TREASON AND <i>ATIMIA</i> IN FIFTH-CENTURY ATHENS: THE EVIDENCE FROM TRAGEDY

This article traces how changes in the depiction of atimia (loss of honour/citizen rights) in Athenian tragedy provide crucial information for understanding how the actual punishment evolved in the fifth century. Scholarship on the term has long agreed that the archaic personal form of atimia differed from the legal version of the fourth century, but has failed to explain why and when that change occurred. The tragedians’ discussion of atimia reveals when the punishment took on its legal aspects and how its scope expanded after the restoration of democracy at Athens, when the Four Hundred were declared traitors and atimoi .