The vast majority of city-states that existed in the Greek world c.700 bc would not have matched Aristotle’s vision of the city. You would have sought in vain for any concept of citizenship, because power was in the hands of one or a few men, and neither law-codes nor the ideal of eunomia yet existed. Sparta was renowned for the development of its monarchy into a constitutional government by the mid-seventh century. With this came laws and a social system designed to ensure the community’s survival, and indeed superiority over its rivals on the battlefield, which they termed eunomia. Definition of citizenship was fundamental to the system. This status belonged to the heavily armed soldiers who formed its hoplite phalanx who, as a counterpart to their duty to defend the community, received both political rights as voters in the assembly of the Spartans and economic rights through the assignation of land. Sparta was in many ways an exceptional city-state, but its concept of citizenship was archetypal. As cities developed hoplite armies, it is clear that the members of these armies came to claim an enhanced political status. How soon it was defined, and what rights, if any, were granted to those members of the community who did not serve as hoplites, varied from city to city and depended on the activity of lawgivers.
The origin of some of Aristotle’s principles is apparent. The unwarlike - women, children, and slaves - could not be full citizens, though old men, formerly warriors, did not lose their status: in fact the latter were on occasion called up in an emergency. Resident aliens might acquire some of the rights and duties of citizens, but they remained members of a different community. The city was of course an aggregate of families - the starting-point of Aristotle’s Politics (1.1252b) - and membership of the citizen-body was accordingly normally acquired through birth, though not fully at birth. It follows that questions of citizen-status were raised most acutely when colonies, new communities, were founded. This is neatly illustrated in an early (c.500 BC) document from a small, recently settled community in the Lokrian territory on the Corinthian Gulf:
This covenant about the land shall be valid in accordance with the division of the plain of Hyla and Liskara, both for the divided lots and the public ones. Pasturage rights shall belong to parents and son; if no son exists, to an unmarried daughter; if no unmarried daughter exists, to a brother; if no brother exists, by degree of family connection, let a man pasture according to what is just. . . Unless under compulsion of war it is resolved by a majority of the one hundred and one men, chosen according to birth, that two hundred fighting men, at the least, are to be brought in as additional settlers, whoever proposes a division (of the land) or puts it to the vote in the Council of the Elders, or in the Select Council or who creates civil discord relating to the distribution of land, that man shall be accursed and all his posterity, and his property shall be confiscated and his house leveled to the ground in accordance with the homicide law. This covenant shall be sacred to Pythian Apollo. . . (ML 13, trans. Fornara 33)
We can see how land is expected to remain within the kinship group, how loss of citizenship on account of a criminal offence strikes at the whole family and deprives them of property, how the right to land is bound up with military service and the defense of the community. On the same principle, when the Greek colonists of Cyrene needed to expand their citizen body, they invited men in with the offer of a redivision of the land (Hdt. 4.159). It is also clear from other documents about early colonization that, when a man left his mother-city for a colony, he might be granted a right to return under certain circumstances, but he was essentially losing one citizenship in favor of another (ML 5 = Fornara 18, 34ff.; ML 20 = Fornara 47).
World History
