Social Hierarchy of Classical Athens

The zeugitai were the citizens whose land yielded at least 200 medimnoi a year. The name probably means men who owned a yoke of oxen, or men who stood “yoked” together in the battle line. They provided the hoplites, the heavy infantry who paid for their own shield, helmet, spear and armour and fought shoulder to shoulder in the phalanx, as at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. Many worked their own farms in the Attic countryside, some with a slave or two. Cleisthenes’s Council of 500 was restricted to men of this class and above, and in 457 BCE they were admitted to the archonship. Scholars debate whether the zeugitai were ordinary family farmers or a wealthier minority, with many hoplites drawn from the poorer citizens. When the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BCE, Pericles’s strategy brought the farmers of Attica inside the city walls while the Spartans ravaged their land, and many died in the plague that broke out in the crowded city.

Moving in or out. Membership followed the yield of a man’s land, so a poorer citizen who prospered could rise into the class, and a farmer ruined by debt or war could sink out of it.

How many? Estimate: perhaps 10,000–15,000 citizen men of the hoplite census in 431 BCE (Thucydides counts 13,000 hoplites in the field army and 16,000 more on garrison duty, among them metics), with their families.

The thetes were the citizens whose land yielded less than 200 medimnoi a year, or who had none: smallholders, craftsmen, shopkeepers and labourers in the city and the port of Piraeus. They were the largest class of citizens. Solon gave them a vote in the Assembly and a place on juries, and the democracy made that vote count: from the time of Pericles jurors were paid, three obols a day from the early years of the Peloponnesian War, so that a poor man could afford to sit, and after 403 BCE citizens were paid for attending the Assembly too. Their power rested on the fleet. Thetes, with metics and hired foreigners, rowed the triremes that won at Salamis in 480 BCE and held the empire together, and a fleet of 200 triremes needed some 34,000 oarsmen, paid for their service. Critics of the democracy, such as the anonymous writer known as the Old Oligarch, complained that the poor ruled because they manned the ships.

Moving in or out. A poorer citizen whose farm or trade prospered could rise into the hoplite class; after the defeat in the Lamian War in 322 BCE, at least 12,000 poorer citizens were stripped of their citizenship.

How many? Everyone not counted in the other ranks: the citizens and their families among whom the thetes were the majority; adult male citizens numbered perhaps 60,000 in the mid-5th century and about 30,000 in the 4th. The three richer classes are estimates, so this share is one too.

Metics were free people who lived in Athens without being citizens: Greeks from other cities drawn by its trade and wealth, some non-Greeks, and freed slaves. The status probably took shape in the mid-5th century. Every metic registered in his deme, needed a citizen sponsor (prostates), and paid the metoikion, 12 drachmas a year for a man and his household and 6 for an independent woman. Metics served in the army and the fleet and, if rich, paid the war tax and performed liturgies, but they could not vote, hold office or own land or a house in Attica without a special grant. They could bring cases in court, but could be tortured as witnesses, and a metic who failed in his duties could be sold as a slave. Many were craftsmen, traders, bankers and teachers. The family of the orator Lysias, invited from Syracuse by Pericles, ran a shield workshop with 120 slaves in the Piraeus.

Moving in or out. Citizenship was granted only rarely, by a special vote of the Assembly, as it was to the freed slave and banker Pasion; in 404 BCE the Thirty Tyrants seized the property of rich metics and put Lysias’s brother Polemarchus to death.

How many? Roughly: a census of about 317 BCE counted 10,000 metics beside 21,000 citizens (adult men in both cases), and one modern estimate (in James Renshaw’s survey) puts the metic men of 431 BCE at about 25,000; with their families perhaps a tenth to a fifth of the population.