- Location
- Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
As I've said, one could see it the entirely other way round: They are allowed, as foreigners, to make a living in a prosperous city.Because having a situation where someone who lives in your society for years and has no path to become a citizen is anti-democratic.
Sparta didn't allow that at all, for the most part.
One should consider that in Ancient Greece, the Polis was not the physical city, not the buildings and walls and streets. The Polis were the people. If Spartans or Athenians were on campaign, then they would quite naturally hold their popular assemblies in the field, if they had a sufficient quorum, because it was "the Polis" being in the field - the physical structures of Sparta or Athens itself really didn't matter much. Likewise, when the Persians kept control of Ionia after the rebellion, there were many ideas floating around there and on the Greek mainland to relocate the poleis of Ionia to Italia and Gaul. Phocaia, for the most part, did up and go and move to the colony of Aleria. There, too, the attitude was that it wasn't the structures who mattered, but the people. The people made up the Polis.
Basically, before the Macedonian conquest, poleis were quite simply tribes of blood, so to speak. Which meant, to answer @Axslashel , it didn't matter in what physical environment you have lived your whole life. As I have said, the physical city didn't really matter. Whether you were Athenian or Corinthian or whatever was a category, an inborn category at that. That was what poleis were (at that time).
Indeed. In the ancient attitude - well, they still got to make a livelihood in a foreign city, didn't they? Without that, they wouldn't be able to make a living at all. And starvation and deadly poverty was still around every corner for the common people in ancient times, so this mattered arguably much more than political rights.Because there was no path for representation despite them having to live with the city's decisions, including wars, while they contributed to its prosperity. It's either grant the same right to long terms residents you grant your citizens, or give them citizenship.
Of course, that's a modern standard. But most judgments about them are.