[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This edited volume) aims “to reconsider the varieties of subordination practiced and experienced within the Greek world” (11). It reconstructs the voices of subordinated peoples, as well as the nature of their subordination, in Archaic and Classical Greece. The contributors, who are all prominent scholars in their respective fields, use a variety of literary and material sources to examine the lives and experiences of individuals and groups who were subordinated in variety of ways, including those who themselves were subordinators.
While the overarching structure of the volume moves chronologically from Hesiod to the fourth-century Attic orators, the order of the contributions allows the reader to consider them in conversation with one another. Since I do not have the space to give each chapter its due, I will review multiple chapters together in what appear to be their natural groupings.
Samuel D. Gartland and David W. Tandy’s introduction (“Subordination in Boiotia”) illustrates the aim of the volume by looking at two case studies in Boiotia, the world of Hesiod’s Works and Days in the seventh century and the world of Thebes in the fourth century, to show how individuals (e.g. Hesiod and his peers) and an entire community (e.g. the village of Askra) could simultaneously subordinate persons and groups in their own households and farms while also being subordinated to a larger polis (e.g. Thespiai in Hesiod, and Thebes in the fourth century).
The first two chapters reconstruct the perspective of the demos in Archaic Greece. In chapter 1, Julien Zurbach uses the notion of ‘moral economy’ to suggest that non-elite groups participated in social conflicts not in a spontaneous or purely reactive way, but in accordance with an ideology and a corpus of ideas and values. In Athens, for example, and possibly in Megara and Sparta as well, “the poorest members of the community arguing for a complete redistribution of land” stemmed from an ideology that private property rights were “the basis for peasant independence” (30). In Chapter 2, Anthony T. Edwards tries to recover the demands of the demos on Solon based not only on what he says he gave them in his political poetry, but also what he denied them and how he criticized them. Edwards shows that in many ways Solon was trying to restrain the demos, and his warnings to the demos also served to address the concerns of the elite that he would give the demos too much.
The next three chapters examine the various persons and groups who made up the working class in the Greek world. In chapter 3, Sarah C. Murray uses an interdisciplinary approach to reconstruct “a kind of cultural history of the urban worker” (68). Murray contrasts the elitist biases against basaunoi in the literary sources with a larger diachronic survey, which shows that craftspeople held a more honored place in the Late Bronze Age and Archaic Period than the Classical Period. She then uses the archaeological evidence from workshops to reconstruct the diverse daily lives and experiences of urban craftspeople. In chapter 4, Lucia Cecchet recovers the lowest Solonian class of citizens, thetes, who are barely visible in the classical period. Cecchet argues that the invisibility of thetes stems both from their refusal to self-identify as such, given the stigma attached to this socio-economic class, but also from how the Solonian census classes, based on land, lost meaning during the Classical Period as economic and social indicators, since forms of wealth had extended beyond land. In chapter 5, Hans van Wees demonstrates that the Athenian working class was much larger than has commonly been assumed, from the early sixth century, when they made up 90 percent of the citizen population in Athens, through the Classical Period, when wage laborers still made up about half of the citizen population.
Chapters 6–7 study enslaved persons in ancient Greece. David M. Lewis redefines what slavery was in ancient Greece by looking beyond slavery in Athens. Lewis debunks modern classifications which suggest forms of slavery outside Athens were akin to a form a serfdom, showing instead that there was a “diversity of Greek slave systems” (156), each of which emerged from the local contexts. He illustrates this diversity with four case studies: the slave systems of Thessaly, Lokris, Herakleia Pontike, and Khios. In chapter 7, Sara Forsdyke examines the “middle ground of resistance,” the strategies “between everyday acts and flight or full-scale rebellion” (187) that enslaved people took not necessarily to escape enslavement, but to improve the conditions of their enslavement through their familiarity with Greek law and religious customs. The desired outcomes were typically getting a new master or becoming enslaved to a sanctuary. The existence of laws concerning collusion with enslaved persons and the ubiquity of sanctuaries where enslaved people could seek refuge suggest there was some level of frequency for using these strategies.
The final three chapters examine how the experiences of persons in precarious status positions, especially metics, citizen women, and citizen minors, complicate the overly simplistic tripartite division of the Athenian population into the categories of enslaved persons, metics, and citizens. In chapter 8, Sara Wijma uses funerary monuments and inscriptions to show how Athenian metics portrayed themselves in public. Metics typically declined to refer to themselves as “metics” in funerary contexts, creating some challenges for this study (the surest identifiers for metics were the occurrence of ethnika, references to non-Athenian ethnic background, or the identifier isoteles, an honorific for those metics who paid taxes on par with Athenian citizens). Wijma shows that many metics participated in the customary funerary practices of the Athenians, putting themselves on equal footing with citizens. Thus, the differentiation of metics and other groups from citizens mattered more to the Athenian citizens than the metics themselves. In chapter 9, Deborah Kamen uses the graphē hubreōs, the law which purported to give equal protection from hubris to people of all statuses, as a case study for how persons of varying statuses in practice had different levels of access to this law. She surveys the range of levels of access from enslaved persons who needed another person to bring a graphē hubreōs on their behalf to adult male citizens who could bring the charge on their own behalf, demonstrating that the law in fact did not provide equal protection to all. In chapter 10, Rebecca Futo Kennedy examines the precarious nature of citizenship for women and minors in Athens. Contrary to the common assumption that the Periclean citizenship of 451 BCE increased the standing of citizen women, Kennedy shows through several fourth-century speeches that even distant male relatives could threaten not just the inheritance of women and children, but their status as citizens and thus their protection from potential enslavement.
Each chapter stands well on its own, but as I hope I have demonstrated, the real strength of this book comes from reading multiple contributions together. The chapters focused on Athens complement the studies that try to engage the Greek world beyond Athens. Similarly, the more material culture and archaeology-based studies (Murray and Wijma) provide a balance for those relying more heavily on written sources.
The book is very well edited and structured. Each chapter begins with a preface, where the authors situate their works within the larger scholarly trends and oftentimes their own work on the topic, before transitioning to a separate introduction. Each chapter also has its own extensive and up-to-date bibliography (sometimes including works published in the same calendar year).
My only quibble is not unique to this volume: given the stature of each of the contributors in the wider field of classics, such a gathering of great minds invites the opportunity for welcoming and mentoring early career scholars into the conversation (many of the contributions, however, do stem from discussions and collaborations from 2017 and earlier, when several of the authors were still in the early stages of their careers). Nevertheless, given the breadth of content and approaches, the quality of the analysis and argument in each chapter, and the thorough bibliographies, this book should prove an excellent resource for both the advanced undergraduate student and the established senior scholar.
Authors and Titles
“Introduction: Subordination in Boiotia.” Samuel D. Gartland and David W. Tandy
- “A Moral Economy of the Demos in Early Archaic Greece.” Julien Zurbach
- “Solon and the Demos in his Poetry.” Anthony T. Edwards
- “Reconstructing the Lives of Urban Craftspeople in Archaic and Classical Greece.” Sarah C. Murray
- “‘Don’t tell anybody you are a thete!’: Athenian Thetes: Identity and Visibility.” Lucia Cecchet
- “The Athenian Working Class: Scale, Nature, and Development.” Hans van Wees
- “The Local Slave Systems of Ancient Greece.” David M. Lewis
- “How to Find a New Master: The Agency of Enslaved Persons in Ancient Greece.” Sara Forsdyke
- “Spoken from the Grave: The Construction of Social Identities on the Funerary Monuments of Metics in Classical Athens.” Sara Wijma
- “Varying Statuses, Varying Rights: A Case Study of the graphē hubreōs.” Deborah Kamen
- “Strategies of Disenfranchisement: ‘Citizen’ Women, Minor Heirs, and the Precarity of Status in Attic Oratory.” Rebecca Futo Kennedy