Ancient Greek City-States, by Mogens Herman Hansen
Polis-as-state, through which city-state ‘maintained’ and ‘furthered’ society
Mogens Herman Hansen wrote:
Chapter 17: Polis as State
The concept of polis as a political community—what we call a ‘state’—has different aspects, which are most clearly reflected in the different senses the word polis could have in a political context: (a) polis was used occasionally to mean a city plus its hinterland, and so meant a territory; (b) it was frequently used of the citizens and meant, in that context, the people of a state; and (c) it was with equal frequency used of the political institutions, e.g. the People’s Assembly, or, more abstractly of the state itself and the way it was governed.
Territory
The ancient Greek polis was a Lilliput, and that goes for the size of the territory and the size of the population. Of the 1,035 Archaic and Classical poleis in the Polis Centre’s Inventory the locality of 166 is not yet known. But for 636 of the remaining of the 869 poleis it is possible to give an approximate idea of the size of their territories and place it in one of five categories: 25 km2 or less, 25–100 km2, 100–200 km2, 200–500 km2 and 500 km2 or more. Investigations show that 15 per cent of all poleis had a territory of at most 25 km2, 60 per cent a territory of at most 100 km2 and 80 per cent a territory of at most 200 km2. Ten per cent at most had a territory of more than 500 km2, and only thirteen poleis had more than 1,000 km2. As one would expect, the colonies had larger territories than the poleis in Greece proper. … Corinth had a hinterland of c.900 km2; Athens, which had subjected the whole of Attika, and Sparta, which had conquered Lakedaimon and Messenia, were exceptionally large, with territories of, respectively, 2,500 and 8,400 km2. Almost all the poleis were small enough to be correctly described as city-states, i.e. a state consisting of a city plus its hinterland. If one reckons, tentatively, a city-state’s hinterland as at most a day’s walk from city to boundary, a radius of 30 km gives a territory of c.3,000km2. There seem to have been only four cities that went over that limit …
Population
… The city-states often registered their citizens, and in some the full citizens were provided with tickets of lead or bronze as identity cards. Free non-citizens were doubtless listed in so far as they had to pay an annual tax to the state theywere in.But nobody ever counted how many slaves there were living in a polis. …. [Most] of our sources are statements by historians about the sizes of the armies that took part in the big battles [the hoplites] …
… If our scattered sources are looked at together, it emerges that in the smallest poleis there will have been no more than, say, 300 adult male citizens. Medium-sized poleis, like Plataiai, had c.1,000 citizens, and big ones like Eretria had c.4,000–6,000; only the very big ones went above 10,000. Athens had 50,000–60,000 at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, but only c.30,000 in the fourth century, and Sparta had some 8,000 citizens at the time of the PersianWars, but only c.1,200 at the beginning of the fourth century. …
Constitution
The most general account we have of the polis as a political community is Aristotle’s Politics, especially Books 1 and 3. He gives us a sharp-eyed analysis of the polis and its components, and at most points his description corresponds to the picture to be obtained from the other sources, both the Athenian sources and what we have for the rest of the ancient Greek city-state world.
In Book 1 Aristotle produces a socio-economic description of the rise and development of the polis and its components. The smallest unit is the household (oikia); several households make a village (kome), and the city (polis) emerges by the joining together of several villages. …
… In Book 3 Aristotle passes to analysis of the political structure of the polis. Now he argues that a polis is to be understood as a ‘community’ (koinonia) of citizens (politai) with regard to a constitution (politeia), meaning the city’s political institutions and how they are organised. …
… The word ‘community’ (koinonia) shows that for Aristotle the polis is not primarily a settlement but a society: it is a community of politai, i.e. adult male citizens, excluding women, children, slaves and all free non-citizens. The insistence that only full citizens are members of the polis shows that polis in its political sense is kept apart from polis in its urban sense: as city, the polis includes women, children, slaves and free non-citizens, but from polis as state they are all excluded.
The third element in Aristotle’s definition concerns the sphere of activity that the citizens have in common: that is, the politeia. The word politeia actually means ‘citizenship’ in the abstract, i.e. being a citizen of a polis; and that meaning is confirmed in hundreds of city decrees in which one or more named persons are granted citizenship in a given polis. But from this basic meaning two other senses developed: (1) in a concrete sense the word politeia could mean the whole citizen body; and (2) in an abstract sense it came to mean the political structure of the citizen body, and in that sense it can be translated by words like ‘form of government’ or ‘constitution’: a modern political scientist might prefer ‘political system’. In Aristotelian terms the ‘citizen body’ is the matter that makes the polis, while the ‘constitution’ is the form that the polis has. Apart from this philosophical singularity, Aristotle’s analysis of polis, polites and politeia is quite in line with our other sources …
If we ask for a more precise definition of what politeia covers, we shall find that it is ‘the structure of the political organs (archai) of the polis and in particular that organ that is in charge of the whole’. But the structure of political organs varies from polis to polis. According to whether the supreme organ is a monarch or a minority of the citizens or a majority of them, we can distinguish three types of constitution: rule of the one, rule of the few, rule of the people. In a monarchy power is wielded by a king (basileus) or a despot (tyrannos); in the rule of the few (oligarchia or aristokratia) it is wielded by a ruling class of wealthy men or aristocrats who monopolise the right to fill all the important offices of state; under a rule of the people (demokratia or politeia) it is the ‘little people’ (demos), the majority in fact, of the less wealthy citizens who exercise power through a People’s Assembly in which all citizens have the right to speak and vote irrespective of their property status. This fundamental division into three of the types of constitution is found in all our sources …
… In the ancient Greek city-state culture ‘citizenship’ was what it has become again in the modern world: a person’s juridically defined, inherited, membership of a state, in virtue of which that citizen enjoys a number of political, social and economic privileges in that state which a non-citizen living in the state is deprived of or can enjoy only to a limited extent. In most cases a given person can only have citizenship in one state. In the Middle Ages and in Early Modern times ‘citizenship’ applied only to (some of) those who lived in the cities, and in the full political sense was found only in city-states …
In Greece … astos (masculine) and aste (feminine) were used when what was referred to was the inherited membership of the citizen body. And as a general rule, you could only be polites in one polis. … In practice a citizen is defined as a person born of citizens (astoi); but functionally a citizen is defined as a person (polites) who takes a part in the running of a polis by exercising his political rights. In a democracy the two definitions coincide … In oligarchies the functional definition applies only to that fraction of the native-born citizens who have a given property qualification. Since a polis is a community of citizens from which non-citizens are excluded, the polis par excellence is the democratic city-state. Oligarchies, and especially monarchies, cannot be poleis in the same sense, because not just non-citizens and slaves but even native-born citizens are excluded from participation in the political institutions that are the centre of what makes a polis. In an oligarchy full political rights depend on a property qualification, and in a monarchy the monarch is the only citizen in the political meaning of the word: absolute monarchy was in Greek eyes ‘tyranny’, and one can with a certain justification say that a city-state ruled by a tyrant is in principle not a polis at all. In the fourth century and the early Hellenistic period there is a tendency to see demokratia as a constitution that a polis must have.
Aristotle, indeed, does not share that viewpoint, but he says that more or less all contemporary poleis are oligarchies or democracies, and democracy has become the commonest type of constitution. An overview of all known city state constitutions in the fourth century bc gives a rather different picture: namely, fifty-nine democracies, forty-seven oligarchies and thirty-nine tyrannies. If these figures are representative, tyranny was much commoner than Aristotle allows, and there were still a good many oligarchies around.
But, on the other hand, the overview shows that the same institutions were found in all poleis irrespective of their type of constitution. Most oligarchies had an Assembly of the People: its competence was, of course, limited, but as a rule all citizens had access, and only seats on the Council and access to the top administrative posts were confined to the wealthiest citizens. Tyrants also summoned assemblies, and a tyrant’s power often rested on his occupying the city-state’s top administrative post and terrorising the city-state’s political institutions into doing his bidding by means of his clique of followers or his bodyguard.
Organs of government
The ancient Greek polis was one of the most totally institutionalised societies in world history, and even in oligarchies and tyrannies there were a large number of administrative posts filled by ordinary citizens. Most poleis had the same set of institutions: an Assembly (ekklesia), a Council (boule), sometimes a Senate (gerousia), courts of law (dikasteria) and magistrates (archai), either elected or picked by lot. It was the way in which power was divided between the institutions, and the limited access to some of them, that distinguished one type of constitution from another.
A typical example is the constitution we call the ‘moderate oligarchy’ of Kyrene. It was founded in 322 bc or immediately after, and inscribed on a marble stele which was found when Kyrene was excavated in the 1920s. It is the oldest surviving written constitution in the world, and in outline it lays down the following provisions. Citizenship belongs to all persons born of citizens in Kyrene and the poleis founded by Kyrene. Political rights are confined to 10,000 citizens over 30 years of age with a property of at least 2,000 drachmas. Amongst the political institutions the following are referred to: (1) an Assembly of the People in which all 10,000 can meet; (2) a Council of 500 men over 50 years of age chosen by lot for two years at a time; (3) a Senate of 101 men over 50 serving for life, chosen by the Assembly; and (4) boards of magistrates, the most important being the board of five strategoi chosen by the Assembly to serve alongside the Egyptian ruler, Ptolemy, who is perpetual strategos. Crimes punishable by death must be judged by the Senate, the Council and 1,500 jurors chosen by lot from the 10,000.
If we turn from the institutions to their competence, we can best get a picture by surveying the tasks that, according to our sources, were performed by the polis, i.e. where the polis appears as the acting subject. First of all, the polis legislates and passes laws, or naturalises foreigners, or bestows honours on foreigners. In the administration of justice it passes sentences, or inflicts punishments, or arrests somebody, or brings an action on behalf of a citizen, or shelters a refugee, or appoints a panel of jurors. In financial matters it strikes coins, or accepts as legal tender coins struck by other poleis, or collects revenue, or defrays expenses, or takes up a loan, or pays interest on a loan, or enters into a contract, or owes money, or pays a fine, or buys landed property, or pledges some property. In religious matters it organises a festival, or makes sacrifices to a god, or makes a dedication to a god, or consults an oracle. In foreign policy it sends out envoys and representatives, or enters into an alliance, or goes to war, or sends out an army, or buries the citizens killed in war, or makes peace, or defects from a league or a ruler, or founds a colony.
Alternatively, one can take a look at the decisions that were taken in councils and assemblies and put into practice by the magistrates and dealt with in the courts. Some of the laws and decrees that have come down to us are about the political machinery itself: rules about meetings of Assembly and Council, about election or choosing by lot of magistrates and so on.Other laws concern the working of the legal system, and fall under what we nowadays call criminal law, law of inheritance and family law. In many such laws most of the provisions are about the administration of justice. On the other hand, there are very few laws about production and trade and the whole economic sector. Such provisions as do concern the economy are mainly about taxes and customs, the taking up and paying back of loans from the sanctuaries and how to secure the city’s grain supply. Laws about foreign policy include declarations of war, peace treaties and alliances, mobilisation of army and navy, and upkeep of the fortifications. There are comprehensive laws about the organisation and financing of the great religious festivals, and long tables of all the festivals that have to be celebrated during the year, listed month by month. Finally, there are a huge number of grants of citizenship and honourary decrees for citizens and non-citizens. They survive in great numbers because they were often inscribed on marble stelai and displayed publicly.
Below the niveau of the polis there was in every polis a network of subdivisions of the citizen body. Especially in the larger poleis the citizens were divided into smaller units, some territorial, others based on personal relationships. The territorial ones were often communes (demoi) or villages (komai) the ones based on personal ties were tribes (phylai), brotherhoods (phratriai), or clans (gene), and so on. The kinships on which these units were supposedly based were fictive, and in the period covered by our sources the groupings were only administrative divisions, though they sometimes retained the old kinship-based names such as ‘tribe’ or ‘brotherhood’; sometimes, however, they acquired entirely new titles that reveal their artificiality, such as pentekostyes (groups of fifty) or hekatostyes (groups of a hundred).
Having established the concept of the dependent polis, and having disposed of independence as the essential criterion for distinguishing a polis from a municipality, we have to address the question: if many poleis were dependencies, what was then the difference between a dependent polis and a civic subdivision, such as a demos, a kome, a phratria, a phyle, etc.? Like a polis (dependent or independent), a civic subdivision could have its own sanctuaries, including a theatre, its own cults and its own festivals. It had its own Assembly, in which laws (nomoi) and decrees (psephismata) could be passed and taxes and liturgies imposed; there were separate local magistrates and a local court. But in contradistinction to a polis (dependent or independent) a civic subdivision had no prytaneion [town hall], no bouleuterion [Council-house] and no boule [Council]; its members were citizens of the polis of which the civic subdivision was a part, and were not citizens of the civic subdivision as such; a local Assembly had no right to pass citizen decrees and proxeny decrees [honorific status granted to members of external political unit]; a local court could impose fines but was not empowered to pass a sentence of death or exile, and no civic subdivision seems to have had a prison (desmoterion). A civic subdivision did not strike its own coins, and it had no right to enter into relations with foreign states.The members of a civic subdivision could form a unit of the army of the polis, but would not operate as a separate army.
All these matters that the polis concerned itself with show that the city-state was not only a political community, but a religious, economic and social organisation as well. From a modern standpoint it is tempting to see the political institutions as a framework within which the polis ran its defence and religion and social and economic affairs; but such an analysis would not coincide with the ideals and self-perception of the Greeks themselves. They saw politics as a value in itself, and participation in the political institutions as an end in itself, not just as a means to some other ends. Aristotle defines man as a zoon politikon, a ‘political animal’—or a ‘polis animal’— and the purpose of human life was precisely to take a share in the establishment and distribution of the values of the society. The nub of the polis was its political institutions, and through them the city-state regulated the various sectors that were important for the maintenance and furtherance of the society.
[Addendum: p. 120, Chapter 19]
… two facts about Greek religion: it was an important part (though not necessarily the central part) of what the polis was concerned with; on the other hand, there was no institutionalised or organised sphere of religion distinct from or opposed to the sphere of the polis. The polis had nothing like the medieval distinction between the different spheres of power that could be in conflict with one another: King and Church.
The Source:
Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State, Oxford 2006 [Chapter 17]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.