Migrants and Membership in the Greek City-States

In Euripides’ Electra, the protagonist’s dislocation from and relocation to a home emphasize the ways she is differently displaced from her brother, Orestes, who is also banished from their familial oikos. Where he roams, city-less, she stays in Argos in a forced countryside marriage she likens to death, homelessness, and the condition of an “exile” (phugas).

The interaction of the polis with its foreign residents in the Hellenistic period has generally been discussed through the perspective of public benefaction, where influential and wealthy foreign benefactors are rewarded with public honors and citizenship by the host community for their political, economic, or skilled help during a crisis.

Migration has significantly shaped the social life in the Hellenistic world. While migration has long been a topic of archaeological research, questions about the role of material culture brought by migrants in the new social contexts of host cities have rarely been addressed.

The study of the ancient Greek metic has seen a revival in recent years. The traditional focus on the legal aspects of metoikia (Whitehead 1977; Niku 2007; Kamen 2013) has been augmented by a series of studies that explore the wider social, economic and political contribution of free foreigners (Wijma 2014; Kennedy 2014; Akrigg 2015; Kasimis 2018) greatly expanding our knowledge.