W. begins with the question ‘what does it mean to belong to a community?’ The community in focus here is the Athenian polis (and its subdivisions, the demes) and the disputed members, the foreign immigrants who made it their home. W. positions herself within a growing tradition of those who believe that traditional politically focused answers to this question represent only one part of the picture (p. 14, see e.g. Manville [1994], Cohen [2000], Vlassopoulos [2007, 2009], Wallace [2011], Osborne [2011]). The alternative approach she adopts focuses on polis religion; the acceptance of metics into official festivals and the careful delineation of their roles in them. W. emphasises that citizenship comprises duties rather than rights and argues for participation in the rites of the polis as an integral part of citizen status, of equal importance to participation in the ecclesia or the army (pp. 20, 24–5). From this starting point, then, understanding the integration of foreigners into these rites takes on a particular urgency for W. This integration, it emerges, was neither uniform nor static and was shaped by both the nature of the rite and its other participants as well as the broader contemporary context, all subject to change over time. W. further argues that the particular ways in which Athens regulated metic participation in civic ritual determined and expressed the nature of their association with the city. As the Athenians used the regulation of religious rites to ‘structure, articulate and comment on their changing community’, so the role carved out for foreign immigrants within these rites played a part comparable to the institution of taxes, the inability to own property or to vote in the assembly, in conceptualising what it meant to be a metic (p. 26).

The first two chapters take on polis festivals. Chapter 1 deals exclusively with the Panathenaia, both as the festival for which we have the largest body of evidence and because, it is argued, metic participation in the festival constituted an important, early moment in the history of the developing notion of the metic. On the basis of visual evidence, W. wishes to backdate the initial organisation of metic participation from the 450s to c. 480–70 b.c. (p. 39). A small number of vases from this period depict individuals performing religious roles which were, in later sources, tied closely and exclusively to metic status. The argument is attractive but may not persuade everyone. The fact that these roles are exclusively associated with metic performers in later evidence could reflect the fact that, once metics were associated with these roles in the Panathenaia, this became the prevailing perception. It is not obvious, then, that the appearance of the tasks themselves (without independent indication of the metic status of their performers) in earlier evidence can be used to date when this change in the Panathenaia took place.

The chapter focuses on how a festival complex, such as the Panathenaia, allowed for the expression of different identities and relationships through its different events, from procession to sacrifice to athletic and artistic competitions. W. does a good job of integrating her discussion of ritual actions in the broad context of their associations in our sources – so that, for example, an emphasis on wealth and on supportive roles is brought out – and of looking at the metic experience through a comparison with the experience of citizens in the same or related contexts – for example, if metic participation in civic ritual was demanded, so was citizen participation elsewhere. Some associations are more persuasive than others. The comparison of citizen and metic youths as figures in transition is helpful. Much less convincing is the suggestion that old men were likewise ‘metoikoi in some sense … moving from one stage of life to another’ (p. 56). It is difficult to see in what sense old men are comparably on the verge of a transition which will see them adopting a new role in the polis, which they do not (as citizens and old men) already perform.

Chapter 2 turns to other Athenian hiera: the Lenaia, City Dionysia and Hephaisteia. The development of metic participation in these festivals is shown to coincide with various political and fiscal developments in the status of the metic at Athens, from Pericles' citizenship law to the introduction of the metoikion. W. does not, though, see inclusion in these festivals as a consolation prize for metics subjected to new social and administrative restrictions. Rather she argues again for understanding such complex religious inclusion in itself as a means not just of incorporating but of articulating the complex, distinct and separate nature of metic membership in the Athenian community (pp. 65–6). Religious participation constitutes not just inclusion but a fine-grained statement on the nature of identity and membership. W. is sensitive again to the importance of the nature of the festival and of historical context to the ways in which metic participation was negotiated. So the seemingly inclusive arrangements of the Lenaia are contrasted with the Dionysia, where an increased non-citizen audience coincides with a decreased role for metics.

The third chapter turns to deme festivals and the question of how to integrate foreign immigrants at a local level. Here again we find variety with different demes adopting different policies towards those non-demesmen (sometimes both metic and Athenian) resident in their community. The limited evidence available is subjected to close analysis as W. explores the reasons, geographical, financial and military, for such diversity. Ultimately W. wishes to argue that the deme's decision to grant non-demesmen a role in hiera was no less effective a way of honouring non-members than their capacity to waive taxation, another way in which they mirror polis action.

The final chapter returns to the polis level and to the special case of the Thracian worshippers of Bendis. W. offers a lengthy discussion of our evidence for Thracians at Athens as well as a review of past scholarship on this unique and fascinating cult before offering her own interpretation. The diversity of the Thracian community at Athens, however, encompassing slaves and mercenaries as well as metics, is, once acknowledged, sidelined in favour of a focus on Thracian metics in particular as the most important group in explaining the significance of the political and social gesture of inclusion conveyed by the Bendis cult (p. 131). W. argues for the fairly radical conclusion that Thracian orgeones were indistinguishable from citizen orgeones and, in accordance with the citizenship law preserved in Philochorus' Attis, were thus accepted into Attic phratries (pp. 152–5). Even if we accept W.’s suggestion that these orgeones initially consisted of a limited number of Thracian families, the question of how this privileged group related in both practical and symbolic terms to the broader Thracian population (the ethne Thrakiôn, IG ii 1283), who participated in the Thracian pompê (Pl. Rep. 327a), deserves further consideration.

Recent years have witnessed some challenges to the polis religion model to which W. wholeheartedly subscribes (see e.g. Kindt [2012]). There is an inherent risk in considering metics as religious agents only in so far as this agency can be seen through the prism of state-run religion. The question at the heart of W.’s book is what it means to belong to the community of Athens. Her answer is that religion provides one especially important and flexible avenue for inclusion. Precisely in the light of that approach, however, we should surely consider also how non-official channels of religious expression and agency – one may think of dedications, cursing, visits to religious experts or private religious associations – were available to the metic no less than the citizen and facilitated their participation in the community and their interaction with citizens, slaves and xenoi. Greater focus on metics and citizens as individuals alongside metoikoi and demos as institutions would further enrich the picture W. presents here.