This article challenges the modern orthodoxy which states that phratry membership was a necessary precondition of Athenian citizenship in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and argues that the purpose of the phratry was to establish not claims to citizenship, even though membership in a phratry was proof of citizenship, but inheritance entitlements. It questions the widespread assumption that citizens needed to be born of unions legally cemented by engyê. In turn, it challenges a recent attempt to argue that legitimacy (...) of birth and legitimacy in community were one and the same. Finally, in examines passages of orators which show that the concern of the phratry was to establish not the right to participate in Athenian polity, which was the business of the deme to determine, but the right to inherit property, and in the light of those conclusions argues that while membership in the phratry proved citizenship, it was not essential or necessary for each and every citizen of Athens to be a member of a phratry, the chief purpose of which was to establish inheritance claims. (shrink)

“What is a word?”1 The question was not asked in the expectation of a definitive answer, for words of their nature—as he saw—cannot readily provide one. It is of course a truism that all definitions are made of words, but Leavis was apt to point out that the meanings of many important words resist full lexical definition. Their being thus resistant is often a mark of their importance.2 By a very different route, Wittgenstein arrived at an “answer” akin to that (...) which Leavis himself tacitly proposed: “Die Bedeutung des Wortes is das, was die Erklärung der Bedeutung erklärt.”4The meaning of a word is what the... (shrink)