Métèque

In ancient Greece, a metic (Greek métoikos: from metá, indicating change, and oîkos "dwelling") was a foreign resident of Athens, one who did not have citizen rights in their Greek city-state (polis) of residence.

The history of foreign migration to Athens dates back to the archaic period. Solon was said to have offered Athenian citizenship to foreigners who would relocate to his city to practice a craft. However, metic status did not exist during the time of Solon.

Scholars have tended to date the development of metic status to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/7. However, the rate of the increase in the Athenian population in the years following 480 is difficult to explain by purely natural growth – suggesting that immigrants to Athens could still become Athenians citizens at this point, and metic status did not yet exist. The first known use of the word metoikos is in Aeschylus' play Persians, first performed in 472 BC. However, James Watson argues that the word was used in Persians in a non-technical sense, meaning nothing more than "immigrant". Rebecca Futo Kennedy dates the origin of metic status in Athens to the 460s, while Watson argues that the legal status of being a metic did not develop until 451/0 BC – the same year as Pericles introduced his citizenship law.

In other Greek cities (poleis), foreign residents were few, with the exception of cosmopolitan Corinth, of which however we do not know their legal status. In Sparta and Crete, as a general rule with few exceptions, foreigners were not allowed to stay (Xenelasia). There are also reported immigrants to the court of tyrants and kings in Thessaly, Syracuse and Macedon, whose status is decided by the ruler. Due to these complications, the legal term metic is most closely associated with Classical Athens. At Athens, the largest city in the Greek world at the time, they amounted to roughly half the free population. The status applied to two main groups of people—immigrants and former slaves. As slaves were almost always of foreign origin they can be thought of as involuntary immigrants, drawn almost exclusively from non-Greek speaking areas, while free metics were usually of Greek origin. Mostly they came from mainland Greece rather than the remote parts of the Greek world.

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