Supplication and Request: Application by foreigners to the Athenian Polis

Abstract

The status of foreigners in the Greek world was always delicate; outside his own polis the foreigner was usually without rights or protection. These he could obtain by applying to the authorities in another polis. However, the sources do not provide a detailed description of the procedures established in these cases, and these procedures have to be inferred from the large number of inscriptions that refer to the granting of privileges to foreigners. The terminology used in Attic inscriptions indicates that the two methods used by foreigners to apply to the polis were the request (a?t?s??) and the supplication (??ete?a). Requests made by private non-citizens (in contrast to those made by official emissaries of foreign cities) appear in Attic honorary decrees from the Hellenistic period, while supplication by foreigners to the polis is found only in fourth-century B.C. inscriptions. The different terminology used in these different periods has led Ph. Gauthier to conclude that these were two distinct procedures, and that the rules which regulated application to the polis by foreigners may have been changed by the reforms of 330 B.C. These reforms, he suggests, also ruled out the supplication as a form of application1). A review of the evidence, however, seems to lead to a different conclusion. I shall argue in this paper that both these methods of applying by foreigners already existed as a defined procedure in the fifth century B.C.; that the difference between these two forms of application was one of wording rather than procedure; and that the procedure of applying to the polis, known from sources of the classical and Hellenistic periods, was an institutionalized form of an