The Ideology of the Athenian Metic

The Ideology of the Athenian Metic PDF Author: David Whitehead
Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
ISBN: 1913701107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
An essential feature of the classical Greek city-state was the presence of a large body of 'metics', more or less permanent immigrants, most of them from other Greek cities, who played a large part in the economic, social and political life of the community but were excluded from citizenship in all but the most exceptional cases. Despite the importance of the subject, there has previously been no extended account in English. Dr Whitehead's monograph, based on an exhaustive register of the ancient sources, centres on the 'ideology' of the metic in Athens. How much ambiguity was there in his position vis-à-vis the exclusive in-group of citizens? Did the metic think of himself as in some respects an outsider? What were his rights and disabilities? After answering such questions in the analytical first part of the monograph, Dr Whitehead examines the history of the institution over two centuries and offers several new hypotheses about crucial stages in its history.

The Ideology of the Athenian Metic

The Ideology of the Athenian Metic PDF Author: David Whitehead
Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
ISBN: 1913701107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
An essential feature of the classical Greek city-state was the presence of a large body of 'metics', more or less permanent immigrants, most of them from other Greek cities, who played a large part in the economic, social and political life of the community but were excluded from citizenship in all but the most exceptional cases. Despite the importance of the subject, there has previously been no extended account in English. Dr Whitehead's monograph, based on an exhaustive register of the ancient sources, centres on the 'ideology' of the metic in Athens. How much ambiguity was there in his position vis-à-vis the exclusive in-group of citizens? Did the metic think of himself as in some respects an outsider? What were his rights and disabilities? After answering such questions in the analytical first part of the monograph, Dr Whitehead examines the history of the institution over two centuries and offers several new hypotheses about crucial stages in its history.

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy PDF Author: Demetra Kasimis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107052432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.

Status in Classical Athens

Status in Classical Athens PDF Author: Deborah E Kamen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400846536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Ancient Greek literature, Athenian civic ideology, and modern classical scholarship have all worked together to reinforce the idea that there were three neatly defined status groups in classical Athens--citizens, slaves, and resident foreigners. But this book--the first comprehensive account of status in ancient democratic Athens--clearly lays out the evidence for a much broader and more complex spectrum of statuses, one that has important implications for understanding Greek social and cultural history. By revealing a social and legal reality otherwise masked by Athenian ideology, Deborah Kamen illuminates the complexity of Athenian social structure, uncovers tensions between democratic ideology and practice, and contributes to larger questions about the relationship between citizenship and democracy. Each chapter is devoted to one of ten distinct status groups in classical Athens (451/0-323 BCE): chattel slaves, privileged chattel slaves, conditionally freed slaves, resident foreigners (metics), privileged metics, bastards, disenfranchised citizens, naturalized citizens, female citizens, and male citizens. Examining a wide range of literary, epigraphic, and legal evidence, as well as factors not generally considered together, such as property ownership, corporal inviolability, and religious rights, the book demonstrates the important legal and social distinctions that were drawn between various groups of individuals in Athens. At the same time, it reveals that the boundaries between these groups were less fixed and more permeable than Athenians themselves acknowledged. The book concludes by trying to explain why ancient Greek literature maintains the fiction of three status groups despite a far more complex reality.

Immigrant Women in Athens

Immigrant Women in Athens PDF Author: Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131781469X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being ‘sexually exploitable.’ Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the ‘citizen wife’ and the ‘common prostitute,’ the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in Classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market. This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study if women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic women, because they could not legally be wives, as some variety of whores. Author Rebecca Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the Classical period. She then constructs new approaches to the study of metic women in Classical Athens that fit the evidence and open up further paths for exploration. This leading-edge volume advances the study of women beyond their sexual status and breaks down the ideological constraints that both Victorians and feminist scholars reacting to them have historically relied upon throughout the study of women in antiquity.

Race

Race PDF Author: Denise Eileen McCoskey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755697855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.

Citizenship in Classical Athens

Citizenship in Classical Athens PDF Author: Josine Blok
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521191459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This book argues that citizenship in Athens was primarily a religious identity, shared by male and female citizens alike.

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens PDF Author: Jenifer Neils
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
This book is a comprehensive introduction to ancient Athens, its topography, monuments, inhabitants, cultural institutions, religious rituals, and politics. Drawing from the newest scholarship on the city, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.

Athenian Legacies

Athenian Legacies PDF Author: Josiah Ober
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691133948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
How do communities survive catastrophe? Using classical Athens as its case study, this book argues that if a democratic community is to survive over time, its people must choose to go on together. That choice often entails hardship and hard bargains. In good times, going on together presents few difficulties. But in the face of loss, disruption, and civil war, it requires tragic sacrifices and agonizing compromises. Athenian Legacies demonstrates with flair and verve how the people of one influential political community rebuilt their democratic government, rewove their social fabric, and, through thick and thin, went on together. The book's essays address amnesty, civic education, and institutional innovation in early Athens, a city that built and lost an empire while experiencing plague, war, economic trauma, and civil conflict. As Ober vividly demonstrates, Athenians became adept at collective survival. They conjoined a cultural commitment to government by the people with new institutions that captured the social and technical knowledge of a diverse population to recover from revolution, foreign occupation, and the ravages of war. Ober provides insight into notorious instances of Athenian injustice, explaining why slaves, women, and foreign residents willingly risked their lives to support a regime in which they were systematically mistreated. He answers the question of why Socrates never left a city he said was badly governed. At a time when social scientists debate the cultural grounding necessary to foster democracy, Athenian Legacies advances new arguments about the role of diversity and the relevance of shared understanding of the past in creating democracies that flourish when the going gets rough.

The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia

The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia PDF Author: Peter Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521542135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The first major study of a central cultural institution of classical Athens.

Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy

Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy PDF Author: Sara Forsdyke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400826861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This book explores the cultural and political significance of ostracism in democratic Athens. In contrast to previous interpretations, Sara Forsdyke argues that ostracism was primarily a symbolic institution whose meaning for the Athenians was determined both by past experiences of exile and by its role as a context for the ongoing negotiation of democratic values. The first part of the book demonstrates the strong connection between exile and political power in archaic Greece. In Athens and elsewhere, elites seized power by expelling their rivals. Violent intra-elite conflict of this sort was a highly unstable form of "politics that was only temporarily checked by various attempts at elite self-regulation. A lasting solution to the problem of exile was found only in the late sixth century during a particularly intense series of violent expulsions. At this time, the Athenian people rose up and seized simultaneously control over decisions of exile and political power. The close connection between political power and the power of expulsion explains why ostracism was a central part of the democratic reforms. Forsdyke shows how ostracism functioned both as a symbol of democratic power and as a key term in the ideological justification of democratic rule. Crucial to the author's interpretation is the recognition that ostracism was both a remarkably mild form of exile and one that was infrequently used. By analyzing the representation of exile in Athenian imperial decrees, in the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and in tragedy and oratory, Forsdyke shows how exile served as an important term in the debate about the best form of rule.