2017. Review in L'Antiquité Classique: S.M. Wijma, Embracing the Immigrant. The Participation of Metics in Athenian Polis Religion (5th-4th Century BC)

444 COMPTES RENDUS réflexions de Gordon Campbell qui étudie ensuite, chez Lucrèce, comment le poète a pu inclure un exposé « scientifique », celui du matérialisme épicurien fondé sur la doctrine atomiste de Démocrite, dans un poème en hexamètres, forme par excellence de la poésie inspirée. Dans la cinquième contribution, David T. Runia rappelle précisément les deux modèles cosmogoniques issus du monde grec (celui du Timée de Platon et celui de Démocrite) tels que les avait présentés Rémi Brague (La sagesse du monde, 1999) aux côtés de deux autres modèles, l’un dérivé des Écritures de la tradition judéo-chrétienne et islamique, l’autre issu de la Gnose. Il prolonge la perspective de Brague en soulignant l’importance du lieu de production des cosmologies et, à Athènes et Jérusalem, il ajoute une troisième cité, Alexandrie, montrant le rôle important qu’elle a joué dans leur évolution, à travers la Septante, les écrits de Philon et d’Origène. La communication de Jason David BeDuhn concerne la cosmologie manichéenne : on y retrouve une multiplicité de traditions, mésopotamienne, indoeuropéenne (grecque et indo-iranienne), anatolienne, présentant des motifs semblables, comme les combats entre dieux, les défaites de certains ou encore le cosmos issu du démembrement d’un dieu, traditions que Mani a voulu unifier et incorporer dans son discours comme des traces de la vérité. C’est au poème didactique en hexamètres d’Aratos que Katharina Volk consacre sa communication. Abondamment traduit, ce poème, résultant de la mise en vers du traité astronomique d’Eudoxe, qualifié de leptos par Callimaque – terme dont K. Volk montre qu’il est un mot-clef des Phénomènes –, fut chez les Grecs, comme à Rome, la première source pour la connaissance des étoiles. Enfin, l’intervention de Rémi Brague pose la question fondamentale, celle de la légitimité du terme « cosmologie » dont il donne sa conception personnelle, à savoir que le terme implique une réflexion sur le kosmos et la façon dont l’homme « comprend et ressent sa présence dans le monde » (p. 306), ce qui en fait une spécificité antique. Cette réflexion de R. Brague sert de point de départ à l’épilogue de Ruth Durrer qui aborde la question par le biais de la physique moderne, exempte de dimension philosophique. Le volume se termine par des illustrations et des indices, les notices bibliographiques accompagnant chaque exposé, une bibliographie essentiellement anglo-saxonne et germanophone, sans aucune référence aux travaux de Lambros Couloubaritsis à propos du discours ambigu des Muses, pourtant point de départ de la réflexion de J. S. Clay (p. 109) et revenant également chez G. Campbell (p. 152-153). Il n’en reste pas moins qu’une fois encore, ces Entretiens offrent aux spécialistes et aux chercheurs de savantes réflexions qui se déploient avec de belles transitions sur une aire chronologique et géographique large. L’Antiquité classique n’y est pas seule convoquée. À cet égard, puisque l’Antiquité orientale y trouve également sa place, on regrettera une grande absente, l’Égypte, qui offre pourtant une multiplicité de cosmogonies. Carine VAN LIEFFERINGE Sara M. WIJMA, Embracing the Immigrant. The Participation of Metics in Athenian Polis Religion (5th-4th Century BC). Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014. 1 vol., 197 p. (HISTORIA – EINZELSCHRIFTEN, 233). Prix : 53 €. ISBN 978-3-515-10642-9. In our world, globalising yet more than ever riven by conflicts of ethnicity, migration and social integration, the study of ancient metics is appropriately very much in COMPTES RENDUS 445 vogue. Athens is of course the prime, most amply documented case-study. After E. Meyer’s focussed Metics and the Athenian Phialai-Inscriptions (Wiesbaden, 2009), D. Kamen’s Status in Classical Athens (Princeton, 2013), for instance, devotes two chapters to these “resident foreigners”; R.F. Kennedy’s Immigrant Women in Athens (London/New York, 2014) has also recently appeared. Now comes a book proposing to sketch a history of the beginnings of metoikia in the city, primarily in the fifth century BC. S. Wijma’s effort is focussed, carefully researched, insightful, and considerably successful; the book deserves to be widely read and engaged with. Aptly beginning with Fustel de Coulanges’ definition of a citizen as “l’homme qui a la religion de la cité” and building on this notion, Wijma develops an attractive argument, namely that the integration –or at least the participation, see below– of metics in the wider community operated principally through their increasing inclusion in the rites and festivals celebrated by the city and its subgroups. The discussion is rich and one may easily single out certain sections for approval. First and foremost, there is an original revisiting of the famous Panathenaia, also taking into account visual representations (p. 38-64, with App. I, 165-166). Though the argument could have been more incisive, Wijma builds a coherent case for the consideration of metics as a welldefined group (perhaps already in the 470s), in light of their different religious duties during the procession. All of this is not elaborated without some special pleading, however; for instance, that the carrying of diphroi (stools) by metics “need not always signal subordination” (p. 63); nor without speculation, for instance when Wijma also adduces other groups of young girls, boys, and old men who participated in processions, viewing these “as metoikoi in some sense” (cf. the strange excursus, “What the Future Beholds [sic]”, p. 56-62). Amid fairly thin evidence from other local communities in Attica (e.g. Ikarion, p. 109-116), Wijma develops an admirable analysis of the regulations of the deme of Skambonidai (p. 103-108, IG I3 244, ca. 460 BC), which testify to an equitable distribution of sacrificial meat for metics and demesmen during a periodic sacrifice to the hero Leos. As a result, Wijma hypothesises that the Attic demes were perhaps “testing grounds for notions that would eventually be taken over by the abstract level of the polis” (p. 124; for instance, the three oxen and their meat given to the metoikoi during the Hephaistia starting in 421 BC: IG I3 82, with p. 88). Indeed, Piraeus was another hotspot for the phenomenon. A discussion of the cult of the Thracian goddess Bendis, probably incorporated into the cultic framework of Athens by 429/8, and certainly by the time of the inaugural civic procession of the Bendideia in 413/2, forms the culmination of Wijma’s work. Chapter 4 (p. 126-155, with App. III, p. 169-171), wholly devoted to this subject, represents a valuable contribution, tracing the evolution and popular appeal of the cult through a detailed examination of the epigraphic material (e.g. IG I3 136). Though there is an avowed difficulty in determining whether any Thracians involved in the cult actually had the status of metics or not (p. 131 with n. 31), Wijma is certainly right to underline “how the special position of Thracians within Athens” –they were present in good numbers already in the sixth century– “was given shape by the careful and gradual acceptance of the cult of Bendis as a polis cult” (p. 156). This is an eloquent case for the full-fledged acceptance of a foreign cult by a city and for the participation of foreigners alongside citizens during the rituals. That being said, Wijma also readily ventures into hazardous territory (p. 154-155, e.g. “Can we, then, 446 COMPTES RENDUS imagine the unimaginable?” – rhetorical questions abound in the book). Since the members of the association concerned with the cult of the goddess were called orgeones, she wonders whether this implies that they therefore qualified for acceptance into phratries and for integration into the citizenry; this supposed prerogative of traditional groups of orgeones in Athens is far from uncontroversial. The fact is that we know little about the status of any foreigners who may have been involved in the association; in fact, by the middle of the third century BC, the Thracian precursors of the orgeones already seem to be a thing of the past (cf. IG II2 1283). Overall, then, Wijma’s study provides a compelling and intriguing snapshot of the increased participation of metics in cult starting in the Classical period. But the efforts of Athens and its demes in that regard raise the difficult and often unanswerable questions of why they were attempted in the first place, and what effect they had in later centuries (when data are much more scant). It will be interesting to see how much acceptance this book finds. For my part, I suspect that Wijma’s version of Fustel de Coulanges is only partly right: “having the religion of the city” was but the first step on a possible path for the metoikoi, and a small or precarious one at that; this path did not inevitably lead to “acculturation” or to “integration”. As marshalled by Wijma, the evidence regularly highlights just how limited or exceptional the role of metics in cult truly was: meat only from the sacrifice to one hero, from only three oxen at the Hephaistia, etc. Despite Wijma’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, the “differentiation” between metics and citizens during processions and sacrifices was an adequate reflection of existing “hierarchical perspectives” about foreigners (p. 36). In much the same way, Wijma’s analysis of the festival of the Lenaia rests to my mind on a misleading interpretation of Dikaiopolis’ comments in Ar. Ach. 508 about the metics present at the occasion. To call them the achura tō n astō n was perhaps an underhanded compliment – metics are part of the same “grain” as Athenian citizens – yet they are still the comparatively useless husks, the chaff of the citizenry. We cannot jump from this to speak, as Wijma does, of a “homogeneous composition of the Lenaian audience” (p. 71, etc.). In other words, the metousia tō n hierō n acquired in the fifth century certainly entailed a measure of cultic participation for foreigners, but a highly controlled one, and one which was not tantamount to metechein tē s poleō s (see Wijma’s Conclusion). As ever, fully embracing the immigrant was a rare feat. It is in attempting to study ancient categories that Wijma’s argument also reveals its weaknesses. Eager to read an Athenian wish to incorporate the metoikoi into civic rites, she misinterprets (p. 53) passages from Aeschylus’ Eumenides (1028-1031) and Hesychius as testifying to an Athenian “benevolent disposition towards metics participating in the Panathenaia”. This is not quite the same thing as what both passages actually state: that the participation of metics was meant to foster their own “goodwill” or “kindly disposition” (euphrō n and eunoi are the terms used). Turning metoikoi into well-wishers by awarding them some degree of involvement in the rites was very much in the interests of the state and its citizenry: it fostered the philotimia and the propensity of foreigners to contribute to liturgies (cp. p. 54 with n. 74; Wijma only occasionally acknowledges such “contributions” by the metics, e.g. p. 158). This type of participatory mechanism is still in evidence well into the Hellenistic period, for example, in one of the decrees augmenting the festival of Artemis Kindyas at Bargylia (SEG 45, 1508B). There, five individual metics are to be chosen as “the most COMPTES RENDUS 447 suitable” participants and to receive a subsidy for rearing cattle, but the purpose for doing so is clearly to augment the sumptuousness of the festival of the goddess with more sacrifices; as in the Athenian Hephaistia, the metics receive only the meat from the five oxen thus reared, not from any others. In short, it remains to be more amply demonstrated if the “integration” or “acculturation” of foreigners was something that communities truly sought; more likely, the “goodwill” and contributions of the metics, stimulated through a closely circumscribed involvement in cult, was the prime consideration at play. Before concluding, it deserves to be underlined that the book has been both expediently and ably published from a recent thesis. This not only demonstrates that such a feat is still possible –and that Wijma needs to be commended for it– but it also stands in patent contrast to not a few of the relatively careless recent publications of Franz Steiner Verlag and other presses (but cf. still here p. 88 n. 103, inter alia). The book is generally well-written and exhibits a firm command of the different types of available evidence: epigraphic, literary, and archaeological – though the latter is much less frequently deployed. Factual mistakes are few, though some are glaring (e.g. historians of Greek religion will be surprised to read in the Introduction, p. 23, that “Parker’s Athenian History [sic] boils down to a chronologically ordered description of rites, cults…”). There are useful indices (Sources, Inscriptions and General) and a thorough bibliography. Jan-Mathieu CARBON Dobrinka CHIEKOVA, Cultes et vie religieuse des cités du Pont Gauche (VIIe-Ier siècles avant J.-C.). Berne, Peter Lang, 2008. 1 vol. 22,5 cm x 15,5 cm, XV-325 p., 1 carte (EUROPÄISCHE HOCHSCHULSCHRIFTEN. SÉRIE XXXVIII, ARCHÄOLOGIE, 76). Prix : 99 CHF. ISBN 978-3-03911-448-1 ; ISSN 0721-3530. Le Pont Gauche désignait dans l’Antiquité le littoral occidental de la mer Noire, celui que les navigateurs suivaient au sortir du Bosphore jusqu’à l’embouchure du Danube. C’est cet espace géographique, qui regroupe de nos jours les façades maritimes de la Bulgarie et de la Roumanie, que l’auteur a choisi pour inscrire cette étude consacrée aux cultes et à la vie religieuse dans les colonies grecques pontiques. La volonté affichée est de décloisonner les recherches conduites sur les cités de l’Ouest de la mer Noire en interrogeant l’existence éventuelle d’une identité régionale. Elle exclut toutefois de son périmètre deux colonies, pourtant indissociables de la région, à commencer par Olbia, et son noyau initial Borysthène, dont le territoire succède immédiatement à celui d’Istros et qui tant par ses cultes, sa chronologie ou l’importance des recherches qui lui ont été consacrées, demeure indissociable de sa voisine. Héraclée du Pont est ici l’autre absente alors qu’elle n’est autre que la métropole de Callatis. Dobrinka Chiekova rassemble dans cette perspective une bibliographie éparse, rédigée de surcroît parfois en bulgare, roumain ou russe, qu’elle met ainsi à disposition du lecteur. Le plan adopté s’avère particulièrement clair et efficace puisqu’il s’articule autour d’une opposition binaire entre colonies d’ascendance « milésienne » et celles d’origine « mégarienne » que l’auteur décline dans la plupart des dix-neuf chapitres qui structurent cette étude. Ces derniers regroupent l’ensemble des divinités majeures ou secondaires, ainsi que des figures héroïques qui composent les panthéons poliades depuis la fondation des premiers établissements, vers le milieu