Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece

Citizenship is a major feature of contemporary national and international politics, but rather than being a modern phenomenon it is in fact a legacy of ancient Greece. The concept of membership of a community and participation in its social and political life first appeared some three millennia ago, but only towards the end of the fourth century BC did Aristotle offer the first explicit statement about it. Though long accepted, this definition remains deeply rooted in the philosophical and political thought of the classical period, and probably fails to account accurately for either the preceding centuries or the dynamics of emergent cities: as such, historians are now challenging the application of the Aristotelian model to all Greek cities regardless of chronology, and are looking instead for alternative ways of conceiving citizenship and community.

Focusing on archaic Greece, this volume brings together an array of renowned international scholars with the aim of exploring new routes to archaic Greek citizenship and constructing a new image of archaic cities, which are no longer to be considered as primitive or incomplete classical poleis. The essays collected here have not been tailored to endorse any specific view, with each contributor bringing his or her own approach and methodology to bear across a range of specific fields of enquiry, from law, cults, and military obligations, to athletics, commensality, and descent. The volume as a whole exemplifies the living diversity of approaches to archaic Greece and to the Greek city, combining both breadth and depth of insight with an opportunity to venture off the beaten track.
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Alain Duplouy, Reader in Greek Archaeology, Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne,Roger W. Brock, Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Leeds

Alain Duplouy is Reader in Greek Archaeology at the Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, where he has been teaching since 2003. He studied Classics in Brussels and Archaeology in Paris, and was previously a British Academy Visiting Fellow at Leeds and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been involved in and also co-directed various field projects in Greece (Itanos) and Italy (Laos and Pietragalla), and his research interests focus particularly on the archaic Greek world, the archaeology of ancient Lucania, and the history of university collections. His publications mainly cover the social and political history of archaic Greece, with a focus on the elite and on citizenship.


Roger W. Brock is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Leeds. He studied at Oxford, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ohio State University, and taught at the University of St Andrews and Balliol College, Oxford, before moving to Leeds in 1990. His research interests lie particularly in the fields of Greek historiography, especially Herodotus, and ancient Greek politics, while his publications cover Greek political and constitutional organization, political imagery and ideology, and also wider topics in Greek history and literature. His research currently focuses on ancient Greek citizenship, especially civic subdivisions and non-political aspects, and the related topic of the functioning of Greek oligarchies; he also has a long-standing interest in wine in ancient Greece.
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