Greece’s status as a single sovereign nation is a realization of the modern age. Even under Roman occupation, what now constitutes the Hellenic Republic was administratively divided between the provinces of Achaea, Macedonia, and Crete-Cyrene. Before that, Greece comprised a plurality of small citizen communities with varying degrees of autonomy known as poleis (singular: polis) of which, for the period down to the death of Alexander the Great in 323, no fewer than 1,035 are known by name throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea areas (though not all of these existed concurrently). Often considered to be the dominant and most characteristic political formation in the ancient Greek world, it is hardly surprising that considerable effort should have been expended in attempting to determine how, why, and especially when the polis emerged.
Scholarly interest in this last question can be traced back to 1937 and an article entitled “When did the polis rise?” written by Victor Ehrenberg. Disputing the claim, advanced by the German historian Helmut Berve, that the polis first emerged out of conflicts between major political leaders ca. 500 and that its evolution was still not complete by 450, Ehrenberg argued that the internal dissolution of the polis was already discernible in the time of Pericles and the sophists in the fifth century, meaning that its acme should be situated much earlier. Presupposed in sixth-century laws and decrees as well as in the poems of Solon, dated to the beginning of that century, Ehrenberg thought that the concept of the polis was a little hazier in the Boeotia that is depicted in Hesiod’s Works and Days; nevertheless, he reasoned that it may have been more developed
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
In those regions that were less “backward.” Ultimately, he resorted to Homeric evidence: claiming that the polis is absent from the Iliad but plays a central role in the Odyssey - and adopting a somewhat high dating for the Homeric epics - he proposed a date of ca. 800 for its emergence.
As we have seen (pp. 23-6), it is notoriously difficult to make chronological arguments on the basis of the Homeric poems. Few today would date the epics so early and many are unconvinced that the polis is entirely absent from the Iliad. In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, the question of when the polis arose was given a new lease of life by classical archaeologists, who noted that the middle decades of the eighth century witnessed a number of material changes that could possibly be attributed to socio-political development - notably, the construction of monumental temples, shifts in the location of cemeteries, the reappearance of crafts skills that had fallen into disuse since the Late Bronze Age, and the re-establishment of intensive overseas communications. It is this resumption of cultural practices that had remained dormant throughout the Dark Age that has inspired some to talk in terms of an eighth-century Greek “renaissance.”
The traditional focus on the rise of the polis in accounts of Archaic Greece has, of late, provoked a good deal of scholarly angst. The polis, it is argued, has been studied too teleologically, retrojecting to the Archaic period definitions that were only formulated in the fourth century - if they were not the Eurocentric fantasies of more recent historiography. Approaches that apply universal criteria or “thresholds” to determine when the polis arose fail to acknowledge the sheer variety in political organization across different communities at the same time as they establish an artificial disjunction within a more gradual and continuous process of state formation. And undue emphasis on the atomistic nature of the polis as the primary unit of political, social, and cultural analysis neglects the connectivity that linked various levels of organization within a wider Mediterranean world.
These are all valid criticisms and they will be addressed at various points throughout this book, but dismissive, outright rejections of the polis concept on the basis of its “irrelevance” or “uselessness” to understanding Archaic Greek history are undoubtedly too cavalier. Even the briefest perusal of Archaic Greek poetry or the Histories of Herodotus reveals an almost obsessive fixation on the polis. While different authors undoubtedly entertained different conceptions of what the polis encompassed, which may or may not match with modern definitions, they surely had some idea of what it was they were describing and the historian has an obligation to try to understand these ideas and how they changed over time.
Most modern treatments of the early polis are based, directly or indirectly, on the definitions offered in the fourth century by Aristotle in the Politics. Thus, while the polis is regarded as resulting from the physical fusion of villages (komai), it is its characterization as a community of citizens that is typically given the most emphasis. The community should ideally be small enough that officeholders are familiar to voters but large enough to encourage labor specialization in order to achieve self-sufficiency (autarkeia). Perhaps most importantly from the modern perspective, the polis should be self-governing and independent (autonomos). Aristotle recognized the importance of employing historical evidence: the Athenian Constitution, written by a member of his school, is the sole surviving example of the originally 158 accounts that described the constitutional histories of different Greek poleis and served as the empirical database for the Politics. But the Politics itself is a work of political theory, not history, and we cannot automatically assume that the “ideal type” of polis that it depicts is strictly representative of any single actual polis in Aristotle’s day - let alone in earlier centuries.
In a massive undertaking which, in some senses, offers a modern parallel to the research project of Aristotle and his school, the Copenhagen Polis Center, under the direction of the Danish historian Mogens Herman Hansen, has collected all known attestations of the term polis and its derivatives in the period ca. 650 to ca. 323. The aim is both to determine what the ancient Greeks thought a polis was and to identify those communities that they expressly defined as poleis. The results have challenged certain orthodoxies: self-sufficiency, for example, was rarely achievable in practice while external autonomy was not a defining characteristic of the polis since there are many communities that were politically or militarily dependent on more powerful neighbors but are still named as poleis in ancient sources. Above all else, the term polis - at least by the Classical period - seems to have signified three things simultaneously: it could be used synonymously with astu to indicate an urban center and with ge or khora to denote a territory which included both the urban center and its hinterland, but it also signified a political community in the Aristotelian sense. The equation of polis with a territory is not terribly common but the urban connotations of the term would appear to be just as important as the social associations. In fact, one of the conclusions to have emerged is that the term polis was not indiscriminately applied to any urban center but only to an urban center that served as a center for the political community. Conversely, and with very few exceptions, only those political communities that possessed an urban center could be described as poleis. As both an urban center and a political community, then, the translation of polis as “city-state” - an equation that was immortalized with the publication, in 1898, of Jacob Burckhardt’s Griechische Kulturgeschichte - is not as inappropriate as is sometimes claimed. It is true that the Greek poleis differed in several important respects from medieval Italian comuni or German Reichsstadte. Yet the similarities between these various city-state cultures far outweigh the differences and serve to distinguish this type of political formation from nation-states, nomadic states, or feudal systems.
It should, nevertheless, be pointed out that the vast majority of the Copenhagen Polis Center’s evidence derives from texts of the fifth and fourth centuries. We cannot be completely certain that the three meanings of polis that can be identified in Classical sources were all inherent in the term from the outset. In fact, it has been argued that since urbanization in early Greece was limited and proceeded at such a slow pace, it makes little sense to talk about “cities” before the late sixth century. Conversely, the argument continues, certain features in the material record of Dark Age settlements such as Lefkandi or Khora on Naxos could be taken to indicate complex political and social hierarchies that might have survived the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces ca. 1200. According to this view, the “state” aspects of the polis preceded its urban characteristics.
There is, however, some evidence to suggest a different reconstruction. On the basis of cognates in other Indo-European languages - e. g. Old Indian pur; Lithuanian pilis; Latvian pils - it seems likely that the original meaning of polis was “stronghold.” Indeed, in some literary and epigraphic texts the term p(t)olis is used interchangeably with “acropolis” in contexts that suggest that this was its signification in the Late Bronze Age. This should indicate, then, that the meaning of the term was extended to denote the urban settlement that sprang up around the foot of the acropolis and then the surrounding territory more generally before coming to be applied to the political community of that territory.
It is probably no accident that in the Iliad, polis is only very occasionally used to indicate a community: upon recognizing Hector’s lifeless body, for example, Cassandra laments the hero’s death, describing him as a “delight to the polis and to all the people” (24.706). In the vast majority of cases, however, polis is employed synonymously with astu to denote a physical place. When, in the Odyssey (8.555), the Phaeaecian king Alcinous asks Odysseus to name his gaia (“land” or perhaps “region”), demos (probably “territory” to judge from the term’s Mycenaean ancestor), and polis, it is clear that he is “zooming in” on an ever more precise identification of his guest’s origins, in which polis can only really refer to a specific settlement. Nor is this more restrictive sense of polis limited to Homer. Tyrtaeus (Document 4.1) employs the termpatris rather than polis when glorifying the warrior who sacrifices his life for his homeland and his juxtaposition of the term polis with “rich fields” (pionas agrous) clearly indicates that he had a physical, rather than social, connotation in mind. One cannot discount the possibility that Tyrtaeus is here consciously employing “Homeric”
World History
