Classics Colloquium with Ifigenia Giannadaki

Modern scholarly consensus has it that metics were ‘isolated’ figures in litigation in democratic Athens, a view argued by Patterson (2000), while other scholars consider metics as closer to slaves than to citizens in the Athenian legal system (e.g. Kennedy 2025). More specifically, Patterson’s study expresses serious doubts about metics’ ability to exercise their legal rights in action in Athens. This lecture—stemming out of my current major project on metics in Athens at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard), focuses on key forensic orations which involve both metic males and females in court, and argues that metics were not ‘isolated’ figures in the Athenian justice system. As the evidence shows, they were entitled to certain ‘political’ rights in democratic procedures, rights which citizens themselves held. Yet, this is not to suggest that metics’ legal rights in the private and public spheres brought them closer to the citizen group in legal terms. Athenian law safeguarded the status boundaries between citizens and non-citizens, but the evidence reveals complex social networks which metics living in Athens were part of. Those diverse networks offered support to metics in litigation in the private and public spheres, unlike what has become the modern ‘orthodoxy’ in the study of metic legal rights in 4th c. Athens.