was its status as the basic unit of citizenship. Young men were
enrolled at age 18 in their deme registers, thus becoming citi-
zens; thereaft er they would be known in formal contexts by
name, father’s, name, and deme affi liation. Th us, the states-
man Pericles (ca. 495–429 b.c.e.) was known as Perikles Xan-
thippou Cholargeus, “Pericles, son of Xanthippus, of the deme
Cholargos.” Although it was geographic in origin, deme af-
fi liation was inherited and did not change if a citizen moved
from one locality to another. In practice, few did move unless
compelled by circumstance. Th e Greek historian Th ucydides
(d. ca. 401 b.c.e.) speaks of the forced evacuation of the coun-
tryside during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 b.c.e.) as a
time when citizens felt they were leaving their own native cit-
ies to move into Athens.
Th e trittys was by far the least important of the social
units. It does not seem to have had an elected governing body
or offi cials, although trittyes seem to have played some part in
the organization of the navy and perhaps the army. Th e phy-
lae, however, were central to civic life, and most state institu-
tions were organized along tribal lines. Th e Boule, or Council,
was composed of 500 citizens, selected by lot, 50 from each
tribe; the 6,000 jurors for the law courts were selected in a
similar way. Th e tribes became the basis for military orga-
nization, and the strategoi (generals) who led the army and
became the de facto leaders of the city, were elected annually,
one from each tribe. Civic competitions (in athletics, danc-
ing, or singing) were contested according to tribal divisions;
even the great tragic festivals chose their judges with equal
representation from each tribe.STATUS AND IDEOLOGY
Th ere existed throughout the democratic era in Athens a
strong ideology of equality, which emphasized that all citi-
zens had an equal share in the government, enjoyed equal
protection of its laws, and possessed an equal right to speak
freely. Th e typical Athenian citizen believed himself to be
metrios, “in the middle,” neither extremely rich and power-
ful nor extremely poor or cut off from the governance of the
city. Th e word does not exactly describe an economic middle
class. Even well-off Athenians could be metrioi if they lived
without extravagance or obvious arrogance. Rather, the term
suggests a habit of equality and civic competence. Th e vast
majority of Athenians were deemed capable of running the
state (and, in fact, did so in turns, thanks to the large num-
bers of offi ces that were fi lled by lot). Th e free and equal status
of the citizen was taken very seriously indeed. Hubris was the
term used for the deliberate and gratuitous personal insult to
a citizen’s dignity, and such an insult was punishable by law.
Th ose who committed certain crimes could be punished with
atimia (loss of citizen rights), while those who were found
guilty of making a false claim of citizen status could be taken
and sold into slavery.
Offi cially, wealth brought obligation (higher taxes,
usually in the form of expensive public services known as
liturgies) rather than privilege; offi cially, noble birth like-wise counted for little. Nevertheless, the rich and well-con-
nected were, even in Athens, overrepresented in public life
and enjoyed more comfortable lives. It is an open question
as to what extent the rich were really in control of the state;
certainly the ideology of equality guaranteed high status
for middling Athenians, and most scholars believe that the
common people really did have a large share in the running
of the polis.
Th e ideology of equality among citizens was found in
most other cities as well, though its practice varied greatly
from one location to the next. In particular, cities with oli-
garchic constitutions (government in which a small number
of people were in control) might restrict full citizenship to
those who met certain property qualifi cations (oft en tied
to their ability to undertake and pay for their own military
service); in other instances, descent from some particular
ancestral group was a requirement. In Sparta there was a
radical social and economic equality among citizens, who
were known as homoioi (equals). Together they owned the
best land in Sparta, which could not be transferred to outsid-
ers and which was worked by a subservient group known as
helots (“the captured ones”). Spartan men devoted their lives
to military training and service. Aft er a rigorous and austere
upbringing, they became members of syssitia (eating groups),
to which each contributed produce from his ancestral land.
Power was by no means equally shared. Two hereditary king-
ships, a body of elders, and a small group of annually elected
offi cials essentially ruled the city, with the Assembly of Citi-
zens having little more than veto power. Nevertheless, the
Spartans viewed themselves as having an equal share in the
state and remained a relatively harmonious political unit for
several hundred years.
Sparta shows with particular clarity the ways in which
citizenship and social status were defi ned in opposition to
those on the outside. For Sparta to have its military society, a
nonfree class of helots was necessary; in addition, there was
a group called perioikoi (“surrounding inhabitants”), who,
while free, lacked a voice in the governance of the polis. In-
deed, every Greek city had in its midst a large number of non-
citizens—slaves, women, local but disenfranchised freemen,
and Greek and non-Greek foreigners. In the modern world,
citizenship is a matter of birth or naturalization, and virtu-
ally every inhabitant of the planet is a citizen of one country
or another (and sometimes more than one). For the Greeks,
to be a citizen was a special and privileged status, one that
entitled its possessor to a share in his government (a frequent
turn of phrase in the ancient texts) and that guaranteed four
basic abilities: to vote, to hold offi ce, to fi ght for the polis, and
to own land.
Greek cities marked out resident noncitizens in a variety
of ways, oft en using the term metic (Greek metoikos, “dweller
among”); the status of metics varied from place to place, and,
as usual, Athens provides the best evidence. Any foreign res-
idents in Athens who stayed longer than a month were re-
quired to register as metics—as such they had to pay a special1034 social organization: Greece0895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i1034 1034 10/10/07 2:30:50 PM