II. The main sources: Wasps, scholia, Philochoros and Plutarch

Philochoros’ account appears in the scholia to Aristophanes’ Wasps, produced at the Lenaia of 422. At this point in the play, Bdelycleon tells Philocleon he could be powerful and rich, thanks to the allies, but instead the prominent Athenians give him the run around:

Several points are alluded to in this passage. At this time, Euboea was an important factor in Athens’ policies, supplying grain that the Athenians expected in substantial amounts. Shortly before the production of Wasps, so probably in late 423, only a modest supply of barley had been distributed.Footnote ⁵ Since only Athenian citizens qualified for this distribution, a scrutiny as to citizen status had taken place, with the risk of being charged with xenia (being a foreigner pretending to be an Athenian citizen).

The scholia to this passage of Wasps provide crucial background information.

Scholia 718b and 718c offer a few different elements:

Jacoby reconstructed F119 of Philochoros from scholion 718a:

Let us first look at scholion 718a. It offers five items of information, here listed in order of appearance and with ‘Ph’ indicating what is explicitly derived from Philochoros:

1. a) when grain was distributed, a scrutiny of citizen status took place;

2. b) at some point, 4,760 Athenians were illegally enrolled as citizens (Ph);

3. c) in the archonship of Isarchos the Athenians invaded Euboea (Ph);

4. d) in the archonship of Lysimachides, Psammetichos sent 30,000 medimnoi of grain (Ph);

5. e) 14,240 Athenians received (a portion).

Philochoros, then, is the source of b), c) and d). Concerning e), in this sentence the infinitive γενέσθαι is governed presumably by an unwritten φησι, the subject of which is of course also not mentioned. The most plausible inference, derived from b) and d), is that the subject is Philochoros and the portions are grain; the most cautious option is that both the subject and the kind of portions are unknown.Footnote ⁹ So, Philochoros is the likely source for e), too, but not conclusively so.Footnote ¹⁰

Even less clear is whether b), d) and e) together belong to one single report about a scrutiny of citizens held when Psammetichos gifted his grain in the year of Lysimachides. In Jacoby’s edition of F119, however, these three items appear as three elements of one and the same fragment of Philochoros, that is, as belonging to one report on one event. How did Jacoby arrive at this point of view? And what should we think of the numbers ‘that are totally inconsistent’?

Jacoby saw good reasons for his reconstruction.Footnote ¹¹ He first traced the thoughts of the scholiast looking in Philochoros for information. For the distribution of grain discussed in this passage of Wasps, the scholiast acted on ‘they promise you Euboea’ (l. 715) and found the expedition to the island in the year of Isarchos (424/3). But since no distribution was mentioned in that year, the scholiast looked for such an event at an earlier moment (πρώην) and found the distribution of grain from Egypt in the year of Lysimachides. Jacoby did not doubt that this archonship was that of 445/4, because all these events were closely associated in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles:Footnote ¹²

In this passage, Plutarch reflects on the Citizenship Law hitting Pericles hard following the death of his legitimate sons, having previously brought devastation to others. To explain how this came about, Plutarch recounts the story of the gift of grain, albeit with details that differ somewhat from the scholia. He does not mention Psammetichos, but instead ‘the king of Egypt’ as the supplier of the gift. And the numbers vary slightly: the amount of wheat is now 40,000 medimnoi, the illegal citizens are ‘nearly 5,000’ and the number of those judged true Athenians 14,040. Plutarch does not specify when all of this happened: Pericles had introduced the Citizenship Law ‘many years before’ the death of his sons (Per. 37.3), and the gift of grain with its scrutiny took place after the law. He also adds information lacking in the scholia: following this scrutiny, there were numerous prosecutions of citizens who by the standards of Pericles’ Citizenship Law were of illegal birth, and many were the victims of informers. They were exposed as nothoi, according to Plutarch, not xenoi as the scholia contend, and, according to some MSS, were sold into slavery. For this account, Plutarch clearly relied on an authoritative source, but he does not mention Philochoros.

Plutarch’s Life thus explicitly associates Pericles’ Citizenship Law with the gift of grain from Egypt and the scrutiny of the citizens. Although Jacoby accepted the year 445/4 for this event, he suspected that at some point in the tradition a lighter check on citizen status connected with grain distribution had been conflated with a full diapsēphisis following on Pericles’ Law (see below).Footnote ¹³ In the margin of F119, Jacoby therefore added a reference to Philochoros F35, a fragment about polis subgroups.Footnote ¹⁴ The fragment lacks a book number, but since Jacoby thought it was connected to Pericles’ law he assigned it to book 4 of the Atthis, which presumably began ca. 460.Footnote ¹⁵ Philochoros’ account of the grain distribution and the scrutiny, together F119, dealt with events of 445/4 and thus followed Philochoros’ F118 (Schol. Ar. Nub. 213) about Pericles’ campaign against Euboea in 446/5 and the ensuing settlement of Athenian klērouchoi on land confiscated from Hestiaia.Footnote ¹⁶ Fittingly, Jacoby also assigned F119 to book 4, although the scholion does not mention a book number. In sum, for Jacoby, reading the scholia through the lens of Plutarch, there was a coherent link between Philochoros’ account of a diapsēphisis and of the gift of grain in the year of Lysimachides in 445/4, although he was mistaken concerning the scrutiny.

Nonetheless, it will not do. In a critical assessment of Jacoby’s reconstruction, Giuseppe Nenci argued that, contrary to Jacoby’s reading, the scholiast was aware of discrepancies between the reported facts about 423 and 445/4.Footnote ¹⁷ The grain distribution and the scrutiny of which Bdelycleon speaks took place πρώην (‘just recently’), an adverb that cannot refer to an event of more than 20 years before, since which the Athenians had lived through the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and the plague, no less. Furthermore, the gift from Egypt was wheat, whereas in 423 the Athenians received only common barley, a difference observed by scholion 718b. Finally, the target of Wasps was Cleon, not Pericles. In sum, there were two grain distributions with scrutinies, one in 445/4 and one in 423, both after campaigns in Euboea, and the scholiast duly noted this.Footnote ¹⁸ In his edition of F119, however, Jacoby obscured this fact, by putting the reflection in scholion 718a on the inconsistency of the numbers between brackets and attributing it to a different author, and by omitting scholion 718b altogether.Footnote ¹⁹

Although I agree with Nenci on the elisions in Jacoby’s edition of F119, his observations do not solve all our problems. Scholion 718a presents material from Philochoros in an arrangement of shorthand notes and summaries which may now be identified as three separate fragments:

And we have two references of uncertain origin:

1. 1) when grain was distributed, a scrutiny of citizen status took place;

2. 2) 14,240 Athenians received (a portion).

If, or how, the three fragments of Philochoros were connected, and how they relate to references 1) and 2) is still unclear. We now need to add a few questions. What do the numbers of citizens refer to, and do they belong to 445/4 or 423 or to some other historical context? Do all the components of the accounts on gifts of grain and scrutiny of citizens belong to Philochoros’ Atthis and if so, where? Answers to these questions would inform us about the impact of scrutinies, and why and when they took place.

III. The riddle of the numbers

The scholiast was of course right that 14,240 rations of 5 medimnoi do not yield the 30,000 medimnoi of Philochoros, or for that matter the 40,000 of Plutarch, but instead 71,200. But these inconsistent numbers are not the only puzzle. The 4,760 illegal citizens and the 14,240 citizens receiving grain together make 19,000, a round figure that is too neat to be true and, worse, incompatible with the number of Athenian citizens that scholars estimate for these years. Such estimates concern the demography of citizens and metics on the eve of the Peloponnesian War (431), appraised between 30,000 and 60,000 adult male citizens.Footnote ²⁰ An increase of between 10,000 and 30,000 citizens in less than 15 years can be ruled out. Observing that either 4,760 or 14,240 must have been simply deducted from 19,000, scholars have wondered which of these figures came first, what the 19,000 might relate to, and how a sensible historian like Philochoros could seem so wide of the mark. A consensus emerged that the number of recipients (14,240) must be correct, because it might have been available to Philochoros from archival sources, while 19,000 would represent not the entire legitimate citizen population, as Plutarch erroneously supposed, but only those presenting themselves as in need of grain.Footnote ²¹ Access for Philochoros to the correct number of illegal citizens was deemed less plausible.Footnote ²²

But why would Philochoros have had recourse to archival sources for the number 14,240, and not for 4,760? While we should perhaps be suspicious of both figures, the number of 4,760 illegal citizens derives explicitly from Philochoros, unlike that of the recipients of grain; the figure of 4,760 thus has better credentials. In addition, such precise numbers of counted citizens, rounded off to the nearest tens, and high numbers at that, are extremely rare in our records; usually, Athenians used round figures for large numbers and worked with estimates.Footnote ²³ One must ask, moreover, how the polis kept records of 14,240 citizens receiving grain, given the practicalities of its distribution.Footnote ²⁴ Against this background, these figures suggest a singular event, and 14,240 appears to be the result of deducting 4,760 from 19,000, rather than the other way round. Where the round figure 19,000, obviously an estimate, derives from and what it refers to, can only be conjectured:Footnote ²⁵ perhaps the number of thētes,Footnote ²⁶ or those who received food from the state.Footnote ²⁷

In any case, the number of people who fell victim to the scrutiny was high, as is confirmed by a source used by Plutarch, reporting that sycophants were active in the diapsēphisis, with a mass of court cases as a result. Considering that the scrutiny and its aftermath must have created upheaval whose effects were felt for years, it is remarkable that the gift of grain in the year of Lysimachides and particularly its sequel, a diapsēphisis that removed an estimated 15 per cent of the Athenians from the citizen lists, do not figure in other sources.Footnote ²⁸ Of course, silence can never be decisive, but the diapsēphisis and its effects on manpower and citizen numbers would have been of interest to Thucydides and the author of the Athenaion Politeia. In Diodorus’ account of the year of Lysimachides (445/4; 12.22.1), the event would have fit his report on the 1,000 Athenian klērouchoi settled on the land of Hestiaia. But none of these sources mentions a gift of grain or a momentous scrutiny.

IV. Grain distribution in Athens

The scrutiny of citizen status was applied, according to Wasps and the scholia, to Athenians keen to receive a ration in the grain distribution. To feed its rapidly growing population, Athens needed to import grain to supplement its own produce.Footnote ²⁹ In the fifth century, the city did so from several regions, but its chief supplier was Euboea.Footnote ³⁰ In 446 the Euboeans revolted, but after a successful campaign Pericles removed the population of Hestiaia and distributed their lands among Athenian klerouchs (Thuc. 1.113–14; see above, section II). In 411, however, Athens lost Euboea and so had to find new resources. The Black Sea region and notably the kingdom of the Bosporos became important suppliers.Footnote ³¹

Providing the Athenians with affordable grain was not only a matter of supply, but also of some price control. While the external market had its own mechanisms, the polis regulated the market at home with a series of laws.Footnote ³² Grain was bought in bulk and imported by merchants (emporoi), off-loaded in Piraeus and brought to Athens. The grain was sold as soon as possible by the sitopōlai, at a price supervised by the sitophulakes, namely at a profit of one obol per medimnos (Lys. 22.8–9, 12).Footnote ³³

These arrangements normally allowed Athens to secure supplies of affordable grain for its population, unless weather fluctuations, warfare, piracy or other problems created scarcity, which meant high prices. Scarcity needs to be distinguished, where possible, from famine, both sitodeia in Greek.Footnote ³⁴ In the fifth century, no real grain shortage is apparent in Athens, and nothing suggests a grain shortage in 445/4, for instance due to the short-lived revolt in Euboea.Footnote ³⁵ In the Archidamian War, Spartan raids ravaged harvests in Attica, but this loss was compensated by supplies from Euboea, exemplified by the episode in Wasps (422).Footnote ³⁶

After the loss of Euboea, Athens became more dependent on the wider market and faced greater risk of shortages than before.Footnote ³⁷ Responding to these difficulties, the city created a protected ‘internal market’ with the Grain Tax Law of 374/3, and in 329/8 with a decree on the produce collected under the First-Fruits Decree.Footnote ³⁸ Such measures provided the people with a substantial amount of affordable grain, the price of which was set by the assembly.

Athens rarely distributed grain for free. The grain distribution discussed in Wasps is apparently a gift (no purchase is mentioned) by an anonymous ‘they’ who must be leading Athenians and in this case was possibly the council.Footnote ³⁹ As Johannes Engels rightly underlines, we should not imagine that Athens, or any other polis, arranged a welfare policy for the entire (free) population.Footnote ⁴⁰ Grain was perhaps distributed for free when the city received it as a gift, but not every gift was distributed for free. It was distributed and sold cheaply in Piraeus for the citizens living there, and for all others in the city. Only citizens qualified for the distributions of free grain, as Wasps and the scholia make overtly clear, and the same rule very likely applied to the low prices set by the people in the ‘internal market’.Footnote ⁴¹ To benefit, every individual’s citizen status was checked. Was this check a diapsēphisis?

V. Diapsēphisis in Athens

Diapsēphisis is the procedure and the result of casting votes in a ‘secret ballot’ with tokens (psēphoi).Footnote ⁴² Such a secret ballot was the proper way of voting when a decision was made regarding an individual, for instance in the courts. The semantic value of δια- in διαψηφίζομαι seems to be ‘asunder’, signifying the split into ‘yes or no’ by the vote.Footnote ⁴³ Diapsēphizesthai and diapsēphisis were used in particular for voting on citizen status, as the lexicographer Harpocration explained:

The first round of voting (diaphēsizesthai) every male citizen had to face was the assessment of his admittance to the deme (dokimasia), to check that he was 18 years of age, of free status and born of two Athenian parents.Footnote ⁴⁵ But diapsēphiseis could also be applied to current deme members. Euxitheos, one of the victims of the great diapsēphisis of 346/5, told the court of appeal (Dem. 57.62):

The ‘former revision’, according to Euxitheos, took place when ‘the demesmen had of necessity to hold a diapsēphisis (διαψηφίσεις ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἐγένοντο τοῖς δημόταις), after binding themselves by solemn oaths, when their voting-register was lost during the dēmarchia of Antiphilos, the father of Euboulides, and they expelled some of their members’ (Dem. 57.26).Footnote ⁴⁶ Later in this speech, Euxitheos tells the court that on this previous occasion the deme expelled ten men, nine of whom were restored to their citizen status on their appeal to the courts (Dem. 57.60).

Whether it was undertaken for a regular dokimasia of young citizens or for a full scrutiny of the citizen lists to sift out illegal members, a diapsēphisis on the citizen status of an individual was carried out in the demes, with oaths taken on sacrificial animals and a secret ballot by all demesmen.Footnote ⁴⁷ For the procedure, the demesmen were to assemble in their deme of origin, regardless of where they actually lived at the time. A full diapsēphisis, when not only a few young men, but all demesmen were scrutinized, was quite an enterprise. In 346/5, in Euxitheos’ deme, Halimous, where 73 men were to be scrutinized one by one, many of whom lived in the city, the procedure took two days (Dem. 57.9–13).Footnote ⁴⁸ Halimous was a relatively small deme, represented by three men in the council; in larger demes such as Phrearrhoi (nine men), Lower Paiania (11) or Aphidna (16) this part of the procedure must have taken at least a week. Men rejected by their fellow demesmen could appeal to a magistrate and to a jury court; the procedure could take months, if not years, to reach a final verdict.

We can now draw a preliminary conclusion: the check on citizen status of those claiming their portion of grain cannot have been a full diapsēphisis. A diapsēphisis took place in the demes, grain distribution took place in the city. For such a distribution, only Athenians who wanted grain presented themselves.Footnote ⁴⁹ Only these claimants were checked, not all adult demesmen as in a full diapsēphisis. Finally, the scale and duration of a diapsēphisis were incompatible with the rapid distribution of grain that was customary in Athens and expected, especially when citizens were in need. For this very reason, Jacoby rightly doubted that ‘the ponderous apparatus’ of a diapsēphisis was set in motion for the grain distribution of 445/4.Footnote ⁵⁰ But if it was not a diapsēphisis, what form did the check on the claimants’ citizen status take?

A fitting solution was offered by Anthony Raubitschek over half a century ago.Footnote ⁵¹ Archaeological, epigraphical and literary evidence shows that in the fifth century male citizens were required to line up in the Agora to enter specific areas designated for each phulē and trittus to vote in an ostracism or for grain distribution.Footnote ⁵² Similar arrangements were made for grain distribution in Piraeus, with horoi designating the areas for the polis subgroups.Footnote ⁵³ At the entrance of each designated area of the Agora was a gate, at which the archon (or grammateus) and the bouleutai of the phulē in question checked the citizens’ identity:

What applied to the voters also applied to the claimants of grain.Footnote ⁵⁵ This analogy is no coincidence: both the right to vote, in the assembly and for ostracism, and eligibility to receive cheap or free grain were prerogatives of the male Athenian citizen. Individuals suspected of falsely claiming citizen status were charged with xenia before the nautodikai, as the scene in Wasps exemplifies.Footnote ⁵⁶ The scrutiny was sharp, but charges were probably few.

Now that a full diapsēphisis can be ruled out for a distribution of grain, when and why did a diapsēphisis that caused perhaps thousands of citizens to be removed from the lists take place? The most likely occasion, according to Jacoby and others, came in the wake of Pericles’ Citizenship Law.

VI. Diapsēphisis after Pericles’ Citizenship Law?

Disconnected from the gift of grain, there is no longer any reason to date the diapsēphisis to 445/4, unless we suppose that the two events happened to take place in the same year. But assuming that the scrutiny was held around this date, just a few years after Pericles’ law of 451/0, what might its purpose have been?Footnote ⁵⁷

Pericles’ Citizenship Law (PCL) laid down that only those who had an Athenian father and an Athenian mother were Athenian citizens (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 26.3–4).Footnote ⁵⁸ For Jacoby, who was convinced that Athenian political life was shaped by party strife between aristocrats and democrats, Pericles proposed his law to remove citizenship from his rival Kimon, whose mother was not Athenian.Footnote ⁵⁹ PCL could only work as such a weapon if it was retroactive, excluding from citizenship Kimon and all other Athenians who in 451/0 had a non-Athenian parent. Jacoby ascribed this retroactive force to PCL because he compared it to the racist legislation enacted in 1933 by the Nazis, which defined as Jewish and excluded from citizenship all Germans whose grandparents were Jewish.Footnote ⁶⁰ This law indeed applied a retroactive birth criterion to rob Jewish German citizens of their rights. However, a similar effect of PCL is incompatible with the fact that Kimon died on campaign as an Athenian general, so with full citizen status, shortly after PCL (Thuc. 1.112).Footnote ⁶¹ Nonetheless, scholars have tried to find ways around this fact with variations on this theme, arguing that PCL enabled the removal of people who had a non-Athenian parent or who had fraudulently made their way into the citizen dēmos, within a few years of its enactment.Footnote ⁶² But this view is unconvincing, for several reasons.

The first reason is the nature of Athenian laws: they were never retroactive. Such a force would be extremely unjust, especially when it concerned citizen status. PCL was no exception to the rule, as the case of Kimon confirms, but instead prescribed rules of citizenship to be valid from the archon year following its enactment. In the mid-fifth century, PCL meant that for citizen status two Athenian parents were required for those born after 451/0. Individuals’ citizenship would be checked for legitimacy when necessary: for girls upon being given in marriage, for young men in their dokimasia when they were 18 years of age (i.e., from 433/2 onwards).

The second reason combines social reality and political expediency. In 451/0, an unknown number of Athenians had one non-Athenian parent, often the mother, or were married to a non-Athenian. If PCL were retroactive, it would declare all these people and their present offspring forfeit of their citizen status. For Pericles to propose a law that would make him deeply unpopular with many Athenians (and yet have it miraculously accepted somehow) would have been immensely stupid, which Pericles certainly was not.

The very idea that PCL was (meant to be) an instrument to weed out foreigners illegally registered as citizens or to cut off mētroxenoi such as Kimon and his sons, is simply mistaken. Disconnected from the reputed gift of grain of 445/4, holding a full scrutiny (diapsēphisis) five years after Pericles’ Law does not seem to make any sense.Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, if we heed the deafening silence of all other sources, it does not appear to have taken place.

VII. The diapsēphisis of 346/5

On closer inspection, our sources mention just one diapsēphisis in the sense of a full-scale scrutiny of all male citizens in the demes.Footnote ⁶⁴ It took place on a decree proposed by a certain Demophilos in the archonship of Archias (346/5), probably late in 346.Footnote ⁶⁵ Voting in the demes was by majority, and those rejected by the deme could bring their case to a dikastērion presided by the thesmothetai. The diapsēphisis features in several sources, principally Androtion and Philochoros (short quotes, above), Aeschines’ Against Timarchos with its scholia, Demosthenes 57 and Isaeus 12.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even if we allow for the special pleading typical of court speeches, the disconcerting picture emerging from all the sources together is clear and consistent: the diapsēphisis was the moment par excellence for demesmen to settle old scores, rake up neighbourhood gossip and gather friends to harm common enemies. Such quarrels were occasionally a factor in dokimasiai, but the diapsēphisis exacerbated long-standing animosities, creating a vicious climate in which numerous people were voted out, perhaps some rightly but many more wrongly (Aeschin. 1.114, 2.182; Isae. 12).

Consequently, many rejected citizens brought their cases to court. Euxitheos’ speech (Dem. 57) concerns one such case of ephesis (‘appeal’). Even if he was not the simple innocent victim he pretends to be, his picture of the long-standing animosity within his deme leading to his expulsion was evocative and held claims that the court could verify.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet the courts were not lenient, on the contrary. Euxitheos projects onto the dikastai he faces an image of them as ‘severe but just’, implying that he expects them to be severe in the first place.Footnote ⁶⁸ He claims he was given no chance to defend himself against the unproven allegations of his deme, a claim unexpectedly confirmed by Aeschines, who, for different reasons of his own, draws a scathing picture of both the scrutiny and the following trials as unjust and prejudiced (Aeschin. 1.77–78):Footnote ⁶⁹

According to the defendants in these cases, their accusers acted out of malice, but also because they could do so because they risked nothing in attacking their victims, with or without arguments, unless they could be convicted of perjury, whereas the rejected citizens had to mount a solid defence and risked losing their status forever, if not worse.Footnote ⁷⁰ The climate of distrust and malice in the diapsēphisis depicted in the speeches matches the situation depicted in the first lines of the scholion to Wasps.Footnote ⁷¹ Besides being driven by enmity, accusers could also act from greed, since the property of a convicted ‘foreigner’ was to be sold: a conviction provided an excellent way of purchasing the land of one’s neighbour.

How many citizens were voted out of their demes and took their cases to court, and how long did it take the polis to sort out this mess? All of our sources report large numbers of rejected citizens and subsequent trials.Footnote ⁷² That these were not merely rhetorical exaggerations can be inferred from Euxitheos’ account of the previous diapsēphisis in the deme of Halimous, when ten out of around 70 deme members were rejected, nine of whom later had their citizenship restored by the courts (as some Athenians must have remembered). If, by analogy, in the great diapsēphisis roughly one-seventh of all male Athenians (ca. 30,000) were voted out, a staggering 4,287 were rejected, in other words a number not a million miles from Philochoros’ 4,760.Footnote ⁷³

We can now draw several conclusions. First, I am inclined to think that Philochoros found the number 4,760 somewhere in the archives, whether or not it was the exact number of cases involved. Second, this number does not indicate that the number of illegal citizens was very high in reality, as some scholars believe, but instead reflects the lengths to which the Athenians could go when acting out their malice against each other with impunity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Third, the dikastēria, where the appeals were heard, met between 175 and 225 days a year; given that they also had other cases to deal with, the dikastai could handle, say, around 200 cases of alleged xenia a year.Footnote ⁷⁵ If around 4,000 rejected citizens took their cases to court, it could take the polis 20 years to decide all the cases arising from the diapsēphisis.Footnote ⁷⁶ And all this time the accused would have been ‘in limbo’ concerning their status. In 338, after the Battle of Chaironea, their numbers were still so high that Hypereides mentioned them explicitly in his proposal to include all non-citizens in the army to defend the city.Footnote ⁷⁷ Did the polis decide at some point to terminate the endless court cases? There is no evidence to tell.

Why this diapsēphisis took place has not been fully clarified.Footnote ⁷⁸ Most historians, including myself, have assumed that existing concerns about civic status were aggravated by the tension created by the aggression of Philip of Macedon, although the peace of Philokrates of 346 might have brought some measure of calm. However, a scholion to Aeschines’ Timarchos (1.77) offers a glimpse of a more immediate cause of this invasive scrutiny:

According to this account, which surfaces only in this scholion, the diapsēphisis was a response to a stasis, a conflict within the polis for which furtive xenoi were held responsible. Most foreigners were indistinguishable from Athenians, so they had to be rooted out by a thorough scrutiny.

Meagre though it is, this account seems plausible. The same Demophilos who proposed the diapsēphisis had previously proposed a measure (politeuma) to investigate alleged attempts to bribe the assembly and the courts, setting off a series of court cases against men charged with this crime that was still ongoing when Aeschines was speaking against Timarchos (Aeschin. 1.86–87).Footnote ⁷⁹ Apparently, Demophilos was inclined to see subversive elements everywhere and was not averse to inciting the dēmos against them. Was the charge that xenoi were the source of stasis a classic case of scapegoating outsiders in times of political and social anxiety? Certainly, as the scholion shows clearly, but perhaps not only that.

From the 380s, sitodeiai were increasingly frequent. In Greece more widely, recurrent warfare and, in the mid-fourth century, Macedonian aggression made the procurement of regular supplies more difficult. Threatening grain shortage created tensions, which led to the targeting of foreigners, as happened in Sparta (Schol. Ar. Av. 1013 = Theopompus FGrH 115 F178):

In Athens, too, grain prices were rising despite the polis’ measures to keep prices artificially low. The year 346 is not known to have been particularly difficult, but the continuous anxiety about supplies in this period is manifest.Footnote ⁸¹ With grain supplies scarce or insecure, non-Athenians, on a rough estimate numbering one-fifth of the free inhabitants, faced even more serious problems: free grain distributions benefited only citizens and so, probably, did the grain sold at low prices in the ‘internal market’.Footnote ⁸² With recurrent periods of this staple becoming unaffordable or unavailable, non-Athenians might have become desperate and angry. This was probably the origin of the smouldering unrest due to ‘foreigners’ reported in the scholion. The xenoi were an internal, unrecognizable enemy whom Demophilos therefore meant to weed out, calling for a diapsēphisis.

This reconstruction explains why an account of grain distribution could be attached to an account of a full diapsēphisis, which normally had no connection to such distributions. Perhaps the short quote from Philochoros derived from a much longer account by him of these events that had shocked the polis profoundly. But how did a conflated and confused version of his and other accounts of these mid-fourth-century affairs appear in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles?

VIII. Shifting archons, years, events

The passage from Theopompos about the xenēlasia derives from a scholion to Aristophanes’ Birds, produced in 414, where the protagonist Peisetairos tells Meton that the chaos in the city resembles Sparta: ‘they’re expelling foreigners, and punches have started flying pretty thick and fast all over town’ (ὥσπερ ἐν Λακεδαίμονι | ξενηλατοῦσι καὶ κεκίνηται τινες, 1013).Footnote ⁸³ Here, the scholiast explains a word of the later fifth century with reference to a situation of the late fourth, about 70 years later. In terms of historical order, this reference is quite typical of scholiasts’ work: they used snippets of historical information for textual and lexical clarification (not the other way round, as we are wont to do). The chronological frame mattered to them only when the text required it. For instance, in Wasps two events of the 440s appear without any indication that they happened 20 years before. For the audience of 422, for whom the events were shared memories, such indications were unnecessary, but for later readers the references were confusing and needed clarification.Footnote ⁸⁴ Likewise, for the passage on the grain distribution (l. 718), the scholiast wonders if Aristophanes/Bdelycleon refers here to a gift of grain that the scholiast had found in Philochoros, although the interval of 20 years does not fit the adverb πρώην.

Although scholiasts culled much information from the Atthidographers, whose framework of the annual eponymous archons provided a chronological mooring, the historical frame was secondary to and embedded in their textual interests; so, things could easily go wrong. When trying to explain such errors, we can usually do no more than speculate about their causes. In our present case, two causes of potential confusion may have played a role, perhaps also reinforcing each other: the occurrence of two eponymous archons with the same name, and historical digressions referring back to the more distant past, which seem to have been common in Philochoros’ work.

The first potential cause of confusion concerned different years with the same archon name; when the reported events also resembled each other to some extent, misperception could easily arise. Ancient authors had only the archon names to go by, not an independent chronology against which to check them.Footnote ⁸⁵ Such double names occurred in the archonships of Lysimachides (445/4 and 339/8) and Archias (419/8 and 346/5). If in the year of Lysimachides (339/8) Athens had received a gift of grain from Egypt, it could be associated with the diapsēphisis of 346/5, since in 339/8 there were still numerous ‘illegal’ citizens.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, such a gift in 339/8 is quite unlikely, as Luraghi shows, rendering this source of confusion improbable in this case. Instead, the scholion to Wasps revolves around the association between a gift of grain and citizen scrutiny, which may have connected Philochoros’ account of the great diapsēphisis with the gift of grain from Egypt in the year of Lysimachides (445/4). Likewise, as we just saw, the association of food troubles and foreigners being cast out aligned events at Sparta some years after the second Archias (346/5) with similar events some years after the first Archias (419/8), when Birds was produced (414). In sum, there were possibilities aplenty to associate the grain distributions and scrutinies of the fifth and fourth centuries.

A second possible cause is the historical digressions in the Atthidographers, notably Philochoros. David Roselli makes a strong case that incidental subsidies for visiting the theatre and festivals in Pericles’ time have unjustifiably been dismissed because references in Old Comedy to θεωρικά were mistaken by ancient commentators and modern scholars alike for the structural institution of the theōrika fund, which was only instituted in the mid-fourth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ Following Jacoby, Roselli argues that Philochoros mentioned the first (incidental) theōrika in the mid-fifth century in book 3 (F33), but provided a much longer history of this subsidy in book 6 on the mid-fourth century, when it became a structural fund.Footnote ⁸⁸ This fund, too, was open only to citizens. The theōrika itself is unlikely to have been the cause of the diapsēphisis, because the theatre fund required just the conventional light check on citizen status, and its institution does not fit the account of a threatening stasis discussed above.Footnote ⁸⁹ But it is likely that, just as for the theōrika, Philochoros looked back in his account of the diapsēphisis of 346/5 and its aftermath, which was still an issue in 338, to the history of citizens’ scrutinies, with a telescoping effect that confused later readers.

The full conflation of the mid-fifth and mid-fourth centuries apparent in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles 37 must have been mediated by an authoritative source. For telling details, he often made use of Aristophanes, whether the protagonists of the Lives were contemporary with the playwright (Nicias, Alcibiades) or not (Themistocles, Pericles, Kimon, Demetrius).Footnote ⁹⁰ In Pericles he quotes Aristophanes (twice), other comedy writers (Cratinus, Eupolis, Plato) and many other authors.Footnote ⁹¹ By his time, readers needed commentaries to understand Old Comedy.Footnote ⁹² Likewise, the language and background of Demosthenes’ speeches needed clarification. For all of this, Plutarch consulted, among other works, the commentaries by Didymos, the Alexandrian scholar who flourished in the second half of the first century BCE and into the first century CE.Footnote ⁹³ Famous for his learning and incomparable in his productivity, Didymos was highly respected, and the scholiasts on Archaic and Classical poetry as well as lexicographers drew extensively on his writings, from which many extant quotes from the historians derive.Footnote ⁹⁴ His commentary on Aristophanes was a compilation of earlier philological and lexicographical work by Alexandrian scholars (Euphronios, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Callimachos and others).Footnote ⁹⁵ Such commentaries often juxtaposed information from various episodes and years in the way described above. Didymos’ commentary on Demosthenes likewise drew on previous commentaries, probably combined with readings of his own in the Atthidographers and other historians.Footnote ⁹⁶ In sum, Didymos’ authoritative commentaries combined information collected from the works of others and notes made by himself and his assistants, and not always in the correct historical framework, as the numerous inaccuracies in his work show.Footnote ⁹⁷

In our main sources, this information probably culled from Didymos appears in ways fitting the genres of scholion and moral essay. In the scholion to Wasps 718a, the five individual references are still discernible behind the stitches. Plutarch’s Lives are philosophical-moral essays, in which the chronology is subservient to painting character and drawing moral lessons.Footnote ⁹⁸ For the account of the scrutiny, Plutarch probably used Didymos’ commentary on Aristophanes and that on Dem. 57, with information from Demosthenes, Aeschines and Isaeus on the diapsēphisis. Closely associated in Didymos, the moral mould of Plutarch’s Life of Pericles 37 worked all the details on illegal citizens, grain distribution and Athenians receiving benefits into a single assessment of Pericles.