The reasons for the origins of the city-state are controversial. It is sometimes said that the mountainous landscape of the Greek peninsula gave rise to the city-state. Although favorable for such developments, this sort of geography need not be determinative: city-states dominated in flat Sumer, and kingdoms have often held sway over mountainous regions, indeed in Greece itself. Particular historical circumstances must also contribute. Villages may have coalesced into larger units as communications and economies improved. Towns may have developed their identities in conjunction with local cults, to promote and protect the favored gods and heroes. In this too, the parallel with Sumer is strong.
Some early towns developed as fortified centers in isolated places, if menaced by pirates or untrustworthy foreigners. Such is the case of Karphi, a village of Minoan refugees established high in the hills of Crete but occupied for a short time only, from ca. 1050 to 950 BC. Coastal sites too needed to be picked with care. Smyrna, founded during the migrations to Ionia, was built on a promontory jutting into a bay. Indeed, the early Greeks favored such peninsulas, because they could be easily defended. A good example of a long-lived settlement on such a land form is Kinet Hoyuk on the north-east Mediterranean coast near modern Dortyol (Turkey), probably the city of Issos in the Classical period. The Iron Age town, shown here in an imaginative reconstruction (Figure 12.2), was built directly on top of at least 2,000 years of continuous occupation.
Also valued were hilltops near the sea: again, defensible situations. Some important sites of the early Iron Age profit from this latter sort of location. Lefkandi, on the island of Euboea, occupied a prominent mound right by the sea, and Zagora, an eighth century BC town on Andros, was built on a bluff rising high above the Aegean, an advantage in security that outweighed meager water supplies and ferocious winds. As dangers of marauders receded, those towns that were well situated to profit from trade or agriculture survived and prospered, whereas those built strictly for protection, such as Karphi and Zagora, were abandoned.
The polis consisted of an urban center and a varying amount of rural territory. Some were quite small, while others were huge. Syracuse, in Sicily, one of the largest, possessed 4,740km2 of land, port city and hinterland, with a population of perhaps 250,000 in its heyday in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Control of the government varied. In general, the early city-states were ruled
Figure 12.2 Kinet Hoyuk in the Iron Age (reconstruction)
By kings, according to later Greek tradition; we might think of them as chiefs, in anthropological terms. Gradually the power base widened. Kings gave way to aristocracies, a group of wealthy citizens, and, in some cities, aristocracies eventually yielded to the citizenry at large. Occasionally a tyrant, a man who seized power illegally, would intrude. Whatever good he might do, and the term “tyrant” originally had no quality of bad or good attached to it, his descendants usually lacked the father’s gifts, roused animosities, and were overthrown.
Citizens lived in both city and countryside. Political rights, including the famed democracy of ancient Greece, were restricted to male citizens. Women were expected to manage the household and raise children. In addition to the citizens and their families, Greek cities contained large numbers of non-voting free persons (such as foreign emigrants), sometimes indentured servants and farmers (the Spartan helots), and slaves.
World History
