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Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy by Susan Lape

2011; Classical Association of the Middle West and South; Volume: 107; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tcj.2011.0024

2327-5812

Matthew R. Christ,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

BOOKREVIEWS 245 tions, the success won (for a moment) by their sufferings. The disturbing attraction of power, of mastery over the world, is a human failing. Foster’s book succeeds admirably in demonstrating that Thucydides provides precise details and vivid enactmentsofhowdangerous that attraction canbe. PHILIP STADTER University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, pastadte@email.unc.edu Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. By Susan LAPE. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 341. Hardcover , £55.00/$90.00. ISBN 978-0-521-19104-3. In this engaging and original study, Lape explores how Athenians conceptualized their shared identity through myths of common descent and racial purity and how this view of citizen identity shaped Athenian interactions with nonAthenians within and outside their city in the classical period. Although scholars have addressed aspects of this topic in discussing the regulation of citizenship within Athens and the presentation of Athenian civic identity in the Attic funeral orations and elsewhere, this is, to the best of my knowledge, the first comprehensive treatment of the subject. The picture of Athenians that emerges through this survey of the uses and abuses of the idea of common kinship is provocative, unsettling ,and largely persuasive. Chapter 1, “Theorizing Citizen Identity,” lays the theoretical foundations for assessing race and citizen identity in Athens, and productively discusses the terminology to be used in probing this subject. While scholars have tended to view Athenian invocations of birth and ancestry in connection with citizen identity as manifestations of ethnic-nationalism (7), Lape proposes that there is a strong racial component to Athenian social identity from the mid-fifth century on following the passage of the Periclean citizenship law: “the law encouraged hereditarian narratives that … articulate a racial conception of citizen identity” (8) and “had the effect of banning mixed (inter-polis) marriage” (23). Lape suggests that it is appropriate in this context to apply the term “racialism,” which is “a value-neutral concept employed to characterize the beliefs of a group linked on the basisof putative hereditary features” (32). Although racialism “does not entail or imply racism,” Lape posits that “in the Athenian case racialism and racism do 246 BOOK REVIEWS go hand in hand. In general, racialism can be correlated to racism when a group’s supposedly distinctive inherited traits are given political or moral salience” (32). Athenians engaged not only in “intrinsic racism,” that is, “favoritism toward members of the same group based on family feeling or perceived common kinship ,” but also less overtly in “extrinsic racism” towards persons of foreign ancestry , who were viewed as outsiders lacking the proper birth and ancestry “to share in democratic citizenship and its privileges” (32–3). This requires a flexible understanding of “race” since Athenianracism was directed toward non-citizens as a group, not toward specific racial groups in a modern sense; it also demands that we appreciate that race is not necessarily “color-coded” or a matter of physical appearance. This view of race in an Athenian context will likely be contested, but Lape’s approach has the merit of forcing us to confront some of the darker implications of Athenian pride in citizen purity and their efforts to maintain it. Lape observes, moreover, “I stress that nothing in this study’s argument hinges on the use of these terms perse. This is an investigation of citizenship asa social identity, and racial citizenship is the label I am applying to one component of that identity narrative”(3). Chapter 2, “The Rhetoric of Racial Citizenship,” examines how Old Comedy “inadvertently furthered the ideology of racial citizenship” (63) by casting new politicians as foreigners whose servile associations and occupations betray their alien origins, and then considers how litigants in the Athenian courts seek to expose their opponents as counterfeit Athenians on the basis of their un-Athenian behavior. Lape’s treatment of this rich evidence is rather brief, but suggestive. Chapter 3, “Euripides’ ‘Ion’ and the Family Romance of Athenian Racialism,” offers a detailed and nuanced reading of the Ion that explores how “the play of ideologies orchestrated in the family plot mirrors the ideological negotiations and conflicts spawned by the advent of Athenian racialism”; Lape argues...