This book provides a fresh perspective on Athenian democracy by exploring bad citizenship, as both a reality and an idea, in classical Athens, from the late sixth century down to 322 B.C. If called upon, Athenian citizens were expected to support their city through military service and financial outlay. These obligations were fundamental to Athenian understandings of citizenship and it was essential to the city's well-being that citizens fulfill them. The ancient sources, however, are full of allegations that individuals avoided these duties or performed them deficiently. Claims of draft evasion, cowardice on the battlefield, and avoidance of liturgies and the war tax are common. By examining the nature and scope of bad citizenship in Athens and the city's responses-institutional and ideological-to the phenomenon, this study aims to illuminate the relationship between citizen and city under the Athenian democracy and, more broadly, the tension between private interests and public authority in human societies.

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ζιµε η1σ 4ξδσαΚ π µενοΚ 2ησε ειξ ξ οφΚ War always hunts out young men (S. fr. 554 R)

Several features of this compact passage have puzzled scholars ever since the discovery of the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians a century ago. First, did the Athenian Assembly really deliberate on all these disparate matters in the chief meeting of the sixth prytany, and if so, why? Second, why did it limit complaints (probolai) against sycophants to a total of six divided equally between citizens and metics? Since the answers we give to these questions are fundamental to our understanding of basic Athenian institutions, they deserve careful consideration. This paper will argue that the Assembly did deliberate on these matters at the same meeting and indeed that this was natural, since they are all symbolic, as well as practical, instruments for controlling behaviour inimical to the demos' interests. It will also suggest that the limitation on probolai against citizen and metic sycophants was introduced to safeguard against the sort of abuse of the label ‘sycophant’ that took place under the regime of the Thirty, and that the measures described in Ath. Pol. 43.5 were, therefore, most likely linked together in the early years of the restored democracy.