The Project

The concept of citizenship (politeia) is one of the notions underlying political institutions and society in the Greek world which, also owing to the stimuli of contemporary reality, has attracted sustained scholarly interest in recent years. Is citizenship defined in purely legalistic terms as the enjoyment of political rights, as Aristotle argued in Politics, book 3? Or does it entail the sharing of a system of values that is more complex and effectively reduces, if not minimizes, the importance of merely legal barriers?

While the institutional and sociological perspectives have hitherto been seen as irreconcilable and antithetical, the project aims to bring these approaches into dialogue through an integrated use of literary and epigraphic sources, in order to shed light on the origins and evolution, continuities and discontinuities of politeia in a holistic approach. We still lack, indeed, a systematic study of citizenship in the Greek world in a longue duree perspective, despite the presence of a vast bibliography on this subject. Based on the assumption that citizenship is a dynamic process, the research group proposes to carry out a comprehensive historical study of the nature and meaning of politeia in political thought and in the practice of community life. The investigation will be conducted both in a «vertical» perspective with reference to the diachronic development of the concept over the centuries between the archaic period and the second century BC and in a «horizontal» perspective through a comparative investigation of its morphology and dynamics in the parallel realities of poleis and federal states (ethne).