Like all the tragedies about the House of Atreus, Euripides’ Electra dramatizes the political stakes of familial disorder. In the background lies the legendary story of Agamemnon who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia and, after returning from Troy, was killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Electra takes place sometime after that murder and political usurpation, with the couple scrambling to secure their rule against the potential threat of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's children. When the play opens, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus have already exiled Orestes from Argos and relocated Electra to its border where she lives in a forced countryside marriage to a poor farmer. Over the course of the play, the siblings reunite and plot the murders of their mother and her new husband. By its end, Orestes and Electra are prepared to say goodbye to each other for good and, under the stain of matricide, to embark on their respective forms of movement, wandering for him and a new marriage for her.

Greek new comedy is infused with characters on the move, whether they be mercenaries, traders, economic migrants, refugees, or the many and various victims of trafficking (slave and free). While it is unclear exactly how closely comic mobility tracks historical circumstances, mobility in and out of Athens was certainly more frequent in the later part of the fourth century. Witnessing free and enslaved others—both in comedy and in culture—forced to contend with the consequences of migration and displacement gave audience members new opportunities to perceive and respond to the newly relocated and the dispossessed, and to take a closer look at their own circumstances and perceptual processes. This study investigates the way comedy brings the precarities faced by female economic migrants into view, and what this reveals about gender, freedom, and cultural frames, using Menander's Dis Exapaton with Plautus’ Bacchides as test cases.

Were women imprisoned in classical Athens? To search for an answer to this question in the secondary literature is to be met with deafening silence. Few scholars have examined evidence for the incarceration of women in the ancient Mediterranean, and the little work that has been done remains focused in such marginal (from the vantage of traditional classics departments) areas as Late Antique studies and early Christianity. When classicists speak of prisoners and prisons, we mean men and the ways men control men.

In addition to its many famous innovations in popular government, the Athenian democracy seems to have also experimented with another, more ambivalent political institution familiar to modern societies—penal incarceration. In recent years, there has been renewed debate over the precise role of imprisonment in Athens, as an increasing number of voices, including Marcus Folch in this volume, make the case that imprisonment was an important point of contact between criminal punishment and democratic politics and society in Athens.

When Sophocles wrote Electra's story, he gave her a sister, Chrysothemis. In their two scenes together, the sisters warn, entreat, cajole, insult, spar with, and proclaim affection for each other. While Electra maintains her public mourning for their father Agamemnon, Chrysothemis chooses not to openly defy his murderers, Aegisthus and their mother Clytemnestra, believing that resistance that accomplishes nothing is futile. Time has not been kind to this more pragmatic sister. In English-language criticism, she has acquired her own epithet, ‘timid’; her femininity has been dismissed as vacuous and her morality as driven by material self-interest. For many critics, she is a shallow and conventional figure whose main purpose is to act as a foil to the exceptional Electra. Since the pairing of a ‘stronger’ and a ‘weaker’ sister recurs in the depiction of Antigone and Ismene in Sophocles’ Antigone, this portrait of two contrasting sisters has been recognised since antiquity as distinctively Sophoclean, and the corresponding reduction of the sister–sister bond to a template has frequently precluded deeper examination of this relationship in both plays.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the meaning of kinship in Sophocles’ Theban plays has raised a great deal of interest in critical interpretations in the fields of philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis. From the 1970s onward, Antigone in particular has also become a staple of feminist theory, both as a philosophical and political gesture contra Hegel and Lacan, but also in connection with post-structuralism. Conversely, the topic of kinship in Athenian drama has attracted comparatively little attention from classical philologists. As a consequence, theorists have often been more inclined to discuss the theme with reference to modern conceptual frameworks, rather than to Sophocles’ language itself.

One of the commonest clichés in the study of ancient and modern democracy is the claim that the former is ‘direct’, the latter ‘representative’. A few scholars have recently explored areas in which the Classical Athenian democracy had representative features, particularly the magistracies. These studies continue, however, to understand ‘political representation’ according to the definition proposed by the political scientist Hanna Pitkin, that is, as ‘acting [on the part of the political representative] in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them’. In this paper I introduce the insights of the recent ‘constructivist turn’ in studies of political representation to the analysis of Athenian politics in the hope of suggesting, in what will necessarily be a brief and incomplete exercise, how productive this exciting new paradigm can be for understanding the dynamics of ancient democracy. I first lay out the basic tenets of constructivist representation, particularly the notion of the ‘representative claim’ as developed by the political theorist Michael Saward, and argue for their suitability for studying ancient Greek history and political thought. Next, I adapt the model of the representative claim to two episodes of Athenian democratic deliberation, showing how it illuminates processes of demotic will- and identity-formation. I conclude by briefly underscoring how approaching Athenian politics in terms of constructivist notions of representation restores an aesthetic dimension to ancient democratic debate, one that allows us to compare more productively the ‘demos’ of symbouleutic oratory with its counterparts in poetry, sculpture, and other media, namely as a represented object fashioned for creative and rhetorical purposes.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides waits until he has passed the midpoint of Book 1 to introduce an individual speaking ‘character’ into his narrative. He does not do so until the scene of the Congress at Sparta (1.67–88), where it is first ‘the Corinthians’ and then ‘the Athenians’ who plead their cases before the Spartan assembly. One of the functions of this scene is to illustrate the internal division of opinion among the Spartans, and Thucydides now brings two distinct, elite Spartans onstage to voice their conflicting perspectives: King Archidamus addresses his countrymen urging caution (1.80–5), while the ephor Sthenelaidas makes suitably laconic remarks pressing for war (1.86). Before this turning point, Thucydides had carried out his analysis of the war's causes exclusively with reference to foreign rulers and Greek polis-populations (‘the Athenians’, ‘the Spartans’, etc.)—and not to any individual actors or leaders of those poleis, such as Archidamus and Sthenelaidas of Sparta.

In recent decades, political theorists have significantly revised their understanding of Athenian democratic thinking. By opening up the canon, shifting their focus from abstract principles to democratic practices, and employing an increasingly diverse range of interpretive approaches, they have collectively reconstructed a more robust and multi-faceted account of the Athenian democratic public sphere. Despite its ecumenical ambitions and manifest successes, however, this project has been fettered by a singular focus on language as the medium of democratic politics. As can be seen in the gloss of one of its contributors, this body of work effectively limits the democratic public sphere to ‘the domain in which judgments and public opinion are shaped and formed through speech’. This logocentric demarcation of democratic practice does not harmonize well with our own experience of modern politics, however, where public monuments, political imagery, and civic spaces play a critical role in the formation of political understanding and judgment, as well as starting points for discussion, debate, and disagreement. It seems similarly out of tune with what we know about the ancient Greeks, who demonstrated a readiness to move between visual and verbal content in reflecting on political and ethical life, and who developed the very idea of theôria out of an extension of the process of seeing. If, as political theorists, we can temper our habitual logocentrism and learn to attend more closely to the visual culture of Athenian democracy, we stand to add new dimensions to our collective reconstruction of the democratic public sphere and, in turn, to enhance our understanding of those texts that have long preoccupied our attention.

The Athenians of the fifth century BCE both created and were captivated by an unusual and memorable concept that provided citizens with an ancestry that was closely linked to the very earth they inhabited: autochthony. Although autochthony in classical Athens has been studied extensively, the methodology of viewing the myth as a representation of a ritual and performative act has not been widely considered. This paper reflects upon autochthony from the angle of its ceremonial (re)presentation, considering how iconography helped shape a concrete and specific understanding of Athenian civic identity, including familial ties with the gods and eponymous ancestors. By situating fifth-century visual representations in vase painting as the most effective conduit for what autochthony meant, we can better understand its power as a visual action that replicates a ritual gift.