Spoken from the Grave

Abstract

Abstract Talking about metics means echoing the Athenian master narrative on the free foreigners who were living in the Athenian polis. Metoikia was essentially an Athenian creation, solely formulated and articulated by the Athenian demos. However, the fact that the people who were labelled ‘metics’ were not actively participating in this master narrative on their status in Athenian society does not mean that they were completely silent or silenced on this matter. This chapter investigates the ways in which the people who were commonly and collectively labelled as metics by the Athenians constructed a wide range of social identities on the funerary monuments of their loved ones. It builds on a corpus of 125 (fragments of) funerary monuments and around 500 funerary inscriptions from the fifth and fourth centuries that can to some degree be associated with metics. Significantly, these funerary monuments never explicitly refer to the metic status of the deceased. But what, if not their metic status, were the important values and social relationships deemed worthy of public praise by these free foreigners living and dying in classical Athens?