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Immigrant Communities in the Classical Polis : Some Principles for a Synoptic Treatment

52

Citations

0

References

1984

Year

Abstract

The metics of Athens represent by far our best-known example of a community of free immigrants - neither citizens nor slaves - in any classical Greek polis ; however, a thin scatter of data reveals that the existence of groups comparable in name (---oikoi) was widespread. The way to approach these data is not, as in M. Gere's study of 1 898, to assume the universality of the Athenian metic-system in all its details, but to construct a model of logical and chronological choices for any polis thrown up by the evolution of the status-structure of the polis itself.