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Rethinking Athenian Citizenship
‘What I have to say about myself is, I think, the simplest and most
just: that because I am born from astos parents on both sides and
have received my kleros of the property and of the family, I am a
citizen (polites).’1
Euxitheos, in Against Euboulides, Dem. 57.46
In Athenian law, a citizen was someone born from citizen parents. Until
the mid-fifth century, one parent of citizen birth, usually the father, suf-
ficed for citizen status, but since Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451/0 only
those born from two citizen parents could participate (metechein) in the
Athenian polis.2 What did this metechein entail? Going through the rich
documentation on classical Athens, we find many areas of public and
private life where Athenians were active as citizens, usually organised
according to gender and age. All the citizens, male and female, partici-
pated in religion in a wide variety of ways. For male citizens over eighteen,
furthermore, participation in political office and its concomitant finan-
cial administration was an important domain of citizen activities, beside
military duties. In sum, we find that descent is the fundamental qualifica-
tion for citizenship in Athenian law, and that participation in religion and
other fields are the typical ways of acting as a citizen.
1
Dem. 57.46: λοιπὸν δέ μοι περὶ ἐμαυτοῦ πρὸς ὑμᾶς εἰπεῖν, τὸ μὲν ἁπλούστατον οἶμαι καὶ
δικαιότατον, ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων ἀστῶν ὄντα με, κεκληρονομηκότα καὶ τῆς οὐσίας καὶ τοῦ γένους,
εἶναι πολίτην. This speech is dated shortly after 346/5. All dates are BCE, unless otherwise indicated.
2
Ath.Pol. 26.3: καὶ τρίτῳ μετ᾿ αὐτὸν ἐπὶ Ἀντιδότου διὰ τὸ πλῆθος τῶν πολιτῶν Περικλέους
εἰπόντος ἔγνωσαν, μὴ μετέχειν τῆς πόλεως ὃς ἂν μὴ ἐξ ἀμφοῖν ἀστοῖν ᾖ γεγονώς. ‘And in
the third year after this, when Antidotos was archon, they decided owing to the large number of
citizens on the proposal of Pericles that no one who was not born from both astos parents would
participate (metechein) in the polis.’ Cf. Ael. VH. 13.24, Plut. Per. 37.3. For metechein in citizenship
law, cf. Schol. Aeschin. 1.39. Coşkun’s arguments (2014) for a date close to 445/4, when a scrutiny of
the citizen body took place in connection to a gift of grain by Psammetichos of Egypt (Philochoros,
FGrH 328 F 119; Plut. Per. 37.3) and for the law being retroactive, do not answer the many questions
they raise, so I retain here the date, the text and the contents of Pericles’ Citizenship Law proposed
in Blok (2009b).
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2 Rethinking Athenian Citizenship
When ancient historians discuss Athenian citizenship, however, strange
things happen. Let me give one example, an article by John Davies enti-
tled ‘Athenian citizenship: the descent group and the alternatives’ (1977).3
It is not very recent, but it is concerned precisely with the qualification
of descent and it offers a lucid analysis of crucial moments when the
Athenians debated how it should be used as a criterion for citizenship.
Used and quoted extensively since its publication, the article expresses
what is in many respects the prevailing view. Its first lines are as follows:
Classical Athens defined membership of its citizen body, and thereby its
civic space, rigorously in terms of descent. Citizens were those who were
male; were sons of a citizen father; were born from a woman who was the
daughter of a citizen father; were born from a woman who was ‘pledged’
(ἐγγυητή); and had been accepted as members of their father’s (phratry
and) deme.4
The statement in the first sentence is clearly founded in Athenian law. But
why, having first correctly identified Athenian insistence only on descent,
does he proceed with the non sequitur that ‘citizens were those who were
male’? To understand this, we have to bring in a further text, Aristotle’s
Politics, book III, the most extensive ancient theory of citizenship. Here,
Aristotle states:
Who [or what], therefore, is a citizen (polites) is clear from these considera-
tions: we can now say that he who is in a position to share in political or
[and] judicial office, is a citizen of that polis, and a polis is a group of such
people large enough in number to maintain a self-sufficient life, speaking
generally.5
Aristotle does not claim that his argument in the Politics applies to
Athens, nor to any other specific polis, although he observes that his
definition of a citizen works best in a democracy.6 Nonetheless, many
historians have used Aristotle’s Politics and in particular his definition of
a citizen as a guideline in their analysis of real Greek poleis, notably of
3
Davies (1977).
4
Davies (1977) 105. On 106, Davies states that the rules on descent as laid down in Pericles’ law
themselves are clear, but his handling of them shows that statement to be too optimistic.
5
Arist. Pol. 1275b17–22: τίς μὲν οὖν ἐστιν ὁ πολίτης, ἐκ τούτων φανερόν· ᾧ γὰρ ἐξουσία κοινωνεῖν
ἀρχῆς βουλευτικῆς ἢ (OCT: καὶ) κριτικῆς, πολίτην ἤδη λέγομεν εἶναι ταύτης τής πόλεως, πόλιν
δὲ τὸ τῶν τοιούτων πλῆθος ἱκανὸν πρὸς αὐτάρκειαν ζωῆς, ὡς ἁπλῶς εἰπεῖν. For ἐξουσία
as ‘to be in a position’, Ostwald (1996) 55. ‘βουλευτικῆς’ means ‘deliberative’ rather than ‘legisla-
tive’, although presumably the former is seen as a component of the latter. In Aristotle’s definitions
ἁπλῶς usually means ‘without further qualifications’ (see e.g. 1275a19 below), but here ὡς ἁπλῶς
εἰπεῖν is not a part of the formal definition.
6
Arist. Pol. 1275a33–1275b17.
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Rethinking Athenian Citizenship 3
Athens. This also applies to Davies’s argument. The reason for his at first
sight illogical phrase ‘citizens were those who were male’ becomes clear
when he characterises citizenship as holding elected or allotted polit-
ical office and the concomitant right to own property.7 Descent now
turns out to be no more than the condition for and therefore the means
of access to political office; the emphasis is entirely on the latter, and
women, who do not share these functions of citizenship, are not even
considered members of the descent group ‘citizens’ in their own right
anymore, but are only ‘daughters of citizen fathers’. This conception of
citizenship is fundamentally at odds with the Athenian citizenship laws,
which do not limit participating in the polis to political office and refer
explicitly to both men and women as citizens by legitimate birth (astos,
aste, with contrastive counterparts nothos, nothe), making legitimacy
emphatically dependent on birth from a citizen woman.8 In fact, the
Athenian laws approach the issue from the other side: male and female
are both citizens when legitimately descended from Athenian parents,
and this status is conditional for participation in the polis for both.
Political office is not mentioned, let alone used as a means to conceptu-
alise the rules of descent. Looking for the reason why Davies makes this
fundamental turn away from the very laws the use of which he sets out
to clarify, we find that he derives his conception of a citizen not from
these laws, but from Aristotle.9
More examples of this use of the Politics in some of the best historical
work on Athens will appear later in this chapter. It is remarkable that in
all of them, as in Davies’s article, the choice of Aristotle’s definition as the
leading concept by which to interpret the evidence is not really explained.
One among several reasons might be that the passage from the Politics is
virtually unique in the ancient Greek record in that it offers criteria on
which citizenship is defined in general terms, abstracted from specific polis
7
Davies (1977) 105. He gives no references for this conception, but I assume that ‘were sons of a
citizen father; were born from a woman who was the daughter of a citizen father; and had been
accepted as members of their father’s (phratry and) deme’ combines Ath.Pol. 42.1: ‘Those who are
born from astos parents on both sides share in the politeia, and they are enrolled in the demes when
they are eighteen years of age’, with Ath.Pol. 55.3, a part of the questions to the candidates for the
archonship: ‘Who is your father and to what deme does he belong, and who is your father’s father,
and who your mother, and who her father and what his deme?’; the phrase ‘born from a woman
who was “pledged” (ἐγγυητή)’ is derived from citizenship law, Is. 6.47; law ap. Dem. 43.51.
8
Is. 6.47; law ap. Dem. 43.51; Ath. 13.577b; Schol. Aeschin. 1.39. For the full texts and discussion, see
Chapters 2.1; 3.1; 6.1.
9
Davies (1977) 114: the difference between the inhabitants of the area or community and those ‘who
are citizens of that community in Aristotle’s sense of sharing the holding of office and the adminis-
tration of justice’. Also Whitehead (1991) 137–8.
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4 Rethinking Athenian Citizenship
laws.10 Such a use of general characteristics is what we expect a definition
to be like. For some historians, furthermore, the relevance of Aristotle’s
Politics to Athens seems to be grounded not so much on the Politics itself,
but rather on the Athenaion Politeia (henceforth Ath.Pol.). Written by an
unknown author belonging to Aristotle’s circle in the 330s and revised in
the 320s as a part of the project of the Politics, the text contains both a
historical and a systematic account of the politeia (societal and political
organisation or ‘constitution’) of Athens. Here we need to ask if Ath.Pol.’s
testimony on historical Athens was collected independently of the Politics
or rather drafted with the conception of citizenship proposed in the philo-
sophical work in mind.
Whatever the reason of their choice, Aristotle’s focus on political office
has led historians to take only, or primarily, this element into account when
studying citizenship at Athens. No one will contest the importance of poli-
tics to the self-conception of the polis as a citizen community, but we may
ask if other aspects were not equally important, if not more so. Surveying
the evidence, one other essential aspect is the role of the divine world in the
Athenian conception of the polis and of religion broadly conceived as cen-
tral domain of the actions typical of citizens. Current scholarship, as I will
discuss in more detail below, is investigating the polis as the platform of
religion, but tends to underestimate religion as a crucial element of citizen-
ship. Concomitantly, many activities of women taking place in the domain
of religion have not been sufficiently understood as acts of citizenship, nor,
on the other hand, have religious actions been sufficiently understood as
integral to men’s civic roles. Only when these elements are given their full
due can we attain a more comprehensive understanding of what politics, in
the sense of running the polis, really meant at Athens.
What means do we have to attempt a different approach to citizenship
in classical Athens? Among the numerous texts documenting ideas about
citizenship and the ways it was practised, some stand out for their length
and wealth of details. One of them is a speech written by Demosthenes
in or shortly after 346/5 (Dem. 57) for the defence of a certain Euxitheos,
a man from the deme Halimous on the western coast of Attica who had
been deleted from the list of citizens in his deme, because allegedly he
was not of citizen descent on both sides. The speech is not a theoretical or
10
τίς in the first line can be translated either as ‘what?’ or as ‘who?’, in the first case leading to a
description of what a citizen typically does or is, and in the second case asking who fulfil this role.
Both readings are possible: H. Rackham (Loeb ed.) ‘What constitutes a citizen is therefore clear’;
T.A. Sinclair and T.J. Saunders (Penguin Classics): ‘From these considerations it has become clear
who a citizen is.’
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Euxitheos’ Appeal 5
historical account of Athenian citizenship, but it shows what Athenians
expected a citizen to be and to do.
We begin our enquiry into Athenian citizenship by examining in
greater depth the three contemporary ancient accounts introduced
above – Demosthenes 57, Aristotle’s Politics and the Ath.Pol. – to see what
each of them tells us about what it meant to be a citizen and what the
relationship between their conceptions of citizenship might be. To that
end we need to break down the complex concept of citizenship into its
major components by asking some fundamental questions. What was a
citizen in the view of the author, that is to say, which activities or atti-
tudes did the author identify as typical of a citizen? Who were the citizens,
that is to say, what were the qualifications or criteria according to which
one was a citizen? Some of the answers are stated explicitly in these texts,
others are merely implied. This vocabulary will here serve only to chart
the writer’s perceptions of citizenship, but we need to look into the precise
meaning of these words at a later stage. We begin with Demosthenes 57,
Euxitheos’ defence speech before the Athenian court.
1.1 Euxitheos’ Appeal
In 346/5, the Athenian polis decided to hold a scrutiny (diapsephismos) of
all its citizens. Details on the motives for this decision are lacking, but
the pressure of the military conflicts with Philip of Macedon played an
important role as in Athens itself tensions ran high, even if the peace of
Philocrates in 346 gave a temporary relief. The diapsephismos created an
ideal opportunity to settle old scores. The speech written by Demosthenes
for Euxitheos is our main source for the procedure. In every deme a meet-
ing was held of the demesmen – that is of those who had previously been
recognised at age eighteen as having two citizen parents – and each indi-
vidual demesman was re-examined to consider again whether both his
parents did have good claims to citizen status.11 Euxitheos was one among
many who were ejected from the list of citizens in the course of this scru-
tiny.12 He appealed to the people’s court to revise the deme’s decision.
11
For the regular procedure of dokimasia (assessment) of a young adult male on entering the deme,
Ath.Pol. 42.1.
12
Cf. Is. 12 (Euphiletos) of 344/3; Is. 3.37 (Pyrrhos), the date of which is unknown, but the occasion referred
to may well have been the same diapsephismos of 346/5; references in the speech to Diophantos of
Sphettos (LGPN no. 54) and Dorotheos of Eleusis (LGPN no. 52) suggest a date in the 340s. Euxitheos
himself refers to ‘many who with justice have been expelled from all the demes’ (Dem. 57.2), of course
in contrast to himself, ‘a victim of political rivalry’; note also his claim that many members of his own
deme have been cast out unjustly (57.58), whereas several xenoi have bought their way in (57.59).
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6 Rethinking Athenian Citizenship
Much was at stake: if Euxitheos failed to convince the dikastai, he could
be sold into slavery. His speech had to be cast in terms in which the
dikastai would recognise their own conceptions and expectations. Only in
this way could he win their understanding and sympathy.13
Demosthenes deploys several lines of argument to persuade the jury.
First, he shows how the speaker himself and his witnesses acted in accord-
ance with, and his opponents contrary to, the laws which the collective of
citizens had to uphold and were read out aloud during the trial. Moreover,
he appeals to the expectations among his audience as to what in all prob-
ability the conduct of plaintiff and defendant would be in situations with
which the jury were familiar. Demosthenes encapsulates these arguments
in compelling character sketches of plaintiff and defendant, a textbook
example of Athenian forensic method.14 In this speech, Euxitheos is por-
trayed as the victim of a certain Euboulides, a man keen to harm his fel-
low citizens, who out of malice had manipulated his fellow demesmen
to vote against Euxitheos, who presents himself as a man devoted to the
common good. In sum, Demosthenes needed to convince the court that
Euxitheos was indeed legally qualified to be a citizen, in terms of who he
was and what he was and did. To do so he both brought arguments that
directly bore on the legal criteria for citizenship (two citizen parents) and
arguments that depended on matching Euxitheos’ past behaviour to what
the court would have expected of a citizen, and only of a citizen. Let us
first look at the contents of Euxitheos’ argument.
The accusations that Euboulides had put forward were false, and now
it was up to him, Euxitheos, to tell what was true and just (dikaios) and
to show that he was truly a citizen (1). Since the dikastai feel passionately
about just claims to citizenship (1–3) and about the necessity to observe the
nomoi (laws) and dike (justice; 4–6), they need to know that Euboulides’
actions were motivated by malice, arising from Euxitheos’ support of a
woman previously prosecuted by Euboulides for impiety. (We may note
here that Euboulides will have been fined 1,000 drachmae for this failed
prosecution in what is bound to have been a high-profile case; the loss of
face incurred in losing a trial like this was severe.) Now, Euboulides had
used the polis’s scrutiny of its citizens – a legitimate exercise for the public
good – as an opportunity to take his private revenge (8–16). No doubt had
13
On social knowledge involved in legal procedures Humphreys (1983a); Humphreys (1985);
Humphreys (2007 (orig. 1985)).
14
References to the laws and witnesses are ‘external’ persuasive arguments, according to Arist. Rhet.
1375a21–1377b11, whereas the drawing of character is an ‘internal’ argument.
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Euxitheos’ Appeal 7
ever been raised about whether any of his relatives had been true Athenians.
Owing to his eugeneia (good birth) on his father’s side, i.e. membership of
a genos (23–8), he was elected by his fellow demesmen to be a candidate
for allotment for the deme’s priesthood of Heracles.15 Had he been selected
by the lot, it would have been his duty to sacrifice on behalf of the very
men who now tried to prevent him even from sharing sacrifice with them
(46–7; 62). The schemes of his fellow demesmen and their unjust decision
(59–66) were caused by his time of office as demarch, when he had pressed
them to pay their overdue debts to the treasuries of the deme and of the
sanctuaries (63). Finally, he performed a new scrutiny of himself, testified
to his citizen status and ended with a passionate plea to be allowed to bury
his mother in the ancestral tomb, and not to be cut off from the polis and
his relatives, but to be buried in his fatherland (67–70).
After disqualifying the actions of the deme against him, Euxitheos
devotes the largest part of his speech to persuading the dikastai of his citi-
zen status. He does so with two strands of evidence. One aims at dem-
onstrating the citizen status of his father and of his mother, and similarly
of his grandparents. Euxitheos claims that although his father was born
before the re-enactment of the law on citizen status and therefore only
needed one parent of citizen birth to be a citizen himself (29–30), none-
theless his father was in fact an Athenian of citizen descent on both sides
(23). The same holds true for his mother. Witnesses are produced to testify
to all family relations on both sides (17–54). The other strand of evidence
consists of showing that he himself, his parents and other relatives all par-
ticipated in the group activities typical of Athenian citizens, namely the
cults and religious rituals marking Athenian kinship. The two strands are
tightly woven together, because participation in such rituals was a sign of
being a born Athenian, i.e. citizen status. By going through all of these
group activities, so familiar to his audience, the impression is reinforced
that because Euxitheos’ parents and he himself had always participated
without anyone protesting, every one of them and he, Euxitheos, too,
must have been truly qualified to do so. Crucial in demonstrating his
status are the solemn giving-in-marriage of the women according to the
law (54), the sacrifices with the phrateres (polis subgroup supervising legiti-
macy), sacrifice with his kin to Apollo Patroios (protector of patrimony)
and Zeus Herkeios (protector of the oikos fence), and sharing ancestral
tombs (patroia mnemata) with them (54). He had passed the scrutiny of
15
For genos, see Chapter 3.
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8 Rethinking Athenian Citizenship
Athenian birth for offices (46). In other words, there never had been and
could not be any doubt that Euxitheos was born an Athenian citizen.16
We must not only look closely at the arguments but also at the words
and expressions (as crafted by Demosthenes) in which Euxitheos cast his
plea to be acknowledged as a citizen. The first instance of such vocabulary
occurs very early in the speech, where Euxitheos proclaims:
[There were many occurrences of injustice towards citizens who were vic-
timised in this scrutiny and lost their status . . .] I will tell you at once what
I consider to be just (dikaia) in these matters. I hold it to be your duty to
treat harshly those who are proven to be xenoi (strangers), and who, with-
out persuading you or asking for it, have come with stealth and violence to
participate (metechein) in your hiera (things of the gods, cults and rituals)
and koina (common things), but to help and save those who have met with
misfortune and who demonstrate that they are politai.17
Here, a contrast is made between xenoi, who do not share the privilege
of participating in the hiera and koina of the polis, and others who do.
Implied in the latter group are politai who may seem to be xenoi but none-
theless can demonstrate their status. The speaker reminds the dikastai
that the demesmen took their oaths on the hiera (sacrifices (26)) and
recounts how he went to all the hiera (sacred places (54)) where only
born Athenians were expected to be. Throughout the speech, Euxitheos’
account of his sharing in the hiera of his family, of the deme and of the
polis builds on this initial distinction between those who are members of
the polis and those who are not, filling in the picture of himself as someone
who from his youth participated in these hiera without anyone objecting.
The implied conclusion is clear: he was a polites. The concept of ‘sharing’
recurs in the vocabulary used: meteinai tes poleos (to be a member of the
polis) occurs at the beginning (1), the middle (23) and three-quarters of
the way through (55) the speech; and the same idea is present in metechein
tes poleos (to participate in the polis), which occurs in a cluster at 51.6 and
51.10, soon followed by meteinai in 55.
A frequently recurring verb (nineteen times) is proseko, ‘it is befitting,
it belongs to’.18 Demosthenes uses it to indicate that something should be
16
MacDowell (2009) 293: ‘If in truth Euxitheos was not the son of Thoukritos, Demosthenes has
shown great skill in obscuring the fact.’
17
Dem. 57.3: . . . ἃ νομίζω περὶ τούτων αὐτῶν πρῶτον εἶναι δίκαια, ἐρῶ πρὸς ὑμᾶς. ἐγὼ γὰρ
οἴομαι δεῖν ὑμᾶς τοῖς μὲν ἐξελεγχομένοις ξένοις οὖσιν χαλεπαίνειν, εἰ μήτε πείσαντες μήτε
δεηθέντες ὑμῶν λάθρᾳ καὶ βίᾳ τῶν ὑμετέρων ἱερῶν καὶ κοινῶν μετεῖχον, τοῖς δ’ ἠτυχηκόσι καὶ
δεικνύουσι πολίτας ὄντας αὑτοὺς βοηθεῖν καὶ σῴζειν.
18
Dem. 57.1 (2×), 2, 4 (2×), 5 (2×), 6, 24, 25, 30, 32, 34, 36, 44, 46, 56, 69 (2×).
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Euxitheos’ Appeal 9
the case, either because it is typical of a situation or person, or because
something ought to belong to someone. He begins the speech with this
word to make his client’s position clear: the slanders of Euboulides do not
‘befit’ him, Euxitheos (1); instead, he is confident of showing that it befits
him to belong to the polis (2). The dikastai should not take the deme’s vote
as a sign that membership of the polis would not befit him (6). Even if his
father had only one citizen parent, it would still befit him to be a polites,
because he was born before the archonship of Eukleides (30) – an implicit
reference to an apparently well-known law on legitimacy.
In all these passages with proseko claims are made to everything that
belongs to the status of a citizen, by drawing on what people know as
a solid convention or what is to be expected considering what everyone
knows, or on which the polis is entirely agreed and what therefore ought
to be the case, but never to a notion that in modern terms is called a right.
The string of proseko constructions throughout the speech weaves an argu-
ment strongly claiming that citizen status has been part of Euxitheos’ life
just as it has been of all who are like him – Athenian citizens – and that
it ought to belong to him here and now and in the future. After hearing
the witnesses testify to the legitimacy of his descent on both sides and his
participation in the hiera, just over half way through his speech, he sums
up what must be the clearest statement of his citizen status:
What I have to say about myself is, I think, the simplest and most just: that
because I am born from astos parents on both sides and have received
my kleros (allotted part) of the property and of the family, I am a citizen
(polites).19
Note that Euxitheos calls both his parents astos (born citizen) and men-
tions that he has received his kleros (share in the inheritance) of property
and family; receiving this kleros is presented as the ground for being a
citizen (polites) and therefore serves as a sign of being one. Throughout
the speech, ‘citizen’ is designated polites in case of a man and politis of a
woman, or astos of a man and aste of a woman.20 To the exact meaning
of these words we need to return at a later stage, but here we may note
that being a polites means to belong to the polis with all that entails and
astos indicates being born of citizen parents, unlike, for instance, someone
made a citizen by a decree.
19
Dem. 57.46.
20
Dem. 57: πολίτης male citizen, in sing. or plur.: 3, 11, 17, 20, 26, 29, 30, 44, 45, 46, 48, 51, 59, 61;
πολῖτις female citizen, in sing. or plur.: 30, 43; ἀστός male (born) citizen, sing. or plur. 24, 25, 30,
46, 54. ἀστή female (born) citizen, sing. or plur. 35, 36, 40, 43, 45, 46, 54.
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10 Rethinking Athenian Citizenship
Apart from a polites, Euxitheos calls himself an Athenaios (Athenian).
The first time, he does so as a statement:
[What I hold to be just] I am going to demonstrate to you: that I am an
Athenian, both from my father’s and from my mother’s side, and offer wit-
nesses of all this, who you will judge to be truthful.21
This designation of himself and his father as Athenaios, one of eight occa-
sions in the speech where ‘being Athenaios’ expresses their citizen sta-
tus, resonates with the way the members of the court are addressed as
Athenaioi, nineteen times in all.22 The implication, that he is an Athenaios
as much as they are, is made explicit once he has produced all the wit-
nesses and their accounts:
As to me, gentlemen dikastai (and by Zeus I beg you that no one starts
shouting or being angry at what I want to say), I consider myself an
Athenaios on the same grounds as each one of you, because I have from the
beginning regarded her as my mother whom I present as such to you, and
I do not pretend that I am hers while in reality I am not but someone else’s.
And the same holds true, gentlemen Athenaioi, for my father.23
Now that it will come to a decision, Euxitheos makes a distinction (56)
between the dikastai on the one hand, and the deme, the boule and the
assembly on the other: only the decisions of the first are eminently con-
cerned with dike. In this way, he conjures up the image of a group of
Athenaioi consisting of the dikastai and himself, who by virtue of their
commitment to justice distinguish themselves from the rest of the citizens.
Finally, when stating the grounds of his citizen status, Euxitheos uses the
verb kleronomeo, receiving one’s part (kleros) of the inheritance.24 The noun
kleros is the root of the verb kleroo, to allocate or select by lot. Euxitheos
uses kleros words in relation to his birth and inheritance (46.6), and when
he recounts he was elected to stand for selection by lot for the priesthood
of Heracles (46.10). He returns to his qualification for allotment several
times closely following on the same passage (48.3; 48.4; 49.3; 53.3; 62.9).
21
Dem. 57.17: δεῖξαι πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐμαυτὸν Ἀθηναῖον ὄντα καὶ τὰ πρὸς πατρὸς καὶ τὰ πρὸς
μητρός, καὶ μάρτυρας τούτων, οὓς ὑμεῖς ἀληθεῖς φήσετ’ εἶναι.
22
Sing. Ἀθηναῖος: 17, 19, 22, 23, 27, 29, 50, 61; plur. ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι: 6, 7, 8, 22, 30, 32, 35, 37, 43,
44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62; used in other cases: 14, 31.
23
Dem. 57.50: ἐγὼ δ’, ὦ ἄνδρες δικασταί (καί μοι πρὸς Διὸς καὶ θεῶν μηδεὶς θορυβήσῃ, μηδ’ ἐφ’
ᾧ μέλλω λέγειν ἀχθεσθῇ), ἐμαυτὸν Ἀθηναῖον ὑπείληφ’ ὥσπερ ὑμῶν ἕκαστος ἑαυτόν, μητέρ’ ἐξ
ἀρχῆς νομίζων ἥνπερ εἰς ὑμᾶς ἀποφαίνω, καὶ οὐχ ἑτέρας μὲν ὢν ταύτης δὲ προσποιούμενος·
πατέρα πάλιν, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον.
24
He does so twice, once referring to his own inheritance (46), once concerning his mother’s first
husband who received an inheritance through an epikleros he could marry (41).
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