The Greek term for the structure of a polis government was its politeia (πολιτεία), which would could mean the government (the way we would say “the state”) or the structure of that government (its “constitution”) or the rights and conditions of the citizenry (in the sense of “citizenship”); as with the many meanings of polis, the many meanings of politeia all shade into each other and are understood as blended.
Because this week we’re interested in the politeia of a polis, that’s going to mean we’re mostly focused on the politai, the citizens, who we discussed last time as one of the key building blocks of the polis. Now, as we noted last time, it’s important to keep in mind that the politai are not all of the people in the polis or indeed even very many of them: women, children, resident foreigners, native members of non-citizen free underclasses and slaves were all set outside the politai and often had no means of gaining entrance. We’re going to talk about all of those folks in more depth in the third part, where we’ll look at the status layer-cake of polis society. But for now I just want to note that all of those people are there, even if they won’t figure very prominently in this discussion of the structures of polis government.
Now we’ll explore this question of how a polis was governed: first laying out the standard elements of a polis constitution, which as we’ll discuss were surprisingly similar from one polis to the next. Then we’ll deal with variations in how those elements are structured, which the Greeks understood to define the differences in the three kinds of constitution that a polis might normally have: oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Then […] we’ll look at what sort of magistrates a polis might have and what their jobs might be as well as the structure of the legal system a polis might have.
THis is going to mean that we’re discussing the “constitutions” of poleis, but I want to be really clear here at the start that these are almost never written constitutions. So when I say “constitution”, understand that we mean this in the broad sense of “the actual makeup of the state’s institutions” rather than in the narrow sense of “a formal set of instructions for the running of the state”. Some poleis did actually have the latter (the oldest we have that I know of is a constitution established by Ptolemy I Soter for Kyrene in 322; the fact that this is a constitution dictated by a king to a subordinated polis should signal how odd it is), but they seem to have been very rare.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101, Part IIa: Politeia in the Polis”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-17.
April 5, 2026
QotD: The structure of a typical polis government
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