David M. Pritchard (Brisbane 2022), 'The Social Structure of Democratic Athens', Public Lecture, Full Text with Slides and Program, The Twenty-Seventh UQ Ancient-History Day: 19 March 2022: Co-Convened by the Friends of Antiquity and the University of Queensland (Australia). (original) (raw)

Classical Athens had 3 distinct groups. The largest, by far, was the Athenian descent group, whose members were the offspring of Athenian fathers and Attic women. The second largest group consisted of metics. It included resident aliens who had registered as such with the Athenian state, as well as their dependants. The smallest group were the slaves. Within the Athenian descent group, gender dictated radically different statuses. Athenian males enjoyed the highest status of Attica’s residents. As classical Athens was a consolidated democracy, male citizens equally enjoyed extensive legal and political rights, as well as the obligation to fight in the armed forces. Athenian men had the right to own land and became, usually after their marriages, the masters of households. Their female relatives had a much lower status. As a woman had no share in Athenian democracy, she was never considered ‘a citizen’ or, for that matter, ‘an Athenian’. Instead, she was called an astē (‘a woman belonging to the city’) or an Attikē gunē (‘an Attic woman’). Free males believed that their female relatives should concentrate on being homemakers. Nevertheless, even within her household, an Attic woman was treated as a perpetual minor and was always subordinated to her master, whether he be her father, husband or adult son. I often give public lectures about the position of Attic women in democratic Athens. In this public lecture, I am going to focus instead on their male relatives slide 4. In spite of their equal rights, the classical Athenians drew social distinctions among themselves. The most important of these distinctions was between ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’. The Athenians did not employ these terms vaguely to describe the overall prosperity of some free men relative to others. Rather the terms described 2 distinct social classes, who, in reality, had different ways of life and civic obligations. A striking feature of legal and social statuses in democratic Athens was that individuals constantly performed them. For their part, rich Athenians demonstrated their superior social status by practising leisure pursuits that were too expensive and time-consuming for the poor, by wearing distinctive clothing, and by paying taxes and performing civic obligations that they alone could afford. The legal statuses of metics and slaves were no less performative. While resident aliens did not enjoy the same rights as citizens, they had access to metic-only courts and were allowed to make good livings. In exchange, they had to line up regularly to pay a small metic tax, to register an Athenian as a sponsor and to perform metic-specific military roles. While such obligations were not onerous, performing them made abundantly clear who belonged to this lower legal status group. Metics who did not comply could be, if caught, enslaved, since they, it was judged, had been pretending to be citizens. Slaves clearly had the lowest legal status. However, some of them did live independently and so had lives that were not so different socially from poor citizens. Yet, what set slaves apart from all free men was that they faced bodily punishments: their owners could, whenever they wished, assault them physically and sexually.