YES I WANT TO TALK ABOUT CITIZENSHIP AND BLOOD RIGHTS AND WHAT THAT SAYS ABOUT ATTITUDES TOWARDS EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIRS AND BY EXTENSION FEMALE SEXUALITY DO IT DO THE THIIIIING

latining:

OKAY! I do NOT have access to JSTOR or any of my textbooks/notes since I moved, so this is all from memory. Classics side of Tumblr, spank me with sources.

So the thing about citizenship is that it’s important for a whole host of reasons. You need to know who to tax, who to back politically and financially, and whether or not that smashed cart is an international incident. (Well, international as far as city-states go. ANYWAY.) As such, the leaders of city-states had a vested interest in knowing who was a citizen.

The Speech Against Neaira (Wikipedia, Greek text, English text) is a speech from the Athenian courts that claims Neaira was a Corinthian courtesan who married an Athenian and proceeded to pass her children off as full Athenian citizens. Under Athenian law, citizenship only counted if both parents were Athenian citizens. Neaira’s past jeopardises not just herself, but her entire family. Let us also consider The Murder of Eratosthenes (Wikipedia, Greek text, English text), a murder trial which hinges on the Athenian distinction between (and attitudes towards) seduction and rape. To summarise Athenian attitudes, rape is crime of passion against one’s property, whereas seduction is the systemic corruption of the family unit and by extension the city-state itself. Yikes.

Given this context, it is easy to understand the excessive misogynistic suppression of Athenian women. But what about the other city-states?

Thebes, Corinth, and Argos had much more reasonable citizenship requirements, usually requiring one parent to be a citizen. This makes sense, as it was common for men to purchase their favourite courtesan and either marry them or integrate them into their households. For heterosexual unions, it’s natural to want any offspring to have the benefits of citizenship and inheritance, so as long as one parent is a citizen, the child is granted citizenship. (Citizenship laws varied; sometimes marriage conveyed citizenship to the wife (or not), some local cultures required a physical inspection, etc.)

Basically, outside of Athens, infidelity was regarded as a personal affront instead of a political threat. Culturally diverse attitudes to sex work, religion, parenthood, and the gender divide mean that Athenian writing cannot and should not be used to generalise for all of Greece. I don’t have any sources offhand, but lots of Greeks thought it was pretty fucked up the Athenians married twelve year old girls.

Finally, most of what we know of other city-states comes from Athenians writing about those stupid backwoods people with their dumb loose morals and stupid buttfaces. I cannot for the life of me understand why serious academics take it as gospel.