Immigrant Women in Athens

Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being ¿sexually exploitable.¿ Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the ¿citizen wife¿ and the ¿common prostitute,¿ the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in Classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market.

This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5^th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study if women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic