Citizenship in Antiquity brings together scholars working on the multifaceted and changing dimensions of citizenship in the ancient Mediterranean, from the second millennium BCE to the first millennium CE, adopting a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective.
The chapters in this volume cover numerous periods and regions - from the Ancient Near East, through the Greek and Hellenistic worlds and pre-Roman North Africa, to the Roman Empire and its continuations, and with excursuses to modernity. The contributors to this book adopt various contemporary theories, demonstrating the manifold meanings and ways of defining the concept and practices of citizenship and belonging in ancient societies and, in turn, of non-citizenship and non-belonging. Whether citizenship was defined by territorial belonging or blood descent, by privileged or exclusive access to resources or participation in communal decision-making, or by a sense of group belonging, such identifications were also open to discursive redefinitions and manipulation. Citizenship and belonging, as well as non-citizenship and non-belonging, had many shades and degrees; citizenship could be bought or faked, or even removed. By casting light on different areas of the Mediterranean over the course of antiquity, the volume seeks to explore this multi-layered notion of citizenship and contribute to an ongoing and relevant discourse.
Citizenship in Antiquity offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive collection suitable for students and scholars of citizenship, politics, and society in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as those working on citizenship throughout history interested in taking a comparative approach.
Chapters: Chapters 47 and 48 of this book arefreely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Jakub Filonik is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He has published on Athenian oratory, Greek law, political metaphors, and liberty ancient and modern; co-edited special issues on ancient identities (Polis; The European Legacy) and a volume The Making of Identities in Athenian Oratory (Routledge). Jakub translated selected Athenian speeches into Polish (with commentary). He is currently working on monographs focussed around the rhetoric of freedom in classical Athens and Greek political metaphors.
Christine Plastow is a Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University, UK. Her research interests fall into two main areas: practice-as-research work on modern adaptations of Greek tragedy and myth (with By Jove Theatre Company), and the study of the rhetoric, law, and social history of Athenian forensic oratory. Her book Homicide in the Attic Orators was published by Routledge in 2020.
Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz is a retired Professor at the Department of Classics, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research covers slavery and other non-citizen groups in the Greek polis; the shifting lines between the private and public spheres in the Greek polis; Greek historiography; Greek drama; and rhetoric. She is the author of Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (2005), Taxing Freedom in Thessalian Manumission Inscriptions (2013), and articles on these subjects, published in journals and edited collections. She co-edited Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama (2021) and translated Herodotus into Hebrew. Her current research project, funded by the Israel Academy of Sciences, is the verbs of speaking (verba dicendi) used by Greek historians to describe their own and their characters' historiographical activity.
