Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part I: Component Parts

This is the first of a planned three part (I, IIa, IIb, IIc, III) look at the structure of the ancient Greek polis, the self-governing ‘city state,’ as part of a larger series on civic governance in the pre-modern world. Since I argued, way back in June of 2019, that a noble house in Game of Thrones was unlikely to have the administrative capacity to run a large city, folks have been asking: well then how were large ancient and medieval cities run? Some ask out of curiosity but a lot of folks because they are worldbuilding for novels or RPGs or just for fun and want to make more realistic towns and town governments. But offering a single, “here is what town government looks like” model isn’t going to work because forms of civic governance can be quite different across time and culture. So instead we’re going over the next several months be taking a few looks at different forms of communal government, starting with the Greek polis. After the polis, we’ll at least take a look at the civic governance of the Roman Republic (a much larger entity than any polis). After that, my hope is to get a few colleagues to perhaps offer similar primers on other forms of civic governance, particularly in the European Middle Ages.

I thus hope this series will speak both to readers who want to better understand ancient forms of civic governance as historical entities for their own sake, but also for the worldbuilders – I know I have quite a few readers who do this – who want to imagine pre-modern civic structures that make sense. At least a little more than the standard ‘this town has one mayor who does everything and one shopkeeper who sells everything.’ And the best way to do that is just to explore how actual civic governance was structured!

But for this series, we’re focused on the polis! In this first part, we’re going to look at how the polis is defined by its component parts: the households and physical space that all make up and are definitional to the polis. Then, all going to plan, part II will take a look at the typical governing structures of a polis and part III will then look at the members of the community both mortal (the status of various kinds of people in the polis) and divine (the role of religion in the polis).

And unlike an actual polis (which tended to be quite closed-off to new entrants), if you want to join the amici of the blog, you can do so by supporting supporting me on Patreon. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live.

(Bibliography: The first place to start on the polis is M.H. Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City State (2006), though the book is less of an introduction than the title may imply. I am also here going to rely a fair bit, as any modern study of the polis must, on the Copenhagen Polis Centre’s great opus, M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004), particularly its introductory chapters. Though it is an edited collection, there is enough useful in R. Brock and S. Hodkinson (eds.), Alternatives to Athens: Varieties of Political Organization and Community in Ancient Greece (2000), that’s it’s worth noting the whole volume, as well as Hans Beck (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (2013). On oligarchy in particular, note M. Simonton, Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (2017). On the economics of the polis, A. Bresson’s, L’économie de la Grèce des cités (2007/8) is now available in English translation as, A. Bresson, The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets and Growth in the City-States, trans. Steven Rendall (2016); it is a shame they did not keep the rather more to-the-point French title. On religion and the polis, F. de Polignac, Naissance de la cité greque: Cultes, espace et société, VIIIe-VIIe siècles (1984) is available in translation as Polignac, Cults, Territory and the Origins of the Greek City-State, trans. J. Lloyd (1995), a rare example of a title improved in its clarity by translation.)

A Typical Polis?

Defining the polis (plural: poleis) is remarkably tricky, so tricky in fact that the Polis Center, after spending ten years inventorying every known polis, did not quite manage to settle on a single definition and instead inventoried poleis based on if they are called poleis in the sources or if they show signs of doing the things that a polis usually does (like building walls or minting coins).¹ In Greek usage, a polis was a town, but it was also the political community of that town (which may or may not be an independent state, though the Greeks tended to think that poleis ought to be independent by nature) and the broader territory that political community controlled and also the body of citizens, the politai, who made up the community. These are connected definitions, of course, but there is a lot of give in these joints, yet the idea of a polis as a self-governing community centered on a single, usually fortified, town center is a strong one in Greek thought.

In any case there certainly were a lot of them. The Polis Center’s inventory counts just over a thousand archaic and classical poleis (it does not extend into the Hellenistic period), of which probably around 800-900 existed at one time. Now our vision of these poleis is necessarily a bit skewed: most were very small and leave little evidence, while the two most prominent poleis in our sources by far, Athens and Sparta, were both very unusual in their size and governing structures. That said while most poleis were very small, it doesn’t follow that most Greeks lived in very small poleis; M.H. Hansen notes ((2006), 83) that by his estimates 80% of all of the poleis housed around 35% of the polis-living population, while the top 10% largest poleis housed roughly 40%.

But the smallest poleis could be very small. A touch over 200 poleis in the inventory had territories of less than 100km². A small polis like that might have a total population of just a few thousand, with an even smaller subset of that population consisting of adult citizen males. On the other hand, very large poleis like Athens or Sparta might have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, though as M.H. Hansen notes in the inventory these sorts of massive poleis with territories in excess of 1,000km² were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.²

But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis institutions, which seem fairly common regardless of size. Indeed, the language and thinking of our Greek sources is often informed by a sort of idea of an ideal or standard polis, from which every real polis deviates in certain ways. These little communities had institutions which resembled each other, to the point that the difference between ‘oligarchic’ or ‘democratic’ or even ‘tyranical’ poleis could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis, which is going to be quite important as we go forward, since the way one structures a government depends on how one imagines the component parts being governed.

Putting Houses Together

A polis is made up of households, called oikoi (singular: oikos),³ to the point that creating a new polis was called synoikismos (or synocism). The Greek there is συνοικισμóς, συν- (meaning ‘together’) and οἶκος giving the word a meaning something like ‘living together in one house’ or ‘putting the houses together as one.’ This was the word the Greeks used to describe the process by which a disparate set of tribes, villages and households came together to create a polis; Indeed Aristotle (Arist. Pol. 1253b) is explicit that the oikos is the smallest unit, the ‘atom’ to use M.H. Hansen’s word, of the polis, not the individual.

So what is an oikos? Well that word is about as plastic as polis. Oikos can mean a house (as in a physical building), or it can mean a household (as in the family that dwells in that building) or it can mean all of the property of that household, and indeed Greek writers will use this word to mean all of these things, often in the same context (that is they shift freely between these linked meanings, not seeing them as fully distinct). Now as a ‘family’ we should note that an oikos was rather more extensive than our sense of family (though rather less extensive than the Roman concept of a familia and a lot less extensive than a Roman gens; we’ll come to these in a later series): an oikos consisted of all of the people who lived together in a house, which generally meant the adult citizen male, his wife and dependents and also their enslaved workers. It that family had enslaved workers who did not live with them, they also generally counted as part of the oikos because they were understood as the property of it.

The creation of a polis meant merging all of these things together in a very literal way. In a physical sense the creation of a town core meant literally putting houses together, as a good part of the population might move to live in that town core (with their farms just outside the town in walking distance, remember: most of these poleis are very small). Indeed M.H. Hansen notes in the introductory article on synoikismos in the Inventory that the only “purely political synoecism” – that is, a synoikismos that did not involve actually moving people to form or merge with a new town center but merely politically united existing geographically distinct communities – occurs in myth in Theseus’ supposed creation of the Athenian poleis. That this sort of synoikismos never happens in the historical period (there’s an attempt in Ionia in 547/6 but it never gets off the ground) ought to suggest that it probably didn’t happen with Theseus either.

It is also in a sense the merging of families, as one of the key privileges of citizenship in a polis was the right to marry women of citizen status (that is, the daughters of citizens) and thus have citizen children.⁴ And it meant the new citizenry putting their fortunes – in a literal, physical sense of the wealth that enabled them to survive (think farms and farming) – together in common when it came to things like war.

This may all seem fairly straightforward, but I invite you to consider the different implications it has compared to the way we mostly conceive of the population of a country, which we tend to imagine as a collection of individuals; as we’ll see the Greeks did this a bit too, but it wasn’t the first thought they reached for. In the polis, it is the households that have standing, represented by their adult, free citizen male heads, not individuals. The polis protects the households from the world, not the members of the household from each other, with the most obvious and immediate legal implication being the fact that crimes against junior members of the household are often understood as property crimes against the head of the household and actions within the household are simply not the business of the state. Now we shouldn’t over-stretch this: the Greeks were capable of understanding non-free and non-male people as individuals at times, but the political structure of the polis is predicated on units of households.

The Polis as a Place

A polis is also a place made up of physical spaces. Physically, the Greeks understood a polis to be made up of city itself, which might just be called the polis but also the astu (ἄστυ, “town”), and the hinterland or countryside, generally called the chora (χώρα). The fact that the word polis can mean both the city and the (city+chora=state) should already tell you something about the hierarchy envisaged here: the city is the lord of the chora. Now in the smallest of poleis that might make a lot of sense because nearly everyone would live in the town anyway: in a polis of, say, 150km², no point might be more than 8 or 9 kilometers from the city center even if it is somewhat irregularly shaped. A farmer could thus live in the city and walk out – about an hour or two, a human can walk 6-7km per hour – each morning.

But in a larger polis – and remember, a lot of Greeks lived in larger poleis even though they were few, because they were large – the chora was going to be large enough to have nucleated settlements like villages in it; for very large poleis it might have whole small towns (like Eleusis or Thoricus/Laurion in Attica, the territory of Athens) as part of the chora. But we usually do not see a sort of nested heirarchy of sites in larger poleis; instead there is the astu and then the chora, the later absorbing into its meaning any small towns, villages (the term here is usually kome), isolated homesteads or other settlements. The polis in the sense of the core city at the center of the community was not a settlement first-among-equals but qualitatively different from every other settlement in the polis – an ideal neatly expressed in that the name of the city served as synecdoche for the entire community (imagine if it was normal to refer to all Canadians as ‘Ottawans’ regardless of if they lived in Ottawa and indeed to usually do so and to only say ‘Canada’ when it was very clear you meant the full extent of its land area).

That is not to say that the astu and chora were undivided. Many poleis broke up their territory into neighborhood units, called demes (δημοι) or komai (κῶμαι, the plural of kome used already) for voting or organizational purposes and we know in Athens at leas these demes had some local governing functions, organizing local festivals and sometimes even local legal functions, but never its own council or council hall (that is, no boule or bouleuterion; we’ll get to these next time), nor its own mint, nor the ability to make or unmake citizen status.

There are also some physical places in the town center itself we should talk about. Most poleis were walled (Sparta was unusual in this respect not being so), with the city core enclosed in a defensive circuit that clearly delineated the difference between the astu and the chora; smaller settlements on the chora were almost never walled. But then most poleis has a second fortified zone in the city, an acropolis (ἀκρόπολις, literally ‘high city’), an elevated citadel within the city. The acropolis often had its own walls, or (as implied by the name) was on some forbidding height within the city or frequently both. This developed in one of two ways: in many cases settlement began on some defensible hill and then as the city grew it spilled out into the lowlands around it; in other cases villages coalesced together and these poleis might not have an acropolis, but they often did anyway. The acropolis of a polis generally wasn’t further built on, but rather its space was reserved for temples and sometimes other public buildings (though ‘oops [almost] all temples’ acropoleis aren’t rare; temples were the most important buildings to protect so they go in the most protected place!).

While the street structure of poleis was generally organic (and thus disorganized), almost every polis also had an agora (ἀγορά), a open central square which seems to have served first as a meeting or assembly place, but also quickly became a central market. In most poleis, the agora would remain the site for the assembly (ekklesia, ἐκκλησία, literally ‘meeting’ or ‘assembly’), a gathering-and-voting-body of all citizens (of a certain status in some systems); in very large poleis (especially democratic ones) a special place for the assembly might exist outside the agora to allow enough space. In Athens this was the Pnyx but in other large poleis it might be called a ekklesiasterion. The agora would almost always have a council house called a bouleuterion where a select council, the boule (βουλή) would meet; we’ll talk about these next time but it is worth noting that in most poleis it was the boule, not the ekklesia that was the core institution that defined polis government. In addition the agora would also house in every polis a prytaneion, a building for the leading magistrates which always had a dining room where important guests and citizens (most notably citizens who were Olympic victors) could be dined at state expense. Dedicated court buildings might also be on the agora, but these are rarer; in smaller poleis often other state buildings were used to house court proceedings. Also, there are almost always temples in the agora as well; please note the agora is never on the acropolis, but almost always located at the foot of the hill on which the acropolis sits, as in Athens.

And this is a good point to reiterate how these are general rules, especially in terms of names. Every polis is a little different, but only a little. So the Athenian ekklesiaterion was normally on the Pnyx (and sometimes in the Theater of Dionysus, an expedient used in other poleis too since theaters made good assembly halls), the Spartan boule is the gerousia, the acropolis of Thebes was the Cadmeia and so on. Every polis is a little different, but the basic forms are recognizable in each, even in relatively strange poleis like Sparta or Athens.⁵ But it really is striking that self-governing Greek settlements from Emporiae (Today, Empúries, Spain) to Massalia (Marseille, France) to Cyrene (in modern Libya) to Panticapaeum (in Crimea, which is part of Ukraine) tend to feature identifiably similar public buildings mirroring their generally similar governing forms.

A polis was mostly a polis, no matter where you went. Or no matter where it went, which brings us to:

The Polis as the Politai

A polis is most importantly made up of the citizens, the politai (singular polites (πολίτης), plural politai (πολῖται)); indeedAristotle says this too in his Politics (Arist. Pol. 1274b): “for the state [polis] is an assembly of citizens [politai].” Now we are used to the idea that most people in a country are citizens of it, but the idea of the politai is much narrower. In its fundamental meaning a polites is a person engaged in the running of the polis; it is an idea defined by political participation. The politai were adult, citizen men; women, children, the enslaved and free non-citizens were all excluded from this group. A bit of demographic math might suggest that a modest polis with 2000 inhabitants might thus have just 300-400 politai.⁶

Not everyone born in a polis was a member of the politai. Women could be of citizen status (and thus able to bear citizen children in poleis where that was required), but they could not be citizens at all.⁷ Being the male child of citizen parents was generally the core requirement of citizenship and in a democratic polis that was generally enough, but oligarchic poleis typically imposed wealth qualifications for political participation so not everyone born to citizens might themselves be a polites if they ended up too poor to meet the requirements. The terms astos and aste (ἀστός and ἀστή), ‘townsman’ and ‘townswoman’ respectively, might be used to make this distinction between the politai and people who were ‘merely’ natives of the polis but barred for whatever reason from political participation. These distinctions become a lot more meaningful when you realize the point Aristotle is making defining the polis this way: if the polis is a community of politai then the residents of a polis (the physical space) who are not citizens are not members of the polis (not merely, we might imagine, non-participatory members).

Now the politai themselves also existed in subdivisions. We’ve mentioned division into demes or neighborhoods; while notionally geographic, demes could become hereditary (and indeed did become so in Athens). In Sparta and some poleis on Crete, citizens were divided into mess groups (syssitia or andreia). But by far the most common and important such division was into ‘tribes’ or phylai (φυλαί, sing. φυλή), inherited⁸ kinship groups that often formed the largest subdivision of the politai of a polis, with even very small poleis having attested divisions into phylai in some cases (e.g. Delos as noted by M.H. Hansen in “Civic Subdivisions” in the Inventory). The politai might also be subdivided by other groupings like phratria (brotherhoods) and indeed a polis might have multiple such groupings, either neatly nested (as in Athens’ demes sorted into thirty trittyes sorted into ten phylai to make up the citizen body) or they might confusingly cross-cut each other.

There’s another key distinction between the politai – or at least men who might be politai – which isn’t a legal distinction but nevertheless matters for understanding how the Greeks imagined civic governance: the distinction between the few (hoi oligoi) and the many (hoi polloi). The few were the economic elite of the politai – the wealthy landowners – and the dominant group in oligarchies. A few terms might signify this group: ‘the few’ (οἱ ὀλίγοι – hoi oligoi) or ‘the best’ (οἱ ἄριστοι – hoi aristoi), or ‘the rich’ (οἱ πλούσιοι – hoi plousioi) and can also be part of the meaning of the appellation ‘beautiful and good’ (καλὸς κἀγαθός = καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός – kalos kagathos) which translates more idiomatically to something like ‘gentleman’ with an implication of both good conduct (especially in war) and high status. At its broadest reach, the few might consist of those politai with enough wealth to serve as hoplites, though it seems in most cases this group is understood much more narrowly and might be defined by heredity in addition to wealth in some cases.

In contrast to the few were, of course, the many. Once again a few terms might signify this group: ‘the many’ (οἱ πολλοί – hoi polloi or οἱ πλῆθος – hoi plethos) or ‘the poor’ (οἱ ἀποροῖ – hoi aporoi) or the people (δῆμος – demos), the last of which gives us the word democracy – rule by the demos. At it’s narrowest extent, these are all of the people too poor to serve as hoplites but who would otherwise be politai; in fact in a democracy they are politai, but in closed oligarchies they may not be.⁹ More broadly the concept of the demos can encompass all of the politai, both wealthy and poor, especially in a democratic context. Nevertheless the Greeks often understand these two groups as oppositional and non-overlapping: the politai composed of ‘the few,’ with money and high status lineages and ‘the many,’ without that, but with far greater raw numbers.

As we’ll see, it is that distinction – between ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ which the Greeks used to define the different forms of polis government, what they called a politeia (πολιτεία), which we might translate as ‘constitution’ with the caveat that these are not written constitutions. And that’s where we’ll go next: now that we have our subdivisions, we’ll discuss next week the different ways they are organized and governed.

1. And this definitional complexity is then immediately caveated by the note that the Greeks call some things which are obviously not poleis, like non-Greek settlements or smaller settlements within an existing polis‘ territory.
2. But chances are you’ve heard of some of them: Argos, Athens, Byzantium, Rhodes, Sparta and Syracuse are all in this category, with Sparta (8,400km²) and Syracuse (12,000km²) being more than twice as large by territory as any other polis on the list (third place goes to Panticapaeum in Crimea with 3,000km² and then Athens is in fourth place with 2,500km²). I thus reiterate my point that Sparta ought to have been a lot more powerful than it was given how enormous it was as a polis.
3. No, I do not know why there is a Greek yogurt brand named ‘house.’
4. We’ll come back to the question of how one gets citizenship a bit later, because it varies by polis.
5. Indeed, this is one of the most useful points of recent Sparta scholarship to note: Sparta was a strange polis, but still recognizably a polis. I tend to regard Sparta as rather more strange than, say, Stephen Hodkinson does, albeit on different metrics.
6. Assuming adult males are around a quarter of the population and something like 20% of the population are enslaved or non-citizen. The number could, of course, be much lower; as we’ve seen in Sparta the politai made up a single-digit percentage of the community.
7. Whereas by contrast Roman women were citizens, albeit with sharply restricted rights. It is, in my view, a meaningful difference.
8. male-line
9. Note again, oligarchies could often be quite a bit narrower than merely the hoplite class.