Honors, Privileges, and Greek Migration Regimes

Abstract

AbstractChapter 4 focuses on the common Greek institution of award giving and explores its implications not only as a diplomatic tool that encouraged foreigners to engage in acts that benefited the host state but also as an essential part of Greek states’ migration and membership regimes. By granting honors to foreign individuals, Greek states simultaneously delimited the rights of immigrants and enabled a prolonged and even permanent stay by foreign-born visitors, including the Phoenicians. Those honors included monetized gifts of gold wreaths, honorific grants of proxenia and euergesia, and a wide assortment of legal awards, such as the right to own property, tax exemptions, personal and property inviolability and security during travel, the right to serve in the military with citizens, the grant of resident alien status, and the rare grant of citizenship. Through an examination of decrees honoring Phoenicians from Athens, Delos, Delphi, and Oropos, among other Greek states, the chapter shows that even as these awards encouraged mobility and migration they also defined the rights of privileged immigrants. Each time a state granted a combination of monetized, legal, or honorific awards to a foreign individual, it created a distinct social status for that foreign resident to inhabit, which could shift along a spectrum of participatory membership in a political community, making these notions more fluid.