Ancient Greek literature, Athenian civic
ideology, and modern classical scholarship have all
worked together to reinforce the idea that there were
three neatly defined status groups in classical
Athens--citizens, slaves, and resident foreigners. But
this book--the first comprehensive account of status in
ancient democratic Athens--clearly lays out the evidence
for a much broader and more complex spectrum of
statuses, one that has important implications for
understanding Greek social and cultural history. By
revealing a social and legal reality otherwise masked by
Athenian ideology, Deborah Kamen illuminates the
complexity of Athenian social structure, uncovers
tensions between democratic ideology and practice, and
contributes to larger questions about the relationship
between citizenship and democracy. Each chapter is
devoted to one of ten distinct status groups in
classical Athens (451/0-323 BCE): chattel slaves,
privileged chattel slaves, conditionally freed slaves,
resident foreigners (metics), privileged metics,
bastards, disenfranchised citizens, naturalized
citizens, female citizens, and male citizens. Examining
a wide range of literary, epigraphic, and legal
evidence, as well as factors not generally considered
together, such as property ownership, corporal
inviolability, and religious rights, the book
demonstrates the important legal and social distinctions
that were drawn between various groups of individuals in
Athens. At the same time, it reveals that the boundaries
between these groups were less fixed and more permeable
than Athenians themselves acknowledged. The book
concludes by trying to explain why ancient Greek
literature maintains the fiction of three status groups
despite a far more complex reality.
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