Abstract
Metics formed a large segment of the population of ancient Athens. Juridically speaking, they were free noncitizens who resided in Attica under a variety of constraints and received some legal protections. Athenian metics were a heterogeneous group. Some were people of wealth and privilege, others poor; some of them were also former slaves. Moreover, while many metics were lifelong inhabitants of the city, others were simply visitors in town for a month (the legal threshold) or more, on business or for other reasons. And although many metics were ethnically Greek, others hailed from surrounding regions like Thrace, Macedonia, Caria, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Carthage. Kasimis’s book concerns itself with a subset of this varied population—namely, those “perpetual immigrants” who closely resembled the Athenian citizens with whom they mixed daily. Its primary aim is to reestablish “the figure of the metic as a site of discursive and political theoretical meaning” (3). Using close readings of a number of ancient texts, Kasimis argues that the difficulty in telling metics and citizens apart gave the question of who truly belonged to the democratic city a performative, indeed constitutive, dimension, with significant consequences.
Kasimis’s argument begins from Pericles’s law of 451/50 BCE limiting citizenship to children born of two Athenians married to each other. This legal criterion was reinforced by the widespread myth of autochthony depicting Athenians as an indigenous people sprung from the land itself. Together these two features made Athenian identity strongly “nativist”; they created a divide between citizens and metics that was in theory deep and unbridgeable, no matter how long the latter lived in Attica or how “Athenian” they became. Kasimis reads the famous Periclean funeral oration (Thucydides 2.35-46) as a piece of democratic self-congratulation documenting both the envy others felt for Athens and their faltering attempts to emulate its citizens.
Kasimis proceeds to a close reading of Euripides’s Ion, a complicated tragedy hinging on the identity of its protagonist. The son of an Athenian mother (Kreousa) raped by Apollo, Ion had been exposed as an infant. The play begins some years later, with him now a youth tending the god’s shrine at Delphi. In the course of revelations, reversals, and late-breaking news from the oracle, Ion is recognized by his mother, adopted by her non-Athenian husband Xuthus, and directed by Athena to move to her city. In time, the goddess says, he will rule there, with his descendants extending their sway to Ionia. Yet for Kasimis this is not a fully happy ending. By rights Ion should depart for Athens glorying in his reclaimed citizen status, a proud scion of its ancestral king Erectheus. Instead, Athena tells his mother to keep quiet; Xuthus should never learn the truth about his son’s identity. Ion must perforce play the role of a metic from Delphi, a foreigner adopted and brought to Athens by a noncitizen father. For Kasimis, Ion is thus an “immigration fable” whose “boundary crossing provides a paradigm of Athenian membership” (28). According to her, it “troubles the autochthonous claim that blood settles questions of membership and belonging at the same time that it seeks to incorporate that instability into the democracy’s etiology” (40). Kasimis engagingly describes this conclusion in contemporary terms, arguing that “closeting” and “passing” were important elements of political life in classical Athens. On her reading, the play outs “practices of disclosure and concealment . . . as the daily work” (48) upon which the democratic status quo depends.
Kasimis turns next to Plato’s Republic, focusing on elements of Books 1, 3, and 8 that she rightly sees as indebted to Athenian political Realien. She notes the importance of the Piraeus setting and highlights Socrates’s observation that there were no appreciable differences between the twin processions honoring the goddess Bendis; although one was composed of citizens and the other of metics, both were equally splendid (327a). Moreover, the evening’s subsequent discussion took place in the home of a metic, with people of varied civic status mingling freely. Turning to Book 3, Kasimis suggests that Callipolis’s classes of citizens resemble the juridical categories of Plato’s own city. Socrates seeks to justify the former’s political distinctions with an autochthonous “myth of metals” (414d–415c) to be inculcated among all citizens. According to it, each person’s psychic admixture is inherited from their parents and determines their societal role. Crucially, heredity does not have the final word. If ongoing communal scrutiny reveals that some people are, for example, golden in nature despite coming from silver parents, they must be reassigned to the appropriate category; downgrades are also possible. Kasimis stresses that in outlining this “noble lie,” Socrates himself speaks honestly; moreover, Glaucon’s reaction is not outrage but a “winking” (85) recognition of the familiar terrain on which the interlocutors find themselves. For they knew well the shortcomings of the Periclean law and understood that its criteria were insufficient to guarantee political virtue. Like the Ion, the Republic is engaged in an act of disclosure; the notion that hereditary political statuses are natural, stable phenomena proves to be a “regulatory fiction” (84). Who and what you were in classical Athens was in significant part a matter of public persona and peer reaction.
Kasimis concludes her reading of the Republic with an analysis of part of Book 8. Here too she demonstrates a refreshing knack for contextualizing Plato, noting that the text’s examination of political typologies “intervenes in specific historical debates about membership and exclusion” (119–20) and is “an empirically informed project” (122). Examining Socrates’s account of the democratic person and their eventual decay into tyranny, she focuses on lines 563a1–2: in democracy, “the metic is made equal to (exisousthai) the citizen (astos), and the citizen to the metic. And the same with the foreigner (xenos)” (110). Kasimis argues that mimesis is the driving force by which different sorts of people become like one another. She claims that Plato here uses mimesis in its older, more traditional sense of “behavioral modeling” (127n69), adducing the long role-playing history of tragic choruses. In her succinct formulation, “imitation produces habits that sediment” (128). According to Kasimis, Plato understands civic status in a democracy as performative, fluid, and mutable. Moreover, his mimesis is a two-way street; while metics can turn into citizens, the converse is also possible. Kasimis offers a short excursus reading the Menexenus along these lines. In borrowing his funeral oration from Aspasia, Socrates assumes her identity as a metic woman; he “articulates the exclusionary tenets of Athenian membership entirely in her voice . . . becoming the citizen copy of the metic original” (141).
Kasimis concludes her overall argument with a reading of Demosthenes 57 (Against Euboulides). In this forensic speech, the speaker Euxitheus appeals the decision of a deme assembly that he was not a citizen but rather a metic trying to “pass” as one. With the threat of enslavement hanging over his head, Euxitheus contends that he has not been seen engaging in any of the characteristic practices of metics. Moreover, his enemy’s attack endangers not only Euxitheus’s citizenship but that of many other poor citizens as well. For his part, Euxitheus has always considered himself an Athenian and conducted himself accordingly. If in the end he should be found, “like an inverted Oedipus,” to have been mistaken about his parents and status, that would make him “guilty only of mimicry . . . but not of passing” (166). The city’s devotion to the Periclean citizenship criteria and autochthony has made public performance so important that no one’s civic identity is secure anymore.
Kasimis’s book appears in the series Classics After Antiquity. This is partly due to the author’s skilled deployment of concepts and terminology borrowed from contemporary theorists (e.g., Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick). But it is even more so because of the broader reach of her claims. Kasimis sees democracy (both ancient and modern) as making “strategic investments in nativism” (170) whose returns include “intergenerational democratic exclusion” (14), “second-class citizenship” (15), and an imperialistic bent. She concludes with a question at once provocative and rhetorical: “What if the metic is the central figure of our time?” (183).
Kasimis’s book is intelligent, clearly written, and well-produced. But her avowedly theoretical approach (9) would nevertheless benefit from even more historical contextualization. For one thing, she claims that “the Periclean world . . . constitutes the political horizon” (19) of her analysis. Yet the first of her main texts, the Ion, appeared more than a decade after the leader’s death and two generations after his citizenship law. Moreover, some seventy years separated the tragedy from Kasimis’s final text, Against Euboulides. This long interval saw many significant political changes at Athens; as Mogens Hansen observes, “where chance permits a comparison of the fifth- and fourth-century democracies, it is often the differences rather than the similarities that leap to the eye.” 1 Moreover, the city’s commitment to its citizenship criteria and ideology seems to have wavered over the years, especially at crucial junctures like the aftermath of the plague, the Sicilian expedition, the run-up to Arginousae, and the return of Thrasybulus. Kasimis’s treatment of the dates of her texts should likewise be deepened. Disputed questions like the Ion’s date of production, and both the dramatic date and the date and process of composition of the Republic, all have an impact on her arguments and conclusions. (It is also a little odd that Kasimis’s otherwise sensitive and historicizing treatment of Plato does not pay more attention to the political crisis that upended his life and long shaped his thought—namely, the rule of the Thirty Tyrants.) 2
The persuasiveness of Kasimis’s account depends to an extent on several largely empirical questions difficult to answer: How widespread was metic “passing”? How likely were metics to get away with it? And how much anxiety did the phenomenon really produce? In this regard, Kasimis’s arguments should be considered alongside additional passages from other texts. Some of these lend further support to her claims. At Hippolytus 925–931, for instance, Theseus laments the general difficulty involved in separating true from false and friend from foe. Likewise, pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians suggests (I.10) that it was ordinarily difficult to discern civic status in people’s external appearance and demeanor. Both Euripides’s Suppliants (888–900) and Lysias’s Against Philon (31.29) praise metics of surpassing civic virtue; the latter also faults citizens who fail to live up to expectations. And a close reading of Apollodorus’s Against Neaera ([Demosthenes] 59) would afford Kasimis the opportunity to discuss what happened when multiple members of a metic family sought to “pass” as citizens. On the other hand, block grants of citizenship to Plataeans (427 BCE), Samians (403/2 BCE), and Olynthians (348), as well as the parabasis of Aristophanes’s Frogs (especially lines 716–736), all suggest that the importance of descent and autochthony was relative and circumstantial; the city knew how to prioritize when it needed to. Moreover, during the time period of Kasimis’s study, Athens was transitioning from being a predominantly “oral” culture to a more “literate” one. Monuments like casualty lists, the Erechtheum building accounts, and the so-called Naval Catalogue (Inscriptiones Graecae i3 1032) all show that Athenians were increasingly capable of keeping track of civic status when they wanted to, often inscribing men’s demotics, ethnics, and demes of residence. Finally, metic “passing” seems relevant to other, similarly messy status-related issues like membership in Solonian census categories, eligibility for hoplite service, liability for liturgies, and recourse to the antidosis (property exchange challenge). In short, the question is whether metic “passing” and an attendant need for ongoing, public performance of one’s civic status played a fundamental role is shaping the classical Athenian democracy. Kasimis’s answer, rooted primarily in theory, is an emphatic “yes.” Others, by contrast, might prefer to read the metic–citizen divide as a more unremarkable matter, something generally ignored until a sycophant, ambitious citizen (ho boulomenos), or orator (rhetor) sensed an opportunity too good to pass up.
The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy is an interesting book worthy of careful consideration. Its fresh readings of an impressively wide range of ancient texts have much to offer political scientists, classicists, and historians. And its effort to recover an important strain of ancient political thought, and to reconnect it with some of the most pressing questions in our contemporary democracies, is surely laudable and timely.