Auteur(s) : David WHITEHEAD (Univ. of Manchester, Grande-Bretagne)
Titre : Immigrant Communities in the Classical Polis : some Principles for a Synoptic Treatment
Revue : L’Antiquité Classique
Volume : 53
Date : 1984
Pages : 47-59

Abstract:
The metics of Athens represent by far our best-known example of a community of free immigrants – neither citizens nor slaves – in any classical Greek polis; however, a thin scatter of data reveals that the existence of groups comparable in name (---oikoi) was widespread. The way to approach these data is not, as in M. Clerc’s study of 1898, to assume the universality of the Athenian metic-system in all its details, but to construct a model of logical and chronological choices for any polis thrown up by the evolution of the status-structure of the polis itself.