[Authors and titles listed at the end of the review.]
In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously wrote of universal equality and human rights. It is a commonplace that Greek antiquity lacked an idea of inalienable human rights shared by all in virtue of being human, but did that rule out context-specific rights, such as the rights of citizens? This recent compilation of essays aims to bridge the gap between a ‘performative’ or value-driven conception of citizenship, which understands citizen status as a moral bargain or trade-off, and an institutionalist conception, which views citizenship as an organised system of rights and prerogatives enshrined in the laws and institutions of the polis.
In an introductory chapter, Josine Blok, drawing on the sociologist Maarten Vink, offers as a theoretical framework the idea of the ‘citizen regime’. On that model, citizenship ‘is not only a legal frame, but always embedded in norms and values’ (31). Blok argues for its applicability to antiquity in explaining the development of civic institutions that enshrine a preexisting code of behaviour. A weakness of the approach is that it misidentifies citizenship as benefaction. To be sure, citizenship could be benefactory, especially when conferred on outsiders as a reward for a good deed or service rendered, but the best documented case, democratic Athens, shows that citizenship was mostly held iure sanguinis; that is, under most circumstances, possession or non-possession did not ride on the moral qualities of individuals granted or denied access. Blok writes of the ‘values of reciprocity between individuals, subgroups and the polis’ (37) and claims that citizenship expressed itself in terms less of rights than of communal belonging. Though correct that Greeks lacked any notion of inalienable human rights comparable to those detailed by Rousseau, she nevertheless makes the unwarranted inference that laws ‘lacked clear definitions of entitlements or actions’ (29), which is to ignore the clear implications of the first written law on record, the Draconian statute on homicide (IG I3 104; Dem. 23), which frames itself upon a substantive issue, whether homicide has been committed or not, stipulates rights in the event of extenuating circumstances, and expressly eschews any consideration of status.[1] When writing of norms enshrined in the laws, Blok leaves readers none the wiser as to what those norms are to which she refers. To return to Draco, its most conspicuous norm is that all members of the community, irrespective of rank, wealth, status, or sex — the law also applied to women, as the first homicide case (Antiphon 1) shows — must respect life, limb and person of all other members.[2] The earliest known legal text confirms what Aristotle states in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, that justice is about the crime committed, not the rank, status, or position either of the perpetrator or of the victim.
The essays hereafter fall under three discrete subheadings: (1) ‘shaping and performing membership in the polis’; (2) ‘outsiders and their integration in the civic community’; and (3) ‘Greek citizenship beyond the polis’.
The first comprises three essays which emphasise in different measure the performative and institutionalist concept of citizenship. Alain Duplouy views the archaic city as a composite of societal subgroups defined by trade and practice. Rightly pointing to the iconoclastic studies of Bourriot and Roussel,[3] which showed that such groupings were products, not preconditions, of the polis, Duplouy does not reflect on their implications, namely that the polis institutionally precedes its components. Subgroups dedicated to performance ends were shoots, not roots, of polis institutions. Gunnar Seelentag draws on inscriptional and material evidence from Crete to argue that written laws presuppose ‘cartels’ with a need to self-regulate internal and external interactions. He links written law to austerity, which gave impulse to the institutionalisation of societal norms. Even if right to note the synchroneity, it remains questionable that the fashion for material austerity necessarily reflects economic impoverishment;[4] to follow this reasoning, legal institutions which took shape under historical contingencies must have been disregarded once material comfort improved, which is as counterintuitive as it is unprovable. The standout contribution is that of Mirko Canevaro, which rightly differentiates honour that accrues from status (‘recognition respect’) from honour accruing from performance (‘appraisal respect’), and shows that citizenship primarily was an honour (time) in the first, not the second, conceptual sense. Canevaro does not rule out performance-centred honours, but those mostly operated above the baseline of citizenship. I would add that performance-based honours often cut across status lines, which problematises the idea that institutionalised status was about performance.[5]
The second part, on the integration of outsiders, comprises four contributions. In a fresh study of Solon’s law on naturalisation, Winfried Schmitz links two different laws mentioned in Plutarch’s Life, one on atimia reversal (Sol. 19.3–4), one on integration of foreigners in a state of permanent exile from their homeland into the citizen body (Sol. 24.4). Schmitz alleges that Solon demarcated citizen beneficiaries from settlers from abroad who were not to be considered Athenian in the fullest sense. Several assumptions are at play. The first is that the seisachtheia was a debt-relief measure, disproven conclusively by Edward Harris.[6] The second is that later authors could not cite Solonian laws accurately, which implies that record-keeping in archaic communities was primitive, an older view which more recent scholarship has demolished.[7] The third is that the amnesty law and the naturalisation law both came from an unattested law which engendered a distinction between citizens and metics, which contradicts the statement of Plutarch, whose authority Schmitz dismisses without solid grounds, that those brought to Attica from outside renounced their foreign nationality and became Athenians.
Examining wide-ranging evidence, Kai Trampedach shows that ancient diviners did not normally hold official positions in the Greek polis, and, with a few notable exceptions, their role was not institutionalised. The case of Sthorys of Thasos, who was naturalised at Athens for his benefactions as a seer on the eve of Cnidus in 394 BCE (IG II2 17), was exceptional.[8] With different conclusions, Daniela Marchiandi connects Sthorys to a long-standing tradition going back to the Homeric world. A passage from Odyssey 17 (ll. 383–387) extols the merits of seers and other skilled practitioners, and states that all who perform deeds useful to the community are welcome. Marchiandi ignores the most salient implication of the passage she cites, which is that the outsider introduced to perform a special task is understood still to be an outsider (ξεῖνον…ἄλλοθεν). The chief innovative aspect of Solon’s naturalisation law was to grant full citizenship as distinct from residential status to artisans and does not square therefore with Homer. The Hellenisation of the foreign names of those, such as Amasis, who worked in Kerameikos proves nothing, and the habit of honouring foreigners for service to the community comes as no surprise. In a well-documented essay, Marietta Horster details the forms of public service undertaken by those without full citizenship, including women and foreigners, in the Classical and Hellenistic polis and implies that citizenship and performative obligation were conceptually distinct. The fact that women, metics, and sometimes slaves fulfilled central roles in the city’s day-to-day functioning yet were not institutionalised as citizens, like free native-born males, must signify that citizenship, as a concept, did not turn on a civic function.[9]
The last section, on citizenship beyond the polis, comprises four essays. The first, by Christel Müller and Émeline Priol, argues that sympoliteia, or membership of a federal body, was less hierarchical and more network based. It takes as axiomatic the view of Blok as to what constituted citizenship in the Greek sense, without noting its defects, the most important of which is that it rests on a partial reading of Demosthenes 57 and overlooks the abundance of evidence from all over the historians and orators, which shows that the construction of citizenship by Aristotle, which Blok dismisses, was essentially correct.[10] As the authors admit (236), ‘it is very difficult to know from the decrees granting privileges whether or how they were actually implemented’. The second, by Chiara Lasagni, repeating the idea that Aristotle’s view of citizenship is ‘biased’ (246), focuses on four citizenship grants from northern Greece to women. Lasagni rightly notes that citizenship entails a system of rights primarily, among the most important of which were those that attached to inheritance and property, and that in a social context those rights were shared by women as well as men. The wish, nevertheless, to dismiss Aristotle’s construction as the product of a male-focused bias fails to engage with the most pivotal of Aristotle’s remarks at Pol. 3.1275a22–24, which is that citizenship in its fullest sense (ἁπλῶς) is a male prerogative, and Aristotle therefore does not exclude women and children in a more fragmented sense, as Pierre Fröhlich has conclusively demonstrated.[11] Though Lasagni makes excellent remarks about the documentary texts on which she comments, those texts provide no ammunition against the Aristotelian conception which, following Blok, she seeks to deflate.
Turning to the enfranchisement of Greeks in the Roman system, Filippo Carlà-Uhink presents an appealing model of the ‘uncanny valley’, according to which entities very far away and ones very close are inoffensive to the eye of the beholder, but those in the middle distance invite negative reaction. Carlà-Uhink argues plausibly that the issue of the lex Iulia de civitate in 90 BCE, which granted Roman citizenship to the Italic peninsula south of the Po, resulted in cultural friction between a sense of ‘Greekness’ and ‘Romanness’, which by the time of Augustus, who made large-scale grants to Greeks, had become less overt. Lucia Cecchet, in a stimulating and well-argued concluding essay, focuses on the multiple citizenship of Dio of Prusa, who in his discourses advocated the extension of political ties across competing cities in the province of Bithynia. Cecchet argues that acquired citizenships ‘contributed to spreading the idea and practice of multiple belonging and extended citizenship’ (307) and is right to view the ‘regional dimension of belonging’ as part of a programme to end petty internal quarrelling among city-states.
In sum, this volume presents contrasting approaches to the problem of citizenship and, at the same time, eschews one single unifying doctrine. Despite its professed intention to be ecumenical, it should not have reified one side of the debate in its preface, for example the editors’ remark (9) that ‘religion, rather than politics, was the sphere of public life that contributed to defining the civic community at Athens’. Institutions and values are important in different ways, but the deciding factor is how they are used and what they might prove. In the United States in the 1950s, as the Cold War was taking shape, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated politicians thought to harbour links to Communism. Did ‘being American’ depend on being anti-Marxist, or did being anti-Marxist depend on ‘being American’? The McCarthy trials turned on the second, not the first, proposition; that is, no ‘right-minded American’ should subscribe to ideologies deemed ‘un-American’, but the institutional reality was not negated by the non-possession of its normative baggage. Athens was no different. Failure to uphold behavioural norms conferred loss of rights (atimia), but the reversible nature of cancellation suggests that ‘Athenian-ness’ conceptually preceded attending expectations of behaviour and performance.
Authors and Titles
Lucia Cecchet and Chiara Lasagni, ‘Preface’
Josine Blok, ‘Introductory: Citizenship Regimes in Ancient Greece’
Alain Duplouy, ‘Multiple Ways to Citizenship and Multifaceted Archaic Cities’
Gunnar Seelentag, ‘Citizenship as an Expression of “Cartelisation”: The Example of Crete from Archaic to Classical Times’
Mirko Canevaro, ‘Honour(s) for Citizens: Egalitarianism and Social Distinction in Democratic Athens’
Winfried Schmitz, ‘Átimoi, Epítimoi and Metoikizómenoi: Solon’s “Law on Naturalisations” and “Those Immigrating to Athens to Pursue a Trade”’
Kai Trampedach, ‘Citizens and Outsiders Both: Diviners and Other Divinatory Specialists in Athens (5th–4th c. BCE)’
Daniela Marchiandi, ‘Citizenship and Technitai: Experiments of “Selective Immigration” in the Greek World’
Marietta Horster, ‘Ideal Exclusivity and Pragmatic Flexibility: Offices and Liturgies for “Outsiders” in Late Classical and Hellenistic Cities’
Christel Müller and Émeline Priol, ‘How to Be a Citizen in a Koinon? Practices of “Common Citizenship” in the Classical and Hellenistic periods’
Chiara Lasagni, ‘The Grant of Citizenship in Western Greece: A Case Study for Greek Politeia between Honorific Rhetoric and Practical Realities’
Filippo Carlà-Uhink, ‘Uncanny Valley? Cicero, Archias and the Enfranchisement of the Greeks after the Social War’
Lucia Cecchet, ‘Between Native and Acquired Citizenship: The Discourse of Multiple Citizenship in Dio Chrysostom’s Bithynian Speeches’
Works cited
J. H. Blok, 2017. Citizenship in Classical Athens. Cambridge.
F. Bourriot, 1976. Recherches sur la nature du génos. Lille.
M. Faraguna, 2015. ‘Citizen-registers in archaic Greece: The evidence reconsidered’, in A. Matthaiou, N. Papazarkadas (eds), ΑΞΩΝ. Studies in Honour of Ronald S. Stroud, II. Athens, pp. 649–667.
P. Fröhlich, 2016. ‘La citoyenneté grècque entre Aristote et les modernes’, in Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz, 27, pp. 91–136.
E. M. Harris, 2006. Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens. Cambridge.
E. M. Harris, 2013. The Rule of Law in Action in Democratic Athens. Oxford.
C. J. Joyce, 2023a. ‘Could Athenian women be counted as citizens in democratic Athens?’ in J. Filonik, C. Plastow, R. Zelnick-Abramovitz (eds), Citizenship in Antiquity. Civic Communities in the Ancient Mediterranean. London, pp. 342–354.
C. J. Joyce, 2023b. ‘Civic rights, not civic rites. The meaning of tes poleos metechein/meteinai and the language of participation in democratic Athens’, RDE 13, pp. 101–144.
U. Kahrstedt, 1938. ‘Untersuchungen zu athenischen Behörden II. Die Nomotheten und die Legislative in Athen,’ Klio 31, 1–32.
M. J. Osborne, 1981–3. Naturalisation in Athens. Brussels.
D. Roussel, 1976. Tribu et Cité. Paris.
J. Sickinger, 1999. Public Records and Archives in Classical Athens, Durham, NC.
Notes
[1] For discussion of universal applicability under rule-of-law systems, see Harris 2013: 6–8.
[2] Other examples of the universal applicability of a statute include IG I3 10 lines19–22; 19 lines 7-9; 34 lines 31–35; 41 lines 70–72; 58 lines 14–16; 63 lines 1–5; 78a lines 34–36, 57–59; 114 lines 12–13. For similar examples of this principle from the fourth century, see Harris 2006: 46–47.
[3] Bourriot 1976; Roussel 1976.
[4] Some of the laws imposed by tyrants in the archaic age regulated consumption (cf. Ar. Fr. 611.20 Rose; Diod. 11.38.2–3; Arist. Pol. 1274b18–23; Diog. Laert. 1.76, 79), but these need not reflect impoverished conditions.
[5] See, for example, the law at Ilion (I. Ilion 25), which prescribes rewards for the killing of a tyrant irrespective of the legal status of the beneficiary.
[6] Harris 2006: 249–270.
[7] Kahrstedt 1938. For a thorough refutation of the idea that Athens lacked archives until the fourth century, see Sickinger 1999; Faraguna 2015.
[8] On the uniqueness of the language of the decree of naturalisation for Sthorys, see Osborne 1981-3: II, 47.
[9] As argued by Joyce (2023a).
[10] Blok 2017; for a cross-examination of those views, see Joyce 2023b.
[11] For a convincing analysis and vindication of Aristotle, see Fröhlich 2016.