Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis by Sarah C. Humphreys

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis by Sarah C. Humphreys John Ma Sarah C. Humphreys, Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis (2 Vols.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxi, 1457. $365.00. ISBN 9780199788256; 9780198788263. Some time in the 350s bce, after the death of Kallias, son of Hipponikos, his long-lost son reappeared in Athens to claim his share of the inheritance. This was a scion of scandalous birth and dubious legitimacy, and the family claimed that the returnee was not "Kallias' bastard" but an imposter, a groom who had stolen his master's identity after the latter died in war. This fourth-century Martin Guerre is one of many delights in S. C. Humphreys' latest work, the fruit of thirty-five years' research (1; the nothos is discussed on p. 215). In addition to an anthropology of kinship (vol. 1), it offers an original history of state emergence in Archaic Athens, a discourse on historical method, and (in vol. 2) an overview of corporate groups in Attica (phratries, genê) and official territorial and demographic structures (tribes, trittyes, demes). Kinship has long been a center of Humphreys' interest, reflecting engagement with the concerns of British social anthropology; comparison with the theoretical underpinnings and findings of recent French and Anglo-American work [End Page 108] on Athenian social history might prove interesting (Humphreys herself provides some comment to that effect). Her gambit is that classical learning (prosopography, legal history, epigraphy), taking the place of fieldwork in modern anthropology, can reveal the workings of Athenian kinship, a particularly well documented version of the common Greek patrilinear nuclear family. Humphreys' strategy is to look at areas of stress. The tensions surrounding adoption, guardianship, marriage with kin, and intra-family disputes offer a hair-raising casebook of family law which Humphreys tackles with gusto. What emerges is the intricate entanglement of the household as defined in family law (established in Solon's time and itself a compromise between aristocratic and folk-peasant practices), civic institutions (centered around the importance of citizen status), property, individual greed, or emotional attachments. Bargains and compromises, often struck to solve conflict, generated trouble down the line, mobilizing kinfolk in networks of support when matters went to protracted litigation. Because citizen status depended on recognition by wider groups, the shape of households was, in practice, open to renegotiation. No wonder that family conflicts were a prime subject for Attic drama, richly exploited by Humphreys alongside forensic rhetoric. The same fluidity characterized official performances of kinship. Rites de passage, funerary and dedicatory practices, festivals, politics, and warfare—these all provided the means for the community to shape the practices of kinship. For instance, public funerals for the war dead influenced private funeral commemoration. Conversely, they were themselves shaped by kinship relations. The last phenomenon is complex: the "long adolescence" (between the ages of 18 and 30) is a result of family practice (paternal power over property, late male marriage), but also a reaction against the power (and simply the tedium) of familial bonds. Why dine with your uncles when you might consort with coevals (and parasites like Sokrates)? The most official contexts for the performance of kinship were the various interlocking groups which constituted the Athenian state. After a history of the obscure pre-Kleisthenic tribes, trittyes, and other institutions (naukrariai, the "Twelve Towns" of Attica), Humphreys examines (often speculatively) the genê and the phratries, an essential but obscure part of the Kleisthenic system in deciding on status. The Kleisthenic tribes, trittyes and demes receive extensive treatment, before a four-hundred-page gazetteer-cum-prosopography for every known deme, organized by tribe. This section teems with helpful and original insights. I would single out the following: the observation that Athenian tribal-based mobilization was ill-suited to the real wars Athens waged with ad hoc contingents; the possibility that bouleutic quotas were fluid and negotiated at the local level; the prevalence of patronage and cronyism at phratry and deme level; the utopian nature of many deme decrees. Some receive extensive and illuminating treatment, such as Sphettos (near Koropi, in rich Mesogeia land and the origin of several politicians), Halai Aixonides (the site of a prolonged...