Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece ed. by Alain Duplouy and Roger Brock (review)

The edited volume under review began as two conferences in 2009 and 2010.¹ The contributors are all respected scholars in the field who represent an array of methodological approaches to citizenship. The uniting factor is the recognition of the archaic period as a valuable era of study in its own right, rather than solely a precursor to the classical age, and an overt rejection of the traditional view of citizenship based on Aristotle's standard of holding office and administering justice.² Looking beyond an institutional definition of citizenship that privileges political office, the volume showcases what it meant for the Greeks of the archaic period to be citizens from the standpoint of descent and participation. An examination of the table of contents reveals the impressive range of contributions. The chapters explore the role of military obligations, commensality, religion, athletics, associations, luxury and other community delimiting activities. The volume serves both as a compilation of the current state of scholarship on archaic Greek citizenship and as a call to action, with some chapters laying the groundwork for future developments in the field. Rather than produce the most cursory summaries of all the chapters within the constraints of this review, I will instead highlight representative chapters, in particular those that gesture towards new directions for the field. Thus, exclusion by no means indicates a lack of quality or appeal.

The book opens with Duplouy's wide-ranging survey that lays out traditional approaches to citizenship and the general response to them of the past couple of decades. Announcing from the outset that his survey will not be comprehensive, he manages to dip into controversies without getting bogged down. Despite his caveat, the chapter is a useful outline of the main currents of scholarship for those wishing to situate the chapters that follow.

In "State Formation in Early Iron Age Greece: The Operative Forces," Davies presents a model of six forces that lead to the development of the polis and so citizenship (namely, the exceptional individual, population, the environment, the supernatural, convertible resources and the combination of memory, imagination and identity). His self-proclaimed experimental approach is intended to lessen the gap between Classics and the social sciences and between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. Davies suggests that his chapter is preparatory to future analysis since the work is incomplete without an account of the interaction of those forces. Blok's following chapter, "Retracing Steps: Finding Ways into Archaic Greek Citizenship," develops what a citizenship that decenters office holding was like in practice. She brings a keen eye to the study of terminology for "citizens" and participation in the polis in order to present a view of citizenship rooted in cult activity that is capacious enough to include women. While less detailed than her monograph, Blok's methodology reveals what careful philology coupled with historical method can accomplish.³

In line with the revisionist stance of the book, in "Citizenship and Civic Subdivisions: The Case of Sparta," Lupi makes the novel argument that obai were not in fact the five villages that predated Laconia's synoikism, but that they were the Spartan-variety of phratry (a subdivision of phylai). The contemporary evidence for archaic Sparta, including an inscription and fragments of Tyrtaeus, makes it a good case study for demonstrating the link between civic subdivisions and archaic citizenship. Whitley's chapter "Citizenship and Commensality in Archaic Crete: Searching for the Andreion" combines literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence, which are at times at odds with each other, to show the role of dining groups in citizenship. He frames the activity in these groups as "diacritical feasting" that delineated citizens from non-citizens in Crete. Whitely does not attempt to answer every question he raises, but encourages greater incorporation of archaeology in historical argument.

Duplouy puts his introductory comments into action...