3 - The responsibilities of the citizen

Summary

Family and local interests and responsibilities

Certain obligations were specifically associated with Athenian citizenship, such as personal service in the armed forces and, in the case of the propertied classes, financial levies, but there was also a vast range of responsibilities which were implicit in membership of the polis. These might be interpreted in different ways by the individual. The friends of Sokrates, for example, when he had been condemned to death on a charge of impiety and corrupting the youth, urged him to escape and to live in exile. Not a few Athenians chose exile when under political or judicial attack, and, in fact, exile was a penalty which could be imposed by law. But Sokrates at his trial declined that legal alternative and also rejected the pleas of Kriton to escape from prison. He argued that all his life he had enjoyed the protection and benefit of the laws and that he must not now seek to evade them and so destroy them and the whole polis. Not all Athenians would have fully shared the high-minded attitude of Sokrates, but in theory they would have endorsed the notion of obedience to the laws, for they shared with other Greeks a deep conviction that the laws, not the whim of a despot like the Persian king, were their master and that obedience to the laws was fundamental for the well-being of their polis.