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.
Scholarly investigations of the rich field of verbal and
extraverbal Athenian insults have typically been undertaken
piecemeal. Deborah Kamen provides an overview of this vast terrain
and synthesizes ...the rules, content, functions, and consequences of
insulting fellow Athenians. The result is the first volume to map
out the full spectrum of insults, from obscene banter at festivals,
to invective in the courtroom, to slander and even hubristic
assaults on another's honor.
While the classical city celebrated the democratic equality of
"autochthonous" citizens, it counted a large population of
noncitizens as inhabitants, so that ancient Athenians developed a
preoccupation with negotiating, affirming, and restricting
citizenship. Kamen raises key questions about what it meant to be a
citizen in democratic Athens and demonstrates how insults were
deployed to police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. In doing
so, she illuminates surprising differences between antiquity and
today and sheds light on the ways a democratic society valuing
"free speech" can nonetheless curb language considered damaging to
the community as a whole.
Slavery and sexuality in the ancient world are well researched on
their own, yet rarely have they been examined together. This volume
is the first to explore the range of roles that sex played in the
...lives of enslaved people in antiquity beyond prostitution, bringing
together scholars of both Greece and Rome to consider important and
complex issues. Chapters address a wealth of art, literature, and
drama to analyze a wide range of issues, including gendered power
dynamics, sexual violence in slave revolts, same-sex relations
between free and enslaved people, and the agency of assault
victims. Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity
reveals the often hidden and contradictory attitudes concerning the
sexual identities and expression of enslaved people. These
individuals were typically objectified by both social convention
and legal description but were also recognized as human subjects,
with subjectivity and sexual desires of their own. The contributors
provoke valuable and fascinating questions that not only recognize
the trauma and struggles of enslaved people but also point to the
apparent inconsistencies in the mindsets of the enslavers. The
resulting volume expands our understanding of both sexuality and
slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, as separate subjects and as
they impacted each other.
In this article, I argue that a secular form of manumission existed in classical Greece that was in many ways akin to the (better-attested) institution of sacral fictive sale. In the latter form of ...manumission, slaves were freed by being “sold” to a god, who made no use of his right of ownership; in the former, the third-party “buyer” was not divine but human. I then demonstrate that secular fictive sale was of particular use to slave-prostitutes, especiallyhetairai, due to their access to a number of potential “buyers”—namely, their past and present clients.
Slavery is attested throughout ancient Greek history and all over the Greek world. Unsurprisingly, then, scholarship on Greek slavery has proliferated in the past twenty-five or so years, making a ...holistic synthesis of such work especially desirable. This book offers a state-of-the-art guide to research on this subject, surveying recent scholarly trends and controversies and suggesting future directions for research. Topics include regional variation in slave systems; the economics of slavery; the treatment of enslaved people; sex and gender; agency, resistance, and revolt; manumission; and representations, metaphors, and legacies of Greek slavery. Readers, including those interested in slavery of other time periods, will find this book an essential resource in learning about key issues in Greek slavery studies or in pursuing their own research.
Whereas the Roman slave’s peculium has been well explored by scholars, comparatively ignored is a similar institution in classical Athens. In this article, I first demonstrate the existence of an ...Athenian slave-allowance. I then argue that this allowance, like the Roman peculium, permitted masters to employ their slaves as independent contractors and offered slaves the possibility of saving money towards their freedom. I suggest, further, that the relative silence on this topic by modern scholars reflects an ideologically driven silence on the part of our ancient sources.
In Aeschines’ Against Timarchos, the orator tells the jury about occasions on which sexual innuendos uttered by or about Timarchos provoked laughter in the Assembly (Aeschines, Against Timarchos, ...80-84). Arguing that the Assembly’s laughter not only affirmed Timarchos’ reputation but also drowned out his voice, I demonstrate that Aeschines coopts this laughter in order to reinforce the civic silence that was Timarchos’ due as a male prostitute. That is, the laughter was made “consequential,” in that it ultimately contributed to Timarchos’ conviction and disenfranchisement (atimia).
Dans son Contre Timarque, l’orateur Eschine raconte au jury les moments où Timarque a provoqué le rire de l’Assemblée en raison de sous-entendus sexuels dans ses propos ou dans les propos le concernant (Contre Timarque, 80-84). Après avoir montré que le rire de l’Assemblée non seulement contribue à renforcer la réputation de Timarque mais vient également parler à sa place, cet article met en évidence la façon dont Eschine utilise ce rire pour souligner le silence civique, seule « parole » que mérite Timarque en tant que prostitué. Par conséquent, ce rire a des effets concrets et contribue, en définitive, à la condamnation de Timarque et à sa déchéance civique (atimia).
In his speech On the Crown (330 b.c.e.), the orator Demosthenes twice refers to his opponent Aeschines as a kinados (‘fox’), both times in the context of accusing him of flattery and slandering in ...the service of Philip of Macedon (18.162, 242). Although a number of scholars have studied the use of invective in the speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines, very little attention has been paid to the significance of this peculiar epithet. In this note, I investigate why Demosthenes calls Aeschines a kinados, suggesting that, in addition to painting Aeschines as devious, the word may also have served as a pun.
In this article, I argue that a secular form of manumission existed in classical Greece that was in many ways akin to the (better-attested) institution of sacral fictive sale. In the latter form of ...manumission, slaves were freed by being "sold" to a god, who made no use of his right of ownership; in the former, the third-party "buyer" was not divine but human. I then demonstrate that secular fictive sale was of particular use to slave-prostitutes, especially hetairai, due to their access to a number of potential "buyers"--namely, their past and present clients.
![KINA[I]DOS: A PUN IN DEMOST...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/0009-8388/small "KINA[I]DOS: A PUN IN DEMOSTHENES’ ON THE CROWN?")
