Re: Mass-Immigration: The Athenian Approach
I have a clarificatory question.
In several places discussing citizenship at Athens, you mention the importance of membership in what you refer to as “family groupings.” (You mention that these groupings were prehistoric, that they were united by blood, that they usually were also united by participation in an associated religious community; you also say that citizenship was an automatic right only for full-blood members of one of the family groupings, and that the need for citizens to be affiliated with one of them posed an administrative problem for granting naturalized citizenship to foreigners.)
But what, exactly, are you referring to here by the English word “family grouping”? Are you talking about the Archaic-era brotherhoods (phratriai)? Are you talking about the social-political system of what are normally called “tribes” (phylai)? If the latter, do you mean the four traditional (pre-508) phylai, or the ten classical (post-508) phylai attributed to Cleisthenes? Or do you mean something else? If so, what?
Anticopyright.