The Ideology of the Athenian Metic

By David Whitehead

An essential feature of the classical Greek city-state was the presence of a large body of 'metics', more or less permanent immigrants, most of them from other Greek cities, who played a large part in the economic, social and political life of the community but were excluded from citizenship in all but the most exceptional cases. Despite the importance of the subject, there has previously been no extended account in English. Dr Whitehead's monograph, based on an exhaustive register of the ancient sources, centres on the 'ideology' of the metic in Athens. How much ambiguity was there in his position vis-à-vis the exclusive in-group of citizens? Did the metic think of himself as in some respects an outsider? What were his rights and disabilities? After answering such questions in the analytical first part of the monograph, Dr Whitehead examines the history of the institution over two centuries and offers several new hypotheses about crucial stages in its history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701109

David Whitehead

David Whitehead is a prolific full-time writer/publisher best-known for the many westerns he has written under the name Ben Bridges.

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INTRODUCTION

(i)   Aims and Methods

To study the Athenian metic requires no justification. The mere numerical importance of the immigrant community in Athens during the classical period demands attention of itself, and the metoikia constitutes a major subject for the historian of the period. Yet there are works – Michel Clerc’s monograph above all – which already, it might be thought, treat it as exhaustively as evidence permits. Why, on a fairly large scale, does the metic need further scrutiny?

The simple answer would be Andrewes’ observation that ‘there is no recent study devoted specifically to the metics, though no lack of incidental recognition of their economic role at Athens’.¹ Les métèques athéniens is eighty years old, and the bibliography as a whole is (a) comparatively small and (b) mainly concentrated in a productive Pentekontaetia between the 1880’s and the Second World War. New evidence has appeared, during that period and subsequently, and old data – inscriptions especially – have been re-examined with greater care and expertise. But the necessity for a full re-appraisal derives above all from the fundamental inadequacy of the bibliography itself. If well-trodden, the path of metic studies has not (in general) been trodden well; for the Athenian metic belongs to that handful of truly emotive subjects which it has seemed impossible to consider without overt bias and special pleading, as if composing or contesting a moral apologia instead of conducting an intellectual inquiry.

There have been two principal phases. In the first (summarised in the introduction to Les métèques) eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars saw the Athenian metic as a humiliated being, hounded from pillar to post by a narrow-minded, vindictive citizenry; and metic-status, on this view, was a burden to be avoided if at all possible. However, after advances by Böckh and others, particularly in the treatment of inscriptions, Schenkl’s article of 1880 inaugurated what I shall call the modern orthodoxy. Soon boosted by the zeal and auctoritas of Wilamowitz, whose manifesto was set in a more reasoned and ample context by Clerc, the central tenet now, explicit and implicit, was that Athenian metics enjoyed a privileged status, a ‘quasi-citizenship’ (Wilamowitz’ own term) coveted throughout Greece and beyond. Wilamowitz’ more outrageous claims were too much even for his contemporaries; nevertheless, apart from the slightly more neutral standpoints of Busołt, Hommel, Diller, and latterly Mossé, this ‘privilege model’ – to be seen at its most naked in Kahrstedt and Harrison – is still largely unchallenged today.

Why this dogma is no more acceptable than its predecessor is that its technique is circular: the privilege is a prior assumption, not a conclusion, and evidence is distorted or (more often) selected to suit it. Now ad hominem polemic is to be deplored if practised for its own sake (and not least if, like Juvenal, we choose targets who can no longer answer back), but in this case it cannot be wholly eschewed. To reconstruct the modern historiography of an important topic has its own interest, particularly when men of the stature of Wilamowitz are involved; and when their shadow still falls across the ‘incidental’ work of more recent times – when, lacking a modern magnum opus, it is to them that we still turn for detailed studies – the task of equipping ourselves to understand and combat their all-pervasive influence assumes the nature and dimensions of a duty.

If I seem to be claiming to offer the first sensible investigation in a succession of cynicism and sentimentality, let me admit that, willy-nilly, sympathies are engaged by the Athenian metic and his situation. And I believe that it is the central paradox of a paradoxical subject that during two centuries of political, social and economic change in Athens, attitudes toward the metic – and therefore his actual framework of existence – changed extraordinarily little; so that the citizen/metic division, albeit blurred in certain well-documented respects, was maintained and reinforced with astonishing inflexibility. But to go no further than that would merely swing the pendulum back to the nineteenth century: my purpose is not to issue another manifesto but to remove the discussion from the area of morality altogether.

The first requirement for this, clearly, is a morally neutral standpoint; and this, if not always achieved, has been my aim. Partiality blunts paradox. Yet beyond the recognition of our own preconceptions and those of the modern orthodoxy we must do precisely what that dogma fails to do, namely to realise that controversy, polemic and special pleading do have their place – not in Vienna or Göttingen but in Athens itself. We need a way of looking at the subject which, so far from trying to iron out contemporary conflict and inconsistency, will give it its full weight.

‘Ideology’ is an over-worked catchword in modern disciplines; I must therefore define exactly its meaning in this study, which is to be not only (and not even primarily) such abstract or quasi-abstract metic ‘theories’ as survive from the period but something at once more basic yet harder to evaluate. Of the two principal meanings of the word offered by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary – (i) ‘the study of the origin and nature of ideas’ and (ii) ‘a system of ideas concerning phenomena, esp. those of social life; the manner of thinking characteristic of a class or individual’ – it is the second, more concrete definition which provides my point of departure. Halpern takes us further.² ‘The students of ideology … seek the origins of ideologies in situations: particularly situations of social conflict and competition. Because of this an ideology … always implies other ideologies with which it is in dynamic relations … segregating and consolidating groups in relation to each other’. At this stage it is too soon to talk of ‘conflict’, but my meaning can certainly derive from this emphasis on related groups within the same social framework.

Two important riders must be added, however, given the nature of the power-structure in a democratic polis like Athens. Firstly, whereas many (even most) ideologies are the product of the group to which they apply, this is not axiomatic; and certainly the ideology of the metic is largely the creation of non-metics – the ideology, so to speak, about the metic. And the second, related point is that this is not devised and propagated in vacuo but implemented by actual decision-making. In a democratic polis the politai legislate a life-style for themselves, but the polis does not live by politai alone: outsiders arrive, and, unless driven away, join the community. And they, the metoikoi, pose a central and continuing problem for the politai: if the politai resolve that demarcation must be maintained they have to regulate not one but two free statuses and determine the precise differences and similarities between them. In such a situation, and especially if the group excluded from the political monopoly come to make a significant economic, intellectual or artistic contribution to the community, feelings will be strong and (often) conflicting, and Halpern’s conditions fully satisfied: both groups will develop a perception of themselves and of the other, and in the case of the politai this will interact with the concrete decisions they take as to how the metoikoi shall live. (In fact, as well as the power-structure, surviving evidence makes this largely a question of how citizens conceived and perceived metics and metic-status, but we do glimpse how the metic saw his own position).

In what follows, then, ‘the ideology of the metic’ is a portmanteau phrase encompassing not only the sum of opinions, prejudices and tensions, recorded or deducible, in such a polis but the actual reciprocal relations between politai and metoikoi co-existing in a political and social environment controlled exclusively by the politai. This is no sub-division of metic studies but a way of examining the subject as a whole – an empirical framework which allows all the data their full weight since it has no prior assumptions to prove. Scarcely a sophisticated framework, no doubt, but it can accommodate a flexibility which earlier work neither displayed nor, apparently, desired. Methodology can be no more elaborate than the evidence available to it (if one is to remain an historian), and Greek historians can rarely hope to take advantage of the increasingly refined range of tools evolved by the social sciences and applied successfully to the history of more recent times. There is, however, scope for experiment, if only to break out of the familiar, sterile circle of problems which run through the bibliography. (I am thinking particularly of the inordinate importance attached to study of the ad hominem privileges to which metics could, in theory, aspire; whatever their significance they distort our perspective.) At the heart of my programme is an exhaustive survey of everything which contemporary sources tell us about metoikoi. This can cut across the categories of analysis used hitherto and provide the basis for that detached scrutiny which will reveal the ideology of the metic in its true subtlety.

(ii)   Chronological and Geographical Limits

The ideology of the metic can be studied only within limits, chronological and geographical. Both are justified – indeed, imposed – by the available evidence.

I The importance of contemporary source-material has already been emphasised. Both the literary and the epigraphical testimony are concentrated in the fifth and fourth centuries. (All dates, unless otherwise stated, are b.c.) Thus, although the second part of the investigation will look back to the pre-classical origins of the metoikia, as well as considering its disappearance in the early Hellenistic period, I shall be concerned chiefly with that century and a half (c.450-c.300) which furnishes us with contemporary evidence about a living institution.

II I have spoken of ‘the polis’ as a generality, but most of the detailed characteristics of the type are, of course, extrapolated from Athens; and I confine myself to Athens the more resolutely since the metic evidence too is so overwhelmingly Athenian. To be sure, metoikoi are attested for many other cities, and this leads (or at any rate used to lead) to the presumption that a metic-status of the Athenian type was a common, even universal feature of Greek poleis. Other -oikoi groups too have been assumed to be ‘metics’: peda(w)oikoi in Mycenae and Argos; synoikoi in Delphi and Achaea; epoikoi in Dyme and Hierapytna; enoikoi in Eretria and Histiaea; and the mysterious paroikoi, katoikoi and katoikountes.³ There seems, at first sight, a body of evidence which calls for an attempt to treat Greece as a whole; but a synoptic view would in fact be almost worthless. This is not only because most of the data are isolated and (by and large) uninformative: the trouble is that Clerc’s conclusion that ‘les caractères généraux de l’institution sont à peu près les mêmes partout’⁴ was no conclusion at all but an article of faith, and the basis of his methodology not the small number of supposed factual correspondences which he found⁵ but his implicit belief that equivalence in terminology presupposes equivalence in substance – a metic is a metic is a metic. Now it is obvious enough that, unless it practised xenelasia,⁶ every city had to make provision for foreign residents; but beyond admitting that, and registering the existence of -oikoi groups elsewhere, what is to be done? The political variations from one polis to another were enormous, and as long as we remain ignorant of crucial variables – above all the qualifications for citizenship – it is mere pretence and delusion to imagine that the economic and demographic facts of life threw up an Athenian metoikia anywhere but in Athens.⁷

Notes to Introduction

1. A. Andrewes, Didaskalos 4,1 (1972) 163.

2. B. Halpern, History and Theory 1 (1961) 135-7 (his emphasis).

3. Schenkl 162-5; Thumser 46-7; Gilbert, Handbuch II 293-6; Gardikas, Athena 28 (1916) 200-1; Ehrenberg, Greek State 37-8; above all Clerc, Étr., a collection of ‘evidence’ for 70 cities. As regards the other -oikoi groups Hommel 1420 voiced doubts; cf (paroikoi) H. Schäfer, RE 18 (1949) 1695-1707, with Gauthier 109 n.4.1 return later to katoikountes in Athens.

4. Clerc, Étr. 268.

5. ib. 269-71.

6. As did, par excellence, Sparta: Thuc. 1. 144. 2, 2. 39. 1; Aristoph. Av. 1012-4; Xen. Lac. 14. 4; Plato Prt. 342C (cf. Lg. 950A-B); Ael. VH 13.16 (Apollonia, κατὰ τὸν Λακεδaιμόνιοv vόμoν).

7. I hope to build positively on this sceptical foundation elsewhere.

PART I: ANALYSIS

CHAPTER ONE: DEFINITIONS

Since virtually every discussion of the metic has begun with a definition¹ it might appear otiose to offer another, but even this simple matter has been dogged by intrusive preconceptions. Yet satisfactory definitions can be reached if only the evidence is allowed to speak for itself – and provided we distinguish between the official standpoint of the polis (the juristic definition of the status) and the unofficial attitudes and expectations of the politai, and indeed the foreigners, themselves.

A. (a)   The words metoikos and metoikein.

What does metoikos (and metoikein) actually mean? Etymologically, of course, it divides into meta plus oikein; but that is no answer, since meta is ambiguous. The scholarly consensus admits no problem here, declaring firmly for ‘living with’ and its barely-concealed overtones of hospitality and fraternity;² but I can find no external support for this, whereas there is circumstantial evidence pointing in another direction. The verb metoikein occurs in Eur. Hipp. 837; and Barrett observed in his note on the line that a metoikos, in the first generation at least, is someone who changes his oikos from one city to another, so that the meta would share the implications of metabainein, metapherein and so forth.³

Barrett did not go on to suggest that ‘home-changer’ might be the original or predominant meaning of the word itself – somewhat illogically he adhered to the Mit-bewohner orthodoxy – but why not? In his negative definition of the metoikos, Aristotle quotes the Homeric insult …ὡς ε’ί τιν’ ἀτίμητoν μετανάστην.⁴ The etymology of metanastes is itself obscure but its meta is certainly the meta of ‘change’ – thus migrant, wanderer, outsider.⁵ The Mit-bewohner school naturally dismisses lexicographers and scholiasts who gloss metanastes with metoikos,⁶ but Aristotle cannot be brushed aside so easily. Even if it would be far-fetched to claim a substantive connection between the two words,⁷ a semantic link is a real possibility. The most common meaning of the verb metoikein in the classical period is (unhelpfully) ‘to be a metoikos’, but metoikein as ‘migrate’ does survive;⁸ and indeed it later emerges – or re-emerges – as the principal usage of both verb and noun.⁹ The burden of proof thus rests upon those who deny the persistence of a ‘change’ implication in metoikos (and metoikein) throughout the fifth and fourth centuries.

So here is one nuance (to put it no higher) of the word metoikos in the classical period which has been largely overlooked hitherto;¹⁰ I can find only two champions of it, in casual references.¹¹ If it is valid, the metic is characterised by a past act no less than a present and continuing state; and metoikia, while certainly applicable to that state (Soph. Ant. 890; Xen. Vect. 2. 7), is in the first instance the act of (im)migration. And even though the metoikia came, as we shall see, to embrace foreign nationals who had no intention whatever of changing their oikoi, that is no argument against an original ‘change’ meaning of metoikos – indeed, it would be no less destructive to the Mit-bewohner idea – for the fact that not only genuine immigrants but manumitted slaves became metoikoi (infra, C.) constitutes clear evidence that the technical term, once adopted, took on a fossilised life of its own independent of historical circumstances.

At all events, while an adequate translation of metoikos may elude us, its flavour is better captured by ‘immigrant’ than by such tired translationese as ‘resident alien’, which makes no attempt to come to grips with the word itself.

(b)   The metoikos

The word metoikos first appears in (surviving) public documents in the second quarter of the fifth century, and thereafter with increasing frequency in epigraphical and literary sources; but no contemporary thought to ‘define’ the term, in the sense of discussing the actual machinery whereby a foreigner who came to Athens would turn into a metoikos. However, the earliest of the retrospective definitions, that of Aristophanes of Byzantium (c.257-180), is also the fullest: μέτoικoς δέ ἐοτιν, ὁπόταν τις ἀπὸ ξένης ἐλθὼυ ἐνoικῇ τῇ πόλει, τέλoς τελῶν εἰς ἀπoτεταγμένας τινὰς χρείας τῆς πόλεως · ἕως μὲν οὗv πoσῶν ἡμερῶν παρεπίδημoς καλεῖται καὶ ἀτελής ἐστιν, ἐὰν δὲ ὑπερβῇ τὸρ ὡριομένoν χρόνoν, μέτoικoς ἤδη γίνεται καὶ ὑπoτελής. (‘A metic is anyone who comes from a foreign (city) and lives in the city, paying tax toward certain fixed needs of the city. For so many days he is called a parepidemos and is free from tax, but if he outstays the specified time he becomes a metoikos and liable to tax’.)¹² Kahrstedt drew attention to the brevity of the ‘specified time’ which this implies – a matter of ‘days’, not months or years – and, earlier, Clerc began the convention of adducing a clause in the fifth-century treaty between the Locrian cities of Chaleum and Oeanthea which prescribes that αἰ μεταρoικίοι πλέoν μενὸς ἒ|ὁ Xαλειεὺς ἐν Oἰανθέαι ἒ Oἱανθεὺς ἐν Xαλειοῖ, ταῖ ἐπιδαμίαι δίκαι χ| ρέστο. (‘If the Chalean live for more than a month in Oeanthea, or the Oeanthean in Chaleum, let him be subject to the law of the place’.)¹³ Here, seemingly, is just such a mechanism, albeit legal rather than fiscal, as Aristophanes describes.

Was this the procedure in Athens too? It has been accepted as such by many scholars, whether specialist students of the metic or not;¹⁴ yet the orthodox have demurred.¹⁵ Wilamowitz declared that Aristophanes’ methods were ‘lexicalisch-grammatische’, not ‘historisch-antiquarische’, so that whatever validity his definition might have for his own day it cannot be used as evidence for the classical period without ‘difficulties’. The difficulties, however, were not specified – nor could they have been, for they amounted merely to a conviction that the willy-nilly process conjured up by Aristophanes did not tally with the sort of solemn, purposive act which ought to accompany admission to a position of privilege. And what was chiefly missing was any idea that the foreigner has migrated to Athens for good. But another, later definition was at hand to supply this element: Aristophanes, Kahrstedt maintained, ‘is contradicted by the equally clear information in Harpokration, metoikion, that oikesis, permanent residence in Athens, is necessary for admission to the metoikia. The latter has the more plausible ring to it’.¹⁶ According to Harpokration μέτoικoς μέν ἐστw ὁ ἐξ ἑτέρας πόλεως μετoικῶν ἐν ἑτέρᾳ, καὶ μὴ πρὸς ὀλίγoν ὡς ζένoς ἐπιδημῶν ἀλλὰ τὴν οἴκησιν aὐτόθι κατακτησάμενος (‘… not visiting briefly like a xenos but having established residence there’). Here, it might seem, is confirmation of what French scholars in particular have insisted upon: definitive, permanent immigration, ‘sans esprit de retour’.¹⁷

Yet this insistence flies in the face of a crucial piece of contemporary Athenian evidence – crucial not only in defining the metic but for the ideology as a whole. As the rider to a mid fourth-century honorific decree in favour of Strato, basileus of Sidon, a privilege is voted for Sidonian emporoi who visit Athens: ὁπόσοι δ’ἂν Σιδω|νίων οἰκõντες ἐς Σιδῶνι καὶ πoλι|τευόμεροι ἐπιδημῶσιν κατ’ ἐμπορ|ίαν Ἀθήνησι, μὴ ἐξεῖναι aὐτὸς μετ|oίκιοv πράττεσθαι μηδὲ χoρηγὸν|μηδένα καταστῆσαι μηδ’ eἰσφoρὰv|μηδεμίαν ἐπιγράφεν. (‘Whenever Sidonians who live in and are citizens of Sidon visit Athens on business, no metic-tax shall be exacted from them, nor are they to be appointed to any choregia or registered for any eisphora’.)¹⁸ So without this special concession these men would have to become metics – for even without Pollux’ truism that the metoikos is someone who pays metoikion (3. 55) it is obvious that the clause expresses an exemption from metic-status qua fiscal category. Yet here are no permanent immigrants: they have every esprit de retour, for they have homes and citizen-rights elsewhere; they merely visit Athens on business, and (in Aristophanes’ terms) the privilege is that a sojourn for longer than the ‘specified time’ will not, in their case, necessitate their becoming ‘metics and liable to tax’.¹⁹ An evidently brief epidemia converts foreigner into metic, whether he likes it or not (and even if he has not the slightest intention of ‘changing his oikos’); and he can stop being one at any time simply by leaving.

IG ii² 141 does not, unfortunately, tell us the length of the ‘specified time’ in Athens; and Aristophanes’ ‘so many days’ doubtless means that there was variation from city to city.²⁰ But could it be the month of the Locrian treaty? The idea has been canvassed and rejected more than once²¹ but Gauthier has now revived it with the extra observation that the twelve-drachma metoikion divides neatly into twelve months. The hypothesis possesses obvious attractions (not least, as will be seen, in linking the tax and the residence-period); and Gauthier might well have mentioned the inclusion of dikai emporikai in the category of monthly suits (dikai emmenoi) as a second argument in its favour.²²

At all events there are no rational grounds for rejecting Aristophanes’ definition:²³ Harpokration (pace Kahrstedt) can scarcely overrule it, and a solitary passage which ostensibly lends support to the standard view is textually corrupt.²⁴ Furthermore, the supposed status-category of katoikountes – intermediate between metics and visitors – which has been so beloved of the jurists²⁵ is a fiction, and a superfluous fiction: juristically only two conditions, ‘before’ and ‘after’, are required, and only two are found.²⁶ The notion of a separate classification for residents who, so to speak, reserved their right to leave is absurd. IG ii² 141 reveals the businesslike view which the polis itself took of metic-status, besides posing the question to which the orthodoxy has no answer: if it is a privilege to avoid metic-status, where is the privilege in the status itself? There is hardly any need to point to the exiles and others living temporarily in Athens who are granted exemption from the metoikion.²⁷ But I cannot refrain from adding the missing element – a transitory metic not given any such privileges. Sopaeus’ son in Isoc. 17 has paid eisphora (41), and thus, presumably, metoikion also; yet he only left home ‘to combine business with pleasure’ (4), and still considers himself as ‘living in Pontus’ (56).

So, in the fourth century at least, foreigners arriving in Athens – whether intending to ‘immigrate’ or not – encountered an essentially pragmatic machinery: intentions apart, if they stayed for longer than a statutory (and fairly short) period the polis required them to become metics. But I say ‘in the fourth century at least’ because only then is Aristophanes’ definition valid beyond dispute; for the fifth century – to anticipate a later discussion – there are signs that the machinery was less rigorous, so that, on average, metics may have constituted a more settled population de facto than they did later, when a metoikos might be someone merely completing his emporia before sailing home. Hence our two levels of definition: Aristophanes’ metic may be the correct juristic concept (in the fourth century) but it cannot automatically be assumed to be the key to the ideology of the metic in its unofficial forms; on the contrary there is, as already pointed out, an obvious semantic incongruity when the word metoikos – on either meaning of meta – is applied to temporary visitors and to freedmen. The ‘Aristophanic’ mechanism was a fiscal and administrative net designed to retain fish above a certain minimum size (i.e. length of sojourn). Their actual size – and their type – was irrelevant; yet these things were what interested the private observer most. To him the difference between visitor and ‘metic par excellence’²⁸ was obvious, even if there was always a blurred region in the middle. These were the extremes of a spectrum of practical degrees – in all periods – which was officially unrecognised, and I return to this heterogeneity in section C.

(c)   The xenos

In Aristophanes’ definition, ἕως μὲν οὖν ποσῶν ήμερῶν παρεπíδημος καλεῖται (cf. Harp., … καὶ μὴ πρὸς ὀλίyον ώς ζένος ἐπιδημῶν). There are, however, no instances from classical Athens of parepidemos as a technical term – nor indeed at all. Nearest to it is the quasi-technical verb epidemein in IG ii² 141,²⁹ though in literary sources this is not even confined to foreigners: citizens too can be ‘in town’ (epidemein) or ‘out of town’ (apodemein). But it is instructive, I suggest, that official usage employs a verb, not a noun, in connection with these men: what concerns the polis is not who they are but what they are doing. Until the foreigner has lived out the ‘specified time’ he is not merely ‘free from tax’ – he has, from the city’s point of view, no real existence, just as an unborn foetus has no name. If the foetus is born it can be called metoikos; but if it never comes to birth (by leaving before the deadline), no matter – there will be other confinements.

Thus, the only designation found for such people is unofficial – appearing in literary sources only – and occupies one small