Burgundian Autun (­Rose 2005, no. 41: 366; Rose 2017a, 1­ 30–​­131). The apostolic prerogative of speaking up in the face of the powerful of this age is rooted in biblical discourse (­Psalm 118/­119, 46), presented as mediating between the faithful and God, paving the way for the prayers of the faithful towards a divine response. The exemplary nature of the libertas apostolica is most emphatically expressed in a Mass for Thomas in the later medieval liturgy of Spain, where the increasing influence of Rome led to the composition of new service books in the reformatory eleventh century. One of those is the Sacramentary of Vich, compiled in 1038, which also brings in Psalm 118/­119, 46 as the central notion of the apostle’s duty to speak freely (­libera voce) in the face of secular rulers. The prayer takes matters one step further in actualizing the preaching of the apostle Thomas as narrated in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas: the apostle is explicitly presented as a role model (­exemplis eius) for the faithful (­Olivar 1953, no. 751: 109).

Freedom from sin In the apocryphal narratives that underlie many liturgical prayers, the apostle is portrayed as a liberator from local cults, as we have seen above. One of the most outspoken examples of this is the apostle Bartholomew, whose cult was first introduced in the West with the arrival of his relics to the island of Lipari south of Italy around the year 580 CE, spreading from there through the European mainland. Most early medieval liturgies commemorate how Bartholomew ‘­liberated’ the people in his mission area (­India) from the local cult, presented as an oppressive system where the godhead 699

Els Rose

strikes his followers with illnesses only to free them again upon their sacrifice (­Rose 2009: ­90–​­98). The prayers translate this ‘­act of liberation’ into the apostle’s authority to liberate from sin, which the congregation now prays for in a liturgical actualization of the apocryphal narrative. The sinful soul is compared with the pagan temple; the liberation of the temple from the ancient cult paves the way to redemption from sin (­Férotin 1911/­1995 no. 843: 375). The direct object of liberation is defined as those involved in performing the sacrifice of Mass, so that they become free from sin. This ritual purity makes the liturgical sacrifice of the Eucharist effective and will purify the hearts of all faithful who participate in it (­Férotin 1911/­1995 no. 845: 376).

A ‘­free voice’ for all Christians So far, our focus has been on saintly apostles and a­ postle-​­like saints as the embodiment of new, Christian interpretations of civic and religious (­spiritual) forms of freedom. In the examples taken from the liturgical prayer tradition, we have already seen that spiritual freedom is shared with the entire Christian community. The (­apostolic) saint is commemorated as a role model of free speech that should incite the faithful to imitation, and as a mediator of spiritual freedom for all faithful. That the apostolic prerogative of free speech was shared with all baptized Christians becomes clear from a ­fifth-​­century commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, composed by bishop Chromatius of Aquileia (­c. 400), which circulated widely in the early Mid­ re-​­baptismal catechesis. The text is found in early Carolingian dle Ages as part of p handbooks for pastoral care (van Rhijn 2022) and late e­ ighth-​­century Frankish service books for cathedral Mass (­e.g., Dumas 1981, no. 553: 72). The instruction of baptismal candidates or, in the case of infant baptism, their (­god)­parents, included an explanation of the Lord’s Prayer as one of the core texts that a new Christian had to learn by heart (­Lemarié 1969: 91). Once baptized, the new faithful took on their role in the performance of the Mass, which included the recital of this prayer until well into the first millennium (­Rose 2017a: ­70–​­71). Chromatius taught the baptismal candidates of his congregation and of generations after him throughout the Frankish realm to pray through these words ‘­boldly’ and in all ‘­freedom of speech’: Therefore, the Word of God and the Wisdom of God, Christ our Lord, taught us this prayer, so that we may say: Our Father in heaven. This is the voice of freedom, which is full of faith.24 Chromatius seems to play with the Roman concept of libertas dicendi and the Latin term fiducia which occurs in the Vulgate as the most common translation where the Greek New Testament has parrhesia (­van Renswoude 2019). Libertas dicendi was no longer only a civic virtue inherited from Rome, but it also became a core Christian virtue. At the beginning of this section, we saw that in Roman political discourse, freedom is a matter of the community (­civitas) and the citizen (­civis). We see now that this remains valid in a Christian reconceptualization of libertas, where a new, theological interpretation of freedom affects both the community and its members. The individual members are addressed in Chromatius’ p ­ re-​­baptismal catechesis, whereas in another sermon his use of libertas also concerns the wider political entity of ‘­gentes, cities, provinces and, in the end, the entire world’ (­Chromatius of Aquileia, Sermones 19; Lemarié 1971: 28). Like his contemporaries (­R istuccia 2011), Chromatius adapted 700

Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom

his language to his audience to make his sermons accessible and persuasive (­L emarié 1969: 59; McEachnie 2018: 4­ 67–​­468). In this attempt, he also used civic language to express his theology in terms familiar to his audience and recognizable for them in the daily reality that they brought to church. Through this process, Chromatius as well as the anonymous prayer texts above present Christian reconceptualizations of existing civic concepts. Libertas is now a Christian virtue, linked to the privileges that a ­post-​­Roman Christian acquired through baptism and membership of the church. It also becomes a Christian duty, as all Christians participating in the cult of Mass were expected to join in the congregational recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, their communal expression of freedom and faith.

Conclusion In the transitional period of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, profiles of the citizen and citizenship were redefined with the help of ancient terms filled with new meaning and along new lines of inclusion and exclusion drawn according to Christian definitions of civic belonging. From the fourth century onwards, the civic community came to bear the hallmarks of a religious definition of who belonged and who did not belong. To be qualified as a citizen one depended on one’s religious affiliation, and baptism became a crucial requisite to participate in civic rights and privileges. We have encountered the Christian saint, primarily the apostles and those most closely cast in their mould, as a role model for this new profile of citizen and civic community. The saint embodied civic virtues, among which libertas stood out as one of those virtues that served the civic community (­civitas) through its members (­cives). The Christian conception of libertas in its social (­freedom of the community and its members from external dominion) and political form (­freedom to speak out in front of a ruler) was not a mere response to Roman political conceptualizations of freedom. Nor did it follow a purely biblical programme of frankness of speech necessary to safeguard religious freedom and to further spiritual liberty from sin. Rather, the performative discourses that we encountered in saints’ lives and the liturgical cult of saints show a mixture of Roman and biblical discourses, in which the religious and the political increasingly overlap. A new form of community developed, in which Christian conceptions of virtue and community fed political outlook and actions, while leadership was more and more commonly performed in accordance with this Christian programme of community. Freedom worked on several levels as a core value and virtue to be performed by all. With the examination of the liturgical tradition, the question arises as to how and to what extent Christian cultic practices modified social practices and divisions of roles. As is well attested, Christian theologians and leaders generally accepted slavery as a common social phenomenon in Roman society and, in large measure, the biblical ­thought-​­world. The baptismal candidates who entered the church with Chromatius’ catechesis as their primer left it after Mass to return to a daily reality of slaves serving masters and masters dominating slaves, both in Chromatius’ fifth century and in the early medieval communities that inherited his baptismal catechesis (­Wickham 2005: ­259–​­263). While free voice counted as an exclusive privilege and duty for all those seeking membership of the Christian community, speaking up to the godhead in the confined ritual space of communal worship was not the same as freedom to speak in the political domain. However, with this emphasis on speaking up to the godhead as the ​­ speechless highest authority, in which all Christians were called to ­participate – even 701

Els Rose

infants whose p ­ re-​­baptismal confession was mediated by parents or g­ odparents  – ​­a seed of the existential search for freedom was sown in every new member of the church. With baptism came a mode of thinking in terms of freedom from the start, to be continuously cultivated and performed by each named member within the context and to the benefit of the community. The image of Christianity as promoting submission and ‘­quietism’, for which Annelien de Dijn sees an origin precisely in the late and early ­post-​­Roman period (­de Dijn 2020: 118), does not do full justice to the centrality of the concept of freedom in performative texts of the first millennium of Christianity (­Brague 2016). Freedom is an example of how civic virtues were Christianized in the ­post-​­Roman world, giving shape to new patterns of civic belonging and new agency in the performance of citizenship.

Editions of texts Athanasius, Life of Anthony, in G.J.M. Bartelink (­ed.) (­1994) Athanase d’Alexandrie, Vie d’Antoine, Sources chrétiennes 400 (­Paris) Chromatius of Aquileia, Sermones, SChr 154 and 164, in Lemarié (­1969, 1971) Cicero, De officiis, in W. Miller (­transl.) (­1913) Cicero, On duties, LCL 30 (­Cambridge MA) Hilary of Poitiers, Liber in Constantium imperatorem, in Rocher (­1987) James of Voragine, Legenda aurea, in Maggioni (­1998) Liber mozarabicus sacramentorum, in Férotin (­1911/­1995) Life of Macrina, in Maraval (­1971) Livy, Ab urbe condita, in B.O. Foster (­ed.) (­1919) Livy History of Rome Books 1­ –​­2, LCL 114 (­Cambridge, MA) Missale Gothicum, in Rose (­ed.) (­2005) MS UB Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Theol. 321 Paulinus of Périgueux, De vita sancti Martini libri sex, in Labarre (­1996), SChr 581; cf. Petschenig, M. (­ed.) (­1888) Poetae christianae minores, CSEL 16 (­Vienna) ­14–​­159 Richer of Metz, Vita sancti Martini (­BHL 5634), in Decker (­1886) Sacramentarium Gellonense, in Dumas (­1981) Sacramentarium Vicennense, in Olivar (­1953) Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi, in C. Halm (­ed.) (­1866) Sulpicii Severi libri qui supersunt, CSEL 1 (­Vienna) ­152–​­216 Sulpicius Severus, Life of Martin, in Fontaine (­1967) Venantius Fortunatus, Vita sancti Martini, in Corpet (­1849); Quesnel (­1996)

Notes 1 This chapter was written as part of the project NWO ­VICI-​­Rose ­277-­​­­30-​­002 Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, ­4 00–​­1100, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO. I thank my colleagues in this project for their valuable comments on a first draft of the chapter. 2 Salzman (­1993); Lo Nero (­2001); Humfress (­2008); Flierman and Rose (­2020). 3 Rosenwein (­2009: 46); Brown (­1981); van Dam (­1993). 4 Fontaine (­1967: 121); Brown (­2002, 2012); Allen et al. (­2009). 5 Fontaine (­1967: 867); Stancliffe (­1983: ­351–​­352); Burton (­2017: ­229–​­230). 6 Based on this structure of Sulpicius’ Life, I see Martin’s iconoclasm as the very heart of Sulpicius’ portrayal of the saint, pace Wood, who marginalizes Sulpicius’ interest in Martin’s missionary work (­Wood 2001: 28).

702

Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom 7 Purification (­emendatio) as cleansing from disease and sin (­Fontaine 1967: 867; Burton 2017: 230: ‘­the language is cultic, not primarily medical’). 8 Fontaine (­1967: 866) refers to Luke 7, 12, the story of the dead son of the widow of Nain who is carried to the necropolis outside the city. 9 TLL s.v. libertas, 7.2.1314.28 (­TLL consulted online at https://­w ww.thesaurus.badw.de/­­tll-​ ­digital/­­tll-­​­­open-​­access.html [last accessed 14 January 2021]); libertas as a complex political concept in Rome affects both individuals (­Cic. Off. I.70) and communities (­Livy Hist. 37.54). For an individual it covers ‘­the sum of civic rights granted by the laws of Rome’ (­Wirszubski 1950: 7). 10 Burton (­2017: ­235–​­236); also in Sulpicius, Dialogi III.11; van Renswoude (­2019: ­139–​­140). 11 XVII.­1–​­4, XVII.­5 –​­7 and XVIII.­1–​­2; Fontaine (­1967: ­832–​­862).
 12 Although many interpreters state that the servant’s feet are washed, not his boots: Burton (­2017: 97): ‘­and he, the master, in turn acted as slave to him, to the point of taking off his shoes and rubbing him down’. The same in Mönnich (­1962: 18); Nissen and Rose (­1997: 29). Likewise, the ­twelfth-​­century rewriting of the Vita Martini by Richer of Metz: pedum tergens vestigia (­Decker 1886: 6). James of Voragine, in his Legenda aurea, follows Sulpicius more closely: et calceamenta sepius detrahebat atque tergebat (­Maggioni 1998: 1133). Fontaine translates: ‘…en general, c’était lui qui lui retirait ses chaussures, lui encore qui les nettoyait’ (­Fontaine 1967: 255). 13 Paulinus of Périgueux, De vita sancti Martini libri sex, I, l. ­43–​­53: Unum progressus socium sibi vix sinit ire / Non opere adstrictum, sed solum nomine servum. / O felix, cui tale jugum tam grata paravit / Conditio, ut de sorte tua contendere tecum / Nobilium possint certantia vota virorum, / Si liceat servire tamen; sed tu quoque duram / Cogeris ad legem nascendi lege solutus. / Nam tibi subiecti servit devotio sancti: / Idem habitus, parcae communis copia mensae. / Hic prior obsequiis, ne saltim noscere possit / Praelatum domino quaevis sollertia servum. Edition with French translation: Labarre (­2016: 1­ 36–​­138); English translation is mine. 14 The Latin allows us to read at the same time ‘­freed from the law’ and ‘­freed by the law’, i.e., the Christian religion presented as lex: Ristuccia (­2019); Ando (­2018). 15 Edition with French translation: Maraval (­1971: 165). See also Lenski (­2021); Harper (­2016). 16 On habitus as referring to both ‘­way of life’ and ‘­way of dressing’, also in the more narrow monastic context since the late fourth century CE, see Burton (­2017: 162). 17 Life of Martin VI.5, VII.1, X.­1–​­9; Burton (­2017: 186). 18 On Christian liturgy as a means to further a late antique city’s libertas: Ristuccia (­2018: ­50–​­51). 19 On the civic character of monastic liturgy, see Birkedaal Bruun and Hamilton (­2016); Malone (­2016). 20 The ­fi fth-​­century triple f­east-​­day of Martin’s episcopal ordination, the translation of his relics, and the dedication of the new basilica in Tours was universally celebrated on July 4 (­Maurey 2014: 42). 21 non dominatio … sed servitus, et obsequium potius quam potestas. No. 888: 398. 22 de Wet (­2018). Particularly De Wet’s argument that Paul’s hymn furthered a ‘­habitus and hexis’ of subjugation because the congregants ‘­may have included gestures of bowing and kneeling’ (­­p. 41) ­one-​­sidedly emphasizes the servitude of Philippians 3, 7 and passes over the exultation in v. 9, echoed by the libertas emphasized in the Old Hispanic prayer. 23 Férotin (­1911/­1995 no. 888: 398): Quia non occasione exercende potestatis suscepit principatum sacerdotii; sed formam serui suscepisse cognouit: ipsius Domini et Saluatoris formatur exemplo, ut maneret in eo diuine electionis intemerata libertas. 24 Chromatius of Aquileia, Sermones 40; Lemarié (­1971: 226): Ergo dei sermo et dei sapientia, christus dominus noster, hanc orationem nos docuit, ut ita oremus: pater noster qui es in caelis. Haec libertatis uox est et plena fiducia.

Bibliography Allen, P., Mayer, W. and Neil, B. (­eds) (­2009) Preaching poverty in the late Roman world (­Leipzig) Ando, C. (­ed.) (­2016) Citizenship and Empire in Europe 2­ 00–​­1900: the Antonine Constitution after 1800 years, Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 54 (­Stuttgart)

703

Els Rose ——— ​­(­2018) ‘­Religion, toleration, and religious liberty in republican empire’, History of European Ideas 44, ­743–​­755 Arena, V. (­2018) ‘­A ncient history and contemporary political theory: the case of liberty’, History of European Ideas 44, ­641–​­657 Arthur, J. (­2008) ‘­Christianity, citizenship and democracy’, in J. Arthur, I. Davies, and C. Hahn (­eds) The SAGE handbook of education for citizenship and democracy (­Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore) ­305–​­313 Besson, A. (­2020) Constitutio Antoniniana: l’universalisation de la citoyenneté romaine au 3e siècle (­Basel) Birkedaal Bruun, M. and L. Hamilton (­2016) ‘­Rites for dedicating churches’, in Gittos and Hamilton (­2016) ­177–​­204 Blaise, A. (­1966) Le vocabulaire latin des principaux thèmes liturgiques (­Turnhout) Boynton, S. (­2015) ‘­Restoration or invention? Archbishop Cisneros and the Mozarabic rite in Toledo’, Yale Journal of Music and Religion 1, ­5 –​­30 Brague, R. (­2016) ‘­God and freedom: biblical roots of the Western idea of liberty’, in Shah and Hertzke (­2016) ­391–​­402 Brélaz, C. (­2021) ‘­Democracy, citizenship(­s) and “patriotism”: civic practices and discourses in the Greek cities under Roman rule’, in C. Brélaz and E. Rose (­eds) Civic identity and civic participation in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Cultural encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 37 (­Turnhout) ­271–​­294 Brown, P. (­1981) The cult of the saints: its rise and function in Latin Christianity (­Chicago) ——— ​­(­2002) Poverty and leadership in the later Roman Empire (­Hanover and London) ——— ​­(­2012) Through the eye of a needle: wealth, the fall of Rome, and the making of Christianity in the West, ­350–​­550 AD (­Princeton, NJ) Burton, Ph. (­2017) Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini (­Oxford) Carmichael, A.G. (­1993) ‘­Leprosy’, in K.F. Kiple (­ed.) The Cambridge world history of human disease (­Cambridge) ­834–​­839 1987) ‘­ Conclusion: after sainthood?’, in J. Hawley (­ ed.) Saints and virtues Coleman, J.A. (­ (­Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London) Corpet, E.-​­F. (­ed.) (­1849) Venance Fortunat, La vie de saint Martin (­Paris) ­233–​­367 de Dijn, A. (­2020) Freedom: an unruly history (­Cambridge, MA) de Wet, Chr. (­2018) The unbound God: slavery and the formation of early Christian thought (­New York) Decker, R. (­ed.) (­1886) Programm des königlichen Gymnasium zu Trier für das Schuljahr ­1885–​ ­1886 (­Trier) Dumas, A. (­ed.) (­1981) Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, CCSL 159 (­Turnhout) Elliott, A.G. (­1987) Roads to paradise: reading the Lives of the early saints (­Hanover and London) Férotin, M. (­ed.) (­1911/­1995), Liber mozarabicus sacramentorum (Paris) Flierman, R. and Rose, E. (­2020) ‘­Banished from the company of the good: Christians and aliens in ­fi fth-​­c entury Rome’, ­Al-​­Masāq 32, ­64–​­86 Fontaine, J. (­ed.) (­1967) Sulpice Sévère, Vie de St Martin, Sources chrétiennes ­133–​­135 (­Paris) Gittos, H. and Hamilton, S. (­eds) (­2016) Understanding Medieval liturgy: essays in interpretation (­Burlington) Harnoncourt, Ph. and H.-​­J. Auf der Maur (­1994). Feiern im Rhythmus der Zeit II.1, Gottesdienst der Kirche: Handbuch der Liturgiewissenschaft (­Regensburg) Harper, K. (­2016) ‘­Christianity and the roots of human dignity in Late Antiquity’, in Shah and Hertzke (­2016) ­123–​­148 Herrin, J. (­1987) The formation of Christendom (­London) Humfress, C. (­2008) ‘­Citizens and heretics: Late Roman lawyers on Christian heresy’, in C. Iricinschi and H. Zellentin (­eds) Heresy and identity in Late Antiquity (­Tübingen) ­128–​­142 Kitchen, J. (­2005) ‘“­Raised from the dung”: hagiography, liberation, and the social subversiveness of Early Medieval Christianity’, in W. Braun (­ed.) Rhetoric and reality in early Christianities (­Waterloo) ­121–​­159 Labarre, S. (­ed.) (­2016) Paulin de Périgueux Vie de saint Martin, Prologue, livres ­I -​­III (­Paris) Labarre, S. (­1998) Le manteau partagé: deux métamorphoses poétiques de la Vie de saint Martin chez Paulin de Périgueux (­Ve siècle) et Venance Fortunat (­VIe siècle) (­Paris) Lavan, M. (­2013) Slaves to Rome (­Cambridge)

704

Christian reconceptualizations of citizenship and freedom Lemarié, J. (­ed.) (­1969) Chromace d’Aquilée, Sermons I et II, vol. I (­Paris) ——— ​­(­1971) Chromace d’Aquilée, Sermons I et II, vol. II (­Paris) Lenski, N. (­2021) ‘­Monothéismes’, in P. Ismard (­ed.) Les mondes de l’esclavage: une histoire comparée (­Paris 2021) ­409–​­426 Lo Nero, C. (­2001) ‘­Christiana dignitas: new Christian criteria for citizenship in the later Roman Empire’, Medieval encounters 7, ­146–​­164 Maggioni, G. (­ed.) (­1998) Iacobus de Voragine legenda aurea (­Florence) Malone, C. (­2016) ‘­A rchitecture as evidence for liturgical performance’, in Gittos and Hamilton (­2016) ­207–​­237 Maraval, P. (­ed.) (­1971) Grégoire de Nysse, Vie de sainte Macrine, Sources chrétiennes 178 (­Paris) Maurey, Y. (­2014) Medieval music, legend, and the cult of St. Martin: the local foundations of a universal saint (­Cambridge) McEachnie, R. (­2018) ‘­Zeno, Chromatius, and Gaudentius. Italian preachers amid transition’, in A. Dupont et al. (­eds) Preaching in the patristic era, A New History of the Sermon 6 (­Leiden) ­454–​­475 Miller, M.C. (­2014) Clothing the clergy: virtue and power in Medieval Europe, c. 8­ 00–​­1200 (­Ithaca, NY and London) Moeller, E. (­­1971–​­1979) Corpus benedictionum pontificalium, 4 vols. (­Turnhout) ——— ​­(­­1980–​­1981) Corpus praefationum, 5 vols. (­Turnhout) Moeller, E. et al. (­­1992–​­2004) Corpus orationum, 14 vols. (­Turnhout) Mönnich, C.W. (­1962) Martinus van Tours naar de beschrijving van zijn leven door Sulpicius Severus (­A msterdam) Nissen P. and E. Rose (­1997) Het leven van de heilige Martinus door Sulpicius Severus (­Kampen) Olivar, A. (­ed.) (­1953) El sacramentario de Vich (­Madrid) Oury, G. (­1961) ‘­Culte et liturgie de Saint Martin’, L’ami du clergé 71, ­641–​­650 Quesnel, S. (­ed.) (­1996) Vie de saint Martin (­Paris) Rapp, C. (­2005) Holy bishops in Late Antiquity: the nature of Christian leadership in an age of transition (­Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London) Ristuccia, N. (­2011) ‘­Law and legal documents in the sermons of Peter Chrysologus’, Journal of Late Antiquity 4, ­124–​­156 ——— ​­(­2018) Christianization and commonwealth in early Medieval Europe: a ritual interpretation (­Oxford) ——— ​­(­2019) ‘­L ex: a study on Medieval terminology for religion’, JRH 43, ­531–​­548 Rocher, A. (­ed.) (­1987) Hilaire de Poitiers, Contre Constance, Sources chrétiennes 334 (­Paris) Rose, E. (­ed.) (­2005) Missale Gothicum: e codice Vaticano Reginensi Latino 317 editum, CCSL 159D (­Turnhout) Rose, E. (­2004) ‘­Apocryphal traditions in Medieval Latin liturgy: a new research project illustrated with the case of the apostle Andrew’, Apocrypha 15, ­115–​­138 ——— ​­(­2009) Ritual memory: the apocryphal Acts and liturgical commemoration of the apostles in the Early Medieval West, c. ­500–​­1215 (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ——— ​­(­2017a) The Gothic Missal, introduction, translation, and notes (­Turnhout) ——— ​­(­2017b) ‘­Provinciae et civitates ecclesiis plenae: transformation of the civitates Indorum in the Apocryphal Acts and the liturgical commemoration of the apostle Thomas’, in P. van Geest et al. (­eds) Sanctifying texts, transforming rituals: encounters in liturgical studies (­Leiden and Boston, MA) ­103–​­122 ——— (­ ​­2021) ‘­Citizenship discourses in Late Antiquity and the early middle ages’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 55 (­2021) ­1–​­21 Rosenwein, B. (­2009) A short history of the Middle Ages, 3rd edn (­Toronto) Salzman, M.R. (­1993) ‘­The evidence for the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in Book 16 of the Theodosian Code’, Historia 42, ­362–​­378 ——— ​­(­2017) ‘­From a classical to a Christian city: civic euergetism and charity in late antique Rome’, Studies in Late Antiquity 1, ­65–​­85 Shah, T.S. and Hertzke, A.D. (­eds) (­2016) Christianity and freedom, vol. 1: Historical perspectives (­Cambridge) Stancliffe, C. (­1983) St. Martin and his hagiographer: history and miracle in Sulpicius Severus (­Oxford) Turner, V. (­1969) The ritual process: structure and ­anti-​­structure (­New York)

705

Els Rose van Dam, R. (­1993) Saints and their miracles in late antique Gaul (­Princeton, NJ) van Renswoude, I. (­2019) The rhetoric of free speech in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (­Cambridge) van Rhijn, C. (2022) Leading the way to heaven: pastoral care and salvation in the Carolingian period (London and New York) Wickham, Ch. (­2005) Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 4­ 00–​­800 (­Oxford) Wirszubski, Ch. (­1950, repr. 2007) Libertas as a political idea at Rome during the late Republic and the early Principate (­Cambridge) Wood, I. (­2001) The missionary life: saints and the evangelisation of Europe ­4 00–​­1050 (­London and New York) Wood, Ph. (­2018) ‘­The idea of freedom in the writings of ­non-​­Chalcedonian Christians in the fifth and sixth centuries’, History of European Ideas 44, ­774–​­794

706

49 CITIZENSHIP AND BELONGING A view from Byzantium Dion C. Smythe

‘­W ho am I? And who are you?’ These two questions summarize the related ideas of ‘­identity’ and ‘­belonging’, together with their antithesis of exclusion and difference. In the modern world of emigration, immigration, refugees, and asylum seekers, identity and right of access is evidenced by passports or other identity cards. We know that asylum seekers often arrive in a n ­ ation-​­state without such documentation. Cyril Mango (­1980: 3) wrote that the Byzantines would often begin with the Homeric questions ‘­W ho are you and where are you from’? These Byzantines would have no passports or proof of ‘­citizenship’. The tripod of Roman polity, Greek language and literary culture, and Christian religion, which made Byzantine culture and ­civilization – ​­what Évelyne Patlagean (­1981: 81) has defined as ‘­la romanité chrétienne de Byzance’  – ​­suggests that Byzantines asked these questions should have responded by defining themselves as ‘­Romans’. Citing Mango again, St Gregory the Decapolite arriving in Thrace in the ninth century was asked ‘­W ho are you, and what is your religion?’ He replied, not with ‘­I am a Roman, doulos (­literally ‘­slave’ but could be glossed as ‘­subject’) of the emperor’, but said ‘­I am a Christian, my parents are such and such, and I am of the Orthodox persuasion’. Mango suggests that he may have looked like an Arab (­more exactly or precisely a Muslim) and this may have prompted the religious question. The one thing the saint did not define himself as was as ‘­a Roman’ (­Mango 1980: 31). Other chapters in this volume deal directly with the more rigorously defined citizenship in Classical Athens and Sparta, as well as other civilizations and Empires of the ancient world. Byzantium was heir to that ancient world, but it was not part of the classical world and nor was ­it – ​­in its ­entirety – ​­part of ‘­Late Antiquity’. In the later Roman Empire, the Edict of Caracalla (­212 CE) legally extended the rights of Roman citizenship beyond Italia to all inhabitants of the Empire. Before the edict of 212, Roman citizenship was a privilege that conveyed status and rights. It was often used to woo and incorporate elite families of liminal provinces into the central elite of the Roman Empire (­Roymans 2004a: ­55–​­66; 2004b: ­251–​­260). It was such a claim to Roman citizenship that allowed St Paul the Apostle to claim his right of direct appeal to the emperor in Rome (­p erhaps more importantly allowing the tribune and governor of Syria to pass an intractable problem up the chain of command the emperor being Nero, so that riots and civil unrest in Jerusalem would not DOI: 10.4324/9781003138730-58

707

Dion C. Smythe

follow) (­Acts 16:­37–​­38; Acts 22:­25–​­28; Acts 25:­10–​­11). It may be significant that the claim is mentioned twice in the Acts of the Apostles, but not in any of the epistles. Saul of Tarsus in Cilicia was born of Roman citizen parents and was therefore himself a ‘­born’ Roman citizen. This sense of protection from the infamy and outrages of Roman justice served Paul well. There may have been a ‘­­folk-​­memory’ of the protection afforded to Paul by his citizenship in the Christian Empire of Byzantium, but it is unlikely to have been as explicit or as accessible as a ‘­meme’ (­to use a term out of time and place) as it was to the elite guardians of the Pax Britannica in the m ­ id-​­nineteenth century. Whilst there was a sense in which ‘­true Byzantines’ (­and this raises all the issues of the ‘­no true Scotsman’ fallacy) could and did see themselves as ‘­citizens’ (­as Christians) of the Heavenly Jerusalem, this did not hinder the Byzantines’ ability to hold two conflicting ideas at once: citizen of the Heavenly Jerusalem and doulos of the basileus (­emperor) in Constantinople. The outstanding historical proponent of British citizenship as a permanent personal protection was Lord Palmerston, the surprisingly Whiggish remnant British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister in the central decades of the nineteenth century. The main significance of the Don Pacifico Affair (­as it is usually known) was the speech in the House of Commons by Lord Palmerston on 25 June 1850. Palmerston (­1850) spoke for five hours, and his peroration ended with an allusion to Roman citizenship: and whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong. Palmerston’s statement to the House was the high tide of British intervention on behalf of the Queen’s subjects, soon to be matched by the High Noon of the British Empire itself and the definitive example of ‘­g unboat diplomacy’. At Easter 1847, the home in Athens of David, Don Pacifico, a British subject, was attacked by a mob. Three days after the attack, Don Pacifico wrote to Sir Edmund Lyons, British Minister Plenipotentiary to Greece, asking for protection and aid from the British Minister in gaining compensation. Lyons reported to the Foreign Office in London, and the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston became involved, directing that Don Pacifico should compile an itemized list of the materials for which he was demanding restitution. The list was prepared, sent to Lyons who, in turn, transmitted it to the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, notifying the Greek Prime Minister at the same time. The claim was rejected by Kolokotronis, the Prime Minister of Greece. Don Pacifico wrote to Lyons again in August 1848, saying he had received no compensation. This was followed by a further appeal in October 1848. Lord Palmerston wrote to Sir Thomas Wyse, the British Minister in Athens in December 1849 that he, Palmerston, had directed the Admiralty to instruct Sir William Parker commanding a flotilla returning from the Dardanelles, to ‘­take’ Athens. The blockade lasted two months, ending when the Greek government agreed to pay Don Pacifico compensation. But what of Byzantium, the Christianized Empire of the Romans in the East? Did it hold to such an elevated notion or definition of what it meant to be a subject of the autokrator (‘­emperor’, the equivalent of the Latin imperator) and from the seventh century onwards the basileus in the ­God-​­guarded City of Constantinople? Under Justinian (­­527–​­565), the Byzantine Empire achieved a certain late antique stasis. The Empire was 708

Citizenship and belonging: a view from Byzantium

clearly Christian. The law reforms overseen by Tribonian ensured that the traditions of Roman Law as understood in the reign of Justinian were transmitted (­eventually to the modern world). The rights (­and perhaps duties) of the free Roman were accepted in the Corpus, but as with much ­Roman – ​­and later ­Byzantine – ​­law, they were not enumerated explicitly. On the other hand, however, the ‘­subject’ of the autokrator and the basileus was not a citizen, a civis, but rather a doulos, a servant or slave depending on the intended meaning. Though the Byzantine Empire rested on the tripod of Roman Law or polity, Greek language and literary culture, and the ­Semitic-​­derived though modified religion of Christianity, yet ideas of ‘­political life’ from the ancient polis were overwhelmed by the autocratic system of the emperor as the ­v ice-​­gerent of God, mirroring the established order in heaven in the imperial palace in earth on the Bosphoros. The ideas of Aristotle serve as no guide for the operation of the Byzantine ‘­state’ (­Paris 2016: ­90–​­94). Nor can Cicero (­Roselaar 2016: ­145–​­65) be held to be a guide for the operations of Byzantium and the many rebellions (­Cheynet 1996), a clear and present danger for all that the Byzantines prized stability or stasis (­which in the confusing way of Greek can mean both stability and the overthrow of the established order). With the increased Christianization of ideas in the ­Roman-​­based polity that was Byzantium, notions of a ‘­citizenship’ fell away. Anthony Kaldellis, in his 2015 monograph The Byzantine Republic (­Kaldellis 2015), has most recently attempted to rebalance the three legs of the tripod of Byzantine civilization. In his book, he argues that the idea of the Christian Empire of Byzantium and the linguistic but more especially literary Greek nature of the Empire has been overstressed at the expense of the Roman traditions of the politeia, the politics of Empire in the long thousand years of Byzantium. He asserts that there has been an emphasis on the emperor (­often on the person of the emperor rather than the office of the emperor) and on the religious aspects of the Empire (­Kaldellis 2015: ­8 –​­10). What is noticeable for my purposes here is that though politeia is discussed in depth and with detail, there is no mention of ‘­citizenship’. Kaldellis notes some of the words used to describe ‘­the peo​­ ple’ – those we might want to describe as ‘­citizens’ – ​­but the Byzantine sources do not use terms derived from polis. They are described variously as ‘­p eople’ anthropoi, ‘­the majority’ to plethos, ‘­the masses’ o ochlos or ‘­citizens’ politai (­Kaldellis 2015: 11). The use of politai is less frequent and becomes a more technical term appearing in N ­ ovels –​ ­in this case Novel 59 of Leo VI. In his discussion, Kaldellis uses ‘­citizens’ and ‘­subjects’ as synonyms, which is not quite the case (­Kaldellis 2015: 12). On page 32, he asserts the centrality of ‘­subjects’ (­Kaldellis 2015: 32). He introduces demos ‘­the people’ as the Byzantine Greek version of populus (­Kaldellis 2015: 63). Later, he contrasts demos ‘­the people’ with demoi ‘­factions’ – ​­usually associated with riots in the ­h ippodrome – ​­(­Kaldellis 2015: 159). Kaldellis (­2015: ­90–​­93) provides an extended discussion of Psellos’s account of the fall of Michael V. Here, ‘­the people’ have an unusual and extended role to play but though the term means ‘­p eople’ it is clear that Psellos has ambivalent feelings about these actions of the mob, which unnaturally includes women rioting on the streets and baying for blood. More traditionally perhaps, Byzantine sources attempting to convey the totality of the subjects of the Empire use variations on the theme of ‘­senate, army and people’, with the people appearing in the hippodrome for acclamations or as a rioting mob (­Kaldellis 2015: 104). A final variation appears in an account of the death of Alexios I Komnenos, ‘­all the Romans’ to panromaion (­Kaldellis 2015: 140). The assertion of religious identity of what it meant to be ‘­a Byzantine’, rather than a secular legal definition, had the greatest impact on the Romaniote communities of 709

Dion C. Smythe

­ reek-​­speaking Jews in the Byzantine Empire. Special sections and often special enG actments were directed in Byzantine law codes to the ‘­Jewish question’. This was in part because the Jews constituted a distinctive ­sub-​­group within the Byzantine Empire, differentiated by religion (­Sharf 1971: 3). In 212, Roman citizenship had become universal. Jews were protected under the law and Judaism was a ‘­licit religion’ (­Sharf 1971: 19). Increasingly, this came to change under the legislation made by Justinian (­­527–​­565). The Codex of Justinian was based in part on the Theodosian Code, compiled about a century earlier in 438, ­re-​­affirming many of the points set out in the earlier code, though sometimes restricting some aspects. Jewish circumcision was permitted; castration, allegedly banned in the Roman and later Byzantine E ­ mpire – the ​­ presence of eunuchs ­notwithstanding – ​­carried the death penalty (­Sharf 1971: 20, 36). Synagogues were legally recognized places of worship and were protected as such from violence or desecration. If a synagogue was seized, it had to be returned or compensation paid. If necessary, a building plot suitable for erecting another new synagogue had to be supplied. Decisions of Jewish courts of law (­batei din) in civil cases between Jews had full legal force and were to be executed by imperial magistrates. A Jew could not be forced to desecrate the Sabbath or his Festivals. A gentile could not fix the price of goods a Jew offered for sale. Finally, if he himself was causing no offence, the Jew was not to be molested: ‘­not to be trampled upon for being Jewish and not to suffer contumely for his religion... the law forbids private revenge’. This sounds extremely positive: but in 404 CE certain government posts were closed to Jews. In 418, a great many more followed and in 425 all posts whether military or civil were closed to Jews as they were ‘­unworthy’ atimoi (­Starr 1939: 25; Sharf 1971: 21, 36). The situation deteriorates further in the reign of Justinian. By the Novel 45 in 537, Justinian set out the principle that Jews must never enjoy the fruits of office but only suffer its pains and penalties (­Sharf 1971: 21, 36). Justinian’s legislation continued to degrade the position of Jews as ‘­equal citizens’ of the Empire. Jews were prohibited from holding Christian slaves; the law freed the slaves and fined the erstwhile owner. No new synagogues were to be built. In both codes, the penalty for circumcising a Christian slave was now the old Roman penalty for castration: death and confiscation of property (­from the heirs). The penalty for circumcising a free adult was confiscation of property and exile for life (­Sharf 1971: 22, 36). Justinian, by Novel 146 in 553, required that the Torah be read from the Septuagint or the Aquila (‘­the most comely of men, who had made the beauties of Japhet dwell in the tents of Shem’) translations and in the vernacular. He forbade the deuterosis (­the oral commentary or Mishnah) and the denial of Christian doctrines (­Sharf 1971: 24, 37). All these measures had conversionist aspects: the aim was to make the Jews see the truth of the Christian Revelation (­Sharf 1971: 25). According to Prokopios, Justinian legislated that Pesach should always follow Easter, though this runs counter to the canon of Nicaea I (­325 CE) by which if Passover and Easter coincide, then Easter is one week later (­Sharf 1971: 23). However, the mention of Justinian’s legislation in relation to Passover comes from The Secret History, a source given its status as psogos (­or not) renders difficult to use as reliable. In 537, Justinian forbade the practice of Judaism, along with heresy, in North Africa. Having been conquered from the Vandals, the province was to be brought back into true ‘­r ight belief’ as well as direct imperial control (­Sharf 1971: 26). ‘­Belonging’ in Byzantium, therefore, was more an expression of religious identity (‘­I am a Christian; and follow the teachings of the emperor and patriarch in 710

Citizenship and belonging: a view from Byzantium

Constantinople’) than an expression of political belonging (­a citizenship: ‘­I am a doulos of the emperor in Constantinople’). Belonging might have had an ethnic c­ omponent – the literary sources are awash with negative terms for those perceived as ‘­the other’ (­Smythe 1991). A legal ­identity – ​­a ‘­Byzantine Citizenship’ if you ­w ill – ​­did not construct a Byzantine sense of belonging. Robert S. Lopez’s ‘­Foreigners in Byzantium’ (­1978 [1974]: ­341–​­352) discusses how one might approach the question of who belongs to Byzantium, and who does not. He develops the idea by saying that the point under discussion is one of citizenship and asks the question: how one might gain such citizenship (­Lopez 1978 [1974]: 341)? He notes that Zachariae von Lingenthal is silent on the idea of Byzantine citizenship, so there is no firm legal definition of citizenship. Lopez then proposes that there may have been a reciprocal relationship: citizens paid taxes, so people who paid taxes were citizens; people who did not pay taxes were not citizens (­Lopez 1978 [1974]: ­341–​­342). Lopez recognizes that this overly legalistic approach cannot be supported by the sources, as only one tax ­register – the ​­ Cadaster of ­Thebes – ​­survives (­Svoronos 1959: 1­ –​­145; Neville 2004). He abandons ideas of citizenship in favour of more traditional ideas of Roman ‘­belonging’, maintaining that they still held sway in Byzantium. If one lived within the territory of the Empire and lived as a Roman (­i.e., was enrolled in the army or was enrolled on the tax registers and thus paid taxes), then one was a Roman. This according to Lopez was the Roman ideal. The frontier was static and rigid; the boundary was known to and recognized by all. However, even in the case of an obvious and physical boundary such as the River Danube or Hadrian’s Wall at the northern reaches of Britannia, more recent scholarship suggests that this was a border zone rather than a singular linear frontier of division between ‘­us’ and ‘­them’ (­Breeze and Dobson 2000; Johnson 2004). The frontiers were not as clear and definite as the Romans liked to profess. Ideologically, of course, there was a frontier of the mind: here, on our side, were the Romans, cities, law, and civilization; there, across the frontier, was under the sway of the barbarians, no laws, no cities, only forest or desert, and so little civilization that even intelligible language was lacking. Extracting comments about the barbarians from writings by emperors or chroniclers is an easy sport; Lopez comments, ‘­we know that the Byzantines came close to the Chinese in looking at foreigners with utter contempt’ (­Lopez 1978 [1974]: 342). Well, yes they did; but Byzantine civilization was not a monolith and so this was not the only attitude towards foreigners or ‘­the outsider’. People who lived in the Empire, subject to the authority of the ­now-​­Christian ­now-​ ­basileus, were subject to the taxes of the Empire. This originates with the first Augustus (‘­there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed’ Luke, 7:1), but liability to taxation (­and the inability to win an exemption from the emperor) showed the position of ‘­citizens’ more as douloi of the basileus. Rather than a citizenship of rights and duties, the Byzantine question was: ‘­Are you the subject of the ­Vice-​­gerent of Christ on earth in his capital, the ­God-​­guarded City? Do you pay your taxes to him?’ The powerful, however, avoided taxation; the repetition of laws prohibiting the expansion of large landowners’ estates (­w ith tax exemptions) at the expense of ­tax-​­paying soldier proprietors of the early Middle Byzantine period shows them to be largely ineffective (­Morris 1976: ­3 –​­27). Under the Komnenoi, pronoia (­the alienation of taxes due in the future for military service now) created other classes of tax ­non-​­payers, though these ­warrior-​­generals cannot be construed as external to the Byzantine elite. So even taxation or more precisely the payment of taxes cannot be taken as the indicator of ‘­belonging’ in Byzantium. 711

Dion C. Smythe

Dealing with what foreigners could do in Byzantium, Lopez turns to the merchants or traders. The comparison here with imperial China seems most apt: ‘­medieval Byzantium, like mandarin China, gradually dulled the edge of its keen merchant and maritime class through a combination of conservatism, hybris [sic], and neglect’ (­Lopez 1978 [1974]: 345). However, foreign traders came to Byzantium and residential warehouses or mitata were created in the capital to h As ­ ouse  – ​­and probably to ­control  – them. ​­ Venice moved from being a dependency or colony of sorts to being independent in the late eleventh century (­and of course Byzantium’s nemesis by 1204), the mitata of Venice became less a place where the Byzantine authorities could control foreign merchants and more of a compound of expatriates with ­extra-​­territorial rights, rights upheld by the representative powers of the Italian trading ­city-​­states. It seems simple to say that taxation is an indicator of citizenship. The Internal Revenue Service of the United States federal government holds this to be the case. No matter where resident, a citizen of the United States should file an annual tax return of all income, whether it is earned in the territories of the United States or beyond the jurisdiction of that government. The situation in Byzantium, however, is much less clear cut, not least because of the lack of sources. Byzantium in theory maintained a bureaucratic governmental apparatus, with records kept in triplicate. The nature of the end of the Byzantine Empire, however, meant that the successor state had neither a need nor a desire for the older records; the Ottoman Empire was a new beginning by conquest. The specific instance of taxation on which there has been some level of research is the position of Jews in the Byzantine Empire. The basic ­question – ​­deriving in its own turn from the situation of the Jews within the Roman E ­ mpire – ​­is whether the Jews were subject to a specific tax as Jews (­Sharf 1971: 189). The Aurum coronarium was a tax on Jews levied on and gathered by their communities. In 429, it was clearly a tax on Jews. It is mentioned in the law codes of 883, but silence follows. It is not mentioned in the Ecloga, nor in the Basilica nor in the Peira, compiled 1­ 034–​­1056 (­Sharf 1971: 193). The status of the Jewish inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire, however, was ambiguous: were they Jewish and citizens or Jewish and therefore not citizens? The sources are sparse and unclear and often relate to specific locations and periods, which means that extrapolation to a universal case applicable throughout the Empire is fraught, if not completely impossible (­Starr 1939: 1­ 1–​­17). A clear example of this is the situation of the Jews on Chios in the ­m id-​­eleventh century (­Starr 1939: 1­ 4–​­16; Sharf 1971: ­145–​­147; Oikonomides 1995: ­218–​­225). The discussion begins with a charter donation by Constantine IX Monomachos to the monastery of Nea Moni on Chios in 1049 (­Oikonomides 1995: 218 n.1). The monastery was being made independent of its bishop, and the concern was to provide Nea Moni with an independent income. This was d ­ one – ​­rather than by a direct grant of money from the im​­ granting to certain people an exemption from their tax liabilities. By the perial ­fisc – by terms of the charter, certain ­taxes – ​­notably the head [poll] tax or kaphaletion, paid by Jews to the imperial treasury, but not by Christians (­Oikonomides 1995: 224) – ​­were to be ‘­excused’ from the people liable to pay the fisc, with the money going instead to the monastery to support its fiscal independence from the bishop. Such exemptions were a feature of the Byzantine tax regime, and the oikoi exkoussatoi  – ​­those ‘­exempted’, whether individuals or ­households – ​­were identified as a clearly delineated group. By the charter of 1049 for Nea Moni, the exkoussatoi were to be the 15 Jewish families/­ households, resident on Chios. They were also exempt from all other taxes and corvées (­Oikonomides 1995: 218 n.3). 712

Citizenship and belonging: a view from Byzantium

The history of Nea Moni did not run smoothly. In 1056, the founders of the monastery were exiled and the properties of Nea Moni were confiscated (­Oikonomides 1995: ­218–​­219 n.4). In the reign of Isaac I Komnenos (­­1057–​­1059), under the influence of the Patriarch Michael Kerularios, the emperor restored the monks and returned the properties of the monastery. In 1062, Constantine X Doukas confirmed the privilege of Nea Moni over the descendants of the original 15 Jewish families (­Oikonomides 1995: ­219–​­220 n.5). All 15 families were to remain in the monastic properties they rented and there were to be no additional Jewish settlers on Chios (­this looks very like an attempt to ensure that no further losses would be incurred by the fisc). The privilege was confirmed once more by Nikephoros III Botaniates in 1079, but the charter did not set out the specifics of the exemptions (­Oikonomides 1995: 219 n.7). Oikonomides lists various donations dating from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, by which oikoi exkoussatoi were ‘­excused’ paying tax to the state and instead paid their taxes to a monastery or a monastery’s founder or patron. These exkoussatoi could be extended to include war heroes (­a spatharokandiatos in 999), or a metropolis (­by Manuel I Komnenos ­1143–​­1180) (­Oikonomides 1995: 221). In each of these cases, the taxpayers were liberated from their obligation to pay their taxes to the state. The exkoussatoi were free landowners, not paroikoi (­the Middle Byzantine dependent ­p easants – ​­loosely paroikoi can be thought of as the equivalent of ‘­serfs’). However, the exkoussatoi were not free from all state taxation; they paid land tax and any tax​­ payable on a pair of yoked o ­ xen – ​­and the ation due on professions. The synone – tax kapnikon – the ​­ hearth or chimney t­ ax – ​­went to the institution or person on whom they depended (­anakeisthai in the charters). Oikoi exkoussatoi had all additional taxes and corvées transmuted into cash payments, again due to the institution or person on whom they depended (­Oikonomides 1995: 222). Oikoi implies ownership of private property (­land); the Jews of Chios in 1049 are described as ‘­families’, not oikoi. They rented monastic properties; they did not own the land they worked on (­Oikonomides 1995: 223). History is the science of the specific and the particular. There are issues of interpretation with the exkoussatoi of Chios. Firstly, he charters deal with the fiscal realities or donations to one monastery (­Nea Moni) on one Aegean island (­Chios) in the eleventh century. Much more evidence would be required to extend the conclusions valid here to other centuries and other provinces of the Byzantine Empire. Secondly, because the exkoussatoi families are identified as ‘­Jewish’, this raises questions as to whether their Jewish identity is a significant element. Are they ‘­Jewish’ because this makes them easily identifiable as a distinct group on the island, or are they treated in this way because they are Jewish and somehow therefore ‘­less truly Byzantine’? This case was a local fiscal treatment for a specific local problem and cannot be extrapolated to a universal for the Empire at various times in its long history (­Oikonomides 1995: 225). Thinking about Byzantium, or the ‘­Christian Roman Empire centred on Constantinople’, ideas about ‘­citizenship’ are not very helpful. Lopez proposed that a focus on either fiscal status (­did the person pay taxes, and to whom?) or the legal contrast between citizen and foreigner could be productive if the sources were available, but they are not (­Lopez 1978 [1974]: ­351–​­2). The Byzantine legal sources do not provide or use concepts of ‘­citizen’ or ‘­citizenship’. The reality of the Byzantine Empire, though it paid ­lip-​­service to its origins in the Roman polity and legal system, did not express belonging in those terms. The seismic shift for ­Byzantium – ​­in common with all the polities of the Mediterranean ­world  – ​­was the transformative impact of religion as the main substructure of social organization. In the Byzantine world, one’s religious 713

Dion C. Smythe

identification triumphed over ethnic, social, and gender roles. Perhaps it is best to say that the religious identification was ‘­most senior’; it did not erase other identities but in the medieval and specifically Byzantine context, it was one that had most effect. In Byzantium, one was a ­slave – ​­doulos – ​­of the basileus in Constantinople, the ­v ice-​­gerent of God on earth, not a citizen of the Empire.

Bibliography Breeze, D.J. and Dobson, B. (­2000) Hadrian’s wall, 4th edn (­London) Cheynet, J.-​­C. (­1996) Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (­­963–​­1210) (­Paris) Johnson, S. (­2004) Hadrian’s wall (­New York) Kaldellis, A. (­2015) The Byzantine Republic: people and power in New Rome (­Cambridge, MA) Lopez, R.S. (­1978 [1974]) ‘­Foreigners in Byzantium’, reprinted as paper 14 in Byzantium and the world around it: economic and Institutional Relations, originally published in Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 44 [= Miscellanea Charles Verlinden] (­Brussels) ­341–​­352 Mango, C. (­1980) Byzantium: the Empire of New Rome (­London) Morris, R. (­1976) ‘­The powerful and the poor in t­ enth-​­century Byzantium: law and reality’, P&P 73, ­3 –​­27 Neville, L. (­2004) Authority in Byzantine provincial society, ­950–​­1100 (­Cambridge) Oikonomides, N. (­1995) ‘­The Jews of Chios (­1049): a group of excusati’, Mediterranean Historical Review 10, ­218–​­225 Palmerston, Lord. H.J.T. 3rd Viscount Palmerston (­1850) ‘­Don Pacifico Speech to the House of Commons’, Wikisource: https://­en.wikisource.org/­w iki/­Don_Pacifico_Speech (­accessed 28 September 2021) Paris, C.C. (­2016) ‘­A ncient, modern, and post-National democracy: deliberation and citizenship between the political and the universal’, in G.C. Kellow and N. Leddy (­eds) On civic republicanism: ancient lessons for global politics (­Toronto) ­89–​­116 Patlagean, E. (­1981) ‘­Byzance, le barbare, l’hérétique et la loi universelle’, in L. Poliakov (­ed.) Ni Juifs ni Grecs: entretiens sur le racisme (­Paris, La Haye, and New York 1978), 8­ 1–​­90; reprinted as paper 15 in id. (­ed.) Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté à Byzance (­London) Roselaar, S.T. (­2016) ‘­Cicero and the Italians: expansion of Empire, creation of law’, in P.J. du Plessis (­ed.) Cicero’s law: rethinking Roman law of the late Republic (­Edinburgh) ­145–​­165 Roymans, N. (­2004a) ‘­Roman frontier politics and the formation of a Batavian polity’, in id. (­ed.) Ethnic identity and imperial power: the Batavians in the early Roman Empire (­A msterdam) ­55–​­66 ——— ​­(­2004b) ‘­Conclusion’, in id. (­ed.) Ethnic identity and imperial power: the Batavians in the early Roman Empire (­A msterdam) ­251–​­260 Sharf, A. (­1971) Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the fourth crusade (­London) Smythe, D.C. (­1991) Byzantine perceptions of the outsider in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: a method, diss. St Andrews (­u npublished) Starr, J. (­1939) The Jews in the Byzantine Empire, ­641–​­1204 (­Athens) Svoronos, N. (­1959) ‘­Recherches sur le cadastre byzantine et la fiscalité aux XIe et XIIe siècles: le cadastre de Thèbes’, Bulletin de correspondence hellénique 83, 1­ –​­145, available at Recherches sur le cadastre byzantin et la fiscalité aux XIe et XIIe siècles: le cadastre de T ­ hèbes -​­Persée (­persee.fr) (­accessed 15 May 2022)

714

INDEX

Note: page numbers followed by ‘n’ or ‘nn’ refer to endnote numbers; spelling variants and the use of singular and plural forms reflect those used throughout the volume. abbuttum (‘partly shaved head’, ‘mark of enslavement’, Akkadian) 91–93, 95–96n31, 95n38 acts of citizenship 49, 125, 128, 130, 132, 134 adoption/s 16, 27, 37, 85, 91, 92, 94, 95n29, 98, 129, 172, 177n30, 302, 303, 306, 308n23, 312, 313, 317, 318, 321–323, 345, 390, 391, 397n16, 397n18, 398n34, 399n48, 489, 490, 493, 558; illegal 14, 296, 297, 299, 301, 303, 306, 322, 323 Aelius Aristides 17, 69, 72, 340n42, 545n28, 548, 556, 557, 559, 559n12, 627, 633 Aeschines 15, 60, 269, 270, 277n12, 287, 330–331, 333–335, 337n7, 338n16, 338n17, 348, 356, 357, 360, 362, 364, 365, 369, 370–375, 377, 381n11, 382n22, 397n5, 400–411, 411n3, 411n4, 411n18, 412n25, 412n26, 423n5 agora 42, 55, 59, 161, 169, 220, 232, 251, 254, 268, 269, 271, 277n26, 291, 328, 332, 335, 337n7, 343, 359, 360, 362, 372, 404, 415, 550 Alexandria 465, 466, 474, 476, 535, 537, 540, 541, 543n13, 544n23, 544n24, 545n33, 640, 641, 643, 644–646, 647n9, 648n19, 648n24, 648n27, 648n30, 649n32, 649n33, 655, 661 Alföldy, Géza 68, 70, 72, 74n19 Anatolia 3, 11, 98–105, 106n19, 107n33, 107n34, 108n40, 132 Anazarbos (in Cilicia) 554 Andocides/Andokides 284, 286, 287, 332, 333, 361, 397n5, 423n13 andreion/-eia (‘male dining society’, Greek) 167–172, 174, 176n3, 176n6, 176n7, 227, 234n10, 274, 506

anthropology 11, 25–33, 49–50, 112, 113, 114, 259, 261n23, 487, 489, 612 Antiochia (in Phrygia) 554–555 Antonine Constitution 4, 5, 8, 12, 18, 64, 66, 71, 125, 497, 627, 634, 640, 652, 653, 655–659, 661–663, 670, 671, 678, 691 Apamea: in Bithynia 557–558; in Phrygia 498 apeleutheros/-oi see: ‘freedman, freedmen’ below Apuleius 96n38, 633–634 arbitration 43, 149, 154, 155, 161n2, 330 arbitrator/s 12, 30, 147, 149, 150, 153–155, 161, 322, 329, 338n13 Archias 73n3, 377, 381n1, 568, 569 Aristogeiton: the litigant 379, 414, 416–417, 422, 423n1, 424n17; the tyrannicide 60, 247, 288 Aristophanes 37, 57, 254, 255, 257, 260n8, 261n19, 289–300, 303, 304, 306, 313, 314, 350, 402, 403, 411n12, 437 Aristotle 7, 16, 36–38, 41, 42, 48, 51, 58, 81, 106n10, 120–122, 156, 159, 171, 179, 182, 204, 205, 212, 213, 214, 218, 226, 228–230, 234n3, 235n16, 241, 242, 248n6, 248n7, 248n9, 261n29, 265, 268, 272, 275, 276n7, 276n9, 305, 318, 319, 329, 333, 344–350, 355, 356, 373, 377, 382n24, 398n27, 400, 416, 421, 425n45, 429–431, 436, 439, 440n2, 446, 453, 455, 476, 480, 489, 506–515, 516n18, 522, 528, 530n3, 545n34, 549, 550, 623, 709 Arrapḫe (north of Babylonia) 89 Arrhonos (in Epirus) 202, 204 Artemis Orthia 256

715

Index artisans 112, 116, 118–120, 153, 507, 555, 583 assembly/-ies 477, 535, 553, 613, 634; Babylonian 7, 81, 83–87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95n11, 95n13, 129, 131; Egyptian 478, 480; Greek 8, 14, 37, 38, 39, 44n12, 51, 60, 134, 154, 160, 165, 179, 186, 194, 199, 214, 230, 244, 247, 268, 273, 285, 287, 290, 291, 293n17, 294n22, 306n1, 314, 328, 332, 333, 335, 337n7, 338n15, 339n33, 344, 345, 356, 360, 364, 365, 366n11, 369, 370, 371, 387, 403, 410, 415, 418–420, 424n32, 430, 433, 446, 449, 452, 461, 463, 520–522, 527, 528, 530n8, 548, 550; Phoenician 4, 11, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 121, 123; Roman 4, 525–527, 529, 531n16, 579, 583, 584, 592, 597, 607, 619, 628, 637n10, 670 association/s 15, 31, 42, 45n31, 129, 175, 228, 230, 234n3, 235n14, 237n55, 346, 378–380, 387–394, 396–397, 398n28, 464, 468, 469n9, 469n23, 473, 475–477, 480, 536, 537, 544n16, 554, 555, 659 Assurbanipal 132, 137n38 astē (‘female citizen’, Greek) 37, 73n12, 198, 199, 244, 264, 317, 322–323, 325n6, 325n13, 333, 350, 372, 644, 645, 646 astos (‘male citizen’, Greek) 13, 37, 169, 170, 199, 240–242, 244–248, 248n5, 248n14, 264, 322, 323, 325n13, 333, 349, 350, 352n22, 645, 646 ateleia (‘exemption from duties/taxes’, Greek) 171–172, 499 Athena 54, 60, 241, 253, 254, 256, 258, 260n10, 260n11, 260n12, 261n25, 285, 362, 366n5, 403, 498 athletes 55–58, 60, 171, 255, 554, 555, 559 athletics 11, 12, 50, 55–61, 171, 184, 188–192, 196, 237n53, 255, 522, 555 atimia (‘dishonour’, ‘disfranchisement’, Greek) 14, 215, 222, 270, 271, 277n26, 287, 289–291, 293n16, 293n17, 327–340, 344–346 Atina (in central Italy) 589, 595, 600n2, 600n3, 611 Augustus 6, 7, 64–70, 520, 537, 541, 591, 599, 612, 620, 655, 657, 670, 711 Aulon 169, 170, 172, 217 autonomy 37, 42, 112, 170, 200, 210, 211, 222, 337n6, 429, 447, 449, 454, 536, 560n21, 569, 644, 659 baby smuggling 13, 14, 296–306, 307n5, 308n29 Babylon 36, 84, 85, 89, 92, 111, 126–133, 137n35, 682 Babylonia 10, 83, 89, 101, 120, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135n3 Babylonian: cities 125, 126, 128–130, 132; citizens/citizenship 81, 82, 126, 130–135;

language and names 135n1, 136n12; Period 121; politics 3, 7, 12, 81, 137n41; society 133; state 125–127, 134, 135n3, 135n6; see also: ‘laws of Hammurabi’ below Babylonians 81, 119, 127, 129, 131, 132, 243, 513, 533 Balibar, Étienne 28, 33, 49 barbarian/s 15, 56, 67, 130, 254, 358, 379, 407, 408, 440, 449, 454, 455, 457, 663, 672–674, 676, 683–685, 695, 711; law 674–676 Battos 147, 149, 151, 154, 156 behaviour 2, 9, 11, 48, 49, 51–57, 60, 61, 112, 206n12, 215, 234, 236n50, 245, 256, 259, 270, 287, 290, 329–332, 334, 336, 338n12, 338n15, 338n21, 338n22, 355, 356, 359, 361–364, 366, 374, 382n25, 405, 436, 450, 494, 553, 606, 609–611, 654, 674, 684 Berenice in the Cyrenaica 475, 476, 537 Berenice Troglodytica 474 birtherism 400, 401, 405, 410, 411n6 Bithynia 553, 555, 556, 560n23, 659 Blok, Josine 8, 11, 50, 81–83, 106n10, 106n11, 161n7, 200, 242, 267, 312, 315, 333, 342, 370, 373, 374, 393, 395, 396, 549 body 11, 50, 52, 54, 55, 217, 283–286, 290, 292, 293n16, 405, 506, 540, 696 Borsippa (in Babylonia) 126, 128, 131, 133, 136n30 bouleutērion (‘council building’, Greek) 14, 356, 360–366, 366n13, 367n14, 367n15, 367n16, 415 Bourdieu, Pierre 11, 52, 53 burial 100, 147, 231, 233, 237n55, 258, 267, 290, 291, 380, 399n44, 445, 454, 462, 466, 470n31, 583, 604, 679 Cadaster of Thebes 711 Caesar 4, 17, 68, 535, 536, 571, 612, 613, 618, 621, 658 Caracalla 4, 6, 70, 71, 74n17, 130, 497, 545n28, 560n20, 632, 634, 637n19, 640, 652–654, 656, 659, 670, 707 career 38, 217, 220, 269, 363, 400, 401, 404, 407, 408, 514, 549, 552, 554, 558, 627, 630, 636, 637n17, 646 Carthage 7, 16, 120, 121, 148, 274, 444, 445, 450, 457, 505–515, 515n2, 516n5, 516n7, 516n21, 516n23, 577, 587, 597, 618, 625n3, 631, 633–635; Carthaginian constitution 120 Carthaginians 7, 16, 121, 445, 450–454, 456, 457, 458n26, 505–515, 515n1, 516n6, 516n13, 516n18, 517n31, 566, 583, 585, 625n3, 633, 634 Cassiodorus 679–681 Cassius Dio 652

716

Index censor 17, 515n2, 523, 524, 556, 578, 579, 584, 591, 593, 595–598, 601n23, 601n24, 605, 616–620, 625n5 census 4, 99, 168, 422, 430, 431, 433, 488, 493, 523, 524, 526, 578, 579, 584, 585, 591, 594–598, 616–618, 620–622, 625n3, 625n4, 625n5, 645, 654, 662 Chaeronea/Chaironeia/Chaironea (in Boeotia): battle at 15, 267, 378, 401, 410, 414–418, 420–422, 423n5, 467, 488 children 13, 37, 60, 88, 92, 108n49, 114, 171, 180, 198, 201–205, 231, 243, 253, 257, 258, 268, 288, 312, 315–324, 325n14, 343, 345, 347–350, 372, 373, 376, 405, 415, 416, 418, 420, 429, 436, 453, 461, 465, 466, 468n3, 487, 491, 494, 496, 520, 521, 628, 629, 642, 643, 647n3, 647n11, 647n15, 648n18, 648n20, 649n33, 655–657, 662, 671; illegitimate 14, 296–308, 313, 314, 316, 321, 323, 324, 348, 372, 373, 375, 376, 406, 500; legitimate 258, 312, 313, 314, 316, 346, 375, 430, 490, 498, 551, 646, 654; of non-citizens or mixed marriages 5, 6, 41, 134, 244, 582, 629, 641–643, 645, 646, 656, 661, 672; see also: ‘adoption/s’ above Christianity, Christian ideas 5, 9, 18, 65, 70, 71, 632, 669, 672, 677, 682–685, 691, 692, 694, 696–698, 700–702, 703n14, 703n18, 707–711; Christian emperors 4, 672, 683; Christian Empire 708, 709, 713; Christian saints 692, 696, 701; Christianization 18, 71, 606, 610, 702, 708, 709 Christians 66, 70, 71, 632, 671, 672, 673, 681–683, 685, 691, 694–696, 700, 701, 707, 708, 710, 712 Cicero 64, 71, 73n3, 256, 424n17, 500, 542, 564–570, 585, 587, 589, 590, 594, 595, 599, 607, 610–612, 623, 624, 658, 678, 679, 709 Cilicia 474, 482n10, 482n11, 494, 536, 554, 658, 679, 708 Cimon 189–191 citizenship law/s: Pericles’ citizenship law 37, 134, 199, 203, 204, 241, 242, 265, 288, 303, 312, 314, 315, 319, 325, 347, 370, 395, 411n8, 418; Solon’s laws 41, 59–61, 134, 177n38, 237n55, 269, 285, 313, 314, 324, 334, 346, 347, 401; see also: ‘Antonine Constitution’ above; ‘law/s’ below civic identity 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 128, 129, 135, 188, 259, 312, 315, 327, 347, 371, 381, 409, 421, 682, 685 civic rights 5, 6, 12, 155, 179, 201, 270, 271, 327, 328, 346, 349, 433, 463, 500, 551, 553, 554, 558, 631, 636n4, 641, 670, 675, 691, 701, 703n9

civic subdivisions 129, 226–234, 234n3, 447, 490, 549 civil war 17, 65, 68, 74n28, 74n39, 273, 536, 569, 618, 624 class: property 272; social 13, 32, 33, 41, 42, 50, 51, 83, 91, 95n15, 122, 180, 209, 213–215, 217, 244, 251, 252, 260n5, 287, 314, 422, 430, 455, 475, 489, 511, 525, 550, 551, 582, 583, 606, 640, 712 Cleisthenes/Kleisthenes 153, 156, 158, 228, 345, 347, 617; reforms of 39–40, 154, 156, 227, 228, 236n50, 288, 230, 312, 316, 345–347, 617; tyrant of Sicyon (grandfather of Cleisthenes) 228 client/s (Lat. cliens/-ntes): of patrons in Rome 522, 526, 530n8, 570, 585, 600n10, 655 (see also: ‘patron/s’ below); of bankers 378; of sex workers 322, 331, 380; of Pindar 192, 195; of speechwriters 236n35, 330, 371, 379, 383n49 Codex Theodosianus see: ‘Theodosian Code’ below coexistence 240, 328, 447 colonization 7, 151, 152; Greek 7, 149, 152, 154, 158, 210, 273, 277n28; Roman 7, 612 colony/-ies 7, 120, 450, 475, 506, 513, 519, 530n1, 572n22, 712; founder of Greek colony (Gr. oikistēs) 12, 68, 147, 149–156, 160, 161, 187, 188, 444, 452; Greek 149, 150, 152–154, 156–160, 188, 205, 228, 254, 276n6, 272, 446, 448, 495, 497, 586; Phoenician 7, 506, 513; Roman/Latin (colonia/-ae) 17, 65, 66, 68–70, 74n32, 558, 567, 569, 578, 581, 585, 586, 590, 591, 594, 597–599, 601n25, 602n31, 602n32, 602n35, 612, 613, 617, 620, 621, 625n3, 632–635, 637n9, 637n14, 654, 678, 712 Constitutio Antoniniana see: ‘Antonine Constitution’ above corruption 14, 31, 182, 217, 356, 362, 370–372, 405, 406, 589 council/s 8, 11, 38, 66, 112–120, 123, 154, 186, 221, 286, 328, 330, 332, 333, 335, 337n7, 357, 360–363, 365, 366, 367n13, 367n16, 381n8, 392, 415, 419, 420, 431, 433, 452, 453, 463, 465, 513, 535, 550, 554, 555, 557, 660, 679–681, 686n5; of elders 7, 85, 113, 115–118, 120, 122, 123, 221 Crete/Krete 5, 36, 57, 58, 148, 165, 166, 168, 170–172, 174, 175, 176n19, 205, 206, 234n10, 234n11, 274, 434, 499, 506 Cyrenaeans/Cyrenians/Kyrenians 147, 150, 152, 153, 156, 157, 192, 431 Cyrenaica 474–476, 481n6, 536, 537 Cyrene/Kyrene 12, 147–157, 159, 187, 192–194, 228, 237n52, 377, 431, 655, 658

717

Index Damophilos 192–194 Davies, John K. 6, 8, 9, 19n1, 203, 204, 370, 371, 578 debt/s 89, 90, 98, 131, 271, 374, 380, 420, 493, 497, 525, 579; bondage 41, 66, 88, 92, 285, 579, 586; public debtors 271, 333, 338n20, 339n33, 417, 419, 425n44; remission (Akkadian andurārum, Sumerian amar-gi4) 88, 89, 90 decree/s 14, 15, 43, 44n12, 60, 100, 101, 102, 104, 122, 166, 169, 170, 172, 175, 177n27, 205, 206n3, 206n6, 206n11, 226, 229, 232, 233, 236n42, 237n56, 271, 273, 286–288, 294n21, 315, 325n7, 334–336, 339n25, 344, 345, 363, 364, 374, 378, 403, 414–423, 423n7, 423n9, 423n14, 423n16, 424n29, 424n32, 424n39, 430, 433–435, 437, 439, 452, 463, 465, 469n9, 469n10, 479, 482n32, 487–489, 496, 499, 537, 552, 554, 555, 568, 593, 620, 659, 711; foundation 150, 151, 155, 157, 158; granting citizenship/naturalization 13, 15, 198, 200–203, 205, 206n10, 318, 319, 343, 346, 378, 414–423, 423n12, 433, 463, 470n29, 493, 494, 496–498, 500, 521, 522, 527, 548, 554, 555, 558 defraudation see: ‘fraud’ below deme/s 14, 15, 40, 42, 57, 210, 226–233, 234n8, 235n29, 236n44, 236n47, 236n49, 237n51, 237n53, 237n54, 237n55, 237n56, 250, 255, 264, 269, 277n22, 285, 288, 289, 291, 293n10, 294n23, 303, 312, 315–320, 322, 343–346, 351n7, 369, 371–375, 379, 380, 381n2, 381n8, 381n16, 382n26, 387–392, 394–396, 397n9, 397n19, 397n21, 398n31, 398n36, 398n39, 398n41, 398n43, 401, 403, 433, 462, 490, 493, 644, 645; demesmen 229, 230, 233, 237n55, 255, 293n10, 317–320, 323, 345, 371–373, 382n22, 394, 466; demeswomen 236n45; register/list 287–289, 369, 372, 381, 403 Demonax 147, 149–159, 161, 161n7, 228 Demophilos 14, 294n21, 369–371, 374, 379, 381n9 dēmopoiētos/-oi (‘naturalized citizen’, Greek) 16, 490, 491, 493, 498 Demosthenes 15, 229, 233, 242, 268–270, 277n12, 284–286, 292n2, 292n6, 296, 297, 299, 306, 306n1, 317, 321, 328–330, 333–336, 338n16, 339n33, 340n48, 344, 347, 348, 356–360, 362–365, 366n5, 366n11, 369, 371, 372, 374, 375, 377–379, 381n11, 383n45, 388, 389, 391, 393, 394, 397n5, 398n26, 400–411, 412n25, 414–416, 418, 419, 424n32, 491, 522 descent 8, 10, 11, 15, 27, 37, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 147, 181, 204, 226, 229, 244, 247, 264, 268, 269, 271, 312, 319, 325n11, 325n13, 347, 370, 374, 388–396, 397n19, 398n24, 399n44, 399n46, 399n48, 402, 410, 489, 492, 496, 513, 674, 675

diapsēphisis (‘review of citizen lists’, Greek) 14, 229, 293n11, 369, 374, 375, 377, 380, 381n1, 382n22, 388, 389; see also: ‘deme register/list’ above Dio Chrysostomus 17, 548, 553, 557, 559 Diondas 421, 423n1 Dionysia: City 257, 261n19, 298, 344, 376; Rural 233, 376 Dionysius/Dionysios: of Gortyn 166, 169–171; of Halicarnassus 294n22, 372, 458n8, 540, 541, 580, 582, 610; I of Syracuse 153, 449–452, 456; II of Syracuse 449, 514 disability/-ies: because of atimia 215, 331, 332, 335, 336 (see also: ‘atimia’ above); legal 329, 671; political 293n14 dis(en)franchisement 15, 26, 215, 271, 287, 328, 339n30, 371, 405, 410, 417–422, 423n13, 423n14, 425n44, 613, 672 dishonour 296, 327–332, 334, 337n8, 338n15, 346; see also: ‘atimia’ above Dodona (in Epirus) 13, 198, 201–203, 301, 436, 461 doulos/-oi (‘slave/s’, Greek) 58, 172, 209, 218, 244, 707–709, 711, 714 Dunbar’s number 231–232, 236n48 Egypt 10, 19, 104, 111, 117, 148, 212, 233, 466, 470n35, 483n41, 493, 499, 536, 540, 541, 543n9, 653, 659, 661; Hellenistic/Ptolemaic 5, 16, 473–481; Roman 18, 639–641, 643–646, 647n2, 647n5, 648n26 Egyptian: administration 116–118; chōra (‘territory’, Greek) 640; kings and pharaohs 101, 119, 243, 370; law 660, 661; poleis (‘city-states’, Greek) 18, 473, 474, 476–481, 483n40, 541 Egyptians 120, 122, 129, 245, 379, 469n23, 480, 483n44, 540, 541, 544n18, 641, 645, 646, 647n4, 648n22, 648n23, 655, 656, 659, 661 elite instrumentalism 604–607, 613 Emporion (in the Iberian peninsula) 148, 444, 453–455 enfranchisement 2, 15, 17, 33, 34n5, 48, 49, 57, 64, 68, 70, 105, 134, 169, 218, 219, 223, 273, 275, 414, 417–422, 424n29, 425n44, 430, 450, 494, 515, 527, 528, 541, 564–567, 570–571, 590, 593, 599, 601n17, 611, 620, 623–624, 652, 662, 671, 678, 680 enslavement 6, 41, 66–68, 84, 88–93, 95n30, 39n96, 172–173, 285–286, 288, 289, 361, 414, 456, 458n31, 530, 658, 696; see also: ‘slavery’ below epigraphy 72, 466, 498, 580, 582–585, 587, 630 epiklēros/-oi (‘heiress/es’, Greek) 182, 205, 261n27, 321, 346 Epirus 2, 13, 148, 198–206, 206n9

718

Index equality 2, 4, 28, 31, 32, 38, 56, 59, 67, 71, 147, 149–154, 157, 159, 174, 175, 180, 214, 272, 359, 440, 448, 454, 522, 530n7, 539, 542, 585, 698; see also: ‘inequality’ below Ergoteles 194–195 Eshnunna (in Sumer) 91, 92, 96n32 Etruscan 17, 148, 577–587, 592 European Union 49, 72, 73, 74n40 Euxitheos/Euxitheus 234n8, 294n21, 317, 371–375, 382n20, 382n26, 383n38, 388–389, 391, 394, 398nn35–39, 399n44, 404, 411n15 exclude/d (groups, individuals) 1, 3, 4, 14, 31, 58, 114, 171, 200, 215, 229, 271, 291, 312, 314, 319, 323, 324, 334, 337n7, 343–345, 347–349, 373, 430–432, 435, 438–439, 448, 492–494, 548, 569, 578–579, 585, 644, 671–672, 674 exclusion/exclusivity 2, 3, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 28, 51, 58–60, 104, 113, 134, 153, 171, 215, 234n3, 244–246, 248, 251, 252, 255, 257–258, 268, 272, 274, 284, 289, 292, 300, 303, 313, 318, 327–328, 334, 336, 337n5, 338n22, 340n45, 346, 376, 380, 421, 422, 429, 430, 432, 433, 436, 439–440, 479, 524, 527, 548, 558–559, 592, 600n12, 609, 611, 643–644, 681, 697, 701, 707 exile/s, exiled 12, 38, 85, 134, 182, 184–196, 202, 205, 215, 226, 235n27, 285, 336, 405, 407, 408, 417, 420–421, 423nn12–15, 431, 447–451, 456, 500, 512, 514, 516n25, 521, 586, 710, 713; Alexander’s Exiles Decree 229 feast/s 155, 174, 188, 233, 237n52, 244, 255, 274–275, 323, 344, 398n37, 697, 698, 703n20 festival/s 5, 16, 39, 57–59, 103, 106n19, 108n40, 131, 188, 194, 250, 253, 255–256, 258–259, 260n13, 261n19, 261n26, 274, 306n1, 316, 317, 318, 324, 344, 346, 351n3, 357, 376–377, 402, 409, 419, 435–437, 440n3, 449, 469n5, 554, 579, 584, 587n2, 589, 610–611, 683, 710 Flavius Josephus 17, 121, 482n24, 535–542, 544n23, 545n32, 641 foreigner/s 5, 14, 15, 16, 19n2, 19n3, 38, 43, 50, 57, 59, 101, 106n19, 122, 128, 134, 135n7, 169–170, 173, 174, 176n3, 176n17, 177n31, 200, 210, 216, 245, 251, 252, 255, 260n10, 261n20, 268, 273, 285, 289–291, 312, 315, 318–320, 322, 334–337, 372, 377, 378, 387, 391, 397n20, 400, 402, 403, 405–406, 410, 417, 419, 421, 429–430, 432–435, 439, 440n2, 450, 463, 466, 467, 469n5, 470nn34–36, 477, 487–488, 490, 493–494, 496, 497, 500, 507, 514, 521, 523, 535, 540–541, 552, 553, 564–565, 568, 579–580, 583, 584, 621, 632, 639, 655, 660–661, 672, 692, 711–713; foreign wives 37, 133–134; foreign women 12, 129, 132–133, 315, 435, 496, 656; see also: ‘resident alien/s’ below; ‘xenos’ below

fraud, fraudster, fraudulent 14, 92, 289, 296–297, 300, 304–306, 315, 322–323, 564; defraudation 151–152 freedman, freedmen 70, 95n26, 166, 172–173, 218–220, 223, 286, 291, 373, 377, 383n43, 433, 465, 487, 506, 522–529, 530n1, 531n11, 531n13, 531n14, 531n21, 565, 629, 631, 641, 644, 653–655, 663, 663n8, 671, 676; freedwomen 291; see also: ‘apeleutheros/-oi’ above; ‘libertus/-ti’ below freedom/s 6, 29, 42, 43, 45n35, 60, 64–66, 70, 90–92, 131, 135, 137n47, 170, 175, 205, 218–220, 285, 287, 315, 348, 377, 380, 414, 417, 419, 421, 433, 437, 461, 487–488, 522–525, 528, 585, 628–629, 672, 691–702; see also: ‘liberty’ below Gauthier, Philippe 4, 467, 487–488, 498–500, 519–520, 528, 542, 549, 551 Gigthis (in Tripolitania, modern Tunisia) 630 Gildas 684 Gortyn (in Crete), Gortynian 57, 58, 148, 166, 168–175, 176n10, 176n11, 176n14, 176n17, 176n19, 176nn23–25, 177n29, 177n30, 177n35, 205, 234n11, 470n31, 499 government/s 1, 11–12, 29, 48, 51, 66, 67, 82, 94, 99, 100, 103, 108n47, 112, 118, 123, 134–135, 160, 236n40, 256, 268, 343, 344, 348–350, 439, 440n2, 453, 454, 473, 475, 476, 481, 507, 582, 583, 599, 611, 618, 621–622, 625, 633, 680, 681, 708, 710, 712; governmental apparatus 608, 712; governmentality 29, 622 graphē paranomōn (‘public prosecution for proposing an illegal decree’, Greek) 134, 333, 414, 417, 421 Gregory of Tours 96n38, 679, 681 Gylon 408–409 gymnasium (Gr. gymnasion/-ia) 42, 55–58, 61, 169, 171, 174, 176n23, 216, 447, 477, 534; gymnasial class/group 640, 648n23, 648n30 habitus (‘lifestyle’, Bourdieu) 11, 50, 52–53 ham (‘the people’, Punic) 507–508, 512, 516n9 Hamilcar Barca 445, 507, 509, 511, 513, 516n10 Hamilcar the Magonid 509–511, 514, 517n35 Hannibal 505–515, 515n1, 516n25, 517n28, 609 Hannibalic War 597, 608–610 Hanno 511–513, 516n20, 516n24 Hansen, Mogens H. 8, 36, 129, 211, 229, 231, 333, 335, 337n5, 342, 370, 422, 470n35 Ḫatti (the Hittites, central Anatolia) 11, 98–105, 105n4, 105n5, 106n15, 106n19, 107n22, 107n23, 107n25, 108n42, 108n46, 108n49; ‘men of Ḫatti’ 3, 100–104, 107n25, 108n49 Ḫattuša (capital of the Ḫatti) 98, 104, 105, 105n4, 105n6, 106n15, 106n19, 107n25

719

Index hegemony 69, 213, 220, 246, 357, 453, 456, 457, 515, 590, 594, 618, 660; hegemonic 15, 94, 112–113, 246, 447, 450, 455, 456, 586 helot/s 41, 180, 183, 209, 211, 214, 216–223, 251, 256, 522 Heracleopolis/Herakleopolis (in Egypt) 475, 477, 479, 482n13, 482n14, 482n19, 536, 544n13; Heracleopolite nome 474, 475 Herodotus 13, 54, 56, 58, 122, 129, 153, 155–160, 181, 182, 185, 189, 190, 210, 214, 228, 233, 235n22, 235n25, 240–248, 297–298, 302, 305, 308n29, 346, 509, 522 hetaira/-ai (‘female companion/s’, ‘courtesan/s’, Greek) 321–323, 371, 375–377, 379, 382nn29–35 hetaireia/-eiai, hetairia/-iai (‘political club/s’, ‘brotherhood/s’, Greek) 155, 161n5, 171, 172, 175, 378, 506 hetairoi (‘comrades’, Greek) 151, 521, 530n5 Hittite state 98–105, 105n6, 106n12, 106n13, 107n35, 108n42 homoios, -ia (pl. homoioi, -iai, ‘the same’, ‘equal/s’, Greek) 58, 59, 149–153, 156, 158, 159, 161, 179–183, 213–221 honorary: citizenship 433, 551; consulship 202; decree/s 166, 202, 378, 434, 479, 494, 500, 548; dignity (priestly) 637n9; inscription/s 537, 550, 552, 560n20; leader 513; meals 274; statue 60; title/s 438, 632; see also: ‘honorific’ next entry honorific: (grant of) citizenship 17, 202, 229, 549, 551, 559, 652, 654; decree/s 334, 374, 419, 433, 463, 465, 469n9, 469n10, 554; epitaphs 611; inscription/s 122, 551, 611, 631; positions 653; practice/s 552, 559, 560n14; title/s 122, 549, 555; see also: ‘honorary’ above honour/s, honouring 5, 8, 14, 38, 40, 51, 58, 59–60, 68, 72, 122, 153, 156, 157, 169–171, 201–203, 206, 206n6, 232, 236n49, 245, 258, 261n30, 264, 265, 269, 284, 301, 327–337, 344, 358–360, 366, 378–379, 404, 405, 433, 437–439, 444, 452, 453, 463, 469n28, 478, 490, 491, 494, 498, 515, 520, 539, 548, 550–552, 554, 557, 558, 565 hybris (‘insolence’, ‘outrage’, Greek) 329, 337n10, 337n11, 377, 383n39, 712 hybristic/hubristic 254, 329, 338n12 Hyperides/Hypereides 15, 333, 372, 383n49, 397n5, 414–423, 423n6, 423n9, 424n17

312, 387, 393, 434, 436, 467, 469n5, 521, 529, 567, 701 individual grant/s (of citizenship and franchise) 13, 64, 201, 205, 494, 495, 564, 566, 567, 655 inequality 30, 31, 64, 66, 128, 174, 181, 205, 294n26 inheritance/s 12, 14, 84, 104, 134, 135, 149, 150, 155, 158, 179, 205, 268, 273, 300, 312–316, 320–325, 345–348, 372, 377, 379–380, 389–393, 438, 508, 610, 628, 643, 654, 662, 670–672, 674 intermarriage/s 4, 222, 433, 496, 497, 506, 513, 514, 515, 585, 676; see also: ‘marriage/s, mixed’ below intersection/s, intersectionality 18, 175, 259, 590 Isaeus 302, 313, 316–317, 320–321, 323–324, 325n1, 325n12, 347–348, 372, 375, 377, 379, 381n15, 382n22, 389, 390–391, 393, 394, 397n5, 397n12, 397n19, 398n26, 398n31 Isidore of Seville 645, 679 Isin, Engin F. 6, 25, 49, 82, 125 isopolity/-ies (Gr. isopoliteia) 3, 42, 43, 45n42, 265, 433, 452, 463–465, 469n26, 494–500, 534, 585; see also: ‘sympolity (Gr. sympoliteia)’ below Jew/s 16, 476, 478, 480, 483n44, 533–543, 544n13, 544n18, 544n19, 544n24, 710, 712–713; of Chios 712–713 Jewish: authors 17, 476, 533; citizens 544n26, 712; citizenship 537, 541–542, 545n33; community/-ies 478, 535, 539, 540, 542, 543, 544n16; constitution, politeia 481, 541–542, 544n26; literature, sources, texts, writings 477, 533–543; people 533–543, 544n26, 710, 712; politeuma/ta 475, 477, 479, 482n13, 482n14, 482n19, 536–538, 543–544n13; see also: ‘politeuma/ta’ below Jewishness 533, 536, 538, 541–542, 544n26 Johnson, Boris 64, 70–73 Jones, Nicholas F. 42, 200, 230, 234–237 Josephus see: ‘Flavius Josephus’ above Junian Latins see: ‘Latins, Junian’ below jurisdiction/s 134, 169, 313, 351n7, 456, 527, 536, 555, 556, 560n21, 568, 594, 620, 655, 658–660, 712

ilkum (‘duty’, Akkadian) 92, 96n37 immigration see: ‘migration/s’ below imperial ideology 69, 272 inclusion (political, social) 9, 12, 31, 51, 68, 69, 74n23, 149, 153, 203, 252, 255, 257, 272, 274,

Kaldellis, Anthony 709 Kaška (in Ḫatti), men of 102, 104, 108n42 kingship 111, 115, 121, 122, 241, 533, 534, 581, 583; see also: ‘monarchy/-ies’ below kinship 13, 14, 15, 39, 69, 82, 126, 128, 137n39, 226, 231, 235n13, 312, 314, 318, 346–347, 350, 351n9, 352n22, 388, 390, 490, 521, 580, 592, 594, 595, 662

720

Index klēros/-oi (‘lot/s’, ‘portion/s of land’, ‘inheritance/s’, Greek) 149–152, 157–159, 161, 180–183, 214, 215, 222, 272–274 koinon/koina (‘shared thing/s’, ‘federacy/-ies’, Greek) 13, 201, 203, 204, 269–270, 272, 291, 374, 380, 464, 469n26, 477, 482n28, 496, 551–553, 560n15, 560n16 koinonia/-ai (‘communion/s’, ‘association/s’, Greek) 177n39, 476 koinopoliteia (‘citizenship of a koinon’, Greek) 465, 469n26 Korydalla (in Lydia) 552–553 Kyrene see: ‘Cyrene’ above land ownership 179, 183, 195, 205, 273, 291, 527, 553 Late Bronze Age (LBA) 11, 98, 104, 112–118 Latin hagiography 692 Latins 564, 566, 585, 587, 593, 601n17, 654; Junian 520, 524, 629, 631, 654, 663, 671 Latosion (in Gortyn) 166, 172–173 law/s: civil 4, 130, 481, 566, 628, 645, 660, 661; of Eshnunna 91–92, 96n32; family 44n7, 301, 324, 490, 620; of Hammurabi 84, 88–89, 92, 93, 95n15, 95n21; Hittite (HL) 100–101, 104, 107n23, 108n49; inheritance 104, 134, 155, 273, 312–315, 320–321, 324, 438, 662; inscribed 265–266, 343; Jewish 535–542, 544n19; local 556, 621, 657, 659–663; of Lycurgus (Spartan), Rhetra 44n20, 58, 154, 182; Roman 4, 6, 71, 95n26, 556, 578, 599, 602n36, 620, 623–624, 628, 642, 644, 645, 648n26, 654, 655, 658–663, 671, 674–676, 678, 686n3, 703n9, 709; Visigothic 675, 679–680; see also: ‘barbarian law’ above; ‘citizenship law/s’ above; ‘lex’ below; ‘marriage/s, law/s’ below lawsuit/s 15, 81, 85, 92, 168, 345, 349, 369, 409 legal: action/s 5, 168, 290, 322, 323, 628, 661; category/-ies 18, 95n26, 308n29, 489, 669, 674–676; charge/s 269, 405, 407, 408, 411n20; discourse 241, 277n17, 327, 335, 336; document/s, documentation 11, 30, 32, 89, 128, 273; fiction 291, 602n36, 612, 676; framework, landscape 18, 523, 599, 602n36, 669, 670, 675, 678; meaning, sense 14, 327, 328, 350, 454, 473, 489, 601n22; penalty 327, 328, 329, 332, 333, 338n23, 340n47; pluralism 18, 658, 661; procedure/s 90, 300, 424n34, 531n20, 565, 674, 675; proceedings 84, 86, 87, 168, 169, 339n36; protection/s 4, 120, 129, 432, 617, 670; relationship/s 313, 318, 526, 654, 657–658, 662; rights 83, 130, 329, 330, 331, 671, 683; status/es 1, 5, 10, 13, 42, 52, 93, 101, 104, 132, 168, 170, 173, 199, 272, 275, 277n21, 297, 299, 301, 302, 308n30, 313, 320, 344, 351n8, 411n19, 417, 475, 478,

479, 489, 628, 632, 653, 654, 670, 674–678; system/s 170, 313, 481, 623, 671, 676, 713; term/s, terminology 12, 16, 135, 331, 420, 473, 474, 627; see also: ‘adoption/s’ above; ‘children’ above; ‘disability/-ies, legal’ above lex (‘law’, ‘statute’, Latin): Aelia Sentia 70; agraria 594, 601n22, 602n36; Appuleia 567; Fufia Caninia 70, 523n2; Irnitana 661; Iulia 4, 568–570; Iunia (Norbana) 6, 520, 524, 629, 654; Licinia de sodaliciis 589; Minicia 628, 643, 661; Osca Tabulae Bantinae 602n36; Ovinia 625n5; Plautia Papiria 569–570; Pompeia 555–556; Publilia 601n24; repetundarum 568; Ripuaria 676; Rupilia 658; Salica 676; Visellia 531n11 libertas (‘liberty’, Latin) 68, 74n20, 525, 692–701, 703n9, 703n18, 703n22, 703n23 libertus/-ti (‘freedman/-men’, Latin) 16, 525–527, 531n12; see also: ‘freedman, freedmen’ above liberty 15, 65–66, 83, 96n38, 418, 421, 438, 523, 654, 658, 671, 698, 701; civic liberties 212; see also: ‘freedom/s’ above Libyphoenician/s 506, 510, 511, 513–514, 517n30, 566 lifestyle 11, 48–61, 183, 186, 215, 222, 269, 293n16, 376, 545n32, 578, 627; see also: ‘habitus’ above liturgy/-ies: (Christian rites) 18, 691, 692, 697–701, 703n18, 703n19; (public duties) 39, 122, 232, 379, 392, 397n22, 429, 434, 435, 437, 438, 548, 552, 553, 557, 568, 643, 680, 683 Livy 454–455, 505, 507, 508, 510, 513, 564, 566, 578, 581, 583, 584, 585, 591–593, 595, 596, 600n12, 607, 609, 612 Lopez, Robert S. 711–713 lot/s, lottery 12, 149–151, 155, 157–159, 161, 180, 363, 374, 407, 431, 496, 498, 520, 602n27, 640; drawing of 151, 159, 180, 498; see also: ‘klēros’ above Louis, Robert 202, 487, 552 Lycia 520–521, 551, 554, 559n10, 559n12, 560n15, 560n23; Lycian society and institutions 244, 464, 551–553, 559, 559nn11–13; Lycians 474, 482n12, 536, 658 Lycurgus; (Athenian orator and politician) 267–268, 272, 277n12, 357, 361, 397n5, 415, 416, 420–423, 423n5, 424n39, 467–468; (Spartan reformer) 58, 147, 149, 160, 180, 181, 182, 216 Lysias 236n35, 272, 284, 330, 352n23, 356, 361–363, 376, 377, 392, 397n5 magistrate/s 66, 68, 150, 172, 203, 211, 212, 247, 328, 398n39, 408, 446, 447, 464, 465, 467, 469n28, 500, 505, 507, 510, 512, 519,

721

Index 520, 523, 524, 526, 535, 537, 557, 567, 581–582, 583–584, 589, 597, 607, 610–611, 617, 618, 621–622, 628, 637n9, 654, 660, 663, 670, 680, 710; see also: ‘official/s’ below Magnesia (imagined polity) 272–273; (on the Meander/Maiander) 436, 463 Mago 506, 510, 511; Magonid/s 509, 510, 511, 513; see also: ‘Hamilcar the Magonid’ above Mango, Cyril 707 manumission (Lat. manumissio) 5–6, 16, 40–41, 44n27, 91, 129, 173, 203, 205, 218–219, 286, 292n7, 379, 414, 417, 418, 420, 421–422, 437, 439, 450, 469n6, 497, 519–531, 564, 565, 628, 636n5, 643, 654, 662, 670–671, 674–675, 676 Marcus Aurelius 74n36, 629, 642, 653 Marduk-rēmanni of Sippar 127–129 Mari (in Babylon) 7, 89, 91 Marius 565, 567, 572n21 marriage/s 12, 14, 37, 54, 85, 87, 90, 95n29, 104, 133–135, 137n43, 181, 182, 200, 204, 244, 246, 257, 258, 268, 269, 271, 275, 289, 293n14, 293n15, 298, 300, 301, 303, 307n21, 307n22, 312–315, 317, 319–323, 325n6, 325n11, 325n14, 346, 372–377, 380, 403, 405, 408, 410, 461, 490, 493, 494, 496, 513–514, 517n31, 520–521, 525, 527, 530n6, 548, 551, 553, 560n15, 585, 628, 629, 636, 641–646, 647n14, 653, 654, 656, 657, 659–663, 671–672; contract/s 133, 136n14, 659–663; law/s 244, 246, 289, 373, 374, 628; mixed 37, 133, 134, 204, 289, 293n14, 293n15, 315, 322, 496, 629, 643–644, 657; see also: ‘intermarriage/s’ above Marshall, Thomas H. 11, 34n3, 64–69, 73n7, 74n18, 82 Massalia (modern Marseille) 148, 444, 453–454, 456, 458n27 Mauretania 628–631, 633, 635, 657 Mauss, Marcel 11, 52 medieval city/-ies 9, 683–685 medieval citizenship 71, 681 Megacles 190–192, 550 Memphis (in Egypt) 148, 474, 479–480, 483n41 ‘men of the town’ 102–104, 108n41 meson (‘middle’, Greek) 151, 159–160 metaphor/s 3, 8, 13, 16, 137n35, 158, 160, 259, 264–272, 277n11, 277n12, 277n18, 277n19, 278n38, 283, 285, 365, 408–410, 533, 537–538, 542, 613; civic terminology as 13, 16, 264–276, 277n12, 277n19, 278n38, 409, 533, 537–538, 542; conceptual 266–267, 272, 277n11, 277n19 metechein (‘to have a share’, Greek) 48, 50–51, 147, 150, 157, 265–272, 276n6, 276n7, 278n36, 342–348, 373, 489, 499; see also: ‘sharing’ below

metic/s (Gr. metoikos/-oi) 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 19n2, 40–41, 44n25, 44n26, 50, 55, 134, 209, 212, 213, 220, 248n9, 248n14, 253, 254, 258, 260n16, 261n20, 268, 273, 275, 277n21, 286, 289, 291, 292n6, 294n23, 312, 319, 323, 324, 334–337, 343–345, 347, 349, 350, 351n3, 367n18, 372, 373, 377, 379, 380, 416, 417, 421–423, 429, 432–436, 439–440, 440n3, 461–468, 469n5, 469n6, 469n21, 492, 499, 519, 523, 527–529, 540, 560n21, 577, 579; residence as (Gr. metoikia) 261n20, 469n5; tax (Gr. metoikion) 254, 292n6, 334, 343, 461, 463, 527, 555; see also: ‘resident alien/s’ below Midias/Meidias 296–297, 299, 306, 328–330, 338n12, 378–379 migration/s (immigration, emigration) 2, 8, 16, 30, 69, 93, 134, 152–153, 156, 184, 271, 445, 461, 468, 480, 550, 580, 583, 586, 593, 653, 684, 707 Minyans 157, 245 mobility/-ies 15, 17, 93, 127, 137n47, 153, 189, 218, 380, 445, 450, 455–456, 468, 499, 500, 549, 555, 577–578, 585, 587, 612; immobility 655, 656 monarchy/-ies 12, 83, 99, 111, 113, 119, 120–121, 123, 203, 453, 538, 582, 616, 623, 624, 678, 681; monarch/s (Gr. monarchos) 4, 111–113, 115, 117, 120, 121, 226, 450, 491, 578; monarchic rule 67, 111, 121, 243, 578, 579, 583, 625n8; see also: ‘kingship’ above multiple citizenship/s 8, 17, 498, 548–559, 560n23 municipium/-ia (‘township/s’, ‘municipality/ies’, Latin) 17, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73n10, 455, 570, 581, 587, 589, 590, 593–595, 598, 599, 600n3, 601n16, 601n17, 601n20, 602n32, 622, 630–635, 637n9, 637n14, 654, 678 Myra (in Lycia/Lykia) 464, 469n25, 551, 552, 559n12 naturalization 9, 10, 15, 27, 30, 67, 70, 82, 88, 94, 134, 204, 243, 318, 325n13, 334, 346, 416–423, 423n12, 424n29, 434, 494–497, 527, 534, 555, 559n3, 560n21; see also: ‘dēmopoiētos, -oi’ above Neaera/Neaira 322, 323, 325n14, 371, 374, 375, 377, 380, 382n30 negotiating identity 14, 49, 184, 186, 188, 189, 196, 327, 380, 675 Neo-Babylonian/s 3, 128, 135n1, 135n6, 136n12, 136n16, 137n39, 137n41 Neo-Babylonian state/Empire 12, 125, 126, 127, 135n3 neopolitēs/-tai (‘new citizen/s’, Greek) 450, 458n15, 497

722

Index networks (social) 8, 12, 14, 42, 50, 85, 88, 112, 159, 184, 186–188, 195, 226, 227, 377–380, 549, 595, 612, 613 Nicomedia (in Bithynia) 553, 554, 557, 560n20 Nicomedians 553, 554 Nippur (in Sumer) 84–87, 89–90, 126, 129, 131, 137n36 North Africa 115, 120, 506, 513, 627, 629, 631, 710 Nuzi (in Mesopotamia, near the Tigris river) 89 official/s: in Babylonia 85, 127, 128, 129; in Carthage 121, 510, 512, 517n26; in Egypt 479; in Etruria 582; in Greek poleis 5, 38, 41, 176n15, 211, 217, 230, 254, 269, 344, 363, 372, 380, 418, 436, 438, 449, 465, 522; in Hittite Empire 7, 100, 105, 107n25, 108n42; in Phoenicia 118, 120; in post-Roman West 672; in Roman Africa 628, 630, 634, 647n3, 648n26; in Rome 37, 523, 524, 599; see also: ‘magistrate/s’ above Opramoas of Rhodiapolis 551, 552 orator/s 15, 17, 69, 230, 267–271, 273, 290, 296, 320, 321, 333, 335, 345, 357, 360, 362, 381n14, 388, 392, 393, 395, 406, 415–422, 488, 489, 557, 589, 627 oratory 15, 206n12, 271, 275, 277n12, 277n18, 293n8, 307n3, 328, 344, 345, 355, 356, 361, 366n2, 376, 387–397 Oscan: citizenship 455, 457, 584, 586; language 584, 586; settlements/communities 455, 457, 584 Patara 551, 552, 559n12 patron/s (Lat. patronus/-ni): of clientes and manumitted slaves (in Rome) 6, 522, 525, 526, 529, 530n8, 531n12, 531n13, 566, 622, 655; of metics and foreigners (in Greece) 286, 292n6, 292n7, (in Carthage) 506, 515n4; religious 18, 181, 357, 514, 699, 713; see also: ‘cliens/-ntes’ above patronage: divine 115; of clientes and manumitted slaves (in Rome, patronatus) 525, 526, 527, 529, 531n12, 567; royal 127, 128 peregrinus/-ni (‘foreign resident/s’, ‘free noncitizen/s’, Latin) 5, 70, 580, 628–631, 636, 636n4, 642–646, 648n26, 682, 683 performance/s: citizenship as 9–10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 49–53, 61, 94, 100, 105, 108n46, 108n49, 113, 123, 132, 175, 200, 229, 242, 243, 247, 330, 331, 355, 374, 400, 417, 491, 548, 549, 550, 552, 557, 578, 619, 684, 685, 692, 694, 697, 701, 702; of cult activities 103, 128, 201, 228, 250, 252–256, 261n19, 261n25, 269, 316, 350, 374, 376, 379, 436, 437, 477, 490,

566, 606, 607, 610, 685, 691, 694, 700, 701; of manumission 90, 523, 524, 696; of sports and arts 57, 58, 59, 60, 206n7, 255, 611 Pericles/Perikles 37–39, 44n11, 60, 134, 199, 275, 276n9, 325n3, 347, 351n8, 357, 359; Pericles’ citizenship law see under: ‘citizenship law/s’ above perioikos/-oi (‘dependent inhabitant/s’ in Sparta, Greek) 5, 13, 40, 41, 151, 153, 156, 157, 179, 180, 209–216, 223, 256, 434, 497, 550 Philip V of Macedonia 38, 45n34, 434, 437, 495, 497, 498, 500, 519, 585, 609 Philista 202, 206n8 Philo/Philon of Alexandria 17, 482n24, 535, 536, 538–542, 543n9, 544n21, 544n22, 544n24, 544n26, 544n27, 545n33, 545n34 Phinto 202 Phoenicia 111–123, 148, 511, 513, 516n23 Phoenician (things) 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 111–123, 148, 444, 445, 506, 508, 509, 513, 581 Phoenician/s (people) 7, 111, 506, 513, 516n5 phratry/-ies, (Gr. phratria/-ai) 15, 39, 40, 42, 129, 226–229, 231, 236n34, 250, 258, 259, 302–303, 312, 315–318, 320–324, 325n5, 325n6, 325n7, 325n8, 325n14, 345–348, 351n7, 351n9, 352n11, 352n12, 375, 379, 381n1, 382n20, 387–396, 397n9, 397n19, 397n20, 397n21, 398n31, 398n34, 398n35, 398n36, 398n37, 398n39, 399n44, 447, 498 Pindar 157, 185, 189, 191–195, 350 Plato 36, 37, 42, 54, 56, 57, 59, 180, 211, 266, 272–273, 275, 304–305, 402, 424n34, 528; ps.-Plato 339n38 Plato comicus 411n13 Pliny the Younger 555, 556, 641, 644, 655, 659 Pocock, John 622–624 poiēsis (‘creation’, ‘adoption’, Greek) 16, 489–491, 493, 500 de Polignac, François 50, 251, 252 politēs/-tai (‘male citizen/s’, Greek) 2, 13, 37, 44n3, 151, 166, 168, 170, 171, 174–175, 177n36, 183, 186, 199, 200, 201, 209, 210, 213, 231, 240–248, 248n1, 248n5, 248n8, 248n9, 248n11, 248n12, 248n15, 248n16, 264, 268, 325n13, 333, 349, 350, 352n22, 373, 429, 431, 434, 473, 475–478, 489, 491, 494, 496, 534, 536–538, 542, 544n18, 544n24, 550, 709 politeuma/ta (‘government/s’, ‘citizen body/ies’, Greek) 431, 473–480, 481n3, 482n10, 482n11, 482n13, 482n14, 482n16, 482n19, 482n22, 482n23, 496, 497, 534, 536–538, 543n11, 543n12, 543–544n13, 544n14, 544n17, 545n34; see also: ‘Jewish politeuma/ ta’ above

723

Index political reform/s 4, 11, 12, 15, 27, 40, 44n15, 58, 64, 73, 74n40, 120, 147, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 181, 183, 227, 228, 230, 235n16, 285, 288, 303, 312, 316, 347, 371, 381n9, 395, 507, 578, 580, 585, 597, 598, 602n27, 617 political reformers 12, 147, 149, 153, 154, 161, 183, 228 politics 3, 9, 17, 30, 32, 72, 99, 120, 285, 293n17, 336, 342, 349, 369, 381, 382n26, 392, 400, 405, 411n6, 411n12, 433, 439, 473, 475, 489, 505, 507, 511, 516n10, 520, 531n14, 550, 577, 605, 612–613, 616–620, 624, 629, 669, 709 politis/-ides (‘female citizen/s’, Greek) 37, 73n12, 198–200, 206n6, 264, 269, 324, 325n13, 333, 350, 374, 430, 435, 494, 496 politography 489, 495, 496 Polybius 4, 447, 458n9, 458n12, 507–510, 516n15, 545n34, 597, 604–608, 612–614 Pompey 569–571 post-Roman 674, 702; Christian 701; Italy 677, 685, 691; kingdoms 674, 681; period 18, 679–681, 702; urban communities 685; (Latin) West 18, 669, 670, 678, 682 praefectura/-ae (‘prefecture/s’, Latin) 17, 589, 590, 594, 595, 600n4, 601n22, 602n32 Prokopios 710 Propylaea/Propylaia 14, 356, 357–361, 364–366, 366n5, 366n7, 366n11 province 18, 37, 43, 65–70, 123, 543n5, 555, 556, 564, 568, 570, 571, 608, 617, 625n3, 627–637, 639, 641, 647n2, 652–662, 669, 670, 673, 683, 700, 707, 710, 713 provincial administration 66, 630, 635 Prusa (in Bithynia; modern Bursa) 553, 558, 560n20 public office 30, 31, 179, 201, 363, 374, 389, 400, 438, 448, 495, 510, 515, 520, 548, 550, 632, 697, 698; see also: ‘magistrate/s’ above; ‘official/s’ above puhrum (‘assembly’, Akkadian) 85, 89 racism 28, 71 ransom 41, 88, 89, 95n23, 373, 380, 449, 530, 683, 684 redemption 87, 88, 89, 700 religion/s 13, 17, 39, 82, 200, 232, 233, 234n3, 237n52, 237n54, 250, 251, 253, 257, 259, 261n30, 268, 269, 275, 296, 325n2, 342, 344, 346, 436, 477, 548, 549, 579, 604–614, 697, 703n14, 707, 709, 710, 713 resident/s 18, 112, 618, 691; alien/s, foreigner/s 1, 5, 15, 40, 95n19, 106n19, 134, 210–213, 251, 254, 261n19, 261n20, 273, 286, 290, 312, 334, 335, 336, 349, 401, 415, 420, 421, 429, 432–435, 439, 440n2, 467, 487, 492, 495, 507, 519, 522, 527, 540, 544n27, 555, 580, 682

restoration of rights 87, 90, 271, 272, 348, 406, 417, 419, 423n12, 682 rhetoric 1, 9, 14, 15, 131, 137n34, 267, 270, 271, 273, 276, 277n12, 277n18, 297, 320, 356, 360, 365, 366, 366n12, 369, 371, 375, 377, 381n10, 411, 625, 678, 684, 685 rhetorician/s 376, 415, 418, 420, 421, 424n17, 633 Rhodiapolis (in Lykia) 551, 559n10 right/s, civic 5, 6, 12, 155, 179, 201, 270, 271, 327, 328, 346, 349, 433, 463, 500, 551, 553, 554, 558, 631, 636n4, 641, 670, 675, 691, 701, 703n9 rights and duties/obligations 2, 11, 12, 37, 49, 54, 99, 102, 125, 131, 165, 277n21, 312, 349, 355, 356, 542, 550, 685, 691, 711 ritual 49, 50, 55, 57, 107n22, 131, 176n15, 195, 203, 233, 244, 245, 252, 254, 256–259, 261n25, 302, 332, 356, 357, 374, 376, 377, 380, 382n25, 409, 410, 435, 438, 490, 506, 530n3, 578, 579, 584, 591, 594, 605, 606, 607, 610–612, 617, 685, 694, 695, 696, 700, 701 Roman army 632, 640, 641, 672, 673, 674 Roman Empire 7, 8, 9, 11, 18, 43, 64–67, 69, 72, 73n11, 73n15, 206n7, 256, 277n27, 495, 587, 622, 629, 635, 637n10, 652, 669, 670, 674, 678, 707, 712, 713 Roman republic 4, 7, 9, 10, 66, 72, 130, 447, 585, 606, 607, 609, 613, 621, 623 Roman statutes 599, 602n35; see also: ‘lex’ above Romans in Egypt see: ‘Egypt’ above sacrifice/s 152, 166, 174, 228, 233, 237n56, 252–255, 258, 260n11, 267, 268, 274, 278n36, 325n8, 362, 377, 380, 432, 451, 478, 495, 509, 512, 521, 584, 605, 607, 610, 611, 696, 697, 700 Samnites 447, 578, 585 Seleukos of Rhosos 549, 655 sharing: in booty 150–152, 160; cloths 692, 693, 696, 698; in cult, sacrifice 50, 233, 234, 242, 258, 267, 268, 274, 275, 278n36, 315, 374, 432, 436, 473; in freedom 700; in governance 8, 11, 343, 440n2; in kinship 39; in land and resources 153, 157, 158, 270, 272, 273, 312, 313, 324, 325, 450; in meals 16, 155, 166–167, 274, 380, 695, 696; in places 243; in the polis 12, 13, 17, 48, 51, 81–83, 85, 105, 125, 134, 147, 149–153, 156–158, 161, 199, 226, 234, 242, 247, 264–278, 302, 324, 325, 339, 342–344, 348, 349, 373, 433, 489, 497, 519, 538, 549, 578, 580, 599, 619; see also: ‘metechein’ above Sicily 120, 148, 157, 160, 217, 228, 230, 443–445, 449–453, 455–457, 458n26, 509–515, 566, 567, 570, 577, 654, 658

724

Index Sippar (in Babylonia) 84, 85, 91, 92, 126, 127, 129, 131 slavery 5, 8, 71, 73n11, 74n20, 89–93, 96n38, 286, 294n26, 299, 308n30, 404, 433, 440, 450, 507, 525, 528, 579–580, 586, 601n14, 654, 671, 694, 695–698, 701; see also: ‘enslavement’ above Smyrna (modern Izmir) 45n35, 188, 202, 243, 434, 436, 556, 557 Social War (Roman) 4, 17, 564–570, 577, 581, 583, 586, 587, 590, 591, 599, 600n6, 602n36, 613, 617, 620, 621, 623, 624, 678 Solon 41, 44n24, 59, 60, 61, 134, 147, 155, 161, 177n38, 234n11, 237n55, 269, 285, 313, 314, 324, 334, 346, 347, 401, 412n25; Solon’s laws (see under: ‘citizenship law/s’ above) ‘son of a man’ 84, 88, 90 Sparta 3, 8, 12, 13, 36–43, 57–59, 61, 147–151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 168, 179–183, 185, 187, 198, 205–206, 209–223, 227, 231, 256, 274, 297, 298, 338n22, 356, 366n3, 406, 438, 447, 448, 497, 500, 506, 522, 530n9, 659, 707 Spartiates, Spartans 12, 36, 40, 41, 44n20, 57–59, 147, 154, 156, 157, 158, 179–183, 198, 209–223, 231, 236n38, 242–246, 248n12, 256, 274, 497, 522, 523, 541, 544n23 Spensithios of Datala 166–171 St Martin of Tours 692–698, 702n6, 703n12, 703n13, 703n20 Strato of Phalerum 329, 330 sufetes 16, 505, 507, 508, 512, 516n9, 517n26 Syllion (in Pamphilia) 550 sympoliteuomenos/-oi (‘civilian member/s of a politeuma’, Greek) 473, 475, 476–478, 482n32 sympolity (Gr. sympoliteia) 3, 42, 434, 494–496, 498, 500, 557; see also: ‘isopolity (isopoliteia)’ above Tabula Banasitana 629, 657, 658 Tacitus 64, 67–69, 73, 54 taxation 131, 171, 463, 578, 584, 619, 655, 657, 673, 711–713 Thebes 40, 155, 192, 193, 230, 236n45, 356, 364, 365, 367n21, 414, 483n41, 516n13, 711 Theodosian Code 672, 676, 680, 691, 710

Theophrastus 333, 400–402, 528 Timarchus 330, 339n36, 404, 405, 407, 408, 412n25 timē/timai (‘honour/s’, Greek) 14, 157, 284, 327–337, 337n6, 338n12, 338n16, 339n24, 449 Tlos (in Lycia) 551, 552, 559n10 torture 218, 286–289, 292, 293n8, 377, 378, 670, 671 traders 40, 41, 120, 153, 375, 378, 379, 445, 555, 570, 612, 712 Trajan 68, 552, 555, 556, 641, 644, 655, 659 tribus (‘citizen tribe’, Latin) 17, 578, 584, 589–599, 600n2, 600n8, 601n13, 601n17, 602n34, 619, 631, 639 Tusculum 566, 580, 589, 593–595, 601n16, 601n17, 601n18, 601n21 Ulpian 652 Ur (in Sumer) 86, 90, 120, 126, 129 urban 30, 66, 127–129, 132, 133, 135, 135n7, 214, 251, 252, 457, 473–476, 480, 527, 578, 580, 582–584, 590, 594, 612, 633, 636, 658, 680, 682, 684, 685; communities 12, 118, 125–134, 200, 444, 445, 446, 451, 453, 456, 474, 479, 578, 593, 679, 680, 681, 685, 699; saints’ cults 18, 683, 699 Veii (in Italy) 581, 582, 590–593, 600n10, 601n17 Weber, Max 11, 50, 51, 82, 94n5, 126, 127, 135n4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 11, 52, 53 women’s citizenship 13, 101, 333, 435; see also: ‘politis/-ides (female citizen/s)’ above Xanthos (in Lycia/Lykia) 464, 469n25, 552, 559n12, 560n23 xenos/-oi (‘foreigner/s’, Greek) 5, 19n3, 134, 176n17, 209, 216, 246, 247, 252, 268, 322, 336, 377, 430, 432, 434, 450, 470n35, 497; see also: ‘foreigner/s’ above; ‘resident alien/s’ above Xois (in Egypt) 474, 477 Xystarch 554, 555

725