This article challenges the commonly held belief that atimia in its earliest Greek usage meant exile, arguing instead that atimia and outlawry were always two entirely distinct, though not mutually exclusive, concepts. It is often claimed that atimia originated as a penalty of death or exile, but that over time its harshness became modified so that those who suffered under its restrictions could not be killed or assaulted with impunity. A careful study of the evidence will show that atimia never (...) meant outlawry, and moreover, its archaic cognates do not imply that in early times to lose timê was the same as losing membership in a political community. Rather, atimazesthai entailed the loss of social honour and status which was an all-encompassing value in the aristocratic societies of archaic Greece. Atimia in the Classical period is similarly a loss of rights, and because penalties and conditions such as exile and outlawry can be easily described, in Greek, as involving the loss of prerogatives, they are conceptually forms of atimia. However, in the legal language of democratic Athens atimia is and always was something distinct from exile, and this legal distinction went back to the very earliest times. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to reassert the traditional view that Athenian women of the classical period regularly had an association with phratries. As part of my argument I adduce an overlooked piece of evidence, a much discussed passage from the Donatus commentary on Terence; for this I provide a new interpretation.There is some evidence that Athenian women were introduced to their fathersphrateresat birth, or to their husbands'phrateresat marriage, or both. The speaker of Isaeus 3 repeatedly asserts that a (...) certain Pyrrhus would have presented his daughter to hisphrateresif she had been legitimate. A scholium on Aristophanes,Acharnians146 may refer to such a practice. Euxitheus calls as witnesses of his mother's citizenshipphrateresfor whom his father celebrated the wedding feast, thegamelia, on her behalf ; celebration of thegameliais regarded as proof of the legitimacy of the speaker's mother at Isaeus 8.19. Neither Demosthenes nor Isaeus says that women were formally registered among thephrateresor even present at the feast; but notices in the lexicographers do connect thegameliawith registration among or introduction to thephrateres. Many scholars have accepted these passages as evidence for normal practice at Athens in the classical period. (shrink)

Following the idea first expressed by Heinrich Swoboda, there is a general perception that the meaning of ἀτιμία in Athens eventually evolved from the original ‘outlawry’, when an ἄτιμος was liable to being deprived of his property and slayed with impunity if he returned to the land from which he had been banished, into a certain limitation on civic status, which has often been rendered as a ‘disfranchisement’. Specific outcomes of this later form of ἀτιμία varied depending on the dating (...) and circumstances of individual cases, thereby giving rise to theories of a so-called full – or ‘total’ – and partial ἀτιμία. Still, whether it was viewed as ‘full’ or ‘partial’, this ἀτιμία did not inflict the death penalty. The precise dating of the transformation of ἀτιμία has also been debated, with opinions ranging from pre-Solonian times (L'Homme-Wéry) to the late sixth (Swoboda, Hansen, Manville) or the late fifth century (Scafuro). While the exact dating is unknown, this transformation was definitely over in the fifth century, when inscriptions and literary texts mentioned punishment by ἀτιμία alongside the death penalty and the confiscation of property. Thus, according to Raphael Sealey, ἀτιμία evolved ‘from a more severe to a milder sense’, and Alick R.W. Harrison pointed to the evidence that, by the fourth century, any willing Athenian could seize an ἄτιμος who happened to be in Athenian territory and surrender him to the θεσμοθέται, instead of killing him. (shrink)