Cynthia Patterson

The family in Greek history

The 19th-century paradigm of Greek family history the family in Homer and Hesiod early Greek law and the family marriage and adultery in democratic Athens adultery onstage and in court public and private in early Hellenistic Athens.

Athenian Citizenship Law

From Aristotles perspective in the late fourth century, the question “who is a citizen ( politēs )?” is one of the first questions that arise when thinking about the nature of the state. “The state,” he says at the opening of Book 3 of the Politics , is composite, like any other whole made up of many parts - these are the citizens, who compose it. It is evident, therefore, that we must begin by asking, who is the citizen [ politēs ], and what is the meaning of the term? (1274b40-42) After considering and then rejecting various options, such as those who “live in a certain place” or those who have the “legal right to sue or be sued,” as too broad, Aristotle arrives at the conclusion: “he who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizen of that state” (1275b19-21). He then dismisses the “practical” definition that a citizen is the child of citizen parents as not in fact much of a definition - e.g., what about the founder of a new state - is he not a citizen (1275b23-33)?

Other Sorts: Slaves, Foreigners, and Women in Periclean Athens

When Pericles son of Xanthippos rose to speak in honor of the Athenian dead from the first year of the Peloponnesian War, coming “forward from the tomb and standing on a high platform, so that he might be heard by as many people as possible in the crowd” (Thucydides 2.34), he stood as a privileged and powerful representative of the strong side of three social polarities in ancient Athens: he was free not slave, citizen not foreign, and male not female. These “either/or” contrasts were part of the basic Athenian - and indeed Greek - political and social vocabulary, but they did not create a simple bipolar society of one united “us” versus one excluded “other.” Rather, the three sets of polarities combined to create a complex set of identities and a community in which male and female members of citizen households lived side by side with free and enslaved foreigners, male and female. Representatives of this complex community stood together in the Kerameikos to hear the words of Pericles on that day in 431 - just as they stood (willingly or unwillingly) behind the energetic and creative achievements of the Periclean era.

Book Review: Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens

Cheryl Cox’sHousehold Interests presents an exhaustive survey of relations among and within families of Ancient Athens in primarily the fourth century B.C. With the exception of chapter 2 (“Town and Country, Marriage and Death”), which considers the evidence of inscrip tions and grave markers, the discussion is almost exclusively based on the classical fourthcentury Athenian orations. After a brief introduction, Cox provides four chapters of detailed examination of marriage strategies and household relationships. Then in chapter 5 (“What Was an Oikos”), she steps back to consider more general questions such as the composition of the oikosand the importance of guardianship and adoption. Chapter 6 (“The Nonkinsman, the Oikos, and the Household”) is the last substantive chapter, followed by “Conclusions” and an appendix on the marriages of “political families.” Throughout the book, the method followed is the careful culling of data from the same primary group of sources, and the result has more the character of sociological survey than historical analysis. Like Virginia Hunter’s Policing Athens and David Cohen’s Law, Sexuality and Society andLaw, Violence and Community , recent books that also take their primary evidence primarily from the orations, Cox’s project is synchronic in scope (see, e.g., p. 78); both Hunter and Cohen, however, are more analytical in their approach to the study of Athenian society than is Cox. The main thrust of Household Interests i to “describe the instability of the basic domestic unit in ancient Athens, the oikos” as well as to “examine the difference between law and practice” (p. xiii). Cox presents a convincing picture of the fluidity of oikos, or household composition among the families of the orations—exile, travel, and warfare added to the disruptive effects of the deaths of spouse or parent (chapter 5)—and her sure-handed reading of the marital relationships of the Athenian families in both the rhetorical and the inscriptional sources reveals a complexity of motivation and behavior that, despite her own best efforts, cannot be reduced to simple patterns or rules such as the self-conscious “balancing” of kinship endogamy and exogamy (p. 10). When only some 19 percent of known marriages are endogamous, and of these thirty-seven marriages ten are through the mother’s line and twenty-seven though the father’s, the positing of such a pattern as well as a strong preference for marriage through the patriline seems unjustified (pp. 32-37). Cox considers her portrait of the complexity and fluidity of oikos as challenging of or con trasting with both ancient Athenian rules of inheritance and the modern conception of the oikos as a nuclear family. On both counts, however, she seems to have created something of a “straw oikos.” First, from start to finish, Cox insists on the essential “agnatic” character of Athenian fam ily structure and inheritance law, that is, “descent through males from a male ancestor” (p. 3). The laws “decreed,” she asserts in her conclusion, “that an individual should define himself through male lines” (p. 209). This seems at best an oversimplification of the nature of Athenian civic and family identity, which was rooted in both bilateral, nonagnatic inheritance and patrilin eal political enrollment. Although the system of a bilateral kindred focused on each male Athe nian (in which a sister and her children inherit an estate after a brother and his children but before more distant male kin) is now commonly recognized as distinctively Athenian, Cox insists that what she terms the “agnatic bias” justifies the conclusion quoted above. The term “agnatic” is taken from Roman law and describes the strict Roman family structure, a structure also revealed in the Roman naming system in which all daughters and sons took the family name of their father. Greek (and Athenian) naming practice, however, was more flexible and frequently fea -

A Response to Adele Scafuro

I begin where Professor Scafuro ended--with the claim that “the staging of the scene calls attention to more than itself; it reaches beyond the theater world to the world of the city--its relations with foreigners, to its own assemblies and lawcourts, and to its own cultural heritage where theater would be, but of course cannot be, contained.” When I reached that concluding sentence one question came immediately to mind: “which city?” What might be the “real” correlative of Plautus’ theatrical world? It seems to me that the interest of this paper for our conference goes beyond the specific legal issues and also the specific scripts that Professor Scafuro identifies so convincingly in the Persa. The paper speaks directly both to the issue of “performable meaning” with which Niall Slater opened the conference yesterday and to the notation of “translation for performance” with which Jeffrey Henderson ends it today. I note especially Professor Scafuro’s suggestion that “metatheatricality” applies not only to the way in which the play self-consciously ‘talks about itself as a play, but also to the play’s calling upon the theatrical elements in the larger world of the community. [“The point that I should like to make about these stagings, about these ‘plays within plays’, about their ‘metatheatricality’ is that their objective correlative … is not only the stage, but the court system as well.”]