1In a recent issue of the Annales, Julien Zurbach published a stimulating study on the evolution of land tenure systems in Archaic Greece, relating it to the general historiography on the formation of Greek cities. [1] In particular, he outlined how twentieth-century French historiography progressively shifted from a juridical and institutionalist approach to the Greek city—rooted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century German public law (Staatsrecht)—to an approach focused on sharing, participation, and civic identity, which emerged from the late 1970s on. More specifically, Zurbach carefully traced the epistemological changes that took place within the concept of status, which gradually moved from a legal to a psychological register, from a bundle of rights and duties to a fluid, unstable position based on public esteem and individual prestige. Criticizing this shift and the “debatable interpretations” deriving from it, Zurbach advocates in favor of a legal reappropriation of the concept of status. His critical position focuses on the idea that “new statuses are constantly constructed and contested,” which implies that “those enjoying a strictly equivalent symbolic capital, granted by the same group of individuals or based on identical practices, were rare.” [2] In contrast, Zurbach argues that the notion of “status groups” should be established on a legal basis, members of this kind of group being “characterized by a similar bundle of rights and duties,” guaranteed by a collective decision made by the city. In this article, I will focus closely on some of the different groups that made up the Archaic city, and remind the reader that it is possible to approach the formation of Greek cities and the definition of Archaic citizenship from a perspective that has nothing to do with any legal conception of statuses.

2First, however, we need to agree on the concept of citizenship. [3] In 1970, Émile Benveniste drew historians’ attention to the two linguistic models of the ancient city. In Latin, civitas is derived from civis, but in Greek the opposite is true: politēs is a derivative of polis. In other words, in the structure of the Greek language (as, incidentally, in both French and English) the citizen cannot be conceived without a city. [4] This linguistic relationship tends to support a historical vision in which the city represents a theoretical, rational entity—Oswyn Murray’s “cities of reason,” for instance. [5] The foundation or reorganization of this entity, attributed to a founding father or archēgetēs (such as Theseus in the case of Athens) or a legislator (Draco, Solon, Cleisthenes), supposedly offers a political, legal, social, institutional, economic, cultural, and artistic framework to its members, within which they can be considered as citizens. In this sense, citizens only exist when they belong to a city with clearly defined structures.

3The Greek city has generated infinite historiographical debates, most recently synthesized by Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard. [6] Though I do not wish to enter into these debates here, I should briefly clarify my position on the nature and the origin of this entity. As a historian and an archaeologist, I have always found it difficult to imagine the Greek city as a creation emanating from “reason” and to envision it, as Aristotle and Plato did, as a theoretical model of the relationships between the state and the individual that gradually took shape over the course of the Archaic period. Far from considering that the Greek city is based on a kind of “social contract” negotiated within elites to reinforce their domination over the masses, I believe that it is the result of a long, empirical process aimed at defining the contours of a social community that gradually came to consider its members as citizens. In this sense, I follow the program that François de Polignac set out in the mid-1990s when he proposed to “rethink the city,” or, more precisely, to “forget the city in order to think about society,” discarding the concept of polis as “more misleading label than heuristic concept.” [7] Emerging from the ruins of the Mycenaean palatial system (with which it nevertheless showed obvious signs of continuity, notably religious), the Greek world of the early Iron Age was driven by a dynamic of rebuilding and restructuring social communities where the political—in short, the “common”—was placed at the center of collective concerns. This formative stage of the Greek city began well before the so-called “eighth-century renaissance.” It was mainly the result of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, for conformity with the model that gradually came to be valued by the group was essential in order to be accepted and acknowledged by its members. [8] To understand the construction of Greek cities, it is thus crucial to grasp the creation of citizen communities—that is, of groups of citizens—and to determine the modalities of this process. This is why I insist on resituating individual action at the heart of the formation of Greek cities in a particularly dynamic way, and on reinstating its role in the shaping of communities and the identities connected to them.

4For Benveniste, the structure of the language was not necessarily a direct reflection of reality: “each time it is only part of the language and part of society that are being compared in this way.” The linguistic derivation between polis and politēs evokes only “the possibility (which is all that one can say a priori) of a parallel situation in the realm of social realities.” [9] Benveniste never claimed to work on anything other than a world of representations. Linguistic derivation should not, then, be confused with the historical process of the formation of the city and the definition of the citizen. The link between the city and the citizen cannot be conceived as the simple relationship between an abstract entity and its members. As Josine Blok has shown, the term politēs was never used in its singular form before the last quarter of the fifth century BCE. [10] During the Archaic period, it only occurs in the plural form, politai, whose collective dimension is, by definition, essential. Before it was a status granted by the polis, the Archaic politēs was above all a “fellow citizen,” who existed only in relation to his peers and not in relation to an abstract statal entity.

5This is, however, how the relationship between city and citizens has usually been conceived, as the simple “membership” of an individual in a political entity. In his research on the origins of citizenship in Athens, for instance, Philip Manville invoked the formation of the city: “the quest for the origin of the community will necessarily provide clues about membership in it.” [11] Mogens Hansen, for whom a strict parallel exists between the Greek notion of polis and the modern concept of the state as it has been defined since the eighteenth century, likewise claims that “in the ancient Greek city-state culture ‘citizenship’ was what it has become again in the modern world: a person’s juridically defined, inherited, membership in a state, in virtue of which that citizen enjoys a number of political, social and economic privileges in that state which a non-citizen living in the state is deprived of or can enjoy only to a limited extent.” [12] Accordingly, some historians go so far as to conclude that, during the Archaic period, cities could exist without true citizens. As Benedetto Bravo put it (in his critique of the idea), “one could say that in the Archaic period the polis already existed, but not the politai.” [13] Henri Van Effenterre and Françoise Ruzé talk of “pre-politeia,” defined not as “a precise status that preceded Classical citizenship,” but as “the convergence of disparate efforts, enabling the fundamental relationship between individuals and their cities to gradually be defined.” [14] However, this kind of ideal and conceptual Archaic city is not the polis that I have found myself confronted with in the sources, whether literary or archaeological. “Andres gar polis,” wrote Thucydides, following Alcaeus: “Men make the city.” [15] And these “men” must be our focus, in a perspective that leads from individuals to institutions, and not from institutions to individuals.

6Instead of describing the relationship between citizens and their city as “membership,” which implies a top-down vision, I prefer to see Archaic citizenship as a form of “participation.” This is the true meaning of the definition proposed by Aristotle when he spoke of the “right to participate in judicial functions and in office” (his famous metechein kriseōs kai archēs), [16] provided that participation is not restricted to political and judicial institutions, but also includes cults and rituals, war and funerals, the economy and political rivalries, as well as the multiple domains that in reality were related to the practice of citizenship. [17] The result is an active conception of Archaic citizenship that makes it possible to consider the role played by individuals in the construction of communities (the contours of which they helped to define), but also to stress the importance of the social practices that brought these communities to life.

7Among the many elements that may have played a part in the definition of citizenship in Archaic Greece, economic factors were essential—if only because land ownership was one of the main privileges of citizens. Unlike Moses Finley, who linked individuals’ economic activity to their legal status and considered that land ownership hindered the development of the ancient economy, [18] historians today tend to see economic activity as independent from the legal distinctions established by the Classical city and to highlight the involvement of citizens in activities that were long considered unbefitting of their status. [19] In Archaic Greece, economic capacity, regardless of where it came from, was undoubtedly an essential element in the definition of a citizen and his or her acceptance by the community. [20]

8From this point of view, Solonian Athens provides an indispensable case study. Over the course of this article, I will focus my attention on the so-called property classes attributed to Solon, the standard interpretation of which [21] (incidentally implying the existence of a Solonian constitution) relies more on a certain conception of Archaic history essentially inherited from Classical Athens than on a specifically Archaic approach to Greek societies and their functioning.

Solonian Property Classes

9Sources relating to Solonian Athens are rare. Apart from a few fragments of Solon that have unfortunately been decontextualized (or rather recontextualized by later authors), they essentially consist of the first chapters of the Athenian Constitution and Plutarch’s Life of Solon, the latter being largely inspired by the former. These texts credit Solon with an extensive reform of the citizen body, including its division into four property classes (telē) based on disposable income (timēma). According to the author of the Athenian Constitution:

10

[H]e arranged the constitution in the following way: he divided the people by assessment into four classes, as they had been divided before, pentakosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai and thetes, and he distributed the other offices to be held from among the pentakosiomedimnoi, hippeis and zeugitai—the Nine Archons, the Treasurers, the Vendors of Contracts, the Eleven and the Paymasters, assigning each office to the several classes in proportion to the amount of their assessment; while those who were rated in the thetic class he admitted to the membership of the Assembly and law-courts alone. Any man had to be rated as a pentakosiomedimnos the produce from whose estate was five hundred dry and liquid measures jointly, and in the hippic class those who made three hundred—or as some say, those who were able to keep a horse, and they adduce as a proof the name of the rating as being derived from the fact, and also the votive offerings of the ancients; for there stands dedicated in the Acropolis a statue of Diphilus on which are inscribed these lines: “Anthemion Diphilus’s son dedicated this statue to the gods having exchanged the thetic for the hippic class” and a horse stands beside him, in evidence that ‘hippic’ meant the class able to keep a horse. Nevertheless it is more probable that the hippeis were distinguished by their amounts of produce as the pentakosiomedimnoi were. And men had to be rated in the class of zeugitai who made two hundred measures, wet and dry together; while the rest were rated in the thetic class, being admitted to no office: hence even now when the presiding official asks a man who is about to draw lots for some office what rate he pays, no one whatever would say that he was rated in the thetic class. [22]

11Apart from the order in which the first three classes are listed, we find the same information in a short passage from Aristotle’s Politics:

12

He appointed all the offices from the notable and the wealthy, the pentakosiomedimnoi and the zeugitai and a third property class called hippic; while the fourth class, the thetes, were admitted to no office. [23]

13Plutarch’s description was also identical:

14

In the second place, wishing to leave all the magistracies in the hands of the well-to-do, as they were, but to give the common people a share in the rest of the government, of which they had hitherto been deprived, Solon made an appraisement of the property of the citizens. Those who enjoyed a yearly increase of five hundred measures (wet and dry), he placed in the first class, and called them pentakosiomedimnoi; the second class was composed of those who were able to keep a horse, or had a yearly increase of three hundred measures, and they were called Hippada Telountes, since they paid a Knight’s tax; the members of the third class, whose yearly increase amounted to two hundred measures (wet and dry together), were called zeugitai. All the rest were called thetes, they were not allowed to hold any office, but took part in the administration only as members of the assembly and as jurors. [24]

15The bibliography on the Solonian property classes is extremely rich, and they have been interpreted in numerous different ways. Set between Cylon’s failed coup and Pisistratus’s seizure of power, and associated with the series of constitutional reforms undertaken during Solon’s archonship in 594/593, modern historians generally consider the Solonian system of property classes to be a pivotal point in the history of Archaic Athens. For many, this reform marked a major step forward for democracy: it deprived the Athenian nobility of their political exclusivity, opening up full citizenship to commoners solely on the basis of their wealth, even if this was still assessed through land ownership. [25] In Athens, the establishment of Solon’s property classes is thus supposed to have introduced a social hierarchy and a right to take part in political life based on the sole criterion of means. In the words of Victor Hanson, with this reform “wealth must replace birth as a prerequisite for polis participation.” [26] According to this interpretation, a class of wealthy people gradually supplanted the old hereditary nobility, the political exclusivity of Theseus’s eupatridai in particular fading into memory. No longer restricted to the nobility, this new, wealth-based institutional elite supposedly had a broader base than the one it replaced and thus, it was argued, paved the way for democracy. This interpretation seemed all the more satisfying in that the transition from nobility to wealth-based elite corresponded to the Aristotelian principle of aristocracies’ degeneration into oligarchies.

16This vulgate, however, does not fit with what we now know about the Greek aristocracy. In Le prestige des élites, I showed that this hereditary nobility—supposedly formed at the same time as the city and thought to have dominated society throughout the entire Archaic period—is actually a chimera devised by fourth-century-BCE thinkers and developed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians. Archaic Greece in fact had multiple elites whose status depended on their social investment in time- and energy-consuming strategies for achieving social recognition, such as genealogies, weddings, funerals, offerings, banquets, wars, and so on. Even the eupatridai of Athens, supposedly one of the three groups issued from Theseus’s division of the population (along with the geomoroi and the demiourgoi), [27] were probably nothing more than a political group of opponents to tyranny formed toward the end of the sixth century—it was only subsequently that their name assumed a new meaning independent of any political and historical context. [28]

17Within a social framework like the one established by recent historiography, the Solonian reform cannot represent the transition from a gentilician order to a more open organization of the Athenian city. At the very most, its division of the citizen body into four property classes might be seen as an initial attempt to fix the economic norms of citizen status—unless it was driven by a desire to concretely define a particularly rich and exclusive citizen community via the criterion of land ownership. This attempt would correspond to a kind of “top-down” organization of the citizen body and the elites through the medium of law, modulating access to specific institutions (especially public offices) according to groups defined by property ownership. Finley insisted that the result of such a division of the Athenian citizen body should be understood not as “classes” (which are self-forming), but as “orders” in the Weberian sense (which rely on strong legal and institutional foundations). [29] Be they “classes” or “orders,” however, the definition of these property-based groups—referred to as telē by the author of the Athenian Constitution [30]—is supposed to have marked a major step in the political organization of the Athenian state, intended to put its citizen body in order and to clarify each individual’s rights and duties. This interpretation is far from unequivocal, however, and the institutionalist approach is not necessarily a given for the Archaic period. Indeed it is possible to interpret the “Solonian property classes” in an entirely different way if we reopen the debate on the nature of our sources and how they should be handled.

A Historiographical and Critical Approach

18Solon is one of the best-known figures of the Archaic period. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of questions have been raised about the nature and value of the ancient testimonia and about the authenticity of the surviving fragments of his work. Heated debates continue between specialists, who cannot agree on several crucial points. This is clear in a recent volume on Solon, where the editors Josine Blok and André Lardinois do not even attempt to reconcile differences or offer a consensual view but, on the contrary, seek to emphasize the points of controversy. [31] It is interesting to note that there are now more philologists than historians among the skeptics and the (hyper)critics; conversely (and almost paradoxically), historians tend to value even the indirect Solonian testimonia and to accept as fact what specialists in the literary tradition themselves cast doubt on. Strangely enough, however, the historiographical approach—which attempts to explain the genesis of the Solonian tradition and would probably enable both perspectives to be reconciled—is no longer really popular.

19This approach was explored by Claude Mossé in an article published in the Annales and somewhat forgotten today, especially outside the French-language historiography. [32] Mossé was interested in the way that societies of the past constructed and transmitted particular images of their history, and in this article she focused on how the image of Solon as a founding father of the Athenian democracy was created from the end of the fifth century BCE on. Recalling the traumatic impact that the two oligarchic revolutions of the end of the fifth century had on the development of the fourth-century Athenian democracy, Mossé stressed the extent to which the restored democracy was deliberately associated with the tradition of Solon’s reforms. From this perspective, she raised several questions about the content and the Solonian origin of the laws that were reworked by a committee of nomothetai in the late fifth and early fourth centuries. Given the extent of these revisions and Solon’s important place in the democratic imagination of fourth-century Athens, Mossé adopted a skeptical position: “If … there is no doubt that Athenian society underwent profound changes in the course of the sixth century and if moreover it is possible to connect certain of these changes with Solon’s work in the social sphere, in contrast it seems more difficult to fit them into a consistent system developed by the legislator.” She continues: “This evaluation of income in measures of grain or liquids lends Aristotle’s information an archaizing tone which can only authenticate its source. Nevertheless, … the names borne by the four classes raise many problems.” Hippeis and zeugitai apparently refer to “military categories,” even though the Solonian division of the citizen body did not imply any military obligations and was simply intended to define conditions of access to public offices. In addition, “accepting for the archaic period that a drachma is equivalent to a medimnos, might it not be supposed that the term pentakosiomedimnoi designated at first, not those who had five hundred measures of produce, but those who, at a given time, had been liable to a contribution of five hundred measures?” (Mossé here thinks particularly of the “tithe established by Pisistratus.”) In this regard, “one may wonder whether the heterogeneous nature of the names applied to these four classes, far from relating to a systematic redistribution brought about by Solon, did not in fact transmit a reality which was quite different: superimposing, in the course of the sixth century, on [de facto] distinctions linked to military roles a new redistribution based on wealth, and leading to setting apart amongst the ‘cavalry’ those who were liable to the tithe of five hundred measures.” As for the systematic coding of the division, Mossé was tempted to attribute it to Cleisthenes, suggesting that the authorship and the nature of such a system of property classes may have been reinterpreted and modified in the historical discourse of fourth-century Athens, the image of a moderate legislator being preferable to that of a revolutionary reformer. In other words, by placing this system at the core of the ancestral constitution (patrios politeia)—which corresponded to the moderate democracy that various fourth-century philosophers and historians were calling for—the historical vulgate relayed by the author of the Athenian Constitution simply confirmed the image of Solon as the “founding father of Athenian democracy,” a “wise and moderate democracy in which the power of the demos was tempered by the recruitment of magistrates on a basis of assessment of wealth.” [33]

20As Louis Gernet once observed about a similar matter, “a text is always a testimony: if this one does not concern sixth-century constitutional history, it may concern the history of ideas in the fifth century.” [34] Mossé’s study did not simply aim to demonstrate the inner workings of a historiographical construction such as the “invention” (in the sense of Nicole Loraux’s Invention of Athens) of Solon’s character in the fourth century. Her goal was also to investigate Archaic realia by removing all the elements associated with reinterpretations introduced during the Classical period. This implies questioning the information provided in the Athenian Constitution, and not necessarily accepting it all as fact. I do not necessarily follow Mossé on all accounts: equating the five hundred medimnoi to a tithe (and not to total production), for example, would imply huge properties of approximately three hundred hectares. [35] However, her article continues to open up avenues of research on Archaic Athens that are particularly stimulating. More recently, Kurt Raaflaub has also adopted a critical position in regard to the Solonian tradition, drawing attention to the numerous inconsistencies in the ancient sources and the complicated issues raised by readings that take them at face value. Like Mossé (whom he does not cite), Raaflaub observes that “for the time of Solon … all four census categories pose difficulties.” He therefore suggests attributing the authorship of the four “Solonian” classes—and in particular the definition of the property qualification and the political rights associated with each class—to Ephialtes or Pericles, in other words, to the political reforms of the mid-fifth century. “Before 462 or 450,” he concludes, “pentakosiomedimnoi did not exist, while zeugitai and hippeis were informal categories, based on military capacity and the concomitant social status and prestige, and on self-declaration.” [36] Everything else was the addition of later historiographical constructions.

21Few historians have accepted Mossé’s approach, which is considered “postmodern” or “pessimistic,” [37] and in general this kind of method is stigmatized as a form of “hypercritical rejection of textual sources.” [38] However, it does not imply an admission of failure before an Archaic society that is difficult to understand, nor a retreat into the hypothetical adopted because of the lateness of the sources (more than 250 years passed between the so-called Solonian reforms and the writing of the Athenian Constitution). In fact, it responds to the need for rigorous analysis when faced with a complex historical tradition that has been constantly reinvented by both ancient and modern historiography. These are the very principles of German Quellenkritik or source criticism, at the core of my training and my practice as a historian. Such principles sometimes force us to question facts that we thought were well established. To put it another way, during the first stage of the investigation, there is no historical approach other than a critical one.

The Nature of the Solonian Property Classification

22To understand the nature of the “Solonian system,” it must first be stressed that Solon probably did not create these social groups. The author of the Athenian Constitution is clear about this: he states that Solon divided the citizen body into four classes “as it was previously divided,” and also mentions the existence of pentakosiomedimnoi, hippeis and zeugitai (as well as fines associated with these groups) in his description of Draco’s constitution. [39] If the existence of the latter is hypothetical, [40] there is no doubt that the author of the Athenian Constitution did not consider Solon to be the originator of these groups. Although the legislator is credited with establishing a new definition of property classes, then, it does not necessarily follow that he radically changed the structure of Athenian society by forming new groups. Most historians agree that the pentakosiomedimnoi, whose name itself appears to be associated with a reform of property classes, could not have existed before Solon. Despite the text of the Athenian Constitution, and without necessarily trying to contradict it, Peter Rhodes considers that “the nomenclature suggests that the πεντακοσιομέδιμνοι [pentakosiomedimnoi] are a later addition to a structure in which ἱππεῖς, ζευγῖται and θῆτες [hippeis, zeugetai, and thetes] already existed … probably what Solon did was to distinguish the very richest citizens from the other ἱππεῖς [hippeis], and for the first time give the classes a precise definition and a political function.” [41] If the situation of the pentakosiomedimnoi remains ambiguous, it is nevertheless likely that the hippeis, zeugitai, and thetes already existed in one form or another in pre-Solonian Athenian society. The lack of consistency in the names chosen for the four Solonian categories also makes it difficult to grasp, from a purely terminological perspective, the intellectual logic of the whole nomenclature. What was the true nature of the Solonian classification? Was it based on an evaluation of wealth, thus founding a timocracy, as explained by the author of the Athenian Constitution? Or was it based on a military organization reflecting the fact that every citizen was also a warrior, as many modern historians think?

23Despite the apparent archaism of evaluating property classes according to agricultural produce, a number of historians have explained this as a later rationalization that extended the principle behind the naming of the pentakosiomedimnoi to the other three classes. [42] More radically, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix considered that the whole system, from the sixth to the fourth century, never involved any kind of quantitative assessment of property. [43] It should also be emphasized, following Ismard, that “the Solonian public organization is only imperfectly based on the assessment of property: the lack of a division based on property qualification in the courts, at the ecclēsia, or at the boulē explicitly defined a citizen identity that excluded any type of division based on property qualification.” [44] The Solonian property classification thus only had any real effect on the attribution of public offices, from which the thetes were permanently excluded.

24Beyond political distinctions based on property qualification, for many historians the Solonian categories corresponded above all to a military organization of society. [45] This explanation is especially valid for the hippeis and the zeugitai, whose names seem to refer to the two main army corps of Archaic Greek cities: horsemen and hoplites. The links between land ownership and the organization of the army can be observed in many ancient sources—Aristotle notably remarked that “it often happens for the same men to be both soldiers and farmers [46]—and they lie at the core of any historical analysis of the Greek city. Although the author of the Athenian Constitution privileges a quantitative definition of hippeis, linked to the evaluation of their agricultural capacity at three hundred medimnoi, he also records another explanation, according to which their name and identity were based on their ability to raise a horse (τοὺς ἱπποτροφεῖν δυναμένους). Indeed, according to Aristotle, “the earliest form of constitution among the Greeks after the kingships consisted of those who were actually soldiers, the original form consisting of the cavalry.” [47] If the author of the Athenian Constitution does not provide any explanation for the name of the zeugitai, scholars since the late nineteenth century have equated them with hoplites. Relying on a metaphor as old as the Iliad that emphasized the cohesion of a pair or a line of warriors, [48] they argue that the zeugos (or yoke) that gave this Solonian property class its name referred to the link that united the warriors within the hoplitic phalanx. The Solonian property classification would therefore overlap with the military organization of the Archaic city.

25Accepted for a long time as fact, the military dimension of the zeugitai has recently been questioned in several studies, paving the way for a third interpretation of the Solonian categories. Without casting doubt on the existence of a coherent system, Hans van Wees has argued against the military dimension of the property classes. [49] For him, their names reflect first and foremost an agricultural hierarchy. If hippeis were seen as horse-owners in the ancient tradition cited but rejected by the author of the Athenian Constitution, van Wees concedes that “zeugitai may have been farmers prosperous enough to cultivate their land with a yoke of plough-oxen or mules.” [50] This would result in a clear hierarchy, based on agricultural labor and land ownership, between the Solonian classes: those who had enough land to produce five hundred medimnoi per year, then those who were able to raise a horse, those who could keep a pair of oxen, and finally the thetes, who did not own enough land to be autonomous (or even any land at all), and were therefore compelled to place their labor at the service of the richer categories. Instead of likening the zeugitai, as earlier scholars did, to a hoplite “middle class,” van Wees ranks them among the Athenian elite: “Those who owned a pair of oxen—and probably no more than a single pair—formed a first narrow stratum of leisured landowners, followed by those who also owned horses and presumably more than one span of oxen, and those who owned so much land that it could only be expressed in measures of produce.” He concludes that “Solon’s property-class system did not enfranchise a middle class of independent owner-cultivators and hoplites, but confined certain rights and obligations to a small, strictly defined elite.” [51] In sum, he considers that the enrollment of hoplites in the Athenian army was not associated with Solon’s reform, but simply depended on the financial capacity of each individual to afford the necessary equipment, valued at at least thirty drachmas toward the end of the sixth century. [52]

26Van Wees makes a convincing argument, yet the systemic nature of a reform concerning the whole Athenian citizen body nevertheless raises some difficulties. Was it, strictly speaking, a partitioning of the citizen body, as explained by the author of the Athenian Constitution? Did Solon implement a “reorganization” of the citizen body (διέταξε τὴν πολιτείαν) through a “division” (διεῖλεν) into four classes? The words clearly recall the political thought of the Classical period, but is such a global organization not foreign in spirit to the Archaic period? Whether based on property qualification or on military or agricultural criteria, these interpretations of the Solonian property classes imply the existence of a clearly defined citizen body, within which a political division based on land revenues, military involvement, or agricultural capacity could be used to define four clearly distinguished subgroups with precise political and legal attributions. In my opinion, such a Solonian constitution—held up as an ideal by a juridical and institutional approach to the Greek city—does not correspond to the customs of Archaic Greece in either its fundamental nature or its principles. In the first place, the French anthropological approach has shown that Archaic Greece, unlike Classical Athens, did not restrict the political sphere to its institutions, but rather extended it to multiple social activities. [53] Second, although much credit has been given to legislators such as Zaleucos, Solon, Charondas, Draco, and Lycurgus, (echoing the emphasis placed on them in ancient sources), a renewed juridical approach has shown that, aside from a few late seventh-century Cretan texts, “the age of the lawmakers” did not correspond with the period for which most legal inscriptions are documented, i.e., the late sixth and early fifth centuries (around 500 BCE). As Van Effenterre and Ruzé have pointed out, even this later period does not correspond with “the methodical creation of new structures, like the progressive organization of a status for the city.” [54] In the same way, according to Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, one should not expect an Archaic law code to represent a global organization of society, but on the contrary see it as a series of disjointed elements that do not necessarily form a system, responding first and foremost to isolated and concrete individual preoccupations. [55]

27In this respect, I remain convinced, along with Mossé and Raaflaub, that the organization of these categories with different names and attributes—some of which may have existed before Solon—is the result of a rationalization that took place later, perhaps at the same time as the generalization of a quantitative evaluation of these social groups. The lack of conclusive evidence means that it is pointless to argue about the exact moment when a “Solonian property-class system,” reflecting both a specific political vision of the city and a historical reinterpretation of its evolution, was invented. Only the reference to both the zeugitai and the thetes in the foundation decree of the Athenian apoikia at Brea ca. 445 (or 426/5) shows—in all likelihood—the existence of a system dividing the Athenian citizen body, providing a terminus ante quem for its creation. [56] However, reflection on the so-called “Solonian property classes” must not stop with the difficult questions of when, how, and why such a system was established. For such a system also reflects the emergence, within the Athenian political debate, of a property-based and fiscal approach to citizenship and the responsibilities associated with it. The overarching structure reported by the author of the Athenian Constitution and, after him, Plutarch in the Life of Solon, is probably nothing other than the projection of a political perspective typical of the fifth and fourth centuries onto the Archaic period, reasoning in terms of successive constitutions and regulating all aspects of citizen life. In early sixth-century Athens, it was no doubt more pressing to define the actual contours of citizenship—in other words, to determine the various methods or strategies for participating in the citizen community.

28In his major study on Athenian associations, Ismard recently provided an insight into the diversity of the communities gathered together within a civic entity whose contours were still loosely defined at the beginning of the sixth century. [57] Indeed, it was through a series of associations (in the broadest sense of the term) that an initial and specifically Archaic form of Athenian citizenship and its related rights appeared: “infra-polis communities were often the mediators that ensured such rights could be exercised.” [58] Acting as vectors of integration into the city, these communities were not, however, formal subdivisions of a preexisting city or of a citizen body that was otherwise being defined. Based on parallels with late Archaic Crete, Ismard observes that “the structure of integration into the citizen body is clear: in each case, it is via the intermediary of a given community within the city that an individual is enfranchised.” [59] Among these “infra-polis communities” which could play a part in the definition or the activation of Archaic citizenship, Ismard cites the groups mentioned in a law on associations attributed to Solon—demes, phratries, participants in sacred orgia, sailors, participants in dining or burial groups (homotaphoi), members of a thiasos, or “persons who go away for plunder or trade”— but he also admits that these represented “only a part of the communities existing in the Archaic period” [60] and stresses the “variety of names characterizing the communities of the sixth century.” [61] In addition, Ismard points to the existence of an Archaic law on citizenship attributed by Plutarch to Solon, which “defines groups based on their practices,” as with those migrants “who … moved to Athens with their entire families to ply a trade.” [62] Ismard’s interpretation is very stimulating, for he shows how all participation in the citizen community of Archaic Athens passed through its multiple associations, thus defining a loose and unstable form of citizenship whose variability and instability only subsided with the Clisthenian reforms. In other words, far from reinforcing a unitary conception of citizenship, individuals’ participation in the Archaic city actually implied multiple forms of social groups. This conclusion is both deeply original and essentially important for our understanding of the Archaic city.

29Nevertheless, adopting a rather conventional approach to the Solonian property classes, Ismard refuses to include the Solonian categories (telē) in his reflection on “infra-polis communities”: “it would obviously be absurd … to deny the structuring role of the Solonian property classes in sixth-century Athens, even though many aspects related to their genesis remain very obscure.” [63] Apart from an overly reverential approach to the Athenian Constitution in our understanding of the Archaic city, I cannot see any reason why the groups of hippeis, zeugitai, or even pentakosiomedimnoi and thetes, would not have claimed their place (for most of them as landowners) in the city of Athens by promoting intrinsic features of their identity through their lifestyles. As Ismard himself has shown, a whole series of “infra-polis communities” played a part in defining Archaic Athenian citizenship and in constructing the citizen body.

Occupational Groups

30Even though she chose to understand the “Solonian property classes” in military terms, Mossé referred to them as “de facto distinctions.” [64] According to Raaflaub, hippeis and zeugitai were “informal categories,” while for Rhodes the word thetes was an “undoubtedly economic and occupational” name. [65] Similarly, for de Ste. Croix, “hippeis and zeugitai (and therefore thetes) corresponded with military and social groups that already existed in Solon’s day,” while according to Vincent Rosivach the thetes represented a “socioeconomic group” without any particular military character. [66] In sum, the idea of defining these groups in terms of their lifestyles is not foreign to historical analysis, but compared with a well-ordered, conceptually fine-tuned institutional machinery it no doubt seemed too elementary to lead to a true historical interpretation of the Solonian telē. However, together with kinship groups, long recognized as an essential factor in the shaping of the Greek city, [67] occupational groups—organized on the basis of religion, war, institutions, banquets, and, more globally, lifestyles—in fact played a primary role in structuring the Greek city. [68] The Solonian logic shows all signs of being a rationalization dating from the Classical period, and was probably reworked several times before assuming its definitive form. If we set it aside in favor of a behavioral or even functionalist approach to these social categories, we can begin to ask questions about the meaning and purpose of the groups that bore these names within Archaic Athenian society, both before and after Solon.