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THE COPENHAGEN INVENTORY OF POLEIS AND THE LEX HAFNIENSIS DE CIVITATE¹

Mogens Herman Hansen

In 1993 the Danish National Research Foundation set up at Copenhagen University a small research centre devoted to the study of the polis in ancient Greece. One of the main objectives of the Copenhagen Polis Centre is to build up an inventory of every single Archaic and Classical settlement which is explicitly called polis in contemporary sources. The main purpose of this investigation is to find out what the Greeks thought a polis was, and to compare that with what modern historians think a polis is.² The concept polis found in the sources and in modern historiography ought, of course, to be the same. But that is far from always the case. Let me adduce just two examples. The orthodoxy is that the small Boiotian town Mykalessos was not a polis; it was rather a kome. This is indeed the term used by Strabo, whose classification is cited in, for example, Pauly- Wissowa s.v. Mykalessos, and again in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.³ What is passed over in silence in both these articles and in most other studies of the history of Boiotia is that Mykalessos is called a polis by Thucydides, not just once, but three times in a passage where he uses polis both in the urban and in the political sense of the word.⁴ Similarly, it is commonly believed that a klerouchy was not a polis.⁵ Nevertheless, the Athenian klerouchies are repeatedly classified as being poleis both in literary texts and in inscriptions.⁶

Scores of other examples could be adduced but it would serve no purpose to list them here. In such cases the modern historian’s reaction has normally been to admit that these settlements may well be called poleis in our sources, but then to imply or to state explicitly that they were not poleis in the true sense.⁷ The curious result of such a policy is the view that our sources often apply the term polis to a settlement that, according to modern orthodoxy, was not a polis. We are faced with a polis that was not a polis.

The contradiction has its root in the fact that modern historians who write about ancient Greece like to use the term polis synonymously with the term city-state.⁸ But city-state is a modern historical term which seems to have been coined in the mid-nineteenth century and first applied to the Roman republican concept of civitas,⁹ from where it was rapidly transferred not only to studies of the Greek polis¹⁰ but also to investigations of Italian city-states from c. 1100 onwards,¹¹ of medieval German Reichsstädte, of Sumerian, Phoenician and Etruscan cities and of other city-state cultures as well.¹² Thus, modern historical discussions of the concept of the citystate combine characteristics borrowed from many different cultures,¹³ and therefore the concept of city-state is not necessarily coextensive with the concept of polis. Mykalessos may well have been a polis in the eyes of the Greeks, although it is not a city-state in the eyes of a modern historian.

In order to avoid paradoxical statements of the type that a certain settlement though called a polis was not a polis, I suggest that the two terms polis and city-state should be kept apart and not used indiscriminately. The term polis should be restricted to the Greeks’ own understanding of what a polis was, whereas the term city-state should be used only when we discuss modern historical analyses of ancient Greek society.

Consequently, instead of saying that Mykalessos, though called a polis, was not a polis in the true sense, the historian ought to say that Mykalessos, though apparently a polis in the age of Thucydides, was not a city-state. In this form the statement makes sense. Whether it is historically true is a different matter. Whenever the city-state is discussed, independence or autonomia is singled out as the most important defining characteristic.¹⁴ But a great number of communities, called polis in our sources were not independent and did not enjoy autonomia.¹⁵ Thus Mykalessos was a dependency of Tanagra;¹⁶ the Greeks thought it was a polis, but according to modern orthodoxy its lack of independence or autonomia indicates that it was not a city-state.

If we establish and acknowledge a distinction between the ancient concept of polis and the modern historical concept of city-state, it follows that we can conduct two different investigations of ancient Greek society which may lead to different conclusions. If we study the city-state and apply the modern historians’ understanding of what a city-state is, we get one picture of Archaic and Classical Hellas. If we go through the written sources and list all settlements that are actually called poleis in contemporary texts we investigate the ancient Greeks’ understanding of their own settlement pattern and get a different picture.

It would be wrong to say that one of the two pictures is the right one and that the other is misleading; rather, the two pictures are complementary. It is always legitimate to contrast a culture’s perception of itself with an outsider’s more detached perception of the same culture.

At the Copenhagen Polis Centre we want to know how the Greeks perceived their own settlement pattern, and therefore our investigation must be based, first of all, on a careful examination of the terminology used and the site-classifications found in our sources. In this type of study it is necessary to describe and define the ancient concept of the polis before we begin to compare it with the modern concept of the city-state. So how do we do this? In all literary and epigraphical sources of the Archaic and Classical periods we collect every attestation of the term polis in order to conduct two different investigations.

One of our tasks is to examine how the term polis is used whenever we meet it. Our sources tell us, for example, that a polis waged war, or made peace, or entered into an alliance, or struck coins, or passed a law, or a sentence, or founded a colony, or defrayed expenses, or repaired the walls; and we hear about the territory of a polis, or its roads and water supply, or its altars, or its protecting divinity.¹⁷

The other task is to examine every single attestation of the term polis referring to a named polis such as Korinth, or Melos, or Megalopolis.

In the first investigation we must analyse all the passages we have listed, no matter whether they concern a named polis or refer to a polis or the polis in general; and for this investigation a specific law passed by the polis Dreros is just as valuable a source as is a general reference in Aristotle that it is the polis which is responsible for passing laws.¹⁸ Conducting the second investigation we must, of course, restrict ourselves to the attestations which contain an explicit reference to a named polis and ignore all the passages referring to the polis in general.

These two different investigations relate to a very simple, but very important distinction, acknowledged in linguistics and philosophy and applied in that branch of logic which is devoted to the definition and classification of concepts. The meaning of a term is one thing; that which is denoted by a term because it has a certain meaning is another. In linguistics this distinction is sometimes referred to as the distinction between connotation and denotation; in modern logic the two terms used are the intension of a term (that is, its meaning) and the extension of a term (that is, the totality of objects to which the term refers).

For example: the connotation (or meaning) of the term ‘state’ is something like ‘a geographically delimited segment of human society united by common obedience to a single sovereign’,¹⁹ but the term ‘state’ denotes any existing state, such as Greece, Denmark, Russia or Australia.

The intension of the term ‘state’ is the sum total of all the properties that must be possessed by a community in order to be called a state; the extension of the term ‘state’ is constituted by the total number of existing states.²⁰ If we concentrate on the connotation or intension of a term we can determine its meaning by listing the essential characteristics which the term connotes, and then afterwards establish a list of the objects which fulfil the requirements of our definition.

If we concentrate on the denotation or extension of a term we shall do it the other way round: we begin by enumerating all the denotata, i.e. all objects to which the term is applied. Next, we look for the essential characteristics which these objects have in common, and finally we establish the meaning of the term by assembling the common characteristics we have found in order to build up a picture of the concept behind the term.

After this digression I will return to my topic and ask the question: what is a polisi? Let me subdivide the main question into three questions: do we want to examine the term itself? Or the concept behind the term? Or the objects denoted by the term?

The term. An analysis of the term is principally a linguistic investigation and in a study of ancient Greek history it is relevant only in so far as it can shed light on the meaning and uses of the term. By studying the etymology of the word polis, for example, we learn that it is related to Old Indian púr, Lithuanian pilìs and Latvian pils, and that these three words originally meant stronghold.²¹ Consequently, the original meaning of polis must have been stronghold, and in this sense it may perhaps have been used for the fortified sites in Crete in the tenth century at, for example, Dreros and Anavlochos.²²

The concept. A historian studies a term not for its own sake but in order to grasp the concept behind the term, to determine its essence, to find all the essential characteristics that go with it and transform these criteria into a description or even a definition of the concept. In doing all this the historian is faced with the problem that he has to apply modern terms and concepts in his description both of the ancient societies themselves and of the concepts used by the ancients themselves to describe them. Sometimes the historian prefers in his analysis to use modern terms, such as ‘state’ or ‘settlement’ or ‘town’ or ‘village’; but sometimes the historian takes over an ancient term found in the sources and uses it in transliterated form. As pointed out above, polis is precisely such a term, and accordingly we cannot conduct our investigation of the term polis before we have decided whether we want to study the ancient concept of polis as found in our sources or the modern concept of polis as we meet it in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of the history of ancient Greece, where the word polis is frequently used synonymously with the modern term city-state.

The objects. The third type of investigation is to focus on the denotata and analyse the communities or settlements referred to by the word polis. Such a study is not necessarily bound up with a study of the term itself to the same extent as is an investigation of the concept. It is a commonplace, but nevertheless true, that language is the medium in which concepts are expressed and words are the principal traces which ancient concepts have left behind for the modern historian to study. Symbols expressed in painting or sculpture or architecture, etc. are important accessories, but to conduct an investigation of an ancient concept without focusing first on the words used to express it would be a nonsense.

On the other hand, the objects to which a term refers leave many other traces than the term itself. If we focus on the objects rather than on the concept, an examination of the terms used about the objects may be relegated to the background, and that is in fact what has happened in recent studies of ancient Greek society. Inspired by the growing number of archaeological surveys of the Greek landscape, the focus of interest has shifted from the written to the archaeological sources, and from the towns to the countryside. The result has been a rapidly increasing number of what can be called settlement pattern studies. Here the historian starts with the settlement pattern of a landscape, so far as it can be ascertained for macro-periods (Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Roman), then the investigation is focused on the actual pattern of the social, economic and political structure of the landscape and its settlements, and only then does the historian start looking at the names given to the various types of settlement and the terms used to describe them.²³ In such an investigation it does not matter very much how the Greeks classified the different types of settlement, and what they themselves thought of their settlement pattern comes second to the study of the settlement pattern itself.²⁴

Prominent examples of such an approach are John Fossey’s studies of Boiotia, Lokris and Phokis. Or the Cherry—Davis— Mantzourani investigation of northern Keos. Or Carter’s studies of Metapontion.²⁵ And a survey for the general reader, covering the whole of Hellas, is given by Robin Osborne in his Classical Landscape with Figures. In this study the settlements under discussion are called either ‘cities’ or ‘towns’ or ‘villages’ (11). A discussion of the Greek terminology as applied to each individual settlement is eschewed. Admittedly, Osborne states in his preface that he will use the English term ‘city’ synonymously with the Greek term polis in its political sense (ibid.). Nevertheless, he sometimes uses the term ‘village’ about a settlement that, in a contemporary source, is unquestionably called a polis in the political sense.²⁶ Such inconsistencies, however, do not necessarily subtract from the value of his book, since the Greek terminology and the Greeks’ understanding of their own environment are issues intentionally left out of consideration in this type of study.²⁷

Although such investigations are extremely valuable in their own right they are not designed to answer the question: what is a polis? This is nevertheless still an important question, although to some extent it seems to have become a neglected one. That is why we have set up the Copenhagen Polis Centre with the explicit aim of answering that question or at least to shed light on some important aspects of it.

First we collect all attestations of the term polis in Archaic and Classical sources in order to analyse and list how the term is used in every single case, i.e. that a polis wages war, or strikes coins, or passes a law, or has its walls repaired, or sets up a cult for a protecting divinity, etc. After this first investigation which focuses on the intension of the term we move to the extension and try to build up an inventory of all attested poleis.

In our collection of all attestations of the term polis we now discard all the instances of the word polis being used in a general way without reference to any named polis, and in our second investigation we focus exclusively on attestations of the term polis being linked to a named locality such as Korinth, or Megalopolis, or Thasos, or Kyrene. Next, for every single locality that is called polis in a contemporary source we then attempt to have forty-five other questions answered, e.g. did the polis in question possess an agora or a bouleuterion or a prytaneion? Do we know about victors in one of the Panhellenic games coming from this particular polis? Did it have a mint? Was its urban centre protected by a circuit of walls? Do we know about citizenship decrees passed by the polis? Was the name of the polis used in personal names after the patronymic as a kind of city-ethnic, e.g. Korinthios or Thebaios, or is a citizen of this polis designated by e.g. a demotic instead of a city-ethnic? The forty-five questions we ask have, of course, been generated by the first investigation in which we examined the various properties and activities typically connected with the concept of polis. When, for example, we ask for a bouleuterion it is because we know from our sources that a boule and its bouleuterion were a characteristic of a polis but not to be found in a deme or in a kome.²⁸

Every attested polis is included in our inventory and classified as a polis type A. Next we collect information about localities which are not actually called polis in any contemporary source, but are known for a number of the activities we examined in our first investigation, for example, the community in question may have had an agora or a bouleuterion or a prytaneion; its citizens may have been known as victors in the Panhellenic games; or it may have possessed a mint. Its urban centre may have been protected by a circuit of walls, and a citizenship decree passed by the assembly may be preserved or referred to in a literary source.

If such a community shared a number of properties with the communities actually called polis, the presumption is that it was in fact considered a polis by the Greeks, and that it is only because of the fragmentary state of our sources that it is not attested directly as a polis in a contemporary inscription or in a piece of literature. All such communities are now added to our inventory, but classified as poleis type B and C. We choose between B and C according to how certain or uncertain we are that it is only due to lack of sources that the community in question is not actually recorded as a polis. We note, of course, if such a community is called polis in a later source, especially if the source is retrospective.

Thus our principal criterion for inclusion and classification is the requirement that a locality is called a polis in at least one contemporary source, that is, in Archaic and Classical sources down to the death of Alexander the Great in 323. By adopting this method we are faced with a number of methodological problems.

1. To what extent was polis a loaded term and consequently subject to manipulation?
2. To what extent are our sources consistent in their terminology?
3. To what extent did the word polis denote the same concept in the seventh and again in the fourth century?
4. To what extent will the mass of Athenian evidence result in an inventory of poleis which reflects the idea of a polis in Classical Athens but obscures the complexity of the concept as used in the rest of the Greek world?
5. To what extent is our investigation thwarted by the fact that the word polis is used not just in one sense but has four different meanings?

Questions 1–4 have been treated in my longer and more detailed account of the inventory of poleis,²⁹ and I will devote the rest of this chapter to a discussion of question 5.

The most serious problem we have to face is that the term polis has more than one meaning. In fact, it seems to have had four, since it is found in the senses of (1) stronghold, (2) town, (3) country and (4) state. When used synonymously with akropolis the term polis denotes a stronghold and/or a small hill-top settlement.³⁰ When used synonymously with asty the term polis denotes an urban centre.³¹ When used synonymously with ge or chora the term polis denotes the totality of town plus hinterland,³² and when used synonymously with a koinonia or a plethos politon the term polis denotes what we today call a city-state.³³

Now, recording every single attestation of the word polis found in Archaic and Classical documents and literature must, accordingly, result in an inventory of poleis which comprises not only city-states, but also strongholds, towns, and countries. Under such circumstances an inventory of all localities called polis is apparently doomed to be a hotchpotch of settlements and of no value whatsoever. In the Polis Centre, however, we think that this problem is much less serious than it appears, and this optimistic view is based on the following observations.

Let me first mention the relative frequency with which the four different senses occur. In Archaic and Classical authors and inscriptions attestations of polis in the sense of stronghold amount to less than one per hundred of all attestations, and attestations of polis where country is the principal sense or a secondary meaning that goes with the sense of town and/or state amount to less than two per hundred only. In the remaining c. 98 per cent of the attestations polis is used either in the sense of town or in the sense of (city)state, or the two senses are combined and indistinguishable. Again, in some authors, such as Herodotos and Aeneas Tacticus, the urban sense is much more common than the political, whereas in Thucydides and Xenophon the sense of political community is about twice as common as the sense of urban centre. In inscriptions the political sense dominates and there are few attestations only of polis in the sense of town. Let me offer a brief discussion of the different meanings.

Polis used synonymously with akropolis in the sense of stronghold is not only extremely rare, it is also confined to fixed formulas almost exclusively found in public documents, such as the provision that a certain document be inscribed and set up on the polis, that is, on the akropolis, for everybody to inspect.³⁴ Consequently, it is easy to spot and identify the very few attestations of a locality being called polis in the sense of stronghold or small hill-top settlement, and even if we include such sources for the sake of completeness, we shall find only a handful of localities which are called polis in the sense of akropolis without being a polis in the political sense. One such example is the Attic deme Erchia, whose sacrificial calendar has several references to the polis, that is, the akropolis of the deme, to be distinguished from the polis of the asty, that is, the akropolis of all Athenians in Athens.³⁵

In a number of passages ‘country’ or ‘territory’ is either the principal meaning of the word polis or at least a secondary meaning where the principal meaning is either ‘state’ or ‘town’ or both.³⁶ But whenever polis occurs in the sense of territory, there is no doubt that the reference is to the territory of a polis in the political sense. We have, for example, references to a law or a verdict prescribing that a person be exiled from a named polis, or that the corpse of an executed criminal be thrown over the border of the polis. In such passages polis must denote both the town and its hinterland, but obviously the reference is to the territory of a polis in the sense of ‘state’. Consequently, we do not muddle up our inventory of attested poleis if we classify such communities as polis type A. One of the few exceptions to this observation is the passage in Lys. 6.6 in which Italy, Cyprus and other regions are all called poleis.

We are left with two different meanings of the word, namely, first, polis in the sense of town denoting an urban centre and, second, polis in the sense of political community denoting what we today call a city-state. When constructing our inventory of poleis in the Copenhagen Polis Centre we have to face two questions: first, is it possible in our sources to distinguish between polis used in the sense of town and polis used in the sense of state? and second, what happens if we simply record all attestations of the term polis irrespective of whether it means town or state?

Sometimes it is very easy to determine whether an author uses polis in the sense of town or state. See for example the following passage from Aeneas Tacticus in which the sense of town and the sense of state, both easily recognizable, appear only two lines apart: (Aen. Tact. 11.4).³⁷ Here those who guard the town (polis) and its walls are juxtaposed with the state (polis) providing their pay. But in many other cases it is simply impossible to know which of the two senses an author has in mind, and in such cases the correct answer is that he probably uses the term in both senses without distinguishing one from the other, so that it is simply pointless to try to establish a distinction. When, for example, Herodotos lists the six poleis on Athos, it is impossible to decide whether the six names he mentions denote towns or states:

(Her. 7.22.3).³⁸

Here the word polis is probably intended to convey both meanings simultaneously.

One important reason for this ambiguity in the meaning of the term is that in almost all poleis the name of the town was the same as the name of the state. In modern Europe there is only one example of the name of a state being identical with the name of the state’s principal city, namely Luxembourg. But in ancient Hellas, as we all know, this applied to nearly every polis. The toponym Korinthos, for example, can denote both the town Korinth and the Korinthian state,³⁹ and the ethnic hoi Korinthioi is used to denote both the inhabitants of the town Korinth and the Korinthian citizens. So, when Xenophon, for example, tells us that the Korinthians feared that their polis was being betrayed, it is impossible to know whether their concern was for the town Korinth or the entire Korinthian state.⁴⁰

In the case of Korinth this ambiguity does not confuse us because, even admitting that polis is used ambiguously in such a passage, we know from innumerable other sources that Korinth was a polis in the political sense as well as in the urban sense. Consequently it appears in our inventory as a polis type A. But what about all the poleis which are attested as polis in one passage only? If in this case we are in doubt whether the reference is to the town or the state, are we then, in our list of attested poleis, to include or to exclude the polis in question?

On the face of it, this ambiguity in the meaning of the term polis in our sources seems to be a major threat to our whole investigation, but the difficulty in distinguishing between the sense of state and the sense of town does not make our investigation impossible: quite the contrary; it sheds light on an important aspect of the Greek polis.

A closer study of polis in the senses of town and state reveals that the term polis is not used to denote any town, but only a town that is also the urban centre of a polis in the sense of political community. The word polis has two different meanings, but its reference, its denotation, seems invariably to be what the Greeks called a polis in the sense of a koinonia politon politeias, and what we today call a city-state. Exceptions to this rule seem to amount to less than one per cent. So far the investigation has been completed for Herodotos,⁴¹ Thucydides,⁴² Xenophon⁴³ and Aeneas Tacticus, and is being conducted for the Attic orators and for Skylax. The results look very promising, and I shall report them here for the four historians.

Of 159 communities called polis in the urban sense in Herodotos 134 are attested either in Herodotos’ own work or in some other source as poleis in the political sense as well. In twenty-three instances we have no contemporary information about the political status of the urban centre in question, and there are only two exceptions to the rule we have stated, namely the small settlements Anthela and Alpenos near Thermopylai, which are classified both as poleis and as komai.⁴⁴

In Thucydides seventy communities are called polis in the urban sense. In some five cases we are in doubt whether the community was a polis in the political sense as well, and there is only one attestation of a polis in the urban sense, which seems not to have been a polis in the political sense, namely Skandeia, the harbour of Kythera, the island south of Lakonia. Skandeia is called polis in the urban sense at 4.54.1 although Kythera was a one-polis island with the city of Kythera as its political centre.⁴⁵ But even here Thucydides’ use of the term polis does not necessarily break the rule stated above. A distinction is made between ‘the polis by the sea (4.54.1), and ‘the upper polis (4.54.2), which indicates that Thucydides took both Skandeia and Kythera to be one half of a polis. So Skandeia can be viewed as a part of Kythera and not as a polis in its own right⁴⁶

In Xenophon’s Hellenika there is no detectable exception to our rule. In seventy-five out of eighty-six cases we can be fairly certain that a town called polis by Xenophon was a city-state as well, in the remaining eleven cases the result is a non liquet. But if we extend the investigation to cover the other Xenophontic treatises we find in the Poroi Xenophon’s proposal to increase the number of mining slaves and to found a new polis in the mining district.⁴⁷ Here the word is undeniably used about an urban centre that was not the political centre of a polis. This is an exception to our rule, but it is the only one in the entire Xenophontic corpus.

In Aeneas Tacticus’ work polis in the sense of town obviously prevails over polis used in the sense of state, whereas polis in the sense of territory is attested in a few passages only.⁴⁸ In most cases the term is used either generally about any town

under siege or the reference is to an unnamed town. But occasionally Aeneas’ examples concern named poleis, and the towns to which he refers are the following:

see table

The list is short—thirteen entries, that is all—but there is no denying the fact that all the towns called poleis by Aeneas were poleis in the political sense as well. Furthermore, in several of Aeneas’ references to an unnamed polis he takes it for granted that the town he describes was also a political community.⁴⁹ Thus in Aeneas’ treatise the term has several meanings, and is used most frequently in the sense of town, sometimes in the sense of state and occasionally in the sense of land or country; but the sites called poleis in the urban or territorial sense are all known to have been poleis in the political sense as well.

To conclude: as is well known, authors like Herodotos, Thucydides and Xenophon did not care much about technical terms. It is unlikely that they spent long hours making sure that in every case they had used the term polis in accordance with the rule stated above. In my opinion, their use of polis simply reflects the ordinary use of the word in Classical Greek.

Thus, I think that a generalisation is permitted, and let me sum up by stating what we in the Polis Centre propose to call the lex Hafniensis de civitate: in Archaic and Classical sources the term polis used in the sense of ‘town’ to denote a named urban centre is not applied to any urban centre but only to a town which was also the political centre of a polis. Thus the term has two different meanings, town and state, but even when it is used in the sense of town its reference, its denotation, seems almost invariably to be what the Greeks called polis in the sense of a koinonia politon politeias and what we call a city-state. The lex Hafniensis applies to Hellenic poleis only. The references to barbaric communities called poleis in the urban and/or in the political sense must, of course, be analysed separately. Whenever a term is transferred from one culture to describe a more or less similar phenomenon in other cultures it is unavoidably twisted, sometimes more, sometimes less according to how remote the other culture is. An obvious example is the term ‘state’ as applied, for example, by historians to describe ancient Greek poleis or by nineteenth-century politicians to describe contemporary African societies.

Consequently, in our inventory of Archaic and Classical poleis in the political sense of the term we can register as poleis type A not only localities explicitly called polis in the political sense but also all the localities explicitly called polis in the urban sense, but then implicitly in the political sense since we can infer from this usage that the town in question must have been a polis in the sense of state as well.

A further consequence of applying this law is the recognition that the concept of polis in the sense of town was much more closely connected with the concept of polis in the sense of state than many modern historians are inclined to believe. The prevailing orthodoxy is that there were citystates without an urban centre, or, to formulate the view in ancient terms, that there were poleis in the political sense which were not centred on a polis in the urban sense.⁵⁰ This orthodoxy is without support in our sources⁵¹ and, in my opinion, it ought to be rejected as unfounded, at least for the late Archaic and Classical periods. In the Copenhagen Polis Centre we expect every polis in the political sense to have had an urban centre, perhaps so small that a modern European would call it a village rather than a town; but in this context it is the existence of an urban centre, not its size that is important. Furthermore, we hope that in many cases it is possible to trace the physical remains of these urban centres. And by combining the archaeological evidence of urbanization with the written evidence about polis in the political sense we hope to revive the view that in ancient Greece the concept of state, or rather the concept of self-governing political community, was inseparably bound up with the concept of town. The traditional rendering of polis, namely ‘city-state’, is basically correct and not a misnomer as it has become rather fashionable to say. But that is a separate investigation to be developed in future studies.⁵²

NOTES

1 We have called it the lex Hafniensis on the assumption that the Latinized name of the Copenhagen Polis Centre would be Institutum de Civitatibus Graecis Hafniense.

2 Hansen, ‘Poleis and City-States, 600–323 B.C.: A Comprehensive Research Programme’, in Whitehead (ed.), From Political Architecture to Stephanus Byzantius, 14–15.

3 Strab. 404.9.2.11, 14; Fiehn, RE xvi.l (1935), 1005; M.H.McAllister, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, 600–1.

4 Thuc. 7.29.3, 5; 7.30.2; see Hansen, in Hansen (ed.) Sources for The Ancient Greek City-State, 18–21.

5 See, for example, the thorough discussion of klerouchies in Graham, Colony and Mother City in Ancient Greece, 166–92; cf. also P.J.Rhodes, in Hansen, op. cit. (n. 4), 94–5.

6 IG i3 285.107–10; Hyp. 2.18; Skylax, 57 and 66.

7 See, for example, P.J.Rhodes, in Hansen (ed.) The Ancient Greek City-State., 163 (writing about the perioikic towns in Lakonia). Cf. also Rhodes’ comments in Hansen, op. cit. (n.4), 91–2. Contrast E.Lévy, Cahiers du Centre Glotz 1 (1990), 53–67.

8 See, for example, Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, 4.

9 Hansen, in Whitehead, op. cit. (n.2), 19–22.

10 Gawantka, Die sogenannte Polis, 204–6.

11 Molho, Raaflaub and Emlen (eds) City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy.

12 Griffeth and Thomas, (eds) The City-State in Five Cultures. Cf. the list in Hansen, op. cit. (n.2), 10–11.

13 P.Burke, in Hall (ed.) States in History, 137–53.

14 Finley, op. cit. (n.8), 4–5: ‘Aristotle…was writing about the autonomous citystate, the polis in Greek…. The ancient city was soon to lose its autonomy. The process began soon after Aristotle died.’ Murray and Price (eds), The Greek City from Homer to Alexander, vii: ‘Our focus has been the autonomous Greek city-state or polis from its origins in the “Dark Age” until the point at which it was transformed into a basis for world civilization by the conquests of Alexander the Great.’ Osborne, Classical Landscape with Figures, 195: ‘The essential mark of the Greek city is political independence.’ (For city=polis see Osborne, p. 11.)

15 Hansen, in Hansen and Raaflaub (eds) Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis, 36. See also Burke, op. cit. (n.13), 137, 140, etc.

16 Hansen, op. cit. (n.4), 36–7.

17 A polis waged war (Meiggs and Lewis, 42.B.31–2, Argos); made peace (Tod, 145.5–6, Argos); entered into an alliance (Olympia Bericht 7 [1961], 207–10, Poseidonia); struck coins (Syll.³ 218.10, Olbia); passed a law (Corp. Inscr. Delph. i 9.2–3, Delphoi; Meiggs and Lewis, 2.1–2, Dreros); passed a sentence (Syll.³ 530.4, Dyme); founded a colony (Meiggs and Lewis, 5.37, Thera); defrayed expenses (Meiggs and Lewis, 83.2, Thasos; I. von Olymp. 16.7–8, Elis and Skillous); repaired the walls (CEG 869, Paphos); organised a festival (IG xii.9 189.5, Eretria); horoi marking the borders of a polis (treaty between Sparta and Argos quoted by Thuc. 5.79.4); the water supply of a polis (Heraclides 13– 14, GGM i. 102–3, Thebes); the altars of a polis (Fouilles de Delphes, iii.2 18.5– 7, Delphoi); the protecting divinities of a polis (IG xii.8 356, Thasos).

18 Law on the proclamation of crowns passed by the polis (Dem. 18.120); the passing of laws is one of the principal duties of a polis (Arist. Rhet. 1.1360al8– 23).

19 F.M.Watkins, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, xvii. 150.

20 The connotation versus the denotation of a term: Mill, A System of Logic, Book 1, sections 2, 5 and 6. The intension versus the extension of a concept: Rescher, Introduction to Logic, 26–7. On the definition (connotation, intension) of the term polis cf. now Sakellariou, The Polis State.

21 See Hansen, op. cit. (n.7), 9–10.

22 K.Nowicki, in van de Maele and Fossey (eds) Fortificationes Antiquae, 72–3.

23 Cf.Hansen, in Hansen and Raaflaub, op. cit. (n.15), 46–7.

24 Cf.Fossey, The Ancient Topography of Opountian Lokris, 94–5: ‘The overall conclusion must be that in this area it is purely an archaeological investigation, almost entirely bereft of written sources, which can reconstruct the history of Opountian Lokris. The primacy of archaeology as our means of investigating the past of this part—and of many others—of Greece, even in the “historical” period is beyond dispute, pace those colleagues in the Classical profession who would see archaeology essentially as an adjunct, or peripheral aspect of their discipline.’

25 Fossey, The Ancient Topography of Eastern Phokis; Fossey, Topography and Population of Ancient Boiotia; for Lokris see preceding note; Cherry, Davis and Mantzourani, Landscape Archaeology as Long-Term History; J.L.Carter, in Hackens et al. (eds) The Age of Pyrrhus, 97–145.

26 According to Osborne, Elis is the only ‘city’ (= polis) in the region and other settlements are described as ‘villages’ (124–7), but in the Hellenika Xenophon 6.5.2. repeatedly refers to several of them as being poleis: see 3.2.23; 3.2.30; 3.5.12;

27 See, for example, Fossey’s thorough and valuable studies of the settlement pattern of Boiotia, Phokis and Opountian Lokris, op. cit. (n.23–4), in which he focuses on site location and has no discussion whatsoever of the site classifications found in our sources.

28 Her. 1.170.3; Thuc. 2.15.2. See Rhodes, op. cit. (n.5), 102.

29 Hansen, in Hansen (ed.) Introduction to an Inventory of Poleis, 7–72.

30 For example, Horn. Il. 4.514; Thuc. 2.15.6; IG iv.2 492.3; IG xii.9 196.8–10.

31 For example, I. von Priene 1.6; GDI 147.4, 11; Her. 8.35.1; Thuc.

32 For example, GDI 147.4; Her. 7.58.2; Xen. Hell 5.4.49; Din. 1.77.

33 For example, Meiggs and Lewis, 2; in the Peace of Nikias quoted by Thucydides at 5.18–19 the term polis occurs nine times in the sense of city-state.

34 For example, IGi3 46.17–18. The earliest attestation in an Attic decree is in IG i3 4.B.3 (485/4), the latest securely dated attestation is in IGii2 17.10 (394/3). For the literary evidence see Wyse, The Speeches of Isaeus, 476–7.

35 Sacrificial calendar of Erchia: SEG xxi 541. Cult of Athena Polias (col. 1, lines 62–6) and of Zeus Polieus (col. 3, lines 59–64) on the akropolis of Erchia (distinguished from the akropolis in the city of Athens: col. 3, lines 15–17).

36 Lys. 6.15: (‘He shall be banished, according to the laws of the Areopagos, from the city of the man who has been injured.’)

37 Whitehead’s translation is: ‘He also recommended discharging the bulk of the city’s guards—on the grounds, of course, of minimizing its expenses.’

38 ‘On this isthmus, which is at the end of Athos, there stands a Greek city, Sane; there are others too seaward of Sane and landward of Athos, which it was now the Persians’ intent to make into island and not mainland cities; to wit, Dion, Olophyxus, Acrothoum, Thyssus, Cleonae.’

39 Thuc. 2.93.2 (town); Xen. Hell. 4.4.6 (state).

40 Xen. Hell. 4.4.3: (‘Agesilaos…withdrew after breakfast in the direction of the town, as though the city were going to be betrayed to him; so that the Korinthians, in fear that the city was to be betrayed by some one, summoned Iphikrates.’)

41 See Hansen, op. cit. (n. 29), 39–54.

42 See Hansen, op. cit. (n. 4), 39–45.

43 See Th. Heine Nielsen, in Hansen and Raaflaub, op. cit. (n. 15), 83–102.

44 Her. 7.176.2 versus 7.200.2 (Anthela); 7.176.5 versus 7.216.1 (Alpenos).

45 Cf. 54.4, where the reference is to (‘Skandeia the polisma at the harbour’). As far as we know, the island Kythera had only one polis, viz. Kythera (cf. Skylax, 46; Strab. 363.8.5.1; Paus. 3.23.1), and Skandeia is just the port of Kythera, not a political community in its own right. Cf. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, iii. 509.

46 See Hansen, op. cit. (n. 4), 43–4.

47 In Xenophon the term polis is used about the urban centre to be founded in the mining district (Vect. 4.50). How strange Xenophon’s usage is here is duly noted by Gauthier in his Commentaire historique des Poroi de Xenophon, 188–9.

48 For example, at 1.1; 7.1.

49 For example, at 10.23.

50 For example, W.G.Runciman, in Murray and Price, op. cit. (n. 14), 348; Welwei, Die griechische Polis, 16; K.Raaflaub, in Latacz (ed.) Zweihundert Jahre Homer-Forschung, 241.

51 For Archaic and Classical Sparta as a conurbation called asty and polis (in the urban sense) see Hansen, in Hansen, op. cit. (n. 7), 13.

52 Argued provisionally in Hansen, op. cit. (n. 7), 13–16.