IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES IN THE CLASSICAL POLIS SOME PRINCIPLES FOR A SYNOPTIC TREATMENT *
In 1893 a thirty-six-year-old French archéologue, Michel Armand Edgar Anatole Clerc, brought out the first comprehensive study of the largest, most important and best known community of free immigrants in the classical Greek world - the metics of Athens x. The work enjoyed instant and deserved success, securing its author a chair at the University of Aix-en-Provence ; and it may still be read with profit 2. For several years subsequent to that, Clerc continued to work in the same field but broadened out its geographical scope, and 1 898 saw the fruits : a synoptic survey, in three parts, of metic-like groups in as many other cities, besides Athens, as seemed to possess them 3. With no fewer than seventy 'différentes cités1 covered, this marked a notable advance, as he was well aware, over its handful of precursors 4. However, what would greatly have surprised him, no doubt, is the fact that it has never, to this day, been formally superseded in its turn ; the twentieth-century bibliography of the topic is an oddly piecemeal one 5,
* This paper was delivered to the Joint Triennial Conference of Greek and Roman Societies in Oxford, 6th August 1981 . 1 am most grateful to Professor J. K. Davies for chairing the ensuing discussion, and to all who contributed to it.
1 M. Clerc, Les métèques athéniens .· étude sur la condition légale, la situation morale et le rôle social et économique des étrangers domiciliés à Athènes, Paris, 1893 (Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, 64).
2 For some methodological criticisms see D. Whitehead, The Ideology of the Athenian Metic, Cambridge, 1977 (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Suppl. 4), pp. 1-2 and passim.
3 De la condition des étrangers domiciliés dans les différentes cités grecques, in Revue des Universités du Midi, n.s. 4 (1898), pp. 1-32, 153-79 and 249-74.
4 H. Schenkl, in WS, 2 (1880), pp. 162-5 ; V. Thumser, in WS, 1 (1885), pp. 46- 7 ; G. Gilbert, Handbuch der griechischen Staatsalterthümer , II (Leipzig, 1885), pp. 293-6.
5 H. Hitzig, in ZRG, 28 (1907), pp. 211-53 ; H. Francotte, Mélanges de droit public grec, mém. 5 (1910), pp. 167-220 ; K. G. Gardikas, m Athena, 28 (1916), pp. 200-1 ; G. Busolt, Griechische Staatskunde, I (Munich, 1920), pp. 292-303 ; V. Ehrenberg, The Greek State, second edition, London, 1969, pp. 37-8. [I have not seen
