Vanishing mothers: the (de)construction of personal identity in attic forensic speeches

After Pericles’ law on citizenship, civic identity and status were defined in Athens not only by the father but also by the mother. Male identity was now dependent on women. Even though legally decisive, mothers remained socially quite invisible. The identity of Athenian citizens became therefore more vulnerable and a reflection of this condition is to be found in some legal cases, particularly in hereditary cases. The mothers’ social position stimulated the development of rhetorical tools and argumentative lines, in forensic speeches, in order to demonstrate the mothers’ identity or to confute it, disregarding the unitary representation of the oikos and weakening the Aristotelian image of cohesion between individual, oikia and polis. Attacking mothers meant not only damaging a figure that a parallel “rhetoric of the oikos” considered as fundamental to its organization and breaking the “protocol” that required not to mention women in law-courts, but also introducing in the law-courts, through rhetorical tools, a gender-centered contrast regarding motherhood. Mothers lose their topical traits and end up fading away as a socially recognizable reality, to be recreated on a purely narrative plane: a conflict that defines the ambiguity of the definition of the maternal role, also shown in a number of cultural products of democratic Athens.