Greece - The Polis

All beginnings are lost in obscurity, including those of a race or people. Still, the social foundations of Greek life, namely, marriage and the family and property rights, appear to have been present already in pre-Hellenic times; they were certainly present among the Hellenes and Greco-Italic people before they differentiated into sub-groups. They must have been shaped by a primal religion which bestowed a central role on the ancestral cult as well as on the hearth. Ancestor worship also imposed monogamy, found in Greece at the very beginning, as evidenced by elaborate marriage rites and the severe punishment adultery entailed. And, likewise, the right to own land was causally related to veneration of the hearth and graves.

According to Diodorus, the hearth taught man the art of building houses. Originally, Greek houses were separated from each other; there were no rows of houses with partition walls between them. The family burial site was located on one's own land; therefore, this property could not be alienated. The duties deriving from ancestor worship also imposed the right of inheritance. The son inherited the land, the daughters being left out. But, to guarantee the continuation of sacrifices to the dead, daughters as inheritors were married to the next of kin, and adoption was permitted. Paternal power must have been very comprehensive.

In historical times the genos, i.e., the racial community in the old sense, was present only as a vestigial remnant, surviving nowhere in its original form. The genos appeared as a recollection, as an awareness of a common ancestry, and in a communal worship of the dead, the grave site being the only property held in common. The relation of the later lines of descent to the ancestral lineage remains in question; the accession of slaves and hired hands also had a complicating effect on the racial groupings. The interrelation of the racial stocks and tribes baffles conception and is purely hypothetical. We simply cannot tell whether families formed phratries, phratries phylae, and phylae tribes, or whether, on the contrary, the tribe was first and it broke up into phylae, phratries, and sub-groups. Whether it was a process of subdivision or of amalgamation cannot be ascertained.

In any event, a remnant of gray antiquity towers like an ancient mountain peak above alluvial plains-the phylae. The marked changes in the social structure and in the usage of words have here, as elsewhere, greatly encumbered our grasp of the original affairs.

The population of the Doric states tended to be composed of three phylae -Pamphylians, Dymaneans, and Hyllosians. Pamphylus and Dyman were sons of King Aegimius and grandsons of Dorus, while Hyllus was the son of Heracles, who once helped Aegimius in combat against the Lapithae. This third branch must somehow have been the favored one, for it provided the leaders, the Heraclidae, under whom the Dorians set out on their renowned migrations and laid the foundation of states.

In Attica, and likely also in other Ionic states, there were four phylae: Geleontes, Argadeis, Aegicoreis, and Hopletes, heroes who were ostensibly the sons of Ion. Antiquity supposed that these names stood for various modes of life-roughly, landowners, tradesmen, shepherds, and a knightly nobility. Not until subsequent historical times did each of the phylae comprise eupatrids and ordinary citizens of every sort. The phylae became elective bodies and, after Solon's constitution, each one contributed one hundred members to the council. It can not be determined whether the phylae in their early stages lived each in a separate place or not. Later, to be sure, they all lived together; it sufficed to know to which phyle one belonged. The names of the Athenians who fell at Marathon were recorded on the gravestones set on the large burial mound, according to phylae and, indeed, according to the new ones with which Cleisthenes replaced the old ones.

Are we to say that originally the Dorians were divided into three phylae and the Ionians into four? Or rather that the Dorians took their rise from the combining of three phylae, the Athenians from the combining of four? A fiery smelting process inconceivable to us gives rise to a race of people, whose individual states quite consistently reflect their common origins.

Originally, phylae were based on descent rather than occupation, as suggested by the examples adduced, for later phylae were artificially created in new settlements. When misfortune befell Cyrene, Demonax was called from Arcadia to restore order; he created three phylae out of the main components of the population: the first of emigrants from Thera and their neighbors, the second of men from the Peloponnese and Crete, and the third of men from the islands.

In its three original tribes Rome perhaps possessed a far older arrangement than it realized, namely, proto-Greeks and Italians living together, as may well be supposed they did in that area. It is commonly agreed that, although tradition makes Ramnes, Tatian, and Luceres centuries [subdivisions of tribes] instituted by Romulus, they were originally names of tribes. In Rome, indeed, there flourished a counter legend, according to which three population groups came together in the city only many years after it had been founded-Latins, Sabines, and some Etruscans. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, born a Greek, was the only one to detect that all three tribes were native there and that those who came later, Sabines and whoever else, were subsequently incorporated among the tribes already existing.

Cleisthenes may have divided the four phylae of Attica into ten in order to equalize matters. The four old phylae which Solon used as a basis may well have become lopsided in power during the agitated century between Solon and Cleisthenes. Such arrangements are veritable Janus heads; one face turned toward ancient processes and foundations from which the whole complex descended, the other turned toward the basis of representative government in states and hence often altered and deliberately reshaped.

Before the Greeks, the Phoenicians had already founded poleis, i.e., city communities, city states, with bodies of laws. The power of the kings was limited by a council whose membership apparently was made up of the chiefs of privileged families. These city states were able to settle colonies that copied the organization of their mother cities. These poleis differed from the ancient royal strongholds of the Orient, which in each nation represented the central point of the whole; they differed from the gigantic army encampment of the Assyrian dynasties on the Tigris, differed from Babylon founded as a common stronghold for property and the gods, differed from the three alternating residences of the Achaemenids, differed from the great mercantile centers associated with oriental trade, and from the temple cities of Egypt: essentially, they were civil strongholds.

Would the honor of the Greeks suffer if one assumed that the Phoenician poleis influenced them? In many other respects the early impact of Phoenician culture on Greek life is recognized; we may assume that Thebes was originally a Phoenician city on what later became Boeotian territory. At all events, the Greeks must have had early knowledge of the cities along the Phoenician coast and of the colonies they planted.

For a long time they lived in the form of a multitude of smaller and larger tribes under chieftains called kings. Single tribes or their royal members must have taken over or built cities and citadels here and there. Thucydides supposed that the ancient cities, both on the islands and on the mainland, were built at some distance from the sea because of piracy. For only later, with the rise of Greek shipping, there were built strongly walled cities on the coasts and on the headlands, for commerce and defense against neighboring powers. Mycene and Tiryns are much older than any polis.

But, in that ancient period, people making up a tribe lived mostly in hamlets. It is not known whether these settlements were politically organized and how they were officially represented in the tribal government, nor to what extent common shrines and customs and mutual self-defense tended to unite neighboring settlements. If the people had access to strongholds in their communities or territories, they must have used them as common citadels, as refuges against pirates from land and sea. The ancient Sikanians in Sicily lived exclusively in fortified places on elevations, because of pirates. Still, it is said they lived in hamlets, although the term poleis is already in the offing for these settlements.

The ancient Greek tribes must have somehow been possessed of stronger impulses than the other Indo-Europeans. Their subsequent vitality and energy was, as it were, prefigured in the migrations, settlements, and intermingling of the old individual groups, which must often have been on the move for long periods. Accounts of these events are quite numerous but so tangled and confused that they only occasionally serve for a precise historical reconstruction. Every little clan has its own migration legends, whereas among the Germanic tribes only broad outlines were known. The Greeks are keenly aware of their origins and their settlements, even though they express this awareness in myths. They personify their past by means of tribal heroes who flee and later achieve new dominion; they weave these legends into the general body of myths. The legends, graves, and cults centered about these heroes are an earnest of the strong vitality later expressed in the poleis. Bards recited heroic lays; in addition, a more general body of poetry, at once genealogical and ethnographical, might arise, like that of the Eoiae, Homer's catalogue of ships, and similar epic material. These migration legends set no limits on the exploits the tribes perform, and children and children's children recount these exploits with defiant exultation.

The polis is the definitive form of the Greek state, a small independent state comprising a central city and surrounding territory; it tolerated no competing stronghold and no independent citizenry. The Greeks never thought of the polis as having developed gradually, but only as the product of a single creative act. Greek fantasy teems with notions of cities being founded full-fledged and, as whim had no part in shaping these cities, so the life in them is wholly under the aegis of necessity.

The Greeks had, above all, a city-state outlook. When the Achaeans, driven out of the southern Peloponnesus, settled in their new locality in Achaea on the bay of Corinth, they could certainly have established a unified state; indeed federation was at hand, but they had no penchant for it. Instead, they established twelve poleis where the Ionians had hitherto lived in hamlets scattered over twelve little districts, and actually their communal activities rarely went beyond periodic sacrifices and festivals, as those in the sacred grove of Zeus at Hamarion not far from Aegae. And the Ionians, who had fled from the Achaeans, went under Athenian leadership to the west coast of Asia Minor. There, they naturally founded a series of twelve poleis.

To maintain rule over larger territories and not expose individual settlements to perpetual struggle against invasion, either a Spartan militarism or an exceptionally favorable location was necessary, like that of the people of Attica. Attempts to federate into larger groups succeeded only temporarily, in wartime; they were never lucky or powerful enough to achieve permanence. In the long run the hegemonies of Sparta and Athens aroused terrible hostilities, and whoever has learned to know the polis will know how uninclined it was to treat fairly its weaker allies, however expedient it might have been to do so. The clue to the whole unhappy history of Boeotia lies in the perpetually repeated attempts to embrace that territory in a federal union.

In creating the polis, the vital elan takes the form of the so-called synoikismos, the joining together of hitherto separate settlements in a fortified city-on the sea wherever possible. The motives of commerce, material prosperity, and the like would only have created a polisma, a ptoliethron; but the polis is something more than that.

Without question, the Dorian migration was largely the external motive force that gave rise to the polis. Both, those who migrated and those who were able to ward off the invaders, were ripe for an organization that promised increased permanent power in defense as well as attack, constituting the real purpose of their existence.

When people lived in hamlets, say seven or eight to a district, they were exposed to tribal hardships, but their way of life was more innocent than later. They had to defend themselves against pirates and land robbers, but still they carried on as peasants. Now, polis began to compete with polis for existence and political power. And without doubt more land was cultivated originally, for when people concentrated in a city they began to neglect the outlying acres within their bounds. Synoikism may well have been the beginning of the laying waste of Greece.

Political thought of a later age has depicted the synoikism of the people of Attica as having been brought about in mystical times by Theseus. He first dissolved the prytanies (presidencies) and archonships in the twelve settlements into which Cecrops had gathered the people of Attica for the sake of safety, and then permitted only one bulefterion (council half and one prytany in Athens. The people might live in the country on their holdings, but henceforth they had only one polis which Theseus was able to hand down to descendants as great and powerful, since everybody paid tribute into a common treasury. This was the ideal desired everywhere, and the whole of Greek life pressed toward this, its final form-the polis-without which the higher Greek culture is inconceivable.

To be removed from his ancestral graves must have spelled a misfortune for the Greek. For then he either had to neglect his ancestral rites or perform them only with difficulty; at any rate he no longer had the ancestral burial site daily before his eyes. Being forcibly removed to a new place of residence was an act that caused more sorrow and grief than any other, even in the entire later history of the polis.

Accounts of the founding of cities are numerous. In the Peloponnesus, Mantinea, already mentioned in Homer, became a polis through the uniting of five communities. Only after the Persian Wars was Elis made into a city out of several communities. During the Peloponnesian War, the Mytileneans wanted to transplant all the inhabitants of Lesbos into their own city; whereupon the people of Methymna appealed to Athens and so prevented the whole venture. In 408 B.C. Lindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus voluntarily united to establish the magnificent city of Rhodes destined for a truly splendid future; it is not difficult to imagine, however, with what feelings the people abandoned their age-old cities.

During the Peloponnesian War, Perdikkas II of Macedonia persuaded the inhabitants of the peninsula of Chalcidice to forsake their coastal towns and settle in Olynthus, a migration that likewise entailed withdrawal from Athenian hegemony. The state of Argos was especially notorious for having carried out synoikism by use of force, even though it was done for the sake of strengthening its position against Sparta. In the face of an enemy like Sparta, Epaminondas himself knew of no better stratagem except to persuade a goodly number of weak little Arcadian settlements to move together into a large center, Megalopolis. The inhabitants of Trapezus, refusing to join in the colonization of Megalopolis, were attacked, and they fled to the city of Trapezus on the Euxine. After the battle at Mantinea, many wished to leave the Megalopolis but were forced to return and remain in the large city by the rest of the Megalopolitans with Athenian help. Part of the abandoned settlements later lay fully deserted while some of them became villages occupied by Megalopolitans who cultivated the adjacent land.

Why were smaller places not left to carry on as country towns represented by elected officials in the council of the polis? Simply because in the long run they would not have been content to remain towns but would have exerted all the power they possibly could to remain independent and so become poleis themselves.

Perhaps only the entirely new city of Messene was founded with great cooperative enthusiasm. Here Epaminondas did not have to coerce surrounding communities; he merely had to appeal to descendants of Messene (who had scattered throughout the Greek world but had recently returned) in order to get them to build a new capital. Those who had been without a country for several generations and even for centuries, now had a homeland. On the other hand, very many poleis were founded by high-handed tyrants and overlords. The Sicilian tyrants, even the best of them, ruthlessly mingled peoples in poleis already established. They supposed that they could be sure of the loyalty of poleis only when they had removed half or more of their populations and brought in outsiders, even mercenaries, as replacements.

Gelo, meritorious in other respects, razed Camarina and brought its inhabitants, along with over half the population of Gela, the people of Megara Hyblaea, and of other Sicilian cities, to Syracuse, where he gave the upper classes citizenship but sold many of the commoners into slavery abroad, for he distrusted the masses. He appointed his brother Hiero tyrant of Gela. Hiero transferred the inhabitants of Catana to Leontini and peopled the empty walls of Catana with five thousand Syracusans and as many Peloponnesians. He wanted ready troops to defend the strategic city and also looked forward to being honored some day as the heroic founder of an eminent polis. Later Dionysii and Agathocles caused some of the most frightful exterminations and new racial mingling in Sicily.

A tyrant like Mausolus forcibly gathered the inhabitants of six cities into his Halicarnassus. This amounted to three-fourths of the eight cities of the Leleges, and we are not told to what extent the people might have regarded the transference as a benefaction. In the history of the diadochi, the newly founded cities in the Orient and in Egypt above all claim attention; and not to be overlooked are the violent deportations, the racial commingling, and the renaming of famous old cities these diadochi carried out in the ancient Hellenized territory of western Asia Minor.

The establishment of a polis was the great, the decisive experience in the whole existence of a tribe. Even in cases where people continued to cultivate the fields, in time their rural way of life became predominantly urban nevertheless. And men who had been farmers became politically minded when living together. But the significance of the experience was reflected in legends about the founding of the city and its delivery from great dangers in the past. When Heracles was driving his cattle through Italy, he met Croton, who wanted to help him. But Heracles in the dark of night mistook him for an enemy and killed him; later he recognized his mistake and honored him greatly by building a city named Crotona around his grave site.

Where there was no monument honoring the past, veneration went to some shrine such as a spring. At Haliartus in Boeotia the stream Lophis took its rise from the blood of a boy cut to pieces by his father at the behest of the Pythian priestess, who during an unrelieved drouth commanded him to kill the first living being he met. At Celaenae in Phrygia, a chasm opened which swallowed many houses and people. Pursuant to an oracle that the most precious offering should be hurled into the chasm, gold and silver were tried but did not help; then the heir to the Phrygian throne mounted his horse and spurred it into the chasm, whereupon it closed. At times, the acquisition and deposition of relics, such as bones of a person long dead would suffice for the founding of a city. For instance, when the Athenians under Hagnon definitely founded Amphipolis, he secretly sent some people to the country of Troy to fetch the remains of Rhesus from his burial mound. Possibly, also, human sacrifice was later replaced by a more innocuous rite, the telesm, consisting of the burial of secret objects.

The real center of a polis was the agora, the public square. The little ancient towns consisted only of an agora, on which were situated the prytaneum, the council chamber, the courthouse, and one or more temples. The agora also served for sports and popular assemblies. But even when facilities for one or more of these functions were richly provided for elsewhere, the agora still remained the heart of the city. "Market place" is a very inadequate translation, for wherever people built towns they included market places. But agora is the noun form of the verb agorein, to assemble; very often it also signifies an assemblage, regardless of the place.

On this Aristotle helpfully provides us a very clear distinction. He demands an agora for the free men, where nothing may be bought and where no farmer or laborer may enter except on command of the authorities, and another agora for the purpose of buying and selling. In coastal towns people tended to locate the public square near the harbor; at least that is what the Phaeacians did whose whole life was arranged with a view to comfort. Here, in the presence of ships, surrounded by temples, offices, monuments, shops and exchanges as thick as they could stand, the Greek was exposed to agorazein, an activity not to be translated by one word of any other language. Dictionaries give to traffic in the market place, to buy, to talk, to deliberate, etc., but cannot reproduce the combination of business and conversation mingled with delightful loafing and standing around together. It is enough to say that forenoon got the well-known designation -the time when the agora is full of people.

When a crowd of idlers arose in a city, it routinely developed as the public square crowd. In the sixth century B.C., Cyrus the Great is already said to have told the Spartan envoys: "I have never yet been afraid of men who have a special meeting place in the center of their city where they gather and cheat one another on oath."

If any man has ever been greater than his place of residence, surely that man was the Greek. The living polis with its pride of citizenship was a much grander product than all its walls, harbors, and magnificent structures. Aristotle classified man as being by nature a political creature. In an eloquent passage of his Politics, he contrasts the Greeks with two kinds of barbarians-the natural man of the north and the man of culture in Asia and accords them the advantages of both: the courage of the one and the intelligence of the other, so that they are not only free and in possession of the finest polity, but also able to rule over all others as soon as they establish a state.

Monuments of a not unpleasing kind decorated agoras; in the agora of Thuriae, the eminent man Herodotus was buried. Indeed, in later times a forest of altars and statues of famous men almost cramped the public square of Greek cities. A monument to the grisly recollection of a human sacrifice was nearly always present. Among people other than Hellenes, a similar saga may now and then echo about the walls of a stronghold. The touching song the Serbians sing about the founding of Skadar may well reflect Greek influence.

A characteristic narrative branch of poetry and prose was devoted to the history or to the myth of the founding of cities. Illustrious names like Mimnermus of Smyrna, Cadmus of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon are numbered among those who recounted such native legends. In addition, Xenophanes deserves our gratitude for recording the bold wanderings of the Phocaean fugitives until their founding of Elea. These early stories laid the foundation of later Greek historiography.

Rights of man were not recognized in antiquity, not even by Aristotle. He regarded the polis as a community of free men; metics (residents of foreign birth) and especially the masses of slaves enjoyed no political rights; whether, beyond that fact, metics and slaves were human beings was not spelled out. Indeed, as time will show, the duties imposed on citizens were not commonplace, and not just anybody would do.

Here it was above all a matter of quality; accordingly limits were imposed on the quantity. Infants born crippled and ill formed were not, according to Aristotle, to be brought up; and his view becomes intelligible when one reflects on the wretched lot a cripple had among the Greeks. But, as we know, many infants were abandoned because their parents could not or would not care for them, and Thebes, which forbade this practice, was cited as an exception.

The mode of life a polis was obliged to maintain was characterized by the word autarkeia, self-sufficiency; a very obscure word to us, it was fully comprehensible to the Greeks. This self-sufficiency required arable land to grow the necessary foodstuff, trade and industry to provide modestly for the remaining necessities, and an army of hoplites comparable in strength to that of the neighboring, usually hostile, polis.

Aristotle speaks on this subject as plainly as we could wish. As soon as a polis became overpopulated, it could not maintain itself. The greatness of a city was dependent on the number of its citizens. It could not be upheld by its horde of workers (banausics) if there was a paucity of hoplites. To administer justice and to perform their official duties with merit, citizens had to know each other and the character of the people.

As to optimum size, a city should be large enough to provide for the necessities of life yet small enough to be within eyeshot. And it appears that ten thousand was regarded as the proper number of mature citizens for a city to have. Heraclea and Trachinia and Catana (renamed Aetna after a new colony was established there)-all had this number; by way of illustration, we may also mention the popular assembly of ten thousand in Arcadia. In recent times, apart from philosophical and social thought, it is essentially the individual who demands a state advantageous for his own purposes.
For the most part, all that he demands really is security, so that he may freely develop his potentialities. To this end he gladly makes well-defined sacrifices, though the less the state bothers him otherwise, the more content he is. The Greek polis, on the other hand, starts with the whole, which precedes its parts. From an inner logic we may add this: It is not only a matter of giving preference to the general over the particular but also of preferring the permanent over the momentary and transitory. The polis demanded that the individual not only take part in campaigns, but be ready to sacrifice his individual existence for it is to the whole that he owes everything, including the security of his very existence, then enjoyed by a citizen only within his own city's limits, or at most within the range of its influence.

Whoever governs or is governed here is the citizen of the polis. To govern means, more precisely, to serve on the tribunal or to hold an office. As a rule, the citizen realizes all his capacities and virtues within the state or in its service. The entire Greek spirit and its culture are most intimately related to the polis, and of the poetry and art created during the flowering of Greek genius the loftiest by far was not created for the enjoyment of individuals but for the public, i.e., the community.

The magnificently moving knowledge of these views comes to us in part from the greatest Greek poets and in part from the philosophers and orators of the fourth century, who no longer were able to capture prevailing sentiments and rather dwelt on those that should have obtained.

The native city is not only home, where one is happiest and whither one is drawn, but also a mighty being, lofty and divine. Above all, one owes it one's life in battle, thereby merely repaying the polis for one's keep. Now and then Homer grants the Trojans, and especially Hector, the most ecstatic patriotic sentiments, and the elegiac poets, in the few works that have survived, dwell often enough on patriotic subjects. But Aeschylus is the most powerful witness. In his Seven Against Thebes the speeches of Eteocles combine the belief in the citizen's highest duty to sacrifice himself for the homeland with the noble emotional tone befitting the king and defender. In his own epitaph, Aeschylus mentions only his courage, saying nothing about his poetry.

Of his prowess the grove of Marathon can tell And the long-haired Persian who learned to know it well.

But in the end it is the polis, not the individual, who gets credit for the mighty deeds of valor, and this polis was the victor at Marathon and Salamis, not Miltiades and Themistocles. And, to Demosthenes it was a symptom of decline when people said that Timotheus had captured Corcyra and that Chabrias had defeated the enemy in the naval battle at Naxos. At all events, the most deserving hero owes more gratitude to his country than his country owes him.

In the Suppliants, the splendid choral ode of the Danaids overflows with blessings gratefully bestowed on hospitable Argos. But Aeschylus reserved his finest tribute for his native Athens in the last great choral ode of the Eumenides. In the dialogue with Athena the goddess assuages the wrath of the Furies by recounting the honors they would receive if they dwelt in Attica. Only one writer in antiquity was able to produce mightier notes of this kind.

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