Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T16:03:32.711Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The origin of metic status at Athens*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

James Watson
James Watson
Affiliation:
The Perse School, Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is widely held as uncontroversial that throughout the classical period male inhabitants of Attica were divided between three distinct categories – Athenian citizens, metics (regularly translated as ‘resident aliens’) and slaves – and that Athenian society had, therefore, a tripartite structure. The opportunities available to and requirements demanded of a man depended on his category. Those foreigners permanently resident in Attica – those with the legal status of ‘metic’ – were, unlike slaves, free, but, unlike citizens, they could not own land, vote in the Assembly, or serve as a dikastes or as a magistrate; in addition, metics were required to pay a poll tax (the metoikion) and to have a citizen sponsor (prostates). In this paper I seek to challenge not the nature of the distinction between citizens and metics but instead the assumption that the distinction was made throughout the classical period. I suggest that the growth of the Athenian citizen population after the Persian invasion of 480–479 demands that the origin of metic status be situated around the middle of the fifth century, and that the occasion on which the Athenian polis first defined metic status is likely to have been the occasion on which it first took an interest in restricting who might become a citizen: in 451/0, with the passing of Perikles' citizenship law.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 56 , 2010 , pp. 259 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Akrigg, B. (2007) ‘The nature and implications of Athens' changed social structure and economy’, in Osborne, R. (ed.) Debating the Athenian cultural revolution: art, literature, philosophy, and politics 430–380 BC, Cambridge, 27–43.Google Scholar
Andrewes, A. (1961), ‘Philochoros on phratries’, JHS 81, 1–15.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Bakewell, (1997) ‘Μετοιχία in the Supplices of Aeschylus’, Classical Antiquity 16, 209–28.Google Scholar
Balme, M. and Lawall, G. (1995) Athenaze: an introduction to ancient Greek (Book 1 UK edn.), New York and Oxford.Google Scholar
Barrett, W.S. (ed.) (1964) Euripides' Hippolytos, Oxford.Google Scholar
Blok, J.H. (2005) ‘Becoming citizens: some notes on the semantics of “citizen” in archaic Greece and classical Athens’, Klio 87, 7–40.Google Scholar
Cohen, E.E. (2000) The Athenian nation, Princeton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Angelis, F. (2003) Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: the development of two Greek city-states in archaic Sicily, Oxford.Google Scholar
Duncan-Jones, R.P. (1980) ‘Metic numbers in Periclean Athens’, Chiron 10, 101–9.Google Scholar
Gallo, L. (1980) ‘Popolosità è scarsità: contributo allo studio di un topos’, in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa S. III.9, 1233–70.Google Scholar
Gomme, A.W. (1933) The population of Athens in the fifth and Jourth centuries B.C., Oxford.Google Scholar
Hansen, M.H. (1988) Three studies in Athenian demography, Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Hansen, M.H. (1991) The Athenian democracy in the age of Demosthenes: structure, principles, and ideology, Oxford.Google Scholar
Hansen, M.H. (2006) The shotgun method. The demography of the ancient Greek city-state culture, New York.Google Scholar
Hassan, F. (1981) Demographic archaeology, London.Google Scholar
Henige, O. (1988) Numbers from nowhere: the American Indian contact population debate, Norman, OK.Google Scholar
Hicks, E. (1874) The collection of ancient Greek inscriptions in the British Museum. Part I. Attika, Oxford.Google Scholar
Kapparis, K. (2005) ‘Immigration and citizenship procedures in Athenian law’, RIDA 52, 71–113.Google Scholar
Lambert, S.D. (1993) The phratries of Attica, Ann Arbor.Google Scholar
Loraux, N. (1994) The children of Athena: Athenian ideas about citizenship and the division between the sexes, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Loraux, N. (2000) Born of the earth: myth and politics in Athens, Ithaca, NY.Google Scholar
Meiggs, R. (1966) ‘The dating of fifth-century Attic inscriptions’, JHS 86, 86–98.Google Scholar
Meiggs, R. and Lewis, D.M. (1988) A selection of Greek historical inscriptions to the end of the fifth century B.C. (rev. edn.), Oxford.Google Scholar
Morrison, J.S., Coates, J.F. and Rankov, N.B. (2000) The Athenian trireme: the history and reconstruction of an ancient Greek warship (2nd edn.), Cambridge.Google Scholar
Ogden, D. (1996) Greek bastardy in the classical and Hellenistic periods, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osborne, M.J. (1981–1983) Naturalization in Athens, 4 volumes, Brussels.Google Scholar
Osborne, R. (1994) ‘Democracy and imperialism in the Panathenaic procession: the Parthenon frieze in its context’, in Coulson, W.D.E., Palagia, O., Shear, T.L. Jr., Shapiro, H.A. and Frosted, F.J.. (1994) The archaeology of Athens and Attica under the democracy. Proceedings of an international conference celebrating 2500 years since the birth of democracy in Greece, held at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, December 4–6, 1992. Oxbow Monograph 37, Oxford, 143–50.Google Scholar
Reprinted in Osborne, R. (2010) Athens and Athenian democracy, Cambridge, 306–22.Google Scholar
Osborne, R. (1997) ‘Law, the democratic citizen and the representation of women in classical Athens’, Past and Present 155, 3–33.Google Scholar
Parker, R. (2005) Polytheism and society at Athens, Oxford.Google Scholar
Patterson, C.B. (1981) Pericles' citizenship law of 451–50 B.C., New York.Google Scholar
Rhodes, P.J. (1981) A commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion politeia, Oxford.Google Scholar
Rhodes, P.J. (1988) Thucydides, History II: with translation and commentary, Warminster.Google Scholar
Rosivach, V.J. (1987) ‘Autochthony and the Athenians’, CQ n.s. 37, 294–306.Google Scholar
Scheidel, W. (2003) ‘The Greek demographic expansion: models and comparisons’, JHS 123, 120–40.Google Scholar
Sealey, R. (1994) The justice of the Greeks, Ann Arbor.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theodoridis, C. (2002) ‘Eine unbeachtete Buchangabe zum Bruchstück des Philochoros über die attischen Orgeonen’, ZPE 138, 40–2.Google Scholar
Vlassopoulos, K. (2007) ‘Free spaces: identity, experience and democracy in classical Athens’, CQ 57, 33–52.Google Scholar
Watson, J.M. (2009) ‘From archaic to classical: reassessing Greek history, 525–450 BC’, PhD thesis, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Whitehead, D. (1977) The ideology of the Athenian metic. Cambridge Philological Society supplement 4, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Whitehead, D. (1986) The demes of Attica 508/7–ca. 250 B.C. A political and social study, Princeton.Google Scholar
Wijma, S. (2009) ‘Joining the Athenian community: the participation of metics in Athenian polis religion in the fifth and fourth centuries BC’, PhD thesis, Utrecht.Google Scholar