This book develops carefully a bold and stimulating argument: to be a ‘female citizen’ in Classical Athens was no oxymoron. On the contrary, female citizens were central to Athenian citizen interaction, and ancient understandings of it. Blok makes this case not so much by identifying new forms of female participation in the Athenian democracy as by arguing that the female contributions usually stressed – to the religious and festival life of Athens and to the reproduction of new, legitimate citizens – were much more central to Athenian understandings of citizenship (politeia) than normally acknowledged.

Chapter 1 sets out well the current scholarly debate and Blok’s original contribution to it. Blok argues well that Aristotle’s proposal that a citizen is someone who participates in ‘judging and ruling’ has often led modern scholars to adopt a picture of the citizen too narrowly focussed on participation in political and legal institutions. This has partly obscured the central role of other forms of interaction, especially collective relations with the gods through ritual, in Athenian citizen life and citizen ideology. The institutional picture of Athenian citizenship has also gained strength because it chimes with modern desire to find in Classical Athens a forerunner of modern rational, secular democracy, run by ‘political animals’ (compare pp. 37–39).

Blok perhaps over-emphasises here the special role of one claim by Aristotle in sustaining the narrowly institutional picture: that approach has also drawn inspiration from the oratory of (for example) Thucydides’ Pericles and Demosthenes and from the stress on institutionalised politics in Athenian inscribed decrees. Conversely, Aristotle himself could perhaps be co-opted as an ally for Blok’s broader approach more readily than she allows: although the earlier Books of the Politics often stress the link between citizenship and participation in political institutions, a different picture emerges in Book VIII of that work – not to mention Aristotle’s ethical works. In Book VIII Aristotle offers a much richer, more varied picture of the citizen interactions indispensable for a good polis, with great stress on education and music (though notably not on interaction with the gods).

In chapter 2, Blok argues for the centrality of participation in festivals and rituals to the performance of citizenship in Classical Athens, by both men and women who shared the responsibility of sustaining their community’s relationship with the gods. This is a helpful corrective to some earlier views, though Blok perhaps sometimes emphasises religious life a little too far to the exclusion of other crucial elements of citizen activity. Central to the debate here is Blok’s re-interpretation of the common Athenian claim that citizens are those who share in hiera kai hosia, both ‘sacred’ rites and relationships (hiera) and those activities which, though less directly focussed on the gods, nonetheless enjoy divine approval (hosia). Blok suggests that this phrase served to foreground relations with the gods as the kernel of Athenian citizenship. While she legitimately calls into question the translation of hosia as ‘secular’, the rhetorical force of hiera kai hosia does often seem designed, not to privilege some civic interactions over others, but rather to be as inclusive as possible: fellow citizens share in everything, across all conceivable dimensions of civic activity. Tellingly, hosia could be replaced in this phrase, presumably without radical change of meaning, by the more unambiguously inclusive concept of koina (‘common things’; see Demosthenes 57.3, discussed on p. 49), which would have captured a wide spectrum of civic interactions.

Chapters 3, 5 and 6 offer very clear overviews, also helpful for undergraduate courses, of other respects in which Blok’s model of Athenian citizenship worked in practice. This includes discussion of how membership of the descent-group of true Athenians, with their special relationship with the gods, was policed, often through religious festivals (ch. 3), in a way which maintained distinctions between citizens and outsiders, who could hope only for partial integration through cult (ch. 6). A useful development of Blok’s argument in chapter 5 comes in the claim that, while all Athenian citizens (both men and women) enjoyed a shared, equal ‘baseline’ or ‘fundamental’ status of citizen honour (time), some citizens could gain differential time through public office or other civic contributions (esp. pp. 205f.). Blok notes the tensions which resulted between democratic equality and more meritocratic principles of differential reward for certain kinds of contribution (pp. 232, 240f.). Although women could gain extra honour through priesthoods, the opportunities for male citizens to add to their ‘baseline’ were considerably greater.

One of the most original chapters of the book is chapter 4, on Greek terminology for referring to citizens. Blok shows through detailed analysis of trends in the evidence that it was usually quite possible to use the feminine forms of the normal words for ‘citizen’ (politis, aste) to denote a female citizen; it was also often possible to use the feminine of the adjective denoting membership of the polis (Athenaia, etc.), though that was complicated at Athens by the overlap with the name of the goddess Athene. This is again a useful corrective to earlier views, with rich supporting evidence.

Sometimes Blok could have dedicated slightly more attention in chapter 4 to phenomena and usages more problematic for her approach. It is striking, for example, that politis hardly features in Athenian inscriptions, one of the richest sources for civic ideology in practice, though the word is attested quite a few times in inscriptions of the Hellenistic poleis of the Aegean and Asia Minor (p. 157, n. 42). Even in Classical Athenian literary sources resort to the term politis could be motivated by the need to pinpoint a particular, subordinate status, that of a potential bearer of legitimate male citizens (see Aristotle Politics 1278a26–33; cf. pp. 161f.), rather than to create a roughly equal female analogue to a male polites. Most importantly, it would have helped to analyse in more depth those uses of the collective hoi Athenaioi (‘the Athenians’) which are clearly at odds with the inclusive conception of citizen community emphasised by Blok: sentences such as ‘the Athenians voted (hoi Athenaioi epsephisanto)’ (to form an alliance, or similar), to describe the result of assembly decisions (e.g. Thucydides 1.145 or Xenophon Hellenica 1.1.34), did imply a much narrower conception of ‘the Athenians’ or ‘the demos’, restricted to adult male participants in the assembly.

This last point has broader implications, which might offer a means of building on Blok’s work. While Blok sees a fairly uniform Athenian understanding of citizenship, in practice the inclusive, primarily religious understanding of citizenship which she documents and analyses very well was in competition with rival conceptions, which might be more prominent in particular contexts. Some contexts encouraged an even narrower conception of citizenship than the one Blok criticises, with a strong focus on voting in the assembly: in the later third century BC, for example, in the union between the island poleis of Cos and Calymna, each citizen had to swear to be a ‘just judge (dikastas) and equal citizen (politas)’, voting in accordance with what seems best for the damos (IG XII 4 1 152, ll. 27–29).

A fruitful way to address this issue would be to cross-fertilise Blok’s approach with the recent work of V. Azoulay on applying to the Classical Greek polis the distinction, introduced by the political theorist C. Lefort, between ‘politics’ or ‘la politique’ (the narrow sphere of institutionalised decision-making) and ‘the political’ or ‘le politique’ (incorporating all interactions which sustain the civic community).1 This would help to bring into focus how narrower and broader conceptions of citizenship or political activity co-existed, and influenced each other, in ancient Greece. It would also reveal the diversity in broad conceptions themselves, and the implications for inclusion and exclusion. Although some broad conceptions located citizenship beyond the assembly primarily in religious participation, as in Blok’s account, other such conceptions emphasised education (Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates) or military participation (the ephebic oath, inscribed epigram). While education-centred conceptions of citizenship could accommodate women’s participation well (consider Plato’s Republic), more martial ones necessarily foregrounded male contributions, perhaps even more than those focussed on political institutions.

Consideration of the links between Blok’s broad conception of citizenship and Azoulay’s interpretation of ‘the political’ would also focus attention on the political character even of the interactions with the gods stressed by Blok: they were shaped partly by political considerations of justice, the common good and civic autonomy – as well as by the workings of raw power. It would be a helpful next step to analyse further what assertions of power were implicated in the competing Greek conceptions of citizenship: who had an interest, when one conception came to the fore in a particular context, in integrating some people, and excluding others? Did the broader conception of citizenship usually empower women on Blok’s picture – or rather integrate them without power, like poor male citizens in an oligarchy? In answering this and other questions raised here, the wide-ranging epigraphic material from the broader Greek world beyond Athens, which Blok introduces to good effect in closing, offers rich potential for further work to build on Blok’s valuable contribution.

Note:
1 See esp. Vincent Azoulay, Repolitiser la cité grecque, trente ans après, in: id. (ed.), Politique en Grèce ancienne (Annales HSS 69.3), Paris 2014, pp. 689–719.