It is time to re-think Greek citizenship. It makes sense to start from the archaic period, not merely because it is the early phase of Greek history, but rather because modern accounts have depicted archaic citizenship as the embryonic stage of what would later become classical citizenship, within a teleological perspective of development of civic institutions that culminated in the classical polis. This approach follows the Aristotelian definition of the citizen as one who participates in deliberative and judicial office (Pol. 1275b18–19). Duplouy's and Brock's co-edited volume aims at – and succeeds in – showing that this definition, already problematic as it is for the classical and post-classical period, is completely inadequate to explain citizenship in the archaic polis.
Duplouy's long introduction offers a detailed discussion of the theories and methodologies for approaching Greek citizenship, starting from the legal and institutional approach of E. Szántó, Das griechische Bürgerrecht (1892), and discussing more recent approaches, such as the teleological perspective of C. Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen (1980), the institutionalist view of M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen (edd.), An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004), the neo-evolutionist model of P. Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (1990) and many others. The reader will benefit much from this critical review – not least because it discusses the rich contributions made outside the Anglo-Saxonic field by the German, French, Italian and Polish schools. Duplouy presents convincing arguments on the risks of viewing archaic citizenship as a bundle of rights and duties or an incomplete form of classical citizenship. We need a better model. The reader will therefore start reading the twelve following chapters with a very clear picture of the challenge at stake.
J.K. Davies's chapter is not actually about archaic citizenship, but rather about state formation in the Early Iron Age. It provides the historical framework in which the eleven following chapters are placed, and it shows that this is a book contesting current orthodoxies. Based on the premise that state formation was not a homogeneous process and that it was not peculiar to the Greek language zone, Davies discusses the operative forces – socio-political, demographic, environmental, religious, economic and cultural – that contributed to state formation. He eventually shows that his own definition of Greek citizenship in the Oxford Classical Dictionary must be complemented by the awareness that it is not only the political sphere that defines citizenship. His conclusion paves the way for what comes next: after highlighting that in the archaic polis only a few citizens participated in deliberative and judicial functions, J. Blok discusses the role of three different factors that contributed to defining citizenship: cult, descent and law. The case of the decree regulating relations between the Hypocnemidian Locrians settling at Naupactus and their polis of origin (IG IX I2 3: 718) illuminates the role played by sacrifice in distinguishing between insiders and outsiders. An important implication of this perspective is that cult acts as an inclusive force also with respect to women: citizenship, therefore, was not only a male prerogative, contrary to what Aristotle's definition seems to imply. In the following chapter, focusing on the military, H. van Wees argues that in the Solonian age warfare was not merely based on a system of volunteering and personal loyalties. Military obligations were more strictly regulated and institutionalised than recent scholarship has maintained. For the three highest property classes citizenship was formalised by a system of rights and obligations (both fiscal and military). By contrast, for the fourth property class, citizen status remained ‘fluid and informal, and needed to be asserted by “performing” in war and other arenas’ (p. 143). P. Ismard discusses the reorganisation of communitarian structures enacted by the Cleisthenic reform, focusing on the role played by three communities, the Gephyraioi, the Philaidai and the Lycomidai, in the context of the conflict enacted by Solon's naturalisation law (Plut. Sol. 24.4), which Ismard maintains to be genuine (p. 149; cf. P.J. Rhodes and D.F. Leão [edd.], The Laws of Solon [2015], p. 132 for discussion of the law). The Cleisthenic reform was not a way of centralising but of regulating linkages between communities.
Chapters 5 and 6, by M. Lupi and P. Cartledge respectively, focus on Spartan citizenship. Lupi contests the ‘standard model’, which relies on late sources for identifying two types of civic subdivisions among Spartan citizenry, namely a kinship-based one and a territorial one. He re-assesses the earliest evidence for the Spartan tribal structure (mainly the Great Rhetra, Herodotus and a late archaic inscription, SEG 11.475a = IG V 1.722) and sketches a new picture, in which each unit consisted of fictional kinship groups and had also a territorial nature. It was membership in these subdivisions (tribes and phratries) as well as participation in communal meals, rituals and education that created social cohesion and defined the citizen-group. Cartledge works mainly in the domain of ‘citizenship theory’: Sparta is a clear case of what P. Gauthier (Mélanges d'histoire ancienne offerts à William Seston [1974]) termed ‘Greek avarice’ in granting citizenship; Spartan citizenship was in fact a powerful weapon for drawing boundaries and excluding outsiders. N. Fisher discusses a phenomenon that is well attested in the Hellenistic and imperial period, but less visible in the archaic world: the role of athletics and victories in agonistic competitions in extending access to civic bodies. This chapter contains a useful catalogue of athletes changing citizenship or holding multiple citizenships on p. 217. J. Whitley's chapter focuses on the institution of the andreion and the practice of commensality in the cities of archaic Crete. It is an ‘archaeological chapter’, discussing, as well as literary sources, material evidence – the only kind of evidence that, as Whitley rightly reminds us, ‘steadily increases every year’ (p. 248).
Duplouy develops in his essay what he promises in the introduction. He effectively digs out evidence of citizenship performances from several parts of the archaic world, including Aeolian Cyme, Chalcis, Colophon and Sybaris. As wealth plays a major role in these performances, such as in the case of horse-breeding and display of luxury-items, he anticipates from the reader the question whether citizen-status and elite-status in fact overlapped. They did – Duplouy argues – inasmuch as ‘archaic citizens were an elite vis-à-vis non-citizens’ (p. 270), but wealth alone is not enough to define the citizen (one needs a set of behaviours to be performed), and, what is more, wealth might not have been the requisite to citizenship in every archaic community. Contesting I. Morris's model of the archaic world as a world divided between an elitist and a middling ideology (Archaeology as Cultural History [2000]), Duplouy maintains that competition and performances pervade every stratum of Greek society and are characteristics also of the non-elites. Hence, while in Cyme and other cities citizenship performance was played in terms of exhibition of wealth (luxury items), the content of performance might have been different in other cities ‘depending on which aspect each city put the emphasis on’ (p. 273). In the last chapter M. Giangiulio argues that the so-called ‘oligarchies of fixed number’ are a late nineteenth-century construction based on the Aristotelian theory on the succession of constitutions. In fact, as discussion of the Thousand of Colophon, Aeolian Cyme, Croton and Locris and the Six Hundred of Massalia shows, these bodies were neither restricted-oligarchies or councils: placing them between the seventh and sixth centuries, namely, three or four generations after the foundation of these poleis, Giangiulio argues they were citizen bodies ‘in the making’, i.e. a crucial stage in the development of the institutional order.
Brock offers a useful conclusion to the volume – a welcome reflection on the diversity of its approaches. This diversity calls into question the usefulness of the term ‘citizenship’ for the archaic polis. The definition of community was a fluid and dynamic process that did not follow the same pattern all over the Greek world. If we are to abstract from the empirical cases discussed in these chapters, the picture we derive of the archaic poleis is that of communities characterised by intense mobility, both in terms of recruiting new citizens from outside and of citizens belonging and moving between different associations within the polis.
The essays in this volume are strongly interconnected by frequent cross-references. A vast bibliography, index of sources and general index complete the work. Few typos escaped the eyes of the editors (such as Griechische instead of Griechisches or das griechische B. on p. 6 and the duplication of ‘was equality’ on p. 184), but these are exceptions in what is otherwise a carefully edited volume. It suggests future directions of enquiry in its conclusion: we need to contextualise Greek citizenship within the broader Mediterranean context, by comparing it, for example, to citizenship in the Near East and in non-Greek Italic cultures.
In some places the reader will wonder about the fact that ‘citizenship’ and ‘membership’ are used as synonyms, despite the fact that one could participate, for example, in cult and in the military and still not be a citizen. But, in fact, what this volume as a whole shows is that there is no citizenship without membership and performance of membership. It highlights the plurality of the forms of participation in the community, based on military, economic, political, religious and, more broadly, associative dynamics; at the same time, it also shows the limits of those approaches that define archaic citizenship by privileging one of these dynamics over the others. The title is, in this respect, provocative, as the book points to the problems intrinsic to any attempt to define archaic citizenship in relation to one single aspect of communitarian life. The essence of archaic citizenship was perhaps the intersection of these diverse forms of participation, none of which alone suffices to define the citizen. One of the most interesting aspects is the idea that performance is not only an integral part of citizen status, it is what defines the citizen and shapes the civic group. This is an important hermeneutical tool, provided that we do not abstract performance from the requisites that enable it and from the objects of performance (wealth? ancestry? ethnicity? military or agonistic victories?) Duplouy's and Brock's thought-provoking revisitation of traditional methodology will therefore be essential to any future study of Greek citizenship.
