Kinship in Ancient Athens

The book covers Athenian kinship from Drakon and Solon to Menander (with some references to later developments). It uses a wide range of sources: epigraphic, literary/forensic, and archaeological. It provides an ethnographic ‘thick description’ of Athenians’ interaction with their kin in all contexts: legal relations (adoption, guardianship, marriage, inheritance, disputes in and out of court); economic interaction (property, economic independence/dependence of sons in relation to fathers); training in specialist skills (doctors, actors, artists), loans, guarantees, etc.; rituals (naming, rites de passage, funerals and commemoration, dedications, cultic associations); war (military commands, organization of land and sea forces); and political contexts, both informal (hetaireiai) and formal (Assembly, Council). Volume II deals with corporate groups recruited by patrifiliation: tribes and trittyes (both pre-Kleisthenic and Kleisthenic), phratries, genê, and demes. The section on the demes stresses variety rather than common features, and provides up-to-date information on location and prosopography.