This received modern account of ancient
citizenship is generally delivered in the
register of political theory. And so it tends
to present a picture of ancient civic life
which is strong on political ideals and principles,
and decidedly thin on political
culture and routine civil life. It is not always
easy, when reading modern accounts of
ancient citizenship, to imagine how the
figure of the active citizen dovetails into the
mundane civil affairs of relatively peaceable
societies – let alone what value, if any, was
accorded to the unheroic practices of ‘passive’
citizenship. A further complication is
that modern images of ancient citizenship
do not come to us directly from the ancient
texts themselves. Rather, in good measure
they are a product of the highly charged
political controversies of the early modern
world, when ancient ‘republicanism’ was
held up as an idealised alternative to everything
which critics disliked about the contemporary
world of territorial states and the
claims of secular sovereign power. And so
modern accounts of ancient ‘republicanism’,
which are so influential in modern
images of ancient citizenship, often bear a
striking resemblance to the self-styled
republican political theories of writers in the