New Books In European Studies

Demetra Kasimis’s new book, The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the role and unstable place of the metics (metoikoi) in Athenian society.  The book focuses on three different presentations and discussions of the metics, in Euripides’ Ion, in Plato’s Republic, and in Demosthenes’ Against Euboulides. The metic, as Kasimis explores, is a classification of individuals within Athenian democracy for those who do not have Athenian blood—they are neither insiders nor outsiders. This whole class of people, who were free and enjoyed certain rights within the society, were, nonetheless, in a kind of liminal space, on the border between citizenship and those excluded from citizenship, like slaves, children, and others.  The Perpetual Immigrant, which is the kind of position that metics found themselves in, since neither they nor their offspring could become citizens, exposes the “fraught and shifting meaning of the democratic citizen itsel