Citizenship in Classical Athens

Abstract

What did citizenship really mean in classical Athens? It is conventionally understood as characterised by holding political office. Since only men could do so, only they were considered to be citizens, and the community (polis) has appeared primarily as the scene of men's political actions. However, Athenian law defined citizens not by political office, but by descent. Religion was central to the polis and in this domain, women played prominent public roles. Both men and women were called 'citizens'. On a new reading of the evidence, Josine Blok argues that for the Athenians, their polis was founded on an enduring bond with the gods. Laws anchored the polis' commitments to humans and gods in this bond, transmitted over time to male and female Athenians as equal heirs. All public offices, in various ways and as befitting gender and age, served both the human community and the divine powers protecting Athens.

Sacrilegio y ciudad en las tragedias de Sófocles

“…4-10;Vicente Sánchez, 2021, pp. 17-25), se han publicado investigaciones que siguen metodologías actualizadas y que tratan primordial o tangencialmente este adjetivo, especialmente sus formas positivas (Blok, 2010(Blok, , 2011(Blok, , 2014(Blok, , 2017Calderón Dorda, 2013, 2020Jay-Robert, 2009;Peels, 2016;Vicente Sánchez, 2019, 2020, 2021.…”

Vox Populi, Vox Deorum? Athenian Document Reliefs and the Theologies of Public Inscription

“…The crucial question which the exploration of these monuments poses, concerning the role of gods in public decision-making, has attracted surprisingly little attention, despite the centrality of the polis religion paradigm to scholarship on Greek religion over the last 30 years, and the work of Josine Blok on citizenship as a contract between citizens and their gods has given it a new urgency (Blok 2014; 2017). 4 Moreover, in one recent contribution in which this issue has been considered, the lack of reference to gods in the oratorical sources has been taken to demonstrate that the gods had no such role in relation to the decisions of the Athenian assembly (Martin 2016).…”

Citizenship and religion in the first-millennium bce Mediterranean: from Etruria to Iberia

“…Citizenship: from Greco-Roman history to political philosophy Recent readings of Archaic and Classical Greek texts have challenged strictly political Aristotelian understandings on citizenship and highlighted shared cult, descent and law as constitutive of Greek citizenship. Scholars now deem the latter to be a fluid and dynamic concept; importantly, participation in religion is seen as key to citizenship, involving a 'convenant' between the members of the polis and the gods, and therefore requiring rules and prescriptions dictating such participation (Blok 2013(Blok , 2017Duplouy and Brock 2018). These new interpretations have gone hand in hand with a significant move to rethink the Greek citystate in relation to civic behaviour, itself driven by strategies for social distinction whereby status was constantly contested and performed (Duplouy 2006(Duplouy , 2019.…”