Supposititious Children and Athenian Civic Identity

Abstract

Supposititious children may be defined as children smuggled into households and then presented as legitimate off-spring. This article considers the sources that refer to such children in the Classical and Hellenistic periods at Athens. It explores the underlying concern of the male citizen that these children might be enrolled in the citizen population. It explains that this anxiety was tied to the possible contamination of their imagined pure bloodlines, a contamination they believed threatened the legitimate operation of the social, cultural, and political mechanisms of the city.