Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book focuses on the rhetorical construction (or deconstruction) of personal identities for individual Athenians. Deme membership was fundamental to the identity of an Athenian citizen, and an adult male was formally identified by his given name, patronymic, and demotic. The book contains four studies of speeches constructing the collective identities of the Athenians and other civic or ethnic groups. An essential and distinctive feature of the Athenians’ collective identity was the myth of autochthony: the belief that they, uniquely among all the Greeks, were born from the very soil of their land, Attica. The book deals first, with the rhetorical manipulation of socioeconomic identities, second with the various identities assumed by prosecutors in the Athenian courts, and third with space and place as factors shaping the identities of the participants in a homicide trial.