VIII FAMILY AND NEIGHBOURS 2 I $
of a deme3 the local community in town or country.A We find
people addressed or described either simply as 'demotat*)
fellow-demesmenj or 'neighbours anddeniesmen5, 'neighbours,
km and demesmen', or 'demesmen and friends'.2 They, be-
sides wives and children could supply the weeping pleaders
in court3 Hermippos wrote a play The Demotai^ and the
Acharntans as well as Eupolis* Prospafaoi took their titles from
the names of individual denies; perhaps Aristophanes'
Dattales referred to a fictitious culinary deme. The chorus of
the old charcoal-burners of Acharnai, which was economically
and politically one of the most important denies of Attica,
illustrates very clearly the close community between the mem-
bers of a deme, who, inspired by their local Muse, are uniform
and united in thought and feeling.4 Elsewhere, too, the deme
appears to have a real unity. In danger, a man would call for
help from his fellow-demesmen s A man longed for his deme
when he was away from it.6 The demesmen met before they
set out on a campaign, and the neb used to give the poor
weapons or money for the equipment they needed. * In general
the rich played an important part in the deme.8 Everybody
knew everybody else, and the circumstances of all the families
of the deme were known to everybody.9 Admetos, a typical
bourgeois^ was as much afraid of the criticism of the demesmen
as he felt for his dead wife.10 Nobody liked to incur the enmity
of a member of his deme (though this sometimes happened),
1 Cf Isaios IX, 18 'Apacprjvlcov iroXAoi TOO.; TOTE avyyscopyouvToov
The KGOfjfjTat (€965, L 5, frg 274), the felbw-vilkgers*, were members ot
the deme in its character not of a political community but of a residential
district There is almost no distinction between them and the yaTOVES The
SrjLOTi8E$ in L 333 were hardly members of the same deine (so Liddeli and
Scott), but female fellow-citizens For this use of 6r|UQTTj$ see above, p 82, n 3
In a political sense, on the other hand, the States, situated close to Attica, were
neighbours (L 698f)
2C2io, PI 322, Susanon r, 3 — £1115 — C 1321.— £ 320, C 1209^
Pi 2 54; cf alsoE io23f
3 Lysias XXVII, 12
4 A 665ff — 319, 3286% 333, 349, 675 Importance of Achamar Thuc. II,
20, 4, 21, 3, see also the inscriptions in L Robert, Etudes epigrephtques et phtfo-
logzquss (1938), 293 ff", tiie most important also Tod, 204
* L 685. « A 33 7 L>slas XVI, 14, XXXI, 15
8 Cf. } Sundwall, Epigrafkische Betfrage, 55ff
8 Lysias XXIII, 3, Isaios II, 36, VIII, 27
10 Eur AIL ic57ff.