Citizens, metics and slaves in ancient Athens

Imagine walking through the market of Athens in the 5th century BC. Everyone looks much the same: simple clothes, sandals, busy hands. But the people around you belong to three very different groups.

The citizens, the πολῖται, were the members of the city. Only adult male citizens could vote in the assembly, sit on a jury or hold an office. Citizens could also own land and houses.

The metics, the μέτοικοι, were free foreigners who had come to live in Athens for good. They worked as traders, potters, builders or bankers. They were free, but they could not vote and they paid a yearly tax.

The slaves, the δοῦλοι, were not free at all. They belonged to an owner, like a piece of property, and could be bought and sold. They cooked, cleaned, farmed, made things in workshops and dug in the silver mines.

Citizenship in Athens came from birth, not from where you lived. After a law proposed by Pericles in 451/0 BC, a child was a citizen only if both parents were Athenian (Constitution of the Athenians 26.3). A man born in Athens to a foreign father stayed a foreigner all his life.

At eighteen, a young man was registered in his δῆμος, his village or district. The members of the deme voted on oath: was he old enough, and was he free and of legitimate birth? If they rejected him, he could appeal to a court, but if he lost, he was sold as a slave (Constitution of the Athenians 42.1). Being a citizen was a privilege that the city guarded closely.

Athenian women were citizens too, and only a citizen mother could give birth to a citizen. But women had no political rights: they could not vote, speak in the assembly or hold office. So the people who actually governed Athens were a minority of its inhabitants: the adult men of citizen families.

A metic, according to the Byzantine dictionary called the Suda, was someone who had moved from one city to live permanently in another, not a visitor passing through. Many came from other Greek cities, others from Thrace, Phoenicia or Asia Minor, drawn by the trade of Athens and its port, the Piraeus.

Metics had duties without the vote. Each year a man paid the μετοίκιον, a tax of twelve drachmas, and an independent woman six; a metic who did not pay could be sold (Suda, quoting the orator Isaeus). A metic also needed a citizen sponsor, a προστάτης. Metics could not own land or a house unless the city gave them that right as an honour. They served in war: Thucydides (2.31) counts at least 3,000 metic hoplites in the invasion of Megara in 431 BC.

Some metics grew rich. Cephalus came from Syracuse at Pericles’ invitation, and his family ran a shield workshop in the Piraeus. His son, the speechwriter Lysias, later told how the Thirty Tyrants seized 700 shields and 120 slaves from them in 404 BC (Lysias 12.4, 12.19).

Slavery was normal in every Greek city, and Athens was no exception. Most slaves were foreigners, captured in war or bought from traders. They worked in homes, on farms, in workshops and, in the worst conditions, in the silver mines of Laurion. Xenophon (Ways and Means 4.14) says the general Nicias once owned a thousand men in the mines and hired them out for one obol a day each.

How many slaves were there? Nobody knows for sure. Athenaeus (6.272c) reports a count under Demetrius of Phalerum in the late 4th century BC: 21,000 Athenians, 10,000 metics and 400,000 slaves. Historians argue about what these categories meant, and many find the slave figure implausibly high. Thucydides (7.27) gives a smaller, firmer clue: after 413 BC more than 20,000 slaves ran away to the Spartans.

Some slaves were freed. A freed slave, an ἀπελεύθερος, did not become a citizen but joined the metics and paid the metic tax. A hostile writer known as the Old Oligarch even complained that in Athens you could not tell slaves, metics and citizens apart by their clothes (Constitution of the Athenians 1.10).