Realm
Ancient Greek social and political organisation
A polis is any Ancient Greek city-state. About 1,500 such states are known to have existed. Primarily located in Greece & Asia Minor, Greek cultural poleis were founded throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Greek City-States”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
A polis (pl.: poleis) is any Ancient Greek city-state. About 1,500 such states are known to have existed. Primarily located in Greece & Asia Minor, Greek cultural poleis were founded throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.
The word polis had a different meaning in Ancient Greek than it does in Modern Greek. The Modern Greek word πόλη (póli), "city", is located within a χώρα (chóra), "country", which is a πατρίδα (patrída) or "homeland" for its citizens. In ancient Greece, a polis was also considered to be a "homeland" and was autonomous, not necessarily belonging to any larger political entity. Poleis had their own constitutions and demanded loyalty from their citizens.
The ancient Greek world was split between homeland regions and colonies. Particularly during the Archaic period, poleis sent out settlers to found new colonies, which would maintain economic, cultural, and military ties with the mother-city for centuries afterwards. Colonization was the main method of spreading Greek linguistic, religious, and artistic culture.
Ancient Greek writers also used the term polis to refer to non-Greek cities and settlements. For example, Aristotle's study of the polis also discussed Carthage, a Phoenician city, in comparing its constitution with Sparta's. Many nominally Greek colonies also included large non-Greek populations, such as the Sicels in Syracuse.
The Modern Greek word πόλη (polē) is a direct descendant of the ancient word, and roughly means 'city' or an urban area. However, the Ancient Greek term that for an urban area was asty (ἄστυ), rather than polis.
The word polis occurs in Greek literature throughout the Classical era. Its major meanings are of 'state' and 'community'. Ancient Greek theorists were interested in studying the nature of a polis; the philosophers Plato and Aristotle have left us the most extensive writings on poleis. While Plato was more interested in theorizing on the ideal state, Aristotle studied how they functioned in reality.
In Plato's Republic, the philosopher argued that the best form of government is the one that leads to the common good. The Republic is concerned with the two underlying principles of any society: mutual needs and differences in aptitude. According to Plato, there are five main economic classes of any polis: producers, merchants, sailors/shipowners, retail traders, and wage earners. A polis also has four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. With all of these principles, classes, and virtues, it was believed that a "just city" (polis) would exist. Plato argued that a philosopher king is the best ruler because, as a philosopher, he is acquainted with the Form of the Good. In Plato's analogy of the ship of state, the philosopher king steers the polis, as if she were a ship, in the best direction.
Aristotle was one of Plato's students. In order to learn more about the nature of poleis, he dispatched followers all over the world to study the society and government of individual poleis and bring their information back for scholarly research. Of all the writings Aristotle wrote on this subject only two works survive, Politics and Athenian Constitution.
Classical studies of the last few hundred years have been relatively stable in their views of the polis, relying basically on just a few models: the concept of a city-state, and Fustel de Coulange's model of the ancient city. The challenge has been to create a model which adequately describes all poleis.
In modern historiography of the ancient world πόλις is often transliterated to polis without substituting a modern word such as "city-state". Authors attempt to define the world polis themselves, by presenting a model of society from one or more of a list of ancient Greek cities (poleis) culled from ancient Greek literature and inscriptions.
For example, in "The World of the Polis," Eric Voegelin describes a model in which "town settlements" existed in the Aegean for a few thousand years prior to the Dorian invasions, forming an "aggregate, the pre-Doric city". After the Dorian invasions, Voegelin argued that Greeks joined (synoecism) with Dorians to form the Hellenic poleis. He therefore dated the genesis of the poleis to this defensive resettlement period (the Dark Age). But Voegelin also proposes that some cities, such as Athens, had continuity with Bronze Age communities that existed before the Dorian Invasion.
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a 19th century scholar, proposed one of the most influential models of the polis in La Cité antique ("The ancient city"). Coulanges' model attempted to describe non-Greek city formations as well, such as the Roman civitas.
Coulanges' argued that Greek and Italic cities shared similar institutions because they both had Indo-European origins. He noted the correspondences between Greek and Italic terms, such as between the Greek genos ("family") with the Italic gens, Greek phratry (a group of families), with the Italic curia, and the Greek phyle (a tribe of multiple phratries), was the tribus.
Coulanges asserted that families originally lived dispersed and alone, but when the population grew to a certain point, families joined into phratries. Further growth caused phratries to join into tribes, and then tribes into a city. The ancient city, therefore, was actually a confederacy of ancient tribes, and the ancient tribes remained sacrosanct.
Coulange's explanation on the origins of the ancient city differs from ancient theories. For example, Livy, a historian of early Rome, portrayed a city formed under competitive duress by a collaboration of warriors, some of whom were from among the neighboring Etruscans, without mentioning phratries or tribes, except among the already settled Latins, Greeks, and Etruscans. The warriors acquired a social structure by kidnapping nearby Italic Sabine women and eventually agreeing on a synoecism with the Sabines.
Coulanges work was followed by the innovation of the English city-state by W. Warde Fowler in 1893. The Germans had already invented the word in their own language: Stadtstaat, "city-state", referring to the many one-castle principates that abounded at the time. The name was applied to the polis by Herder in 1765. Fowler anglicised it: "It is, then, a city-state that we have to deal with in Greek and Roman history; a state in which the whole life and energy of the people, political, intellectual, religious, is focused at one point, and that point a city." He applied the word polis to it, explaining that, "The Latin race, indeed, never realised the Greek conception ... but this was rather owing to their less vivid mental powers than to the absence of the phenomenon."
Polis is thus often translated as 'city-state'. The model, however, fares no better than any other. City-states no doubt existed, but so also did many poleis that were not city-states. The minimum semantic load of this hyphenated neologism is that the referent must be a city and must be a sovereign state. As a strict rule, the definition fails on its exceptions. A polis may not be urban at all, as was pointed out by Thucydides regarding the "polis of the Lacedaemonians", that it was "composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas". Moreover, around the five villages of Lacedaemon, which had been placed in formerly Achaean land, were the villages of the former Achaeans, called the Perioeci ("dwellers round"). They had been left as supposedly free poleis by the invaders, but they were subject to and served the interests of the Dorian poleis. They were not city-states, failing the criterion of sovereignty.
Lacedaemon by the city-state rule thus falls short of being a polis. The earlier Achaean acropolis stood at the edge of the valley and was decrepit and totally unused. Lacedaemon had neither a city nor an acropolis, but all the historiographers referred to it as a polis. The rule of the city-state persisted until late in the 20th century, when the accumulation of mass data and sponsored databases made possible searches and comparisons of multiple sources not previously possible, a few of which are mentioned in this article.
Hansen reports that the Copenhagen Centre found it necessary to "dissociate the concept of polis from the concepts of independence and autonomia". They were able to define a class of "dependent poleis" to consist of 15 types, all of which the ancient sources call poleis, but were not entirely sovereign, such as cities that had been independent, but were later synoecized into a larger polis, new colonies of other poleis, forts, ports, or trading posts some distance removed from their mother poleis, poleis that had joined a federation with binding membership, etc. The Perioeci were included in this category.
When the models are set aside as primary sources (which they never were) it is clear that historiography must be founded on what the authors and inscriptions say. Moreover, there is a time window for the active polis. The fact that polis was used in the Middle Ages to translate civitas does not make these civitates into poleis. The Copenhagen Study uses quite a few evidential indications of a probable polis, in addition to the manuscripts and inscriptions, some of which are victory in the Panhellenic Games, participation in the games, having an official agent, or proxenos, in another polis, presence of civic subdivisions, presence of citizens and a Constitution (Laws).
Aside from modern theories, it is difficult to establish how the ancient Greeks thought of the polis. The only author whose writings have been preserved that wrote extensively about the polis appears to have been Aristotle with his book Politics (Πολιτικά, Politiká).
A polis is identified as such by its standing as polis among the community of poleis. Poleis have ambassadors, can join or host the Hellenic Games, etc. According to Aristotle, their most essential characteristics are those that, if changed, would result in a different polis. These are three. A polis has a particular location, population, and constitution (politeia). For example, if a polis moves en masse, receives a different form of government, or an influx of new population, it is not the same polis.
Aristotle expresses two main definitions of polis, neither of which is possible as stated. In the second (see below for the first) a polis is "a collection of citizens...." (Book III I 2). If they already are citizens, then there is no need for anyone to collect to create a polis, as it already exists. If they are not citizens then they cannot be defined as a polis and cannot act as such. Aristotle's only consistent meaning is that at the moment of collecting together a population creates a polis of which they are now citizens.
This moment of creation, however long it might be, is a logical necessity; otherwise, the citizenship recedes indefinitely into the unknown past. All current citizenships must have had their first moments, typically when the law-maker had gotten his laws ratified, or the colony had broken with the metropolis.
The ancient writers referred to these initial moments under any of several words produced with the same prefix, sunoik- (Latinized synoec-), "same house", meaning objects that are from now on to be grouped together as being the same or similar. It is a figure of speech, the most general instance being sunoik-eioun, "to be associated with", its noun being sunoik-eiosis, the act of association.
A second verb, sunoik-ein, "to live together," can mean individuals, as in marriage, or conjointly, as in a community. The community meaning appears in Herodotus. A closely related meaning, "to colonize jointly with", is found there also, and in the whole gamut of historical writers, Xenophon, Plato, Strabo, Plutarch; i.e., more or less continuously through all periods from Archaic to Roman. Associated nouns are sunoik-ia, sunoik-esion, sunoik-idion, sunoik-eses, sunoik-isis, a multiplication to be expected over centuries of a single language. These can all mean community in general, but they have two main secondary meanings, to institute a community politically or to enlarge the buildings in which it resides.
Finally in the Classical Period and later, the -z-/-s- extension began to be used, as evidenced in Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch: sunoik-izein, "combine or join into one city", with its nouns sunoik-isis and sunoik-ismos, "founding a city", from which the English scholarly term synoecism derives. All poleis looked back to a synoecism under any name as their source of politeia. Not all settlements were poleis; for example, an emporion, or "market reserved for foreign trade", might be part of a polis or out on its own.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Polis”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.