Citizen registers in archaic Greece : the evidence reconsidered

The aim of the paper is to contribute to the discussion on archival practices in the Greek polis of the archaic and classical periods by considering the evidence pertaining to the registers of citizens. Following a close examination of documents from Athens, the Peloponnese and other cities both from the Greek motherland and the colonial West, the main result is that the practice of producing written records in the form of lists of citizens (and, in some cases, of their properties) for administrative purposes – political, military and fiscal – must go back at least to the sixth century B.C. A pattern in particular emerges: citizens’ lists were not kept at central, polis level but ‘locally’ within the tribes, phratries and other subgroups in which the civic body was distributed. A broad, non-Athenocentric approach to such practices proves to be especially fruitful: the idea that in pre-Kleisthenic Athens the naucraries were responsible for keeping citizenship records may appear not sufficiently well founded by itself, but it becomes more likely once considered in the light of what we know for other poleis. Conversely, the richer information we have for Athens can be used to provide a framework for interpreting inscriptions from other areas of the Greek world for which information about the institutional context is limited or virtually nonexistent.