Polis
Polis means 'city' in Ancient Greek. The ancient word polis had socio-political connotations not possessed by modern usage. For example, Modern Greek πόλη, "city", is located within a χώρα, "country", which is a πατρίδα or "native land" for its citizens. In ancient Greece, the polis was the native land; there was no other. It had a constitution and demanded the supreme loyalty of its citizens. Χώρα was only the countryside, not a country. Ancient Greece was not a sovereign country, but was territory occupied by Hellenes, people who claimed as their native language some dialect of Ancient Greek.
Poleis did not only exist within the area of the modern Republic of Greece. A collaborative study carried by the Copenhagen Polis Centre from 1993 to 2003 classified about 1,500 settlements of the Archaic and Classical ancient-Greek-speaking population as poleis. These ranged from the Caucasus to Southern Spain, and from Southern Russia to Northern Egypt, spread over the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. They have been termed a network of micro-states. Many of the settlements still exist, such as Marseille and Syracuse, but they are no longer Greek or micro-states, belonging to other countries.
The ancient Greek world was split between homeland regions and colonies. A colony was generally sent out by a single polis to relieve the population or some social crisis or seek out more advantageous country. It was called a metropolis or "mother city". The Greeks were careful to identify the homeland region and the metropolis of a colony. Typically a metropolis could count on the socio-economic and military support of its colonies, but not always. The homeland regions were located on the Greek mainland. Each gave an ethnic or "racial" name to its population and poleis. Acarnania, for example, was the location of the Acarnanian people and poleis. A colony from there would then be considered Acarnanian, no matter how far away from Acarnania it was. Colonization was thus the main method of spreading Greek poleis and culture.
Ancient Greeks did not reserve the term polis solely for Greek-speaking settlements. For example, Aristotle's study of the polis names also Carthage, comparing its constitution to that of Sparta. Carthage was a Phoenician-speaking city. Many nominally Greek colonies also included municipalities of non-Greek speakers, such as Syracuse.
Definition
The word polis is used in the first known work of Greek literature, the Iliad, up to 350 times. The few hundred ancient Greek classical works online at the Perseus Digital Library use the word thousands of times. The most frequent use is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, an ancient historian, with a maximum of 2,943. A study of inscriptions found 1,450 that used polis before 300 BC, 425 Athenian, and 1,025 from the rest of the range of poleis. There was no difference in meaning between literary and inscriptional usages.Polis became loaded with many incidental meanings. The major meanings are 'state' and 'community'. The theoretical study of the polis extends as far back as the beginning of Greek literature, when the works of Homer and Hesiod in places try to portray an ideal state. The study took a great leap forward when Plato and the academy in general undertook to define what is meant by the good, or ideal, polis.
Plato analyzes the polis in the Republic, the Greek title of which, Πολιτεία, itself derives from the word polis. The best form of government of the polis for Plato is the one that leads to the common good. The 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.
Books II–IV of The Republic are concerned with Plato addressing the makeup of an ideal polis. In The Republic, Socrates is concerned with the two underlying principles of any society: mutual needs and differences in aptitude. Starting from these two principles, Socrates deals with the economic structure of an ideal polis. According to Plato, there are five main economic classes of any polis: producers, merchants, sailors/shipowners, retail traders, and wage earners. Along with the two principles and five economic classes, there are four virtues. The four virtues of a "just city" are wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. With all of these principles, classes, and virtues, it was believed that a "just city" would exist.
Breaking away from Plato and the academy, a teacher there, Aristotle, founded his own school, the Lyceum, a university. One of its strongest curricula was political science, which Aristotle invented. He dispatched students over the world of the polis to study the society and government of individual poleis and bring the information back to the document, placing the document in a political science section of the library. Only two documents have survived, Politics and Athenian Constitution. These are a part of any modern political science curriculum.
Both major ancient Greek philosophers were concerned with elucidating an existing aspect of the society in which they lived, the polis. Plato was more interested in the ideal; Aristotle, the real. Both had a certain view of what the polis was; that is, a conceptual model. All models must be tested, by definition. Aristotle, of course, could send direct observers. The only way to know a polis now is through a study of ancient literature, and to some extent archaeology. There are thousands of pages of writing and certainly thousands of sites. The problem is to know what information to select for a model and what to neglect as probably irrelevant.
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. However, no model ever seems to resolve all the paradoxes or provide for every newly considered instance. The question is not whether poleis can be found to fit a particular model, but whether the model covers all the poleis, which, apparently, no model ever has, even the ancient ones. The redefining process continues.
The Copenhagen study rejects either model and proposes instead the microstate. Some scholars are cynical, rejecting the idea that any solution can be found. This argument places polis in the same category of Plato's indefinable abstracts, such as freedom and justice. However, there is a practical freedom and a practical justice, although not theoretically definable, and the ancient authors must mean something consistent when they use the word polis. The problem is to find it.
Modern usage
The Modern Greek word πόλη is a direct descendant of the ancient word and roughly means 'city' or an urban place. However, the Ancient Greek term that specifically meant the totality of urban buildings and spaces was asty, rather than polis.Modern models
The subjective element of a model
In modern historiography of the ancient world πόλις is often transliterated to polis without any attempt to translate it into the language of the historiographer. For example, Eric Voegelin wrote a work in English entitled "The World of the Polis". In works such as this the author intends to define polis himself; i.e., to present a model of society from one or more of a list of ancient Greek cities culled from ancient Greek literature and inscriptions.For example, 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". This type of city is not to be regarded as "the Hellenic type of the polis". The Greeks set adrift by the Dorian invasions countered by joining to form the Hellenic poleis. The polis can thus be dated to this defensive resettlement period. Quite a few poleis fit the model, no doubt, which was widely promulgated in the 20th century.
Classical Athens, however, is a paradox in this model, to which Voegelin has no answer. He says, "in the most important instance, that of Athens, the continuity between the Aegean settlement and the later polis seems to have been unbroken." It seems a matter of simple logic that if Athens was a Hellenic polis in the time of the Hellenic poleis and was continuous with the pre-Doric city phase, then pre-Doric Athens must have been a Hellenic polis even then. The model fails in its chief instance.
A second approach to the modelling of the polis is not to use the word polis at all, but to translate it into the language of the historiographer. The model is thus inherent in the translation, which has the disadvantage of incorporating a priori assumptions as though they were substantiated facts and were not the pure speculations they actually are.
Problems with Coulanges' ancient city
One of the most influential of these translative models was the French La Cite antique, translated again into English "the ancient city", by Coulanges. Only to read the title gives credibility to the idea that there is a model type inclusive of all ancient cities, and that the author need only present it without proving it. This type is based on the ancient practice of translating polis in Greek literature to civitas in Latin literature and vice versa.Coulanges' confidence that the Greek and Italic cities were the same model was based on the then newly discovered Indo-European language: "Go back as far as we may in the history of the Indo-European race, of which the Greeks and Italians are branches,...." The Greeks had a genos, "family"; the Italics, a gens. Corresponding to Greek phratry, a group of families, was the Italic curia. Corresponding to Greek phyle, a tribe of multiple phratries, was the tribus. The comparison of IE cultures is a solid technique, but it is not enough to develop a solid model of "the ancient city", which must take historical disparities into consideration.
From the analogy Coulanges weaves a tale of imaginary history. Families, he asserts, originally lived dispersed and alone. 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. In the city the ancient tribes remained sacrosanct. The city was actually a confederacy of ancient tribes.
Coulange's tale, based on the fragmentary history of priesthoods, does not much resemble the history of cities such as it survives. For example, there was no familial and tribal development of Rome. Livy, the grandest of the historians of early Rome, portrays a city formed under competitive duress by a collaboration of warriors, some of whom were from among the neighboring Etruscans, led by Romulus and Remus, the true descendants of the Trojans who with the aborigines had earlier formed the Latin people. They were not welcome among the Latins of Alba Longa, and so they had turned to raiding from their base in their seven hills. The myth supposes they had been nourished by a she-wolf and lived a wild life camping in the country. They were, however, supported by an ally. Evander had led a colony from Arcadia before the Trojan War and had placed a polis on one of the hills named Pallantium, later becoming Palatine. He had actually raised the Trojan boys and supported them now. When the band of marauders became populous enough Romulus got them to agree to a synoecism of settlements in the hills to form a new city, Rome, to be walled in immediately. Remus had to be sacrificed because he had set a precedent of jumping over the wall in mockery of it.
There were no families, no phratries, no tribes, except among the already settled Latins, Greeks, and Etruscans. The warriors acquired a social structure by kidnapping the nearby Italic Sabines and settling the matter by agreeing on a synoecism with the Sabines also, who were Latins. Alba Longa was ignored, later subdued. The first four tribes were not the result of any previous social evolution. They were the first municipal division of the city manufactured for the purpose. They were no sort of confederacy. Rome initially was ruled by Etruscan kings.