Aspasia of Miletus

Bust of Aspasia. We have a  few copies likely made
from an original placed on the Acropolis as a dedication.

Every time I see someone post, publish, podcast, or whatever about Aspasia of Miletus, I have a moment of false hope that they will be doing so based on scholarship on Aspasia published in the last few decades and not based on fantasies of her as some high-class Grande Horizontale. Aspasia the hetaira is a long-standing trope that resists evidence to the contrary even though such a trope was disputed even as far back as the 1920s and in some cases, even in the 19th century. It is based on the application of a multivalent term hetaira to a woman whose prevalence in our male-dominated sources from ancient Athens makes her stand out (even though the terms was not applied to her in ancient sources). I was going to write something up for the great site Bad Ancient on this, but I've already written on it a lot, so, I am placing here a summary of the problem, links to further readings, and an excerpt from my book. 

Part of the insistence on "Aspasia the hetaira" is rooted in a misunderstanding of that term itself. Hetaira, as the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon gets right, has a wide range of meanings from the address one woman uses for another who happens to be her friend (Sappho speaks of Hera and Artemis as "girlfriends" in this sense) to a woman who is in a sexual relationship with a man, but is not married to them (what we in the modern world might also call a "girlfriend"). Some of these "girlfriends" may have received payments in gifts or support from the men they were with. In a specific mental landscape, this gets translated as "whore". 

Another part of this insistence is because we have accepted as real a trope of the wife/whore as the primary structuring device for women in pretty much every society. And, we have come to assume that Aspasia was not Perikles' wife, so she must have been a "whore".  And yet, this notion is rooted in an assumption that the Citizenship Law of 451 BCE banned marriage between citizen men and non-citizen women. Scholarly consensus, however, is coalescing around evidence that marriage was not, in fact, banned, until the 380s BCE. And yet, even with this assumption of a 451 BCE marriage ban, many scholars acknowledge that Aspasia was more likely a pallake (also spelled pallakis) in relation to Perikles instead of his "girlfriend" (hetaira). 

But what is a pallake? It is most often translated a "concubine", but it really only has something resembling that meaning in a handful of references in Herodotus to women of the Persian King's court. Or, it gets conflated with the use of the term to refer to temple attendants (who themselves get yoked to a disputed concept of the "temple prostitute") or it gets conflated with enslaved women who worked as personal servants in Athenian households, women who are threatened by their enslavers, we are told, with being sent to brothels. Any enslaved woman could be sent to work in a brothel, whether she was the pallake of an owner or a farm hand or wetnurse. More importantly, however, is that the term pallake is also used in Athenian law to refer to a domestic partner who is free and eligible to bear legitimate children to their partner. If Aspasia was not a wife, she was, as Madeline Henry argued in the 1990s, this sort of pallake. 

And yet, Aspasia is accused in numerous comic fragments of either being a sex worker or a madam. And Plutarch took this seriously. Except that we know for a fact that the easiest way to attack a politician in Athens was always through their mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives. It's hard to take the anti-Athenian writer Ephorus or the comic poets Cratinus and Aristophanes at face value when they call Perikles' non-citizen wife a madam, when the attack would have been a normal part of political discourse AND expected within anti-immigrant, misogynist comic norms. 

We also, of course, have to contend with the Socratic tradition that positions Aspasia as a teacher of rhetoric, likely of young women, but also of young men (see discussion in ch 5 of Immigrant Women). 

Anyway, point is, Aspasia was most likely NOT any form of sex worker or madam, but there are a lot of people invested in this specific version of her and resist any evidence to the contrary. I collated all the evidence in my 2014 book Immigrant Women in Athens and discussed the disputed concept of the hetaira again in my 2015 article on two women named Elpinike (sister of Kimon) and Koisyra (mother of Megakles). You can read the whole section on Aspasia in the book (it's chapter 3; ch 1 is an overview of the laws, ch 2 on tragic representations of foreign women, ch 4-5 moves to the 4th c and oratory and further inscriptional evidence for non-citizen women's lives but includes a section on Aspasia as teacher of rhetoric)). Please feel free to read both the book and the article for further contextualization and evidence for why I and other scholars dispute that Aspasia was a madam or hetaira (in the sense of a sex worker) and what is at stake in continuing to promote that version of her. 

Below, I am reproducing an excerpt from that study that attempts to reconstruct a more likely version of her life based on a broad range of evidence that includes inscriptions that may refer to her male family members and within the context of how immigrants, especially from Miletus, integrated into Athens in the 5th century BCE. Please consider referring to it next time you see some new encyclopedia entry or textbook that tells you Aspasia was a hetaira because her name means "sweetie" or some bullpuckey like that (citizen women in Athens often had names that meant "honey", "sweetie", etc). Aspasia was a wealthy metic (resident non-citizen) woman in Athens with connections to wealthy citizen families. That context matters. 

***

If Aspasia's tomb remained, 
it probably looked a lot
like this.

Reconstruction: When Aspasia arrived in Athens sometime around 450 BCE, she did not come as a poor immigrant looking for work in the bustling imperial city that was Athens at that time or as a trained courtesan. Rather, she came to Athens from the politically unstable Miletos  as the sister-in-law of the fabulously wealthy and well-known Athenian Alkibiades the elder, just returned from his ostracism. When Alkibiades left Athens in 460 BCE and arrived in Miletos, where he seems to have spent his exile, his marriage to a daughter of the wealthy Milesian Axiochus was nothing outside of the norm for an aristocratic Athenian man. His two children from this union, Axiochus and Aspasios, while metroxenoi, were still reckoned as Athenian citizens because they were born before 451 BCE.  When Alkibiades returned to Athens, however, with his Milesian wife and her younger sister Aspasia, the laws had changed thanks to Perikles.  What had been possible for Aspasia’s sister, producing citizen children, was no longer a possibility for the young Aspasia. 

Thus, when Aspasia arrived in Athens, she came allied by marriage to one of the most powerful families in the city, but would perhaps not be able to contract such a dynastic marriage for herself if only because her children could not be citizens. Still, she was not without citizen friends and family in the city and her immediate social circle was from the cream of Athenian society. The possibilities for finding a good marriage were not out of bounds for her. It is even possible that when Kleinias, the son of the elder Alkibiades from an earlier marriage, died at Koroneia in 447/446 BCE and Perikles became guardian of the younger Alkibiades (III), that Perikles also became the kurios of the still young Aspasia. Around this time, Aspasia and Perikles began a long-term relationship that was recognized as a marriage that lasted until Pericles’ death in 429 BCE. They had one child born sometime before 441 BCE who was enfranchised in 430 BCE. Their relationship, because of Perikles’ prominence and because of the law he himself proposed (and which made his child by Aspasia initially a non-citizen), became the subject of much gossip on the comic stage for certain, and likely, in the agora and the assembly.

Upon Perikles’ death in 429/8 BCE, it is unclear what happened to Aspasia and her son Perikles Jr., although it is possible that the latter became the ward of Alkibiades, now aged around 23, or his own uncle Axiochus, Aspasia’s nephew. Aspasia, Alkibiades’ aunt now aged around 40, would have either become the dependent of Axiochus or of Alkibiades himself until her son came of age. The tradition that Aspasia was remarried to Lysikles, by whom she supposedly had a child named Poristes, is neither secure or necessary.  Many of the comic slanders against Aspasia come from the years after Perikles’ death and may be associated with the careers of her nephew and son. Her relationship to Lysikles could have been one of teacher and student because many of the philosophical texts (Plato, Xenophon and Aeschines) treat Aspasia as something akin to a Sophist. It is quite possible that Aspasia and Lysikles were not married at all and never had a child, but by learning rhetoric from her, he was able to bamboozle others as the comic figure Strepseides attempts to do in Aristophanes’ Clouds, thus bearing the metaphorical child, Poristes, a polite way of calling someone a thief.  Aspasia also could have offered basic education to young women, thus the reference to her ‘girls’ in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, the pornê whose kidnapping he jokes led to the Megarian decree. We might view both as comic slanders against Aspasia as Sophist, dressed erotically in the guise of madam or prostitute.

This reconstruction of Aspasia’s journey to Athens and her life is based primarily on the epigraphical and historical evidence linking her Milesian family to the Athenian family of Alcibiades (II). Whether it is completely accurate or not does not matter, although I think it a more accurate picture of Aspasia’s life than what is traditionally posited. What matters most, however, is its plausibility and what that means for understanding the possibilities for metic women found frequenting citizen social circles in mid-fifth century BCE in Athens and the impact laws like the Citizenship Law might have had on them. Aspasia has long been reckoned among scholars, especially among scholars studying women’s history, as a courtesan and madam mostly because she was associated socially with Athenian citizen men and scholars have long rejected any notion that a respectable citizen woman could socialize with men in this way. 

Aspasia was also considered by her contemporaries as educated and intellectual. The combination of her foreign birth, education and eroticization has led to the inevitable conclusion that she must have been a courtesan because within the dynamics that have become established in the study of Athenian women, the only possible way to understand the famous foreign women of wealth we encounter in the historical record is as such. But it is unclear if such prostitutes really did exist in Aspasia’s lifetime. And the history reconstructed for Aspasia by Bicknell suggests a very different path for metic women of wealth in Athens, especially for those with ties to citizens. While the Citizenship Law did eliminate temporarily and technically the possibility that a metic woman’s child could be a citizen, it did not eliminate relationships for those with connections to the Athenian elites nor did it reduce these women to indigence with no options but to prostitute themselves (or others) to survive. What we see at work both in the invectives against Aspasia and in the scholarly tradition is the ideology of the metic woman, especially reflected in the representation of Phaedra. Aspasia, living in Athens on the cusp of a change in Athenian self-definition, bears the scars of the ideological warfare waged after 451 BCE on metic women under the guise of protecting the citizen body. 

Reconstruction quoted from Immigrant Women in Athens (Routledge, 2014) Copyright Rebecca Futo Kennedy. 

Rejecting 'Greekness': Classics Athens’ Anti-Immigrant Policies and Practices

This is the second of three lectures I gave  between July 9-13, 2019 as the Onassis Lecturer at the CANE Summer Institute held at Brown University. The theme of the institute was "E Pluribus Unum".  The first lecture has been posted previously here.

NOTE: there are parts of each lecture where I either did not script the text and refer to slides or simply ad libbed. As a result, in those locations, I will either post the slides or will link to previous posts that explain the point I was making.

In my first lecture, I discussed the fact the “Greeks” were a plurality--they weren’t bothered by being both “Greeks” and Spartan, or Corinthian, or Milesian, or Ephesian, or Samian or Egyptian, Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, even Persian! It’s just how things were. But not all Greeks thought their fellow Greek were their equals--some ‘Greeks’ were, they thought, better than others. The most well know of these ethno-exceptionalists were the Athenians.

Athens, the place where most of my research has focused in the past, had one of the largest ports--Piraeus, a hub for merchant activity, industrial weaving and pottery production, and a thriving shipping industry-- and it had, as far as we can tell, one of the most ethnically diverse populations among the Greeks of the Classical period--thousands of immigrants between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE flooded into the polis either looking for work or seeking refuge from the continual wars that plagued the Aegean. This is not to mention the tens of thousands of enslaved persons being imported at the same time--enslaved who were both fellow Greeks and non-Greeks. However, the Athenians also had, as far as we can tell, some of the most restrictive laws for foreigners. the metic system (metoikia), which I want to talk about today. It was, I would argue, one of the few only truly racist systems in Greco-Roman antiquity and seemed to depend upon a certain level of anxiety about foreigners and foreignness. It may have been instituted, after all, as Aristotle said--because of ‘too many citizens’.

Is Athens exceptional in this regard? Or is it the case that whenever a population feels they are being pushed out by ‘others’ we should expect this reaction? Does it have to be this way? It’s a question we need to consider more broadly if we want to understand the world we ourselves live in, where debates surrounding immigration, refugees, and national boundaries are ever looming. Understanding Athens is particularly important given how often Athens is used as a model for democracy, its high period of empire and anti-immigration sentiment a ‘golden age’ in our textbooks, popular journalism, and entertainment. For example:

In truth, for about four centuries, Athens rejected the plurality of Greekness and insisted not only on its own supremacy, but sought to engineer Athenian ethnic homogeneity. That thing--racial homogeneity--that I argued the other day did not apply to the Greeks generally was, in fact, an ongoing wish for the Athenians--ex uno unum.

My goal for today is to break this wish down, show its ebbs and flows, its final decline, and the contexts in which it functioned. My hope is that it will give us some food for thought as we enter the second decade of an international refugee crisis in which over 10 million people have been forced by war, violence, corporate exploitation, and interventionists policies of superpowers to leave their homes and seek safety in our own and other ‘democratic’ countries, some of whom (like Hungary, Italy, the UK, and the US) have shut their borders and enacted policies that encourage at the least negligence and at the worst human rights violations and cruelty. 


TIME LINE and LAWS

I will start with orienting us with a chronology and explanation of the policies:

Cleisthenes and the Synoecism, 508/7 BCE:

καὶ δημότας ἐποίησεν ἀλλήλων τοὺς οἰκοῦντας ἐν ἑκάστῳ τῶν δήμων, ἵνα μὴ πατρόθεν προσαγορεύοντες ἐξελέγχωσιν τοὺς νεοπολίτας, ἀλλὰ τῶν δήμων ἀναγορεύωσιν. ὅθεν καὶ καλοῦσιν Ἀθηναῖοι σφᾶς αὐτοὺς τῶν δήμων.
       
And he made those dwelling in each deme of the same deme as one another, in order that they not ascertain who were the new citizens (νεοπολίτας) when addressing them by patronymic, but would publicly announce them as belonging to the deme. Thus, Athenians name themselves by their demes (Aristotle Ath Pol 21.4).

Cleisthenes' reforms, if we believe Aristotle, involved making citizens out of those who would be in later times called metics. In 508/7 BCE, however, they were incorporated into the new Athens as citizens. Of course, what Aristotle means precisely by νεοπολίτας here is not certain. It could refer to indigenous inhabitants of Attica in places that had not yet been fully synoecized. Or, it could refer to any residents, whether born in Attica or not. Either way, this is a move that creates the idea of a united Attic Athens and everyone no so incorporated is 'Athenian' and will get to be part of the myths and institutions that held it together under the claims of a pure, 'Athenian' descent.

After the Persian Wars (490 BCE and 480-79 BCE) we see an uptick in anti-Persian rhetoric, but also anti-Ionian Greek rhetoric; policy of subjugating Ionians to Athenian control under the Delian League may stem from animosity over the Ionians generally fighting on the side of Persian in the war.

Institution of metoikia--laws (470-460 BCE)

Periklean Citizenship Law (451 BCE): Both parents must be citizens; law was not retroactive, though some scholars (like D. Ogden) have argued [unconvincingly] that this law reflects practice in Athens towards children of a foreign mother prior to the law's passage.

Relaxations (429 BCE, after 415 BCE): There is evidence that the law was relaxed in the face of first the plague and then the disaster in Sicily that allowed citizen men who had a child by a foreign women to request they be granted citizenship. Carawan (see biblio below) argues that the 429 BCE exception was for those whose legitimate citizen heirs had died. After the Sicilian disaster, we have evidence from the 4th c. BCE that it was--Demosthenes and many others speak in orations of their own parents being born "at the time when" it was required to only have one citizen parent. Chronologically, this falls into the period of the Peloponnesian War. There was a stigma attached to this, but it didn't prevent them from being prominent citizens.

After 403 BCE: After the reign of Thirty Tyrants and restoration of the democracy, one of the first things the restored Athenian assembly did was re-establish the restrictions on foreigners--women immigrants could no longer bear citizen children to citizens. Those children also were additionally banned from being heirs to citizens.

A ban on marriage followed a bit later and enforcement seems to have ramped up--penalties for failure to register and pay tax or for pretending to be a citizen: sale into slavery and the person who reported received a portion of the sale. A man name Aristogeiton, is one of the most well known for this. According to Demosthenes 25, he sold his own sister and attempted to have Zobia, an independent metic woman sold as well. 

Around 322 BCE, Athens attempted to put in place a new metic tax, but the city was soon to lose its independence. In 317 BCE, Cassander, an heir to Alexander, imposed Demetrius of Phalerum on the city as its governor on behalf of the Macedonians. He seems to have removed the ban on foreign ownership of property. He may have ended the taxes on metics. Regardless, even with its loss of independent status, the Ahtenians continued to maintain citizenship as the prerogative of only those with two citizens parents and the marriage ban seems to have remained in effect.

Between 200-100 BCE, outside of Athens, we see Athenians in Athenian settlements (like Delos) intermarrying with non-Athenians; Maybe a sign the chauvinism was diminishing? Regardless, after 200 BCE within Athens itself, we see evidence of the ban on intermarriage with non-citizens being lifted--over 40 tombs for Milesian women married to Athenian citizens have been noted and there are likely many more.

This is quite a trajectory and the most restricted times for immigrants in Athens were during the periods when democracy was supposedly at its height. The equality of the citizens could only be achieved, it seems, through exclusions. Otherwise, what was citizenship other than a burden or series of obligations? To make it desirable, it had to have privileges. And instead of making everyone truly equal (economic inequality was rather high), the elites pushed legislation that targeted foreigners (especially foreign women) and promoted national myths that all Athenians were equal in their purity of descent.

 What reasons? Why would they do this? What is the underlying logic?

RACISM, that weed Knox and many others have convinced themselves could never grow in Greece, especially in Athens, which recall, he calls the polis in its advanced form.

But, as discussed in the last lecture, this homogeneity was a myth as was the idea that our concept of race can be applied to antiquity--race in antiquity is different. Instead, we should consider race as a structuring mechanism. Here is Falguni Sheth:

In other words: Race is more a technology that structures human interactions and embeds prejudices against racialized peoples into systems of oppression-- there are three things: human difference, prejudice, and race: race is the institutionalization of prejudice based on moving signifiers for human difference. Sometimes this involves the biological, sometimes not. If we understand, as Sheth does, race not as a ‘descriptive modifier’, but as “a mode or vehicle of division, separation, hierarchy, exploitation’, we can see better how institutions that seem to be, as she calls it ‘race neutral’ are actually how race itself functions.

And this is how the metic system operates. We miss the implications of the system and its nature if we mistake ‘race’ for a something as banal as skin color--a difference of a few hundred alleles in our genes out of about 3 billion.

Let me explain: How was the Athenian system a race system built on racism? I am going to put up a slide at the end with a select bibliography where you can see where these issues have been discussed before. Susan Lape and I are probably closest in our understanding of race in Athens, though she argues from race as embedded within the idea of descent instead of looking at the structures that support the idea of descent based citizenship. My interest is really in understanding race as a system within institutions, even institutions that can purport to be 'race neutral', as Sheth discusses.

5th century (after 450 BCE): Autochthony and the search of purity--eugenics? Ion--lots of discussion also in Herodotus, Thucydides, the funeral orations. There is a large scholarship on this (see biblio below for a selection). Here are some samples from Athenian tragedy that reflect these ideas.

Foreign women in tragedies are points of contamination, danger (Phaedra in Euripides' Hippolytus, Medea, Andromache in the plays named after them by Euripides)--the language around Phaedra, especially, is the language of nosos, disease. The best metic is the one that sacrifices itself for the state (Euripides' Herakleidae) or can offer divine protection (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus). I discuss this in Ch 2 of the Immigrant Women in Athens book, if anyone wants to take a look at the detailed discussion.

The fact that naturalized citizens in no period could hold the archonship or certain priesthoods--only their grandchildren (so long as their naturalized children married born-citizens) could--points to the fear of reproducing foreignness.

In the 4th century, metics appear in oratory as inherently untrustworthy--Geoff Bakewell has written on this issue in Lysias--another sign of fear of contamination.

380s BCE: Isocrates attempts repeatedly in his speeches to recruit the Athenians to unite the Greeks in a war with Persia. The Athenians weren’t interested--maybe they didn’t see much difference between their fellow Greeks and the ‘barbarians’? He eventually decides Philip of Macedon is a better choice. At least one Athenian wasn't opposed to foreigners...

There was, then, a LOT of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner sentiment in Athens from the 1st quarter of the 5th century to the last part of the 4th. This rhetoric was accompanied by very strict policies that were very harmful to the metics who lived in the city. But it may have also have been not just prejudice against foreigners--certain foreigners were welcome to the city and over the course of the 5th and 4th centuries, we see various periods when wealthy men are invited to Athens to set up factories (Lysias’ father Kephalos, for example) or are made citizens though having been enslaved (Pasion and Phormio the bankers; Apollodoros, the son of Pasion).

We also see evidence of proxenia for metics, a typically honorary status, that also grants them the right to own land in Athens, if not citizenship. We even see a couple of block grants of status (maybe not actual full citizenship) to refugees from Plataea (427); Samos (403/2); and Olynthus (348).

Its also wrong  o say that Athenians were all hateful to the foreign residents living in the city--#notallathenians. There is tomb evidence that some of the immigrant or slave women living within the city were loved by citizens--despite their status as foreign--nurse tombs:

So, we see evidence of acts of kindness to individuals and even certain groups who were ‘other’. But the policies can overwhelm those individual kindnesses. Those individual acts of gentleness are great, but they are only necessary because there are policies that create incentives to cruelty. And these acts of kindness can be hallmarks of systems of oppression--examples trotted out to show it 'wasn't that bad'.

What do we make of all of this? Why do I think it matters here to think about this through the idea of race?

Let’s go back to the ideas I mentioned earlier from political scientist Falguni Sheth: If we understand that race is NOT a content signifier--it isn’t skin color of hair type or any sort of physiological, visible difference (most of the resident foreigners in Athens were other Greeks, after all)--but the mechanisms used to enforce discrimination, inequality, and oppression through those or other shifting markers, then we can understand better how systems of oppression are formed and how they act. We can see what is happening in Athens as a process that isn’t built into ‘nature’ but is constructed willfully, one law, one lawsuit at a time. It gives us a much more accurate picture of what was happening in Athens and gives us the tools we need to see how their imperialism, ethno-centrism, exceptionalism, misogyny, and militarism intersected and fed each other.

It also gives of better tools with which to see beyond and through the elites of many of our literary sources like Thucydides and the orators and get a better picture of those members of Athenian society who lived at the margins. In other words, it gives us a much more accurate picture of what it was like to live in Athens in antiquity, of what it was like to be the person upon whose labor the amazing architecture was built (many (most?) of the craftsmen were foreigners or enslaved). In other words, the “Glory that was Greece” had an underbelly that we, as Americans would do well to pay heed to because our own history shows that the Glory that is America is built on equally if not worse racism and structures of oppression. By ignoring this aspect of one of the models for our democracy in our teaching and discussions of classics, we allow ourselves to ignore it in our own history and daily lives as well.

CONCLUSION

But, I don’t want to leave us on a down note--as Robin reminded us yesterday, IT’S SUMMER! AND SUNNY!. But also because there are alternatives to this exclusionary model presented by Athens in the 5th-2nd centuries. Miletos. From Miletos, we have a series of decrees that span from around 250 BCE to 100 BCE. Some of them are extremely fragmentary, but they attest to 100s of people from all over Greece, the Black Sea region, Italy and Sicily, Asia, the Levant, and North Africa being granted citizenship in the city over the period. Most of them were granted citizenship as whole families--husband (frequently the husband and wife had the same ethnic identifier, but not always), fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. Some were individual women, some individual men.

Of particular note are the inscriptions from 228/7 BCE and 223/2 BCE which include large block grants of citizenship to Cretans. These Cretans came to Miletos as mercenaries. We would expect them to have come alone because that is how we imagine mercenaries from Xenophon’s Anabasis. But, no. These Cretans brought their families. And they settled. And then they became Milesians.

We don’t have a lot of records like this from antiquity, and we don't know everything about these decrees that we would like to know about them. And we know that something was going on that caused Miletos to relax its own citizenship restriction, but this is a significant concession.  I imagine that if we did, we would find that many Greek poleis were far more open to foreigners that we often assume because our most well attested example, Athens, twas so restrictive. This evidence suggests--as does the lack of foreign burials in Miletos--that maybe these foreigners weren’t segregated and derided when they arrived, whether as refugees, as freed slaves, or as free immigrants, but were welcomed in as part of the city.

 

Identity Politics and Classics: The Universal vs. the Particular

Stupendous colleague, Dr. Amy Pistone, recently tweeted some responses to my last blog post on the Claiming the Classical workshop that I think are really astute and worth engaging. Her response got me to think a bit more about one of the comments I made that she had thoughts on.

To my idea of universalism and imperial conditioning, Amy added the idea of hybridity:

Colonial contexts are complicated and have a complicated relationship to classics because of the history of classics as a tool for empire and exclusion. This means that there is no single reason or single way for those so excluded to engage with classics. Hybridity offers of good way to think about some of these engagements.

Hybridity as a concept does have its limitations, however, as Rosa Andujar discussed in her discussion of Luis Alfaro's Mojada (Medea) at the Racing the Classics conference. sometimes decolonial receptions fail to interrogate their own racist foundations, particular in Latin America, where indigenous peoples are often inserted as pre-Columbian fantasies, frozen in time. Or, as Armando Garcia discussed at the same conference concerning Rodolfo Usigli, the elevation of the pre-colonial past still finds itself framed through European/Classical frames, while the indigenous falls prey to tragic tropes. 

The question of the positioning of classics as universal is not simple nor separate from the issue of resistance. It is, in fact, intimately connected and shapes that resistance in so far as the resistance is typically positioned by the resisted as 'particular' or as a self defeating and needless 'identity politics' vs that hegemonic, universal, and necessary 'classical.' This is because of this problem of classics as universal and its linked to European whiteness and maleness as 'norm' and the positioning of 'identity politics' as deviation from the supposedly universal norms of classical, European male whiteness and the social, political, and economic institutions that support it. This what I am pondering this morning. I know I'm not the first person to ponder this problem called 'identity politics' nor will my conclusions here be unique. Importantly for me, though, is the fallacy that the ancient world was without identity politics and any discussion of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or class in classics is an imposition of post-modern, cultural marxist anachronism. This is patently false.

So, my question is 'is there such a thing as identity politics in classical antiquity?' Let's start with what identity politics means. If one does a search on Google for 'what is identity politics?' you end up with lots of articles that tell us all about how dangerous and destructive identity politics are, how antithetical they are to the 'real world' (tm) and how they should disappear (though there are some good discussions on it as well, like the one from Philoso?hy Talk). Identity politics are also predominantly in popular discourse associated with 'leftist' politics, as if conservative 'right' and centrist politics is completely uninterested in identity. For example...

The Urban Dictionary's current 'top definition' of Identity Politics is representative of the sort of bias and intentional misinformation presented about identity:

But, there are many who recognize that Identity Politics is not what burgerva thinks it is. For example, another top definition from UD:

These may be reflective of what the average person thinks when they hear 'identity politics'. We can't say 'non-academics', of course, because there are ample academics who want to get rid of what they refer to as 'identity studies' or 'grievance studies' or, really, anything that isn't a traditional department, but instead is a 'studies' program and these are linked to identity politics. If this is one's attitude towards issues of identity in the contemporary world, it goes without saying that the same individuals will reject the study of identity in the ancient world. Or, will reject studies of identity in the ancient world that don't align with what they think of as universal types of identity vs. particulars.

We see this especially with the issue of race and ethnicity. We've had about 30-40 years now of ethnicity studies in the ancient Mediterranean, but race is still nascent. Part of the issue is because racist approaches before 1950 to study antiquity used the language of race to mean explicitly a biological difference between groups of humans that impact their physical appearance and character and that physical appearance determines character, intelligence, etc. To counter this, the language of race was dropped and ethnicity (a 20th century coinage) was picked up and pretended frequently to be about culture, while often still essentializing that culture into geographic, national, heritable character and physical attributes.

We also have the problem in the US that 'race' has been reduced far too often to a problem of whiteness and blackness. These are particular manifestations of race, not the sum total. But, when one says they are exploring 'race' in antiquity, there is an assumption that this means exploring blackness (as if blackness is itself inflexible and unchanging a concept). And, because of the way Classics and the classical world have been assimilated to whiteness in our contemporary world (I've written about this before), those who oppose the study of race in antiquity will point to the whiteness of Greece and Rome and the essentialist view that black = sub-saharan African and conclude that you are forcing modern identity politics onto the classical past. Again, it is an issue of the universal and the particular, but of a different kind.

Of course, this may seem odd of me to say. I am suggesting here that he ancient world had identity politics that can be understood as aspects of race. The ancient Greek and Roman ways of understanding identity aren't universal and should not be assumed to be universal, but they do have particular ways of thinking that can help us understand that there is a somewhat universal aspect to the struggle over identity and one of its manifestations as 'race.' Meaning, we should not take the Athenians as a model for all that is 'civilized' and adhere to their anti-immigrant laws because they represent a universal norm that modern societies are deviating from. Rather, we should understand their anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner rhetoric and laws as particular manifestations of a more universal habit towards organizing humans that we call 'race'. This organizing habit called 'race' often manifests as a dominant group being set as the universal norm and any challenges by those the dominant group excludes are considered deviations and called 'identity politics'.

How can I say this is a universal habit? Well, I can't say its universal. I can say, however, that it is transcultural and transhistorical. It appears in lots of different geographic spaces in lots of different time periods. My evidence for this is..well...there is a lot of evidence for it. But when I think of ancient Greece in particular, one of the easiest ways to see that identity politics existed and that it functioned in part in a way we might see as coinciding with the organizational principles of race and ethnicity is on tombstones.

Tomb of Melitta. Athens. IG II2 7873/SEG 30.235.

Tombstones from all over the ancient Greek world tell us the stories of the lives of everyday people--what jobs they did, whom they married, who their parents or children were, what they valued, how they were valued by others. These are all identities, or aspects of the identity of that person. We know that there are a politics to this based on who gets what sorts of images, what is said about them and how the tombs locate those people vis a vis the place of their burial. I'll demonstrate with an example.

Here is the text of the tomb for a woman named Melitta.

"[[Melitta]] daughter of the isotelês Apollodoros, Melitta the nurse. In this place the earth covers over the deserving nurse of Hippostratê, and even now she misses you. I held you dear while you lived, nurse, and still now honor you although you are beneath the earth, and will honor you as long as I live. I know that even in Hades, if there is any reward for the deserving, the foremost honors rest with you, nurse, in the house of Persephone and Pluto."

Melitta's tomb was found in Athens and dates from the 4th century BCE. Her tomb tells us that she is the daughter of someone named Apollodoros, who was an isoteles. This means that she is the daughter of an Athenian resident foreigner (metic) who has been given a special status--he is exempted from paying the taxes normally only assigned to resident foreigners living in the city. This means that he must have done some sort of service to the state in order to be granted special privileges. She worked as a nurse. The image on the tomb pictures her with a child, who may have represented Hippostrate, whose family likely is responsible for setting up the tombstone.

There is a lot going on here that tells us about the politics of identity in Athens. First is that the tax status of Melitta's father was so important to her identity that it IS her identifying characteristic on the tomb. It tells us where she ranks in the social and political hierarchy of classical Athens. She is the child of a privileged metic--her father wasn't a citizen, but he had managed to move himself up to one of the tax equality with citizens. Also important, however, is her job as a nurse. Not only does it sit right next to her identification as a privileged metic, but it is figured in the image and is the central identity highlighted in the tombs epigram. It is her relationship to the citizen family who likely funded the tombstone.

It makes sense that the family she worked for would  emphasize that she was a beloved caretaker in their family (probably long term). But why emphasize her political status within the city as part of the tomb? Because that identity mattered not only to Melitta, but it probably also mattered to the citizen family she worked for. They didn't have a slave nurse, they had a free(born) nurse. It elevated the status of the citizen family she worked for within the class dynamics of Athens. This is an instance of identity politics--the nurse Melitta is part of the politically excluded classes of Athens as both a foreigner and a woman. She is also 'working class'. But, she had access to some level of privilege in that her father had been given special status within that excluded class and she must have considered this an important aspect of her identity while alive. Her citizen employers thought it important enough to put it on her tomb.

We might consider whether the use of the isoteles on the tomb to mark her privileged status among the foreign immigrants of Athens was an act of resistance to her subordinate, excluded status (as both a woman and a non-citizen). But, of course, she could only offer that resistance to being subordinated within the framework of her exclusion--isoteles marked her as both a child of privilege among foreigners in the city and as a member of a politically impotent class. Her work as a nurse underscored her inability to access the social status of elite citizen women who would never have worked as nurses, but only hired them.

The hybridity might come from the fact that Melitta was likely also Greek and the iconography of the tomb and the use of the Greek language are shared by the community of Greeks to which the Athenians belonged in the broader Mediterranean. But her political status as isoteles only had meaning within the context of her subordination, her need to work as a mark of her exclusion from the norms of the citizen woman. Melitta's family, like many Greeks in antiquity, probably went to Athens for the financial opportunities offered by an imperial city and trade center. They may have gone there under the pressures of the wars between Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Persia, ad others for dominance in the Aegean in the 5th and 4th centuries. Migrating to Athens may have brought them some financial stability, but they were continually marked out for who they were not by laws and norms of representation. Another instance of a universal vs. a particular and of the potential shortcomings of hybridity as a theory for overcoming the discourse of empire.

I am not sure if this post went where I had planned it to go when I started. Probably not. But that's ok. Because issues of identity are complicated. Identity politics--that thing that we supposedly should get rid of because it is destroying our society and has no place in the study of the ancient world--is a challenge to engage. But it is ingrained in the histories of the world and we do ourselves and future generations a disservice by pretending its some contemporary trend of leftist academics designed to undermine our social and political systems. Unless, of course, by undermine we mean 'point out the shortcomings and show how those systems punish and oppress members of non-dominant groups so we can make them less oppressive.' Because that is, in fact, the point. But, of course, those who want to exclude identity politics are likely those who already know how the system works and simply want to keep it that way.

On Being a [Foreign] Woman in Classical Athens

It's International Women's Day and so I want to celebrate it by writing not about powerful women in antiquity, but about two not-so-powerful women whose lives were marked not just by the fact of their being women, but, more importantly, by the fact of them being non-citizen or "foreign" women. I say "more importantly" because if it weren't for this foreignness, their non-citizen status, their lives would have been fundamentally different. Because of their foreignness, they were a twice oppressed class. If they were economically poor in addition to being women and foreign, it was a triple oppression. (You can read more about other of these women in a previous post).

Some of you will recognize the women in this post from my book Immigrant Women in Athens. Others, may recognize them from classes you have taken or other scholars' writings on them. They don't make it very far, however, into the popular imagination. We know of them because they were prosecuted in court, a function, I argue, of prejudices due to their foreignness.

***

Sandys' famous painting of Medea

could just as easily be of a woman 

like Theoris.

THEORIS was from the island of Lemnos. Although Esther Eidinow has suggested she might be a citizen due to Athens' long history of controlling Lemnos, it is unlikely that she would be recounted as "of Lemnos" is she were an Athenian citizen. What we do know, however, is that she was executed along with her offspring for the manufacture and distribution of pharmakia. We learn about her in an aside in a speech by the orator Demosthenes (25.79-80):

He is the full brother of this man on his father and mother’s side and his twin in addition to the rest of his misfortunes.  This man--I will not talk about the rest--but on his account you put to death the repulsive Theoris from Lemnos, the pharmakis, and all her family.  [80] He took these medicines and chants from the handmaid who later informed on this woman from whom this slanderer begot children, the use of charms, and quackery, and (he claims) the ability to heal epileptics, although he himself is culpable of all wickedness.

Here we can vividly witness the precariousness of this foreign woman’s life. We do not know her precise situation, but she was apparently condemned for witchcraft after selling drugs to the brother of Aristogeiton, who then resold them as a cure for epilepsy. She was called a pharmakis, a word often translated as witch, but it probably had a wide range of meanings and is literally something like “druggist” or “pharmacist.” Derek Collins has argued that Theoris was not a witch at all, but something akin to a folk healer (which I agree was most likely the case) whose remedy must have gone wrong and killed an Athenian citizen. Her punishment was extreme. She and her children were executed. 

There is no mention that she had a spouse; she may have been an independent metic ("immigrant") woman with children who earned a living by making and selling remedies and potions of various sorts. The Athenian jury must have determined that her actions were intended to harm or kill, thus the resulting death sentence. We do not know what representation she had in the court. If she was a simple folk healer (akestris) or herbalist (rhizotomos) who sold remedies or even erotic potions to customers, then it is difficult to believe that she intended for anyone to die. In the fourth century BCE, making drugs and selling them was not illegal. It was possible, however, to be taken to court if you sold a drug that went wrong. 

Was Theoris dabbling in magic and seeking to harm citizens with her potions, as her conviction and some stereotypes of foreign women suggest? It is not uncommon to hear slaves or “prostitutes” accused of selling or using love potions in court cases or in comedy. In some ancient cases, we hear of them killing by poison, thinking (Deianira-style) it is a love potion. The associations of harmful magic and drugs with mythical foreigners like Medea and Circe also encourages us to consider that Theoris’ condemnation resulted from prejudice against foreign women. Theoris may also have been a priestess of sorts. Either way, it didn't end well for her or her children.

***

Theano, citizen wife, remembered on her tomb.

NEAIRA is another fairly well-known, but not well-to-do foreign woman in Classical Athens. She is known best from a speech once attributed to Demosthenes ([Dem.] 59) in which she was accused of pretending to be an Athenian citizen when she was supposedly really a sex worker illegally married to an Athenian citizen and passing of her foreign daughter also as a citizen. Most scholars have accepted that she was a sex worker (calling her a hetaira) and many even accept the charges of illegal marriage. I am (not unusually) an outlier on this. 

Neaira, to me, perhaps best exemplifies the way prejudices impact foreign women’s lives in Athens and the violence to which they could be subjected without recourse in law. She also exemplifies for me the way scholars continue to allow those prejudices to do violence to her. Centuries later, we believe her accuser not because he proves his case, but because we buy into his biases and his story.

Apollodoros, the accuser and a political enemy of her guardian Stephanos, attacks her on charges of 1. pretending to be a citizen, 2. living in marriage with an Athenian citizen, and further, 3. attempting to pass off her own children as citizens. The speech, however, is only minimally interested in proving these charges. Instead, Apollodoros devotes the bulk of his time to weaving a sordid tale of Neaira's life from a childhood as a brothel slave to her days as a supposed sex worker in Athens itself, though the events he recounts mostly took place decades, before this case is taken to court. Neaira’s situation and the case presented against her has been much discussed by scholars--no surprise given how salacious the details are and how much of a supposed insight the speech gives us into the lives of sex workers. It is a story intended to make the jury unsympathetic to the accused, but one that demonstrates as well the violence that a foreign woman was subjected to (not to mention the prejudices). 

I think we can believe that Neaira was likely a sex worker when she was a slave--all slaves were technically able to be prostituted without restrictions--but after buying her freedom, she seems to have been uninterested in continuing that trade. As an independent woman, however, she was dependent on the goodwill of men, and particularly citizen men, for her safety particularly since she had no male relatives to properly represent her in court. 

After buying her freedom, she came to Athens with the citizen Phrynion (he had lent her some of the money she needed to buy her freedom). According to the speech, she ran away from Phrynion to Megara soon after, where Stephanos later met her. She left because Phrynion, Apollodoros tells us, treated her like as if she were his private prostitute and, beyond that, permitted her to be raped in his company, possibly even gang rape. Even Apollodoros is unable to hide the fact that Neaira was brutally abused and was horrified at this treatment of her person (he tells us that she had expected that Phrynion loved her, but was instead treated with ‘wanton outrage’).  

After she fled Phrynion, she secured the guardianship of Stephanos. Phrynion, however, attempted to have her enslaved to him by accusing her of being an escaped slave. Stephanos stood with her in front of officials and she was granted the status of a free, independent metic. Maybe they formed a relationship. Maybe, as I have considered previously, he hired Neaira to take care of his two children after their mother had died (not an uncommon occurrence in antiquity). Maybe she actually once was "just the nanny." Whether they had a more intimate relationship later wasn't illegal (unless it was marriage), but it might have angered those who thought foreigners shouldn't mix with citizens. 

And yet, the treatment Neaira was subjected to by Phrynion and his friends seems to have been justifiable in Apollodoros’ estimation in no small part because of Neaira’s former status as a slave and her supposedly sordid life as a sex worker and her status as a foreigner in the city.  He expects his audience to assume the worst of her, to assume she is still a sex worker, to assume that she would steal citizenship. He also hopes that the jury will believe that the children of Stephanos are his by Neaira and so not citizens (we don't know their ages and no wife is mentioned). And the penalty to Neaira if the case succeeded? She would be sold into slavery. 

It isn't a coincidence that Apollodorus ends his speech with an appeal to the jury in the name of protecting their citizen wives and daughters. He wants to divide this foreign woman Neaira from those other, "proper" women in their lives. Neaira isn't a “whore” and corrupt and deserving of enslavement because she is a woman, but because she's foreign. And the prejudices against her run deep. 

Some (most)  scholars believe Apollodorus. I do not. We don't know how this case turned out. But we do know that he was a notorious liar. He was banned from prosecuting others in the courts, including his step-father. In his attacks on his step-father, he also accused his own mother of complicity in murder (of his father!) and implied that his brother was the child not of their father but of his mother in adultery with his step-father. He did this without proof, without any shame. And the Athenians got so tired of his frivolous lawsuits against his step-father, that they banned him from continuing them. 

Given this background, why should we believe him in this one case? Why does he and not Neaira deserve the benefit of the doubt? Why is it that even feminist scholars continue to believe him and not read between the lines and see his biases and question what has long been regarded as truth? Why is it that we can't see that her foreignness here is more important than her being just a woman? Because if she wasn't foreign, she could been Stephanos' wife. And any charges that she was illegally married would be moot. If she was a citizen of some city, she would never have been in a brothel as a slave, having to buy her freedom and make a new life for herself somewhere else on her own. 

***

Both Neaira's and Theoris' lives were defined by their being women in many ways. But their experiences as we know of them were fundamentally impacted (for the worse) because they were foreign. Had they not been foreign women in Athens, they would likely not have even made it into the historical record, because their lives would have been like most other citizen women's--safe from prosecutions, safe from the need for or charges of sex work, safe from violence, safe from sale into slavery, safe from execution. Their children would have also been safer and not marked out for the same violence their mothers experienced.  

I've spent the better part of 5 years living with these women as my research subject and daily I am struck by how relevant they are to our world. Because we aren't all "just women" or even "women first." We are variably white women, women of color, citizen women, immigrant women, wealthy women, not so wealthy women, tenured women, contingently employed women, well supported women, or women with little to no support networks to speak of (to name only a few variations). All this variety can't be hidden under the name "women" alone. The permutations of our existences matter, these other identities shape our experiences as women. Some women live closer to power, have better access to justice. Others do not. To pretend that the lack of access that being a person of color or immigrant or not wealthy doesn't mean as much as being woman alone is a mark of one's access to power--the closer you are, the less those other permutations of womanhood matter. It's a truth of privilege not just now, but in the past, too.

Immigrants and Cruelty

Tomb of Eirene from the city of Byzantium, buried in
Piraeus, Athens. Her name is recorded in both Greek
and Phoenician script. 4th century BCE.
Photo by Rebecca Kennedy. 

There are days when my scholarship and teaching resonate with the modern world more than others. Today is one such day. Yesterday, Pres. Trump rescinded the executive order known as DACA, passed in 2012 to protect so-called "Dreamers," non-citizen residents of the US who were brought here as children and who have lived their entire lives here. DACA created a pathway for them to get work permits, legal identification, attend college, and generally participate in everyday life without fear of deportation to places they have never known. DACA isn't perfect--they had to register and re-register every 2 years. And it was only a deferment of possible deportation.

Although there is some talk of Congress acting to pass legislation that will replace the executive order, history suggests to me that there are enough members of Congress for whom the cruelty of deporting these individuals is "just business" that no law will come. AG Jeff Sessions seemed particularly pleased at the announcement. Because sometimes, let's be clear, what is morally right and what is legal are not the same thing; sometimes what is legal is morally reprehensible. This is especially the case when it comes to treatment of immigrants in democratic societies.

In my Eidolon article, "We Condone It by Our Silence," I laid out some of the laws Classical Athens had in place for treatment of immigrants. Its strict citizenship policy and its requirements that resident immigrants (known as metics) register every year with the city and pay an immigrant tax are well documented. The registration policy is actually quite similar to DACA, except that it was the universal policy for immigrants as there was no differentiation between "legal" and "illegal"immigrating, only a failure to register once you did. And failure to register meant sale into slavery--the "deportation" of the ancient world. It didn't matter how long you lived in Athens, even if you were born there and your grandparents were born there--you could rarely become a citizen. To register, you had to have a sponsor. The sponsor had to be a citizen (male, over the age of 30). If you were a man or a family immigrating, you paid 12 obols a year. If you were a single woman, you paid 6. I wrote a book on the women who fall into this latter category, and it is those women I am thinking about today.

We don't know a lot of women from Classical Athens--they weren't permitted to participate in politics and when they appear in court cases or histories, they are often left unnamed. We do see some of the names of metic women, though, in courtroom speeches. They are often being maligned or mistreated. We also see their names on tombstones, where we know they were immigrants because they recorded their city of origin. These women's lives often go unrecognized in our histories or, when they are mentioned, they are discussed as if the slanders of their male citizen attackers are truth. What I want to do in the rest of this post is simply describe a few of their experiences. Like the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in this country whose lives are being upended by the DACA decision, that these women were real people with real lives is too often forgotten or ignored.

Zobia: An immigrant woman in Athens, who had the misfortune of being involved with a citizen man named Aristogeiton. She lent him a cloak and some money one day and upon request for repayment, he seized her and dragged her to the court, seeking to denounce her as an unregistered immigrant. Lucky for her, the tax collector vouched for her as did her sponsor and denied Aristogeiton a chance to make money from selling her into slavery.

Aristogeiton's non-citizen sister: We don't know her name, but we are told a court case against him that he denounced her as an unregistered metic and sold her into slavery. Their brother may have intervened, but we don't know the outcome.

Theoris: Theoris was a n immigrant from Lemnos who seems to have made a living selling medicines and love charms. She got involved with Aristogeiton, who got caught selling fake epilepsy cures, and he offered up Theoris as to blame and as a witch. She and her entire family (including children) were executed for witchcraft.

The Nurse: In a speech attributed to Demosthenes (Against Evergus and Mnesibulus), we learn of an old former nanny, who had once been the speaker's family slave. We don't know her name, but we know how she died. The speaker's father freed her and she married and lived in Athens. After the death of her husband, in her old age, she returned to live with speaker, whom she had cared for when he was a child. In a dispute over a debt, the nurse was attacked by men attempting to rob the home. She was injured and died a few days later. The speaker was distraught, not just because she died, but because there was nothing he could do to punish the men who killed her. She wasn't his slave anymore and she wasn't his relative, so, according to the laws, she had noone to prosecute for her murder. Her death, the death of a former slave and metic, was not considered valuable enough in law to hold anyone accountable.

I am reminded of these immigrant women and more in Athens when I read of women dropping charges of domestic abuse for fear of deportation. Or women being granted sanctuary in a churches to avoid being deported and separated from her citizen children. The callousness of those who support the end of DACA, who will never be impacted by it personally, who say "just deport the whole family."  The idea that these women, because they were "immigrants," were somehow worth less than others, makes me angry. It should make us angry to see it still happening now.

All the talk of progress and here we are where the Athenians were 2500 years ago, treating some people as if they are as much cattle. What did they do to deserve this treatment? This disregard? What makes our nation so frightened of them? Or our land so limited and small or poor that we can't possibly house them? Aristogeiton preyed on these women because he could, because he clearly kept getting away with it. The court cases where these crimes are listed are not about those crimes, but about other offences against citizen men. The men who killed the nurse also got away with it. Immoral men still get away with hateful acts especially when they prey on non-citizens, those deemed somehow less worthy of human status. And I'm angry. And sad.