244 James Roy
interest was enquiries by Greek intellectuals into whether communities, both Greek and
non-Greek, could be considered autochthonous. Thucydides says (6.2.2) that, although
the Sikans claimed to be autochthonous, he believed that they came from the area of
the River Sikanos in Iberia. Such enquiries into autochthonous communities, Greek and
non-Greek, continued for centuries. Briquel (1993: 90–4) has, however, noted that,
whereas autochthony when claimed by a Greek community has a positive, prestigious,
value, identifying a non-Greek community as autochthonous does not carry any such
judgment.
Classical Athenian Autochthony
Modern research on claims by Greek communities of the classical period to be
autochthonous have concentrated on Athens, because the available Athenian evidence
is vastly richer than that of any other area (see, most recently, Isaac 2004: 114–24;
Sebillotte-Cuchet 2006: 255–90; and Valdés Guía 2008a,b). Athenian autochthony
appears in various literary settings: in Athenian tragedy, especially Euripides’Erechtheus
(lost) and Ion; in comedy, Aristophanes jokes about autochthony; in philosophy,
especially Plato; and in oratory, above all in the funeral speeches for the Athenian
war-dead. It is also reflected in Athenian art (Shapiro 1998; Cohen 2001). There has
been major work on the presentation of Athenian autochthony in particular genres.
The funeral speeches delivered over the Athenian war-dead each year that Athens was
at war offered a particularly suitable occasion to recall autochthony as a significant
element of Athens’ greatness, and autochthony figures prominently in all the surviving
examples except the first, the speech put by Thucydides in the mouth of Perikles.
Even there, it appears briefly: “the same people have always occupied this land, and
each generation has kept it free till this day through their excellence” (Thuc. 2.36.1:
translation by Pelling). In other cases, the theme of autochthony is developed at
length, and the resultant wealth of material has been studied in depth by Nicole Loraux
(especially 1990, 1993): her arguments form a major part of present understanding
of how the Athenians viewed their autochthony. Work on autochthony in drama has
concentrated on Euripides’Ion(see the text that follows) and what survives of his
Erechtheus, but Nimis (2007) has analyzed a passage of theMedeain the light of notions
of autochthony.
It is notable that the surviving historians of the period do not offer a positive endorse-
ment of the Athenian autochthony myth, though both are clearly aware of it. Herodotus
does not use the word “autochthony” about Athens. At 7.161, when ambassadors from
Sparta and Athens were trying to persuade Gelon of Syracuse to join their alliance against
Persia, and Gelon had offered men and ships, provided that he could command either
the army or the navy, Herodotus has an Athenian reply—that the Athenians should
command the ships because they are the most ancientethnos, and alone among Greeks
to have never migrated. This in effect was the Athenian claim to autochthony, expressed
in other words. However, Herodotus has an enigmatic passage (1.56–7) about the