In her book, Demetra Kasimis rereads ancient Greek political thought through the figure of the metic, and in the company of feminist theories of performativity. The result is an original, thought-provoking, and timely engagement with the unstable dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that trouble democratic politics.
The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy intertwines the author’s readings of specific ancient texts with reflections on the habits of interpretation that have led scholars to neglect the significance of the metic. Kasimis notes that our readings tend to be governed by the binaries of citizen/foreigner or citizen/slave; the metic troubles these binaries because many metics were at once immigrants from elsewhere and free residents of Athens. (The category also includes children born in Athens to these resident foreigners, freed slaves, and, after Pericles’ Citizenship Law in 450/1, people with only one Athenian parent.) Metics were not part of the political life of Athens in terms of formal participation in the assembly or on juries, but they were intimately involved in other aspects of public life. Metics paid taxes, engaged in religious rituals, served as hoplites in Athenian military campaigns, and were a crucial part of the Athenian economy. So the distinction between metics and citizens was not freedom (as it was with slaves), Kasimis stresses; the difference was “blood” or descent.
Kasimis draws on Judith Butler’s theorizing of gender performativity to develop her analysis about the politics of Athenian nativism. For Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990), gender becomes real—gains worldly materiality and meaning—through repeated performances. But that performative quality is concealed through a variety of scientific and everyday discourses, which portray gender as an inner natural essence of which the constituting acts are simply expressive. What gender is in Butler’s theory, Athenian blood is in Kasimis’s interpretations. For Athens, there is a natural distinction between those whose descent qualifies them as Athenian and all others. This natural “fact” is of course a political effect, as Pericles’ citizenship law makes especially clear. But blood has a further uncertain sort of facticity, because it does not “speak for itself” (p. 158). Policing Athenian citizenship thus required a variety of scrutinizing practices and an accompanying anxiety about secrecy and deception, given the imbrication of citizen and metic in the public life of Athens.
Kasimis investigates these tensions through readings of Euripides’ Ion (Chapter 2), Plato’s Republic (chapters 3-5), and Demosthenes’ speech Against Euboulides (Chapter 6). Her interpretive approach is at once sophisticated and clear, offering a distinctive lens through which we can see the writers engaging critically with Athenian nativist politics. For example, in Chapter 4, Kasimis engages in an intriguing reading of the “noble lie” in Book 3 of Plato’s Republic. She points out that Plato’s myth of the metals is not a bizarre invention but a recognizable version of Athenian autochthony discourse. Unlike Athenian discourse, though, Plato’s myth says outright that blood is an unreliable indicator of natural difference—since silver and bronze children can occasionally be born to gold parents, as well as the reverse. Blood’s indeterminacy produces the need for a different criterion, then, and in the kallipolis the criterion is performance. Guardian nature is revealed by how children perform throughout their carefully constructed education and the various tests that comprise it. The claim that nature is what produces performance is established by making (cultivated) performance the proof of nature. Unlike Athens, then, the kallipolis evades the danger of lesser natures “passing”—illicitly performing—as higher ones. And as Kasimis says, “unlike Athens or the kallipolis, then, Plato’s text is fully prepared to affirm that reproduction does not make distinct kinds because it has shown us that politics does" (p. 102).
That quotation indicates the shift in reading that Kasimis recommends. It is Plato’s character Socrates who creates membership rules and ways of policing them, including the noble lie. As an author, Plato shows the audience this (whether the audience is Socrates’ interlocutors or readers of the dialogue), and thus he underscores the political creation of seemingly natural statuses and the practices of judgment that determine them.
In her analysis of Euripides’ Ion, Kasimis directs our attention toward Ion’s shifting political statuses throughout the play, and the secrets and lies that underlie each. At the end of the play, Ion has been revealed to be a native Athenian, but Athena requires that Ion continue to conceal his identity (for an unspecified length of time) and return to Athens as a metic. The play works to expose an underlying Athenian worry: “[I]f a native Athenian can pass as a metic, a metic can pass as an Athenian, for the so-called facts of blood do not speak for themselves” (p. 43). But why does Athena insist that Ion pass as a metic? Kasimis suggests that the act of concealment/revelation is what produces identity as a fact, a difference already there, and thus serves to stabilize the “citizen/metic binary" (pp. 47–48). But it is difficult to see how Ion’s multiple fluctuating statuses could at once destabilize and reinforce the binary—which is simply to say that in my mind, the ending of Euripides’ play remains a mystery.
Kasimis’s work accomplishes the difficult task of taking seriously the specific historical contexts in which these ancient Greek works were written, while at the same time allowing us to see how these works might inform our contemporary practice and discourse. I found myself dwelling on the situation of Euxitheus, for whom Demosthenes’ Against Euboulides was written. Euxitheus is appealing the decision of his deme to revoke his citizenship, a decision that (he argues) was orchestrated by an enemy for revenge. The charge that he is not a citizen transforms all previous evidence into lies, and transforms Euxitheus from a peer into a supplicant. Kasimis writes that “everyone is a secret bearer and potential metic in Athens so long as what separates a citizen from a noncitizen, what turns one into the other, is the charge of lying . . . the potential to be and do falsely” (p. 166).
Consider this in light of the current U.S. administration’s expanded efforts to review hundreds of thousands of files of naturalized citizens, in search of fraud that would enable their denaturalization and in some cases deportation (Seth Freed Wessler, “Is Denaturalization the Next Front in the Trump Administration’s War on Immigration?” New York Times Magazine, December 19, 2018). When these reviews are brought as civil cases, there is no statute of limitations—it does not matter how long one has been a citizen—and no obligation for the government to prove intent to deceive. And, of course, the United States is not alone in pursuing anti-immigrant policies.
This rereading serves to underscore the importance of Kasimis’s analysis. She ends the book by asking, “[W]hat if the metic is the critical figure of our time?" (p. 183).
