Vlassopoulos, K. 2007. “Free Spaces: Identity, Experience and Democracy in Classical Athens.” Classical Quarterly 57: 33 -52.
I’m continuing my trend of using my post as a way to pull out the important ideas and examples from articles. Today is on another article by Vlassopoulos.
Vlassopoulos wants to change how historians think about the political process at Athens and who gets counted as participating in that political process. Specifically, he wants to de-emphasize the actual political institutions of Athens, that is the boule, the ekklesia and other governmental bodies and to elevate in political importance spaces such as the agora, cemeteries, ships and workshops. Here Vlassopoulos’ evidence is quite persuasive: he points to examples from Demosthenes and other Athenian orators of how politicians would talk people in these areas in order to build support for laws or actions that they would then later get passed by the Athenian assembly. Similarly Vlassopoulos provides good evidence that women, metics (foreigners with permanent residence in Athens) and slaves both accessed and participated in discussions in these spaces. Where Vlassopoulos’ position gets weaker is trying to leverage these examples in order to suggest that the access and participation of these people usually understood to be completely excluded from politics translates into political influence. To give credit to Vlassopoulos, he doesn’t really stress this angle in his essay.
Vlassopoulos also provides a number of intriguing examples of how the Athenians struggled with how in these free spaces citizens, metics and slaves all had the same appearance. These struggles usually take the form of complaints, most famously being the complaints of an anonymous pamphleteer called the Old Oligarch.
Now among the slaves and metics at Athens there is the greatest uncontrolled wantonness; you can't hit them there, and a slave will not stand aside for you. I shall point out why this is their native practice: if it were customary for a slave (or metic or freedman) to be struck by one who is free, you would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome. (Old Oligarch 10 trans. Marchant)
For the Old Oligarch, there is an incredible friction between the lack of aesthetic distinction between citizens and slaves and the actual difference of their two statuses. Note that in this example the Old Oligarch refuses to consider the reasonable stance that it is best to treat all people one does not recognize as potential equals: it is clear that the Old Oligarch is instead upset that he has to deduce an interlocutor’s (legal and social) status through conversation rather than simply by sight.
Examples of the importance of the public recognition of one’s status are numerous. Politicians such as Demosthenes, private figures such as the woman Neaera all faced scrutiny over their claims of either citizenship or proper status as metics. Indeed, Demosthenes and other orators had to defend their deceased parents of charges of being slaves, pointing to how the mere rumor of the wrong type of lineage could ruin a career.
An aspect of Athenian life that I wish that Vlassopoulos had covered was how the confusion over identifying slaves in everyday life contrasts with the artistic representations of slaves. Vases from Classical Athens were quite content to depict slaves as deformed and smaller than their masters. It is possible that Vlassopoulos would point to the how vase painters were imitating and interacting with styles of representation that either developed outside of Athens or were manipulating a tradition that had begun prior to the democratic revolutions inside Attica.
I’m continuing my trend of using my post as a way to pull out the important ideas and examples from articles. Today is on another article by Vlassopoulos.
Vlassopoulos wants to change how historians think about the political process at Athens and who gets counted as participating in that political process. Specifically, he wants to de-emphasize the actual political institutions of Athens, that is the boule, the ekklesia and other governmental bodies and to elevate in political importance spaces such as the agora, cemeteries, ships and workshops. Here Vlassopoulos’ evidence is quite persuasive: he points to examples from Demosthenes and other Athenian orators of how politicians would talk people in these areas in order to build support for laws or actions that they would then later get passed by the Athenian assembly. Similarly Vlassopoulos provides good evidence that women, metics (foreigners with permanent residence in Athens) and slaves both accessed and participated in discussions in these spaces. Where Vlassopoulos’ position gets weaker is trying to leverage these examples in order to suggest that the access and participation of these people usually understood to be completely excluded from politics translates into political influence. To give credit to Vlassopoulos, he doesn’t really stress this angle in his essay.
Vlassopoulos also provides a number of intriguing examples of how the Athenians struggled with how in these free spaces citizens, metics and slaves all had the same appearance. These struggles usually take the form of complaints, most famously being the complaints of an anonymous pamphleteer called the Old Oligarch.
Now among the slaves and metics at Athens there is the greatest uncontrolled wantonness; you can't hit them there, and a slave will not stand aside for you. I shall point out why this is their native practice: if it were customary for a slave (or metic or freedman) to be struck by one who is free, you would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome. (Old Oligarch 10 trans. Marchant)
For the Old Oligarch, there is an incredible friction between the lack of aesthetic distinction between citizens and slaves and the actual difference of their two statuses. Note that in this example the Old Oligarch refuses to consider the reasonable stance that it is best to treat all people one does not recognize as potential equals: it is clear that the Old Oligarch is instead upset that he has to deduce an interlocutor’s (legal and social) status through conversation rather than simply by sight.
Examples of the importance of the public recognition of one’s status are numerous. Politicians such as Demosthenes, private figures such as the woman Neaera all faced scrutiny over their claims of either citizenship or proper status as metics. Indeed, Demosthenes and other orators had to defend their deceased parents of charges of being slaves, pointing to how the mere rumor of the wrong type of lineage could ruin a career.
An aspect of Athenian life that I wish that Vlassopoulos had covered was how the confusion over identifying slaves in everyday life contrasts with the artistic representations of slaves. Vases from Classical Athens were quite content to depict slaves as deformed and smaller than their masters. It is possible that Vlassopoulos would point to the how vase painters were imitating and interacting with styles of representation that either developed outside of Athens or were manipulating a tradition that had begun prior to the democratic revolutions inside Attica.