Associations and Citizenship in Attica from Solon to Cleisthenes

This chapter studies the ways in which associations were able to take part in the slow elaboration of civic identity in sixth-century Athens. For a period within which politics has not yet become a specific area of community life, I try to assess how different components of Athenian society gradually align themselves with the civic community via associations (in the broad sense) and their specific customs. From the famous (but controversial) Solonian law on associations until the Cleisthenic reform, the chapter explores the role of the associations in the processes of integration within the ‘city as society’, in order to see how they flow into the ‘city as institution’ at the dawn of the classical period.