Classical Athenian citizenship - an Antisthenic analysis

Abstract

While the laws of Solon and Pericles codified stricter legal requirements for citizenship in the Classical period, earlier periods in Athens saw a much more open attitude towards "outsiders" - refugees, such as the Gephyraioi fleeing Boeotia were granted limited Athenian citizenship, non-Athenians who could provide economically or militarily for the polis, and marriages to foreign women were not uncommon. This paper performed an analysis of Classical Athenian citizenship through an Antisthenic lens, comparing ideas and laws surrounding citizenship to Antisthenes' viewpoint on what a citizen should be. While none of his own works survive, his philosophy and ideals survive in quotations, anecdotes, and stories in works such as Xenophon's Symposium and those of Diogenes Laertius.

Using these resources, as well as similar arguments made by Lysias in the same period, it argues that Antisthenes would have classified many in Athens as citizens who would not, traditionally, be considered or eligible as such - anyone who worked hard, educated themselves, and applied the concepts of justice, virtue, and goodness to their everyday lives; in essence, a much more performance-based form of citizenship. Thus, the typical citizens of Athens, who were granted their citizenship merely by birth rather than their work for and participation in the polis, would have found much less favor in his definition of citizenship than metics, since metics lived and worked harder than many citizens, and even fought and died for a polis they had limited status in.