Mogens Herman Hansen wrote:
There were Greek cities all over the Mediterranean world, from Emporion in the Pyrenees to Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan and from Olbia at the mouth of the river Bug in Ukraine to Kyrene in Libya. Almost all those poleis had arisen or been founded in the period from 750 to 200 BC, and as late as the sixth century ad some of them were still city-states, though most were just cities. Thus the ancient Greek city-state culture lasted for some 1,200 years, exceeded only by the thousands of years of history of the Sumerian and Babylonian city-states. Population-wise there is no city-state culture that can measure up to that of ancient Greece. Precise figures we do not have but a cautious estimate is that in the fourth century BC the population of all the Greek poleis totalled at least 7.5 million people and in the time of the Roman Empire there were about 30 million Greek-speaking people living in poleis.
The city-state culture of ancient Greece stretched so far in time, in space, in population and in number of cities that it can properly be asked: is it right to describe the history of 1,500 city-states over a period of 1,000 years as one and the same city-state culture? Without discussion or documentation, more or less all historians take it for granted that all the poleis belonged to the same civilisation and have so much in common that they can be treated as a unity. Contrariwise, there is no agreement as to how long a period of time is covered by this unified picture. …
The Unity of the City-State Culture of Ancient Greece
… In contrast to many other city-state cultures, the Greek poleis did not lie together in one large region so that communication between them could be by land. In this respect the Greek poleis were like the Phoenician and the Malayan ones: most Archaic and Classical Greek poleis were on the sea, and only in the Hellenistic period did the Greeks found a long row of colonies well into the Persian Empire and far from the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Most early Greek city-states were by the sea or near the sea, ‘like frogs round a pond’ in Plato’s vivid phrase. And his remark is borne out by Pseudo-Skylax, who lists his poleis in the order in which they lie along the coast: only occasionally is his list interrupted by the standard comment, ‘there are also some poleis inland’.
As the world looks today, it is sea that divides and land that binds together, but in antiquity it was the other way round: communication was easiest by sea, and land communication was complicated and costly. The Greeks were a seafaring people, and after polis it is limen, the harbour, that is the commonest term for settlement in Pseudo-Skylax. With Classical Sparta as the one notorious exception, the ancient Greek city-state was anything but a society of xenophobic stay-at-homes. The Greeks were, on the contrary, unbelievably mobile and unbelievably easy-going about letting strangers settle in their cities.
(a) From the eighth to the third century BC new poleis were created all the time, both in Greece and outside it: they were founded as colonies (apoikiai), usually by settlers sent from the big poleis in Greece, which were consequently regarded as a colony’s ‘mothercity’ (metropolis). Many of the colonies subsequently got reinforcements of new colonists, partly from their own metropolis but also from other poleis. Most of the colonies were politically independent of the mother-city, but there were strong religious and cultural links, kept alive by constant communication between colony and mother-city. A large colony might often itself found new colonies in the region, thus acquiring a double status, as both a metropolis and an apoikia.
(b) Many individual Greeks moved from one polis to another. Often they were traders or craftsmen, but the numerous civil wars also resulted in large groups of citizens being sentenced to exile or living as refuges in neighbouring city-states. So besides citizens and the slaves of citizens there was in every polis a large population of free non-citizens who had settled in the city either permanently or for a period of years and were very seldom admitted to citizenship.
(c) The army of a city-state was primarily a citizen militia, but it could be supplemented by professional mercenaries, and in the Classical and Hellenistic periods many Greeks served for years on end as mercenaries in foreign armies.
(d) Inter-regional trade, especially sea trade, was a striking characteristic of the Greek city-state culture: trade was made necessary by the high degree of urbanisation, another typical feature, which also characterises other city-state cultures amongst our thirty-seven.
(e) It was not only trade that caused Greeks to leave their native place for a more or less long period: Delphi and the other famous Greek oracles were consulted every year by thousands of people, who had often travelled for weeks to obtain the god’s answers to their questions, and thousands of Greeks met at two- or four-year intervals at the great pan-Hellenic festivals. At the OlympicGames there may have been as many as 40,000 or 50,000 spectators. This constant and intense communication between Greeks all over the Mediterranean world was the precondition for the ability of the Greeks who lived outside Greece to retain their ethnic identity, including their conviction that, as Greeks, they were superior to the barbarians who surrounded them. In some colonies the colonists were virtually all males, who married and had children by local women. But the Greeks described all non-Greeks as barbaroi or barbarophonoi (people speaking something unintelligible). They did not bother to learn the languages of other peoples, and it was the women and the slaves who had to learn the language and conform to the culture of their husbands and owners. The colonies of ancient Greece are a rare example of it being the father’s language that became the children’s mother-tongue …
… In spite of the enormous distance from Spain to the Caucasus, the Greeks held fast to the conviction that they were a single people, and according to Herodotos (8.144.3) there were four things that bound them together: common origin, common language, common sacred places and cults, and common customs and traditions.
(a) Common origin was a myth: like most other peoples, the Greeks believed that at some time the human race had been wiped out by a flood sent by the gods, that the sole survivors were Deukalion and his family, and that all Hellenes were descended from Deukalion’s son Hellen. Although entirely mythical, this sense of a common origin must not be underrated: on the other hand, it should be stressed that the Greeks did not see themselves as a superior race.When the Greeks went on about how they were superior to all barbarians physically and mentally, they justified this by climate and surroundings: with its temperate climate Greece was the best place in the world, where its people combined dianoia (intelligence) with thymos (spirit). The hot climate of the East promoted intelligence, but was inimical to spirit, while the cold of the West gave people freedom of spirit, but was inimical to their intelligence.
(b) If one takes into account the enormous spread of Greek civilisation, there were astonishingly few dialects, and there was relatively little difference between them. If we can trust our sources, all Greeks could understand each other…. at Athens in the People’s Court any non-local could speak his own dialect and expect to be understood by the jurors … ‘there is practically no evidence that local dialects were ever a hindrance to mutual comprehension’ …
… After Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, the Greeks founded several hundred colonies in the Near East; nevertheless, the Greeks in the Hellenistic Age still maintained a strong linguistic convergence: they all used the same written form, a combination of the Attic and Ionian dialects. This new ‘dialect’ was called koine (common language), and it seems to have lived up to its name. As to the spoken language, we are almost entirely in the dark, but here, too, it seems that the dialects had to give way to a kind of standard Greek.
(c) The ‘common cult-places’ that Herodotos speaks of were partly the great oracles that all the Greeks sought advice from, in Dodone, Delphi, Lebadeia, Abai, Oropos and Didyma, partly the places that held pan-Hellenic competitions in sport, music, drama and recitation: Olympia, Delphi, the Isthmos and Nemea. Herodotos’ reference to common cults shows that the cults and the set of gods that turned up at the festivals must have had so much in common that they can all be regarded as manifestations of one and the same religion—a view to which the Greeks themselves gave expression in the sources we have.
(d) Common customs and traditions can cover everything from recitation and reading of Homer to the use of coinage or the building of peripteral temples. In this connection we will limit ourselves to one example. Sporting contests were a feature of Greek culture that distinguished them from all their neighbours. The Games were pan-Hellenic, which meant that all Greeks could participate—but also that only Greeks could participate. A participant had to state what polis he came from, and a victor was named in his proclamation as a citizen of the city-state he belonged to …
So the Greeks had a common culture and a fixed belief that they were a single people. And that justifies the proposition that all 1,500 poleis belonged to one and the same city-state culture, a proposition formulated with force and brevity by the poet Poseidippos: ‘there is only one Hellas, but there are many poleis’ (fr. 30, PCG).
However, it must not be concluded that the city-state was a specifically Greek institution, a form of society that distinguished Greeks from barbarians. That is a view that can be read in modern works, but, with Aristotle as the sole exception, it is not what the Greeks themselves believed. Aristotle argued that the only true humans were adult Greek males who were citizens of a polis, and that the polis was a specifically Greek form of society such as barbarians did not have the capacity to create. But in Herodotos, Thucydides, Xenophon, Pseudo-Skylax and all the other sources we hear of hundreds of ‘barbarian’ poleis. The word polis is often used in the sense of ‘city’ rather than ‘state’; but it is also often used of ‘barbarian’ city-states, e.g. Rome or the Etruscan or Phoenician city-states. To use the word polis of a barbarian city was naturally often as misleading as when the Greeks identified foreign gods with their own, and called, e.g., the Skythian god Geitosyros ‘Apollo’; but the language and concept the Greek writers used do not show that the Greeks themselves felt that their own division into poleis was one of the characteristic differences between Greeks and barbarians.
The Source:
Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State, Oxford 2006 [the extracts are from the Introduction and Chapter 4]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.