Sacrifice and Athenian citizenship

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Abstract

The core of citizen status in Greece is belonging to a polis, a city, and the citizen's name derives from this: he is a politēs. Being a politēs implies both the conditions that make this status possible and the obligations and benefits it entails. This lesson focuses on the former, namely the question of belonging to the politai community as invoked in cases of contested inheritance litigated in court. Indeed, the making of the citizen is a long-term process, punctuated by sacrifices accompanying the recognition of a son's legitimacy, whether within phratries, genē or demes, and the inscription on their registers. In the phratries, the divine configuration of this recognition goes through Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria, who patronize the legitimacy and civic maturity of the young men, while the courotroph deities, to whom their cut hair is destined, sanction their physiological maturity. Even if the animal offered to the Phratrioi deities is called koureion, "the shearing animal", it seems that it was not to them that the hair of future Phratrioi was offered, but to deities such as Apollo, Artemis, or the Attic river-god Cephise.