Description
is rarely addressed. With scholarship favoring silent, oppressed, or otherwise subaltern groups, the voting demos is too often treated as a monolith. This has left scholars the room to explore other divisions, even dichotomies, in the Athenian citizenry of the archaic and Classical periods. This thesis explores the cultural, economic, and political variances between urban and rural Athenian citizens, and how these categories form and develop over time, from roughly the eighth century BCE to 404 BCE at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Employing diachronic methods, the traditional agrarian nature of the early polis is contrasted with the rise of urbanism in Greece in the archaic period, and in Athens specifically, from the reforms of Solon in 594 BCE through the fifth century. Solon's reforms, the Pisistratid tyranny, Cleisthenic democracy, and Athenian imperialism all built on one another over time to create in Athens a truly urban entity, with poor citizens of the thete class congregated in the city and commanding the political process, and with hoplite-farmers isolated in the country. Thus, the city dominated Athenian policy, and the mass of urban poor favored the imperial ambitions of radical democratic statesmen like Pericles, bolstering an urban economic climate that left the countryside utterly behind. From this dichotomous situation it is possible to reconstruct the typical political opinions of these disparate groups. From Thucydides and Aristophanes we can deduce that the population in the city offered the bulk of the support for Athens' imperialistic policies and advocacy for war against the Peloponnesian League. Farmers, on the other hand, tended to sympathize with oligarchy, and to oppose both imperialism and war against Sparta and its allies. All these events and developments indicate that 'urban' and 'rural' are useful and relevant categories for exploring the internal complexity of the seemingly monolithic Athenian demos in the fifth century BCE.
