Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The People 113
Notable among this latter category were the Macedonians, whom
many Greeks regarded as semibarbaric though they probably spoke
Greek, as the following judgment upon Philip II of Macedon by the
Athenian politician Demosthenes indicates:
He’s so far from being a Greek or having the remotest connection with
us Greeks that he doesn’t even come from a country with a name that’s
respected. He’s a rotten Macedonian and it wasn’t long ago that you
couldn’t even buy a decent slave from Macedon. (Third Philippic 31)
Prejudice toward Greeks on the part of other Greeks was not limited
to those who lived on the fringes of the Greek world. The
Boiotians, inhabitants of central Greece, whose ethnic credentials
were impeccable, were routinely mocked for their stupidity and
gluttony. Ethnicity is a fluid concept even at the best of times.
When it suited their purposes, the Greeks also divided themselves
into Ionians and Dorians, as mentioned earlier (p. 12) . The distinction
was emphasized at the time of the Peloponnesian War, when
the Ionian Athenians fought against the Dorian Spartans. The
Spartan general Brasidas even taxed the Athenians with cowardice
on account of their Ionian lineage. In other periods of history,
the Ionian-Dorian divide carried rather less weight, though it no
doubt helped to bolster Greek-on-Greek racism.
Metics
Metic, which comes from the Greek word metoikos, meaning
“one who dwells among,” denoted a foreigner with the right to
live permanently in the host country of his or her choice. Classical
Athens, because of its empire, wealth, and commercial importance,
attracted a vast number of metics. In this respect, the city-state
was rather unusual, as Perikles pointed out (Thukydides 2.39.1).
It is estimated that approximately 60 percent of the metic population
lived in demes located in or around Athens, 20 percent in the
port of Piraeus, and the remaining 20 percent in rural and coastal
demes. Sepulchral inscriptions reveal that at least sixty different
Greek and non-Greek states are represented among their ranks.
The numbers of metics perhaps reached a peak shortly before the
outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 b.c.e. , and then fluctuated
in line with Athens’s changing fortunes and prosperity. However,
it is difficult to arrive at even a rough estimate of the total.
Athens was not the only Greek state that encouraged the immigration
of foreigners, but it was undoubtedly the one that attracted