The majority of metics probably came to Athens from nearby cities, seeking economic opportunities or fleeing from persecution, although there are records of immigrants from non-Greek places such as Thrace and Lydia.
[8] In other Greek cities (poleis), foreign residents were few, with the exception of cosmopolitan Corinth, of which however we do not know their legal status.
There are also reported immigrants to the court of tyrants and kings in Thessaly, Syracuse and Macedon, whose status is decided by the ruler.
At Athens, the largest city in the Greek world at the time, they amounted to roughly half the free population.
Metics held lower social status primarily due to cultural rather than economic restraints.
Like citizens, they had to perform military service and, if wealthy enough, were subject to the special tax contributions (eisphora) and tax services ("liturgies", for example, paying for a warship or funding a tragic chorus) contributed by wealthy Athenians.
Citizenship at Athens brought eligibility for numerous state payments such as jury and assembly pay, which could be significant to working people.
Neither could they sign contracts with the state to work in the silver mines, since the wealth beneath the earth was felt to belong to the political community.
[9] In addition to the metoikion, non-Athenians wishing to sell goods in the agora, including metics, seem to have been liable to another tax known as the xenika.
Although local registers of citizens were kept, if one's claim to citizenship was challenged, the testimony of neighbours and the community was decisive.
(In Lysias 23,[11] a law court speech, a man presumed to be a metic claims to be a citizen, but upon investigation—not by consulting official records but by questions asked at the cheese market—it transpires that he may well be a runaway slave, so the hostile account attests.)
The large non-citizen community of Athens allowed ex-slave metics to become assimilated in a way not possible in more conservative and homogenised cities elsewhere.
Their participation in military service, taxation (for the rich of Athens a matter of public display and pride) and cult must have given them a sense of involvement in the city, and of their value to it.
In the Greco-Roman world, free people (non-citizens) living on the territory of a polis were called paroikoi (see etymology of parish), and in Asia Minor katoikoi.
This sense was popularized in the late 19th century by the nationalist writer Charles Maurras, who identified metics as one of the four primary constituents of the traitorous "Anti-France", along with Protestants, Jews, and Freemasons.
In 1969 the Greco-French singer Georges Moustaki recorded a song, Le Métèque, which has since been covered by several artists of immigrant descent.