This book offers a comprehensive investigation into the different status groups co-existing within Classical Athens. In so doing, it seeks to challenge the validity of the traditional division of Athenian society into groups of citizens, slaves and foreigners, and instead to support the idea that there was a much broader and more complex spectrum of status identification within Athenian society (following the work of Moses Finley). At the same time, it argues that despite the existence of this broader and more intricate spectrum of identity, the Athenians themselves, particularly in the surviving literary sources, were keen to gloss over/contradict both the complexity and permeability of the different status groups.
The book's focus is on the ‘Classical period’, which is defined as 451 b.c. – 323 b.c. (p. 1). As such, its investigation into Athenian identity starts after one of the most important pieces of status legislation in Classical Athens – Pericles' citizenship law. While this is an understandable divide, as a result the book misses the opportunity to think about how status in Classical Athens changed dramatically during the last decades of the sixth century and first half of the fifth.
In Chapter 1, K.'s focus is on chattel slaves and in Chapter 2 on privileged chattel slaves. These chapters look, amongst other issues, at the problem of slave numbers; the use of slaves in battle (the prevalence of which K. asserts the Athenian sources under-estimated, p. 17); their social and legal rights, including protection of chattel slaves under graphe hubreos (p. 12); and the number of possible gradations and shades of freedom from slavery. It would have been good to see more discussion of sources like the Old Oligarch (p. 18), and particularly his assertion of the way slaves in Athens fared differently from those in other poleis, as well as more discussion of the chronological differentiation between the fifth and fourth centuries.
In Chapter 3, K.'s focus is on freedmen with conditional freedom (slaves freed with strings attached either by individual masters or by the polis in return for services in battle). In Chapter 4, K. examines the position of metics; in Chapter 5, that of privileged metics; in Chapter 6 bastards (nothoi); in Chapter 7 disenfranchised citizens (those who are atimoi); and in Chapter 8 naturalised citizens.
Not only are these fascinating categories, some of which are not often discussed or acknowledged within the study of Athenian society, but they are also all categories which overlap with one another in different ways – and it is on these issues of overlap that K.'s book should be most commended, not least for encouraging further reflection. A freed slave could be a metic, if given official resident status in Athens. But to what extent would a freed slave metic have felt different from, and been treated differently from, a metic who was a free-born foreigner (p. 43)? Just how long would the stain of slavery last on the reputation of a freed slave and influence his status within Athenian society, especially if that freedom came with certain conditions? As K. points out, in Attic oratory there are plenty of examples of freedmen being labelled as ‘still slaves’ (p. 54). Equally, given that the relationship between metics and their prostatai (patrons) changed quite dramatically between the fifth and the fourth centuries b.c. (p. 47), what effect did that have on the status of these individuals within Athenian society over time?
K.'s categories of privileged metics, bastards, disenfranchised citizens and naturalised citizens (Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7) point to another interesting series of overlaps which, as K. makes clear, would have been on view to differing degrees in different spheres of civic life (p. 68). In the religious sphere, nothoi had the same role as metics (as they did in the military), yet nothoi it seems were also particularly susceptible to attacks in the law courts for pretending to be citizens (p. 67). On the other hand atimoi were still technically citizens and could do military service, but were banned from many sanctuaries. Those who were made citizens had all the legal rights of citizens in the law courts, but were often referred to not as polites/astos (as a normal Athenian male citizen would be), but as demopoietos (p. 84), reinforcing an ongoing distinction between those who were born and those who were made in the social and political sphere. Equally those ‘made’ citizens were admitted into demes and tribes, but not phratries (p. 80), to which born-citizens were first admitted in the years immediately after birth.
What K.'s work also highlights is the frequent and ongoing potential for status mobility in Athens amongst these status categories. But whereas metics could rise up the spectrum of Athenian civic identity towards the ‘ultimate goal’ of citizenship, by being given ‘privileges’ such as the right to pay the eisphora, the right to own property (at least from 410 b.c. onwards – another interesting chronological difference to investigate) and to serve in the Athenian military, Athenian male citizens it seems could only descend in status by losing their privileges (p. 102 – especially as demes were regularly voting on the citizenship status of individuals on their registers). This could be by falling foul of new citizenship laws (Pericles' 451 b.c. law was officially called the law ‘on nothoi’), as well as a punishment for particular offences (those who became atimoi) – punishments that could last for a particular length of time and be cancelled at any time.
This nuanced spectrum of status in Classical Athens is only complicated further by the categories of female citizens (Chapter 9) and full male citizens (Chapter 10), particularly since the full male citizen was distinguished – from the time of Solon – into further sub-groups not only in terms of wealth class (which in turn had different rights ascribed to them over time), but also age.
What to take away from this investigation? First, I think we need to be more nuanced in our status distinctions than even K.'s categories allow: not only thinking about different statuses in social, political and legal terms that changed over time, but also in terms of how the perception and experience of status was affected by individual reputations and ancestry.
Second, given the face-to-face culture of Classical Athens, we need to investigate further the ways in which these often overlapping and heavily permeable status groups must have created, in different spheres of public activity, an ongoing sense of potential unease and instability within Athenian society. How did a full citizen male of the thetes class feel in comparison with a privileged metic for example? And what implications did that have for how these two groups acted and interacted within Athenian society, and the strategies they adopted for status differentiation and display? One effect may well have been the creation of a ‘gap’ between the reality and the rhetoric of Athenian status, as identified by K. (p. 111), which sought to paper over the ‘problem’ of Athenian status. But this book should also encourage us to investigate further the way in which the intricacies inherent in the Athenian status system were not only covered over, but also actively perceived by, and in turn affected the experiences and actions of, individual Athenians at every point on the spectrum.
