THE FAMILY PLOT: ATHENIAN RACIALISM ON STAGE

Euripides' Ion, produced sometime between 420 and 409, recapitulates Athenian racial ideology as a family romance. Characters in the play both embody and act out the belief that citizens were thought to inherit the patriotism and special characteristics that qualified them for citizenship. For this reason, the Ion provides a rare glimpse of the play of ideologies (gender, kinship, etc.) that orchestrate racial citizenship as a cultural practice and political ideology. This is, of course, neither to say that the Ion offers us an accurate portrait of exactly how these negotiations worked in practice nor to imply that Euripides intended to endorse the dysfunctional family dynamics he portrays. Rather, the Ion stages what would have been necessary in order for the Athenians to be who they claimed themselves to be.

In broad outline, the story is as follows. Creousa, the sole surviving carrier of Athens' autochthonous bloodline, has traveled to Delphi to consult the oracle about the long sterility of her marriage and about the fate of her abandoned child. Years before, when she was an unwed parthenos, Apollo had raped and impregnated her in a cave. She bore the resulting child, but exposed it in fear because of her unmarried state. Circumstances in Delphi lead her to conclude that Apollo has allowed the child to die. At this juncture, her husband, Xouthos, makes his belated arrival and successfully consults Apollo's oracle.

race and citizen identity in the classical athenian democracy examines how social actors identified as citizens during the fifth and fourth centuries bce. From the mid fifth century onward, citizens increasingly appealed to a language of birth and ancestry to develop narratives about who they were as citizens. Citizens assumed that having the right birth and ancestry not only qualified them for citizenship but also endowed them with capacities and characteristics associated with citizenship, including an inherited love for democracy. In this study, I argue that these narratives articulate a vision of racial citizenship.

Since there is no current consensus on the issue of whether the concepts of race and/or racialism can be used to analyze ancient identities, I thought it might be helpful to clarify why I am using the term “racial” and what I mean by it. In this study, the term “racial” describes one component or narrative of citizen identity (citizen identity was composed of several narratives). I treat this narrative, racial citizenship, as a form of social identity, and investigate the causes and conditions that encouraged the Athenians to formulate and embrace it as well as the way this narrative worked in practice. The study is roughly divided between an examination of why and how racial citizenship emerged and an investigation of its consequences for citizenship practices, historiography, and policy decisions (inter alia). What must be stressed is that nothing in this project hangs on the use of the term “racial” per se.

INTRODUCTION

This is a study of how social actors understood and imagined themselves as citizens in the Athenian democracy and the particular effects and consequences of how they did so. Although the question of identity is not usually singled out for special investigation in studies of Athens' democracy, it nevertheless frequently informs the questions historians ask of the democracy and the answers they formulate. For example, the ongoing inquiry into when democracy really began in Athens hinges on how citizenship is understood as a social identity. Several scholars argue that in order for democracy to be possible, the social actors involved must, of necessity, have some identification – as soldiers or equals – that underwrites their capacity to act as democratic citizens. Although this intuition is well founded – citizen identity is central to democracy – the question is not merely a genealogical one, confined to democracy's origins, but rather persists throughout the democracy's history. In part, this is because the question of who deserved to be a citizen was never finally put to rest. In his seminal study of Athenian citizenship, J. K. Davies describes the situation this way:

ATHENIAN RECEPTIVITY AND RACIAL CITIZENSHIP

Racial-ideology supplied one framework in which the story of citizen identity could be told; but it was only one of several narratives the Athenians pressed into service to articulate their social identity as citizens. One of these alternative narratives was particularly in tension with racial citizenship. In a variety of public discourses, the Athenians boasted that their city was a safe haven for refugees and other afflicted outsiders. In so doing, they advanced a vision of Athenian receptivity and capacious citizenship at odds with the exclusivity of their citizenship practices and myths.

In the Archaeology, Thucydides tells us that from the earliest times refugees driven from other parts of Greece due to war or stasis (civil strife) were welcomed in Athens, where they were granted immediate citizenship. Although there is some anachronism in this report – given that a conception of citizenship did not emerge until the late seventh or early sixth century – historians have tended to see a kernel of truth in Thucydides' account, since Athens is one of the few Greek cities to have been continuously occupied from Mycenaean times straight through to the classical period. For this reason, refugees and suppliants could well have resettled in Athens at the end of the Bronze Age and later. Still, whatever historical memory for Athens' reputation as welcoming to suppliants and outsiders there may have been, scholars agree that the myths championing this behavior were emphasized, if not created altogether, only after Athens took over the leadership of the league against the Persians.

FROM ATHENIAN BIRTH TO CITIZEN IDENTITY

Racialism (i.e., the package of beliefs associated with having legitimate Athenian birth) was not always the most salient component of citizen identity. Individuals identified as citizens in different ways in different contexts; and as with any social identity, some individuals were high identifiers, meaning both that it did not take much to trigger their identification and that they were deeply committed to this identity, while other individuals were (for various reasons) low identifiers. For instance, some undoubtedly understood themselves more often and more profoundly through lenses not directly tied to citizenship, perhaps as aristocrats, athletes, elites, and so forth. But, whether an individual was strongly or less strongly identified as a citizen, the birth norms of citizenship (the need to have two Athenian parents, rather than only one) provided a common framework for elaborating the meaning of citizenship as an identity. That is, birth and ancestry supplied key terms through which individuals could articulate and understand the content of citizen identity.

Just as the racial coordinate of citizenship was not always the paramount basis for identification (e.g., gender was sometimes primary), so also the way citizens translated ideas about birth into a language of citizen identity differed in accordance with the individual's personal history and the overall speech context. For instance, someone whose family gained a non-Athenian member either before the passage of the Periclean law or during a period in which it had lapsed (see Chapter 6) would be unlikely to highlight the hereditary basis of civic competencies and loyalties.