{"id":80749,"date":"2023-08-31T01:00:23","date_gmt":"2023-08-31T05:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=80749"},"modified":"2023-09-20T10:46:03","modified_gmt":"2023-09-20T14:46:03","slug":"qotd-a-typical-polis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/08\/31\/qotd-a-typical-polis\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: A typical polis<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

But the smallest poleis<\/em> could be very small<\/em>. A touch over 200 poleis<\/em> in the inventory had territories of less than 100km2<\/sup>. A small polis<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em> with territories in excess of 1,000km2<\/sup> were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.<\/p>\n

But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis<\/em> 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<\/em>, from which every real polis<\/em> 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<\/em> could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis<\/em> notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis<\/em>, 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<\/em> being governed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis<\/em>, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2023-03-10.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,84,1526,7,41],"tags":[1527,732,1457,1151],"class_list":["post-80749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-government","category-greece","category-history","category-quotations","tag-ancientgreece","tag-athens","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-sparta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-l0p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80749"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84513,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80749\/revisions\/84513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}