Hansen, Athenian Democracy [Part 3]
Polis & politeia, as conceived by 4th century Athenians [7 mins. of Chapter 4]
In his book The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, published in 1991, Mogens Herman Hansen wrote:
Chapter 4
Athens as a City-State and as a Democracy
Polis
… The Greek word polis or ptolis is related etymologically to Old Indian púr and Lithuanian pilis, and in all three languages its basic sense is 'stronghold'. In older Greek, polis could be used as a synonym for akropolis, the 'stronghold on the height', which was often a fortified hill with the royal residence and the principal shrines: thus, the akropolis was at once the centre of defence, government and cult … By the fourth century polis was used almost exclusively in two senses: geographically to mean a 'city' and politically to mean a 'state'. Hence the word 'city-state': it is a made-up word found only in history books, as a way of talking about a self-governing community of limited size consisting of a city plus a territory, in which the city is the political centre and the territory provides a measure of economic independence. …
… Because the Greek city-states were small, they did not normally need to think in terms of political representation: even in democracies the government could perfectly well be direct. All citizens could meet without difficulty in the People's Assembly and serve in the citizen militia.
A polis was a 'face-to-face society'; that is often asserted, but if a polis spread over too large an area some citizens could not come regularly into the city and take part in the Assembly or the festivals, and if a polis acquired too many citizens it would have needed the voice of Stentor [a mythic ‘shouter’] to summon them all to the levy or to the Assembly. Experience seems to show that an assembly of 10,000 or more is too large for genuine debate, and the Athenians could not live up to the ideal that everybody should know everybody else; so Athens was not, in fact, a 'face-to-face society', and the political community of the citizens could only function because out of the 30,000 full citizens not more than 6000, as a rule, turned up for the Assembly and the People's Courts. ….
… Was the polis just a political community? … At Athens every citizen had an equal share in the political society, and Athens fulfilled the idea of a polis as a community more than did any oligarchy, where many of the poorer citizens were excluded from political rights. On the other hand, the Athenians distinguished between a public sphere, where every citizen took a part, and a private sphere, in which every citizen was entitled to live as he pleased, as long as he obeyed the laws and did not wrong his fellow citizens: they were firmly against the notion that a polis ought to control every aspect of the lives of its citizens. …
… The polis was a society of citizens. … If a metic [non-citizen] or a slave was found participating in a political assembly, he was arrested and risked being condemned and executed. Yet every day, when the meetings to deal with affairs of state were over, citizen, metic and slave went off to work side-by-side as artisans, traders or farmers: in the economic sphere the stranger was part of the society, though in the political sphere he was not. … To a large extent the state involved itself in the economic life of the people only to collect taxes from them and to ensure that a citizen could get his daily bread at a manageable price; otherwise, trade and production were only tangential to the real matters with which the polis concerned itself.
In this respect also there was a fundamental difference between ancient Greece and, for example, the Italian city-states of the Middles Ages. … In the ancient city-state, commerce and crafts were not at all a monopoly of the citizens; on the contrary, the Athenians often tried to encourage foreign craftsmen to move to Athens, and a not-unimportant section of the upper class of Athens (in economic terms) were metics, who lacked political rights. … The Athenians of the classical period had a complicated network of political institutions but, as far as we can tell from the sources, no parallel economic organizations.
Recent research has done nothing to undermine what Max Weber asserted in 1921: the citizen of an ancient city-state was homo politicus, whereas the citizen of a medieval city-state was homo oeconomicus.
The polis was, indeed, to a higher degree a religious community. A good deal of cult was concentrated on the great state festivals organized by the magistrates, in which the citizens took part in their political groupings, their tribes and demes. But it is important to stress that priests were never magistrates, and it is also important that metics took part alongside citizens in nearly all the major festivals: they might have an inferior place, but in so far as it was a religious community they, too, could participate; and even women and slaves were allowed to attend many of the ceremonies, including the theatre. So it is misleading to say, as is from time to time said, that the audience in the theatre constituted a kind of political gathering on a par with the Assembly, for if that had been the case no one but citizens would have been there. … There is no doubt that religion figured prominently in the life of a Greek polis just as in an Italian ciua or a German Reichsstadt, but in none of them did the state have its root or centre in religion. Anyone who wants to see a city-state that really was a religious community should look at the Sumerian cities, where every thing was grouped round the temple and where the highest magistrate (called ensi) had as his principal duty that of presiding over the temple administration.
… In classical Athens … the polis, which was the political community of the citizens, and the society as a whole, in which all groups participated, were clearly distinguished. …
Politeia
… Politeia is always translated 'constitution', and that, on the whole, will do well enough. Of course, the Greek word does not only mean a constitution in the American sense, although constitutions of that kind were not unknown in ancient Greece: for example, that of Kyrene (c. 320 BC) was engraved on stone and is probably the oldest surviving written constitution in the world.
Nor does politeia simply mean the sum total of all the rules by which a state is governed. It means, rather, the total political structure of a polis: the 'soul' of the polis, as it could be metaphorically called. And, since a polis is, primarily, its citizens, politeia could also in appropriate contexts signify 'citizen rights', or the political activity of an individual citizen, or the whole citizen body as an entity.
So the concept of politeia was in nature and origin much broader than what we mean by 'constitution'. Nevertheless, in practice it was used more narrowly to mean that which especially bound the citizens together into a society: namely, the political institutions of the state, and, in a specialized sense, the structure of the governing organs of the state...
… In that sense it [politeia] was functionally divided under three heads: the process of political decision, the competence of magistrates, and the judiciary power. And, being thus, primarily, the rules regulating the governing organs of the state, it was often distinguished from nomoi, 'the laws', which were all the rules of law in force in the society.
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The Source has been:
Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, translated by J. A. Crook, Blackwell Publishers 1991
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