Plato’s Myths of Autochthony and the Debate over Citizenship and Political Participation in Fourth-Century Athens

This article examines the role of autochthony in the debate over citizenship in fourth-century Athens and argues that this myth was deployed within a heated ideological struggle which revolved primarily around political participation rather than access to cult. First, it shows how democratic discourse in the epitaphios logos conceptualised autochthony through a set of motifs (omission of the earthborn kings of Attica; collectivisation of eugeneia; metaphor of the community as a family) which legitimised political equality. It then analyses Plato’s engagement with autochthony in the Republic, Timaeus, and Critias. It argues that Plato reshaped the same motifs to articulate an elite counter-discourse of political exclusion grounded in the principle of specialisation based on physis.