THE FAMILY PLOT: ATHENIAN RACIALISM ON STAGE

Euripides' Ion, produced sometime between 420 and 409, recapitulates Athenian racial ideology as a family romance. Characters in the play both embody and act out the belief that citizens were thought to inherit the patriotism and special characteristics that qualified them for citizenship. For this reason, the Ion provides a rare glimpse of the play of ideologies (gender, kinship, etc.) that orchestrate racial citizenship as a cultural practice and political ideology. This is, of course, neither to say that the Ion offers us an accurate portrait of exactly how these negotiations worked in practice nor to imply that Euripides intended to endorse the dysfunctional family dynamics he portrays. Rather, the Ion stages what would have been necessary in order for the Athenians to be who they claimed themselves to be.

In broad outline, the story is as follows. Creousa, the sole surviving carrier of Athens' autochthonous bloodline, has traveled to Delphi to consult the oracle about the long sterility of her marriage and about the fate of her abandoned child. Years before, when she was an unwed parthenos, Apollo had raped and impregnated her in a cave. She bore the resulting child, but exposed it in fear because of her unmarried state. Circumstances in Delphi lead her to conclude that Apollo has allowed the child to die. At this juncture, her husband, Xouthos, makes his belated arrival and successfully consults Apollo's oracle.

race and citizen identity in the classical athenian democracy examines how social actors identified as citizens during the fifth and fourth centuries bce. From the mid fifth century onward, citizens increasingly appealed to a language of birth and ancestry to develop narratives about who they were as citizens. Citizens assumed that having the right birth and ancestry not only qualified them for citizenship but also endowed them with capacities and characteristics associated with citizenship, including an inherited love for democracy. In this study, I argue that these narratives articulate a vision of racial citizenship.

Since there is no current consensus on the issue of whether the concepts of race and/or racialism can be used to analyze ancient identities, I thought it might be helpful to clarify why I am using the term “racial” and what I mean by it. In this study, the term “racial” describes one component or narrative of citizen identity (citizen identity was composed of several narratives). I treat this narrative, racial citizenship, as a form of social identity, and investigate the causes and conditions that encouraged the Athenians to formulate and embrace it as well as the way this narrative worked in practice. The study is roughly divided between an examination of why and how racial citizenship emerged and an investigation of its consequences for citizenship practices, historiography, and policy decisions (inter alia). What must be stressed is that nothing in this project hangs on the use of the term “racial” per se.

INTRODUCTION

This is a study of how social actors understood and imagined themselves as citizens in the Athenian democracy and the particular effects and consequences of how they did so. Although the question of identity is not usually singled out for special investigation in studies of Athens' democracy, it nevertheless frequently informs the questions historians ask of the democracy and the answers they formulate. For example, the ongoing inquiry into when democracy really began in Athens hinges on how citizenship is understood as a social identity. Several scholars argue that in order for democracy to be possible, the social actors involved must, of necessity, have some identification – as soldiers or equals – that underwrites their capacity to act as democratic citizens. Although this intuition is well founded – citizen identity is central to democracy – the question is not merely a genealogical one, confined to democracy's origins, but rather persists throughout the democracy's history. In part, this is because the question of who deserved to be a citizen was never finally put to rest. In his seminal study of Athenian citizenship, J. K. Davies describes the situation this way:

ATHENIAN RECEPTIVITY AND RACIAL CITIZENSHIP

Racial-ideology supplied one framework in which the story of citizen identity could be told; but it was only one of several narratives the Athenians pressed into service to articulate their social identity as citizens. One of these alternative narratives was particularly in tension with racial citizenship. In a variety of public discourses, the Athenians boasted that their city was a safe haven for refugees and other afflicted outsiders. In so doing, they advanced a vision of Athenian receptivity and capacious citizenship at odds with the exclusivity of their citizenship practices and myths.

In the Archaeology, Thucydides tells us that from the earliest times refugees driven from other parts of Greece due to war or stasis (civil strife) were welcomed in Athens, where they were granted immediate citizenship. Although there is some anachronism in this report – given that a conception of citizenship did not emerge until the late seventh or early sixth century – historians have tended to see a kernel of truth in Thucydides' account, since Athens is one of the few Greek cities to have been continuously occupied from Mycenaean times straight through to the classical period. For this reason, refugees and suppliants could well have resettled in Athens at the end of the Bronze Age and later. Still, whatever historical memory for Athens' reputation as welcoming to suppliants and outsiders there may have been, scholars agree that the myths championing this behavior were emphasized, if not created altogether, only after Athens took over the leadership of the league against the Persians.

FROM ATHENIAN BIRTH TO CITIZEN IDENTITY

Racialism (i.e., the package of beliefs associated with having legitimate Athenian birth) was not always the most salient component of citizen identity. Individuals identified as citizens in different ways in different contexts; and as with any social identity, some individuals were high identifiers, meaning both that it did not take much to trigger their identification and that they were deeply committed to this identity, while other individuals were (for various reasons) low identifiers. For instance, some undoubtedly understood themselves more often and more profoundly through lenses not directly tied to citizenship, perhaps as aristocrats, athletes, elites, and so forth. But, whether an individual was strongly or less strongly identified as a citizen, the birth norms of citizenship (the need to have two Athenian parents, rather than only one) provided a common framework for elaborating the meaning of citizenship as an identity. That is, birth and ancestry supplied key terms through which individuals could articulate and understand the content of citizen identity.

Just as the racial coordinate of citizenship was not always the paramount basis for identification (e.g., gender was sometimes primary), so also the way citizens translated ideas about birth into a language of citizen identity differed in accordance with the individual's personal history and the overall speech context. For instance, someone whose family gained a non-Athenian member either before the passage of the Periclean law or during a period in which it had lapsed (see Chapter 6) would be unlikely to highlight the hereditary basis of civic competencies and loyalties.

IDENTIFYING CITIZENS AND PROSECUTING FRAUDS

In democratic Athens, citizen identity was not directly linked to physical appearance. Still, the Athenians were concerned to keep aliens out of the citizen body. This raises the question of whether and how they knew a citizen or a fraud when they saw one? One answer is performance and context. Although it might seem circular, free persons who participated in politics and in the cultic rites exclusive to citizens, and who did not pay the metic tax, could be and were presumptively regarded as citizens. In addition, Solon's law forbidding slaves from exercising in the gymnasia had the de facto effect of associating this practice with citizenship. By excluding slaves from the gymnasia, the law also created the conditions for establishing physical appearance, that is, signs of physical cultivation, as a marker of citizenship. It is likely, though, that this distinction was weak because not all citizens had the leisure time to engage in a regime of physical cultivation, and because, as Aristotle is embarrassed to report, some slaves had bodies resembling those of free men. Still, the Athenians could have, if they wished, manufactured a visible sign of citizenship. Such practices were not unknown in other poleis. But most citizens in Athens wore a standard clothing style that was not exclusive to citizens.

IDENTITY AND HISTORY

Although Athenian sources have a great deal to say about racial citizenship and the myth of autochthony, this material is conspicuously absent from the works of the major fifth-century Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides. The historians' failure to engage directly with these issures is striking because they both offer accounts of early Athenian history and what might be called ethnogenesis; yet, rather than either endorsing or refuting Athenian racial myths, the historians elide them altogether. In so doing, they are not only denying Athenian chauvinism, but are also refusing the Athenian use of their identity fictions as shorthand explanations for crucial past events. In the Athenian history of Athens, autochthony says it all; it supplies a collective identity that is at once noble and a motivation for behavior. In funeral oratory, a genre that came into being during or after the Persian wars, Athenian speakers appeal to autochthony and the nobility it confers to explain their military achievements, both mythical and real. In some cases, speakers even provide a specific list of innate (and inherited) character virtues that both differentiate the Athenians from other Greeks and account for their successes.

The historians' silence on this tradition is, I argue, a constitutive one. That is, although they decline the Athenian identity-based version of the past, they take up the basic proposition that the identity of individuals and groups operates as a causal force in history, explaining why peoples and poleis behave as they do.

These attempts to resolve disputes in a legalistic way rather than through force imply that peace was generally considered preferable to war. Nevertheless, those historians who have tried to evaluate the extent and depth of Greek criticisms of and objections to war have come to widely divergent conclusions. On the one hand, several scholars have searched through all the major classical authors and collected, categorized, and discussed the passages critical of war, of which there are many. They have tended to come to optimistic conclusions. For example, Gerardo Zampaglione was confident that “the problem of universal peace was posed, sometimes overtly, sometime less so, at the center of classical and ancient Christian thought,” and Wallace Caldwell wrote of “a strong peace movement” in ancient Greece. Others have argued that this or that particular work or author was, in one sense or another, anti-war. On the other hand, several prominent and influential scholars have impatiently dismissed such investigations as well as the conclusions they have reached. For example, M. I. Finley contrasted the Greek attitudes with “our” modern condemnation of violence and attacked those “who blunderingly attribute similar values to the Greeks and Romans.”

Disagreements about the actual content of ancient thought are not quite so stark as one would think from such polemics. To begin with, “pacifism” has a different and much broader meaning in mainland Europe than in the United States or United Kingdom.

TWO CONCLUSIONS

1. (1) References to military service to the state were as common as those to financial contributions in Athenian law-court speeches: with remarkable consistency over time, approximately the same fraction of speeches discuss financial contributions and military service. Both could show character or establish a debt of gratitude – although the latter claim was always a prickly subject and there were standard rebuttals to such claims.

2. (2) Neither claim was de rigueur: more than half of our extant speeches contain no such reference. Such claims play little role in deliberative or epideictic speeches. If we subtract these speeches (approximately 25) from our total, we still find that claims of service are mentioned in 58/120 law-court speeches, that is, less than 50 percent of them.

METHODOLOGY

The largest group of passages comprises those in which a litigant talks about his own services, but derogatory remarks about an opponent are also common. I have counted such references even when they may be merely informational, for example “I happened to be out of the country serving as a trierarch when he died,” on the assumption that skillful speechwriters reveal why somebody was out of the country or not depending on the impression the reason will make. I have also included sundry other passages where claims of service are discussed, but not with direct application to either the plaintiff or defendant or their families. These references indicate the relative prominence of financial and military service in the Athenian consciousness.

General explanations of war tend to stress either internal or external factors. They locate the source of war in something within the state – for example an economy requiring imperialism or a militaristic culture – or find it in the external relationships of a state with other states – for example, one state may desire to check the growing power of another. Neorealists, in the discipline of International Relations, aim for a parsimonious theory of state behavior and argue that external factors have predominant explanatory force. The primary evidence for this view – which may initially be shocking to most historians – is the similarity of the basic foreign policy decisions made by a wide variety of states: “all sorts of states with every imaginable variation of economic and social institution and of political ideology have fought wars”; “events repeat themselves endlessly.” Crucial to this argument's plausibility is the fact that it only tries to explain basic foreign policy decisions. Neorealists candidly admit that “Structures never tell us all that we want to know. Instead they tell us a small number of big and important things.” Historians typically aim for a more complete explanation of a particular war: they pay careful attention to the nature of the states involved and how this shaped the course of events. Some theories of imperialism or militarism reverse the Neorealist position and attempt exhaustive internal explanations.

Owing to the towering influence of Thucydides, classical Athens enjoys an extraordinary reputation for the clear-sighted and openly expressed pursuit of advantage in its foreign policy. In particular, Realist scholars and students in the discipline of International Relations, preparing others or themselves eager someday to serve their own nation's interests, admire the Athenians' precise and complex calculations of expedience and envy them their frankness. Consequently, Thucydides appears on lists of canonical Realist texts alongside such twentieth-century classics as Edward Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919–1939 and Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics. A prudent foreign policy, free of self-serving cant and hypocrisy and immune to the emotions of anger and hatred, has an obvious appeal. And, indeed, a significant strain in Athenian thinking about the relations of states did possess these characteristics. Even as we paint a more complete, and inevitably more complex, picture of Athenian thinking and even as we explore the limitations of using interests as a guide to conduct, we should keep in mind two points: first, the attractions of a calculating policy are real and significant; second, we would not be studying Athenian thinking about foreign policy at all were it not for the Athenians' attempt, however doomed, to subject it to rational calculation; for this, as much as anything else, distinguishes their thinking.

INTRODUCTION

Every Athenian alliance, every declaration of war, and every peace treaty was instituted by a decision of the assembly. The assembled citizens voted after listening to speeches that presented varied and often opposing arguments about the best course of action for the state to take. For this reason, the fifteen preserved assembly speeches of the mid fourth century bc provide an unparalleled body of evidence for the way that Athenians thought and felt about interstate relations in general and about issues of war and peace in particular. To understand this body of oratory, its emotional appeals, its moral and legalistic arguments, and its invocation of state interests, is to understand how the Athenians of that period made decisions about war and peace. That is the goal of this book.

No one type of argument or single factor determined Athenian decisions. Rather, various considerations could play independent and important roles. As a result no single overarching thesis about Athenian thinking unites my chapters on, for example, “Legalism,” “Household metaphors,” and “Calculations of interest.” My investigations are united rather by an attitude towards Athenian thinking, a charitable and empathetic one, and my methodological preference for the evidence of assembly speeches. This attitude and methodology are best illustrated by contrasting them first with scholarship that portrays Athenian thinking as simple and deplorable and second with unmasking methodologies, according to which the stated grounds for war – as found in assembly speeches – only mask the truth and thus need to be stripped away rather than examined.

Various scholars have proposed cultural rather than economic explanations for Athenian and Greek warfare. Such theories have, in fact, been more popular in recent years than the economic theories discussed in the previous chapter. They can be divided into two types. Some scholars, Kurt Raaflaub for example, emphasize the high value that Athenian culture placed on waging war. The resulting militaristic culture made warfare important to the advancement of ambitious individuals and to the political clout of those groups whose military participation could be invoked to justify their prerogatives. According to this type of explanation, such individuals and groups were predisposed to favor war because it was the arena in which prestige could be gained or rights ensured. Other historians argue that the Athenians thought about and judged the action of states in terms of analogies with individuals and that these analogies tended to encourage competitiveness and intransigence among states and thus warfare. The application of individual analogies to the actions of states will be an ongoing concern of this book, but this chapter will focus on the first of these two types of cultural explanation. Two crucial points will emerge. First, Athenian militarism had mainly external causes and thus had the potential to contribute to a vicious cycle: war and the threat of war made Athens militaristic; this militarism made Athens more likely to go to war.