Using intensive and extensive survey results to identify demographic climaxes and urban growth in diverse regions of Greece during antiquity (Bintliff 1997b), we find (Figure 9.5) that the florescence of town and country that had been largely focused in the Southeast Mainland during Late Geometric to Archaic times, has now in the fifth and fourth centuries spread more widely, encompassing much of the Southern Mainland from Central Greece down to the Central Peloponnese, together with the Aegean islands (Crete excepted) and the Western Ionian islands. The Great Power battles are between states in these regions, but involvement of surrounding states spreads the conflict over the entire Aegean world and beyond. Add to this the demand of the major cities for timber, everyday and precious metals, mercenaries, and at times food supplies, then one can suggest that the maximally-dense regions of the South form a “core” having close and stimulating relations with a very large “periphery.” Not surprisingly we find that as a result of interventions from the core in politics, military strategy, and interstate economics, parts of the periphery increasingly begin to enhance their militarism, their urbanism, and their investment in status monuments (such as temples) in order to promote their identity and significance.
Although in the core regions and adjacent Lowland zones of South-Central Greece, the basic network of nucleated local centers (proto-poleis and poleis: see Figure 8.3), was expanding through the Geometric era and probably reached its full numerical and spatial extent by the end of Archaic times, the Classical era in the core lands saw these centers grow in size and population. The increasing simplification of the nucleated settlement map into genuine political centers and lesser places subordinate to them (called “villages” (komai) or “demes”) masks the fact that in the vital Southeast Mainland, population generally rose in major and minor towns, and also in villages, whilst the larger city-states such as Athens had incorporated into their swollen territory several town-like settlements, which continued their function despite downgrading to “village.”
Estimating city size combines topographic survey, evidence from urban excavations, surface survey where towns lie today in cultivated or at least open ground, and (more rarely) textual sources. The area enclosed by defensive walls can be used, but critically, to suggest minimum areas for Classical towns, whilst the dating of circuit walls is a well-developed field within Aegean archaeology (Lawrence 1979). Nonetheless, since it is well attested in ancient and medieval urbanism that a town’s population may outgrow its defense system, the existence of extramural domestic sectors should be tested. Legal requirements in general use throughout Greco-Roman civilization, from Classical Greek times onwards, prohibiting burial within a town’s walls because of ritual pollution, make the mapping of cemeteries an additional helpful tool for confirming the likely edge of a nucleated settlement at any particular era.
Geometric-Archaic Greece was dominated by nucleated settlements, predominantly village or hamlet size to modern eyes, with occasional town-sized communities, often precursors of major Classical cities. The city-state emerged almost entirely from the smaller nucleations, hence the term “village-state” (Kirsten 1956, Bintliff 1994). Although most became incorporated as satellite settlements of slightly larger city-states of around 1 to 1,5 hours walking-radius territory by the fifth to fourth centuries BC (the “Normalpolis”), alongside the rarer, much larger “territorial states” (“Megalopoleis”) such as Athens or
Sparta, their function usually continued throughout Greco-Roman antiquity as district centers of population, trade, industry, and farming. The reality of the Classical landscape is obscured by emphasizing formal state centers and forgetting the “urban” character of numerous large villages or small towns which existed within city-states and territorial states. In practice a 10 ha minimum size appears useful to consider a settlement as “geographically urban” (Bintliff 1997a), thus incorporating a large body of Classical villages, although there were exceptionally even smaller formal poleis which claimed independence despite limited demographic and economic resources.
Studying ancient urbanism from a geographical rather than legal and constitutional perspective is especially necessary when we enquire how the landscape was organized within the largest territorial states of Classical Greece. Attica, at around 2500 km2, is the same size as neighboring Boeotia with its 14—15 city-states in a fragile confederacy, yet officially from its earliest accurate records possessed just one town, Athens, in a simple city-state structure. Yet we know that by the end of the Archaic era the population was divided into some 139 villages or “demes,” within whose number Athens itself appears as an agglomeration of suburban quarters (also called demes). As we saw in Figure 8.3, the rural demes form a systematic grid of similar-sized territories, appropriate to villages or small towns, whilst the variable number of representative councillors each rural deme supplied to the state’s executive council indicates indeed that demes must have run the entire range of sizes from hamlet to significant urban centers in their own right. Hans Lohmann has emphasized this variability in several studies of the still little-researched Attic countryside (Lohmann 1992, 1995).
At one extreme is the one deme we know almost everything about, Atene, due to Lohmann’s remarkably fine survey of its territory (1993b). Here the community possessed no nucleated residential focus, consisting merely of rural estates, mostly large and well-established. However there must have been a central meeting-place where the necessary political, ritual, and social events required of demes took place. Perhaps several of the rural demes partially excavated to make way for the new (2004) Athens Airport in the central inland plain of Attica, the Mesogeia, may have had a similarly dispersed character (Tsouni 2001). Next, here and elsewhere in Attica, there are a few partially-excavated villages, both deme centers and subsidiary settlements to an official deme focus. Finally there are at least a handful of very large Attic demes, where the political quotas and/or the archaeological evidence indicate that the main settlement had a genuinely town-like character, such as Sounion, Acharnai, Rhamnous, and Thorikos. Not surprisingly, legends circulating in Classical Athens suggest that prior to the creation of the unitary territorial state of Athens, during the “Dark Age,” there were several rival centers vying with Athens for regional power.
Similarly, within the large territorial state of Thespiae in Boeotia, focused on a very large polis of some 70 ha, minor district foci such as Askra, some 10—12 ha in size, appear to be officially villages but of an extent, according to our surface survey, to have accommodated around 1000 people; Askra possesses its own discrete fertile “settlement-chamber” and many farm satellites within that (see Figure 8.4). Both Kirsten’s term “Dorfstaat” and an ancient Greek term komopolis, with a similar meaning, suit these villages with a town-like character.
World History
