The rise of cities and city-states provides the key to our understanding of what was going on in the archaic period. The development of the phalanx, the creation of temples and sanctuaries, the birth of philosophy and the flourishing of lyric poetry are all unthinkable outside the context of the polis and outside an urban setting. Not surprisingly, the rise of the city-state has long been central to the study of the period. More recently, however, it has been recognized that it is possible, and perhaps even necessary, to distinguish between the process of urbanization - which created “cities” - and the process of state formation, which created “states.”2 This chapter accordingly concentrates on cities and urbanization; the process of state formation is dealt with in ch. 20.
Over the last decades, archaeologists and ancient historians have also come to recognize that the rise of the city (and, indeed, of the state) was a long-drawn-out process: it took most of the archaic period and had not reached completion even by the end of the sixth century. The appearance of monumental architecture in the late eighth century marks an important step in the creation of an urban ambience in centralized settlement nuclei, but on the whole ancient Greek urbanism can only be understood by using a rather long timescale.3
The “city” is notoriously difficult to define. Historians, sociologists, economists, architectural historians, social psychologists, town planners and geographers all use very different concepts and definitions.4 Their criteria variously stress the city’s distinct legal status, size, occupation density, morphology, way of living, type of society, or mentality. There are numerous exceptions to the rule even at the level of single definitions. Size may seem to be an unproblematic criterion, but it is not. For instance, a nucleation of 250 inhabitants would count as a village in the United States, but in Sweden would have the status of a town. Occupation density is not always a distinctive criterion: there are fewer people per square kilometre in the city of Los Angeles than in some rural areas in Asia. As far as ways of living and economic activities are concerned, towns in north-west Europe during the Middle Ages may be rightly characterized as centers of craft production and trade. However, this does not apply to modern cities in Sicily and Andalusia, which are large agro-towns. Finally, impersonal relationships may determine the type of society and mentality that prevails in cities of the modern, industrialized world, but such a qualification hardly matches what we know of medieval towns.
Yet another problem is that sometimes settlements gradually expand and their sociopolitical organization and social interactions become more complex. This raises the question at what point exactly such a settlement stops being a village and starts to meet the criteria that make it a city. It is, of course, impossible to fix this point in time.
Thus, cities are multifaceted, variable and dynamic phenomena to which universalizing criteria and simplifying definitions can do no justice. The city must be understood in its specific temporal and spatial context. This observation has implications for the study of archaic Greece. If the city is a culturally specific phenomenon, we should study the city on the basis of contemporary sources of information. We must ask our sources three important questions: What were archaic Greek cities like? How did the Greeks themselves see them? And how did these cities come into being and develop?
The limitations of the source material determine how one tackles these questions. Political treatises on the institutions of some major Greek cities, and philosophical essays about what the ideal city should look like, are available only from the classical period. There is only very fragmentary written documentation for the archaic era, but by piecing together scraps of evidence it is possible to reconstruct how archaic Greeks saw the city. One of the positive qualities of the main literary sources of this period - Homer, Hesiod and the lyric poets - is that they are part of a tradition of oral poetry: because such poetry was performed for a live audience, the ideas and values expressed are likely to have been shared by a large group of people, and are thus very valuable sources for a reconstruction of mentalities. It will become evident that the source material allows the reconstruction of a coherent picture of the ideational and ideological side of city and city life, and of life in the countryside.5
Visual imagery is another important source of information for the archaic period. However, the information provided by the iconographic evidence is patchy. The archaic Greeks seem not to have been interested in producing images of cities and landscapes, in contrast to their Minoan and Mycenaean forebears, their contemporaries in the Near East and later the Romans. Archaic Greek depictions of nature or of man’s built environment often follow the principle of pars pro toto. An isolated column may indicate the presence of public architecture, just as a single olive tree may show that a scene takes place in the countryside.6 Moreover, the images are especially concerned with the high life of the urban elite.7 For a more comprehensive and more diversified picture of towns and countryside, one has to depend on reconstructions made on the basis of archaeological findings.
World History
