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. 

Race and the Athenian Metic--Modeling an Approach to Race in Antiquity

A few months ago, I finished a chapter for an edited volume on the concept of foreignness in antiquity on the Athenian system of metoikia as an enactment of race in antiquity. I've been working on this idea now for about 4 years, trying to find ways of expressing 1. what we mean when we say 'race' in any context, 2. whether it can be seen in antiquity (contrary to the beliefs on both the majority of classicists and of scholars of modern race), and 3. how a model of race in antiquity might look. Many years ago (spring of 2019), I posted a talk I'd given at Duke-UNC Center for Late Antiquity that attempted a beginning of articulating what this might look like. The chapter on metoikia is the culmination of that work.  

In this blog post, I am going to provide a shortened version of that chapter that will hopefully lay out the model in an accessible way. I also gave a talk in this shortened form at a recent Monitor Racism conference. The audio recording can be found here (I begin at around the 2hr 11min mark. Denise McCoskey precedes me with a discussion of the history of race in the discipline of Classics). The images provided here are from that talk as is much of the text. This work builds from my last book, Immigrant Women in Athens and looks forward to research in other aspects of race and ethnicity in antiquity that I am currently working on or planning. 

I present this abridged version of my model and research as a proposal for what studying race in the ancient past can offer to understanding race in the modern world, but also as reflection of what deep engagement with critical race studies can help us understand about the ancient world as well. We must simultaneously dismantle the centuries of accretion of white supremacist world view from our understanding of the ancient past while also seeing where modern race systems borrowed and adapted their own ancient models. We have to be in conversation with, not borrowing from, modern critical race, if we want to change our discipline and also more accurately understand the past. 

I am willing to share the full version of this chapter for classroom or research use. I am still awaiting revision suggestions from the editors, so it is not yet in its final form. Contact me, if you are interested.

***

Let's start with who or what was a "metic". It isn't as easy a thing as we think. The term is frequently translated as either "resident foreigner" or "immigrant", though you can see from the the slide below that "immigrant" is a metaphorical use for many people who fell into this legal category. Essentially, it was a legal category that sat in between a citizen and the enslaved in Athens (and in some other Greek poleis, but we don't have as much information about how their systems worked). It contained free people, but free people whose status as "free" was not inalienable. 

When the category was first established, it was defined by a series of restrictions that set those counted as 'metics' and those who did not apart from each other. Central to the definition of metic is that it encompasses any free person in the city who has been there for about a month and intends to stay longer. They must register themselves with a local official (the polemarch) and pay a special tax. This separated them out from citizens (who did not pay a special personal tax), enslaved, and visitors from other places, including merchants just passing through. These initial restrictions will increase over time, which I will discuss below. 

Proxenia = honorary quasi-citizenship, isotelia = tax equality with citizens (don't have to pay the metoikion), enketesis = right of property ownership.

These are the basics. Now, for the details and how this legally defined group of people from ancient Athens can help us in articulating a transhistorical concept of race.

Metoikia as Race

Scholars have used race, a concept given to a frustrating multivalence, with different meanings when discussing the ancient Greek world. I must clarify both what I do not mean by ‘race,’ as well as explain the technical meaning I use here, adapted primarily from the work of Falguni Sheth and Karen and Barbara Fields--though their own definitions are rooted in long histories of critical race. Race as I use it here is a technology or doctrine of population management that institutionalizes ethnic prejudice, oppression, and inequality based on imaginary and moving signifiers for human difference, signifiers that manifest differently in different times and places (i.e. it is transhistorical and fluid). 

The imaginary and moving signifiers in the case of the Athenian and metic eventually follow what Fields and Fields define as the ‘doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups.’[1] Because these groups are imaginary, they can be constituted from those who might, in a different classification system, be very diverse. 

Race, then is the doctrine or technology for creating distinctions in institutions. In our Athenian case, I will focus on law thats crafts political institutions that create and then support a doctrine of inherent superiority of the citizen population while casting others as inferior. In this framework, we might define ‘racism’ as the ‘practice of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard.’[2] For the Athenians, the double standard inheres in the application of law (and particularly the right to enslave) between citizens and metics; racism is the application of law to enforce distinctions between political classes and their risk of experiencing state-moderated violence. The distinctions between Athenians and metics are then reproduced through what we call ‘racecraft, ‘the practical, day to day actions that reproduce the imaginary, pervasive belief in natural distinctions between the groups.’[3] Some examples of racecraft would be daily reminders of second class status like having to pay special taxes: the metoikion itself, ‘foreigners only’ taxes for using the port (pentekoste) or selling in the markets (xenika tele),[4] in limitations on contracts and ownership, bans from civic spaces, or segregation when participating in city rituals.[5]

Race forms and reproduces through a process that begins with defining a political community. This community then must recognize internal threats, which Sheth refers to as the ‘unruly’.[6] This recognition instigates a ‘taming of the unruly’ through the imposition or refining of laws that have the threat of violence as their mechanism for enforcement. These laws create distinctive racial categories into which the community is sorted. Next, the racial divisions are then naturalized[7] (or justified) within the community, frequently through narratives of biological sameness or purity, giving rise to ‘race.’ The system is then reproduced through the ‘enframing’[8] of vulnerability and violence as the defining characteristic of the group’s place within the community and ‘racecraft.’[9]

This understanding of race is different from what we might consider ‘folk’ ideas of race in a modern context, what has been called ‘somatic’ or ‘epidermal’ race or ‘bio-race’.[10] This modern folk definition appears within my framework as a signifier of difference, but one that is historically contingent—it may not mean in one context the same as it means in another. For example, the specific modern signifiers of skin color, used as a shorthand to change racism into ‘race’ in the modern US, is not relevant as a component of race, racism, or racecraft in Greco-Roman antiquity.[11] Any biological fiction used as shorthand for ‘race’ is created as part of that process and is just that, a shorthand. 

 

By focusing on the process and technology as race, we can retain the term ‘ethnicity’ as productive and meaningful in discussing antiquity.[13] When I use the term ‘ethnicity’ or ‘ethnic’ in discussions, I am referring primarily to self- or other-defined groups based on ideas of shared culture, language, or political affiliation that are not embedded within legally enforceable hierarchies of oppression. Here we might think of the difference between the two images above. One tomb, on the left, is for a woman identified through her "ethnic"--she is Demetria of Kyzicus. The image on the right is the tomb of Melitta, identified as the daughter of an isoteles, a privileged status granted to some metics in Athens. The tomb on the left was likely put up by a member of Demetria's family who self-identified as Kyzican. The tomb on the right was likely put up by the Athenian family Melitta worked for who identified her through her place within the Athenian metic system. The tomb on the left tells me about the ethnicity of Demetria. The tomb on the right tells me where Melitta fit in a racial hierarchy. 

In order for race to exist as most scholars of critical race suggest, it must exist within a political order, not simply as an abstracted category. Without the creation of hierarchies and the ability to enforce oppressions, we have prejudice or ethnocentrism—it is the power of a state or institutions to enforce socio-political Otherness that determines race. Ancient Athens eventually used a myth of indigeneity (autochthony) linked to biological descent as their justification for the segregation of their population, but it is the institutionalized (threat of) violence for enforcing a form of segregation or caste that makes the case for metics a type of ‘race’ in antiquity.

For the Athenians, the metic was perhaps the most salient ‘other’ in their daily lives in so far as they had another free population against which to rank themselves. It was certainly more operational than than the ‘barbarian’ and it cut across and dismantled on a regular basis the notion of unified “Greek” identity. Demetra Kasimis has discussed this aspect of the metic in the  political theory of Plato (mostly) in the 4th century, for those interested.

How did the ‘metic’ (and so the ‘Athenian’) became racialized? For, it is my contention that the Athenian is only racialized as a result of the process that created the metic.[14] We see the following historical steps: first, the constitution of the Athenian demos (i.e. male citizens) through patrilineal citizenship (510 BCE), next, the creation of the metic as a legal category (ca. 460s BCE), followed by dual-descent citizenship (451 BCE), and, finally, the elevation of the myth of autochthonous ancestors to a myth of full Athenian indigeneity and ethnic purity (starting in the 430s BCE).[15] Later laws, like the requirement for deme registration (410s BCE), reinstatement of the Citizenship Law (403 BCE) and the ban on marriage (380s BCE), are refinements and reassertions of the system. In the first step, we see the construction of a political community, in the second, the identification of what Sheth refers to as ‘the unruly’, a group within a community identified as a threat to the political order. This is followed by the group’s segregation in an attempt to reduce their potential harm to the political order.[16]

The physical and even cultural sameness  of the metic, their Greekness or, even more broadly, Mediterraneanness, may be what made the ‘metic’ threatening; there were only subtle differences that could be sensed, but not easily identified.[19] In the case of the metic, the original unease centered, perhaps, on the basic premise of them not being citizens. We do not know how large this population was.[20] Whatever it was, in consciously creating and defining through legal restrictions a category beyond ‘not citizen’ and designating certain individuals within the community as members of it, the Athenians succeeded in also re-emphasizing their own identity as citizens and the political order upon which their own status rested. They continues to shift the laws over time to adjust policy as prejudice was naturalized.

 

The next phase of the process of racialization after ‘taming the unruly’ is naturalizing the distinctions. The original definition of metic rested on a patriarchal justification; the citizenship law focused on a more purely biological justification. This shift in policy and in definition of the legal category crafted the underlying framework for the racialization of Athenians through the metics. The ancient rationales for the passage of the law (“too many citizens,” Aristotle & Plutarch) are unsatisfactory as a full explanation. I think, in fact, an important element came from an upswing in prejudice, prejudice that resulted from viewing the metics as a distinctive class after the 460s when the legal category came into being--racist ideas and policy precede race. This increased prejudice led to the development of a concept of Athenian indigeneity (autochthony), which functioned as the naturalizing, retroactive justification for the metic’s status.

 

Although laws initially segregated metics, the idea of Athenian autochthony naturalized the category of citizen, grounding the fiction that the law simply reinforced a division made by and through biology or the environment.[21] This naturalization process appears reasonable and rational when we recognize that indigeneity in Athens was a type of environmental determinism, a broadly held idea that the geography, topography, and climate of places shaped and defined the peoples who resided there.[22] The Athenians, indigenous to the land and imbued with certain characteristics from the land, came to identify themselves with a closed kinship group invested in an idea of a ‘real’ or ‘pure’ Athenian.[23] Autochthony myths were the metaphorical manifestation of this doctrine, a racial doctrine, as Susan Lape has argued, that demonstrated the superiority of the Athenians.

 

The process of racializing the metic did not end with either the passing of the 451 Citizenship law nor with the naturalization of the metic as inherently and threateningly different that we see emerging with the development of indigeneity and autochthony as identity. While much scholarship has treated the 451 BCE citizenship law as a ban on marriage between Athenians and non-Athenians, it likely did not. Rather, the evidence suggests that marriage was not banned between citizen men and non-citizen women until the 380s. And, in fact, the law went either unenforced or even was relaxed or repealed for decades during the Peloponnesian war.[24]

 

In 403 BCE, however, the laws requiring that Athenian citizens have two Athenian parents and restricting land ownership to only Athenian citizens were reinstated as foundational laws of the newly revived democracy after the brief government of the Thirty, a reactionary oligarchy that had aggressively and violently dismantled the Athenian democracy in 404 BCE.[25] In the aftermath of this reinstating of the law, the demarcation between metic and citizen became increasingly harsh (eventually leading to the marriage ban in the 380s), suggesting that the prejudices that inhered in the status of metic that required segregation previously did not disappear even under the extreme circumstances of the wars. Relaxing the laws and allowing metics (and even enslaved persons) access to citizenship may have been blamed, in part, for the loss.[26] Once the metic had been racialized and this racialization naturalized, they would always be deemed inherently threatening. That the metic population in the 4th century was increasingly made up of formerly enslaved persons may have contributed to this prejudice.

 

Because of the variety of persons and origins and statuses that made up the metic class, however, and although metics were defined as a single class by law, the laws were not experienced equally by all metics. While scholarship on metics has done a good job at recognizing class distinctions among metics and acknowledging that privileges offered to metics rarely accrued to those who had been freed enslaved persons or working class metics, most scholarship on ‘metics’ talk of the laws and structures surrounding them as if they are default male (i.e. gender neutral) and also absent most forms of ethnic prejudice.[27] But this was not the case for any but the wealthiest or most useful male metics and mistakenly assuming that prejudice diminished because more elite men were granted access to citizenship points to why we need intersectional analysis. Metic was a racialized category that included lots of different groups. It was founded upon and enforced through threat of violence, which some metics were more vulnerable to than other. Nonetheless, even those who did not directly experience that violence were conditioned by its possibility.

Race and Violence 

By 403 BCE, the legal structures were in place for the perpetuation and reproduction of race in Athens through the metic. In other words, the process of racializing the metic (and the Athenian) had been mostly completed. The reproduction of race, which may be understood through the ‘racecraft’ of everyday life, happened in many ways but often through violence or the threat of violence. To be a metic was to be vulnerable to such violence. The penalties (enslavement and execution) enforced segregation and submission to the metic system in Athens, classifying the metic as inferior to the Athenian and closer to enslaved. Metics received only alienable humanity, according to Jackie Murray’s usage of race.[28] Discussing Homer’s Odyssey,  Murray places race and ethnicity on a continuum, with ‘ethnic others’ granted a higher level of humanity while racialized groups, who are further away from the inalienable humanity of the dominant group, are granted less humanity. Thus, in the Athenian context, a Milesian visitor or business partner was closer to Athenian to the extent that they still functioned as their ‘ethnic’ self. But once they became ‘metics’ their racialized status meant that they were subject to Athenian institutional violence in ways visiting foreigners were not. Metics could not appeal to shared Ionian or Greek identities or even to being from an Athenian colony to mitigate their being metics. Such distinctions were erased once they became a metic in law and the Olynthian was no different from the Thracian or the Skythian (or any other ‘barbarian’) in their status and their being subject to state violence.

 

Obviously, not all metics (and, in fact, the majority) would ever have experienced the violence of being sold into enslavement or being executed for breaching their status. They were also, as Ben Akrigg has pointed out, theoretically subject to torture for evidence.[29] We do not have evidence that this was very common, but, this is one of the fundamental characteristics of race—the experience of violence is not necessary, only the threat, which is validated by the fact that others within the group do experience this violence as part of their everyday existence and within the scope of the law.[30] The threat is what allows for those metics with privileges to have them and to feel them as privileges and even argue against the interests of their class as a whole in order to maintain them. 

 

Wealthy metics and those who arrived in Athens as refugees were granted a series of privileges within the scope of law that could mitigate their vulnerability to violence. For some metics, living in Athens approached citizen status, but without assembly attendance and voting: they performed liturgies; they dined with (and in the 5th century still intermarried with) their social peers; they participated in the Panathenaiac procession. And the reward system of privileges, like grants of isoteleia and enktesis, rewarded those metics who not only followed the rules but were deemed most useful to the polis.[32] They became, in some ways, ‘model minorities’, whose privileging could encourage them to become complicit in the enforcement of violence on others within the metic group.[33]

The vulnerability to violence inherent in the status of metic did manifest on a daily basis for metics who were not of the privileged economic classes or who had not been granted special status through grants to specific refugee groups, because of their gender, economic status, or status as formerly enslaved. As I demonstrated in Immigrant Women in Athens, women metics were especially vulnerable to all sorts of violence in law and through loopholes in the laws.[37] Let me offer an example (you can read Chapters 4&5 of Immigrant Women for many many examples). The so-called phialai inscriptions. These are most likely inscriptions that record dedications made by metics who had been charged with not registering or paying their tax, but successfully defended against it.[38] 

Extant are over 400 names, including men, women, and children, some appearing as families. The inscriptions list over 100 different professions, all of them what we would call ‘working class.’ The inscriptions are broken and only a small percentage of those originally carved are extant. They record, likely, about seventy or so years of cases. Hundreds of them. Any citizen could prosecute them and they had incentives. What this suggests is that metics, especially those without wealth or connections to citizens, could be subjected to regular surveillance by citizens, could not trust that a citizen would not turn on them, and were always vulnerable to the violence inherent within their legal status.[39]

 

I would like to end with a quotation from Falguni Sheth, who for me, sums up what the process in Athens looked like over the course of the 5th -4th centuries, a summary which I think would be even more obvious if I could provide for you in this abbreviated space the dozens of legal cases and acts of violence leveled against metics, especially women. Sheth says: 

And so we see through any number of legal judgements, race is never merely about ‘race.’ It is in the drawing of the lines between ‘evil beings’ and ‘moral beings,’ between persons and nonpersons, human beings qua citizens and those who cannot be citizens because they are ‘not human like us,’ where we find the salience of race. Understood as a vehicle by which to draw and redraw the boundaries by which select populations are assured the protection of the law, race becomes deployed as a technology. It is when we understand it as a technology that we begin to understand how race locates and domesticates the ‘unruly,’ and in so doing, ‘reveals’ the apparatus by which the normative ground of racial classifications was once naturalized and concealed.[43] 

My hope with this analysis is that if we can see it happening clearly in the case of metics in Athens, we can better articulate and reveal how it functions at the level of institutions today and elsewhere in our histories, where too many people and governments insist that because race is not a biological fact, it somehow isn’t still real and embedded in our laws and everyday practices.

Endnotes

[1] Fields and Fields 2013, 16. This is their definition of ‘race.’

[2] Fields and Fields 2013, 17.

[3] Fields and Fields 2013, 18-19.

[4] Blok 2017, 273. Blok sees these as reasonable taxes for non-citizens and does not agree with Whitehead’s assessment that the tax was meant to be a humbling and even humiliating reminder of their second-class status.

[5] On marching in the Panathenaia as a mark of privilege, see Wijma 2014. Obviously, the metics selected would have been from among the privileged class. This does not make the segregation a mark of metic privilege. See Fields and Fields 2013, 33-4 for a discussion of sumptuary laws and enforced clothing distinctions historically as racecraft.

[6] “This is the element that is intuited as threatening to the political order, to a collectively disciplined society. As the term suggests, this element threatens to disrupt because it signifies some immediate fact of difference that must be harnessed and located or categorized or classified in such a way so as not to challenge the ongoing political order” (Sheth 2009, 26).

[7] After the initial ‘processing’ of the unruly through the production of certain categories, the process—the political context—of classifying becomes forgotten, concealed, or reified. Thus, it appears as a ‘natural foundation’ for racial categories (Sheth 2009, 28).

[8] “Enframing refers to the cultural, political, social, moral, methodological apparatus that both shrouds and infuses our current quest for the meaning of race” (Sheth 2009, 35).

[9] The enframing of race exemplifies not merely division, but a method of using the unruly as a way to “cultivate vulnerability or the threat of potential violence among its populace in connection with a certain mode of political existence, namely one in which our relationship to society must be understood as one of vulnerability and violence” (italics original) (Sheth 2009, 36). For ‘racecraft’, see below.

[10] On the idea of bio-race, see Fields and Fields 2013, Ch. 2, especially discussion of the idea of ‘blood’ equaling ‘race’.

[11] Somatic race, however, has been usefully deployed, e.g. by scholars such as Shelley Haley, Frank Snowden, and, now, Sarah Derbew (both in her dissertation and now in a forthcoming book), to undermine and reverse the ‘whitewashing’ of the ancient Mediterranean. Scholarship and popular representations of the ancient world since the 19th century have been engaged in this ‘whitewashing,’ and we need to engage with the work cited earlier and produce more.

[12] See Lape 2010, 1-7 and 31-52 for her conceptualization of race through Appiah’s idea of racialism, which she calls a ‘quasi-biological paradigm.’ For my own earlier conceptualization of race in early Greek thought, see Kennedy 2016. I would not now use the term ‘race’ to discuss genealogies and descent outside of enforceable hierarchies, but ethnicity. I agree with Jácome Neto (2020) that what many scholars are discussing under these headings is not ‘race’, though I disagree that ‘race’ is a particularly modern concept. See Heng 2018 for thorough discussion and examples of pre-modern race.

[13] pace McCoskey 2012, 31 who uses ‘race’ exclusive of ethnicity to ‘force[s] us to confront our all-too-frequent idealization of classical antiquity. In the recent Oxford Classical Dictionary entry, McCoskey uses ‘race’ for any system of classification regardless of the ability to enforce any hierarchy based on the classifications and fuses etic and emit forms of identity formation. Yet many scholars of modern race reject its presence in antiquity precisely because the dominant theories of human variation (environmental determinism, descent-based, cultural) lack any institutional structures for enforcement.

[14] Lape 2010 provides a strong argument for the Athenians as ‘racialized,’ but within a framework of ‘before race.’ She devotes only 5 pages to the metic.

[15] Shapiro 1998. 

[16] Sheth 2009, 26.

[17] Kennedy 2014, p and forthcoming (a) 2021. On the relationship between Suppliants and the development of metoikia, see Bakewell 2013.

[18] A primary argument of Kennedy 2014.

[19] “That which is unruly can be evasive enough to be ‘intuited’ or ‘felt’ rather than seen or perceived—because the ‘intuition’ is one of ‘danger’” (Sheth 2009, 26). We might here think also about the statement in the Old Oligarch that one of the problems of Athenian democracy was the impossibility of knowing the difference between a citizen and a slave (citation). Missing from the equation, of course, is the metic, who would also be indistinguishable.

[20] Efforts to calculate the metic population over time have been attempted by Patterson 1981 and then Watson 2010. Both population estimates were used in the service of arguments for the date of the creation of the metic as a class as if once the threshold of foreigners in a place reaches a certain level, citizen anxiety demands action. On the psychology of this phenomenon in the contemporary US, see Craig and Richeson 2014.

[21] The scholarship on Athenian autochthony is large. See Roy 2014 for a recent summary of the scholarship. Most scholarship following Rosivach 1987 have generally accepted his timeline of the development of the concept, but see also Blok 2009, 251-75. I find Loraux 2000 to be the best discussion of the ideology underpinning autochthony. Though see also Lape 2010, 95-136, who discusses it through the myth of Ion.

[22] On archaic and classical concepts environmental determinism, see Kennedy 2016 and Kennedy and Blouin 2020. For discussion of the broader reach of environmental determinism theories in antiquity, see the essays in Kennedy and Jones-Lewis 2016.

[23] For specific ways the autochthony myth appeared in Athenian public discourse and in the landscape, see Clements 2016 for discussion of the Erechtheion, autochthony, and the landscape of the Acropolis. On the visual catalogue of autochthony on pots, see Shapiro 1998. On funeral orations and autochthony, see still Loraux 1986. On Euripides’Ion and the deployment of myths, see Lape 2010, 95-136. The discussion in Kasimis 2018 follows a similar path to Lape’s.

[24] See Kennedy 2014, pp for discussion and bibliography.

[25] On the basic outlines of Thirty and restoration after the civil war, see, Carawan 2013.

[26] Bakewell 1999. See also Lape 2010, 262-74.

[27] E.g. Rubenstein 2018. Carugati 2019a.

[28] Murray 2020.

[29] Akrigg 2015, 166.

[30] As Sheth writes: “When race is deployed through law to demarcate distinctions between populations, violence per se is not immediately manifested through these categories. But more accurately…the sheer capacity to instantiate such distinctions gains its power of enforcement through the potential violence that is inherent in it” (Sheth 2009, 37).

[31] Carugati 2020.

[32] Carugati 2019a, Ch 4.

[33] See Lee 2020 for definitions and debates over its efficacy as a concept.

[34] Bakewell 1999 discusses this period from Lysias’ perspective using Lysias 12 and 31. See also Wolpert 2002.

[35] On the ancient debates, see [Arist.] Ath.Pol. 40.2; Aesch. 3.187– 90.

[36] Loraux 2002, 246-264 is a most illuminating discussion of the restoration of the laws in the context of the amnesty, though see also Wolpert 2002 and Carawan 2013, though Carawan hardly mentions metics.

[37] See Ch 4 in particular for discussion. My analysis of violence as it impacts non-citizen and working-class women is inspired primarily by Crenshaw’s legal concept of intersectionality.

[38] See Meyer 2010 for a detailed reappraisal and updated edition of the inscriptions.

[39] There are also cases of men recognized by their demes as citizens being challenged under the law of graphe xenias. Two particularly interesting orations recording or referring to these cases are Dem 57 (Euxitheus) and Isaeus x (. ). In the former, the speech is his defense of his citizenship and we do not know the outcome. The latter is an inheritance speech and we are told that the father of the heiress was charged but won his case (if only by a slim margin).

[40] Fields and Fields 2013, Ch. 2.

[41] As Schapps 1977 has demonstrated, the naming of women in public for a like the courts or stage was typically reserved for women who were being targeted as ‘not respectable’ and so being classified in these discourses as women who could be targeted. His arguments have been frequently misinterpreted as saying that the women named were somehow shameful. For further discussion, see Kennedy 2014, pp and Kennedy forthcoming (b) (specifically on the courts).

[42] Although there is no space to discuss it, Apollodorus’ attacks on his brother Pasikles (a natural-born citizen), mother Archippe (a woman with quasi-citizenship status; see Kennedy 2014, pp), and step-father Phormio (also a naturalized citizen and former enslaved person) are remarkably enlightening in understanding how the Athenian legal system can be used to police race.

[43] Sheth 2009, 38.

Notes on the Athenian Metic

Tomb of a metic woman from Piraeus.
Inscriptions in Greek and Phoenician.

I have not been blogging much these days, in part because I have been pumping out overdue publications for the last three months and between teaching, translating for the Women sourcebook, catching up on owed writing, and designing a department t-shirt, there isn't much time to breathe. That and the fact that I have a highly active 14 year old who moves from field hockey season to basketball season to fencing season (which is really year round) to orchestra competition season (why is everything in the spring?) and I always stupidly overbook myself for speaking engagements in the spring when I teach my heavier course load. 

BUT! As I prepare for 3 days of fencing (during which I will be parent, substitute coach, and armory volunteer), I have a few minutes of down time to gather some thoughts.  So, what are those thoughts?

***

1. indigeneity: “In many countries, people identifying as indigenous have increased in number in recent decades, as greater numbers claim that identity category because it captures their social relationships to place, to settler or more powerful states, and to one another. For them, indigeneity is much more complex than biological relations alone. In addition, for indigenous peoples, location is not simply an aid to tracking movements of human bodies and relationships of markers. Rather, indigenous peoples understand themselves to have emerged as coherent groups and cultures in intimate relationship with particular places, especially living and sacred landscapes. In short, indigenous peoples’ ‘ancestry’ is not simply genetic ancestry evidenced in ‘populations’ but biological, cultural, and political groupings constituted in dynamic, long-standing relationships with each other and with living landscapes that define their people-specific identities and, more broadly, their indigeneity” (Tallbear, K. 2013 "Genomic articulations of indigeneity," 510).  

I was reading two articles by Kim Tallbear earlier this week with my Race and Genetics reading group and the discussion of indigeneity really struck me. It is something I have been trying to understand better for the article I am writing on metics (and which I was dancing around in my SCS paper). We use this word 'indigenous' a lot in discussion about Athenian autochthony, but because we are classicists, we never actually look at what they word means or its various articulations. And, I use 'articulations' here because this is something Tallbear is also wrestling with, particularly how genetics acts as a type of articulation that is at odds with many articulations of indigeneity among those understood as 'indigenous peoples'.

At the SCS panel, Jennifer Roberts presented a very good discussion of autochthony as it operates among modern groups as a comparative for Athens and she got push back from someone who was "uncomfortable" with the language of race in antiquity and wanted to remind us that "autochthony is just a metaphor". But both Jennifer and I were arguing that autochthony may be a metaphor, but it is also not just one. It has very real meaning and informs very real policies and behaviors. It needs to be taken seriously as not just a silly story. Tallbear can, I think, help us get there.

2. race: “…race becomes a way of organizing and managing populations in order to attain certain societal goals, such as political coherence, social unity, and a well-functioning economy… race is no longer descriptive. But causal: it facilitates and produces certain relationships between individuals, between groups, and between political subjects and sovereign power.” (Sheth, F. 2009 Towards a Political Philosophy of Race, 22).

I think people have seen enough of this blog and other  lectures/podcasts/etc to know my thinking on how race intersects with antiquity. The recent OCD entry on "race" by Denise McCoskey presents a somewhat different approach to race in antiquity, but I think she and I share a view that there are very important reasons to engage critical race theory and the functioning of race as a technology when trying to understand the ancient world. For me, again, it is about understanding the place of the metic in Athens. It is a political, social, intellectual, and racial category.

What do I mean by ‘race’? Three things need to be accounted for: human difference (physiological, cultural, etc), prejudice, and race: race is the institutionalization of prejudice and oppressions based on moving signifiers for human biological difference which can manifest differently in different times and places. This race-making manifests in institutions like laws and practices that create inclusions and exclusions, in groups and out. Metic laws are a manifestation of race-making in so far as they are legal, political, and economic structures rooted in prejudices based on perceived human differences between Athenians and everyone else. Race is the technology for classifying difference from a defined norm. In Athens (as in much of US history), that norm is "rooted" (a metaphor that needs exploration! Which Bettini has done recently) in theories of descent and heritability.

3. intersectionality: “‘Intersectionality was a prism to bring to light dynamics within discrimination law that weren’t being appreciated by the courts,’ Crenshaw said. ‘In particular, courts seem to think that race discrimination was what happened to all black people across gender and sex discrimination was what happened to all women, and if that is your framework, of course, what happens to black women and other women of color is going to be difficult to see.’” Crenshaw, K. from “The intersectionality wars” Vox, May 28, 2019.

A really important thing for me, if I am going to really get ahold of the way this heritability issue works to craft both the category of the indigenous Athenian and the metic, we need to make sure our analysis is always intersectional.

This technology that we call race is also not gender neutral--ie. I am advocating here that the structures surrounding the metic should be and need to be understood through the lens of intersectionality. Most scholarship on ‘metics’ talk of the laws and structures surrounding them as if they are default male--part of this has to do with assumptions about the make of the metic population. Also, it has to do with structural sexism in scholarship that assumes male as the norm or as magically general; anything pertaining to women is a deviation and so is treated separately, which means typically, not treated at all. So, in addition to recognizing the work of race in the making of ‘metics’, we also need to understand the working of gender. This is particularly important because almost every privilege or exclusion that define metics targets or impacts male and female metics differently.

In order to get into this issue, I have been trying to engage the areas of Athenian political discourse that gets us closer to their understanding of heritability and what we might consider the ancient articulation of genetics. It is tied in intimately to the indigeneity issue and, of course, the technology of race. In other words, all the things.

***

So, there you have it. These are the things that have been keeping me from blogging and have been occupying my mind.

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.