1
INTRODUCTION1
P.J.Rhodes
The Greek polis has been arousing interest as a subject for study for a long time—the first edition of Fustel de Coulanges’ book La Cité antique was published in 1864—but recent approaches have shown that it is a subject on which there are still important questions to be asked and worthwhile things to be said. In the conference held in Durham in 1995 our attention was centred on the development of the polis in the first few centuries of its existence.
Two of our chapters address questions of fundamental importance for this study. Mogens Hansen asks what the Greek polis was. As Director of the Copenhagen Polis Centre he is responsible for a comprehensive investigation into the poleis of Archaic and Classical Greece, and here he justifies his decision to base his investigation on the assumption that poleis were the communities which the Greeks themselves called poleis, rather than on a modern construct such as the ‘autonomous city-state’, whose properties were not possessed by all communities which the Greeks called poleis.
There are, as Hansen is well aware, problems with this approach. Language is often used not neutrally but polemically; language is often used imprecisely. Also, our evidence is far from complete: the fact that a community is labelled polis in one text which happens to survive does not guarantee that it will regularly have been labelled polis in other texts, even of the same period, which happen not to have survived. It will not be surprising, then, if the concept of the polis which we can infer from the use of the word turns out to be fuzzy at the edges, if some communities are attested with the label polis which seem no more deserving of the term than others which are not. But that is, literally, a marginal problem, and in most cases we do not have serious doubts whether to call a community a polis or not.
When we study the Greek polis as historians, we have in fact to study a range of citizen communities of which the polis was the typical but not the only embodiment: some poleis had subsidiary communities within them (like the demes of Athens) or dependent on them (as Mycalessus was probably dependent on Tanagra2); poleis could be combined, and could lose varying degrees of independence, in religious leagues (like the Delphic amphictyony) or in alliances (like the Peloponnesian or the Delian League) or in federal states (like Boeotia); in some regions of Greece (like Thessaly to the late fifth century) poleis were not important constituents of the region’s organisation.3 We should indeed study the polis, but we should study it not as an isolated phenomenon but in context; and the work of the Polis Centre will provide us with an excellent body of material on which to base that study.
The importance of context is stressed by John Davies, who asks on another plane how we ought to study the Greek polis. When we study the polis, he insists, we need to study all the forms of the Greek ‘microstate’; and we need to look at the development of similar communities, about the same time, in other parts of the Mediterranean world. Our generation of scholarship is more willing than some previous generations to acknowledge that the Greeks borrowed from their neighbours in other respects, and we should not rule out the possibility that they did so in the organisation of communities. Nor should we exaggerate the uniqueness of the Greek contribution: this volume ends with a chapter by Christopher Smith, who argues that an urban organisation developed in central Italy about the same time as in Greece, as a response to similar problems and similar opportunities.
Davies points us to important approaches which have been opened up by recent scholarship. Archaeology has been emancipated from art history, and can now contribute to our understanding of how the Greek communities developed. Religion has been rescued from its isolation, and the religious arrangements which they made can now be used to throw light on the structuring of these communities. The study of tribes, phratries and the other units through which the citizens of the communities were organised has been liberated from an antiquarian view which saw the units as survivals from an earlier age, and we can now see them as entities with a function to fulfil in the communities in which they are attested. Fruitful questions are being asked about what it meant to be a citizen of a Greek state.
As the Dark Age which followed the Mycenaean has become less dark, the picture of a total collapse from which the Greeks had to make a totally fresh start has been confirmed for some regions but has had to be modified for others. However, it remains generally true that in the Archaic period the Greek communities grew in size from a small basis, and this growth is likely to have affected the ways in which the communities developed. While Snodgrass’s arguments for dramatic growth in Attica in the eighth century were vulnerable (as he himself has acknowledged),4 a good general case has been made out by Sallares for an increase, steep at first, from a small beginning at the end of the Dark Age to a peak in the fourth century.5 Several contributors to this volume take account of a growth in population in the Greek world, and Christopher Smith points to a comparable growth in central Italy in the same period. Lin Foxhall, however, rejects the picture of increasing hardship which is often seen as a concomitant of that, and argues that, on the whole, the Archaic period was one of rising prosperity, and that the land of Greece was not seriously under pressure until the fifth or the fourth century, when Sallares believes the population was reaching its maximum—but of course the fact that a later generation regards its own situation as desperate and envies earlier generations does not rule out the possibility that an earlier generation may in its time have regarded its own situation as desperate.
Some of our chapters address issues which are common to many poleis of the Archaic period. Walter Donlan and Kurt Raaflaub both envisage communities with comparatively few high-ranking members and comparatively few low-ranking, and the majority in the middle—an egg-shaped model, as opposed to the pyramid-shaped model that has been used, e.g., by Forrest.6 They suggest that the men at the top were the first to take advantage of the rise in prosperity, but before long that became intolerable to the majority, who brought the leaders under control again and restored the balance of the community. Raaflaub in studying the part played by hoplite warriors in their states joins those who reject the concept of a ‘hoplite revolution’, but shows how the evolution of what we regard as the standard form of hoplite warfare was one aspect of a many-sided development in which we should look for complementary changes on different fronts rather than separate causes and effects. Consistent with that approach is John Salmon’s treatment of the tyrants who ruled for a time in many poleis. They emerged from feuding within the aristocracy, but by the weakening of the aristocrats which resulted from their rule, and by their provision of public buildings, public institutions and a sense of civic cohesiveness, they prepared the way for the more democratic regimes which were to follow.
Another development to be found in many poleis of the Archaic period was the production of written codes of law. Robin Osborne rescues us from the notion that particular lawgivers simply provided particular cities with a few quaint regulations of the kind that aroused the curiosity of later Greeks, and shows that we can ‘join up the dots’ to produce an intelligible picture of the similar legal developments which took place in different cities in response to similar circumstances.
Several of our chapters are concerned with the two most-studied poleis, Sparta and Athens. Stephen Hodkinson has done much in his publications to save the study of Sparta from serious anachronisms. Here he warns us that even in the fifth century the Spartans were reinventing their past as they confronted new problems; much of the apparently antique detail which used to be seen as surviving from early Sparta is not early at all, and the early Sparta to which he directs us is much more credible, at home in the Archaic period if not in every respect typical of it, than the theme park in which scholars used to believe.
Three writers on Athens look at different aspects of the work of Solon. Edward Harris challenges us to interpret the claims which Solon makes in his poetry in the light of contemporary poetry rather than later historical reconstruction. He argues that uprooting the horoi is not the literal removal of boundary markers but a metaphor for the elimination of stasis; and the hektemoroi are to be regarded neither as debt-bondsmen nor as serfs but as men making a payment to local lords who were powerful enough to protect them if they did pay or to harass them if they did not.
Lin Foxhall seeks to place Solon in his context as a member of the Athenian elite, concerned primarily with the problems of the elite and the would-be elite. She argues that the main cause of discontent in Athens in his time was not poverty and growing presure on a limited supply of land but the dependent state of the hektemoroi and limited access to the ownership of land which was essential for full membership of the community. Interpreters of the four property classes have regularly assumed that the zeugitai were hoplites and the thetes were men too poor to fight as hoplites, but she calculates that even the zeugitai, if they were owners of land yielding 200 medimnoi of produce, must have been not comfortable peasant farmers but distinctly rich men, and, if the line between zeugitai and thetes was the line between hoplites and non-hoplites, the hoplites of Archaic Athens must have been limited to an upper stratum of rich men. It is not just a modern assumption that zeugitai were hoplites and thetes were not;7 but we may have to conclude that the qualifications of 300 medimnoi stated for hippeis and 200 for zeugitai (e.g. Ath. Pol. 7.4) are not authentic Solonian qualifications and that we cannot tell how, if at all, Solon defined the boundaries of the second and third classes. What is undeniable is that Solon was sufficiently interested in the elite to distinguish from the class of hippeis a super-rich class of pentakosiomedimnoi.
Lynette Mitchell likewise focuses on Solon’s concern with the elite. She calls on us to look again at his poetry, and to reject the assumption that because Solon liberated the hektemoroi and gave political rights to rich non-eupatrids he must be viewed as a reformer on all fronts: he not only thought that the demos ought still to follow its leaders but, like Theognis, he tried to preserve the traditional understanding of arete and did not believe that wealth made a man agathos.
George Robertson also starts from the poets’ views of arete. He shows that, whereas public elegy adopted the corporate ethos of the polis and emphasised the public cause for which hoplite warriors fought together, private epitaphs conspicuously failed to incorporate that public motif and celebrated the heroism rather than the patriotism of the deceased warriors. He makes the interesting discovery that the virtue sophrosyne is overwhelmingly Athenian in its appearances in inscribed epigrams of the Archaic period, but in the Classical period, when it came to be perceived as a virtue of an oligarchic kind, it disappeared from the Athenian repertoire.
Emma Stafford bridges the gap between poetry and archaeology in her study of Themis (‘Right’). Already personified in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, in the fifth century Themis was being worshipped at Delphi and received a temple at Rhamnous; and she came to be associated with Gaia (‘Earth’) as Gaia increasingly acquired political connotations.
A good deal of attention has been devoted recently to polis sanctuaries, thanks in particular to the work of de Polignac.8 Catherine Morgan in her contribution to our volume looks at some examples of sanctuaries which belonged not to poleis but to non-polis-based ethne. Warning us against over-simplification, she shows that there was not a single pattern for a community’s involvement with its sanctuaries throughout the world of the Greek ethne; and, indeed, that there was not one pattern for the ethne and another for the poleis.
Our last two chapters take us beyond the Greek mainland. John-Paul Wilson, like other contributors, cautions us against importing into the Archaic period the interpretations of later texts, and urges that the later dichotomy between an emporion and a fully-fledged apoikia has not yet hardened even in Herodotus, and is inappropriate to the earliest Greek settlements overseas. Christopher Smith brings us back to the warning of John Davies against studying the Greek poleis without regard for their neighbours, and, in suggesting that in Greece and in central Italy we can see similar responses to similar circumstances, he compares the new articulation of the Roman citizen body and territory attributed to Servius Tullius with the new articulation of Athens and Attica introduced by Cleisthenes.
Much of our textual evidence for the Archaic period was written in the fifth century or later. A theme common to many of our chapters is the need to explain the history of and the texts written in the Archaic period in terms of that period, and to avoid not only the distortion arising from our own assumptions but also that arising from the assumptions of later periods of antiquity.9 Thus we have to guard against what had become the standard view by the fourth century, that tyrants were inevitably cruel and despotic rulers, and against the assumption that the oddities preserved in the biographical tradition about the lawgivers are typical of their work, and not just marginal to their concern with more central problems. Our chapters concerned with Sparta and Athens show the same concern to avoid the distortions of later interpretation: Sparta was reinterpreting its past as early as the fifth century; Solon’s claims do not necessarily mean what Classical writers thought they meant, and the qualifications attributed to him for the second and third property classes may be the product of later guesswork. When we turn to colonisation, we find that the notions of emporion and apoikia developed during the Classical period are not helpful as categories to be imposed on the overseas settlements of the Archaic period.
Another warning to be found in several of our chapters is against misleading simplifications which force the facts to fit a convenient model, for instance that there is one pattern of religious behaviour that is typical of poleis and another that is typical of ethne; and especially against the temptation to isolate elements of a single complex process and separate them into cause and effect, whether to say that hoplites create tyrants or that tyrants create hoplites.
But we do not need to despair in the face of these warnings: the development of the Greek polis is a phenomenon which is worth studying and which can profitably be studied. If we are sufficiently alert to the dangers presented by our own assumptions and our sources’ assumptions, we can build up a picture which is not complete and not always certain but is sufficiently extensive and has a sufficient degree of probability. Fruitful generalisations can be made: particular places had their local peculiarities, and not only in the more idiosyncratic pronouncements of their lawgivers— Archaic Sparta was unusual in certain respects, though by no means as eccentric as used once to be believed—but, of course, in a limited area, inhabited by people who spoke versions of the same language and had opportunities for contact with one another, often the challenges and problems were similar and the responses to them were similar too.
Urban society developed in other places, as well as in Greece, when there were sufficient concentrations of population and sufficient levels of prosperity. To end this Introduction I should like to suggest that what still seems to be distinctive of Greece is the early development (and not only in the poleis) of a sense of community (demos, as applied to the whole and not just to the unprivileged section) and the common interest (to demosion), and of a belief that matters which affect the whole of the demos are the concern of the whole of the demos and should involve the whole of the demos.10 This emerges from several of the points which are mentioned briefly above and treated in more detail in the chapters that follow.
If there were once kings in the Greek communities,11 they were soon set aside by a body of leading men who regarded themselves as aristocrats and who shared power amongst themselves. As the communities developed, there was an increase in the number of men who owned land and who fought for their community, and who claimed recognition in it. In some places the outcome of this tension was the seizure of power by a tyrant, whose rule weakened the aristocrats, and whose exercise of power and glorification of the community in which his power was exercised strengthened the fellow-feeling among the members of the community. In Sparta a minority of the population, but a large minority, was defined as the demos, with specified rights and duties. In Athens a body of men who in some sense had been dependants was liberated, and again the demos was defined, but this time in strata, with different rights and duties for the different strata. Laws were no longer entrusted to the memories of the leading families, but were brought into the public domain. Sometimes special lawgivers were appointed to formulate the laws, but our earliest surviving inscribed law, from Drerus in Crete in the seventh century, already uses the formula ‘Thus
it pleased the polis’ 
the Great Rhetra in Sparta provided a decision-making procedure in which the demos had a decisive part to play; and Solon in Athens, himself a special lawgiver, insisted that he had enacted laws for kakos and agathos alike.12
These growing-strains are reflected in the poetry of the Archaic period. Tyrtaeus emphasised the common solidarity of the hoplite warriors and the common cause for which they fought, but epitaphs of individual warriors focus on their individual heroism. Theognis expressed horror at the men who claim to be as excellent as those with a traditional claim to excellence, and Solon, though he was prepared to give an improved position in the community to those who lacked that traditional claim, did not think that excellence could be acquired along with wealth and political standing. Religion, as we are frequently reminded, was not a matter of private belief and devotion but was embedded in the life of the community: the gods were the community’s gods; the sanctuaries and their officials were the community’s sanctuaries and officials; principles underpinning the community, like Justice and Right, were personified in poetry from the beginning, and by the Classical period were recognised as deities to whom sanctuaries could be dedicated.
Recently modern scholars have identified Cleisthenes’ reorganisation of the citizen body in Athens as the crucial point on the path to democracy, and have used that as an excuse for celebrating 2,500 years of democracy. Full belief in and commitment to democracy, I believe, came in the time of Ephialtes, half a century later;13 but that belief and commitment could only have been achieved in a world in which the consciousness of to demosion was already well established, and it is not only the principle of democracy but also the underlying notion of to demosion which we owe to the Greek poleis.
NOTES
1 This Introduction has been revised from the Summary which I gave at the end of the Durham conference.
2 It is not among the poleis listed in Hell Oxy. 19.3 Chambers as represented in the Boeotian federation; but as Hansen points out (in Hansen [ed.] Sources for the Ancient Greek City-State, 18–21), it did have a mint of its own. Hansen discusses Mycalessus on pp. 9— 10 below.
3 See Rhodes, in Hansen (ed.) The Ancient Greek City-State, 161–82; Hansen, op. cit. (n. 1), 91–112; Hansen, in Hansen and Raaflaub (eds) Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis, 21–43, and (on komai) 45–81.
4 Snodgrass, Archaeology and the Rise of the Greek State, 10–18; countered by Morris, Burial and Ancient Society, especially 72–96, which was accepted by Snodgrass, in Rich and Wallace-Hadrill (eds) City and Country in the Ancient World, 14–16.
5The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World, especially 86–90, 122–6.
6 The Emergence of Greek Democracy, 48–9, not directly addressing the question of numbers.
7 See, for instance, Thuc. 6.43.
8 La Naissance de la cité grecque, translated as Cults, Territory and the Origins of the Greek City-State.
9 As Christopher Smith acknowledges in his chapter, historians of early Rome have a comparable problem, with the added dimension that Roman writers may have reinterpreted their past in the light of what they knew or believed about the Greek past.
10 Cf. the reference to the ‘common thing’ by Davies, pp. 29–30 below.
11 It has been argued that there were no kings by Drews, Basileus, but his argument depends partly on his setting a standard of kingliness which is inappropriate for Greece at the end of the Dark Age: see my review, Phoenix 38 (1984), 180–2.
12 Drerus: Meiggs and Lewis, 2; Sparta: Plut. Lyc. 6; Athens: Solon, fr. 38.18–20 West ap. Ath. Pol 12.4.
13 See, for example, Rhodes, in C.A.H., 2nd edition, v. 73–4, 87–95.