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What do we know of the purposes, the provisions, and the results of the Periclean citizenship law?

In the autumn of 429BC , at the age of around sixty-five, the mastermind of Athenian glory, Pericles Xanthippou Cholargeus, weakened physically by the plague and emotionally by the deaths of his two legitimate sons, died a broken man. This seemingly ignominious end was a far cry from the man who came to dominate Athenian politics with his aristocratic style and superb oratory skills. He had boldly led Athens and her maritime empire in conflict with the Peloponnesian League, fronted by Sparta and her professional hoplite army – a conflict that Thucydides called “the greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes” and one that affected “the whole of mankind” . However, by the time of his death, Pericles had come in for quite a lot of stick from the demos, not just because after two years of the Peloponnesian War, Attica had fallen prey to two Spartan invasions and the city itself was in the grip of a virulent plague (which can hardly be attributed as Pericles’ fault) but because of his public affair with a non-Athenian, Aspasia of Miletus . This relationship shocked public opinion especially because they remained unmarried and Pericles appeared to treat her as an equal, something unthinkable for most Greek men. The ridicule came to a head when, after the couple produced a son, also called Pericles , the father was to ask for an exemption from his own decree of 451/0BC, the Citizenship Law. The purpose of this essay is to try and understand the reasons for the passing of the law and the results it produced.

Before I highlight the aspects of the Citizenship Law of 451/0BC , I will first look at the personage of Pericles himself. As I have said in the first line of this essay, Pericles died around the age of sixty-five, however, this is only an estimate for while we known he died in around 429BC we are not given a definite year for his birth, although it is assumed to be somewhere around 494BC . As he full name shows, Pericles’ father was called Xanthippus , who had been a famous Athenian general, having defeated the Persians at Mycale in 479BC, but he had also borne the brunt of public criticism, which had culminated in his ostracism in 484BC. With such a famous father and with his mother being a certain Agariste , who was a member of the famous Alcmaeonid family and the niece of Cleisthenes, Pericles was born into a socially distinguished and wealthy family. Undoubtedly the teenage Pericles was one of the multitude that evacuated Athens in the path of the second Persian invasion of 480BC but due to the great events of the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Plataea, hardly anything is known of his early life. The first public recognition of Pericles came after he was fortunate enough to be the sponsor of Aeschylus’ play The Persians , which won first prize at the major drama production during the festival of Dionysus in 472BC. Sometime in the 460’sBC, Pericles married but as is a common practice with regards to the treatment of women in ancient society, we do no know her name. Despite his wife’s name not being recorded, the marriage was fruitful for Pericles, as it produced two sons, Xanthippus, named after his grandfather, and Paralos. As I said above, both these legitimate sons perished along with possibly 20,000 other inhabitants of Athens during the first outbreak of the plague in 430BC.

Pericles’ political emergence seems to have been during the so-called ‘Revolution of 462BC’. It is unclear about how involved Pericles was in the actions of Ephialtes and Archestratos in curbing the powers of the old noble council, the Areopagus, but this is the time we start to hear him mentioned more often. After the assassination of Ephialtes in around 461BC, Pericles became more prominent in the ‘democratic’ party. However, he had to tread carefully in the direct aftermath of 462BC as Cimon, the pro-Spartan politician and general, attempted to re-assert himself as leader in Athens , but he underestimated the power of the common demos, which had been given more influence by the reforms of 462BC, and was ostracised himself. This left Pericles in the front ranks of Athenian politics and throughout the 450’sBC he enhanced his popular position by leading several naval expeditions, using his position on the board of generals (strategoi), to which he was constantly re-elected throughout the 440’sBC down to his death in 429BC , to strengthen the Athenian Empire. His lack of public appearances in the Athenian Assembly made Pericles something of an enigma and he became known for his incorruptibility in public office.

It was this demagogue who proposed and passed the Citizenship Law, which stated that to be eligible for Athenian citizenship, both your parents had to be Athenian themselves. We are given no hints from the primary sources about the background of the law and we do not know for certain what Pericles’ motives were, as he himself left no writings. However, there have been several suggestions put forward to fill this void. The most striking and radical of these is the idea that by making Athens a closed society with regards to citizenship, Pericles was trying to breed an Athenian ‘master race’ . I think that this idea is far too extreme and is possibly the product of an unfair comparison between the Athenian statesman and the twentieth century dictator, Adolf Hitler, who has also been described as a demagogue. It is most likely that this comparison emerged during or in the aftermath of the Second World War and therefore scholarship about Hitler would have been extremely unfavourable. In this case, I think some of that spite has been transferred unjustly to Pericles.

Another suggestion is that the Citizenship Law was a reaction to the idea that Athens herself was getting too big and populous to function effectively as a city-state . By eliminating the opportunity for foreigners to marry an Athenian and in one generation be considered an Athenian family, Pericles may have been trying to limit the growth of a city that was already one of the biggest in the Mediterranean. The example of when Attica was evacuated behind the Long Walls in the face of the Spartan invasion and how it helped cause the plague that devastated the Athenian population was possibly something that Pericles hoped to avoid. I find this idea a little difficult to understand as Pericles seems to have been a very proud Athenian and if he realised as early as 451BC that war with Sparta was inevitable he would have been looking for as many soldiers as he could get. I do not think that he would have tried to curb citizenship to restrict population growth as many Athenians took pride from the fact that their city was as big as it was and would not scoff at the chance at making it bigger. If there was a population problem, the Citizenship Law may only have helped the situation in the long term and if the problem was more acute it may have been more effective to get rid of non-citizens than it would to have limited citizenship.

By limiting the numbers of people eligible to become citizens, Pericles may have been trying to make being an Athenian more of a privilege to the population of rural Attica and the urban poor. This idea has two facets to it. One is that while Athenian prestige throughout the Aegean grew, Pericles was trying to make the status of an Athenian citizen something to be valued more if you had it and more coveted if you did not. This may show a want on Pericles’ behalf to have Athenian citizenship as highly prized as Spartan citizenship was. The second facet to this argument may be that Pericles was trying to get the poorer classes more actively involved in the day-to-day running of Athenian democracy. This may be tied in with his introduction of pay for jury duty, making it more appealing to the poorer classes, but why would Pericles have been anxious to get these classes involved in politics? The easiest answer to this question is that as a prostates tou demou, Pericles needed the support of the common people to retain his leadership of the state. The problem with this is that it makes the assumption that Athenian politics was similar to the ‘party’ politics that we know today. In reality, Athenian politics was more factional than simply ‘them against us’. The titles ‘Champion of the People’ and of the ‘Rich’ make it seem like the divide was entirely class based when we know that that is not the case. For instance, we know that for Cimon and Thucydides Melesiou to be ostracised not just the poor but a portion of the rich had to have voted for them. Similarly, we know that Pericles was not just one of the people due to the family ties I mentioned above. As a member of the Alcmaeonid family, he would have been well off financially and of aristocratic stock.

By being seen to be giving the people what they wanted, by stemming the flow of foreigners who might be taking jobs from the poor, Pericles may have been manipulating the people to vote his way and this possibly gives the idea that the Citizenship Law was an attempt to stimulate more support for himself against the threat of Thucydides Melesiou and Cimon. Linked to these threats is the idea that the new terms for being a citizen could be used as a low-level political weapon against Cimon, whose mother was a foreigner. However, due our lack of material on the provisions of the law itself, we do not know if it was retrospective and, therefore, whether or not it was a direct threat to Cimon. It is possible that it could have been used as political leverage and as a basis to attack Cimon as ‘not a proper Athenian’ but this is just conjecture and is probably tainted with our modern perceptions of dirty politics. This idea is one of a few that suggest that the law could have been used to protect the new radical democracy.

We know that Cimon, while a democrat of sorts, was in favour of the older aristocracy and the leading opponent of the radical changes made by Ephialtes in 462BC . We also know that he was not alone as Thucydides Melesiou is said to have organised a coherent opposition. Many of these opponents to radical democracy may have tried to forge political alliances through marriage with powerful aristocratic and potentially anti-democratic or anti-Periclean families in other cities. Under the new law these marriages would not have produced Athenian citizens and made them less attractive to any possible malcontents. This possibly shows that Pericles was removing a possible threat to his premiership and to Athenian democracy, as there were many city-states throughout Greece who were open with their contempt for rule by the people .

As well as not knowing the reasons for the Citizenship Law, we do not know for certain what the law really did apart from making it only possible to become an Athenian citizen if both your parents were citizens themselves. Our evidence concerning the law is so scant that we do not know for sure if it was retrospective or not, and with Cimon dying at Citium in 451BC we do not have a prominent example of an Athenian citizen of mixed parentage. However, if Athenian history shows us anything, it is that the Athenians did not abolish or get rid of things they were replacing, for example the Phaleron wall was left to fall into disrepair instead being pulled down after the construction of the middle Long Wall and the keeping of ostracism as part of the constitution despite the debacle of Hyperbolus. This points to the Citizenship Law not being retrospective but just to be used from 451BC onwards. Another thing that we do not know about this law is which groups it dealt with. It has been put forward by S.D. Lambert in his work Phratries of Attica (1993), backed up by P.J. Rhodes in his review , that while most classicists tend to base Athenian citizenship on the membership of tribes, trittyes and demes, it is the phratry that played the larger part in establishing if a man was entitled to citizenship through the legitimacy of his parentage because the women and children were introduced to the phratry and not the deme. Despite these well-argued ideas concerning the provisions of the Citizenship Law it is almost impossible to come to any solid conclusions due to the lack of evidence.

The results of the Citizenship Law are equally difficult to unearth. As I have said, it would only really have long-term effects and Athenians would still be getting married, as was expected in the ancient world. It would not have had any direct effects on the Peloponnesian War as it came less than a generation later, although the restraining of political alliances through marriage with other cities may have contributed to Athens’ failure to attract more allies and to keep her empire in tow. It was suggested by a fourth century orator, who was petitioning for a firm distinction of status, that another result of this law was that even for the poorest Athenian woman it provided a guaranteed dowry in the form of her citizenship because more Athenian men would be looking for Athenian women to marry. This also suggests that while we do not hear much about the law, it still existed in the constitution and enforced one hundred years later. By far the most famous effect of the Citizenship Law of 451/0BC is the fact that Pericles, the architect of the law, asked for an exemption from it in the first years of the Peloponnesian War. It came following the death of his two legitimate sons in 430BC and his want to have a son who could carry on his family name made Pericles ask the Assembly to confer his young son by Aspasia special dispensation and be granted Athenian citizenship. Such was the importance of the Alcmaeonid bloodline and influence of Pericles personally at this time the request was approved.

I think that it is extremely hard to come to any conclusions concerning the Periclean Citizenship Law of 451/0BC due to the lack of available source material. We can only guess at the reasons behind Pericles’ motives for making Athens more elitist and there may be some other reason that neither I nor anyone else has pin-pointed. The only things we really know is that the law established that only someone whose parents were both Athenian citizens could be eligible for citizenship and that at some stage Pericles asked for his illegitimate son to be exempt from it. Despite not knowing that much about it, I think we should not overlook the importance of such a law being passed. It proved that Pericles was the leading statesman of the time and that Athenian confidence was sky-high; ready to go head to head with the Spartan army and her Peloponnesian League.


Bibliography

Primary Sources

Athenian Constitution (Ath. Pol.) Aristotle (?)

Pericles Plutarch

History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides

Hellenica Xenophon

Athenian Constitution (Ath. Pol.) ‘The Old Oligarch’


Secondary Sources

Phratries of Attica S.D. Lambert (1993)

Pericles’ Citizenship Law 451/0BC A. French

Electronic Antiquity: P.J. Rhodes (1994)
Communicating the Classics

Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves S.B. Pomeroy (1995)

Pericles’ Citizenship Law 451/0BC C. Patterson (1981)

Pericles’ Family and Political Career hsc.csu.edu (2000)

Biographies of Pericles and Cimon Britannica.com (2000)

The Reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles www.siu.edu (1999)

People and Passions That Changed www.pbs.org (2002)
The World: Life of Pericles

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What do we know of the purposes, the provisions, and the results of the Periclean citizenship law?